Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces 9780748669981

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Without Mastery

The Frontiers of Theory Series Editor: Martin McQuillan Available titles Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces Derek Attridge Of Jews and Animals Andrew Benjamin Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy Andrew Benjamin Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida Geoffrey Bennington Dream I Tell You Hélène Cixous Insister of Jacques Derrida Hélène Cixous Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009 Hélène Cixous Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Joana Masó The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer Timothy Clark

The Post-Romantic Predicament Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan The Paul de Man Notebooks Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius Jacques Derrida Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human Barbara Herrnstein Smith To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida Peggy Kamuf Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art Robert Rowland Smith Veering: A Theory of Literature Nicholas Royle Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory Andrzej Warminski Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For de Man Andrzej Warminski Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces Sarah Wood

About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time Mark Currie

Forthcoming Titles Readings of Derrida Sarah Kofman, Translated by Patience Moll

The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise Mark Currie

Hélène Cixous’s Semi-Fictions: At the Borders of Theory Mairéad Hanrahan

Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at www.euppublishing.com/series/tfot

Without Mastery Reading and Other Forces

Sarah Wood

© Sarah Wood, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6997 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6998 1 (webready PDF) The right of Sarah Wood to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Through the Reader 1 Inventing the Reader 14 Try Thinking As If Perhaps 24 A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction 42 Close to the Earth 53 Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth 66 Edit 75 Reading Matters 85 Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing) 102 Nightshift 115 Too Late To Begin? 134 Notes 151 Index 164

Series Editor’s Preface

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought’s own limits? ‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a ‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather, this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking. It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of crossing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines. Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment, this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued exer-

­viii    Without Mastery cise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory. Martin McQuillan

Acknowledgements

The most enduring influences are those capable of indirectness. My thanks to Graham Allen, Clio Barnard, Geoffrey Bennington, Stephen Benson, Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, Sampurna Chatterjee, Timothy Clark, Clare Connors, Brian Dillon, Thomas Dutoit, Lucy Ellmann, Marie-Dominique Garnier, Ben Grant, Jaçek Gutorow, James Harris, Deborah Jones, Peggy Kamuf, Elissa Marder, Catherine Maxwell, Dawne McCance, Martin McQuillan, Todd McEwen, Forbes Morlock, Stewart Motha, Michael Naas, Kaori Nagai, Marion O’Connor, Lydia Rainford, Nicholas Royle, Bernard Sharratt, Linda Squire, Jonathan Tiplady, Shane Weller, Miranda Wood and Rose Wood. Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in the following journals: ‘Try Thinking As If Perhaps’ in Études Brittaniques contemporaines; ‘Edit’ and ‘Nightshift’ in Mosaic, and ‘Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost’ in Derrida Today. Special thanks to the editors: Frédéric Regard, Dawne McCance and David Coughlan. This book is dedicated with love to Miranda, Rose and Tom.

‘I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.’1 Elizabeth Bowen We are our own censors, our own correctors, our own masters.2 Hélène Cixous

Through the Reader

begin again now with rather less force, because you want to let them speak and you want to know the fate of those particular seeds. So far there are just a few grainy images, epiphotographs: you find the thought of looking into them frightful. Frightful but necessary, as a first scene and as a way of thinking about dissemination, while putting the threat and anguish of disappearance in touch with the desire to speak. That is: you wanted to read, to think – and write. Write it down, as the saying goes. Perhaps you were simply hoping to get in touch with some old friends. You imagined the future and you wanted to hear from them. You thought to summon them, but first – you are not there. Then you find out you have blown upon them. Not every spark wants to become a flame. And in all of us there is a Little Pig, scared to death of being eaten alive. We come to that thought again later. But something is already at the door. It is not a Wolf. Behind the door of personification and the stories we have heard before, the weather is changing and with it the future. The ideas, for example, of eternity, or of individual death. All this – curiosity, scattering, menace – was already implied by the thought of the trace: ‘erasure of the present and thus of the subject, of that which is proper to the subject and his proper name’.1 A more rigorous language, a loosening thought. It occurs to you that what is required of you is the ability not to be: mobility, corruptibility, the capacity to imagine yourself as some sort of ‘mortal germ’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 289). c Don’t ask for information about your condition and your future. You don’t want to know. In Macbeth, Banquo is tempted to question the Weird Sisters:

­2    Without Mastery If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow, and which will not, Speak then to me . . .2

He dreams of getting perceptual access to what he thinks they might know. The demand is urgent. He wants to find out what does and does not have a future. It is especially his own seed and its relation to eternity he is curious about. The witches are elliptical and malevolent. What they have for him is not a message or a prize: he will have to live it and die it, whether he likes it or not. There are no seeds of time; Banquo is imagining them. Begin to look into the seeds of time and you find yourself not seeing but reading – assuming, guessing, following, undergoing an unpredictable and deferred experience, to which tragedy, confusion and evil are not incidental. Banquo’s desire to know what will become of him is not where he starts from: ‘in the beginning is the drift or dispersal from which one might posit that there is something like a being who speaks’.3 Where did that come from? Claire Colebrook – that’s more like it: Far from being a way of accounting for reality as being mediated by systems (or language), text was a way of thinking about anarchic and radical dispersal, or the potentiality and tendencies of forces that could not be grounded upon self-furthering life. (‘No Symbiosis, Not Now’, p. 198)

Could those days come again? Who would there be there then to ask a question like that? There is no one eternal prophet or oracle of text, just as there is no proper topos for the kind of exchange (if it is an exchange) that Macbeth and Banquo have with the three witches at the start of Macbeth. Macbeth wants a provenance for their news: ‘Say from whence / You owe this strange intelligence’, but the only provenance is ‘the earth’, an earth that bubbles the witches into appearance, and ‘the air’ into which they melt ‘as breath’ (I, iii, 75–6, 41–2, 79, 81–2). Earth in this scene, whether the word refers to the soil or the planet, is no more grounding than the ether – or than ‘the subject, that which is proper to the subject, and his proper name’ could be (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 289). It’s all troubled, and troubling, analogous to the ‘cauldron of seething excitations’ that for Freud does not really describe it, the Id.4 ‘The earth hath bubbles as the water has, / And these are of them’, Banquo observes, when the witches have gone (I, iii, 79–80). To him the witches are out of place; they ‘look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth / And yet are on’t’ (I, iii, 41–2). Their relation to the earth makes no sense. The play begins with the witches dispersing. After a dozen lines the

Through the Reader    ­3

first scene ends: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air’ (I, i, 11–12). Their exit is complicated by the thought of them, or something of them, still hovering through the air. It’s as if they remain, permeating the atmosphere. The air they hover through becomes a kind of portal where coming and going are indistinguishable. The witches’ first line, also the play’s first line, suggests their meeting is about to end, that the audience has missed something. ‘When shall we three meet again?’ (I, i, 1). The line gives us a separating ‘three’ whose parting from each other outstrips the prophetic claims of dialectic. Hegelian philosophy foresees the three successive movements of thesis, antithesis and synthesis as ‘moments of an organic unity’.5 The witches don’t have that kind of relation to each other. Their dispersal also puts them at odds with parousia, meaning ‘presence, arrival, return, assistance, right time and Advent’.6 In the New Testament, the ‘three’ would be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the logos mentioned in John 1: 1–14. What am I to make of the witches? For the humans who meet them in Macbeth they are doubtfully living, doubtfully capable of conversation, doubtfully female. Their apparition and vanishing seem more like signs that the earth has come up with speaking beings who do not establish themselves as bodies or living things, nor as humans capable of dialogue, but retain the aspect of geological phenomena, gaseous emissions, pollutants, gusts. (The aerial powers of witches described in King James’s Daemonologie [1594] include an ability to affect the weather, which Macbeth corroborates. They can, it is claimed: rayse storms and tempests in the aire, either upon Sea or land, though not universally, but in such a particular place and prescribed boundes, as God will permit them so to trouble. Which likewise is verie easie to be discerned from anie other naturall tempestes that are meteores, in respect of the suddaine and violent raising thereof, together with the short induring of same.7)

Macbeth and Banquo try to assimilate the witches and what they say. They embark, inevitably, on thwarted acts of understanding and interpreting, but the Weird Sisters remain ‘imperfect speakers’ and answer none of the questions put to them (I, iii, 70). Instead of being understood, their speeches take effect: forecasting, mystifying, deriding and provoking desire – for power, continuity, succession and foreknowledge. The witches’ vanishing bodies and untimely words affect the notion of materiality itself. ‘Speak, if you can: – what are you?’ asks Macbeth, greedy to understand and profit from what is only partly comprehensible (I, iii, 47). The witches remind us of powers of language – and other powers – that are hyper-poetic, madly rhyming, uncontrollably performative and

­4    Without Mastery utterly improper in their agency: ‘like a rat without a tail / I’ll do, I’ll do and I’ll do’ (I, iii, 10). Macbeth asks them later, arriving at a scene of cauldron and thunder: ‘What is’t you do?’ (IV, i, 49). They complete the line with one voice: ‘A deed without a name’. This unnameable doing transmits itself in strange ways. The witches’ language in the opening scenes, as the critic David Kranz points out, offers a ‘selfsame tune and words’ that is taken up in Macbeth’s speeches and remarked upon by Banquo (I, iii, 88).8 The witches’ early talk sets up an iterative movement in shape-like effects of sound and rhetoric that are discernible throughout the play. Kranz suggests that these poetic patterns, which pass through and across the language of individual characters, regardless of whether they have or have not heard one another, ‘represent powers that include but go beyond the demonic’ (‘The Sounds of Supernatural Soliciting’, p. 349). The tune and words ‘bubble up independently in several minds’, representing ‘a power related to but sometimes independent of its manifestation in the witches’ (p. 372). These effects are inseparable from what the play is about. They act upon its language, which would not be what it is without them. The language of Macbeth is not the language of reason, not academic discourse, not domesticated, conceptualised, humanised. It does not stop to censor or correct its demonic aspects. It retains a sense of freedom to write as if regardless of what language can take, going to the limit in order to say what must be said, while at the same time not breaking with language, not breaking faith in its power to manifest the unknown. This wildness may make the language of Macbeth a suitable language for the Anthropocene, an era, Claire Colebrook argues, when humanity is faced with a new image of itself: ‘man is not a being within the world, not a fragment of life, but has existed as a geological force that has irrevocably altered a world that is no longer an earth, but is an imbricated manworld complex’ (‘No Symbiosis, Not Now’, p. 198). The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has the press-release headline: ‘Human influence on climate clear’.9 Quin Dahe, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I, goes on to detail the various effects of the ‘unequivocal’ warming in the climate system: ‘the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased’. The report explains at length the anticipated effects of these general effects and the scientific observation that makes such a high degree of certainty possible. We are the first readers of what ‘the perpetual, insistent and demonic return of anthropocentrism’ has done to the notion of an earth

Through the Reader    ­5

outside, beneath or beyond the destructive effects of human agency (‘No Symbiosis, Not Now’, p. 203). The material conditions on what Colebrook calls neither world nor earth but ‘an imbricated man-world complex’ are such that we who live on it face catastrophe and extinction. We are confronted, in the words of Timothy Clark, by ‘environmental issues which are truly planetary in scale, notably climate change, ocean acidification, effects of over-population and the general and accelerating degradation of ecosystems’.10 Culture, whether as theory, literature, philosophy, religion, or science in its many forms, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, is not in a position to forget its status (Clark again) as an ‘evanescent and fragile bubble suspended vulnerably in a web of material conditions’.11 We could be said to be in a bubble that numbs us to the necessity of responding to the eco-catastrophes that are happening here and now. The bubble is the phantasm of another globe and another time. It allows us to believe it is too late to do anything, and too soon to see what will happen. Writing’s action is no stronger than a bubble.12 We have to think again about what writing can do for us, and about what might be happening while we seek, like soldiers or polemicists, rhetorical solutions: ‘the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon’s mouth’.13 There is also the bubble of a certain kind of puffed-up and thin-skinned narcissism that will think anything to sustain itself. The environmental issues that we face have no mouth, and are not human. The bubbles in Macbeth are not entirely unreal. They suggest forces capable of making their way up from underneath, right through the earth, coming up but soon going away into the air: ready to reappear but not to be located firmly or precisely enough for sustained questioning. They are troubling bubbles, an image of the fragile boundary between an inside and an outside that remains active, that continues to produce effects, that cannot be excluded from consideration. Derrida comments on such phenomena in A Taste for the Secret: What has always worried me is the heterogeneous, namely, that which does not even oppose; it may be called either the greatest force of opposition to the dialectic, or the greatest weakness. I have often felt that the image of weakness offers less purchase to dialectic. It is the weak, not the strong, that defies dialectic.14

c This book keeps going in for what Derrida calls ‘the thought of the trace’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 289). I try, with only partial success, to take seriously the proposal that ‘the trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its own irremediable disappearance, of the disappearance

­6    Without Mastery of its disappearance’. I can’t once-and-for-all take in the notion of the erasure of selfhood and a threat or anguish that, Derrida suggests, is part of the movement of writing in general. The Weird Insisters of this book – literature, psychoanalysis and deconstruction – at times speak in chorus, at times separately and at times are hovering. They do not go away, they make things happen. They perhaps cast some light on why humans have distinguished themselves in destructiveness. By remaining, perhaps by ‘sheer, non-stop, pig-headed repetition’, an insister is in a good position to attend upon this going away (Bowen, The Little Girls, p. 35). This irremediable disappearance is something that Derrida does not see as deferred. He writes about a disappearance ‘without a trace left or retained in the world that is going away, that will go away, is going going away, leaving no trace, a world that has forever been going to leave and has just left, going away with no trace, the trace becoming a trace only by being able to erase itself’.15 It is happening now. At a time when, Claire Colebrook points out, humans are beginning to imagine the next great extinction event – which is to say that this will be the first time that extinction has been imagined. It is as though the layers of our geological past yield a possibility (of extinction) from which we might regard a future that is not a future for us, and a future in which all the ways in which we have mapped time and history will be absent. For even our current conceptions of deep time – a time beyond human histories – have emerged from a present reading of our own past. What we now imagine, from this reading of the past, gives us a sign not only of our end within time, but also of the fact that we will ourselves have altered our place in time.16

One way to read this book is in the context of a developing climate change imaginary, one that is still beginning to be imagined. I have written it in a state of not-knowing-in-advance. It has been a matter of ‘the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way’.17 Another way of describing it would be as an experience of necessity. Necessity is a recurrent term in this book, which sees much of the value of thinking in thought’s capacity to discern what is necessary. Necessity is taken to be part of writing itself. ‘Plot is diction’, says the demon storyteller Elizabeth Bowen. ‘Action of language. Language of action.’ Macbeth stages the actualities of its human meanings (character, plot, psychological motivations, political and theological contexts, weather, time, place) coming up as if by magic, bubbling from a mysterious, incantatory, verbal and intra-verbal source. Banquo’s observation about the bubbles suggests the difficulty of assimilating this kind of event into existing cognitive processes. Earth behaves like water heated or disturbed. Prophetic utterance invokes the subject, real names and

Through the Reader    ­7

actual titles, then refuses to stay and explain itself. Language heats up and behaves strangely, doubling, working between descriptive and magical-performative modes in the famous chant: ‘Double, double, toil and trouble, / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble’ (IV, i, 10–11, 20–1, 35–6). Where we are was perhaps always the water in a pot on a fire. It’s heating up around us, so that: according to the best scientific assessment in 2009, the earth is actually warming to a point that life, i.e. the life forms together with the environmental conditions that sustain them, is threatened in the short term and possibly largely destroyed in the long term, at least on the worst scientifically and culturally emergent scenarios.18

c This is not a monograph. As a treatise, a monograph needs to know how to exclude what cannot be managed (tractare). Such as, for example the thought of irreversible processes now under way across a number of systems which will lead to the widespread extinction of species. According to Roy Bhaskar the phenomenon of climate change needs to be understood ‘in terms of the intrication of several distinct explanatory mechanisms, operating at radically different orders of reality . . . and orders of scale’.19 Writing in the context of academic research, Bhaskar argues persuasively for an interdisciplinary approach to climate change, and in addition ‘transdisciplinarity, involving the potential creative employment of models, analogies and insights from a variety of different fields and disciplines; and cross-disciplinarity, involving the potential to empathize with and understand and employ the concepts of disciplines other than one’s own’. His proposals have radical implications for the curriculum and teaching in higher education, not least in terms of the reading- and writing-practices that would be necessary to cultivate this new informed relational attitude. Gilbert White, whose Natural History of Selborne first uses the terms ‘monographer’ and ‘monography’, firmly believes in the heuristic value and intrinsic meaningfulness of haunts, in the sense of localities.20 He recommends that the person who settles down to study nature, birds especially, should ‘undertake only one district’ and advises that ‘every kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer’. This faith in place and territory is related to the difficulty White has in fully acknowledging what Banquo recognises in his famous speech about the ‘temple-haunting martlet’, that the bird is a ‘guest of summer’ (I, vi, 3–4). White alludes to this speech when he writes about the martlet and other birds of the swallow kind, but he does not let go of the idea that they ‘stay behind and hide with us during the winter’ (Natural History, p. 39).21 When he makes the speech,

­8    Without Mastery Banquo is engaged in not being aware of death coming. He forgets that the air is full of witches. He has not heard Lady Macbeth announce: ‘The raven himself is hoarse, / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements’ (I, v, 38–40). The audience, or the reader, is better attuned to the demonic and deathly atmosphere. The death of Banquo is sad but the play inscribes it, along with all the other deaths, in a human continuity of feeling. The thought of the trace is compelling precisely because it has no proper habitat. It belongs with affect no more than it belongs with reason or any other continuity. It migrates between contexts. It refers to a going away that is not a kind of event we know: not the departure of a guest, not a migration, not the end of a day, or of a year, or even of an individual life. It gives us to think these things, and when these things are written without mastery – written on us, and not merely by us – the writing that results may take us some way towards the thought of the trace, and towards what it is necessary to experience, to feel and not-feel, in order to imagine an extinction. The events I have just listed could be called moments. But there is no moment of species extinction, no moment of climate change. The persistence of writingforce takes effect in and beyond the familiar extensions of writing in the narrow sense (the work, the corpus, the historical period, the genre, the intention, the human psyche or memory, etc., etc.). The geological formation, mining, spillage and circulation of oil can be said to write. Work is being done to read it.22 Writing has the advantage of giving the writer moments that may appear to be moments but that may be extended for indefinite periods, in order for there to be an experience of ‘the impossibility’, as Bowen puts it, ‘of saying what is to be said in any other way’ (‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, p. 35). This extended experience of necessity is a prerequisite for freedom from the blinding effects of human fear, and for allowing what must be said to manifest itself. I cannot imagine a climate change imaginary without it. c For Bowen speech is ‘what the characters do to each other’ (‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, p. 41). She is speaking of fiction but I would argue that what she says describes the reading-effects of ‘voice’ in writing of all genres. She writes down ‘sparks from experience – an experience not necessarily my own’.23 In her novel The Little Girls, the prime mover is Dinah Piggott, by name a little pig, by personal history a former little girl, and by forceful intuition a witch who takes an interest in the ‘far future’ (p. 10). The time of writing was the early 1960s, the time of the Bay of Pigs, the period when a policy of irrevocable mutual nuclear destruction took root in the imagination: The Little Girls is a nuclear-age book.

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Dinah wants to make an archive of friends’ personal possessions. Her collection of ‘expressive objects’ is also a way of thinking about fiction itself (p. 10). In the fear of personal annihilation, but with some confidence in human survival, Dinah explains that she is sealing the things in a cave, with a catalogue. They are ‘for someone or other to come upon in the far future, when practically nothing about any of us – you or me, for instance – would otherwise be known. We’re putting these things in here to be deduced from’ (p. 9). This aspect of the novel does not foresee the possibility that not even a prehistoric cave can be guaranteed to preserve the trace. Nor does Dinah’s proto-archaeological folly foresee the Anthropocene, an age in which human agency has written itself, with radically destabilising effect, into the geology, the chemistry, the plants on our planet. Writing has an especial connecting and disconnecting power that makes history and cannot be held within a history, or even a story. It is a matter of seeds of time, or sparks without determined future. There is always an edge of the unknown in any deed of voice. For reasons that we may guess are related to the motive for putting the expressive objects in the cave, Dinah places some mysterious-sounding personal ads in various publications. They are addressed to her childhood friends Clare and Sheila. They, ensconced in their adult lives, called across fifty years, feel ‘blown upon’ (p. 64). Clare, looking at a heap of the advertisements, comments to Sheila on Dinah’s demonic insistence: ‘They’ve mounted into the number we have here thanks to her having seeded them far and wide, also to sheer, non-stop, pigheaded repetition’ (p. 35). Dissemination and iterability are coming into view as non-human forces. The expression ‘blown upon’, like the Dylan song ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, evokes the winds carrying fallout after a nuclear explosion. It is biblical in origin and has various resonances in The Little Girls, coming through like a draught through different gaps and chinks. Bowen’s novel recognises a blowing that comes before, but also blows through, may be said to blow out, blast right through, human breath and psyche (Greek, breath). Brief candle. In the Bible, ‘blown upon’ refers primarily to the power of speech and the winds of rumour: ‘Spark blown upon will blaze, spat upon will die out; see how of both the mouth is arbiter!’ or in the King James Version: ‘if thou blow the spark, it shall burn: if thou spit upon it, it shall be quenched: and both these come out of thy mouth’.24 One thinks of ‘nuclear rhetoric’, inflammatory or otherwise.25 There is not a smooth path between texts here. Bowen writes crosscountry. Speech is indeed what we ‘do to each other’ – and writing has this dimension too. It can scramble things, break up meaning. Dinah is thinking about nuclear catastrophe. Sheila and Clare feel

­10    Without Mastery disquieted by the initial contact from Dinah. For a moment their lives come into focus as sparks emanating from elsewhere, which they are wanting not to blaze. This seems to mean they want not to be noticed, not to be hated, not to know, not to be burned or devoured. They are little again: little girls, little pigs – guinea-pigs perhaps, in an experiment. This happens to all of us when we read. The threatened consequences of this shift in their sense of the powers around them are severe, not only for themselves. To return to the biblical passage that gives us ‘blown upon’: ‘A backbiting tongue hath disquieted many, and driven them from nation to nation: strong cities hath it pulled down, and overthrown the houses of great men’ (Ecclesiasticus 28: 14). Sheila’s ‘house’ is her place in ‘a prominent local family’, a name enshrined in a family firm, marriage, father watching from beyond the grave, and a home town (p. 34). These interrelated things she is. Clare is a chain of gift shops: ‘ “I am MOPSIE PYE”, she made known’ (p. 42). Being ‘blown upon’ means exposure of who and what one loves, oneself, secrets and all, to the fatal dangers of speech. Bowen touches on the possibility of a nuclear war: the whole novel explores the thought of unintended consequences. Fear, fearing God, is the safe option, the one that Bowen does not take. In the Bible, the tongue, the rule thereof and the burning flame thereof, will destroy those who do not fear God: Such as forsake the Lord shall fall into it; and it shall burn in them, and not be quenched; it shall be sent upon them as a lion, and devour them as a leopard. Look that thou hedge thy possession about with thorns, and bind up thy silver and gold. And weigh thy words in a balance, and make a door and bar for thy mouth. Beware thou slide not by it, lest thou fall before him that lieth in wait. (Ecclesiasticus 28: 23–6)

Don’t speak, don’t write. Shut yourself up in yourself, like a Little Pig. That is the counsel of fear and envy. ‘All is the fear, and nothing is the love’: the death of reading (Macbeth, IV, ii, 12, quoted The Little Girls, p. 244). Sometimes one must stand one’s ground. Melanie Klein, the great thinker of envy, is the one Derrida looks to, to explain the ‘valuation and devaluation’ of writing (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 291). Writing lets quoting exceed itself: it is about desire, it concerns force. It is not geometrical. It does not illustrate. It misgives and misfires. It asks for wisdom and reasonableness. It becomes part of what we do to each other. Dinah, who never meant to cause trouble, is shocked by the phrase ‘blown upon’. Something blows through The Little Girls: writing as what no one ever thought of. It doesn’t dispense with individuality

Through the Reader    ­11

but neither is it afraid of lions, leopards, wolves, fires and falls. Dinah marvels at ‘blown upon’, pauses over it. (‘Dialogue is the thin bridge which must, from time to time, carry the entire weight of the novel’ [Bowen, ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, p. 42]. This is also true of other forms of writing.) Then Dinah repeats what the Wolf says to each Little Pig in turn: ‘ “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down” – Eh? That I never thought of’ (p. 64). She is appalled to see that her small-ads had innocently issued a kind of nuclear threat to her friends’ adult lives. But the movement does not stop there. ‘For some cause she could not pin down’, Sheila ‘misliked those lines Dinah had chosen. Now: “Macbeth, I suppose?” ’ she asks. Sheila is not a literary critic: The Little Girls is blown upon by the folk tale of the Three Little Pigs, the introverted form of the novel is blown upon from an outside inside itself. The threat the Wolf makes is of the order of the wrecking words spoken by the three witches in Macbeth. The old children’s song ‘The Runaway Train’ comes into it too: listened to on a ‘loud record’ by Dinah’s friend Frank (p. 219). Bowen quotes the lyrics, we may pick up that the track is Frank’s rueful, exhilarated tribute to unstoppable Dinah, but the words also dangerously blow through personal messages and intentions, trains of thought. It’s heading off the rails: The runaway train came down the track, And she blew – she blew. The runaway train came down the track, And she blew – she blew. The run away train came down the track Her whistle wide and her throttle back, And she blew, blew, blew, blew –

Much later Dinah says again, ‘to herself, in the voice of one continuing aloud a train of thought: “You huffed and you puffed and you blew my house down” ’ (p. 244). You blew me out of there, out of myself, out of what was proper to me, my deluded expectations and my name. It isn’t clear if she is speaking about herself, or imagining what her friends might say. Not that they would put it like that. Sheila again responds with a misattribution: ‘Macbeth, I suppose?’ And Dinah says neither no nor yes but quotes the ‘particles of sadness’ that ‘make Macbeth so sad’. Bowen lets in the unstoppable from Macbeth. Dinah is not right about ‘dreadful ends’. Sadness is not the last word. Her forcefulness is not in the service of pathos or rectitude. And the last thing we need now is the narcissism of minor differences.26 She is an insister, ineducable as a wish: ‘She never learned: it was try, try and try again’ (p. 39). She remembers lines of poetry, she wants to find her

­12    Without Mastery childhood friends Sheila and Clare and indulges in sheer, non-stop, pigheaded repetition in the attempt to trace them, she keeps secrets. She is aware that personalities vanish and collects expressive objects to make an archive of things her many friends ‘have obsessions about’ for the far future’ when ‘we are a vanished race’ (p. 10). It is a kind of writingimpulse. She speaks in aposiopesis and aphorism – ‘she broke off, as she often did’ (p. 4). Which is right, considering that ‘There’s no such thing as “a whole thing” ’ (p. 65), and considering Bowen’s conviction that characters ‘should, on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying’ (‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, p. 42). Take for example this piece of dialogue between Dinah and Sheila. In it, Bowen is also writing a kind of literary criticism that is under rather than over articulate. She pitches us into literature without stopping to explain, and rather than formulate a theory of tragedy, the writing works with particles and particularities, fragments known by heart – and especially with particles of sadness, that are not usually gathered up as such, but Dinah notices them and repeats them, and wants to hear them, only partly in order to weep over them. As affects go, sadness lasts exceptionally well. Sheila, meanwhile, spikily complies – she rather hates literature, but is nonetheless up to it, capable de tout as she is: ‘ “Was my father a traitor, mother?” – that’s Macbeth.’ ‘Isn’t it about witches?’ ‘Not altogether . . . “All is the fear and nothing is the love,” – that’s Macbeth. And “What are these faces?” I don’t think most tragedies are sad, they are only tragic; but Macbeth is. It’s full of particles of sadness which are seldom noticed – deluded expectations, harmless things coming to dreadful ends. King Duncan arriving to stay with the Macbeths in such good spirits – “This castle hath a pleasant seat.” I know the feeling, driving up to a friend’s house in the evening, enjoying the smell of the air as one gets out of the car, looking forward to everything – but one isn’t murdered. And Banquo going out riding with his son, coming back in the nice dark fit as a fiddle, looking forward to dinner. And Banquo talking about the nesting swallows. “This guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet.” ’ . . . ‘Say, “This guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet.” ’ ‘You’ve just said it.’ ‘I want to hear it.’ ‘ “This guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet” ’, said Sheila, with justifiable coldness. The patient listened. ‘It didn’t make me weep this time – but never mind. Yet Macbeth is the one I’m sorriest for.’ ‘Ought you to be, from anything I’ve heard?’

Through the Reader    ­13 ‘He’d done an irrevocable thing.’ ‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you.’ ‘He did, at least, though, know what it was. Could one fear that one had done an irrevocable thing, without knowing exactly what it was?’ (The Little Girls, pp. 244–5)

An irrevocable thing cannot be called back, not even by the one who has decreed it, not even if they are God. It is past. It is the anthropomorphic name for the irreversible.27 In her sleep, Lady Macbeth dream-talks briskly to her husband, in this moment her little boy: ‘Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone’ (V, i, 63–4). She is repeating an earlier remark in the same vein (rather in the tone of Sheila’s ‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you’.): ‘Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: what’s done is done’ (III, ii, 11–12). Dinah wonders about an unknown, or inexactly known, irrevocable thing. In the Anthropocene the human and the non-human are irrevocably, irreversibly, irremediably mixed, as they are in writing. We inhabit the time when, in Colebrook’s words, ‘man . . . has existed as a geological force that has irrevocably altered a world that is no longer an earth, but is an imbricated man-world complex’. It is no more a time for pieties than it is for settling scores.

Inventing the Reader

And first I sang, as I in dream have seen Music wait on a lyrist for some thought, Yet singing to herself until it came.1 (Robert Browning, Pauline) What are we waiting for? Where will this writing be in forty or fifty years? If I want to think of myself as someone who works in a university, the present can be defined for me. Bureaucratic, managerial language offers to tell me who I am and what I am for. Official mission statements situate what British institutions now call ‘HE’ (who HE?) in the contemporary – painting a context of massive inevitabilities bearing down upon ‘a global environment’ described in terms of ‘competition and collaboration’.2 The space enclosed in this way gives the impression of being simultaneously vast and narrow. These documents tell HE about an ever-accelerating feedback loop between itself and a ‘changing world’ in which change has been instituted and reified (‘Opportunity, Choice and Excellence’, p. 9). They exhort the addressee: Keep up! Innovate! Respond! Rescue! Foretell! One urgency drives out the next. Realism is the only way: thought is drafted into the service of a describable present, a predictable future and a context that can in principle be summed up and made subject to discussion. Talk of the global economic situation claims each of us as a small part of an uncontrollable whole. Our agency is reduced to competing and ensuring a return on investment: ‘reforms to higher education in England will be implemented against the backdrop of an increasingly competitive global environment and the need to ensure that the very substantial investment being made in higher education is used to best effect’ (p. 4). Of course, there is more to it than economics. ‘Opportunity, Choice and Excellence’ lists other international issues for HE to respond to: climate change; disease and the risk of pandemic; energy, food and water security; and the effects

Inventing the Reader    ­15

of new technology on learning and on how ‘we assimilate and analyse data’ (p. 3). The language of management strategy wants to foresee everything, including two concerns of the present book: climate change and reading. Institutional models of risk assessment and measurement by key performance indicators are designed to take care of all eventualities, even as the urgent calls for response and innovation go out.3 In a context determined as the elimination of the possibility of surprise, all that anyone can ask of thought is that it keep up with new developments. If management, as Forbes Morlock suggests, wants to abolish the future, that process does not belong exclusively in universities and government departments.4 There is a tendency to manage in all of us. It often works by naive and underhand rhetorical means, as if the right verbal formulations were guaranteed efficacy over non-human powers – powers that act in language, without belonging to it, and powers that interact with human agency, without being reducible to human mastery. Timothy Clark’s analysis of current climate change policy resists this kind of assimilation. He identifies a ‘dangerous fantasy’ in managerial responses to earth’s finitude: to try to manage the planet’s atmosphere – a boundary condition for life – by making it part of a carbon trading offset scheme or of some kind of market looks like a peculiar variant of the ancient fantasy of establishing some selfmoving system of rationality that can be master of its own conditions.5

Clark proposes we stop considering the environment as ‘a passive ground, context and resource for human society’ (‘Some Climate Change Ironies’, p. 134). He writes to bring the environment and its forcefulness into clear view. The environment emerges from this writing process as ‘an imponderable agency that must somehow be taken into account, even if we are unsure how’. There are different kinds of waiting. Knowing that we live on a finite earth, one may wait to know for certain what the environment is up to, while taking its agency into account as best one can. Clark describes the need ‘to think a bounded space in which the consequences of actions may mutate to come back unexpectedly from the other side of the planet’ (p. 134). This cultivated responsiveness demands a sense of finitude that seems inimical to the freedom and not-knowing claimed by some forms of poetic writing. Cixous imagines the time of waiting as being ahead of her while she writes. What must be said now, must be said to someone who is not present in this time. In her view a ‘contemporary reading . . . doesn’t exist’.6 (A very different scene from the one conjured by the institutional mission statement.) The content of her message is conditional upon an imagined reader, say eighty years

­16    Without Mastery on. That message will begin to arrive, the text will begin to be read and understood, only later: ‘What is interesting when you write is to imagine that your reader is not yet born, so someone writing in say 1842 might think “my idea will be born in 1924.” Of course, it’s totally poetical: you can imagine what you want, invent the reader.’7 It is the present, in this way of thinking, that needs to be prophesied. It’s the same way of imagining writing and awareness as Derrida’s, when he says: ‘One must be several in order to write, and even to “perceive” ’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 284). For Derrida, writing is not the activity of a subject: he thinks it as a scene, even a drama, involving different temporalities and agencies. ‘The “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author’ (p. 285). The thinking that depends on writing involves the invention of a language capable of it. In the era of global warming, researchers have recognised the need to meet the challenge by transforming and melding together the scientific and social scientific models of research, testing and application to make the overall scientific enterprise effectively address all levels of global warming, including physical, geo-­physical, biological, socio-economic, socio-cultural, linguistic and psychological dimensions. (Frank, ‘Global Warming and Cultural / Media Articulations’, p. 102)

Beyond, or in addition to, the indisputably essential development and synthesis of science and the social sciences, even beyond models, we need a language to prophesy what is happening and not happening. In English, Robert Browning is an exceptionally inventive and several writer. He is neither subjective, nor objective: a conscious dramatist of writing. In his vision of beginning a poetic career, one may wait for the right thing to say, quite indifferent to what it is: And first I sang, as I in dream have seen Music wait on a lyrist for some thought, Yet singing to herself until it came.

She waits for the lyrist, the person with the lyrics and the instrument, to arrive. Music is far off: feminine but not human, and what is more she is in a dream-scene. She sings ‘in dream’, where the characters are rather undefined – ‘Music’ might be a sort of spirit animating the lyre-player. She is a dream example or analogue for poets’ writing (‘I sang’ here means ‘I wrote’) that begins without thought, without message, with an ‘I’ on hold, scarcely holding what it holds. Song is a pole of language the furthest from the rhetorically sustained thoughtfulness of realism. An

Inventing the Reader    ­17

experience of voice carries the listener off. Song asks to be heard, it will not be separated from itself in order to be appropriated in commentary or paraphrase. Like waiting, and poetry, song is for a time. Music has regard for thinking: some thought is what she is waiting for. But the thought is still coming. By contrast with Pauline, who gives the poem its name, and whose reading presence the poem and its speaker explicitly require, Music remains somewhat aloof. She sings out of earshot and appears indifferent to what she waits for. It does not matter what the thought will be when it comes. She has no ambitions and no needs. She has the ‘intellectual impartiality’ that Freud attributes to intuition.8 The lines from Pauline are about what happens before thought, in a state of being alone, dreaming, imitating, waiting, singing and writing. They are about beginning to write, before inclination and systemisation. They suggest an active passivity or passive activity and an inwardness conceived as an identification already, necessarily, open to other agencies and times. It is hard not to oppose meaning to form here, hard not to herald the coming thought as the completion of the somewhat semantically empty song Music sings to herself. For Hegel, according to his commentator J.N. Findlay, ‘all dialectical thought-paths lead to the Absolute Idea and to the knowledge of it which is itself’.9 Music would be no exception, as the dialectic of Hegel’s Aesthetics makes clear. Music is on the path: it is ‘spirit, or the soul which resounds directly on its own account and feels satisfaction in its perception of itself’.10 In Hegel’s eyes the art of music relates to ‘inwardly veiled life and energy’, to the human heart, that lives in ‘deep feeling and its undisclosed depth’ (Aesthetics II, pp. 902, 904–5).11 For Hegel, music’s content and destined purpose is psychological, it discloses the depths of the human heart to itself, and the movement of this disclosure is the movement of absolute knowledge fulfilled through the self, the ‘I’. The undisclosed depth does not become part of the visible world but finds its place and freedom within the hearer as a deep spiritual satisfaction. Still, when Music sings to herself in Browning’s poem, she is not making anything as organised or as satisfying as Hegelian music. Browning’s feminine Music does not serve the self in its closeness to itself. We have to go beyond ourselves, to dream and read, to hear her singing. As is always the case when a poem dreams itself as music, we do not hear. Poetry has an absolutely low voice. Browning’s notion of a poet’s early singing is without thought and therefore it is not poetry as Hegel would define it. In the Aesthetics the sound of poetry consists of ‘the articulate tone of the human organ of speech . . . degraded to being a mere token of a word’ (p. 898). The

­18    Without Mastery poetic word has become a sign and set aside its ‘sensuous medium’, voice and speech, to reach an imaginative world through which our inner life can apprehend ‘the entirety of reality’ (p. 899). Poetic sounds depend on words and words articulate views, feelings and thoughts: thus Hegelian poetry goes beyond the vague profundity of music to enhance the reader’s participation in a reality where nothing is lost or wanders off. It goes without saying that Music, in Browning’s poem, has neither read nor understood Hegel. She has no ambition to hold or collect ideas. She is unconcerned about the fact that something has already begun, that she is caught up in it somehow and that it is already too late to start at the beginning. Without being in any hurry, she is faster than already. What is happening with her couldn’t be less like a critical or philosophical preface. Something is gathering in the ear, returning there, without clear plan, without much will. Nothing is to be expressed. What must be said emerges thanks to writing. For a time, words are not coming from inside thought – if there are words in this song and not something else: ringing, humming, intonation, chanted vocables, word-fragments or letter-clusters, unheard-of sound-things we would have to guess how to pronounce and spell. d From here to a tomb: a poem that puts itself on the side of silent strength by calling itself ‘calm block’ and ‘granite’.12 Twenty-eight years after Edgar Allan Poe’s death Stéphane Mallarmé wrote him a tomb. It presents a retrospective defence of Poe, but also of poetry, carried out from the secure standpoint of eternity. ‘Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change [. . . into Himself at last eternity changes him]’. Biography in its classical forms ‘waits for the death of its subject’, Geoffrey Bennington outlines, quoting the first line of ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’, ‘before telling his (usually his) life and gathering it up into a meaningful whole’.13 Poetry becomes itself and comes into its own in a different way. It dispenses with the ‘I’, the subject, the mortal, human master. The interrupting or derailing aspect of the poem, that does not wait for the death of the poet but does its own thing, has to be addressed more obliquely. Mallarmé’s poem does address it, but in the process it encounters the necessity of no longer being readable as his work. The poem unsettles its own status as classical biography. It fails to idealize and interiorise Poe and vividly emphasises the lack of reciprocity between the poet (an angel) and his own century (a Hydra). This is done with a thoroughness that shakes any sense of a shared world in which one might restore a poet’s reputation, put up a tombstone, or indeed defend poetic writing. The poem certainly refuses to offer itself

Inventing the Reader    ­19

as an account of Poe uncontaminated by the malice and incomprehension of his readers. Its complex syntax and irregular sonorities make it dense to the point of obscurity. What is more this ‘black mixture’ of words and sounds becomes associated with defamatory rumours that Poe died by intoxication as well as with certain toxic and inassimilable qualities of his writing, and of poetry in general. Poe is hardly an angelic figure, although he wrote about and from the point of view of angels, and Mallarmé’s evocation of the purifying power of poetic language is inextricably entangled with the unthinking reaction of a reading public figured as a many-headed monster, one that convulses horribly when it hears the angel speak. Hearing – not understanding – is all it takes for the ‘vile spasm’ to happen. The tomb is not simply a block, and it cannot be relegated to the status of a brutally form-effacing content, or a content-obscuring form. Read, it consists of differences and iterations of sound that remain somewhat unreadable: a monument of mobilised words continues to address the reader’s body. Death comes into dynamic relation with the ear. The u that makes itself heard in Lui-même and suscite, and once awakened, recurs in the rhyming end-words nu / connu, tribu / bu, as well as in plus, chu and sculpte. The letter u also pulses visually in pur and obscur / futur, where its sound is [y]. Verbal iterations and reverberations associate the poem’s power to stir readers up (susciter, to rouse) with the naked immediacy of the angel’s bare (nu) sword, and they link purity of expression (pur) with obscurity (obscur) and the future (futur). Sound does not follow sense, nor does it dictate sense. Another experience of words, with its own associative cross-winds, makes itself felt as echo, resonance and reiteration. Each of these effects presupposes spacing and a spaced-out, non-linear time of reading. T. S. Eliot alludes to ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’ in ‘Little Gidding’, where he offers an influential formulation of the poet’s social role as a kind of teacher who would contribute to literary history by his mission to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’.14 Eliot’s choice of ‘dialect’ instead of Mallarmé’s mots, words, suggests that what needs to be purified are peculiar idioms and subordinate forms. Hierarchy comes into it; the poet intervenes from outside. Whereas for Mallarmé’s poem the whole tomb of language undergoes a kind of spasm. ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’ resists paraphrase with especial energy and refuses to settle into unambiguous syntactical forms. The Hydra would be a good reader of this kind of writing because the many-headed beast deciphers nothing. It senses the angel at work and reacts. Tribu, ‘tribe’, sounds in French exactly like tribut, ‘tribute’. That is what Mallarmé is writing. The homophony reminds us that once creation is no longer understood to

­20    Without Mastery be the prerogative of an author-god, the power of words in which both Poe and Mallarmé believed will take effect.15 A denigration may become involuntary homage. Mallarmé’s poem invents a reader capable of Hydra, capable of reading without thinking, and responding to writing in an animal-like way. Such readers understand nothing, get it wrong. They may purr and rub their heads against texts. They may wriggle, twitch, or move away, automatically. What looks like understanding, or thinking, may be governed by equally automatic reactions – if we are to believe Paul de Man’s disturbing statement that whether ‘we know it, or like it, or not, most of us are Hegelians and quite orthodox ones at that. Few thinkers have so many disciples who have never read a word of their master’s writings.’16 Being the creature of the dialect of the tribe can get you caught up in the dialectic. What to do? Mallarmé reminds us of the possibility of reading before we know what to think. It’s as easy as that, as long as we are not too afraid of being wrong. In the academic world hardly anyone does it. You have to be ready for all the things that happen to someone who doesn’t read as if they belonged with, or to, the right side, the side of mastery. d In Glas Derrida listens to Hegel’s name as if he had never heard it, or read a word of the philosopher before. He acknowledges that ‘Hegel’ refers to a formidable organisation of concepts (the left-hand column of Glas is an extended commentary on two of them) but Hegel’s name is the name not only of something, a working logic or even a creative work of thought, but of some one. Someone Derrida does not know. ‘Who, he?’ Derrida asks twice in the first couple of pages. It is a decisive step from someone who had been reading Hegel since before university and whose early career supporter was Jean Hyppolite, the great French Hegelian. Some writing asks us not to think, but to stop and think. In Glas it is not quite clear what ‘Hegel’ says or how it says it. Perhaps it is not a word at all, but a rebus of the kind Freud writes about in The Interpretation of Dreams. No one has a privileged relation to this baffling kind of thing, least of all the dreamer. It’s a ‘picture-puzzle’ that may look strange but, according to Freud, can be read so as to ‘form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance’.17 Adorno claims that the content of works of art is ‘never the amount of intellect pumped into them: if anything it is the opposite’.18 Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Creations of Sound’ is a poem anxious about poems that think too much.

Inventing the Reader    ­21 They do not make the visible a little hard To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind On peculiar horns, themselves eked out By the spontaneous particulars of sound.19

To eke something out is to supplement it. The reverberation of a poem supplements thought, supplies its deficiencies. The verb ‘eke’, like the word ‘author’, comes from Latin augere and Greek auxanein, ‘to increase or let grow’. Stevens’s horns of weird poematic plenty suggest that thinking is not inside the mind but is what extends the mind and even makes it begin to become something else that it needs to be. Thought needs spontaneous particulars like the gl in Glas that interrupts Hegel on the first page and extends his name into aigle, and the lead, gold, red eagles, and glace, gel, légende, letting philosophy dream. The mind needs to stop working on itself, and listen to ‘syllables that rise / From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak’. We need speech that does not belong to an ‘I’ or a ‘we’, nor to a national language, nor to a century. The ecstatic transport of poetic utterance is always a complication of presence. Stevens called his 1947 collection Transport to Summer: his book promises to bear the reader off, to take him or her to a state of summer, a promise that implies one is always beginning somewhere else. It is a spring. ‘The Creations of Sound’ is a poem about where poetry comes from. It doesn’t come from the poet. But what does that mean? The poem begins with an ‘if’, a hypothesis: If the poetry of X was music, So that it came to him of its own, Without understanding, out of the wall Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen, Or chosen quickly, in a freedom That was their element . . .

Music ‘out of the wall / Or in the ceiling’ would not be psychologically expressive. It would have no mouth, no door or window. No one would speak; there would be no way through. What comes ‘of its own’ cannot be predicted and its origin cannot be fixed in relation to the identity of a poet, or even a poetic ‘I’, a narrator. The music that X does not write would come, Stevens says. It is as if understanding were a room one could not go out of, but still something other than understanding could pass into it. At the end of the poem are ‘syllables that rise / From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.’ The finitude of the house is known in a new way.

­22    Without Mastery Stevens wants to tell X ‘there are words / Better without an author, without a poet’. But he is not on the side of purity. Mallarmé famously associates the disappearance of the poet with the emergence of a pure work. ‘Crisis in Poetry’ explains: the pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference [inégalité]; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels, replacing the perceptible breath of the former lyric impulse, or the enthusiastic personal directing of the sentence.20

In this account, the poem dispenses with breath and intention, which liberates impersonal rhythms and relations of letters and sounds in words. Stevens’s poem is rather suspicious of purity. It imagines an ‘accretion from ourselves’, a ‘being of sound’ who might speak in poems. He denies that poetic speech is ‘dirty silence clarified’, disputing the notion of purifying the dialect of the tribe. The cipher X in ‘the poetry of X’, ‘X is an obstruction’, ‘Tell X . . .’ scatters polemic and literary history. And X scatters itself in the poem, it outs itself, ekes X out, makes X something other than the name for a position in a debate on the right way to compose poems. If X is ‘too exactly himself’, the poem already relocates him in sound, as an ‘expositor, / A being of sound, whom one does not approach / Through any exaggeration’. d It is difficult not to exaggerate the power of realism. Genet comments after telling the scene of the first miracle in Miracle of the Rose: Nothing will prevent me, neither close attention nor the desire to be exact, from writing words that sing . . . But let there be no talk of improbability or of my having derived this phrase from an arrangement of words. The scene was within me, I was present.21

The power to testify to an involuntary truth ‘within’ that is not reducible to psychology, a truth that had marked him, comes to Genet thanks to his impulse to write. He could not avow himself without writing. The power of telling and the experience of realities that come from writing owe much less than we imagine to the exaggerated simplicity of lines of thought: ‘Tell X that speech is not dirty silence / Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.’ For Hegel, language becomes itself only by deleting its outward, material, audible medium and preserving itself as meaning in the concept.22 Voice, which according to Hegel gives rise to speech and language, is the means whereby ‘sensations, intuitions, conceptions’ receive a ‘second and higher existence than they naturally possess’ and

Inventing the Reader    ­23

are invested with ‘the right of existence in the ideational realm’.23 In this account, the spontaneous particulars of matter are in essence spiritual, and skilled, silent reading internalises the text in such a way that nothing remains to stain or clutter the world. But writing does mark and remain. Reading activates voice. Mallarmé found that Poe had added something to language rather than cleaning something extrinsic away from it. Writing is part of a world that is not to be transcended, a world that is, as Claire Colebrook puts it: ‘contaminated – literally – and for this reason it might be better to remain among the pollutants that have marked and marred us’ (‘Not Symbiosis, Not Now’, p. 189).

Try Thinking As If Perhaps

This chapter begins, eight times over, to think about thinking. Its official thought-process began with a contribution to a colloquium called ‘The Ethics of Tropes: Writing the Feminine’, and the text remains marked by this title, which interested me very much, and does so still, but which naturally was not of my choosing. I responded to it, as to a kind of necessity. Necessity led me back to the beginnings of Western thought, for it was Plato who got us started thinking about necessity, and he approaches necessity, ananke, both as a concept and as the proper name of a mythical being, merciless, unredemptive, who happened, for the Greeks, to be feminine. Sexual difference comes into the thinking of Necessity, and necessity (how one defines it and how one responds to it) also touches ethics. Already with Plato a sort of figurative play affected the term ananke, leaving something to be read. Both Freud and Derrida, thinkers who bring us closer to an understanding of thought and the operations of sexual difference, have picked Ananke up. (But then, how could they avoid her?) The colloquium’s subtitle: ‘Writing the Feminine’ lent itself to the notion that writing may be a way to think about something as apparently given as the experience of being a man or a woman. My wish at the colloquium was simply to say that thinking is an experience of necessity and that this must involve an encounter with sexual difference. No ethical answers emerged. My main concern, necessarily, was with writing, and reading. And so it remains. In the course of reading Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida asks some ethical questions about writing: ‘Is writing seemly? Does the writer cut a respectable figure? Is it proper to write? Is it done?’1 Following Socrates, he answers at once: ‘Of course not’, and immediately qualifies: ‘But the answer is not so simple . . .’ It is risky to put oneself on the side of the writer, but when it comes to the ethics of writing, they are the ones to look to. The author whose thinking is most important to this chapter is Elizabeth Bowen: her fiction provides not only examples for my argu-

Try Thinking As If Perhaps    ­25

ment but gives me a paradigm for thinking in general. She emboldens me to risk an unqualified claim: literature offers the most advanced way of thinking about thinking. It occurs to me that my engagement with the more familiar forms of critical writing resembles the childhood parting between Dinah and Clare in Bowen’s novel The Little Girls. (I hesitate just for a breath before continuing. I feel I should say that The Little Girls has declared itself necessary to this book as such. It is as if it all begins with reading Bowen, especially when she cites, for example, the Wolf threatening to blow down the house in the tale of the Three Little Pigs. Later on, from Bowen’s early novel The Last September, comes the dream of letting or making writing burn, to the point of burning away the very book that had seemed to house it. She cites and I read, and I don’t know huff from puff. Sometimes I dream of being outside, solid wolf in mid-story, mangily aphoristic, on the side of bringing down the house and the master of the house. But the huff, a sort of exaggeration or inflating breath, rebuilds the edifice in a moment, like the resuscitation effect in anger, it brings me back.) Now there is the gentler question of farewells. In The Little Girls, despite the best efforts of the Little Girl who wants to say goodbye properly, the friend she is leaving does not respond to her farewell until many years later. This lack of response, in fact, defines the whole space of the novel. The name of the trope that characterises this kind of deferred or thwarted farewell would be enantiosis, from the Greek word for ‘opposite’. Enantiosis is a form of irony in which one expresses an idea ‘by the negation of its contrary’ or ‘by substitution of its contrary’ (Chambers). Departure, whether it is from a person, or from a certain expected way of doing things, raises ethical questions. There are ways of saying goodbye that affirm relation, making it stronger or more explicit at the very moment of separation. In Bowen’s book, one girl’s churlish neglecting to say farewell indicates a powerful kind of fidelity. She refuses, denies and thereby protracts the moment of parting – while the girl who so earnestly wants to say goodbye in a properly friendly way is the one who is getting ready to leave her companion. Which is the better friend? When Clare and Dinah meet again as adults, the injunction: ‘Try thinking’ means both ‘Think for yourself, spontaneously, inventively, in response to this particular juncture’ and ‘Think as it has already been decided thinking should be done. To do otherwise is not thinking.’ It is impossible for Dinah to satisfy these two injunctions at once. She weeps at the thought she was wrong to summon her childhood friends to a meeting, but also at the impossibility of thinking ahead, of thinking for, or instead of them. All thought, this chapter argues, must experience that impossibility, and

­26    Without Mastery take the risk of asking the reader, the listener or the friend to think, not knowing what that may mean, or what old anger it may bring down. One synonym for ‘ethics’ is ‘beliefs’ and I happen to prefer the more ordinary word ‘belief’. One does not choose to believe, or not to believe – though perhaps you can choose to make a place for belief in your thinking: what Derrida calls in Archive Fever ‘the radical phenomenon of believing, the only relationship possible to the other as other’.2 Bowen writes at the end of The Little Girls, ‘Chance is better than choice, it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly’ (p. 276). I want to associate thinking with the force of chance and the inexplicable. I offer you in this chapter a series of failed attempts to account for the necessity of the chapter’s own composition. I believe failure, in a certain sense, to be essential rather than incidental to thinking. The call for papers for the ‘Ethics of Tropes’ colloquium happened to refer to Derrida’s Spurs and I responded along the lines suggested by that book, where Derrida writes: ‘There is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself’, and ‘Although there is no truth in itself of the sexual difference in itself, of either man or woman in itself, all of ontology nonetheless, with its inspection, appropriation, identification and verification of identity, has resulted in concealing, even as it presupposes it, this undecidability.’3 My attempt to think the feminine began with the failure to be a woman and the impossibility of simply being a woman. Perhaps we have no choice but to proceed through this impossibility of being one thing, even when we live our lives as if it were otherwise – as if the differences in us could be assimilated, appropriated and identified. The trope and the movement that interests me here is one of interruption and discontinuity – anacoluthia: which means following without following. Its disorder affects all writing and reading. According to Derrida, who sees the broader implications: Anakoluthia designates generally a rupture in the consequence, an interruption in the sequence itself, within a grammatical syntax or in an order in general, in an agreement, thus also in a set, whatever it may be, in a community, let’s say, or a partnership, an alliance, a friendship, a being-together: a company or a guild [compagnnonage].4

Anacoluthia is a way of thinking about all these things, and about the uncrossable gaps that call us to think, read and write. It dictates that I address you, the unknown provider of a greater continuity, in a potentially endless series of tries, goes, bashes, cracks and shots.

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First Try: Bowen and Torok on Thinking During their first, rather difficult meeting as adults, one of Bowen’s little girls, Clare Burkin-Jones, tells another, Dinah Piggott: ‘Try thinking. I warn you against the habit, but try it once’ (The Little Girls, p. 64). It seems to me that the experience of thought always entails trying. It is an adventure in which, as Freud says, the degree of uncertainty is not assignable (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 59).5 The warning ‘against the habit’ that accompanies Clare’s advice to try thinking suggests that thinking takes place in relation to something even worse than uncertainty. One could pass over Clare’s warning as mere sarcasm if the emotional stakes at this point in the story were not so high, the irony so dizzying. Dinah has made contact with two childhood friends, Clare and Sheila, by way of a cryptic small-ad. When they meet, both Clare and Sheila reproach Dinah for her thoughtlessness in bothering them after an interval of fifty years. It isn’t clear to the reader why they feel like this. Dinah straightaway admits responsibility for having disturbed her friends’ peace of mind. She is visibly distressed: ‘ “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down” – That I never thought of. I never thought.’ She suddenly turned to Clare. Down her white face a tear made its bewildered way. One forgets that each tear is shed for the first time. ‘What do I do?’ (The Little Girls, p. 64)

The answer to this ethical question par excellence comes cruelly pat: ‘Try thinking. I warn you against the habit, but try it once.’ Clare speaks as if Dinah’s admission ‘I never thought’, her sudden turn and her unprecedented tear did not show her that Dinah is thinking already. The projected inaccessibility of the object of thought is a kind of prohibitive trap for thinking: it makes thought into what you should have known, or what ought to have been anticipated. It forgets that there may already be thinking, and in a way that cannot be anticipated. Thinking is the enemy of consensus, and the unknown towards which thinking moves goes under multiple names. Clare’s admonition ‘I warn you against the habit’ suggests that thinking may be a bad thing to do, like taking drugs, or masturbation – at least according to the ethics of the days before the First World War, when Bowen’s girls were young. The advice to ‘try it once’, alongside the warning against thinking, implies a silent and repressive commandment: ‘Think! once and once only. Your desire to think is not autonomous. It is subject to my will’. But such an externally determined process would no longer be thinking.

­28    Without Mastery The implicit analogy between thinking and masturbation can be carried further. Maria Torok, following Sandor Ferenczi, reads masturbation as a doubling identification, which brings about the possibility of autonomy (presumably including intellectual autonomy), through pleasure: masturbation brings with it a doubling of the subject; s/he identifies at once with both parties in the couple, performing intercourse self-sufficiently. Let me add that this doubling – touching oneself, the ‘I-me’ experience authenticated by orgasm – also means: ‘since I can do it to myself all alone, I am liberated from those who, up to now, have provided or forbidden pleasure at will’.6

From a relationship of dependence upon the mother, Torok explains, ‘the child moves to autonomy through masturbation, through selftouching in both the literal and specifically reflexive sense of fantasy’. According to this way of thinking masturbation is anything but a habit. In the light of Maria Torok’s research, Clare’s sarcastic warning is a ruse against thinking, but so is the invitation to think that accompanies it. It is as if Clare interrupts Dinah magisterially, silently saying: ‘I know what real thinking is – you just frig about.’ However, far from being examples of the sterile automatism of habit, thinking and masturbation can be seen as paradigmatic movements of liberation. They take us away from an object-oriented way of understanding experience and towards the fulfilment of our desires. For according to Torok, ‘The fulfillment of desires is not a matter of objective realities; it is dependent on our capacity to satisfy ourselves and on our right to satisfaction, that is, on our freedom to accomplish the relational acts of our bodies’ (‘The Meaning of “Penis Envy” in Women’, p. 43). If, as Derrida suggests, ontology is not the way to understand sexual difference, perhaps pleasure and relationality are, given that there is ‘no truth in itself of the sexual difference in itself, of either man or woman in itself’. Fiction applies similar criteria to thinking. Freedom of thought becomes possible when thought ceases to be responsible to those who would control it. This happens when thought ceases to hold itself entirely accountable to ‘objective realities’. The necessity and the possibility of such realities are always apparently determined in advance. Fiction works directly with the relational acts of a reading body, and aims at the satisfaction of wishes for both writer and reader. Fiction, still more than philosophy, gives us an idea of what kind of thinking might be able to transform the determination of reality. Time for another bash, which explores the relation between thinking and necessity, by way of existing thinking about necessity.

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Second Go: Plato, Freud and Derrida on Ananke Various aliases for what I am trying to think about appear in Plato, Freud and Derrida. They are: ‘ananke’,7 ‘necessity’,8 ‘compulsion’, ‘force’, ‘Ananke’,9 ‘Necessity’,10 ‘the death instinct’ (‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, pp. 120–1), ‘non-erotic aggressivity’, ‘the instinct of destruction’, ‘the anarchivic’ (Archive Fever, p. 10), ‘the archiviolithic’, or ‘the anarchy drive’. These words translate each other but it is not established a priori that they refer to the same thing. There is a disturbing interaction between the words and a force that the words can neither house nor mask. The aliases turn on themselves, interrupting, translating one another and repeating one another’s failure to refer. Or does some singular thing, necessity itself, dictate a spinning movement of names? In sections 616–17 of Republic, Ananke (Necessity) is a spinner. Her hollow spindle forms the centre of various astronomical orbits: it is a physical and geometrical phenomenon but also perhaps a linguistic one. The path of the spindle could be called periodos (a ‘circular course’), the word Aristotle and other classical rhetoricians use to describe the linguistically motivated coherence of certain sentences where there is a correctly reciprocal relation between thoughts. Anacoluthia is the syntactical solecism that reveals the force of the foreseeable periodicity of a sentence by trying to break it.11 The various translations do not make a closed circle. I must return to ananke, and to the moment in Archive Fever when Derrida quotes ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’ on ‘the idea of an instinct of destruction’ (Archive Fever, p. 10). Working, as Freud sometimes does, at the level of the scientific idea, comes at a price, and Derrida’s citation suggests what the cost might be in this case. A belief in the synonymy of particular terms marks the borders of someone’s thought, gathers words together in the name of someone’s idea of something. It is an appropriating move. Derrida notes that Freud has three names for what he, Freud, believed to be a single phenomenon. Freud writes ‘sometimes death drive, sometimes aggression drive, sometimes destruction drive, as if these three words were in this case synonyms’ (Archive Fever, p. 10, emphasis added). Derrida’s reading suggests that these names also function as tropes. The synonyms trope, if that verb may be understood intransitively; that is, to refer to a linguistic substitution which is not anchored by becoming a trope for a particular object of thought, in the way that the three names of ananke do for Freud. Let’s pause over the word ‘intransitive’, which means ‘not passing over or indicating passing over; representing action confined to the subject of the verb, i.e. having no object’. ‘Intransitive’ is a good a­ djective for

­30    Without Mastery thinking because thinking does not inevitably pass over to, or act upon a direct object. Thinking doesn’t necessarily come across. It is not telepathic communication and it is not the direct experience of the presence of what preoccupies it. Thought’s risky attempt to act upon or to reach a direct object directs attention to thought itself as a possible failure to be. In this sense the success of thinking is to keep missing what it aims at, not as one misses a target – once and for all – more in the way that one misses a person. This repetitious surprising thinking feeling – braver, more negative and more affirmative than nostalgia or mourning – drives Bowen’s fiction. Fictional thinking would be the relation to ananke as the absence of a loved one. How does this relate to Freud’s certainty about the death drive? According to Derrida, by the time of Civilisation and Its Discontents: ‘For Sigmund Freud himself, the destruction drive is no longer a debatable hypothesis. Even if this speculation never takes the form of a fixed thesis, even if it is never posited, it is another name for Ananke, invincible necessity’ (Archive Fever, p. 10). Freud’s certainty correlates with his conviction that it is possible to close systems of tropes and thus demarcate a scientific system. Witness some remarks in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, the text in which Freud begins to think about the death drive. He refers to the fact that ‘so many bewildering and obscure processes occur’ in the course of his speculations on life and death (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 60). This, he says, ‘is merely due to our being obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language, peculiar to psychology’. It is merely as if ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ were bewildering and obscure. For Freud that effect comes about merely because of the debt that psychoanalysis inevitably owes to psychological language. There could be no psychoanalysis without the repetition of that language. Derrida, however, suggests that the bewilderment and obscurity felt by readers of ‘Beyond . . .’ are not caused by new thought’s having to use the language proper to the old. They are effects of the three-named drive itself – and how could one specify a proper language to describe that which mutely works ‘to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces – which consequently cannot be called “proper” ’? Derrida renames the drive several times, working by the logic of repetition which 1) makes possible the archive as an external memory aid and 2) ‘remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction’ (Archive Fever, p. 12). To try thinking is to encounter this general anomaly. The death drive is the drive to end all drives: follow that! Anacoluthia follows on and does not follow on from the death drive, thereby constituting its afterlife, allow-

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ing its absolute literal reality for Freud to be sustained and broken with in Derrida’s notions of the archiviolithic, the anarchy drive and so on. Thinking tries to understand what is for it a silent, formless and disorganising force that conceals itself, never presents itself, and covers its work. Yet thinking as a work of repetition cannot be done without first making this force appear. Like the flame that shows a message written in invisible ink, desire shows necessity, lends it a name, a voice, disguises it and gives it to appear to someone. Desire lights up the relation to what otherwise would only be invincibly, silently and secretly there. However, at the same moment necessity becomes thinkable, apparently able to be approached by thought as some sort of direct object, he shows himself as what ananke always must be: an impossible object, resistant to narcissistic appropriation.12 Thought is what sustains relation in the face of this failure to understand. Now let’s hear Derrida on Necessity in his own work. He describes how it inspires him and dictates to him: I try to understand why there is what I call Necessity, and I write this with a capital ‘N’ – Necessity, as if it were someone, perhaps a woman, a Necessity which compels me to say that there is no immediate presence and compels me to deconstruct, and to say that there is an interruption, there is a possibility for a letter not to arrive at its destination and so on . . . I take into account this Necessity and I obey, I account, for this Necessity.13

The capitalisation of Necessity and Derrida’s partial personification of the compulsory break in presence are crucial moves. The personification still remains somewhat ungraspable, abstract and generalised. I have said, echoing Derrida and Freud, that necessity – compulsion, force, whatever – does not appear in person and leaves nothing of its own in its wake; yet it is possible for it to take on some erotic colouring and this makes it perceptible. Derrida’s remarks about what he is trying to do seem neither opposed nor reconciled to what he feels compelled to say (‘there is no immediate presence’) and do (to ‘deconstruct’). Instead he maintains a relation to it through the ‘as if it were someone, perhaps a woman’. Whatever the objective reality, desire is at work here – and in more than one way. Derrida adds that he still lives and acts according to the opposition between desire and necessity. He goes on: I take into account this Necessity and I obey, I account, for this Necessity. Nevertheless, in my life, I do the opposite. I live as if, as if it was possible for the letter to reach its destination or somehow to be present with voice, vocal presence. I want to be close to my friends and to meet them and if I don’t I use the phone and so on and so forth. That’s life, consistent with and inconsistent with, following without following. (‘Following Theory’, p. 9)

­32    Without Mastery The ‘as if’ here exposes the fictions we live by, necessary fictions that allow for the very profound connections that exist between how we understand ourselves and the acknowledged fictions of creative writers like Bowen and, at times, Plato.

Third Sally: Plato and Ethics As I have said, Necessity appears personified as female Ananke at the end of the Republic. A concept, an un-gendered concept, of necessity also appears in the Republic, for example in the discussion of co-­education at 458d, where Plato introduces the notion of erotikais anankais, which means that the men and women working and exercising together in his imagined city will inevitably (anankes) end up making love. Here Plato uses ananke to refer to a general notion of what must happen, rather than a specific allegorical figure. The passage makes a conceptual split, and introduces issues of prohibition and discipline, that Derrida’s remarks about Necessity with a capital ‘N’ might be said to displace. Erotikais anankais can be legislated against, Socrates hopes, for ‘it is not to be sanctioned in a state of happy people to have indiscriminate sexual relations with each other, or to do anything else whatsoever indiscriminately, nor will the government allow it’ (Republic I, p. 483). The passage distinguishes between different types of necessity – geometric and erotic. People will be drawn together by their natural inclinations to have sex; ‘Or do you not think that what I am saying follows from this necessity [anankaia]?’ ‘It will certainly not be by geometric [geometrikais], but by erotic necessity [erotikais anankais], which is likely to be keener to persuade and drag the majority of the population along with them.’ (pp. 481–3)

The argument adjudicates between geometry and sexuality, but attempts, like Plato’s here, to decide the most necessary form of necessity are themselves displaced responses to a force for which sexuality, no less than geometry, is still a pseudonym. And what is geometry in the Republic but a failing figuration, the sign of a verbally beleaguered attempt to think? Plato suggests that when we think about geometry there is a problem with abstraction: ignorant that the sole true purpose of geometry is knowledge, people speak as if their calculations and applications were the whole point of the exercise. They forget that geometry is already an ‘as if’ way of doing things. In the discussion of mathematics at 527a, the word anankaios suggests a kind

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of lower-order necessity that makes people who don’t know geometry have a silly, overly empirical way of talking about it. Emlyn-Jones and Preddy’s translation points out that this absurdity is inevitable because it is inherent in language: ‘those practicing geometry inevitably use the language of sense-perception, whereas the subject is essentially in the realm of pure knowledge’ (Republic II, p. 151n). Plato says of these non-experts: ‘the way they argue is quite absurd [geloios, ludicrous, comic], and is forced on them [anankaios], I mean, they talk as if they were doing something and making all their terms to fit their activity’ (Republic II, p. 151). Ananke here is the name for language as necessity, or more precisely, ananke names the impossibility of deciphering language as necessity because there is no language that, like geometry, does not refuse to give us the abstraction it invites us to attempt. And this situation is also funny, Plato suggests, as if there’s pleasure there after all, and not the philosophical pleasure of dialectic but a pleasure indistinguishable from frustration. The notion of true as opposed to necessary pleasures (tes edones ou panu porro, kai kalein to onti anankaios) is introduced later on as a preliminary to determining the most pleasurable pleasure, at 581e. The philosopher (philosophon) judges the various kinds of pleasure available to him. As for some pleasures . . . well, they don’t measure up: ‘And as for the philosopher,’ I said, ‘what are we to imagine he thinks of the other pleasures in relation to knowing what truth is and to be constantly engaged in some aspect of it as he learns? Won’t he consider them far removed from pleasure? And won’t he use the term “essential” [anankaias], in a real sense, as he wouldn’t need any of the others, unless they were essential [ananke] for existence?’ (Republic II, p. 347)

It is as if the philia (love, friendship) attached to wisdom in the word philosophon has been conceptually separated from common pleasure. This is done by the insistence on the strict or literal sense of the word anankaias as the unavoidable, as if certain pleasures (such as eating) were necessary to the point of becoming exiled from the very possibility of thinking or being thought. Plato’s invocation of the true, in opposition to the merely necessary, further reinforces the idealised polarity. And yet the philosopher calls (kalein, to call by name) the pleasures ‘necessary’. Is this not also to think them? A whisper here of a response like Derrida’s, to Necessity with a capital letter ‘as if it were someone’ and of philosophy as a desiring act of language, a thinking that calls ananke by all sorts of names. Plato’s ethical project and his opposition between geometric and erotic necessity, or true and necessary pleasure, contrasts with the kind of shady, fleeting transference

­34    Without Mastery that Derrida describes himself as having with Necessity ‘as if it were someone, perhaps a woman’. The heterosexual identification tampers with the classical heterogeneity of eros (desire) and philia (friendship) which Derrida describes elsewhere as hegemonic in the philosophical canon: ‘How has it been able to exclude the feminine or heterosexuality, friendship between women or friendship between men and women?’14 Furthermore, transference is unknown to classical ethics. Before the possibility of an ethical (in Plato’s narrow sense of ‘good’ or ‘true’) response to Necessity, there must be transference – in the psychoanalytic sense of ‘relational displacement’ but also in the sense of ‘love’. Across centuries, The Little Girls continues Plato’s work on thought and friendship without continuing the philosophical exclusion of the feminine and heterosexuality.

Fourth Crack: Negation, Also Known As Writing and Reading In order to work, as the writer of fiction does, with the ‘as if’, in order to pretend, one way or the other, you have to believe in impossibility. You have to desire the negation of what is, including for example presence and vocal presence. There is no other way to work or play with ‘perhaps’ and ‘as if’ . . . And maybe the idea of trying also has a relation to the mixture of obedience and pretending that Derrida describes. There’s a scene in The Little Girls where a child (Clare, again) watches a woman reading, and in this scene one can glimpse negation. Again, a certain desire colours annihilation. What does negation feel like? Like nothing; like someone reading a book in your presence, perhaps. Clare watches Dinah’s mother, Mrs. Piggott, read a novel: As for her surroundings, they were nowhere. Feverel Cottage, the sofa, the time of day not merely did not exist for Mrs Piggott, they did not exist. This gave Clare, as part of them, an annihilated feeling. She burned with envy of anything’s having the power to make this happen. Oh, to be as destructive as a story! (The Little Girls, p. 86)

What a description of reading! The strange excited hiatus of ‘an annihilated feeling;’ a feeling of not being there and of being part of what does not exist. Or as the words go, there is the pressureless pressure of being part of what ‘not merely did not exist for [think of a name]’ but of what ‘did not exist’. The scene makes the relation to stories appear as something other than absorption and appropriation. There is no actual annihilation but Clare makes Mrs Piggott’s reading appear as negation,

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non-proper, ‘as destructive as a story!’ The trouble with otherness is that one so readily theorises it. To quote Freud’s 1925 essay ‘Negation’: ‘what is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical’.15 All subsequent intellectual judgements are marked by this starting-place as an oral fantasy which Freud articulates as saying: ‘I should like to eat this’ or ‘I should like to spit it out’, and put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.’ That is to say ‘It shall be inside me’ or ‘it shall be outside me’.

The primitive ego constitutes itself in terms of property. What is it, then, that makes us sometimes unable to refrain from loving what we cannot assimilate, from taking what remains irrevocably external as our correlative and companion? What is it that comes before the early ego? Love and belief reveal to us our primitive fear of annihilation: you almost feel it and a longing can take shape. It burns you up: ‘Oh to be as destructive as a story!’ Fiction gives access to the formlessness that precedes form, the absence of relation that gives rise to relationality.

Fifth Shot: Missed Goodbye This try takes the form of a story of non-communication; the kind of botch that might intensify a relationship or end it, or even intensify it by ending it. The scene takes place in Bowen’s novel, just before the outbreak of the First World War. Dinah Piggott (or ‘Dicey’, each little girl has a proper name and a made-up name) is trying to say goodbye to Clare (a.k.a. ‘Mumbo’). Dinah’s mother Mrs Piggott (the one who reads) has warned her ‘you won’t be seeing her, don’t you see, for some time: it will seem quite a long time’ (The Little Girls, p. 152). So Dicey runs and signals after the departing Clare, who apparently does not see or hear, although references to her pig-headed pegging give a suspicion that she does see and hear, somehow. Perhaps she has decided not to try to think. It is explicitly as if she does not hear: Bowen, the novelist who determined never to know better than her characters, marks this uncertainty and leaves it open. The alliterative phrase ‘pigheadedly, she was pegging’ produces an impression that someone is hearing something, seeing something – perhaps the writer. The words constitute a kind of indifferent necessity for the story and the characters. The strange interconnection of words and sounds demands a loose reading, at once close and distant. (As Marie-Dominique Garnier remarked at the colloquium, there is a strong reverberation across the

­36    Without Mastery words ‘Piggott’, ‘pig-headedly’ and ‘pegging’ – and pig-headedness is another name for necessity.) Dinah’s surname ‘Piggott’ stubbornly refuses to appear in or disappear from the passage. It is as if Dinah comes towards presence in the mode of being excluded from it. The style of the name’s departure solicits attention. It trails in bits along the sentence and pulls interest towards the dismantled traces that disappear: for instance, the hauled, hurled ‘tent-things’ that might or might not include pegs. . . . on, pig-headedly, she was pegging. Now she was nearing the place where you climbed up. ‘Mu-u-u-umb –O!’ Now she was at it. Now she was climbing up, scornfully hauling the tentthings after her. Now, on to her feet, she dragged the unfortunates across the grass of the wall’s top, to hurl them (as though to perdition) ahead of her. And now? Alone in the middle of the empty sands wailed Dicey. ‘Mum-BO-O-O!’ The rough child, up there against the unkind sky, on the rough grass, glanced at and over the sands once. She threw a hand up into a rough, general wave. Then she leaped down on the land side of the sea wall. She had disappeared. (The Little Girls, p. 153)

Do the roughness and unkindness come from the terrain – the indifferent sky, grass, sand that figure the general indifference of words themselves? Or are the landscape and the language being invested with the psychological properties of ‘rough child’ Clare / Mumbo? Dicey cannot help but take her friend’s lack of response personally. Reading, we cannot be so sure. We have here only a rough, general draft or dry run of a nonfarewell that is repeated, now with exquisite care and attentiveness from Clare, at the end of the novel. The missed farewell on the beach ends the part of the book that is set in 1914, with a strange mixture of significance and insignificance, of signs repeated and signs missed. Bowen gives due consideration to the bitterness of death and separation: these are never merely psychic events in her work. They take place in time and space; these are never merely ‘context’, not ever a background for the so-called inner life – which Bowen calls elsewhere ‘the barren and pitted territory of emotion’.16

Sixth Dip: Anacoluthia of the Mark ‘Alone in the middle of the empty sands wailed Dicey.’ She does not follow her friend, but feels a loss and a desire. I would associate this

Try Thinking As If Perhaps    ­37

following without following (or to speak in terms of tropes, this anacoluthia) with a capacity for diversion that is part of the structure of writing.17 This conception of writing follows Derrida, who says that the mark is ‘remarked in its essential trait as the same’.18 Yet at the same time ‘the identity of the mark is also its difference and differential relation, varying each time according to context, to the network of other marks’. The mark ‘multiplies and divides itself internally. This imprints a power of diversion on its very movement.’ This potential for diversion within the movement of the mark troubles the movement of thought, and is inextricably that movement. The short French title of Derrida’s essay is ‘Mes Chances’ – a phrase that gets in beautifully the mixture of personal risk, bad luck and opportunity in the dicey, mumbling, shaky adventure of trying to think. The internal division of the mark produces an effect on thought that resembles the innermost blind leap of thought that we call intuition. The mark, like intuition, and like belief, possesses the divergent capability that Freud identifies as ‘intellectual impartiality’. Describing the investigation of repetitioncompulsion that he is undertaking in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, he remarks: it is impossible to pursue an idea of this kind except by repeatedly combining factual material with what is purely speculative and thus diverging widely from empirical observation. The more frequently this is done in the course of constructing a theory, the more untrustworthy, as we know, must be the final result. But the degree of uncertainty is not assignable. One may have made a lucky hit or one may have gone shamefully astray. I do not think a large part is played by what is called ‘intuition’ in work of this kind. From what I have seen of intuition, it seems to me to be the product of a kind of intellectual impartiality. (p. 59)

The mark’s swerve is a potential help to thought, not by lending the quest for understanding some special energy or truth proper to language, but by its dissymmetrical resistance to becoming the tool of intellectual prejudice. It helps by being unhelpful. For as Freud goes on to point out: ‘Unfortunately . . . people are seldom impartial where ultimate things, the great problems of science and life, are concerned. Each of us is governed by deep-rooted internal prejudices, into whose hands our speculation unwittingly plays.’ The otherness of the indifference of writing is not a formula that induces its set response. The dividing and multiplying powers of writing forbid the linear simplicity of pure dictation: yet its force, its wit, can be felt where there is some partiality for it, some wish for relation to it. Without that, I’m arguing, there’s no call to think.

­38    Without Mastery

Seventh Whirl: Argument Narrative argument seeks to demonstrate the necessity of its starting point and the inevitability of its conclusions. It would prefer not to be allegorical or subject to irony. It wants to make thought a proper, finite space or process. It reinvents necessity for the purposes of its own claims. The tendencies of writing I have highlighted work thought differently. As division, intersection, overlap, warp, coloration or repetition they resist reduction to a line or a case. They interfere with models of understanding based on classical geometry and even unsettle notions of grammatical correctness as the sine qua non of powerful language. They are an improbable way of doing things that goes beyond or falls short of what is necessary or expected. The normal rules do not apply. From the point of view of grammar, logic or geometry this looks like sheer inassimilable waywardness. For example, what would you call it, when a sequence abandons the integrity of its initial order to change horses in mid-stream? This is what happens with the non-sequential syntactic construction known as anacoluthia, in which the latter part of a sentence does not grammatically fit the earlier. I have already referred to anacoluthia several times. Broken and unstoppable, anacoluthia fails or refuses to complete one construction and continues instead with another. It is the very figure of trust and hope in continuities greater than we can anticipate. At the colloquium Ronald Shusterman asked about distinctions between anacoluthon, aposiopesis and ellipsis. Definitions of aposiopesis (‘a sudden breaking off in the midst of a sentence’) and ellipsis (‘a figure of syntax by which a word or words are left out and merely implied’) depend on absence: the absence of the second half of the aposiopoetic sentence, or of the elliptical word. But can there be a definitive breaking off or leaving out, without the possibility of some anacoluthonic attachment, even if that attachment only operates relationally in terms of negation, for example producing something like the ‘annihilated feeling’ experienced by Clare? I am also thinking of Robert Browning’s response to Ruskin, who had complained to him about his poems: ‘your Ellipses are quite unconscionable’.19 The poet wrote back: ‘suppose you jumped over there?’ Ellipsis and aposiopesis are perhaps no less metonymic than anacoluthon, which always finds a way on even if it’s one, like Bowen’s way on, that breaks with the consistency of metaphors – and metaphysics. The skip or the jump is already inevitably there. For example in the contiguity between pegging, Piggott, peg, pigheaded necessity, negation . . . to articulate a short stretch of a twisted and perhaps interminable chain of signifiers.

Try Thinking As If Perhaps    ­39

If syntax guarantees a logic of narrative sequencing, anacoluthia doubles that logic and divides it from within. One of the questions prompted by Bowen’s work is whether syntax can be allegorical. Her sentences proceed bizarrely. For example, the syntax of this sentence quoted earlier: ‘Feverel Cottage, the sofa, the time of day not merely did not exist for Mrs Piggott, they did not exist.’ This sentence is not anacoluthic in the grammatical sense but repetition has an effect on sequence such that Mrs Piggott and the ‘activity’ of reading become the fulcrum for a recursive movement that posits and negates space, time, being. Anacoluthic narrative cannot be grasped as the record of past presence without disrupting the sense of presence by forcibly repeating an initial impression of division or interruption. Bowen’s sentence is felt as a crossing, a switching of shapes that never resolves into a ‘before’ or an ‘after’ consisting of two separate entities or two distinct states. Does one live, or read, this erotic impression, this becoming-perceptible of reading as a movement of desire? Can it be appropriated as action or suffering? By the woman reading the novel, by the child reading the woman and her own response to not being responded to, by me or you?

Last Stab: the Infirmity of Allusion Anacoluthia describes the discontinuity not of some thought or of someone’s thought (a break within the same) but of the push or skip or contraction or condensation that moves thinking and moves one to try thinking. Anacoluthia combines continuity and discontinuity. The figure is included in rhetorical handbooks but it is more usually described in terms of grammar, more specifically of the failure to be grammatical. It is, according to Chambers, ‘a non-sequential syntactic construction in which the latter part of a sentence does not fit the earlier’. According to this definition both parts of an anacoluthic sentence are present. The sentence is a metaphorical unity divided by a syntactical disparity. However in Pierre Fontanier’s rhetorical definition, there is a break in presence: one part of anacoluthon is necessarily missing and his description of the figure is laden with impersonal pathos. There is a correlation between a word that is present and one that is not that reminds us of human relationships. He writes that anacoluthon consists in implying, and always in accordance with usage and without contravening it, the correlative, the companion of an expressed word; it consists, I say, in letting stand alone a word that calls out for another as companion. The missing companion is no longer a companion; it is what in Greek is called the Anacoluthon, and this name is also that of the figure.20

­40    Without Mastery It is an allusive figure and it is somewhat infirm, manifesting a kind of infirmity of purpose in relation to presence and companionship. It goes along with usage, but not completely. The two scenes I have already quoted from The Little Girls, like the one I am about to quote, dramatise this figure. They dramatise the impossibility of presence or rather its fracture; a doubling or division rather than an impossibility in the familiar sense. They also enact the impossibility of absolute nonpresence – and desire as the experience of this, an experience that is never simply interior or spontaneous. According to what we might call a syntactical model of allusion, in which all of literature would be imagined as somehow present together at once, the relation between texts resembles the grammatical anacoluthon. Allusion would be a discontinued construction. One text leaves off and another begins. However, Fontanier’s rhetorical definition suggests that the division is not between one text and another but operates within the structure of the mark. Take, for example, a phrase of Shakespeare’s, spoken by Lady Macbeth to her husband: ‘Infirm of purpose!’ and one of Bowen’s that recalls it: ‘infirmity of purpose’ (Macbeth, II, ii, 52; The Little Girls, p. 131). The mark has an anacoluthic structure: I have referred in a previous section to its divisibility, to the capacity to swerve of what ‘My Chances’ calls its ‘marking insignificance [insignifiance marquante]’ (p. 359). Inside the mark, there is a troping movement. The anacoluthic movements of allusion defy the determinism of Atropos (etymologically a-tropos – she who turns not, the daughter of Ananke who, according to the Republic, sings of the future). Allusion is traditionally understood in a cauterised manner as the relation between two texts that are present to themselves and potentially present to each other. Desire can only pit itself against this closed, finite model of the source. Allusion as anacoluthia, however, already has something like eros in it – the mark becomes soft, pliable, fluid, somewhat languid (ugros), so that it neither assimilates itself nor rejects itself.21 For example, in Macbeth:           Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping, and the dead, Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.

Lady Macbeth here refuses to believe in death, in ghosts or in sleep. She speaks in terms of what must be done and reproaches her husband for being infirm and childishly fearful; and of course, children don’t do too well in Macbeth. Bowen, on the other hand, explicitly valorises the eye of childhood, that ravenously desiring eye which, in the case of Clare / Mumbo, the ‘freak intellectual child’, sees the desir-

Try Thinking As If Perhaps    ­41

able destructiveness of stories. Here Clare is in conversation with her mother: ‘Your father back yet, I wonder?’ ‘I suppose so. I saw him.’ ‘Just now? Where?’ ‘Drawing-room window.’ ‘Coming out, going in?’ ‘Standing.’ Major Burkin-Jones’s tendency to do simply that mystified his wife often, his daughter never. It arose not from infirmity of purpose but out of his happening, from time to time, to find himself where he was. (The Little Girls, p. 131)

Standing – standing alone, as we remember the anacoluthic word must do – does not always arise from infirmity of purpose but from happening, from time to time, to find oneself where one is. As if one were not necessarily where one was – and Bowen makes it clear later in the novel that this is the case when she says: ‘Are not desires acts? One is where one would be. May we not, therefore, frequent each other, without the body, not only in dreams?’ (The Little Girls, p. 276). The drapery of psychological motivation suggests that when Major Burkin-Jones stands like that, he is with Mrs Piggott, whom he loves and whom he is not with. He is, as we say, thinking of her or with her in thought, or she is in his thoughts. Finding himself where he is is the surprising experience of anacoluthia, or of presence as dislocating location, beyond any attempt to maintain psychological continuity. Allusion marks the externality of a documentary archive beyond interior memory or forgetfulness. Notice or miss it, allusion has an anacoluthic structure. It is time to go. I would have liked to develop the reading of ananke in Freud, to discuss Bowen at more length, and to address explicitly the relations between the feminine and figurative language. This last relation I have touched on through questions of otherness, desire and personification. I should emphasise that this otherness is not to be identified with the opposition between masculine and feminine: it is not necessarily human. The turning aside which is part of the structure of the mark, the casual ‘perhaps’ in Derrida’s ‘perhaps a woman’ or my own tentative identification of necessity as masculine, are the kind of move that may make it possible to think about ‘the feminine’ and bring something of its force into thought. An unaccountable swerve, a kind of troping within the constitution of the mark, always queers or skews the attempt to think through sexual difference, or to think, by some chance, one’s way out of its impasses.

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction

I do what I do not say, almost, I never say what I do.1 (Derrida, Glas) I am against licence. I am for austerity. And for severity. For severity. And therefore the difficulty today, which is obviously yours, is to free the powers of transformation, of transgression, is it not, without losing severity.2 (Derrida, ‘Bâtons rompus’) These epigraphs concern the relation between freedom and necessity. My question is still: how to be free to read, write, think, do what must be done? The first epigraph is from Glas and has the form of enantiosis, which is as we have seen a form of irony in which one expresses an idea by the negation of its contrary, or by substituting its contrary for it. ‘I do what I do not say, almost, I never say what I do.’ A sentence like that is a severe incitement to read. At that point in Glas, it is as if the text were speaking, which is of course impossible but at times necessary, especially when there is division and conflict, as in the final interview Derrida gave, called in French ‘I am at war with myself’.3 It is as if the text were at war with itself. Perhaps it is gl itself speaking, the Gl of Glas, the insistent pre-verbal formation of letters which, or rather whom, Hélène Cixous has identified as one of the great characters of world literature. Whoever it is, it reminds us that a text never does what it says, that a text never opens up at the first try, it doesn’t offer itself to you on a tray. And if it does, saying to you: ‘Eat, drink, swallow my letter’, what do you do then?4 ‘Almost’, the sentence scrupulously qualifies. ‘Never’, it adds. It laughs at those who like to think they can bargain with Necessity. The second epigraph is Derrida speaking in 2003: ‘I am against licence. I am for austerity. And for severity. For severity. And therefore the difficulty today, which is obviously yours, is to free the powers

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction    ­43

of transformation, of transgression, is it not, without losing severity.’ Part of the difficulty is that necessity may be universal but the goddess Ananke does not show herself as such. She has to be approached indirectly. Furthermore, she has to be found indirectly. The hero of this chapter is a dog. I don’t know the dog personally: it’s in a poem by Robert Browning, who got the story from a friend. The name of both dog and poem is Tray. T-R-A-Y. The moment I heard this name of course I knew it had something to do with deconstruction, and with deconstruction’s interest in the trait, a word which in French and sometimes in English, can be pronounced so as to sound just like ‘Tray’. The trait, from Latin trahere, tractum, to draw, is ‘a distinguishing quality; a characteristic’ also a stroke or touch – perhaps of the draughtsman’s pencil (OED). There is, according to Derrida a ‘rigour and joyous severity of the trait’.5 He says in ‘+R (Into the Bargain)’ that writing appears as ‘trait or form, outside language’, and not by reproducing the thing that is said or shown (p. 159). Writing does not have to go through speech, not even through the human, or the living thing. There are traits, as it might be in drawing, or some other mark-making incidental to processes that are not what anyone could own, or own to, or master. The deeper you go down into the human, the more you find a-human things. A name, a signifier, an event that has marked someone without their knowing anything about it. And the trait works indirectly. Derrida also says in ‘Passe-Partout’ that a trait ‘never appears, never itself . . . it begins by retracting and retracing’.6 The trait too, perhaps, does what it does not say, almost, and never says what it does. The dog Tray on the other hand, arrives before you know it. Browning says: ‘Over the balustrade has bounced / A mere instinctive dog’.7 No one called it. Deconstruction involves playing things by ear, hearing words as a very young child might hear them, before the heavily guarded distinctions between play and seriousness, or between language and reality, have been learned. It’s getting late for me to be a child: I already know the name Tray, and that it occurs in Thomas Campbell’s poem ‘The Harper’ (1799).8 ‘The Harper’ tells the touching story of dog loyalty: a poor man’s dog stays by his owner to the bitter end, even to the point of dying of hunger. Heroes tend to be human, adult and male: their heroic dogs come after them or wait for them, along with the women and children. A dog follows and accompanies. Argus, Odysseus’ family dog, like Tray in Campbell’s poem, knew how to be faithful and how to die. Browning’s Tray is different: this dog has to do with survival. It runs up, as if out of nowhere. It has no master. It acts while others stand by and calculate. The name ‘Tray’ was popular for English dogs in the

­44    Without Mastery eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so calling a dog in a poem ‘Tray’ is a bit like giving it no name at all; it’s a generic dog name. Campbell’s poem became a very popular ballad, so ‘poor Tray’ is also a generic dogin-a-poem name. Originally, the name had to do with hunting, with a dog’s supposed capacity to follow the scent, the trace. Of which it says in Of Grammatology: We must begin wherever we are and the thought of the trace, which cannot not take the scent [flair, Geoffrey Bennington translates this as ‘nose-following’] into account, has already taught us that it was impossible to justify a point of departure absolutely. Wherever we are: in a text where we already believe ourselves to be.9

I believe in the dog. I have been called by him and I want to know how to respond to him. I have a desire for presence, born of reading, born of forgetting that desire is born of nothing. Which does not mean that it is nothing. ‘Every kind of desire, every kind of tongue, appeal, address’ is set in motion by a phantasm, a desire for an intact kernel of presence that we have forgotten has never existed. Derrida admits, warns, explains: ‘one wants to forget that there is nothing to forget, that there has been nothing to forget’.10 One wants the trait to be a sign of presence. Each time I have to write something I have to learn again how to let a text come. I begin the process by preparing wrongly and badly. It’s harsh but there it is. How to talk about the trace? It doesn’t wait to be introduced or induced. It can’t be seduced – as Derrida quotes Genet saying: ‘the words don’t give a fuck’ (Glas, p. 233b). The thought of the trace is nothing. It emphasises itself all by itself in the time it takes to read and reread, or write and rewrite, to stay and think. ‘+R’ reminds how little there is to go on. In that piece, Derrida focuses on the letter-formation tr but cannot thematise it because: ‘tr represents, imitates nothing, only engraves a differential trace, therefore no longer a formless cry, it does not yet belong to the lexicon’ (‘+R (Into the Bargain)’, p. 174). So I can’t look it up, which is a favourite thing to do. It’s either too late or too soon for etymologies and dictionary-definitions. Language is in formation; it is not there. I am writing. What will happen? Derrida continues that tr ‘does not yet allow itself to be domesticated by an appeased verb, it initiates and breaches an entirely different body’. Can I say it’s as if it, tr, bounces like a dog, over the balustrade, crossing what Of Grammatology calls the guardrail of commentary, and opens a reading? (p. 158). Browning can help me, because he is a poet in ‘my’ language and, as a poet, he knows how to call and be called. Browning was never too worried about his messages being received quickly. In the beginning,

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction    ­45

preparing and beginning awkwardly as I always do, I did not think of anything: except the rigour of deconstruction has to do with reading, that deconstruction is childlike, and that Browning has a poem about how to ‘read aright’ that begins with a five-year old.11 I looked for rigour in this book and that. I had identified a theme. Themes are much more obedient than texts. But the dog stopped me in my tracks because his name was Tray. (I don’t know. I’m asking myself whether it’s tr I should want, is that the goods, the treasure, because it has currency, already having been singled out by Derrida – but then what arrives is this particular dog.) I should tell you something about this poem about reading. It’s called ‘Development’ and begins with a childhood memory: My father was a scholar and knew Greek. When I was five years old, I asked him once ‘What do you read about?’      ‘The siege of Troy’ (ll. 1–3)

Sitting down to read, studying, is a bit like besieging or being besieged. You feel you are inside the tower, or outside the tower, waiting, at war, but then, when you are really reading, you have escaped. The poem continues: ‘What is a siege, and what is Troy?’       Whereat He piled up chairs and tables for a town, Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat – Helen . . . (ll. 4–7)

This part of the poem concerns reading before reading, the near side of reading. There’s not a word about the trace or pre-verbal formations of letters. The game of reading hides itself, under the guise of a recollection that is in fact adult and advances systematically towards meaning, what the poem calls ‘who was who and what was what’ (l. 16). And as always in Browning, the question is, where is the poem? It’s often, as in this case, more or less occluded by a speaker who, at the same time gives, hides, disappears into and appears out of the poem. One has to confront the text as if one didn’t know how to read. ‘A trait never appears, never itself, because it marks the difference between the forms or the contents of appearing’ (‘Passe-Partout’, p. 11). In ‘Development’ the speaker asks something like Hegel’s question ‘Why bother with the false?’ in an account of his own life history as a reader (Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 22). Like all Browning’s dramatic lyrics, ‘Development’ gives us to hear and to read the poetry erased by

­46    Without Mastery speech, in writing that imitates and is not speech, that elides, as much as possible, the text. It’s very much a text, it very much does not do what it says and does not say what it’s doing. Thematically, one can say ‘Development’ is about learning to read, about affiliation, learning from the father, learning Western culture, about growing up, advancing in rightness and especially learning how to ‘read aright’. Classically and etymologically, ‘development’ is an unrolling, an unfurling, but the poem ‘Development’ keeps rolling and twisting, it is not itself, it produces itself out of a versatile inability to settle, to seat itself, to remain. Texts remain repetitiously rather than sedentarily. I’ll read on: He piled up chairs and tables for a town, Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat – Helen, enticed away from home (he said) By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close Under the footstool, being cowardly, But whom – since she was worth the pains, poor puss – Towzer and Tray, – our dogs, the Atreidai, – sought By taking Troy to get possession of – Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk, (My pony in the stable) – forth would prance And put to flight Hector – our page-boy’s self. This taught me who was who and what was what. (ll. 5–16)

As the poem goes on the speaker, who is a dialectician, will set aside and raise this episode as only an episode, a didactic game, a development in his development, one of his moments. He goes on to read Pope’s translation of Homer, Homer, Homer scholarship, the scholarship that finds there was ‘no Troy at all’ – an illusion stolen from him by the rightly named scholar Wolf. Late in life he reduces the game of Troy, the first try at reading, to a treasured but now irrelevant moment in his own progression. In old age he reads Aristotle’s Ethics. He wants to be told what to do; he wants to be right. Browning’s game is to approach reading furtively, by thematising interpretation all the time, by writing a text that lends itself to transcendence through psychologism, historicism, the pursuit of the signified. He found the way he was read, the adventures of his reputation, both funny and strange. When he became celebrated in old age, it made him feel ‘as if I were dead and begun with . . . that there is a grotesque side to the thing is certain’.12 No one could read him and anyone could read him. There we are, that’s the trait – a ‘difference which is nothing’ (+R (Into the Bargain)’, p. 223) – how does one make the text appear? As if it could appear, as if . . . as if in the absence of the phantasm that its

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction    ­47

speaker is, that its subject-matter is, that its genre and historical context are, there the text truly would be. Browning’s poem also thematises traces: the trace of a voice, traces of Troy – Browning laughs at reading as archaeology – then there are traces of animals, of course, the cat, the dogs, the pony, the Wolf, finally traces of food that the old man does not spill on the book he reads. The poem ends: ‘At least I soil no page with bread and milk, / Nor crumple, dogsear and deface – boys’ way’ (ll. 114–15). What would reading ‘boys’ way’ be like? Close to the dog’s ear, perhaps, close to the soil, bread, milk of language, to the stables, something as yet undeveloped. Perhaps not too far from the mother, not yet dedicated to the image of the father. The treasures of a poem are not contained in it – a poem may seem to hold or hide but its secret is nothing, furtiveness itself. ‘I do what I do not say, almost, I never say what I do.’ It will never betray you because it contains almost nothing but poem. If you know Browning you may already have noticed that the Troy made of chairs and tables is also a tower. He built towers all over the place.13 The poem is a tower of words piled up from the bottom of the page and also a siege, a seat, the child sits on top of it, the little King of Writing who cannot yet read, it’s all Greek to him, as it was to Shakespeare, but he can play. Try the sounds, boys’ way: Troy, Tray, the Atreidai (sons of Atreus – hidden in that word is another relation to the family altogether, Greek tragedy at its most bloody: infanticide, incest, revenge. Freud liked to quote Goethe’s Mephistopheles: ‘The best of what one knows / Is not to be told to boys’14), then Tray and Towser (there’s the tower in a dog’s name, the word a little tousled but still standing). The top, the town . . . to Robert Browning it’s all poetry. Of Grammatology associates the scent of reading with ‘empiricism and errancy’ with something that is never going to look entirely rigorous. The ‘rigour and joyous severity of the trait’ defies systems and programmes. According to ‘+R (Into the Bargain)’ the trait ‘dislocates, dissociates, unhinges, shifts out of line, truncates, interrupts. But, on the other scene, with the other hand, the gathering force of an erotics repairs, props, joints, reconstitutes’ (p. 163). What we thought we had, what we thought we should be aiming at, does not exist, this thought tears us away from the image and from representation – but losing sight of the goal is just what gets desire mending, gets reading and writing going again. A rigour in deconstruction will be severely interrupted and will survive the interruption. One must believe, without at first knowing what one believes: one must continue. Rigour asks readers for suppleness and flexibility. I am delighted to read in the ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Truth in Painting, that ‘rigour

­48    Without Mastery here needs to be re-thought in terms of flexibility and compromise’ (p. xiv). It is important to be capable of being delighted by writing. Rigour does not obviously lend itself to the liberating force of deconstruction, but it is essential to it, as the increase of tension that, at risk of never getting to pleasure at all, increases pleasure. There’s a sentence in Glas about pleasure and presence: ‘L’os de la jouissance, the snag or bone of pleasure, its loss and its chance, is that it must sacrifice itself to be there, to give itself its there, to touch and tamper with its Da-sein’ (p. 289a / 260a).15 Heidegger’s word Dasein has been hyphenated, severed, jointed. Derrida articulates the Da, the there and the sein, being. It’s just enough to show a glimpse of flesh, the garment of philosophical German brushed aside to reveal another language in sein, French for breast. Being meets and touches, in writing, with flesh and bone, l’os et le chair as the French expression goes. In case one forgot, as one always wants to, what it says in Of Grammatology: In what one calls the real life of . . . existences ‘of flesh and bone’, beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as . . . text, there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking a meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement. (p. 159)

This substituting and differentiating does not put an end to pleasure; far from it. Perhaps the dog will come for these bones? Let’s hear again Derrida on the rigours of Necessity: I try to understand why there is what I call Necessity, and I write this with a capital ‘N’ – Necessity, as if it were someone, perhaps a woman, a Necessity which compels me to say there is no immediate presence and compels me to deconstruct, and to say that there is an interruption, there is a possibility for a letter not to arrive at its destination and so on . . . I take into account this Necessity and I obey, I account for the Necessity. (‘Following Theory’, pp. 8–9)

Necessity, compulsion, force, whatever we call it, has no true name, does not become present. It has to be approached, one has to make one’s advances to it clothed in ‘as if’, as one would try to summon a phantasm, by believing in what, rigorously, one might say is unbelievable, by believing wrongly, lacking the rectitude to remember the first law of deconstruction, there is no immediate presence, so don’t go looking for it, you are broken in your speech and you are speaking to no one in order to perhaps speak to Lord knows who, the order of things is not as

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction    ­49

you would have it, nor as you have calculated it to be and the truth is not where you have put it. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry in this kind of fix, the fix of all fixes, that is beyond fixing. As Derrida says in ‘The Ear of the Other’: the desire or the phantasm of the intact kernel is irreducible – despite the fact that there is no intact kernel. I would oppose desire to necessity, to ananke. The ananke is that there is no intact kernel and there never has been one. That’s what everyone wants to forget, and to forget that one has forgotten it. (The Ear of the Other, p. 17)

So, let’s think desirously, transferentially and inconsistently, with an inconsistency that is capable of being avowed and made explicit. Cixous emphasises the importance of avowal in writing – avowal is never a matter of words only, never a rule-obeying performative, it is itself an experience of necessity. It takes courage. It’s there when we look at Derrida’s own academic career. He recounted how things went for him when he began to write as he had to write, and not as others expected him to write: when I entered the École Normale and took the aggrégation exams . . . when I’d been recognised by Hyppolite, and supported by people who knew my work, I’d been assistant at the Sorbonne: I had begun to publish on Husserl, I was at that moment the golden boy, enfant chéri, of the institution. That’s to say Canguilhem, Hyppolite and those people were saying: ‘That’s promising, etc’. Good. It was the red carpet when I was assistant, for four years. And then, from the moment I began to flirt with literature, to publish things on Artaud, on Bataille, etc. even the protectors said: ‘What’s he doing . . .?’, and then the doors were closed. I saw things close, precisely when I began to write in the way we’ve just been talking about, and that did nothing but get worse. (‘Bâtons rompus’, p. 202)

Freedom must get along with what restrains it. It’s inevitable. Poetic freedom and poetic necessity both arise from the same state of affairs, the same recognition that there is no untouched core of presence or meaning. Writing is not about free will or good intentions but about having the courage to receive dictation. Derrida mentions publishing on Artaud as something that closed doors for him in his academic career. But poets know more about necessity than anyone. This is still true. For Artaud, necessity bore the name ‘cruelty’ and he wanted to explode the predicament of reading, to tamper with the necessity that speech and writing are, as Derrida puts it, ‘always unavowably taken from a reading’.16 Artaud describes a lack of rectitude and uprightness in his writing. He explained:

­50    Without Mastery This scattered quality of my poems, these defects of form, the constant sagging [flêchissement] of my thought, must be attributed not to a lack of practice, a lack of control [maîtrise] of the instrument I was handling, a lack of intellectual development, but to a central collapse of the soul, to a kind of erosion, both essential and fleeting, of the thought, to a temporary nonpossession of the material benefits of my development.17

Thinking subjects the thinker to interruption. A nothing intervenes, hidden by being disguised as the effect of something. Language hides the thought of the trace. For those who know how to read, this opens thought and produces what Derrida calls an original enigma, that is to say . . . the speech or history . . . which hides its origin and meaning; it never says where it is going, nor where it is coming from, primarily because it does not know where it is coming from or going to, and because this not knowing, to wit, the absence of its own subject, is not subsequent to this enigma but, rather, constitutes it. (‘La parole soufflée’, p. 223)

Deconstructive rigour likes to read this something that is nothing: knows how to know not-knowing, how to thematise the unthematisable. This is not opposed to what Artaud calls ‘intellectual development’, but your intellectual development is often not much help when it comes to writing. Let’s not forget how young we are. Let us remain capable of child. In particular, the child Derrida speaks of: who finds itself there, in front of language, before language, who learns language and who, in learning language, draws language towards there where there was as yet no language . . . It’s that, the child who plays with syllables which don’t yet form a language. And then, next, naturally one forms a language, then one is old, very very old [très très vieux]. Glas is a book by someone very old [très vieux]. It’s someone who has read Hegel. (‘Bâtons rompus’, p. 213)

Très, very. It is very Derrida, singularly, rigorously Derrida, to be so aware of the child and the old man together. I promised a hero. It’s not Napoleon, who is Hegel’s hero.18 It’s Tray: so-called because this dog is perspicacious, intuitive and able to follow the scent. His poem by Browning begins ‘Sing me a hero’ but he’s not a Greek warrior, nor an English knight, nor a maverick poet. Nor is he a pet. He is without pedigree. He (I wonder if this maternal creature is exclusively a ‘he’ but there’s no time to explore that now, it’s an emergency) he belongs to no one, runs up, does something incredible and then runs away – not before having attracted the attention of a man of

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction    ­51

reason, a would-be vivisectionist who loves knowledge and is curious to locate the dog’s soul by the anatomical route. We hope Tray gets away, but we don’t know. Here’s the incident, in a strange doggerel, rather difficult to read aloud or settle in the mind’s ear because it sits between verse and speech, obeying the rules of neither. It is in and out of the canal. As so often in a Browning poem we have no choice but to identify with someone we can’t identify with, a more or less idiotic character who just happened to be there at a poetic event but who is singularly ill-suited to speaking about it, who nonetheless necessarily and essentially speaks of nothing else, a kind of poetic revenge on all the world’s prosaic fools, and all the fools who think they know some poem when it’s coming. Without more ado, a few verses of ‘Tray’: ‘A beggar-child . . . ‘Sat on a quay’s edge: like a bird Sang to herself at careless play, And fell into the stream. Dismay! Help, you the standers-by! None stirred. ‘Bystanders reason, think of wives And children ere they risk their lives. Over the balustrade has bounced A mere instinctive dog, and pounced Plumb on the prize. [Now the would-be vivisector takes over] “How well he dives ! ‘ “Up he comes with the child, see, tight In mouth, alive too, clutched from quite A depth of ten feet – twelve, I bet! Good dog! What, off again? There’s yet Another child to save? All right! ‘ “How strange we saw no other fall! It’s instinct in the animal. Good dog! But he’s a long while under: If he got drowned I should not wonder – Strong current, that against the wall! ‘ “Here he comes, holds in mouth this time – What may the thing be? Well, that’s prime! Now, did you ever? Reason reigns In man alone, since all Tray’s pains Have fished – the child’s doll from the slime!” ’ (ll. 11–35)

The witness finds this bit of dumb-animal behaviour intriguing. He doesn’t understand it. That is because he is a spectator. We can only understand by guessing, by diving and divining. By reading. The dog is

­52    Without Mastery so quick! Tray saves the child but also saves what the child loves. This act has its own logic, its own recognition of what is precious. Life can be saved and so can the less-than-life or more-than-life that goes with life. The doll is without prestige, inessential, perhaps a symbol of the symbol itself, an inanimate replica, figure, child of the child as yet too young to have a child, a plaything, the future of the future. Ananke anadyomene, wave-born Necessity. The dog is a retriever, a writer. To write is to save. What he saves is not in his own image. He saves the child and what she would have saved were she able. She sings like a bird, so she’s a poet. Perhaps she will become a philosopher when she grows up. Tray dives through twelve feet of water, between the distractions of the ‘current’ (Browning laughed at notions of the contemporary, of literary and critical fashion) and the unyielding ‘wall’, through the ‘slime’. (The prize is frequently in the slime, unfortunately.) Then he runs off and does something else. He’s free: he knows necessity and he is vulnerable. His ability to retrieve notwithstanding, he doesn’t know what will happen. Over the balustrade . . . already in a text, so that the child can continue to sing. It is some mysterious quality of soul that we need, some trait of dog, of bird, of fish, of child. (All this told by the wrong person, who by chance happens to be there, through whom, despite whom, poetry affirms itself, which is impossible.)

Close to the Earth

thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day, and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star, On Lemnos, th’ Aegean isle.1 (Milton, Paradise Lost) This alternation between the logic of exclusion and that of participation . . . stems perhaps only from a provisional appearance.2 (Derrida, ‘Kho¯ra’) I wrote myself a note in 2006, smiling, without thinking: I’ll be there in two minutes – in two words, in a summer’s day – I’ll arrive at the earth. Specifically, I would land on Lemnos. I had the idea that when someone got thrown out of Heaven (a gated development, masculine, nicely-ranked, well-lit: Where sceptred Angels held their residence And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King Exalted to such power, and gave to rule Each in his Hierarchy, the Orders bright)

they would drop down to Lemnos where outlaws and pirates live. Lemnos would be the name of a gateway to what Wallace Stevens succinctly calls ‘the second part of life’ (‘The Creations of Sound’, Collected Poems, p. 311). Lemnos would also be part of the story of writing: the name of the episode where fear of separation from the group would lose its power to silence and distort what is to be written. I continued to believe I would go there, even though I had also been told on the highest

­54    Without Mastery authority that that part of the story, the part about dropping down on Lemnos, was a myth. I went back to the English authorised version of falling and the Fall, written by Milton, who insists that the coming to earth on Lemnos did not happen. Paradise Lost goes back to Lemnos in order to visibly specifically correct itself, and Homer. It tells how an angel-architect built in Heaven, then rebelled against God and was cast down to Hell. Once there he went on building, and was much admired. According to Milton, this angel only reached Lemnos, earth, in a classical fable. The story comes from The Iliad. Hephaestus, who had built the residences of the other gods on Olympus, recalls how Zeus threw him out: ‘down I plunged on Lemnos, / little breath left in me. But the mortals there / soon nursed a fallen immortal back to life’.3 Lemnos would be the name for a place neither Heaven nor Hell. A place on earth. Homeric Lemnos was where Hephaestus recuperated and Philoctetes suffered.4 Geologically, Lemnos was a volcanic island, where the gases and lava of the lower depths came to the surface. But Lemnos had come to me in a poem and as a name. It was not easy to tell what it meant. In Derrida’s words: ‘when a name comes, it immediately says more than the name: the other of the name and quite simply the other, whose irruption the name announces’ (‘Kho¯ra’, p. 89). No-longer-nameless Lemnos remained an unexpected and longed-for place. But it was not a place; it troubled me, as if it were someone. This island was looked for, sought as if it might know me back, as if it could answer me, speak, so I would no longer have to ask: ‘Why you? Who are you?’ Lemnos came up incidentally. I didn’t expect to find it in Paradise Lost and Milton inherited it from Homer, thrown in with the day-long fall. The poem never returns to it. It was given in, and marked for exclusion from, Milton’s narrative. It is part of the vocation of his poem to be more than, and other than, narrative. The angel, called ‘Mulciber’ by some mortals, but whose true or immortal name we don’t know, is thrown out by God like any other bit of unwanted matter. He is edited, ditched, cancelled. We are, as Cixous says, our own masters. We are both Jove and ‘Mulciber’, this other with a provisional, given, mistaken or fabulous name. What, if one organises oneself around the logic of exclusion and participation, is one to do with a name? For writers, the journey down into the metals and coals, the mines and volcanoes, is necessary. Mulciber is the smith, smelter or forger who softens (mulcere) metals by heat. Writing is formed in dissolutions and streaming currents that have not cooled off into forms. Milton gets language to a dropping consistency. In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous invites her reader to come down, deliberately:

Close to the Earth    ­55 where the treasure of writing lies, where it is formed, where it has stayed since the beginning of creation: down below. The name of the place changes according to our writers. Some call it hell: it is of course a good, desirable hell.5

This down below is, she says, where ‘those who are excluded live’. It is also where we do not know what is coming through. Names come and go. Milton doesn’t want to stay on Lemnos, his destination lies deeper and further back. He explores the inevitability and richness of falling: Mulciber, Lucifer, Eve. Lemnos was not simply the name of a place but a wound, or a wounding impact. Around it, a spectacular inflammation of language. Hyperbolic beauty, luminous, streamlined transport: not without images but in a flow of words,              from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day, and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star . . .

As if Milton were falling over himself to make coming down the noblest and loveliest, the starriest and highest inscription of the zenith. This word ‘zenith’ means it happens directly to you, he falls from right above your head. It comes from the Arabic expression samt-ar-ras, ‘way or direction of the head’, so it is not a general or objective astronomical location but the summit-point of an imagined celestial sphere that is projected from a particular point of earthly vantage. In this case, we imagine a line from the zenith to Lemnos, which becomes another way of saying, it falls to the reader. You are Lemnos, in the errant and fabulous language of poems. The treasure of writing is not the footnotes. They don’t let us stay and descend into them or live in them; one way or another they take us straight back up. In Homer’s version of the fall to earth, Zeus flung Hephaestus down from Olympus because Hephaestus went to help his mother Hera, who was arguing with Zeus. Hephaestus recalls the incident to her in Book I of The Iliad: he is recommending compliance. Let’s all stay up here together, whatever happens, whatever the tyranny: You remember the last time I rushed to your defence? He seized my foot, he hurled me off the tremendous threshold And all day long I dropped, I was dead weight and then, when the sun went down, down I plunged on Lemnos, little breath left in me. But the mortals there soon nursed a fallen immortal back to life. (ll. 711–16)

­56    Without Mastery Better to comply. But it will not take you down to writing. Miltonic Hell has earth in it but it is figured as background or resource, a kind of passive body. As when Mammon and his crew open ‘into the hill a spacious wound’ to dig out ‘ribs of gold’ (Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 689–90). The emphasis is on what comes out of the earth, what earth might contain or support. As Milton tells the episode, neither Mulciber nor the reader beholds the darkness, dirtiness, dense intermixture, fundamental interiority of the earth. Other parts of the poem give us glimpses of earth destroyed and wounded – the destruction of prior forms and of form itself that makes earth earthy. Whether in Heaven or Hell, Mulciber remains Apollonian and Olympian: an architect, a star. He is concerned with images, structures and artistic projections. He has a kind of economical magic power to build, as when gold mined from earth musically becomes the complex of buildings called Pandaemonium:      out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple. (ll. 708–13)

The process reminded me of Nietzsche’s account of a music, Apollonian music, which he calls ‘architecture transmuted into sounds’.6 That music soothes the spirit. It is an art of representation, suggestion, imitation. But the sonorities of Milton’s poem include the other kind of music Nietzsche writes about. Dionysian music manifests something transcendent: ‘the overwhelming power of sound, the unified flow of melody and the utterly incomparable world of harmony’ (The Birth of Tragedy, pp. 20–1). Its relentless, raw, ecstatic power does not correspond to expressive or containing structures. It is on the side of knocking down walls, or resembles a furnace where times, myths, beliefs, histories and words become molten and flow into immense, unpredictable sentences. Nietzsche identifies sound-power, melody and harmony with a tragic loss of structure. Dionysian music elicits ‘supreme joy’ and lets us ‘hear the scream of horror or the yearning lamentation for something irrevocably lost’ (p. 20). As if, he says, undifferentiated nature were ‘bemoaning her fragmentation into individuals’. The more hellish, the more forceful, melodious, harmonious and painfully joyful the outpouring. The ‘essence of nature’ does not follow the Apollonian or imitative model in which an extant phenomenon makes itself known through existing means of expression. It is not initially present as a separate entity to be written about or written up but requires a sort of all-in writing. Nietzsche thinks in terms of dance: ‘the symbolism of the body, not only the symbolism of the mouth, the eye, the word, but the rhyth-

Close to the Earth    ­57

mic motion of all the limbs of the body in the complete gesture of the dance’ (p. 21). Writing-force of this kind might tell us something about literary and poetic writing but it transcends the modes and genres of writing in the familiar sense. One is taken up into its movement. e As ‘writing cannot be thoroughly Dionysiac’, I will retrace my steps for a moment, and read Milton’s account of the fall of Mulciber, which begins before, and after, he has been named.7 All through, admiration accompanies Mulciber, right from the first public opening of Pandaemonium, which is received as a master-work:           The hasty multitude Admiring entered, and the work some praise And some the architect: his hand was known In Heaven by many a towered structure high Where sceptred Angels held their residence And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King Exalted to such power, and gave to rule Each in his Hierarchy, the Orders bright. Nor was his name unheard or unadored In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day, and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star, On Lemnos, th’ Aegean isle. Thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before; nor aught aviled him now To have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he scape By all his engines, but was headlong sent, With his industrious crew, to build in Hell. (Paradise Lost, Book I, ll. 732–51)

Mulciber built high towers in Heaven, and in Hell just the same, his ‘ascending pile / Stood fixed her stately height’ while within there are ‘ample spaces, o’er the smooth / And level pavement’ (ll. 722–3, 725–6). Lemnos was a mistake. Getting to the earth is not about working metaphor, nor is it mining or magical building. It concerns the possibility, origin and meaning of metaphor-making.8 Falling is more than a gesture. The whole body goes down. Its lack of reservation evokes the state we are in when we dream, the dreamer’s bottomless fall into an ‘overall writing of dreams’,

­58    Without Mastery a writing that ‘exceeds phonetic writing and puts speech back in its place’ (Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 274). It asks me to respond with my entire body, more than that, with everything, including what I do not have – for example, my sense of ­fragmentation – an awareness that everything is not one, the awareness of the necessity of reading that does not exempt you from reading. Like the power Nietzsche finds in sound, melody and harmony, what I am calling ‘earth’ took effect and became knowable in an experience including error and fable. Ready-made formalisations could not describe it, even if those cognitive forms are part of it too. The experience also had to include negation: the explicit opening on to nothing. Falling to earth is only the beginning. To remain there one has to retrace one’s steps. e Reading the story of ‘Mulciber’ I heard more than one voice. It was Miltonic, Homeric. It was inside. There was something outside inside me insisting and returning. I heard ‘an interior voice, an absolutely low voice’ that engaged reading, it gave itself to be read by its withdrawal and self-correction, by allowing the traces of its vagaries, inventions and falls to remain.9 It barely gave me an image: only some fleeting transparencies, lights, verticals. There was no established rhythm. I held my breath while it sang. I wanted to save it and determined to do so. It was impossible to keep up with it. At first I thought I could gather it up in speech, with my hands, eyes or mind, perhaps by pursuing this or that terminology, in the work of this or that writer. I thought I might transcribe it, sit for a photograph with it, as if it were only a little scattered or just a touch wild, as if the particles were unmistakable, as if the ‘path back into a landscape of writing’ were not only given in dreams (Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 259). Dictation took me down to the region of ‘lithography before words: metaphonetic, nonlinguistic, alogical’, a dream-writing no more purely natural than it can be reduced to the status of a psychical attribute or an immaterial activity. Dream-writing finds the dreamer reading and writing where they live in an inside that does not belong to them. Bronislaw Szerszynski describes the lithographic traces of our time, the Anthropocene, in their violent effect on our sense of the earth as stratified (the deeper, the older), as a stable foundation, a resource and so on. He describes earth as a stone book that is not ‘immune to the vagaries and errors of literal, fallen writing’.10 In order to be awake we need to understand what happens at the depths, we need to see ourselves in the perspective of the place beneath where names no longer reign:

Close to the Earth    ­59 As the Anthropos turns from reading to writing the stone book of nature, this is a ‘being written’ that seems to disrupt the order and meaning of all the other pages of that ‘written being’. What we as humans put down in the stone book is the disruption of other layers as we drill, mine and extract. We are volcanic, creating extrusive and intrusive formations that break the logic of superposition and burst the relation between space and time in the stone book. Just as magma fills fissures and then cools to create ‘dikes’ – thin sheets of igneous rock that lie discordantly across existing strata – we create pages at strange angles, generating a ‘Rubik’s book’ that would need to be read through in all directions simultaneously. The Anthropos will thus ‘lie’ in the strata in a different sense, in a different plane, not ‘true’ – as a perjurer, disrupting the semiotic logic of geology as much as its materiality. (‘The End of the End of Nature’, p. 180)

e I read again the ‘erring’ relation:              how he fell From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day, and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star, On Lemnos, th’ Aegean isle.

I read, moving along and down the lines, as one does with poetry. Time slowed: something was spacing it out, from morn to noon, from Jove to eve. ‘Eve’ is the evening-time when Mulciber arrives on Lemnos, but also part of the often-repeated ‘never’ (see Book I, ll. 66, 108, 110, 159, 573, 657) and ‘ever’ (ll. 9, 160, 210, 228, 250, 330, 608, 630) of losing Paradise. ‘Eve’ nests or invests itself in ‘envy and revenge’ (ll. 35, 107, 604) and in the ‘great event’ of downfall (ll. 118, 134, 624). It chimes with believing in God (l. 144) and the grieving of God (l. 167). Eve is the name of the mother of humanity, the ‘sons of Eve’ (l. 364) who called Mulciber by that name. ‘Eve’ is also anonymously part of the deceptively ‘smooth / And level pavement’ laid in Hell by Mulciber and his industrious crew (l. 726). Evenness is not obviously special. It is a counter to the intensity, sublime elevations and descents of the poem. Also to its capacity for revelling joyously in shifts of scale, like the moment when the super-gigantic fallen angels take on the appearance of tiny beings:              faerie elves Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees. (ll. 781–4)

­60    Without Mastery Milton works variously by phrases, breaths and commas. The passage about Mulciber’s fall summarises and repeats, drawing out the length of day from ‘dewy eve’ to ‘setting sun’ and all the time ‘he fell’, ‘he fell’, he ‘dropt . . . like a falling star’. Even after falling all day, Mulciber drops from the zenith again, his falling becoming a kind of glorious downward ascent. And he never quite arrives where he is dropped, but remains on the eve of arriving, not landed, not received, as if he had reached the page by accident and still awaited a reader. He does not lie more dead than alive, he is not tended by the inhabitants as in Homer. He remains on the eve, or it is as if he vanished into the air again on landing, like dew. The corrected version which follows immediately is deliberately bathetic, a rhetorical drop. It pretends the fall is nothing to talk about. As if it were over, it happened ‘long before’, and now Mulciber is in Hell where he was sent. As for the Greeks:        Thus they relate, Erring; for he with this rebellious rout Fell long before; nor aught aviled him now To have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he scape By all his engines, but was headlong sent, With his industrious crew, to build in Hell.

I wanted earth and believed the erroneous downward movement of reading would get me there. By means of the fable, as well as the fall, and the manner of falling of the whole body in writing, through, say, ‘relate’, which relates to ‘erring’ through re, to ‘rebellion’, that relates to ‘Fell long before’ by ell and be, that moves on by means of or from ‘before’ to ‘nor aught’ and resumes the relation to ‘relate’ and the rest through ‘built’, ‘all’ and ‘headlong’ and finally it’s time ‘to build in Hell’. The words fall apart and still relate, they relate otherwise than through grammar. Miltonic syntax: vast, labyrinthine, aphoristic. The readingeffect of assonances, consonances and reiterated syllables alters the spacing of the sentence. Reiterated sounds loosen our sense of the relation of the word to the sentence. There are a number of fallings-apart of different kinds of space in the account of Mulciber’s fall. It moves across Greece, returning to Homer via Latin (‘Ausonian land’ gives a Greek name for Italy, Mulciber is a Latin name, like Vulcan, for Hephaestus). The passage gives priority to the ‘Supreme King’, God of the Bible, also referring to Latin Jove, and follows the Homeric rhetorical move of describing an unimaginably large-scale fall from one realm to another through unmarked sky in terms of time, rather than space. It all happens at once and very quickly. In Paradise Lost as a whole, the day as a figure or manifestation of

Close to the Earth    ­61

rhythm and the question of poetry’s capacity to space-out time are fundamental to the poetry. The poem summons voices to sing about beginnings, before-times that would be otherwise impossible to speak about. There is a constant sense of interruption and temporal movement in the narrative, an Augustine-like sense of the trouble with time is part of the way the poem proceeds. The Mulciber episode, and the whole poem, are precipitation-events, like the ones described by Derrida in ‘Envois’ when the narrator (but who is writing when someone writes ‘I never write’?) recounts a conversation about writing in which: I added that in fact I never write, and that what I note in the car or even while running are neither ‘ideas’, of which I have none, nor sentences, but just words that come, a bit luckier, little precipitates of language.11

Precipitates: the word comes from ‘praecipita¯re to throw or cause to fall headlong, to ruin, destroy; to fall headlong, to suffer ruin, come to grief, to hasten, to rush’ (OED). There are disjections, speed-notes in which language falls headlong or suffers ruin. The ‘I’ that writes, the author, speeds to ruin, like a dreamer taking dictation without knowing what has come. It is unanticipated. Precipitation (again like dreaming) concentrates as well as scatters. In post-classical Latin the verb praecipita¯re also means ‘to cause to be deposited as a solid from a liquid solution’, which gives rise to various senses relating to chemical and other nonhuman forms of deposition, including the meteorological sense of ‘precipitation’ as dew, rain or snow. Rain falls upon the place beneath. But rain is no longer a natural metaphor, a known that refers to an unknown. Our sense of it has been complicated by, in Timothy Clark’s words ‘an inextricable and planetary contamination of human aims and unintended natural causality’.12 ‘Something [has] happened to the rain.’ Something has happened to the earth as well. ‘What on world is the earth?’ is Clark’s wonderful but frightening question. Prompted by images of the earth from space, which seem to promise knowledge of earth and to guarantee the viewer’s relation to it, his essay describes terrestriality, ‘not as a moral ground or secure cognitive foundation, but as a limit to conceptual articulation’ (‘What on World is the Earth?’, p. 11). Earth is not to be interiorised by those who live there. To inquire into the nature of earth brings us up against some severe limitations. We can see and know that earth mutates and suffers anthropogenic change. It may be indifferent or inhospitable to the living beings on it. But, more seriously, Clark demonstrates that the earth is not an entity. It is a kind of phantasm whose truth is impossible to represent or conceive. It needs to be thought. There may or may

­62    Without Mastery not be, as Nietzsche argues, a feeling of ‘mysterious primal Oneness’ but the image of that oneness, rolled in a terrestrial ball, is a kind of delusion (The Birth of Tragedy, p. 17). Earth, Clark makes clear: is not ‘one’ in the sense of an entity we can see, understand or read as a whole. No matter from how far away or ‘high up’ it is perceived or imagined, or in what different contexts of cosmology or physics, it is always something we remain ‘inside’ and cannot genuinely perceive from elsewhere. It is a transcendental of human existence, one whose final determinations are undecidable. (‘What on World is the Earth?’, pp. 15–16)

e Far away from sublimity I picked up, across distances, abolishing distance, something basic: ‘humble, close to the earth, low down’ (Derrida, ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, pp. 231–3). Yes, Derrida’s essay on poetic experience insists it is ‘very lowly, low down [très bas, tout bas], close to the earth’ (pp. 235, 234). Again, a little further on, ‘close to the earth’. The eas in the translation eased me towards the closeness: an inside, a writing-inside, a love of language, another reading-body there in a heartbeat: So: your heart beats [le coeur te bat], gives the downbeat, the birth of rhythm, beyond oppositions, beyond outside and inside, conscious representation and the abandoned [abandonée] archive. A heart down there [un coeur là-bas], between paths and autostradas, outside of your presence, humble, close to the earth, low down [tout bas]. (pp. 231–3, 230)

It was beyond oppositions: so low, so early, so close, stepping free of libraries, footnotes, culture. There were these little songs under the breath of the words: ‘au de-là des oppositions, du dedans et du dehors, de la representation consciente et de l’archive abandonée’. That passage gave me an ear for the down-beat. Inside myself I echo-located a third ear, in fact a breath-ear-heart system, a belfry of flesh and blood, capable of bat, the word for the beating of the heart, which happens by itself, also describing the metrical beat of a poem, and should that rhythm seem too regular and Apollonian, too geared to states of calmness and restraint, to the world of ‘literature-and-theory’, there is at the same time the homophone bas nearby, but also right there on the beat and meaning where I went: low inside. Together their pulsion calls up something not yet words, not yet under the dominion of language, like Stevens saying: ‘The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen. / The robins are là-bas’ (‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, Collected Poems, p. 487). Bas, de-là, là-bas. Derrida talks about this child-like or animallike movement of his own work as:

Close to the Earth    ­63 pre-verbal formations of letters such as the syllables gl, tr, pr, there where it’s not yet words. And where all the work, in the books like Glas, organises itself around a certain pre-verbality: gl, +r, +l. Glas, it’s that, the child who plays with syllables which don’t yet form a language. (‘Bâtons rompus’, p. 213)

‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ is full of precipitates of language. I sighted, first in two or three places, then throughout, the tre, ter, rte, ert of a ruined, destroyed or unborn word, which may or may not have been terre, earth. I wondered what comes before letters, what they were made of: ink, blood, oil? Something that runs out. You run after it to find it, making sentences as you go. Not fast enough. The thought sent me a bit mad. I underlined the pre-verbal formations to try to save them. I typed them out. I wished I could photograph them where I found them: not just against a studio background but in their immediate environment. I wanted to frame the shots so the key characters could be pulled clear of the sentences that, because they were only sentences, in my view could not keep them safe enough. I cut them out. My desk was covered in leftover trimmings, which were at times impossible to tell from the bits which I hoped would carry me to the earth by giving me the necessary words to describe my voyage. But the spacing was wrong for communication. Fragmentation and dispersal were what I got. The material was this: each phrase said several ways, spoken by various voices. Imagine a background murmur. As if someone had insisted on the lowest of voices, inaudible as dreams: ‘disparaître est sa loi’, ‘dictée d’être poétique’, ‘l’être perdu dans l’anonymat’, ‘l’un et l’autre’, ‘ni l’un ni l’autre’, ‘solitaire’, ‘autrement’, ‘risquée vers la langue de’autre’, ‘aléatoire’, ‘écrite’, peut-être’, ‘de ma langue ou d’une autre . . . ou d’une autre encore’ ‘de l’autre, grâce à l’autre’, ‘mortel’, ‘littéralité du vocable’, ‘littéralement’, ‘du corps de la lettre’, ‘la résistance infinie au transfert de la lettre’, ‘la pure intériorité’, ‘liberté’, ‘extériorité de l’automate’, ‘liturgie’, ‘près de la terre’, ‘réitère’, ‘la lettre’, ‘venue de l’autre’, ‘coupant avec la poésie discursive, et surtout littéraire’, ‘près de la terre’, ‘peut-être’, ‘signature’, ‘converti’, ‘vers l’autre et vers soi’, ‘près de la terre’, ‘l’être auprès de soi dans l’autotélie’, ‘l’autre signe’, ‘sans support extérieur’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, pp. 222 passim). These snapshots of tre in the wild took me to no other body or place. I believed I’d be there in two minutes, only that was seven years ago. I sorted and chose on the basis of certain letters and signifiers, starting with four that came to me as if they had been names, or one melted name: l’être, being, l’autre, the other, lettre, letter and la terre, the earth. I considered and discarded various possible sources for what I had thought I heard. Perhaps it was not a voice at all but buried pipework,

­64    Without Mastery fracking, fluke echoes of seismic paroxysms. I had heard of geo-hum, and ‘chorus’: a strictly inaudible radioactivity coming off the planet, beamed back from space, sped up by scientists and turned into something like a song.13 One that no one ever sang. But yes, it had been a voice. When I tried to read to the clippings I had collected, I knew it had been a voice because I felt that this way of trying to catch it had broken the wings of its thinking. ‘Disappearing is its law’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 223). The absolutely low voice of silent reading – where was it now? – had found me before I knew how to be found by it. I forgot the exact circumstances of its coming. I won’t go down there again, there’s nothing there I said, rooted to the spot. Now I was all ears for the sounds but the scatterlings: tre, rte, ert, ter, plus the l’s of the definite articles but also of ‘loi’, ‘solitaire’, ‘aléatoire’, ‘mortel’, ‘littéralité’, ‘lettre’, ‘liberté’, ‘liturgie’, ‘littéraire’, ‘autotélie’, so magnetised each other, exerted such a variety of forces of attraction and repulsion in this accumulation, this heap, this evocative but automatically generated handmade pile of letter-formations, that I could not read them in any imaginable now. On the other hand, they organised themselves into phrases, molecules that took effect in another, less traumatically unreadable way. In English: ‘disappearing is its law’, ‘dictated to be poetic, by being poetic’, ‘the being lost in anonymity’, ‘one and the other’, ‘neither one nor the other’, ‘solitary’, ‘otherwise’, ‘venturing toward the language of the other’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, pp. 223, 225). I read these phrases and wondered whether doing so amounted, among other things lost in the speed and desperation of the act, to experiencing what they said. But they were not what had been written, the materiality of which resisted my attempt at assimilation, without even trying. I hoarded the expressions, in the order in which they occurred in the text. Now, because they were in English, often missing their distinguishing letters. As in Milton, I listened: ‘Sing heavenly Muse’ (Paradise Lost, Book I, l. 6). Sing ‘in my language or another . . . or still another’ – by now I knew that this was a thing beyond languages, that much I learned ‘from and of the other, thanks to the other’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 227). I saw that the problem of the earth was and was not about my being ‘mortal’ (p. 229). The earth might be a stone book but it’s not a tombstone. Time for a reassessment of the ingrained structures of denial and anthropomorphism surrounding the extinction-events that threaten today to go through the imaginary limit set by the term ‘endangered species’ and do for the whole lot of us. Some names to call my bat-body, my cockle-eared fluttering: ‘literality of the vocable’, ‘literally’, ‘from the body of the letter’ (p. 229). The little bits of positionality in the form of ‘of’ and ‘from’ offered some access to its sinews and joints. ‘The infinite

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resistance to the transfer of the letter’ is why readers of poetry know, like the lovers in the Post Card: ‘we have never been right’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 231; ‘Envois’, p. 57). Deconstruction often comes back or down to love but not in a recuperative way. Love would be a response to not being able to assure oneself of the existence of what is loved. In ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ ‘heart’, the word ‘heart’, ‘no longer names only pure interiority, independent spontaneity, the freedom to affect oneself actively by reproducing the beloved trace’ (p. 231). It’s not what I want to write but my heart is in it, only in a still more fragmentary and aphoristic way, given up to the ‘exteriority of the automaton’, or as if repeating ‘liturgy’ (p. 231). Whisper it quickly, without punctuation: ‘close to the earth . . . reiterate . . . the letter coming of (or from) the other . . . cutting all ties with discursive and especially literary poetry . . . close to the earth . . . perhaps . . . signature . . . converted . . . turned toward the other and toward itself . . . close to the earth’ (pp. 231–5). Yes, it interrupts or derails ‘autotelic being in proximity to itself’ (p. 235). And ‘the other sign(s)’ the ‘ “by heart” ’ that is ‘without external support’ (p. 237). The inverted commas suggest that it is also without proper name. That was it, those are the phrases – but what was left to read once translation had tampered with the perceptual settings that promised, as I thought, the knotting-together of ter, tre, ert, etc., in an earth, a legible terre-effect? That had been a phantasm. What had happened did not come back to me. The question of how to proceed amidst ‘the turning round of this catastrophe’ brought me close to the earth but did not put me in a position to scrutinise it (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 235). The earth draws things near, including me, by virtue of its gravity, but why assume that it is near to itself? Why assume that the materiality of writing is actually its letters? What I had found was between la terre and la lettre. Love of language, I speculated, might be part of deconstruction’s ‘childlike’ response to a too-inhuman linguistic predicament. Not-knowing-howto-talk takes forward the strangeness of being outside language by getting attached to it, and playing with it, as if it were meat and drink to me, as if life had once, for a time, depended on engaging with a materiality that is infinitely resistant to being appropriated as sense or meaning.

Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth

Of what secret lights are we made? Of what densities?1 (Hélène Cixous, ‘Bathsheba, or the Interior Bible’) We are all private people. We’re all on our own. When people say, ‘Oh someone has seen something that wasn’t there’, it’s absolutely true. It can’t get more pure than that. The atmosphere I want to get across is hope.2 (Nicholas Roeg) We have been getting into the pre-verbal aspect of writing, the part before words, and therefore before ‘theory’ gets established. An interest in spells, chants, liturgies, girls, boys and animals playing and living on the earth of letters (shards of ruin, rubble and ash, an unapproachable but active materiality) follows on more-or-less spontaneously from there. This chapter was written under the hypnotic spell of a film about children and childhood. It cuts away from literature and the literary, not entirely freeing itself from certain delicate critical negotiations with language. Derrida insists that ‘deconstruction started with suspecting the authority of language, of verbal language and even language in general, and human language in particular’ (‘Bâtons rompus’, p. 210). In this way, he insists, deconstruction is ‘childlike and animal-like’. Cixous responds that the child ‘is a dreamer’, and that for an adult it is ‘only in the lifting of prohibition in the state of dreaming’ that one ‘can reach the point of affect where one is oneself witness and proof that extreme pain, the extremity of pain and the pain of pain, and the secret of pain, is a pleasure [jouissance]’ (‘Bâtons rompus’, p. 211). Dreaming is a far point of experience, as is writing. Freud’s understanding of regression in dreams casts its light on the filmy shapes of animal-letters and sounds that are the relics of the prehistory of reading, still left in reading. There

Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth    ­67

is still the problem of writing-about-a-film. There is still a language of film. But that is not what matters most. Have you seen Dark Glass?3 If I could say what it is, it would not be what it is; the sheer surprise, perhaps, of seeing and hearing what happens. The director Clio Barnard says: ‘If you really pay attention to the way people speak, it becomes amazing.’4 Clio Barnard’s films reflect on voices and speech, as well as on sight, world, memory and words. They give room and time for the contemplation of a world where, in addition to everything else that goes on, the making of films takes place. We tend to suppose, presume or anticipate that that world is nowhere but this earth, the same one each of us walks, forgets, sees and doesn’t see. But that is to forget a more difficult thought: if it comes, the world comes to each of us alone. There is no common world, but a ‘dissemination without a common semantic horizon’ (Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, p. 266). Films remind us that despite the world we may have ‘cobbled together’ as a ‘verbal and terminological construction’, a theory, we remain capable of welcoming echoes and after-images. For Barnard these temporal possibilities provide, among other things, an opportunity to cultivate political awareness and a sense of justice by making a world, addressed to the viewer, the hearer. The Arbor (2010) and The Selfish Giant (2013) focus a kind of poetic and visionary attention on the places and stories of people whose lives might otherwise go undocumented. The Selfish Giant is a realist fable, based on Wilde’s fairy tale of the same title. Barnard comments: To some extent, the selfish giant of the title is an ideology that has been allpervasive. It’s a fable about what is lost when that ideology is adopted. Arbor emulates the scrapman Kitten, and Kitten emulates that ideology. What gets lost is Swifty and his friendship with Arbor.5

Fiction remains crucial. She wants the political message ‘to be implicit, not explicit. Otherwise it doesn’t work emotionally as a fiction. That’s why I kept the title. It is a fable.’ For all the films I have mentioned, and others such as the documentary short Lambeth Marsh (2000), voices, accents and idiomatic turns of speech are very important. The Arbor uses material recorded in interviews that is lip-synched by actors. Barnard spent two years interviewing people for the film. She works with her subjects, performers and crews over long periods. This listening, reflective way of film-making suggests the kind of sensibility she wants to cultivate in those who watch her work. She explains about the lip-synching in The Arbor:

­68    Without Mastery I want the technique to raise questions about the relationship between fiction and documentary – to acknowledge that documentaries, more often than not, have the same narrative structure as fiction. I want the audience to be aware that they are watching material that has been mediated. It is a distancing technique, a form of direct address.6

Her films pay amazed and amazing attention to the way people speak and live. Such an attention also necessarily attends to itself, it interrupts the relation to its object in order to take non-relation into account, technically and poetically. Barnard’s fabling observes the interruption of familiar relations (between voice and image, location and fiction, recording and inventing). It is as if these films knew that there is no common world beyond the anticipation or presumption that there is. They recognise and respond to what Derrida calls: the infantile but infinite anxiety of the fact that there is not the world, that nothing is less certain than the world, itself, that there is perhaps no longer a world and no doubt there never was one as totality of anything at all, habitable and co-habitable world. (The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, p. 266)

Film can make a world on the precondition of the world being infinitely distant. Clio Barnard’s films realise − where that word not only means ‘know’, but also ‘make real’: they invent real worlds. Here and now, the inventions of Dark Glass show me what is happening in this writing. Quoting is like lip-synching, taking up anacoluthon again, following without following. I’m tracking on the shoulder of a sentence in The Beast and the Sovereign, or moving the shot along the ground to stay in touch with what can’t be seen, what works over the visible to let something else come through, just as the mobile phone camera that films Dark Glass does. I read Derrida’s sentence, itself unbreakable like the single shot in which Dark Glass is made. Part of the sentence describes ‘what I must do’, which is also what Barnard does: where there is no world, where the world is not here or there, but fort, infinitely distant over there . . . what I must do, with you and carrying you, is make it that there be precisely a world, just a world, if not a just world, and to make the world come to the world. (The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, p. 268)

Clio Barnard’s films do things ‘to make as if there were just a world’ (p. 268). Dissemination, and the absence of common meaning it entails, are the precondition for the attention they give to what is heard, seen, remembered. They read, they work with time to let the audience hear and see, both at an infinite distance, and with strange directness.

Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth    ­69

As If We Had Outlived Ourselves Films can make us able to imagine outliving the world we know. When we watch them, we share the destiny of the man in La Jetée.7 Chris Marker’s photo-novel is, by its own account, the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood. But that traumatic image comes from his future: it is the scene of his own death. It is like that when things write us, they are not simply in us, to be remembered at will. They take on the force of a destiny. When we watch a film, we see a world where we are not. Films come from the future: they allow us to imagine the earth we know without us on it. Films, like memories, are acts of salvation from oblivion and empty sky. But they are not assimilated into the psyche like memories. They complicate presence and teach a time-travelling mobile mindfulness that lets us walk the limits of the classical conception of the object-out-there-familiar-to-me-here, the object-that-I-won’tbe-parted-from-especially-when-I-don’t-have-it. We tend to deny where we are: that is, we treat experience as a series of object-oriented events, set against a general ‘background’ that we can afford not to look at or listen to. Dark Glass is not an exercise in taking a view of objects. Remarkably, one of the things it frees from psychic darkness is the relation between a mother and child – usually assumed to be the unreadable and therefore endlessly fascinating cornerstone of our subsequent ‘object relations’. Clio Barnard lets us see what you can see when something stops you seeing properly. Her film gives to be seen oblivion, blur, time-difference, sunglasses, grass, sky, wigs, psychology, absence. She insists: ‘Seeing accurately is impossible.’

One Shot Dark Glass is a single-shot film. As in experience, you only get one shot. This can be responded to in at least two ways. ‘Single shot’ would be tough-guy stuff: life lived at speed, forwards, following a single track, aiming at a single object or effect, modelled on the predictable stimulus from a slug of spirits or coffee. Making a single-shot film would represent pulling off of a very tricky trick, an artist’s creative tour de force, a virtuoso performance or ‘the smooth or “happy” functioning of a performative’, as J. L. Austin calls it.8 You might imagine some perfect little film like those acts of language that produce, through technique and convention, the effect of which they speak. Bang on target and therefore graspable: the kind of art you might get. The force of Dark Glass is not the force of the classical performative. It isn’t set up like

­70    Without Mastery that. Nothing here has been ‘caught on film’ – and this is what makes it possible for something to happen. Dark Glass goes another wilder way, not the opposite of the first, that refuses to be domesticated by the conventions that pretend to guarantee the success or failure of a vision. The film’s voices give us an unedited re-enactment of what was said – its hesitations and pauses as well as the words – by Clio Barnard and a hypnotist in a trance-session based on some of the film-maker’s old family photos and a Super-8 film. Hypnosis allowed Barnard to see ‘pictures out of my head’ in the shape of ‘very, very vivid hallucinations’. To film without editing is to accept the cuts already in presence, to dare them, to point to them and across them, to open the space between here and there by looking. Yes, Clio Barnard has an ‘eye’, but here she also films whatever: grass, the yard, stairs, darkness. The unfamiliar close-to. The director and crew had to change the shot and the way of shooting in the course of making the film. She says: ‘It felt like it felt ages to get from playing with the children to the [mother’s] friend, you have to stay close, on the grass, on her shoulder, you can’t move through space.’ As in writing, or reading, you have to stay close to the earth, you can’t empty space by hopping at will between significant objects. Close-up puts us virtually in touch with what we are looking at, it allows us to grope a way forward. Such editorial choices as there are in the film come from the prompting words of the hypnotist. Of the mother, she asks her hallucinating client: ‘Would you like to speak to her?’ . . . ‘Is she saying anything to you?’ . . . ‘What do you sense of her?’ The camera remains focused on the child, watchful, looking off-camera. Later, the hypnotist says, ‘Shall we move back?’ – as if there were a line of life. The questions suggest that these images might hold secrets. They suggest an accentuated interest in the mother. But the hypnotised woman just wants to see, to look, not to know. The hypnotist’s gentle questions pretend to preside over the trance and the film, and they do so up to a point, but they can’t stop Dark Glass opening up like a phone call, like the flipped lid-lensearpiece off a phone-camera. The edges of the film are open. Its sound goes wide, to the sea. Everything radiates, stretches, takes on the life there isn’t time for otherwise.

Dictation Dark Glass is dictated by, and in, a waking-dream. Its screenplay has the looping precision and unfazed honesty of literature. At times it

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seems incredible that this is a documentary. The words don’t describe exactly what we see. They come close but both words and images have arrived from the same – from where? The origin is not psychic. But then where do these foreign, intimate memory-paintings come from? Derrida comments in his writing on khora: ‘we are perhaps already in a site [lieu] where the law of the proper no longer has any meaning’ (‘Kho¯ra’, p. 105). Dark Glass was made by dictation, somewhat automatically. Dictation is not description or representation. Laughing a bit, as if she wasn’t sure of what she knows no one can be sure of – the unrepresentable, Clio Barnard says: ‘I’ve no time for representation . . . it’s not experience, it’s something else. You’re better off just remembering.’ To work like that one has to go at speed. She insists that ‘seeing accurately is impossible’ and testifies to the strangeness of words in relation to images. In the trance, she says, she was ‘so engrossed in images or pictures’ that words ‘felt like an interruption or an ­intrusion . . . I had to be as precise and quick as possible and get back to looking.’ Under hypnosis or when recalling a dream, words are not chosen, or chosen quickly. Something chooses us. It’s the same state, brain-wise: watching a film, being under hypnosis, writing, reading, something chooses us, finds us. At once: no more object or subject. And a kind of polymorphous joy that doesn’t know anything about ‘as if’. They call going back to images, regression. The term has a specialist currency in psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘regression’ specifically names what Freud calls an ‘inexplicable phenomenon’ whereby ‘an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 543). According to Freud, the dream’s content of imagined ideas is not framed as thoughts, but ‘transformed from thoughts into sensory images’ which we believe in, which we think we are actually experiencing [erleben] (p. 535).9 For Freud this absolute vividness of the dream must be the most notable characteristic of dreaming, so that the life of dreams [Traumleben], ‘would be impossible for us to imagine . . . without it’ (p. 535). It is not only in dreams that transformations of ideas back into sensory images occur: Dark Glass has this lived thing, this live-think, as if life were thinking, reflecting, life itself. Films also can give us representation ‘as an immediate situation, with the “perhaps” omitted’ (p. 534). To begin to hear its ‘Once upon a time’, you must already be there at the film’s knee, listening. In Dark Glass we hear the voice, we believe it, amazing! someone believed, enough to receive a dictation, and we are actually experiencing it. Right now.

­72    Without Mastery

Faces Film promotes staggered thinking, which is good because simultaneity is never what it’s cracked up to be. Film-making can be another kind of ‘remembering properly’ that lets the divisions within presence be lived. For example in Dark Glass there is the friend’s face. It is an image without filmed or photographic precedent. It does not appear in the external archive of photographs and Super-8 film Barnard used as the main basis for the hypnosis. In the film we get to see time being born from memory, in joy. Tracking from outside the barn to inside it, we come upon, we are found by, a beautiful little girl, first full-figure then close up. The camera is a little unsteady, softening and adjusting to welcome the charge of her silent photoelectric presence. She is quite still and alive. We see her face: great shiny ‘smiling brown eyes’, the ‘dark hair’ that makes her, in the overlapping spoken realm of the film, an inaccurate replica of the dark-haired mother. Her face, like all the faces in the film, is also a way of looking. The camera picks up the red of her mouth, which is more than red, the colour smiles. The entranced woman says: ‘It’s really just her face. Close and vivid and seems quite accurate. I am pleased to see it. [Pause] And to see her. And to remember her. Just remember how she looked: properly.’ We don’t know what the happiness of remembering properly reveals to us. No one knows best and no auteur or supreme eye is in charge. Seeing properly is impossible – but as in dreams, so in films, there is no ‘perhaps’ and therefore it’s all perhaps, everywhere. Dark Glass restores the vibrations of a memory, watching until images start to speak. A sensed secret sets looking going, starts up retrospection, gets the little girl at the beginning of the film looking. The phone-camera begins to move: even in pauses, contemplating a face or a scene, it moves gently like breathing. It seems to have learned from the telephone it also is, how to be ‘properly happy’, how to feel ‘sad now’. It has learned that souls touch more intensely, mix more fluidly, at a distance or in the dark, where we ‘see’ as writing ‘sees’. The phone-camera follows, ears cocked, something we don’t get to see. Its movement isn’t arbitrary. There is a creative plan, a preferred path, calculation: every possible insurance against mishap or nothing happening. But a great deal happens by chance: for example the colour. There are blue sacks, yellow, red-and-white sacks in the lumber of the interior of the barn. Barnard says: ‘We didn’t dress anything.’ In the film’s words: ‘not a performance’. Barnard has made a film on a telephone, a telephonic film poem that crosses distance and separation and yet overcomes the narrow-sightedness that bedevils psychological life

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and relationship-psychology. Is ‘the house I grew up in’ inside or outside the film now? The soundtrack takes us to the sea, we don’t behold it, sound takes the outside inside or makes the inside more inside by retaining outside-sound, but more faintly. Themes stream and shoot through the film, that is to say they disobey the etymology of ‘theme’, which has to do with fixity: ‘theme’ is cognate, way back, with ‘doom’.10 The narrative movement of the phone-camera in its unbroken single shot will have separated times, unravelled character, shown repetition and made it audible.

Surfaces There are many ways for an open surface to become a wall, and behind the wall, the headscarf, yard, grass or other dark we imagine, life itself. Then what we see lours, colourless, like a great seductive cloud and we long to wake into opacity, materiality, solidity. But Dark Glass looks again, across distance. These surfaces, these films, the scrap of red and white cloth, the paved or grassy ground, the dark which is the ground and earth of all sight, are protective covers – like the domestic photographs and the Super-8 films that were the basis of the hypnosis, of which Clio Barnard says it was a question of ‘not allowing myself to go any further than a photograph’. Surfaces and screens guard being from the impulse to penetrate and appropriate it. The energy of looking diffuses across them. The ground between, the tracking shot that the whole film is: everything connects to everything else. There are no breaks and no choices. Again: she said, of the wide-angle and the limitations of the phonecamera: ‘you have to stay close, on the grass, on her shoulder, you can’t move through space’. The reading mind rests against and senses the earth’s forms. Dark Glass responds to the unforgettable by awakening into a new now. It becomes clear that the worst has already happened. The mother has disappeared, she has ‘left us’. Under the shadow of psychological curiosity, the mother in the film would become what Clio Barnard refers to as a ‘picture out of my head’. Under the clouds of psychological interpretation, faces get deciphered, brooded over, regressed towards. This is not the way of Dark Glass, and that kind of psychological logic would not do justice to this film, which loves the becoming, the coming and going, the motion of what it sees, loves the experience of motion pictures. At the end of Dark Glass, the mother comes into view again, in the mind’s eye, the ear’s eye. A new world appears to us as an after-image of words, it happens in us, in the dark of us. The child

­74    Without Mastery watches for it: the film only sees it. The child and the film are mother and daughter reciprocally engendering each other. ‘Reflection’ names both the action of a surface throwing back light, and thinking. Dark Glass reflects with a reflection that passes through the mirror. The camera-phone had a shard of broken glass fixed over its photoreceptive surface. But because it was a phone too, the device had the openness of an ear: the absolute risk of the telephonic eye opening on to a seeing no one owns. That’s how the world remembers itself. According to 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ This film takes a different direction. It allows itself not to know what it shows. It skews the whole ‘face to face’ thing by its even attention to different kinds of surface and its pleasure in faces. Clio Barnard liked being able to see under hypnosis: ‘It felt really lovely somehow, especially looking at the best friend’s face.’ Hypnosis ‘allows you to look at things you wouldn’t normally’ and was ‘accurate, more accurate than a photograph’. It affords, she says, ‘the pleasure of seeing someone I really love again – that’s impossible. It was making something possible that’s impossible. Seeing accurately is impossible.’ And now the end. The last words are spoken over darkness. ‘It seems very bright in here.’ Brightness and darkness together: like the dawn of writing.

Edit

It is time to read again: still more naively and passionately. I dedicate this chapter to the anticipated Library Edition of the Complete Works of Jacques Derrida. While you read you might amuse yourself by wondering what that Edition might look like, for whom it might exist and especially by whom it was written. Would it be, for example, anything like the set of books we call the Standard Edition (of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud)? That Standard Edition aspires to uniformity in the translation of key terms and carries in its editorial apparatus signs of a movement, the Psychoanalytical Movement: an institution more or less formal, more or less explicit and more or less exclusive, of colleagues, friends and followers. If it were to be something like that, the Complete Works of Jacques Derrida would not exclude something else – let’s call it ‘the desire for everything + n’ or ‘this catastrophe’ or ‘my chances’ or whatever it is that goes unnamed in Of Grammatology, curled up in a sentence about the ‘recognition’ and ‘respect’ that ‘has always only protected, . . . never opened a reading’.1 And it’s that something else that I’m concerned with here. In short – in short, I’m on the side of reading. A reading, I would say, is always ‘brief, meagre and laconic’, as dreams are (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 279). Reading concerns a certain disappearance. The reader goes off with the text (Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 21). No one gets to see what takes place between them. If that hasn’t happened it’s just a matter of the reinscription of current social relations within current social relations, of rewording and demonstrating, to others or to oneself that one can indeed ‘speak the language’. Such demonstrations and repetitions may be both unavoidable and desirable but true reading is not held within language (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 235). To edit is to prepare (a writer’s work or works for publication) but editing is also what film-makers do: a

­76    Without Mastery process of selection, rearrangement, etc., of material filmed previously that includes editing out – removing (a piece of film, tape, etc.) during editing. One edits the better to preserve a memory or two. Derrida knew how to make or let that happen. He wrote in a way that says ‘Edite, bibite’. ‘Eat, drink, swallow my letter’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 229). ‘DRINK’.2 Perhaps it is a matter of neither forgetting nor renouncing the primitive ego whose oral impulses, according to Freud, mark all subsequent intellectual judgements: ‘Judging is a continuation, along lines of expediency, of the original process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from itself, according to the pleasure principle’ (Freud, ‘Negation’, p. 239). I couldn’t say. What follows is a reading of one word, in English and in French, that occurs in the ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card. f Reading ‘Envois’, it comes to me that ‘Meditango’ is telepathy (‘Envois’, p. 55). Meditango equals telepathy. Was there ever such a text as ‘Envois’ for making you say strange things? And for making you unable to say anything? For example he writes, having just hit the space bar: I have just hung up, it is still as difficult as ever. Agreed, at 6 o’clock Sunday evening, I dance in the water with you (Astor Piazzola, Libertango, Meditango, Undertango, Adios Nonino, Violentango, Novitango, Amelitango, Tristango) and I will stop only at the point of exhaustion, dead of fatigue. (p. 55)

In the narrative context of ‘Envois’, we could reconstruct what’s going on here quite simply. The text takes the form of love-letters. He’s suggesting a virtual date, a lover’s contract, with the playlist of Piazzola tango music. ‘Libertango’, ‘Meditango’ and the others are all names of actual tracks recorded by Astor Piazzola between the late 1950s and the mid-’70s. The titles would act as – what? Presumably, they would be a way into an evocative, finite stretch of space and time in which the couple might be together although apart. But already the notion of meeting at the soundtrack fasttracks us to poetry. ‘Soundtrack’ is one of the responses to the question ‘What is poetry?’ in Derrida’s ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ (p. 223). That short essay shows how poetry dictates edits rather than edicts, because, as Derrida says, ‘disappearing is its law’ (p. 223). That is why those who make poetry are unacknowledged legislators.3 Hence also poetry’s brevity or condensation. Poetry declares itself not present; I’d say it’s something like the pure desire to write made writing. More like quoting than speaking. Hence its life-threatening capacity for overstretch and its equally strong elasticity – a poem snaps back into shape

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just as Freud says the psyche does (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 36). These definitions may sound a bit cryptic but I’m on more open ground when I say that the terms in which Derrida describes poetry suggest that it is alive with a life we cannot read. And furthermore, I’d say that poetry proves, or poetry is proof that the desire to write is no longer conceivable in psychological terms. He writes: ‘I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me, look at me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 223). I think that poetry gives us a psyche that is inconceivable in psychological terms. Therefore one must rethink human relations, for example, on the basis of a poem, even where the poem may have little or nothing to say concerning those relations. A poem asks of us that we bring to it our not knowing how to read it. This brings us back to ‘Envois’, where to my ears the parenthesis that recites the soundtrack on page 55 is already a sort of poem or the opening of a poematic experience: ‘(Astor Piazzola, Libertango, Meditango, Undertango, Adios Nonino, Violentango, Novitango, Amelitango, Tristango)’. I cannot psychologize it. ‘You often give me the word without knowing it’ he says earlier in ‘Envois’ (p. 13). For me, ‘Meditango’ holds things together and pulls them open more than the other tango-titles here. Why? Let’s ratiocinate, as crazily as he does, as they do in ‘Envois’. ‘Meditango’: it’s meditation plus Latin ‘tango’ I touch. I touch – you, perhaps, when I say or write the word to you – or I touch meditatively, or thought touches as an ‘I’ would touch. He says over the page ‘all our ratiocinations would have been ignoble, the opposite of love and the gift, if they had not been made in order to give us again the time to touch each other with words. What counts’, he adds, ‘is how we again touch each other by mixing our voices’ (‘Envois’, p. 56). It goes on and becomes very beautiful, so that my head swims with it. But no: one does not repeat such things. Adios Nonino, as it also says on page 55. Time to press the space bar       again. In French ‘Meditango’ says first of all and in the present tense me dit, the part-phrase meaning ‘says to me’. It marks that I have been addressed by someone or something. But in this word ‘Meditango’ we don’t know who’s doing the saying, whether he or she or it, we don’t know, it’s in ellipsis here. I could even, by homophony, be talking to myself, ‘Je me dis . . .’ And if it’s a matter of music what does it matter who is speaking? This word ‘Meditango’ is a dictation without dictator – a fragmented address, an address partly without words, somewhat lacking in subject, object or content save perhaps the meaningless remainder of the word, the end

­78    Without Mastery of ‘Meditango’, hanging off or hanging on, jangling rather with any attempt to make sense. The leftover – not ‘tango’ but ‘ango’ – what is that? Thought-excrement, fractured suffix, God knows what, remains. I am ‘somewhat lacking a dictionary’ he says to her, of her (p. 55). Ango: never mind if it gets tiresome, let’s do sums with words. What do they equal, what do they add up to? Ango is a bit like ange, ‘angel’. It could be to do with those ‘monstrous angels’ that he says he and she are for doing sums, when what’s left over is what matters most, their commerce with each other (p. 56). Ango: English ‘anger’ is only a syllable away. Ango might be a name for the amorous annoyances of equivocation in ‘Envois’: ‘while accusing me she cradles me again’ he says and refers to their ‘irrepressible quibbling’ (pp. 56, 57). An anger of love, with love, against it, the repeated surfacing of differences within presence, the eruption of the impossibility of accepting something so altogether strange as this love. And associated with this, ango carries a connotation of the narrow anguish that readers of ‘Envois’ will recognize: angoisse, constriction’s dying fall, the sound of fire hissing into the water. All that ratiocination instead of and as touching! One can neither accept nor reject these prosthetic pawings: enough to really piss you off. Perhaps more enigmatically still, we have the closest homonym of ango, the French word angot (pronounced ‘on-go’) or anvot or anvain (Trésor de la Langue Français). (And angot is an anagram of ‘tango’ which must prove something.) It’s an animal, an angot, known in France as a hedge-eel or anguille de haie, more commonly as an orvet, from Old French or ver meaning ‘blind worm’. In English we say ‘blind worm’ or ‘slow-worm’ or ‘glass worm’. This last name, ‘glass worm’, like the French synonym serpent de verre and the Latin name Anguis fragilis, derives from the fact that this shy, defenceless creature’s tail breaks off easily, thus allowing it to escape from predators. Some words and texts also behave like this. We read them hungrily, as if to death, but they break and a portion, an envoi or concluding part gets away. The angot is hardly a monster, a ‘petit reptile inoffensif’ according to Duméril’s Elementary Treatise on Natural History. In the TLF the word first appears in 1765 as anvoye and in 1807 as anvoie – a breath away, as won’t have escaped you, from envoi. The angot could be said to be en voie and therefore ‘angelic, perhaps’, like Derrida’s hedgehog in ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ (p. 235). But in ‘Envois’ a hedge-eel coils and twists and breaks and escapes and cannot quite curl up on itself. His writing cannot be ‘led back to the circus or the menagerie of poiesis’ (p. 233). It remains capable of ‘an amorous rhetoric that recoil[s] before no genre’ (‘Envois’, p. 57). The natural history of the angot is interesting for readers of ‘Envois’, but to continue more dryly, the etymology of our

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word is disputed. According to the TLF angot probably derives from the Latin anguis, a serpent, but there has been etymological contamination from the French anoeuil, and Latin ab oculis, both meaning ‘without eyes, blind, aveugle’. The latter hypothesis is currently judged improbable, or at least secondary to the derivation from anguis. ‘We have never been right’ (‘Envois’, p. 57). Ango. Meditango. It’s spoken to me, this harmless worm or wordbit, as if ça me dit, as if ‘it speaks’ as if the id were writing, speaking and speaking me here, in me, a French-speaking id or il or elle or eel me dit. One that believes, like Wallace Stevens, that ‘French and English constitute a single language’.4 Such a cross-linguistic apostravaganza of fragmented, edited or dictated addresses ‘Envois’ is! The angot sends me back to what I said about touch a little bit ago. The link was false or at any rate adventitious: the word ‘tango’, the name of the dance and of the kind of music Astor Piazzola is famous for, isn’t from the Latin tangere, ‘to touch’. That’s wrong. According to the OED, it’s a Spanish word for a gypsy or flamenco dance, or a ‘syncopated ballroom dance in 2/4 or 4/4 time introduced into Europe and N. America from Argentina, related to the Cuban Habanera but probably of African origin, characterized by a slow gliding movement broken up by pointing positions’. ‘Meditango’ has nothing to do with touch – according to the dictionary, anyway, if you want to believe the dictionary. Derrida, like Plato and Freud, puts his trust elsewhere, but he flirts very seriously with definition and etymology to make that clear. Meditango: the slow-worm movements of thought as a proper name.       I just hit the space bar. Should I have kept that to myself? ‘I have just hung up’ he says and later on the same page: ‘Hanging up just now (as always ‘Hang up’, – ‘No, you hang up’, – ‘No, you’, – ‘Hang up, you’, ‘I’m hanging up’, etc.’ (‘Envois’, p. 55). Let’s cut it there. This Meditango is a kind of slightly hung-up dancing or teledancing. Like ‘Envois’ in general its repetitions, its impassioned avowals and dissertations can seem a little held up or delayed or point-avoiding, prolonging the long-distance hook-up. All dances, even the fastest, are mutual distancings or avoidances. I want to try and think about the spacing of this. The Astor Piazzola soundtrack parenthesis offers us the gift of ellipsis. It’s elliptical because it takes the form of a language made up of proper names – words like ‘Libertango’ with a capital ‘L’ – that have a referent but no signified and can only ever remind us by association of common nouns. To that extent it’s a very exclusive, monogrammed, private type of writing and the rest of ‘Envois’ is like that too. But because of all the tangos and repeats, because of association, the tango titles appear to be syncopated or condensed ­

­80    Without Mastery s­ ignifiers. ‘Libertango’ = tango of liberty, liberated or liberating dance, or book dance, for example. They give the impression of being ordinary words just lacking a syllable or two, only a couple of vocables short of becoming an ordinary significant phrase – but which one? Which path to follow here? We haven’t got all night. Or even if we had, we don’t have forever. There are all sorts of possibilities in verbal association, not just the one. Syncope, cutting short, contraction, condensation, editing, even the elision of a syllable from a word, can always be read as the promise that restarts what it thwarts. Ellipsis is an envoy and censorship dispatches: ‘it is indeed to someone else that we address ourselves, and in order to tell him something else’ (‘Envois’, p. 57). We read and write as finite beings: editable animals. This thought prompts another: ellipsis breaks like a glass worm. It writhes as it writes, sending us a singular thinking of the mistake, serpentine logic of the thought-mistake, that asks us to learn or grow or lose a kind of angotongue. We feel caught up, tangled up, complicated, precisely by what cuts us loose. We survive, injured. We crawl off, leaving part of ourselves behind, a snapped-off syllable or two for the predatory other. Or perhaps it is a gift? We are edited. Modified, we zigzag towards the unthinkable. Are we merely lashing about, or is this, in fact, the way that an angot always goes? Somewhere in this there is signature, a Signatango. ‘The other sign(s)’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 237). A new kind of impromptu proper name: Meditango. And then? I press tab, for a change. And return. He’s a doll. He’s the hanging, dangling, loosely hinged, suspended and suspensive writing Hampelmann or Jumping Jack with the string or tab like a bell-pull that makes thought jump, pulls thinking up short, knees up and elbows out, as if one could start to pull thought apart or inside-out along a central line. Thought – or a word: a word that splits and melts. A fissuring fusion: ‘Meditango’. I’ve tried to show a few of its reading-possibilities, but it’s also a name, a bit beyond words, like his name or mine or yours, like the name of a tune or the name of a commodity on an ad. ‘Meditango’: buy some. There’s something a touch medicinal about its alloy of disparate elements. A benediction comes through ‘Meditango’ despite everything, from the Indo-European base mete meaning to measure, weigh, consider or judge. We think of all these things as being dependent upon, as hanging on, the autonomy of a sovereign subject but reading him I find I can measure, weigh, consider, etc., without a base or root, while I dance, or dangle or tangle like a puppet in mid air. Held by a word, by something in a word that’s beyond it, and beyond me.

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‘Meditango’ repeats, moves into spaces without occupying them exactly; it’s more energetic than an occupation, more of a spare-time thing. It flings you into the middle as a kind of between, in medias res. It puts you right at the core and the core turns out to be not an essence or a nessence or a concentration or an ultimate but a middle. That is, an intermediate course. A compromise-formation. A word dictates my course, it gives me the core of my writing’s course. Where it touches, if it touches, that is, for there is no touching without touching you, the proof of dictation’s touch is if I touch you (see ‘My Chances’, p. 347). And I will never know for sure. That’s why I say that ‘Meditango is telepathy’. It’s not for a third party. Tighter than the tightest code because it’s a little distracted, wild and loose. It has a wildness that defines itself loosely, sometimes in an absolutely conventional way. Fifty-two spaces. I hit the space bar.       I go, I write. I hit return. I’m too much touched by ‘Envois’. By being in relation, through reading, through the transference that reading is, to a love that I have no specular relation to because it has no specular relation to me. I’m dying of reader’s pique. I’m lorn. There’s a small but exaggerated wound to my vanity. From the French I’m piqué: pricked, pierced, stung, irritated, stimulated, excited. I read, and the more I read this tremendous love, the more I read it’s not for me. I want it. I want a piece of that. Was there ever such a thing? How good it would be to be sure, to have it there in writing, the ultimate experience of anticipation that actually arrives, in person. And he’s not writing to me. How very irritating. It’s heartbreaking in fact: ‘it is always on some reading, you know something about this, that I transfer’ (‘Envois’, p. 218). But I was saying, desire, love, amour, transference, whatever. It’s all sorts of things in ‘Envois’. It’s theme – what Derrida writes about. It’s inspiration – what he writes out of or what makes him write. And it’s the beloved, the addressee, the muse. We could say that it’s the movement between these that allows him to escape. To love and to not love, that is. But as I was saying, to see that, to affirm it, both in its ambivalent and unambivalent modes, is to lose the one one would love to see. To lose his love. To read: to love without hope and in absolute surprise. I cannot love his love for myself. I must love his love as his. I must love love more than I love the one I love. I’m sounding like the narrator in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, whose tumid musings on love themselves sound a little like an overdone Dante, or a bathetic Thomas Aquinas.5 I punch the space bar.       in the middle, I’m medius. That is, at once ‘central, intervening, intermediate, moderate [and] middling . . . from the Indo-European

­82    Without Mastery base of MID’ (OED). I’m mid-riffing in mid-air, writing not out of the middle of the picture, nor out of some authentic heart of writing but merely mediocrely and eccentrically and derivatively from my solar plexus, anatomically the complex of nerves situated at the pit of one’s stomach. Solar plexus means literally the interweaving or complication of the sun. What else is all life on earth but that? And the complication of the sun might not be a bad reading of the word ‘deconstruction’ either. But I digress, where were we, what are we in the middle of here? Medium – being the word lodged at a certain distance from itself, between meaning ‘intervening substance (1643)’ and meaning ‘spiritual medium (1853)’ (OED). Between matter and ether, between substance and spirit, even between medium and meaning: like a wireless connection plugged between worlds; between, as he says in Specters of Marx, ‘all the “two’s” one likes’;6 inhabiting the dyadic metaworld of ‘Envois’; hedging. When we read we are neither fish nor flesh. We are with, after and between the world: together with everything. It’s presence. Here we all are, still in Meditango, caught in the knot of dictionary entries around medi and meta. We are taking dictation from the dictionary, as if it were a poem, or more exactly, according to Derrida, you remember: ‘The poetic, let us say it, would be that which you desire to learn, but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under dictation, by heart; imparare a memoria’ (‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 227). Learn what? I press the space bar       Meditango: ‘listen to me, listen to us’ (‘Envois’, p. 57). The two syllables of Greek meta, meaning among other things, ‘together with’, separate and gather in this word. Meditango gives us meta at a distance, with a di like an audible hyphen distancing meta from itself. If a syllable as such is always already part of a word and of language, this spacing sets up a sort of presyllabic tattoo or shuffle or Undertango. Me di ta. Or a little further on, ‘Amelitango’ pronounces A me li ta. It dictates, lays down the beat. Before words and inside them there is a shared or divided writing-anticipation. By this stretching and shuffling, this tendency to play with sound, this spaced-out or spacey writing, writing counteracts certain inevitable contractual obligations. The ones, for example, that determine the relation and the separation between sender and addressee, or that assume that the sender is necessarily the signer, and the addressee the receiver. Such a contract might read: ‘I will tell you what I tell you. I will stop. I will sign. You will then be free of me and I of you, we will not always dwell here together lost in the middle of writing.’ All well and good . . . but listen: Libertango, Meditango, Amelitango. Sound-track! What contractual freedom of the subject can compare with the wild insistence of a fragment of writing?

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The reading-writing transference recorded right on the body: swallowed or injected letter-clusters that work their way out into one’s life like bits of shrapnel, making a broken trail, a perhaps interminable series of exit wounds. The transferential wound is if anywhere not here, because also there – because I feel it’s already on the move, in between us and so on. Any image of it that we may have must therefore be a somewhat phantomatic envisioning, haunted, out of control, a-sovereign. Space bar again.                 I give it up, this thinking of the absolute mystery. I don’t know if you will enjoy recognising what I’m doing instead. Just tracing and interpolating and missing out, really: just editing. But then again I’m still thinking of the pique induced by ‘Envois’. I associate my needled feeling with the prick on the postcard. You remember: ‘the insane hubris of his prick’, Plato’s (‘Envois’, p. 18). I’m thinking about a certain kind of ambition, ambition that sticks itself out like a neck, one that goes seeking not only for, but through the middle of things, making a cross-section of everything. Anyway, I want to show you the whatyoumaycallit, the structure, like Alice’s flamingo neck in Wonderland, that just goes on and on all the way to where it wants to go, whether you or I want to go there or not. It’s more than a thought, because it appears as a kind of phantasmic cross-section that enlists Plato and Socrates, those two, and all sorts of other objects besides. It’s not merely a personal ambition or private teleology. It’s a di-rection, as Derrida puts it. It takes you with it, though he doesn’t know where, and it leaves you where you are, and sets up within you, as he says, a whole menu, a cartload of displacements. Reading the description of the phantom erection, I thought blimey, that’s what I call a middle term; the sight of its distracted singlemindedness fills me with envy and admiration. You wait till you read it, funny and more than a little frightening, because according to the OED on ‘hubris’ this interminable erection is also encroaching, insolent, insufferable and unable, according to one authority, to believe in the possibility of its own suffering. You don’t want to fall out with something like that. The reference to hubris gives us another instance of what Derrida begins by warning us about, the way that ‘Envois’ ‘places you in relation, without discretion, to tragedy’ (‘Envois’, p. 5). ‘Without arms’, all I can do is quote: ‘For the moment, myself, I tell you that I see Plato . . .’ (pp. 57, 18). Wait a bit. I should underline that Plato is in italics, as is the name Socrates here. The oeuvre, as Derrida writes in ‘My Chances’, is ‘vertical and slightly leaning’ (‘My Chances’, p. 361) – just like italic script, but on the post card as Derrida sees it, we have a kind of big slide, bathetic, downbeat, a downhill writing-slope, a sort of

­84    Without Mastery gravity-accepting Beckett-erection of the external heart, the blind unemphatic blood-temperature insistence of an idée fixe so fixed it traverses everything in sight. It’s a matter of the angle and the angot when you want to go very far, stretch right out all the way over or across, you have to get the angle right, that is, not a right-angle. Perhaps in ‘Envois’, to read ‘Envois’ it takes the fragile serpentine curls, the twists and turns and break-offs, the burrowing and goings-on of a hedge-eel angot orthography or autograph. The oeuvre brings us back to the Complete Works of Jacques Derrida. We were saying . . . we were seeing: ‘I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates’ back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection traversing Paris’s head like a single idea and then the copyist’s chair, before slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrates’ right leg, in harmony or symphony with the movement of this phallus sheaf, the points, plumes, pens, fingers, nails and grattoirs, the very pencil boxes which address themselves in the same direction.’          I hit the space-bar. I keep doing that – far more often than I’ve admitted. What does this mean? In formal logic a medium is the middle term of a syllogism; a ground of proof or inference. And according to that logic, the thing a middle term must not be is equivocal or the whole syllogism just won’t work properly and we all may as well go home. You can’t for example take the blanks of fifty-two signs in the ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card as a middle term in a syllogism or logical equation. And yet, it’s set up like that at the beginning, as if it’s there that all the trouble starts, with editing, with the ‘economy of sorting’ as he puts it, or with his ‘very strange principle of selection’ (‘Envois’, pp. 4, 3). He gives us indextrouble, with his pointy finger pointing at nothing, at ‘passages that have disappeared’ (p. 4). He says: ‘Whatever their original length, the passages that have disappeared are indicated, at the very place of their incineration, by a blank of 52 signs [he then cites the blank, or indicates what disappears, the fireplace itself, it’s a bit indescribable to say the least, by a blank of fifty-two signs and continues, just as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had happened, as one always continues, right up to the end, as if nothing had happened, that’s what continuing is . . .] and a contract insists [he goes on] that this stretch of destroyed surface remain forever indeterminable.’

Reading Matters

One will never be able to prove that it happened, only swear that it did.1 (Derrida, Veils) ‘One will never be able to prove that it happened, only swear that it did.’ Then it’s as if this thing that has happened, had not yet happened. One awaits it, without being able to expect it. The things we would swear to, invite a subtler and more naive response than we are able to give to what is evident. My table of contents, the table des matières that would have narrowed things down and allowed me to bring you quickly to the essential or central concerns of this chapter, would have discussed materiality in terms of 1) perceptual experience, 2) Derrida’s notion of quasi-­ transcendental paper, 3) letters, and 4) tables. I also wanted to say something about reading and sexual difference, and to address their relation to the institutionalisation of deconstruction in the UK and the US. This last was something I could neither abandon nor pursue. What follows remains, determinedly, in the realm of insistence and bearing witness. It moves between English and French and sometimes German with especial awkwardness and care, to think about mylanguage and theirlanguages, and as always to try to take into account what does not come down to language at all but marks language and asks to be read: what matters. Letters, and beyond them, the reading that barely knows how to read. We are here together, and I am covered in ink, thinking; just don’t ask me to prove it, or if you want a proof remember that you ask for proofs just when you realise that you don’t see what you see, you can’t hear what you hear: perception isn’t happening. You’re overlooking something or perhaps it’s coming at you double. Sometimes, in the absence of proof, a voice comes to you saying, smiling: ‘You’re deaf and blind – this must be a text. Come with me now, to writing.’

­86    Without Mastery And then something happens to belief. It loosens. The more relaxed it is, the further you can go. As if that smiling voice took you back to the early times of yourself when the distinction between subjective and objective is not yet instituted. You don’t know, you don’t not-know. That time extends its hands to us and extends us in dreams and not only in dreams. There’s the phone, there’s writing, there’s reading: and where do those stop? Do they stop when they stop? We’ll come back to that. For now I’d like to quote The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud is citing Strümpell’s researches, on the continuities between dreaming and waking. They find that: Far from being mere presentations, the elements of dreams are true and real mental experiences of the same kind as arise in a waking state through the agency of the senses . . . Moreover, there is a sensory consciousness in dreams, since sensations and images are assigned to an external space, just as they are in waking . . . It must therefore be allowed that in dreams the mind is in the same relation to images and perceptions as it is in waking . . . If it is nevertheless in error in so doing, that is because in the state of sleep it lacks the criterion which alone makes it possible to distinguish between sense-perceptions arising from without and from within. (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 51)

Perception is ‘true and real’ . . . ‘it is nevertheless in error’. In the discussion following the delivery of ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Derrida affirms: ‘Now I don’t know what perception is and I don’t believe that anything like perception exists.’2 Roughly speaking, that’s how it is. We do not have the right amount of proof of the things that matter most: it is a question of none, or too much. In our thirst for the salt water of certainty we need the sense of indirection that Derrida recognises in Freud.3 Hélène Cixous takes it up in Insister where she suggests we imagine the way Derrida reads Freud in ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’: One has to imagine the faithful and assiduous reading going through this book [livre] listening to this address of genius right to the end, a reading left behind, thrown off course, dragged on to ‘indirect paths’, the ‘other paths’, cleared by Freud and henceforward [dorénavant] recognised, translated, reinscribed by Jacques Derrida, carried beyond knowledge [savoir], beyond the foreseeable [previsible], launched into the space of undecidability with the energy of this Indirektheit of which he, Jacques Derrida, revives the value overlooked by Freud of irrectitude, a ‘non-straightness’ or ‘non-rightness’, virtue and virtus, uncovered in live action, at the quick of [au vif du] the subject, by the force of his soul at the dawn of the century and named with a new [nouveau] name. An active non-straightness (which does not [ne veut

Reading Matters    ­87 pas] mean non-passive) active even while passive, acting affectively, not subjected to either good or evil, guided only by the bound.4

She writes about Derrida’s listening book in the future tense, in the past imperfect tense, in terms of what must come next. She asks us to imagine: an energy of indirectness is present in a way that exceeds the present tense, or the past-present. She draws on its properties and strengths, including the power of letters that resound. A v is repeating there, as it does in Savoir, or rather in ‘Un ver à soie’ or more properly in Voiles, for example in the note on page 56 of Voiles where Jacques Derrida reads the inscription of the vocable v in Savoir. These matters, the proliferation and diversification of letters and sounds in writing, as well as the movement of vocables between texts and oeuvres are central to our understanding of irrectitude and of psychoanalysis as something sharply alive, a real-life thing, whose continuity is the force of separate nonseparate souls, whose name is not the same, and which comes to us here in terms of a reading. A first impression cannot accentuate itself right away. One gets no further than the middle of beginning. You have to decide how to read, in what accent, with what emphasis, in what tone: there are so many there is no one tone. But there is no choice. A reading, no matter how carefully meditated, has the provisional, cut-off-while-in-progress quality of a counter-proof. As you will know from reading Glas, a contre-épreuve or counter-proof is a kind of print. Unlike most prints it is made by working from the surface of the paper rather than directly from the plate. If the ink of a freshly made print is wet it ‘will produce an image on another sheet of paper under strong pressure in a printing press’.5 That image will be the same way round as the engraved plate, so that if you are a real printmaker you can use it to check the plate and if you need to you can go back and make changes. However, the gravure that Derrida writes about in Glas is non-subjective and it provokes thought only indirectly. Its calculations are not given to us except in the three little stones of an ellipsis: . . . stay and think [reste à penser: the Leavey and Rand translation has ‘remain(s) to be thought’. According to Cixous, it is an imperative: ‘stay and think, rest and think, demeure, stay with me, think with me, live with me, die with me’.6]: that does not accentuate itself [s’accentuer] here and now [maintenant] but will already have been put to the test on the other side. Sense [sens] must respond, more or less, to the calculations of what in terms of printing [en terms de gravure] one calls a counter-proof. (Glas, p. 1a)

The matter of this thinking that remains to be thought is not given directly. ‘Sense’, sens, of course refers to meaning, signification and to

­88    Without Mastery direction. It also awakens, according to a different mode of reading, the sensory apparatus, the ear, the eye, the hand, the tongue, the nose for the scent or flair of writing. However, we get to sense not by interpretation nor by direct perception, but by way of song, the resonances that come to us from what already will have been put to the test on the other side, from the necessity of what is written. For example, there is a resonance of the syllable ça. Ça as you know means ‘that’ and in Glas it is also the name of the psychoanalytic id and of Hegelian savoir absolu, SA, absolute knowledge. The text brings together in an inexplicable way, an unconscious force and the ultimate state of consciousness. Neither of these can belong to a subject: they are on the other side, the side of the unconscious, or of absolute consciousness itself, or, in grammatical terms, the side of the predicate, of what remains to be thought, of having-already-been-marked by a calculation that does not belong to a subject. This ‘other side’ is however this side, the side we are on. And as I’ve got you here listening, which suggests that even if there is no such thing as perception, we are on the side of voice and presence, we could do it another way. By way of words. The verb s’accentuer comes from Latin cantare, to sing. It sings, already, on the other side but not here and now. Thanks to this singing, this opening and enchantment of signs, we can start to hear in the verb s’accentuer other possible pasts, contradictory intimations and changes: S’accentuer has an etymological relation to Greek ake, point, whence Latin acuere, sharpen, from the Indo-European root *ak, rise to a point, be sharp. The Greek word kentron, meaning a sharp point, goad, or sting gives us the word and concept ‘centre’. Accentuation will guide us to what is central, to the centre which Derrida tells us in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ is ‘a function, a sort of nonlocus’.7 It does so by means of cruelty: the kentron, both wound and weapon, would be another name for the ‘cruelty without anyone having been cruel’ that Derrida talks about at the end of ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’ (p. 280). Writing already stings, sings, and magically incantates. In phrases and sentences a thinking enters language, sinks into the surface but to remain there, not to hide itself or build the tomb of a book containing so many dried signifiers and buried meanings. This resonance is endless. It is everywhere but it is not just anything. Derrida’s writing rebounds and resonates, but it does not leap ‘over the text towards its presumed content, in the direction of the pure signified’ (Of Grammatology, p. 159). To read it is to enter writing. We could listen to the en as well as the ça in the lines about the counter-proof: penser, s’accentuer, maintenant, le sens, en termes de gravure. His readers are en-creatured, they become thinking creatures, animal creations and descendants of writing.

Reading Matters    ­89

Or better as he says in ‘Force and Signification’: ‘Writing is the outlet as the descent of meaning [sens] outside itself within itself’ (p. 35). Writing flows out, overflowing the customary psychic boundary between inside and outside by keeping low, just as spilt fluids do. He goes on to describe writing as: ‘metaphor-for-others-aimed-at-others-here-and-now [ici-bas, down here], metaphor as the possibility of others here-and-now [again ici-bas], metaphor as metaphysics in which being must hide itself if the other is to appear’ (p. 35). L’etre, being, hides itself in the letter, as well as in la terre, the earth, and you can read it in l’autre, the other. That’s you, if I’m not mistaken. And the metaphoric vessel, the cache of sens, cracks, breaks, all the animals come to drink water from the rock. When you have tasted the waters of this writing, psychology is no longer enough. Something like thirst brings us together here from all directions, readers of Derrida, readers of Freud, readers of Hélène Cixous. Water comes down to the valleys and brings me to the second epigraph to the second part of ‘Force et signification’ which is a line from Freud: ‘Valley, das Tal, ist ein haüfiges weibliches Traumsymbol’ (p. 27). The French has it just like that, in English and German. In English: ‘Valley, das Tal, is a common female dream symbol’ (‘Force and Signification’, p. 16). Derrida’s essay makes no further comment on Freud but the epigraph suggests that something of Freud, perhaps a Freud unknown to Freud, is nonetheless there in the discussion of Nietzsche with which the essay ends. The Thale and indeed the Tafeln, the tables in Chapter 56 of Thus Spake Zarathustra, ‘Old and New Tables’, have to do, indirectly, with psychoanalysis. More specifically, they have to do with the role of the symbol, the letter and schematic reading in the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis. Derrida’s first epigraph to the second part of ‘Force and Signification’ comes from Delacroix: ‘Some lines are monsters . . . one line alone has no signification; there needs to be a second to give it expression. Important law’ (p. 16). I suppose that the line from Freud that immediately follows this line from Delacroix is the second stroke, the acute stroke (/) that possibly makes the initial monstrous and insignificant grave stroke (\) into a \/. This \/ is the groove or grave of an engraved mark, a hieroglyph or picture meaning ‘valley’ and ‘writing’, it’s also what the musician Prince calls ‘the v of her love’,8 therefore a feminine symbol, weibliche, also the ad hoc graphic symbol and event of meeting and division, and of course, this structure is a letter, ‘V’, the first letter of ‘valley’, of French vallée, if not of the German word Tal. The lines come to a point. The epigraphs start to signify. The landscape trembles with what you might call a feminine vibe, a weib. Derrida’s essay ends (which is different from closing and coming to a point but always makes one

­90    Without Mastery think a little of closure and structure) without settling into any of the grooves that it carefully prepares for itself. It remains with Zarathustra, sitting and waiting. The letter resists formalisation. Zarathustra knows how to write in the air with his voice and he keeps company with written tables, tablets of stone, Tafeln. There is also the deferred question of writing in the hearts of men. For that Zarathustra would need brothers. (At the level of the dramatis personae, but only there, this is an exclusively virile scene.) His readers would have to become a brotherhood and that moment has not yet come. Neither has the movement from the mountaintop down into the valleys, Thale – perhaps this too would also be a kind of writing. But he doesn’t go anywhere just now. He waits. Nietzsche writes, Zarathustra waits, neither writing nor walking, and Derrida reads. Derrida’s reading teaches us a down-going and an undergoing, an ‘excavating work’, or ‘travail en creux’ (p. 35 / p. 49). We become very small, as if we could live in the hollows, the valleys in the letters. You can hear this happening. The end of ‘Force and Signification’ grooves, a word that means that it swings, dances, listens with pleasure, co-operates and gives pleasure. Derrida says: ‘We would have to choose, then, between writing and dancing’ but his writing doesn’t do that (p. 34). It allows two interpretations of writing to meet. First thematic stroke: Flaubert’s notion of the oeuvre, what Derrida calls his ‘religion of the work as form’ (p. 34). But the oeuvre, Derrida has demonstrated earlier, is not a closed structure, not a form. (In ‘My Chances’ he says that ‘the work is vertical and slightly leaning’.) Then a second stroke: Nietzsche wants to abolish Flaubert altogether, saying, in Flaubert’s language and voice: ‘Flaubert est toujours haïssable, l’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre est tout.’ Nietzsche seems to want a Dionysian writing and a knowledge, a savoir, in which nothing sits or settles or sediments: ‘To know [savoir] how to dance with [avec] feet, with [avec] ideas, with [avec] words: must I say that it is also necessary to know [savoir] it with the pen – that one must learn how to write?’ (quoted in ‘Force and Signification’, p. 34 / p. 48). Then again Flaubert insists that you have to sit down to think and write. Then again Nietzsche insists that remaining seated is a sin: ‘Only thoughts that come to you [vous viennent] when you are walking are worth anything [ont de la valeur].’ These repeated strokes deepen the \/, there on the spot, so one doesn’t miss it, but they also move. In ‘Force and Signification’ the notion of structure no longer refers to geometric space, nor to the order of forms and places, including that place or category we think we know as ‘literature’. Derrida suggests that if structure is ‘la chose littéraire elle-même’, the literary thing itself, then

Reading Matters    ­91

the identification transforms the notion of structure, for ‘this structure as literary thing is this time understood, or at least practised, literally [à la lettre]’. Right from her first reading of ‘Force et signification’ Hélène Cixous reads Derrida to the letter, to the point, where point is the most minute discontinuous readable mark, the most basic and yet still divisible grounds of writing’s mill and also, because of this descent towards matter, which I would say requires an almost unimaginable spiritual softening and indirection, the point is the high point, the highest in the world, the accumulation of all that his writing elevates and surmounts, even to the point of advancing, as she sees him, along an invisible but never ideal ridge called into being by his steps, ahead of everyone, out in front like a proof. Her point is also more than an underlining of these extremes of height and depth. The point as she writes it is somewhere else and everywhere. It moves in the way a bird moves; he is under way, the point is that he is on the move, in process, astir: There is always a point in his vicinity, a bird as Kafka would say in search of its cage but not to shut itself in, to make it feel its caginess along with its liberty, I mean the all-inclusive potentiality [maybe the more sexually loaded and literal virtuality would be preferable here] but therefore also agape with limits bars partitions closures, the enclosure and the liberty of each and everyone, their sexual differences, there is always a dot, a point over here, an i somewhere else, I ought to join them and say a ni a neither, yes, a nid a nest, a bird’s nest of signifiers of silkworms of hedgehogs, a secret nest, there is always a secretness secreting unprecedented liaisons, misdemeanours of delight or delirium, unravelling readings.9

A little later she associates the point with the word, the letter and even the cime, the summit, from Greek kuma, wave, the crest of a sea made mountain, he walks on lexemes, a miracle of a reader. And she remains firm on the point that he, like her, must be read in French: Right away, the first time on the mountain, I realized I had to take him at his word, to the letter, to the summit, literally, to the comma as well, without which the sparks wouldn’t fly nor the water gush from his text, meticulously, being attentive to the point of finickiness. To the point as well. (Portrait of Jacques Derrida, p. 7)

Here the point is to the letter, it comes forth from the letter, from the point, the dot, the jot, the comma, the virgule that makes space, separating and distinguishing like the lightest touch of the tip of a fantastically precise reading-writing-scimitar. Which makes Freud’s remark that ‘Valley is a common female dream symbol’ seem rather tame and direct, as interpretations go. The notion of common or typical symbols tends to work against Freud’s own

­92    Without Mastery interest in symbols as ‘indirect means of representation’ and his insistence that each dream invents its own language (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 351). By 1914 the additions to The Interpretation of Dreams amounted to a whole new section of Chapter 6 called ‘Representation by Symbols in Dreams – Some Further Typical Dreams’, which accommodated a large number of folkloric and other symbols gathered by Freud and other analysts. There began to be a tendency towards sedimentation in psychoanalytic reading practice, as The Interpretation of Dreams moved from its autobiographical origins as Freud’s own self-analysis, towards being the foundational text of a new institution. Piling up material, cross-references, thematisation accompanied the formation of a psychoanalytic brotherhood. The remark about valleys is not originally Freud’s but comes from a paper by Alfred Robitsek, published in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse II.6 (1912). The journal was run by Adler and Stekel and came out in Vienna. At this time the centre of psychoanalysis was contested: were you with Freud and the Freudians in Vienna or were you a Jungian, directing your observations and theoretical remarks at or out of Zurich? Freud quotes the whole of Robitsek’s article in the 1914 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams. (After this point there were fewer additions of this kind.) He remarks approvingly on the dreamer’s choice of symbol, which allowed the analyst to interpret the dream ‘with only slight assistance from the dreamer’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 373). It is an obedient dream. Robitsek comments: ‘ “Popular” symbolism made it possible for me to translate the dream unaided.’ I’ll give you the dream and its associations in the order they have in The Interpretation of Dreams and you can see how you do with it: I arrange the centre of a table with flowers for a birthday . . . expensive flowers; one has to pay for them . . . lilies of the valley, violets and pinks or carnations . . . purity . . . valley . . . violate . . . colour . . . not colour but incarnation. I decorate the flowers with green crinkled paper . . . fancy paper . . . to hide untidy things, whatever was to be seen, which was not pretty to the eye; there is a gap, a little space in the flowers. The paper looks like velvet or moss . . . decorate . . . decorum . . . hope. (The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 374–6)

I think you’ll agree it couldn’t be easier. The dreamer is a woman and ‘centre’ – well, we all know what that stands for, what the ‘centre’ of a woman is. And ‘table’ well, we all know what that is, since reading the 1909 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams which says that ‘Tables [Tische], tables laid for a meal [Tische gedeckte] and boards also stand for women – no doubt by antithesis, since the contours of their bodies are

Reading Matters    ­93

eliminated from the symbols’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 355).10 And the ‘valley’, well, there can be no doubt about that, as valley is a common female symbol. And as for the ‘fancy paper’ (‘Phantasiepapier’, Freud and Robitsek translate it, perhaps rather tendentiously) what could the ‘green crinkled paper’ be but pubic hair? Only, Cixous has warned us that in The Interpretation of Dreams the ‘flesh of the dream is no longer there’ (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 107). At which point, reminded of the fact that the materiality of inscription, the flesh of dreams, is not to be confused with phenomena, we might ask, ‘What are our body and our flesh if not what Derrida calls “quasitranscendental paper”?’ He asks: might there be a sort of general, even quasi-transcendental structure? Might we, when we say ‘paper’, already be ‘designating this “quasi-transcendental paper”’, whose function could be guaranteed by any other ‘body’ or ‘surface’, provided that it shared some characteristics with ‘paper’ in the strict sense of the word (corporality, extension in space, the capacity to receive impressions, and so on)?11

How good a reader of bodies, of your body and its wounds, are these readers here? By whom would you prefer to be read? Robitsek? Freud? Derrida? Cixous? Be careful whom you choose. And you, reading here now, what is imperceptibly and poetically happening in and to you, even ‘on you’, as we might say? And what if the table were not ein Tisch, which is what Freud calls it, using the word for ‘table’ that is cognate with ‘disc’ and ‘dish’, those round shapes that hold obediently to a geometrical centre? What if we let the table be eine Tafel, a writing-tablet, what then? Then it would speak with Zarathustra’s broken and half-written tables: these tables would have souls and be able to talk to each other about another kind of reading. Then that centre or gap in the dream, its valley, that little space in the flowers, which Freud does not hesitate to agree is as female in its nature and meaning as a table, would not be the woman’s sex itself. It would not be the Anatomical-Identification-Centre that is, along with its culturally determined ambitions, so readily legible to psychoanalysis, but a reading-writing space or chance or centre where nobody knows. The analyst recounts that ‘The affect attaching to this simple dream – a feeling of happiness – indicated that powerful emotional complexes had found satisfaction in it’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 377). The woman dreamer had her jouissance. As for her interpreters, I don’t know. Perhaps the pleasure was elsewhere. Tafel is the word for illustrative plates of the kind one might find in a nineteenth-century monograph,

­94    Without Mastery like the ‘farbigen Tafeln’ coloured plates, that five year-old Freud and his eldest younger sister blissfully, uberselig, tore apart leaf by leaf as one tears a flower. The picture of the tearing of paper proper was, he says, ‘almost the only plastic memory that I retained from that period of my life’ (p. 172 / Die Traumdeutung, p. 178). As if he had wiped what Hamlet calls the table of memory, except in this respect that allows him, by irrectitude, to connect the unrightful joy of destruction with his subsequent passion for collecting and owning books. The dream concerns decoration in the form of colour: . . . lilies of the valley, violets and pinks or carnations . . . purity . . . valley . . . violate . . . colour . . . not colour but incarnation. I decorate the flowers with green crinkled paper . . . fancy paper. Freud’s section on ‘Considerations of Representability’ distinguishes between ‘the replacing of some one particular idea by another closely associated with it’ so that ‘instead of two elements a single common element intermediate between them [finds] its way into the dream’ and another more colourful kind of displacement in which ‘a single element has its verbal form replaced by another’ (p. 339 / p. 345). This displacement ‘usually results in a colourless [farbloser] and abstract expression in the dream-thought being exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one’. Colour incarnates material for us. Derrida recollects in his interview on paper: ‘We have forgotten to talk about the colour of paper, the colour of ink and their comparative chromatics: a vast subject. That will be for another time’ (‘Paper or Me, You Know’, p. 53). Perhaps when we speak of writing, colour is always for another time. We don’t see the colour at first, we see the absence of colour, the black and white of the indispensable semantic ants on the page, the swarms of words and letters; we hop into bed with the signified, we do everything the wrong way round, in rose-coloured spectacles. Necessarily. Then we learn to wait. And repetition waits for us. Hélène Cixous speaks about her teaching work on Derrida’s texts in these terms: The work that I do on these texts, it’s the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth look, and to make the hidden treasure within appear, I use elementary pedagogic elements. For example colours. I can follow the trace for example in red, in blue or yellow, a signifier, a phoneme that leads [un phonème qui mène]. (‘Bâtons rompus’, p. 192)12

Etymologically, ‘colour’ has to do with Latin celare, to cover or conceal, but one can also pick out its phonic resemblance to French couler, to flow. The movement of reading flows and pulses, liquid and life-giving. A phoneme may lead the way, but the trace, which is what Cixous’ reading follows, escapes. It is not about paper, or skin, or blood, or

Reading Matters    ­95

phonemes, or letters, it is about indirection. When Derrida reminds us of colour he has just quoted Freud, in French, the bit of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety in which, thanks to the psychic rhetoric: The blank sheet of paper becomes the mother’s body [la corps de la mère], at least when it is being written on with pen and ink: ‘As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow [couler] out of a tube on to a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation [coït], or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth [corps de la mère], both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act.’ We have forgotten to talk about the colour [couleur] of paper . . .

Couler, coït, corps, couleur. This movement of colour and sound (heard colour, seen sound), this co-writing, confounds Freud’s distinction between ideational and verbal displacement. The movement of writing begins with but also irreversibly moves off from the corps, the body and the body of the mother. Its materiality is no longer a blank or a dark continent, but a corridor, a passage, a way through that itself leaves traces. One text writes through another, causes and occasions another. Authors write for, whereas reader-writers, real writers, know how to say: ‘it is not for you that I write: it is by you, passing through you’.13 You and I are not as dense as we look at first sight, let’s begin to read each other, let’s read Derrida now, and Cixous, and Freud. Psychology will never be enough to understand this necessity. And all this needs paper. You don’t write straight on to the table, or the bodily heart – you write on paper. You don’t pierce the paper with the beak of your pen to find what Hélène Cixous calls ‘the nest hidden beneath the paper’ (‘Writing Blind’, p. 149). You write. It has to do with contiguity. She writes in ‘Writing Blind’ about the bird, the Vogel of écriture aveugle, blind writing: But how is it that I do not speak that language of writing when I speak? I cannot write in the air with my voice? When I speak – no writing – only discourse. Answer: the text needs the paper. It is in the contact with the sheet of paper that sentences emerge. As if coming out with great wing-strokes from the nest hidden beneath the paper. Maybe the sheet of paper is Kho¯ra?

I’d like to say something about the indecent, reckless, indirect beauty of their writing, Derrida and Cixous. Its decorativeness. A text is night with few stars, without astrolabes, but it has lines. Something draws you and draws you on and draws on you too. What do you love so much you want to write it on your legs with a stolen biro, can you remember?

­96    Without Mastery All our early writings were decorations, be-deckings. Language knows what the small scribbling child knows: ‘decoration’ is etymologically cognate with ‘decency’, ‘decorum’ and droit, right. At a low root-word level rectitude, beauty and goodness are related. These lofty-sounding things come to us indirectly. What do they ask of us? The docility to be led astray by non-droiture. And thought begins with the arrival of a kind of unworkable-with documentary impression, from Greek dokein, to think, seem, appear. The Sanskrit root of all these d words, *dek-, means ‘take’, or ‘accept’. The beauty of writing is not incidental to a writer’s grace and courage in the face of unbearable tensions. It is the sign of a discipline without fear and without ascetic narrowing. In her fiction Hyperdream Hélène Cixous writes about the pain of a sentence that comes to her on a specific day, 15 July 2005, Jacques Derrida’s birthday, the first since his death on 8 October 2004: ‘Thou shalt not telephone.’14 Cixous writes: she extends this sharp pang which is not made ‘global and terminal’ but continues to open as a streaming to-be-livedness of absence. She writes about all the grains that make the mountain of absence upon which she is actually walking. It is too much for the ‘I’, the author, the ego, the subject and yet it can be felt. I quote only part of an uninterruptible sentence which should be read from beginning to end and repeatedly, in its setting on the dune, ‘a mountain without a name which a hundred years from now will not exist’ (Hyperdream, p. 42): . . . it’s – as if from the top of the highest dune in the world in one glance I could survey the quantity of time in slices of sorrow coming my way – the internal vision of quantity in detail, a swarm of absences on the march, not a simple global and terminal Absence, but a procession, a future, it was this physical revelation of infinite repetition that I could not bear and which I will have to notbear and bear, which gave off, on the spot, a precise gaseous equivalent of the catastrophe that was to come . . . (pp. 45–6)15

A tension between tenses in her writing moves more exactly than anybody could. As if I could survey [what is] coming my way . . . the [present] vision . . . that I could not bear and which I will have to notbear and bear . . . [that] gave off . . . an . . . equivalent of the catastrophe to come. Imperfect, present or past historic, present, past, future, perfect, past participle announcing the future. Do we call this tension between grammatical tenses her tone, she Hélène Cixous, the vibration of her perfect imperfect past composed writing voice to come? Yes. But it is also a formal tension and a tension in the syntax and lexicon of metaphysics, to which she too in her own way gives without giving in or giving up.

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The unbreakable rule is: only one time at a time. And yet here this law seems to give, there is a rhythm emanating from the different tenses and contending points in time. Not the phenomenal rhythm of a metrical beat but a loosening, right at the sharp point of the most unbearable suffering, there where she, the subject, is also extended, racked by time, present in an absence between absences. Pain would already be a kind of acceptance experienced in the mode of resistance to it. This writing shows us what a body can do, when it knows where it is but not where it is going. And just there, in more than one place and as if by magic, language softens and lifts its head to her hand like a cat. Derrida writes about the beauty of the beautiful in Archive Fever, reading Chapter 6 of Civilisation and Its Discontents. In that chapter Freud speculates on destruction and the notion of a death or destruction drive on the loose, an aggressive instinct that ‘always operates in silence’ and ‘never leaves any archives of its own’ (Archive Fever, p. 10). It ‘destroys in advance its own archive’ and ‘eludes perception’. It leaves no document of itself, Derrida says. It does not write to us or to anyone. But there is according to Freud a last chance and the possibility of a saving grace. Derrida describes it like this: the anarchy drive eludes perception . . . except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself (gefarbt ist) in some erotic colour. This impression of erotic colour draws a mask right on the skin. In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own. As inheritance it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions. These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death. (p. 11)

Would this explain why a certain kind of coloured, desirous or poetic writing matters? A decorative writing anticipates, escapes the constrictions of lineage and monumental grandiosity, revealing the lawless pulse of the inescapable pulsion called death in ineffaceable writing-escapades or real pretend deaths. As if some dangerous angel wrote on us with its kentron, the spear-point with which, for example, in Sophocles’ play Oedipus blinds himself. And I have the impression, to put it as loosely as I can, that there are people on this earth, right here among us now, and Hélène Cixous is one of them, who are able not only to be the site of these impressions but to feel, quite precisely, that sting which cannot be internalised, or archived externally. They are able to be suffused by it, to disguise it, make it up, paint it, print it, represent it and bring it to light. Cixous and Derrida know how to be docile, that is, accepting,

­98    Without Mastery r­ eceptive before the cruel. They don’t run away. Docility is best practice when something comes out of the blue and I associate this obedience with a freedom so free, so wild that it has at times made nearly everyone start to believe there is no centre. Derrida is the historian of such moments, for example of the disruption that: would have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated . . . Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no centre, that the centre could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the centre had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. (‘Structure, Sign and Play’, pp. 353–4)

To continue to think about the centre as a function, rather than as a fixed or natural place, to hold to the centre, we need colour, the colour of signifiers, phonemes qui mène. I go to another writer who knows much more about this than I do to help me now. In Robert Browning’s poetry blue is both the most beautiful colour and the colour of lowly poetic origins, sexual, animal and literary. The bearded shellfish that, if you know how, will give you blue, is Browning’s Origine du monde. Such origins are unprintable, destined not to be acknowledged and to be misappropriated, except in poems and in poetic experience. But he knows how to write about the beautiful impression left when death is coloured by life, destruction flushes with desire and silence flowers, begins to resonate. Where does the beauty of the beautiful come from? It appears where it is not. It is always incarnations. It is never only an ‘it’, more like the shining or colouring of presence in an atmosphere not of perception, but of belief. Let’s say this atmosphere is blue, like the sky that is given to us naturally. Blue, woad on the skin, archiviolet, even blood, everything can be made blue. Browning situates this general possibility. He says in a poem: ‘there’s the dye’.16 The poem concerns the desire to draw a picture of a true poet, although its speaker knows that poets are not known until the last day of time. Until then, he sees the poet as fisher from the ancient city of Tyre with a net full of shellfish, caught to be made into the famous blue dye manufactured there. This ‘fisher’ – not a fisherman, the poet is not automatically a man – fishes up the dye, the murex and disappears straight away. Obscurity, unpopularity remain the rule. The poem fills instead with what has been caught in the fishing net: ‘there’s the dye’. What a homonym! Die. In one word: chance, death, colour. Purple of mourning and out-of-the blue. As if to die on the spot were possible with the freshness of being caught in a net alive. No one can do this but for Browning the shell-fish can:

Reading Matters    ­99 . . . there’s the dye, in that rough mesh, The sea has only just o’erwhispered! Live whelks, each lip’s beard dripping fresh, As if they still the water’s lisp heard Through foam the rock-weeds thresh. (ll. 36–40)

Nothing has happened yet, the tincture has not yet been extracted, distinguished, ex-tinguished, everything is open, awash with resonances. The whelks are still wet: ‘As if they still the water’s lisp heard’. The voice here is indistinct, life still thrashing about or thrashing things out. It’s absolutely metonymic and rough like a draft this voice, it splashes and foams and drafts over the loosely woven netting and the whelks that water like mouths when the water speaks to them, that is, touches them. The sea does not speak in its own voice – I think I speak to you by myself but you actually hear me when, on condition that, I speak through what is near at hand, which is always edges and between-states of some kind. In this case Browning speaks through the foam and weeds where air, water, rocks touch, between animal and mineral, nature and culture, masculine and feminine. It is writing anadyomene, rising up, rough, before composure. Browning’s sea is not beautiful, it’s messy, fluid and connected to itself by accidents of the signifier. I am reminded of Civilisation and Its Discontents where Freud says: Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty . . . All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally attributes of the sexual object. It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful. (‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, p. 83)

What follows next in Browning’s poem is very beautiful. There’s a frustrated indexical effect. He says ‘there’s the dye’ – but he shows us nothing blue – still that net of whelks is enough to do all kinds of things: Enough to furnish Solomon Such hangings for his cedar-house, That, when gold-robed he took the throne In that abyss of blue, the Spouse Might swear his presence shone Most like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb, What time, with ardours manifold, The bee goes singing to her groom, Drunken and overbold. (ll. 41–50)

­100    Without Mastery He never says ‘It is like this’, or ‘It was like that’. He writes ‘as if’ and ‘might’ in order to reach us. And the speaker of the poem who is trying to draw a true poet, becomes a woman who sees Solomon badly in her mind’s eye; she doesn’t know but she’s sure, she would swear, his palace throne-room and him together make a flower. It’s like a flower out of Genet, a thing of monstrous size and beauty. It’s also very small. The golden figure shining in the abyss of blue could be the sun in the sky but she doesn’t see it like that. She isn’t dazzled. The groom and his room, Solomon-out-of-the-blue, are recognised to be a flower. For her he shines like the feminine part of a flower. The centre-spike, botanically speaking, belongs to what is called the gynoecium, the woman’s house. It looks and sounds phallic, we think of spikes like that, but flowers are more complex. The spike is technically known as a style, so it’s for writing – and it’s hollow like a hypodermic needle or a pen. At the end of the style is an area with no skin, a sort of opening or naturally occurring wound, called the stigma, where pollen can be received. Centre-spike is Browning’s word for this apparatus. Solomon is part of his own special bluebell room hung with murex-coloured temple veils like an indoor tent. Hélène Cixous says flowers are ahead of us (Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 151). In Glas, Derrida cites Hegel relating the colour of flowers to Klang, resonance (Glas, p. 246a). The bluebell is a resonant flower. And, in this state of mind, you don’t tell time by the sun any more but by the arrival of a Queen bee who sings, who is a poet. She is overbold, a little insensate and part of the vicinity of God. Solomon’s palace is a temple and God is right there behind the veil. All of this is still inside the shellfish in the net: the curtains with the golden man inside, the bluebell with the centre-spike of gold inside. And the whelks are still alive. I remember another fragment of English in The Interpretation of Dreams. In a dream association, Freud recalls his nineteen-year-old self committing a verbal error, an incorrectness, Inkorrektheit (the Standard Edition translates ‘my mistake’). He was looking in a rockpool, when a ‘charming little girl’ by the Irish Sea asked him in English: ‘Is it a starfish? Is it alive?’ (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 519 / Die Traumdeutung, p. 524). ‘ “Yes”, I replied, “he is alive”.’ There I went again, says Freud, bringing in sex where it does not belong, in the form of a ‘Geschlechtswort am unrechten Platz’, a word indicating gender or sex, used in the wrong place. What comes to you out of the blue is what gives you the strongest and most impossible experience of taking responsibility for it. Blue tells us nothing we will ever be ready to hear. ‘The blue guitar surprises you’ says Wallace Stevens. Writing that dives, that comes from the deep, is a

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kind of dethroning, a stepping down. The anarchy drive cannot write, the ‘centre-spike of gold’ is not a ‘very hard weapon’ that chooses its colours.17 It works by effacing, loosening, softening, a kind of not-­ writing, a reading first of all perhaps, that does not rush to impose a form on the text but remains immersed in it and takes its time. It’s this giving of time that I sense in Cixous reading Derrida. It makes me want to say, let’s not rush about writing books, let’s read what she writes and what he writes. Let’s read them. To the letter. It could change us, if we let it, that’s the point. As I write this, it was towards an occasion now past, towards speaking, a speech that rests in turn on writing. In English we call this ‘giving a paper’ as if the unbound or loosely bound substrate were especially appropriate as a gift, propitious to the sharing of words and thoughts or even feelings. It’s usually regarded as being less important as an academic activity than the publication of work in printed form, bound in a volume of some kind. It’s less formal and pedagogical than giving a lecture or an address. As I write I daydream about giving a paper: a single occasion towards which or out of which every thought, word, breath, note, conscious or unconscious bodily signal would come together, with who knows who there, actually or virtually present, all the voices heard or repeated or half-heard in writing coinciding for a time in an auditorium or other room, like a voice that resonates between a single pair of ears. Even if it should have gone badly, this is a happy thought of writing towards presence, as a kind of one-off performance or concert. To an extent everything I ever write is a naive fantasy-paper, a green thought in a green shade, and a sort of prophetic wish that writing itself would be a material contribution towards, and an effect of, the dreamlike occasion I have just described and which has, on occasion, actually happened.

Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing)

I want to watch Badlands with you, the scene where the house burns, where Kit Carruthers sets fire to the house.1 Where ghosts live . . . it’s in writing: I must talk to you about this. How they sit waiting at the depths, the depth of the petrol, the level where the text burns, where you give everything up, to hell with it, burn it all, start a fire to burn away everything that looks like an answer, including what you love, language, and the wish to be intelligible and convincing, let that burn too, and all the things that ‘correspondence’ says – the papers, delete all those indestructible bloody emails, but also put under attack the more general phenomenon of telecommunication, of responding with or to someone at a distance – destroy the evidence so that there is no sign of relation, no sign of attachment left but also perhaps no interruption or impediment or betrayal of desire by a language always too everyday, too universal, too capable of signifying. And I have to talk to you about how even the fire burns, sublimates itself, ceasing to be only flames, becoming unrecognisable; as Derrida wrote thirty-two years ago on Monday, the seventh of September 1977, the correspondence preceding and constituting ‘Envois’ is destroyed by ‘fire or that which figuratively takes its place’, as if a figurative substitution were already burning inside anything one might recognise as fire – or as a word, burning to supersede the destructiveness and blazing transformation of fire – or of language, so as to be, I resume quoting him: ‘more certain of leaving nothing out of the reach of what I like to call langue de feu, the tongue of fire’ (‘Envois’, p. 3). Fire stays very close to what it burns, so close, as close as kisses. All this can be recollected: once more made subject to mourning, language and work. Perhaps it’s common knowledge by now, I haven’t kept up with the scholarship. But I am still planning to talk to you about what ‘Envois’ calls the ‘singular one’ who perhaps escapes all that (p. 4). What am I thinking of? Something,

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like Derrida says in Writing and Difference, talking about Artaud, something that the articulations of language and logic have not yet entirely frozen, that is, the aspect of oppressed gesture which remains in all speech, the unique and irreplaceable movement which the generalities of concept and repetition have never finished rejecting.2

There is something, someone, some voice in writing. I keep looking, I watch out for it. I cannot hear it except by watching. I must talk to you about this, when we have time, while we have time. . . . and about how watching, like intending, is a mortal act. Both are carried out in the light of – but also against – a sense of death. The text consists of remains. It’s lumber, leftovers, tags, inaudible gossip. Derrida’s ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry evokes the uninhabitedness of texts that hides and promises life at the same time, when it says how the silence of prehistoric arcana and buried civilizations, the entombment of lost intentions and guarded secrets, and the illegibility of lapidary inscription disclose the transcendental sense of death as what unites these things to the absolute privilege of intentionality in the very instance of its essential . . . failure.3

It’s something ancient and urgent. But this ‘transcendental sense of death’ as what unites life to itself, does it work for the temporality of climate change, which we are making a rather bad go of watching? Do you remember Adorno insisting that no one can live in writing, that above all there is a ‘technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension’ so that in the end ‘the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing’?4 Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing nerding away over the keyboard. ‘Why do I tell you all this / You are not even here’.5 That’s John Ashbery, that spooky poem ‘This Room’ about the room that writing is, a dream room with dream furniture where as in a dream everyone and everything is the dreamer, plural and all alone, chattering in my sleep, except: The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. . . . Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here. (ll. 1–5, 8–9)

­104    Without Mastery Something is hushed up. Dreams, ghosts, literature: a sort of domesticated otherness, set in the context of life. It’s not clear what it would mean to think about them in the context of extinction. I’m still imagining something, some necessary invented string stretched taut between us, or an oscillation, one of Chiara Alfano’s frequencies.6 It stretches ‘between unknown poles’, as Abraham and Torok put it (The Shell and the Kernel, p. 86). It would be as if between the room where I’m writing, where I am, or was and this room, as if there were a thread, a plot to all this, a continuity that moves at an even pace. A voice on a tin can telephone, guaranteeing that through all the terrible adventures, the separation, the accelerations and decelerations, after all that, we were moving to where we must go, where it must go, at unvarying speed and the even speed of our destiny were inseparable from tautness. ‘The tautness of the taut string is equal (or even) all along and at any part of the string’s length’ (‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, p. 36). That’s Elizabeth Bowen on novel-writing. One must maintain the writing-tension through all kinds of tonal and affective variations. Keep in touch, apostrophise, via a relation to death itself: what other destination is there? It’s the limit. And it is necessary to sense how close it is, even when it works in secret and leaves no visible sign of itself. This would be another way to look at the theoretical ‘bubble’ Tom Cohen draws attention to: knowing-about what is happening to the earth and ignoring the events and the danger, continuing to know, think and write in ways that continue the damage, or forget about it, as if we had somewhere else to go, or as if we were already somewhere else.7 Cohen asks: ‘how do mnemotechnics, conceptual regimes, and reading – a certain unbounded textualisation that exceeds any determination of writing – participate in or accelerate the mutations that extend, today, from financial systems to the biosphere?’ (‘Murmurations’, p. 20). This widespread mutation is what he calls ‘telemorphosis’. The term troubles anthropomorphism and telepathy as redemptive forms of personification. The forces of climate change have no ‘moment’. They ask us to imagine a ‘counter-gaze without personification, a perspective without “man” altogether’.8 But as the necessary use of negation suggests, the unimaginable can only be imagined or not-imagined, from here, the side of life, the interruptible. And this has to do with tone, every decision hangs on that line across, beyond the horizon. The scene I wanted to show you, the burning house and the uncontrollable activity of fire at work on the sets and on the shots, disorganising everything, somehow confronts me with the sense that someone created it, someone cut, chose, spliced; someone not visible in the scene. For a moment or two, in the midst of the simulated

Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost    ­105

life of characters and their stories, everyone leaves the screen. Kit and Holly drive away. The fire burns and the music plays. The child in the picture gazes out, the dolls stare up from the bed, the dead man’s eyes can no longer see, the cameras are running but who is watching, who takes the place of Terrence Malick, the director, the first reader of the scene? Who reads it now? According to Specters of Marx: Only mortals, only the living who are not living gods can bury the dead. Only mortals can watch over them, and can watch, full stop. Ghosts can do so as well, they are everywhere where there is watching; the dead cannot do so – it is impossible and they must not do so. (pp. 174–5)

But what about extinction? Historical responsibility and the work of mourning begin with a desire for presence, for what escapes, that something for which we watch and read. What Bowen calls ‘the what did happen’ – can one ever give a full account? One should never stop trying to do so, even if in the process one must go beyond or fall short of the what did happen, right in the attempt to speak of it, to read about it, to write about it, to know it and to act upon what one knows. How far to the ghosts? To put it naively, one cannot say whether ghosts belong inside or outside us or whether they should be considered in the context of mental or bodily life. They tenaciously defy mind-body dualism and the opposition between the abstract and the sensational. It would seem that a different kind of continuity is available to ghosts: one founded on coming back, on repetition. Including the repetition of processes that occur over very long time scales and that concern non-human agencies. The ghost-continuity can’t be assimilated as a predictable rhythm. It causes trouble in the head and can’t be thought out ahead or even seen coming. How is it possible to want or to know or to want to know this ‘something or someone, neither someone nor something’ that is already in the house but perhaps distantly and which, ‘without doing anything, invisibly occupies places belonging neither to us nor to it’ (Specters of Marx, p. 172)? I wanted to talk to you about ghosts and desire. A ghost, I would guess, is right at the limit of the desirable, where desire meets fear. Derrida says in his first film appearance, in Ghost Dance, that the art of cinema in its most original form is an art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms, and an art of letting phantoms come back, also that psychoanalysis plus cinema equals the Science of Ghosts. Freud never developed a theory of ghosts: Specters of Marx notes that Freud knew he should have begun to explain the death drive, repetition-compulsion and the beyond of the pleasure principle with ghosts but he found their frightfulness too

­106    Without Mastery great an obstacle to intellectual clarity. Well there we are. Let’s go to the movies. But before that I wanted to talk to you about how this work on ghosts keeps coming upon almost-psychoanalysis or the legacies of psychoanalysis but it’s so difficult to get back to the beginning, so difficult to keep the tension up when I start to lecture you about, for example sexuality. You, of all people. And how, far from living wherever it has currently been thought to belong, sexual pleasure belongs . . . perhaps anywhere – you know that – and that it stretches to include, to quote Leo Bersani, ‘a type of desire that, unlike the desire principally identified with genitality, does not seek its own extinction in “satisfaction” ’ but ‘aims at being maintained, replicated, and even increased’.9 More desire, more anxiety, more tension, more unpleasure, more pleasure. The scholar sketched in Specters of Marx, who believes that looking is sufficient, has little to say about this beyond of the pleasure principle which exists not only in sexual life but in what Adorno calls ‘intellectual tension’, or what Bowen thinks of as the stretched string of a novel’s plot. I especially wanted to talk you about sublimations; phantom movements of unrepressed sexuality, virtual fires that are a better indication of the nature of the sexual than the psychoanalytic interpretation of neurotic symptoms. Bersani talks about this ‘nonfixated energy’ (The Culture of Redemption, p. 37). It crawls through his text; you must read it, quotation breaks its movement, he is so faithful to the law of what he has to say . . . but what I wanted to get to through all this clutter and apology which I nonetheless love because it gives me the chance to talk to you, quietly and inconsequentially, the destiny of this energy does not define itself in terms of the object world. It’s ‘inherently nonreferential’. He says: The object of desire would be that which is objectless in the jouissance of any object relation. Subsequently, of course, sublimated energy will attach itself to specific ego interests and activities, but the paradigm of all such activities is the project of distilling sexual excitement from all its contingent occasions. A sublimation is only secondarily (and not even necessarily) an ennobling, or a making sublime; it is, most profoundly, a burning away of the occasion, or the dream of purely burning. (p. 37)

Isn’t that the way you might sense the almost-unthinkable ‘something or someone neither someone nor something’ that Derrida magicks up under the provisional name of cela – this? He points to what isn’t there, with a word: this that comes with so much difficulty to language, this that seems not to mean anything, this that puts to rout our meaning-to-say, making us speak

Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost    ­107 regularly from the place where we want to say nothing, where we know clearly what we do not want to say but do not know clearly what we would like to say, as if this were no longer either of the order of knowledge or will or will-to-say . . . (Specters of Marx, p. 172)

It seems there is nothing for it but repetition, which is ‘each time irresistible enough, singular enough to engender as much anguish as do the future and death’ (p. 173). Work on ghosts must proceed without composure: excitedly. Not at random or as one pleases: it must be filtered, but not in order to preserve what Specters of Marx calls ‘the serenity of research and the analytic distinction of concepts’ (p. 173). The principle of sorting would be the tension of writing itself, all its resources geared to maintain, replicate and increase the pleasurable disturbance of movements like those of art, that, as Bersani says, ‘partially dissolve the materiality of the activity, which blur its forms and its identity and allow us fleetingly to experience a pure excitement’ (The Culture of Redemption, p. 37). I’m afraid it’s disreputable and irresponsible to follow the secret law of writing. I’m guessing that’s what Derrida’s so severe about at the beginning of ‘Envois’. Guessing is disreputable too but I always have to. Working with the unknown how is it possible not to risk being arbitrary and therefore unjust? Derrida says the text is the outcome of ‘a very strange principle of sorting’: which for my part, even today, I consider questionable, as moreover, the grate, the filter, and the economy of sorting can be on every occasion, especially if they destine for preservation, not to say for the archive. In a word, I rigorously do not approve of this principle, I denounce it ceaselessly, and in this respect reconciliation is impossible. It will be seen to what extent I insist on this on the way. But it was my due to give in to it, and it is up to you to tell me why. (‘Envois’, p. 4)

There goes the magical fire-artist, who knows how to work with or towards a ‘pure excitement’ that might seem legitimate for the private reader of literature or a theatrical fiction, but which is still usually forbidden in universities, where art becomes an example, and pleasure a performance indicator. And here I go again back to Browning. It’s just there’s something more I wanted to talk to you about: the Browning dramatic monologue ‘St Martin’s Summer’, where he paints such a frightening scene of seduction. Despite all the living can do, ‘dead loves are the potent’.10 I must talk to you about this poem where, as always in Browning’s dramatic poetry, intention fails, the speaker is displaced by the poem that they speak, without knowing it, without moving an inch or undergoing any

­108    Without Mastery fundamental change of mind, only a shock that they interpret, interpreting to the last, never realising that the earth of writing has swallowed them long since – I could write a book on that but it would bore you I think. Too scholarly, too literary. Anyway, in this poem a dead love returns not to rival, to conquer or be conquered by a living lover, but to inhabit her body as the speaker embraces her, multiplying and betraying loves in a very bad moment. Full presence is the end. Life itself seems to have been blown into pieces right when it would perhaps seem most certain where the speaker is, whom he is with, who is there, who is not there, what is happening. The ghost does nothing but be there, more intimately than intimacy. It’s the man who narrates, barely knowing he does so, thinking he’s speaking to someone he loves or kind of, some ‘dearest’ that you can tell he is incapable of apprehending. He takes the slightly phoney authoritative tone of one who understands love, an expert serial monogamist who can negotiate love’s risks. But then: The while you clasp me closer,   The while I press you deeper,   As safe we chuckle, – under breath, Yet all the slyer, the jocoser, –   ‘So, life can boast its day, like leap-year   Stolen from death!’ (ll. 79–84)

Pause here to note the sinister accumulation of rhymes, distorting spoken language, pushing at the rules of literary form – ‘this that does not seem to mean anything . . . this comes back, this returns, this insists in urgency’ (Specters of Marx, p. 172). You have an ear for rhymes, I believe. Listen: ‘closer’, ‘jocoser’, ‘deeper’, ‘leap-year’, ‘breath’, ‘death’. The insistence of the couples of words work across the spontaneity of the character speaking, even across his panic when the dead return. One thing at a time, he says like a scholar, filtering, sorting: one love at a time and a hierarchy of loves. Then a verse-break and it’s all over him, barely time to describe what’s happening. He exclaims: Ah me – the sudden terror!   Hence quick – avaunt, avoid me,   You cheat, the ghostly flesh-disguised! Nay, all the ghosts in one! Strange error! (ll. 85–8)

Time ruptures and bunches up here; the economy of life opposed to death which founds the speaker’s notion of stealing from death is broken into and deranged by the ghost or ghosts whose very being is a cheat as far as reason goes. No oikos, no household – neither the grave, nor any

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kind of earthly dwelling can contain the force of the event the poem cannot describe but responds to with a precise and truthful confusion: Ay, dead loves are the potent!   Like any cloud they used you,   Mere semblance you, but substance they! Build we no mansion, weave we no tent!   Mere flesh – their spirit interfused you!   Hence, I say! (ll. 91–6)

The speaker repudiates all this repetition, and with it, life. ‘Hence quick!’ says both go away now, and go away you life, you living thing that comes at the speed of life to interrupt my understanding of life. A poem is neither mansion nor tent nor flesh nor spirit. It does not contain, but is a kind of animal machine for encouraging ghosts to come. It is alive like an animal and it allows bodily intensities to walk in and out of culture. Browning ends the poem with the cry ‘Ghost-bereft!’ (l. 102). There is nothing worse, Derrida says in Specters of Marx, than ‘absolute life, fully present life, the one that does not know death and does not want to hear about it’ (p. 175). The ghost itself has been chased away but remains in the verbal form of an exclamation which is what Freud would call a negation. The poem, if not the speaker, achieves a strange passivity. No more words. No more ghosts? It apprehends: but what? You’ll recall how the exordium to Specters of Marx begins with apprendre, meaning to learn. Someone says: ‘Je voudrais apprendre a vivre enfin’.11 ‘I would like to learn to live finally’ (Spectres of Marx, p. xvii). By the end of the book this desire returns in the form of what the late pages call ‘experience apprehensive’ (Spectres de Marx, p. 272), that is, as Peggy Kamuf translates: ‘the passive movement of an apprehension, of an apprehensive movement ready to welcome, but where?’ (Specters of Marx, p. 172). Learning comes back as apprehension. Apprendre comes back as apprehender. The latter word in French includes both the derived sense of apprehension as anxious anticipation and its more fundamental meaning of understanding, as if true understanding were always accompanied by a sense that something is under way right in what one has grasped that cannot be grasped. Words haunting each other. I especially wanted to talk to you about that. Let’s look again at the scene of the burning of the house. What can I do but hold the door open to what will inevitably burn down the house? I initially promised to talk ‘on fire’, which is a bit of a tall order. I’m not a circus. I couldn’t begin there. It was too positive, too literalminded and too hot. Fire destroys, including destroying books and

­110    Without Mastery papers. I asked myself: how can we, blinded by a world of object and subject, of subject-object relations and appropriations of a one-to-one kind, get started with ghosts? It has to be less than direct. First I must enter the night (reading, writing), then perhaps there will come what the Browning poem calls a ‘day, like leap-year / Stolen from death!’ or of an ‘extra day’ added to the calendar so that the thing one doesn’t want to happen, that must not happen, can happen: that too. There where what Derrida calls the ‘furtive and ungraspable visibility of the visible’ can be experienced (Specters of Marx, p. 11). I have to wear other people’s words to describe it: second-hand writing. Dead people’s clothes. Or worse, borrowings from my contemporaries. The so-called creatives don’t like it any more than the critics do. But I wanted to say to you what you already know: when you read, darkness has all sorts of names. The word ‘shade’ gives respite from the reign of visibility. There’s also room under its umbrella for colour, nuance, and ghost. Darkness can be palpable and sensational. There’s a sentence or passage in The Last September I wanted to talk to you about, where Bowen goes after something living, crosses the boundary between the human and the non-human, very bold, but still lets the word ‘something’ hold on to its secret, like Derrida’s ‘this’ at the end of Specters. It’s like what I imagine a haunting to be. Bowen unveils language, senses its resonances poetically, like a musician. She touches the skin of words lightly and discreetly: she does not dwell here or there but passes over the whole surface of this something, as if something were moving through her. ‘Something of the trees’, she begins: ‘Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room.’12 Now the ‘something’ here is singular, specific, piercing enough so to provoke the girl Lois, who is being disregarded by the others, to think of love, is that it? What Bowen calls ‘love with its gift of importance’. ‘ “I must break in on all this” [Lois thinks], as she looked round the room’ (The Last September, p. 23). She senses something and she wants it now, here, like an impatient reader. There is an impulse to want to violate darkness (including the darkness of words), to illuminate it, to precipitate the discovery of ourselves in it. It’s a question I wanted to discuss with you: how does a living being relate him or herself narcissistically to shadows, to the obscure or the opaque, even to ‘the relentless anthropogenic draw toward extinction events beyond cognitive maps of precedence in memory formations’ (‘Anecographies’, pp. 44–5)? How do I sustain the darkness that I have begun to desire to know? And what happens when I put myself there where I will never be able to see myself? There is archived light in texts: the glimmer of light itself, rather than light hidden by what we can see thanks to it. We can read the narcissistic

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movements of iteration and resonance by which writing sees itself and shows itself to us. ‘Day’, Bowen writes, ‘still coming in from the fields by the south window, was stored in the mirrors, in the sheen of the wallpaper, so that the room still shone’ (The Last September, p. 23). Bowen allows language its harvest of light: non-immediate like the mirror, non-transparent like the wallpaper. The surface of the room becomes a machine for inviting ghosts. The surface of language does the same – the hushed susurrations of s continue very strongly throughout the passage, soft little hooks to catch the clothes of the ghosts, who also like to dress in letters. Letters are not servants of meaning, they scarcely bend themselves to human purpose. ‘Something of the trees’, has a highly specific referent and a clearly described effect but we shall never know what it is. Bowen knows how to uncover the life of words without freezing or piercing them. Her writing voice, as Derrida says about Artaud: ‘lays bare the flesh of the word, lays bare the word’s sonority, intonation, intensity’ (‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, p. 302). But at this point, what happens to the occasion that is being articulated: to the scene in the house, or in the novel? You lose the plot. Reading, there’s always too much happening at once. Ghosts escape and yet they are with us when we read and write. ‘Everyone reads, writes, and acts’ Derrida says, ‘with his or her ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of the other’ (Specters of Marx, p. 139). Ghosts affect our narcissism: the basis on which we count, and decide what counts. When you open the door to where ghosts live you don’t know who you are: perhaps you are one of many – but you are also less than one. Derrida insists on ‘the less than one of pure and simple dispersion. Without any possible gathering together’ (p. 3). Early on in Specters of Marx he is raising the question of the unreadability, the plurality ‘or more serious still’ the heterogeneity of ghosts (p. 4). How can anyone filter the already scattered, sort it into categories, put it into words? But one must. One must edit the blaze, give rhythm to the burning away of the occasion or the blurring of forms and identities. ‘To filter fire?’ he asks in ‘Envois’, ‘I have not given up doing so, only justifying or giving a reason for it’ (‘Envois’, p. 4). And Specters of Marx also tries to obey the ‘injunction to reaffirm by choosing’ (p. 16). ‘ “One must” means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several possibles that inhabit the same injunction.’ This approach to reading and writing has both psychic and political implications. I must invent a way to join together in solidarity with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of those I do not and cannot know or of whom I am not fully conscious. I must invent a call to unite that includes strangers to the present, those who remain untouched by

­112    Without Mastery conceptualism and beyond the reach of realism. I must invent a way to speak to someone who cannot present him or herself to me. I must speak to you about this. I have a feeling that might change everything. Derrida spoke of his own writing like this in a 1991 interview, insisting on the necessity of calculation but also of something more passive: One is always reckoning with what one perceives of the cultural field. But even if this calculating negotiates in a very cunning fashion, it always consents to serve a more unruly, disarmed, naive desire, or in any case another culture that no longer calculates, and certainly not according to the norms of ‘present’ culture or politics. One is coming to terms with [in French s’explique avec] someone, with someone other, dead or alive, with some others who have no identity in this cultural scene.13

To gather, unite or join is the vocation of eros. Derrida’s notion of s’expliquer avec, coming to terms with or conversing with ghosts, is a matter of unravelling, unfolding oneself, reflexively, in the company of ghosts, perhaps with the assistance of the ghost.14 This would mean an opening up of sexuality, sublimated into the development of a conversation, a verbal detailing that is as precise, responsive and sensational as an act of love. Sexual difference comes in when Derrida specifies that everyone ‘reads, writes, and acts with his or her ghosts’. Talking with ghosts is a narcissistic challenge: an experience of difference beyond, if not without, calculation. It asks of us a certain defencelessness. The house of our solitude must be held open to someone we don’t expect. This someone, or more than one, with whom one wishes to speak has a strange relation to the visible. Narcissism may begin with a story about looking but looking is not enough to understand narcissism. This presents us, as academics, with the necessity of expanding our sense of who we are and what we do. For ‘as theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that looking [regarder] is sufficient. Therefore they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary – speak to the specter’ (Specters of Marx, p. 11 / Spectres de Marx, p. 33). Someone, someone other, some others: not the what of the ghost in its seductively abstract and generalised image but the who, who I don’t know who it is. It’s the someone to whom someone might write. Often, out of discretion, without ever mentioning ghosts and in the bliss of solitude. Bowen describes a place she once encountered while out walking in Kentish woodland: ‘I came to – or was come upon, as one might be by an apparition – a garden created by someone’.15 It’s an event: she recognises a place-become-event and animated by the intention of another. What the intention was can only be guessed at. As with all creations,

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looking is not enough – there is a garden created by someone, an intention at work the trees, a sign of life that meets her recognising desire, there where no one animates the scene. Derrida elsewhere associates this sense of someone who is not present, or presently active, with justice itself and sense of ‘some responsibility beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who have already died’ (Specters of Marx, p. xix). Beyond all living present: would that take us to the necessary point? It can begin with the opening of what Hamlet calls ‘my mind’s eye’: Hamlet: My father – methinks I see my father – Horatio: Where, my lord? Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio.16

There is more than one mind’s eye. Bowen involuntarily imagined something she personally dreaded, the burning of her house by the IRA in the Anglo-Irish war. She wrote what did not happen, so that it did happen as writing. She describes it as if writing had happened to her, surprised her, imposed itself on her as a kind of necessity, regardless of the what did happen: ‘Bowen’s Court survived. Nevertheless, so often in my mind’s eye did I see it burning that the terrible last event in The Last September is more real than anything I have lived through.’17 This ‘more real’ is complex. It merits further analysis. (Of the frequency of the ‘so often’ for example) . . . I want to show you that bit of Badlands again. This fire, all the other fires, literal and figurative . . . What do you see, in your mind’s eye? Films ask us to watch: that is, to desire more than and more of what we see. This includes letting things come back, seeing again something, someone, some ghost or plural ghosts. And I wanted to talk to you about that fire, that ‘event . . . more real than anything I have lived through’ in Bowen’s own text there where she could not live. About how when you tempt a ghost you desire what you don’t want as well as what you do. About all the extra days and the darkness eaten by fire’s scarlet shadow. That’s for another time. I’ll read you the passage. That’s it, the string, the thread, the plot, it’s all about the passage: A fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness; indeed it seemed that an extra day, unreckoned, had come to abortive birth that these things might happen. It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning; while to the north the neck of mountains before Mount Isabel was frightfully outlined. The roads in unnatural dusk ran dark with movement, secretive or terrified; not a tree, brushed pale by

­114    Without Mastery wind from the flames, not a cabin pressed in despair to the bosom of night, not a gate too starkly visible but had its place in the design of order and panic. At Danielstown, half way up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was demolished. The first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the steps, the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace. (The Last September, p. 206)

No one can live in there, I said to myself, it must be almost the end. It’s the smithy of her soul, I thought, it’s a portrait of the artist as burning building. All these births, the landscape coming alive in the motherly unmotherly night. It’s the silence come again, I said to myself, the same as the silence of prehistoric arcana and buried civilisations, dividing me from you. It’s almost nothing, transparent as the petrol, the gas, after the sound of the last car, the space between parallel lines or the silence surrounding a poem, each poem, each line of each one, all that space for everyone’s marginalia, anyone’s, always room for more. You’re not here, are you? I must tell you, when you get here, some other September, in your own good time.

Nightshift

I was going to call this one ‘Nightshift’, although I’m not sure how orderly it is, or how strictly it keeps to the alternation between night and day.1 Or even if it ‘works’. (What would that mean?) But there is something here of dark and light, and I wanted or needed song, what the song ‘Nightshift’ calls ‘sweet sounds coming down’ or ‘voices coming through’ from Freud and Derrida and the others who light our way here. So I thought of the title ‘Nightshift’, or perhaps it should be ‘The Price of Tears’. In any case, I have an epigraph, from the great musician Ornette Coleman: ‘The theme you play at the start of a number is the territory, and what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure’ – because this is not what I expected to write: things have moved on, and some have moved aside, taken a side-step.2 I would like to tell you a story, something short, something with what Walter Benjamin – whom I’m bringing along for moral support – calls ‘that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis’.3 It isn’t there yet. What I’m reading to you is happening in what you might call ‘real time’. I had a story, or what I thought was a story, rather a sentence that fell to me. Then I had the official cover-story of an abstract, and the abstract of the abstract as the first one wasn’t short enough. None of these began to say what I love about Derrida and Freud and Derrida with Freud, nor did they begin to say how it is possible to speak about the night from which writing comes or to say anything with any integrity about these two figures, heroic riders out of, and into, that night. Furthermore, it had not dawned on me that I might want to address how Freud after Derrida might relate to the question of cognition in the Anthropocene. Perhaps what I have to say may be ‘shot through with explanations’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 147). According to Benjamin, writing in 1936, that’s often how it is these days, and it’s still true. But I don’t want only to explain. What I love, for example, about the way Derrida reads ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is the way

­116    Without Mastery his reading values sensitivity to something that isn’t intellectual, or that is naively counter-intellectual, that is to say, in the first place bodily and verbal. To be more precise, he is sensitive to what comes from or through his body, an experience that is more than physical, and he is also feelingly aware of something in the body of a word, that is undeniably greater than the language customarily permits. A soul, I would call it, to give an old and unscientific name to movements of the signifier that betray a life not visible by day and not measured by clock-time. This experience of reading progresses in strange ways that familiar notions of progress cannot recognise or foresee and finds a kind of limit or point of reference in death. I wonder whether when Benjamin’s essay talks about an ‘intelligence [Kunde] that came from afar [Ferne]’, he isn’t thinking of death already, and beyond personal death, of telemorphosis, or far-changingness (‘The Storyteller’, p. 147).4 Death, the body, lived experience, these are important themes in ‘The Storyteller’. This death part I still don’t know how to talk about. As Hélène Cixous has pointed out, the word itself seems to thud: ‘death’, ‘mort’, ‘Tod’. As if, when I’m in the region of this word, something happens to the signifier, that shouldn’t. It begins to run too straight, straight to the signified and there’s an end of it before reading has even started. One might be paralysed by this. One might feel stuck in the outermost of language, in the region of the last word and the last time. Freud can help us understand what is happening. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ he invites us to picture the simplest living thing and talks about its ‘protective shield’ (p. 27). The outside of this little creature’s skin, he tells us, ‘ceases to have the structure proper to living matter’ and ‘by its death saves all the deeper layers from a similar fate’. Kafka, who took the perspective of writing rather than survival, wrote to Oskar Pollak about ‘the frozen sea in us’, an impermeable surface, much bigger than we are, that can be smashed open by a blow from the right book.5 Because there are those who know how to be bitten and stung by books, how to weep, how to tremble, whose words can secrete, poets of one kind and another, who hear and can tell stories from afar and from the inner depths, according to the proper athetic manner. Freud, for example, and Derrida – even though he said he had never known how to.6 Tod. Totter. Across vast distances of languages the word totters, toddles, very old and as innocent as a just-walking baby, with little tender feet, taking all the ancient themes on an entirely new adventure. I’d like to read you a passage from Nicholas Royle’s novel Quilt, about house-clearing, taking the dead father’s stuff to the dump, or the tip as we say in England. ‘Tip’ also as in iceberg: the part of the frozen sea that just shows above the surface. The passage I will quote is rich in themes:

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life, death, mourning and the failure to mourn, Thanatos, eros, sexuality, idealisation, recycling, pollution . . . not to mention Yeats’s rag-andbone shop of the heart and Wallace Stevens’s man on the dump. The totters, bad and good, that Royle writes about are avatars of writing, whose Egyptian or gypsy god is Thoth. One of them will reduce you to nameless, faceless tatters, the other – adorable, beautiful, wise – will lift you up. But really none of this is the point when a storyteller gets going about the totter: He is the figure who attends a dump, who deals with refuse, the rag-and-bone man of the heart who tots, to totter the word, the tot to tot, to turn to itself, backwards and forwards, a stumbling, stuttering figure of refusal. There are two of them, in fact, every day one or the other and often both, always the same. One of them is a small frightening man, with vacuum eyes looking through your face as if nothing you could say or ask could ever register on his, as if your face were indeed already reduced to bone. They think of asking: Where do we put something like this old Swedish orthopaedic kneeling chair . . .? But they know better. They learn very early on not to ask the tiny totter anything. One false move and he’ll have your face off with a nice canister of stuff fit for purpose kept close in one of his numerous pockets, is how he makes them feel. But the other, oh yes, the other totter! What a brave and magnificent specimen, a totter to tot, a totter to take home to your parents and present saying: Look, I have never known whether I was gay or straight or what it meant to have a sexual identity, besides a fiction out now, as the hoax played day and night by the contemporary universal film company, but this man is a totter, folks! Just check him out – the height of the fellow, the flowing golden mane of hair, the stupendous beautiful dirtiness, mom, your tottering colossus roaming the refuse, the mounds, the tipping-effect, like a god to whom you could address any question, no matter how naive or obvious, and he would tell you graciously, with simple but unfathomable courtesy, as if completely in your own shoes and in another world at the same time. How to gauge this disappearance of themselves every time they ask the totter a question? In due course, after a dozen or so visits, they are both in love with him.7

There is a lot one could say about this passage but for now I want to focus on just one aspect, one not unrelated to the others. It’s the story of a word. Royle lets the word tell itself, from the depths of its surface. It is allowed to have and to be more than language: something other than language stirs and stretches in the writing. In ‘The Storyteller’ Benjamin sets the novel against the story, he says that the novel concerns ‘the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in an exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel [Rat] and can give none’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 146 / ‘Der Erzähler’, p. 442). The new climate change imaginary needs stories, I believe, because counsel is

­118    Without Mastery necessary – to know how to know what is happening, to know how to think about it, and what can be done. Benjamin defines counsel as less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. (‘The Storyteller’, p. 146)

Benjamin sets the novel up against the story, but I wonder whether novels, and other kinds of book, can’t still be written so as to contain some wisdom or counsel, including counsel about the continuing story of stories themselves, or about the unrolling possibilities of language itself. I would say that we still need these timely-untimely kind of storybooks, books capable of being an axe for the frozen sea within us, for these are at the same time books written from experience and addressing the experience of those who read them. They also insist on reading as part of that experience. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen articulates some of the implications of this when she says: I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experience, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true. Reduced to the minimum, to the what did happen, my life would be unrecognizable by me. These layers of fictitious memory densify as they go deeper down. And this surely must be the case with everyone else who reads deeply, ravenously, unthinkingly, sensuously, as a child. The overlapping and haunting of life by fiction began, of course, before there was anything to be got from the printed page; it began from the day one was old enough to be told a story or shown a picture book. It went on up to the age when a bookish attitude towards books began to be inculcated by education.8

If there is such a thing as a community of readers or a communicable experience of reading it is not founded on bookishness, nor on the fact that its members happen to read the same authors, but on the kind of childhood experiences Bowen describes. And for those reading children who have found their way into academia, there will be an ambivalent attitude to the demand that one concern oneself with a truth that is held to be separate from fiction, or with a ‘truth’ of fiction that, being fiction, does not really count for much. ‘The Storyteller’ accentuates the brevity and the mighty reserves of the story. If there is something heroic about Freud and about Derrida: courage, daring, accomplishment – greatness, it is also true that in their work small things contain the most. Derrida speaks laconically about ‘economy of memory’ in ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ (p. 291). And he pre-

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ferred what you might call ‘small Freud’: ‘the partial, regional and minor analyses’.9 Sensitivity and memory impel Freud’s research, strategically as well as thematically. From the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) onwards he is trying to invent a way of speaking about memory and sensitivity together, to account for the fact that neurones must be ‘both influenced and also unaltered, unprejudiced’.10 In our own lives and working lives what does it mean to think in terms of our progression 1) when everything that we are talking about under the heading ‘Freud After Derrida’ arises from a necessity Derrida puts his finger on in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’: ‘the necessity of accounting simultaneously . . . for the permanence of the trace and for the virginity of the receiving substance, for the engraving of furrows and for the perennially intact bareness of the receiving surface’ (p. 251)? And 2) when we are confronted by the fact of irreversible changes to the planet, material events that are already generating life-destroying phenomena, accompanied by a terrifyingly intact capacity for receiving news about melting ice-caps, drought, raised temperatures and water-levels, without stopping to think? These are questions for a lifetime’s work but there isn’t time to be leisurely. It will help to be specific. Small steps and side steps. I like Derrida’s sensitivity. For example when he asks in ‘To Speculate – On Freud’ . . . (I interrupt myself here to note how quickly my legs tire, how often I ask to be carried by a quotation) . . . when Derrida asks: How to gain access to the restance of Beyond [the Pleasure Principle] . . .? How is this text to walk, to work, and with what step above all, if some day we are to become sensitive, today, as opposed to so many readings that are partial as they are canonic, i.e. academic, to the essential impossibility of holding on to any thesis within it, any posited conclusion of the scientific or philosophical type, of the theoretical type in general?11

What is it to be sensitive, sensible, to an impossibility of this kind? What kind of reading-antennae or text-sensitive skin do we need to be touched by the unplaceable restlessness of a text’s restance? – a text that may present itself as a phenomenon, or a group of apparently related phenomena, and which, just as much as the books worth reading, or the people one gets to know, cannot be reduced to a thesis. Which cannot be reduced to information nor, though it comes close, to memory. Restance which is neither fictional nor literary and which does not, to quote Freud on excitations to consciousness, ‘expire, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 25). Our ordinary sense-organs are designed not to be sensitive. They are, Freud suggests, intended

­120    Without Mastery for the reception of certain specific effects of stimulation, but . . . also include special arrangements for further protection against excessive amounts of stimulation and for excluding unsuitable kinds of stimuli. It is characteristic of them that they deal only with very small quantities of external stimulation and only take in samples of the external world. (p. 28)

According to ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, we are much less defended to excitations coming to consciousness from the inside. These present themselves in terms of tension or intensity, as differentiations of pleasure, a magnificently variegated inner perception: buzzing whispering sensational musical throbbing contracting extending poetic, including the most exquisitely uncertain experiences of time and the very invention of time, through both improvisation and inherited material. In addition to quantities of pleasure, this inside can also according to Freud give rise to such qualitative phenomena as ‘the association of thoughtprocesses with verbal memories . . . memory-images, dreams and hallucinations’.12 Freud’s self-analysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, Glas, the ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card and ‘Circumfession’ are examples of research marked by experiences of pleasure and suffering and by a desire to account for these effects in words. In the course of this work, which is sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, the notion of reason itself is transformed and becomes more sensitive to itself. This is a kind of experience of making-thinkable that we need in order to make and keep going a new climate change imaginary. Freud and Derrida know how to read texts and experiences as inner events, from memory as it were, sensing traces with a differentiation that escapes the protective outer layer of consciousness. One risk with this kind of work is what Freud calls projection. Projection responds to internal excitations that are too painful by treating them as if they were coming from the outside, so that the mechanisms that protect us from overstimulation can come into effect and help to shelter us from the tensions of our own interior world. This is a useful notion for working with the cognitive programmes that are and are not necessary for knowing what we already know about what is happening to the earth. The foreword to ‘Envois’ tries to ward off the inevitable risk of projection, when Derrida warns the reader not to be afraid of the text, not to let the text only happen out there, as if one could locate where it may strike and in what way. It’s quite a relaxed warning, as you may remember: Because I still like him, I can foresee the impatience of the bad reader: this is the way I name or accuse the fearful reader, the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon deciding (in order to annul, in other words to bring back to oneself, one has to wish to know in advance what to expect, one

Nightshift    ­121 wishes to expect what has happened, one wishes to expect (oneself)). Now, it is bad, and I know no other definition of the bad, it is bad to predestine one’s reading, it is always bad to foretell. It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing one’s steps. (‘Envois’, p. 4)

Of course this kind of bad reading encrusts itself absolutely everywhere. I mentioned earlier the small theoretical fiction in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ where Freud pictures a tiny bun-like creature, ‘the living organism in its most simplified form’ (p. 26). At the surface of this creature there is a crust, which, Freud says ‘would at least have been so thoroughly “baked through” by stimulation that it would present the most favourable conditions for the reception of stimulation and become incapable of any further modification’. It is from this dead crust that consciousness arises. ‘By its death’, Freud explains, ‘the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate unless . . . stimuli reach it which are so strong they break through the protective shield’ (p. 27). However ‘towards the inside there can be no such shield’ (p. 29). I’m suggesting that the richest and most necessary discoveries are likely to come from the inside, where it is dark, where words, if there are words, are also things, from self-analysis, writing that works from memorytraces, because on that side of consciousness there is living sensitive matter, less protected and not filtered by the senses that limit, exclude and sample. Reading, like experience, is not a matter of reception. Cixous, who speaks of this kind of thing with a confidence and lucidity earned from decades of writing-research and interior voyaging, insists on Derrida’s body as a body that secretes, that creates and is touched from the inside: He had the extraordinary audacity to show that the philosopher writes with all of his body, that philosophy can only be brought into this world by a being in flesh in blood in sex in sweat, in sperm and in tears, with all his physical and psychic circumcisions and scarifications.13

All his books, she says, ‘constitute an autobiography of an unknown genre “written interiorly and on the skin” ’. So even Derrida’s early works, where he is partly concerned about proving himself in the context of academic philosophical writing, can be read as documents of physical and psychical experiences, albeit ones that, in Benjamin’s formula, ‘preclude psychological analysis’. In ‘To Speculate – On Freud’ Derrida gives us a glimpse of how the same thing may be true of Freud. I couldn’t begin to see that without Derrida, and still can’t quite believe my eyes when I read what he has written, for instance the pages that read Ernst’s game with the bobbin

­122    Without Mastery as an autobiography of Freud. You’ll remember that for Derrida this means ‘not simply an autobiography confiding his life to his own more or less testamentary writing, but a more or less living description of his own writing, of his way of writing what he writes, most notably Beyond . . .’ (‘To Speculate – On Freud’, p. 303). I want to keep Benjamin close at this point because this living description of writing is extremely testing for his notion of the communicability of experience, a communicability Benjamin insists is decreasing. According to Derrida the death-drive is what tells stories in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. You couldn’t really be less communicative than the death drive. Derrida calls it ‘the enigmatic death-drive which appears, disappears, appears to disappear in Beyond . . .’ (p. 262). He says he calls it enigmatic ‘because it appears disappears while telling many stories and making many scenes, causing or permitting them to be told’. I need the help of Benjamin to understand this because he is sensitive to stories and to history. He is strongly, miraculously capable of putting what appears even terrifyingly discontinuous into a context. Benjamin recognises that stories need to be understood in the context of the whole human being, including its relation to death. The isolate ego can only project death outside itself, or try to keep it on the outside, like Freud’s tiny little vesicle. In academic life, I have liked most those people who are sensitive to things that are barely there or that come and go, who have a sense of history that is neither nostalgic, nor entirely bound up with the distorted, exclusive and unjust contemporary scene that is given to us and that academic position-taking, categorisation, self-advancement, fear and domestication of thought, cannot help us to resist. This contemporary scene mostly deals in information. Handled sensitively, information can become something more. It becomes memorable or repeatable. Benjamin says that the value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender itself to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. (‘The Storyteller’, p. 148)

It commends itself to memory. This gives me faith that the daunting complexity in which I find myself can be staged, if not immediately, if not by me. Do you remember Derrida saying ‘I love only memory’?14 It is a thought related to his insistence that love is narcissistic and that ‘a movement of narcissistic reappropriation’ is necessary for the relation to the other – for example in reading.15 When we read we in some way trace this movement in the image of ourselves, it is a narcissistic experi-

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ence. There is something in me that is bigger than I am. And this may be the context for the information, the phantasms that surround me and trouble me. I’d like to find a way to talk about this in the most relaxed and relaxing way possible. Benjamin says the assimilation of a story into the listener’s experience ‘takes place at the depths’. These depths do not belong to me: places of origination and return. Somehow the whole being is involved, and the listener is a future teller: storytelling, Benjamin says, ‘submerges the thing into the life of the teller, in order to bring it out of him again’. What interests me is this kind of submerged or underground experience: an assimilation that doesn’t leave me with anything I can keep or explain but which may give rise to writing, thinking, action. Benjamin trusts the power of the story to wait ‘like those seeds of grain that have lain for centuries in the airtight chambers of the pyramids and have retained their germinative power to this day’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 148). Well, now is not the time to be pious and leave the seeds with the mighty dead. The story is not individual or communal property, it is both interior and exterior, both ancient and unborn. Benjamin knows all about repeatability and remaining – the seeds with their actual-virtual power are in a tomb or a funerary monument. This is getting less and less relaxing. Perhaps it is the lack of fresh air in the luftdicht Kammern, the airtight chambers. If you know German, which I do only a little, you’ll know that Dicht means ‘thick, dense, sealed, closed’. But no word is ever closed. The verb dichten, to make airtight or to seal, is a homonym for dichten to write poetry, which of course dictates much of the course of Derrida’s essay on that subject, ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’ And dicht gives us Freud’s Verdichtung, the condensation that makes the dream what it is: brief. Writing comes out of, is tendered out of, this density and contraction, as if in an ineluctable rhythm. Inside a pyramid it is dark. At the beginning of this chapter I used the very general term ‘night’ for the environment the writer has to go into, and ‘the dark part of ourselves’ is where, as Cixous puts it, ‘psychoanalysis has built its kingdom’ (‘The Play of Fiction’, p. 4). Sometimes Freud writes not in black on white but in phosphorescence on darkness. Derrida comments in ‘To Speculate – On Freud’: ‘Here, I am asking questions in the dark [dans la nuit]. Or in a penumbra, rather, the penumbra in which we keep ourselves when Freud’s unanalysed reaches out its phosphorescent antennae’ (p. 278). I’ve been trying in my blind and groping way to be more and more specific in what I say to you but according to Cixous: One always writes in darkness. One cannot write . . . there’s no sense in writing except in incomprehension, advancing in incomprehension, advancing

­124    Without Mastery towards incomprehension. What is understood is summed up, settled, and that’s that. It’s necessary to leave what is understood. It is necessary to deunderstand and to reapply oneself to learning: that’s the heroism of writing.16

A psychical interior after Freud can’t be understood in terms of Euclidean space or common sense time. It is made of rhythms and memories, and Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology gives it to us as a scene of writing, of traces left in the body. The soul is not an essence but a soul-making, weaving and unweaving, an invention. Derrida does not recognise Freud. He speaks in ‘To Speculate – On Freud’ of the unexpected structure of [‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’], of the movements within it which, it seems to me, do not correspond to any genre, to any philosophical or scientific model. Nor to any literary, poetic, or mythological model. These genres, models, codes are certainly present within the text, together or in turn, exploited, manoeuvred, interpreted like pieces. But thereby overflowed. (p. 278)

Reception is impossible, if reception involves immediate recognition. I still want to relax all this some more. Benjamin recommends the boredom of rhythmical manual work such as spinning or weaving to induce the relaxation necessary for integrating a story – this hard, dry little thing so full of actual, virtual life – into one’s experience. But this kind of handiwork was dying out in the 1930s, even though I was happy to discover that at least two members of the audience at the conference where I gave an earlier version of this chapter were able to bring knitting. Still, my point is that thinking isn’t just a matter of getting a very big mallet and breaking into a pyramid. Benjamin says that the process of assimilation of a story which takes place at the depths, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental [‘geistigen’ which of course refers to ‘spirit’] relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. (‘The Storyteller’, p. 149)

Another exceptionally lovely sentence. Magically, the seeds in the pyramid have flown over the page and got into the living inside of an egg. It’s inexplicable and implausible. Such is the movement of memory. And now all that is needed is time and the right environment for the dream bird to sit. This bird is not a mother, incidentally, it is der Traumvogel, in the masculine. And so the sexual researches that are the hatching-places of thought start anew.

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I don’t know how, by what miracle, the academy could be a place for this kind of relaxation that creates the conditions for serious thought that comes from real insight into situations. I don’t think anyone, however heroic, could do it alone. ‘We must be several in order to write, and even to “perceive”  ’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 284). Monological thinking and writing are still in charge. Why should its practitioners want to relax their hard-won grip on the throat of thought? Especially when the universities are more and more crowded and rushed, and when, in the UK, where I work, irreversible changes are afoot as the government withdraws state funding from the teaching of arts and humanities subjects. At the same time it remains true that the pleasure of intellectual work involves immense tensions within individuals and requires a correspondingly thorough discharge of those tensions. I don’t need to tell you about the terrifically complex economies that this gives rise to in us as teachers and writers. We tend to suffer, and to cause suffering. Frantic change at the surface. Fewer and fewer nesting places for the dream bird. Still, here we are, devoting ourselves to the immense, the extraordinary pleasure of reading Derrida and Freud, thinkers of pleasure in its principled and unprincipled relation to other points of reference. For them both, a temporal factor, rhythm, is hugely important in the negotiation between quantities of tension and qualities of feeling. Rhythm can be there in the writing itself. Derrida speaks of rhythm in a very strange way: as ‘what suspends the course of the writing, the rhythm of the text itself’, something that’s ‘right inside the sentences’ but also coming from an ‘absolute outside’, an ‘outside of writing’ that he cannot re-appropriate (Counterpath, p. 97). It’s an experience. Sometimes you long for the rhythm to be different, as he does in ‘Envois’ when he imagines not a thick, dicht, dense writing but totally flat writing, Nirvana-writing, ironing out all tension and flatlining the ‘electro-cardio-encephalo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram’: flat – I mean first of all without the slightest literature, the slightest superimposed fiction, without pause, without selection either of the code or the tone, without the slightest secret, nothing at all only everything – and flat in the end because if such a card were possible, even if for a very brief lapse of time (afterwards they would need centuries of university to decipher it), I could finally die content. (‘Envois’, p. 68)

Against this dream we might play the counter-dream of song and music that Derrida talks about, when he says, between raving and reverie: ‘You dream, it’s unavoidable, about the invention of a language or of a song that would be yours, not the attributes of a “self”, rather the accentuated paraph, that is, the musical signature, of your most ­unreadable

­126    Without Mastery history.’17 The self gets rather wildly cast aside in this dream, as does autobiographical narrative. Instead Derrida mentions ‘an intersection of singularities, habitat, voices, graphism, what moves with you and what your body never leaves’. This rather oddly formal word ‘graphism’, ‘graphie’, meaning ‘written form’ – contains a reference to writing without a preceding self or life to domesticate it, close to the ancient Greek word graphein and all the things it says writing can do, some of them not needing human intervention at all: scratch, engrave, write, draw, paint, write down, register, describe, inscribe, and in the middle voice, to write for oneself, to have something painted, to indict. All of that, all at once, in a great mute chord. First of all, scratch. Freud and Derrida both start from scratch, and from the earlier scratches that are the condition of the first scratch, and this interest they have in genesis means, as a number people have noted, they are very much with the Greek and the Greeks, just as they are less ‘after’ one another than simultaneous with each other, albeit in an anachronous sort of way. They don’t dwell in sequence, and they aren’t held in separate languages and nations, which is something they share with the great poets and practitioners of idiom. The more idiomatic, the more universal. And I am thinking particularly of their sense of tragedy; the tragic is a quality of human experience of which they are both less than usually afraid. From the outside, tragedy looks like pathos, identification and anthropomorphism. But the experience of tragedy is always an experience of necessity and irreversibility, a reality-check. Whatever the literarycritical concepts (‘hero’, for example, or ‘unity of time’) may say, tragedy, for those who live it, is without mastery. Derrida often affirms Freud’s courage and his capacity to think and write without alibi. But each of his readings of Freud is an extraordinary act of attention to the idiom, and a discovery of the idiom of the other, not an act of idealisation or hero-worship because you can’t have access to the idiom by going straight ahead, you have to go by way of language, by way of the principles of language and the beyond of language, by way of a reading of specific texts. This entails drift and superdrift, deferral and displacement and all sorts of diabolical obstacles to progress. This is part of the tragedy, and part of what Cixous calls the heroism, of writing. So I am speaking against too much faith in the heroic ideal, the ideal ego, this inevitable urge to follow an invented and idealised self. Because it will escape us. Freud After Derrida, Derrida After Freud there’s no catching up. For example, the motif of advancing, of the step in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and in ‘To Speculate – On Freud’, is immediately interrupted by the French language. Just when the story is progressing in its very stepping-forward and getting going and percep-

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tibly taking-place, it goes off track by means of a step, which in French is pas, not: you have to pass by way of no you shall not pass. It is pasychanalyse. Derrida describes the movement of reading that progresses by means of accidents, follows and diverges in an untranslatable way, like a Buster Keaton sequence that combines grace, danger, persistence and falling. And there are no stunt doubles, he takes it on himself. This is what he says: On the trail we will follow all the steps, step by step and step without step, that lead Beyond . . . down the singular path of speculation. Such a path does not exist before the pathbreaking of athetic writing, but it does not construct itself by itself like the method of Hegelian speculation; and however concerned with revenants it may be, it does not come back over itself, it has the form neither of the dialectical circle nor the hermeneutic circle. Perhaps it makes them visible, but it has nothing to do with them. It constructsdeconstructs itself according to an interminable detour (Umweg): that it describes ‘itself’, writes and unwrites. (‘To Speculate – On Freud’, pp. 268–9)

I had intended an early draft of the present chapter to be called ‘Coming Off Psychoanalysis’, a phrase that I hoped might work as a fleeting description of a certain kind of movement, like coming off the velvet in snooker. ‘Coming off’ would describe a deviation or embarkation or desisting from psychoanalysis, in a writing that still orients itself in relation to what it’s leaving. Part of the game was going to be remaining as faithful as possible to Freud. And as a bonus, I had thought, the title would translate or begin to interpret a bit of a sentence that had been bothering me. It had come up in the course of daily life but it sounded to me like a line from some sort of novel and I took it as an invitation to think about the relation between Freud’s writing and literary fiction. It contained a sentence-fragment: ‘the drug of my father’. I was i­nterested – who is speaking and to whom? What would the words ‘the drug of my father’ do to the notions of father, family and family romance? Presumably family romance is a phantasmatic organisation, and according to Derrida: ‘Every phantasmatic organisation, whether collective or individual, is the invention of a drug, or of a rhetoric of drugs.’18 And as Derrida notes, the drug addict is especially resented because he is thought to cut himself off from the world ‘in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real life of the city and the community; . . . he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction’ (‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, pp. 234–5). Derrida takes up Freud’s term ‘theoretical fiction’ from The Interpretation of Dreams, where it’s used with reference to something problematic about the primariness of the primary process (The

­128    Without Mastery Interpretation of Dreams, p. 603). The problem is, Freud writes, that elements in this complicated whole which are in fact simultaneous can only be represented successively in my description of them, while, in putting forward each point, I must avoid appearing to anticipate the grounds on which it is based: difficulties such as these it is beyond my strength to master. (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 588)

Theoretical fiction is necessary for exposition, especially for the exposition of the nature of thought itself. It is also an alternative to asserting rhetorical mastery over what is in fact too dispersed, too powerful, too basic, too complex, or whatever, to submit to the magic of thought and the instant control of concepts. ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ recognises the notion of ‘theoretical fiction’ as part of Freud’s rigorous accommodation of difference at work in the psyche (p. 256). Later, ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of its Soul’ finds that the same rigour and capacity for patient delicacy characterises Freud’s sense of how the ‘physical, neuronal or genetic sciences’ might contribute to psychoanalytic thought: provided that one knows how to wait expectantly, precisely, and to articulate without confusing, without precipitously homogenizing, without crushing the different agencies, structures and laws, while respecting the relays, the delays, and do I dare say, the deferred of differance. (p. 244)

This waiting, this patience and precision give space to science, neither rejecting it nor simply receiving it without being in turn transformed, or formed by it. (Tim Clark points out how difficult it may be for thinkers in the Humanities to come to terms with the scientific discourses that contain some of what is needed to think about climate change.) Freud’s theoretical fictions are not willed assimilations, there is a necessity at work in them and they take effect shaping psychoanalysis right from the neuronal modelling of the Project for a Scientific Psychology. These plans could have perhaps led to something interesting from someone else but I found my own thoughts on all this banal. Boring. However, the banal is not boring at all when Derrida, Freud and Cixous get hold of it. According to Derrida, Freud is everywhere. It’s not that we are beyond him. We inhabit psychoanalysis (‘To Speculate – On Freud’, p. 262). Hélène Cixous considers her own fiction as ‘above all post-Freudian, that is to say, as marked by the “banalization” of psychoanalysis’ (‘The Novel Today’, p. 19). ‘Banalised’ means laid open, made public, commonplace, even trite. The language of psychoanalysis is used loosely and all over the place – despite much rigorous debate by

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experts. Arguments over metapsychological theory remain on the near side of thought because, whoever you are, according to Cixous, and I agree with her, to enter into thought is to be forced to say what hasn’t been said. For Cixous writing is an experience of darkness. But it’s nothing that special. It is ‘the darkness in which all human beings live’ (‘The Novel Today’, p. 4). She says: It’s there behind the door. As soon as you enter thought, there it is. As a general rule, we don’t live behind thought – by which I mean thought that has been already expressed. We are always in the strip-light or half-light of the already-expressed. But the dark part of ourselves – where psychoanalysis has built its kingdom – is there, all the time, behind our every action, every single day.

Every action, every single day. There’s no need, perhaps, to think in terms of the ‘unconscious’. This dark, it’s totally commonplace but also intrinsically obscure, as well as being hidden. It shares the colourlessness, if that’s not too strong a word, of what Freud called the death drive. Derrida calls the death drive by a number of names, including the anarchy drive and the archiviolithic drive. It ‘is never present in person, neither in itself, nor in its effects. It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own’ (Archive Fever, p. 11). It is boring. I’ve quoted Derrida on flat writing. There’s also the passage when he speaks of the wish to bring together the most banalised, unmarked, bland writing with the blazing excitement of his love. Or in Freud’s words, with the ‘fresh “vital differences” ’ that come from what he decorously calls ‘union with the living substance of a different individual’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 55). This is Derrida: I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, and what is more while erasing all the traits, even the most inapparent ones, the ones that mark the tone, or the belonging to a genre . . . so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately, as soon as any third party would set eyes on it . . . It is somewhat in order to ‘banalize’ the cipher of the unique tragedy that I prefer cards . . . (‘Envois’, p. 11)

In other words again, ‘Envois’ is dreaming of combining the least tension with the most, of playing the tendency towards ‘abolition of chemical tensions’, towards death, against the strength and rejuvenation, the untold glories, of sexual love. Making love would be the time and place of greatest sensitivity to the other in the bodily telepathy and immemorial sweetness of what is rightly called ‘carnal knowledge’. Not

­130    Without Mastery a pacifying joining, as in Plato’s account of the torn halves, not ‘a need to restore an earlier state of things’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 57), but a blinding and incendiary revelation. On the side of truth rather than illusion. Aren’t we interested in Freud and Derrida because they are so powerfully and fundamentally interested in sex? To put it flatly, they have what very few have, a way to speak about lovemaking, a sense of its importance and meaning, the miraculous communication of an incommunicable private joy. Benjamin is on to this too, with his eggs and his seeds, all done discreetly so as to preserve the ‘germinative power’ that is as we have seen quite close to death (‘The Storyteller’, p. 148). ‘Very banal today’, Derrida writes in ‘Envois’: the idea that one is killing by burning a letter or a sign, a metro ticket that the other has held in his hand, a movie ticket, the wrapper of a sugar cube. Very banal too the ‘fantasy’, very run down, but with what force and what necessity it dictates to me, from behind, all my gestures. Murder is everywhere, my immense one. We are the worst criminals in history. And right here I kill you, save, save you, save you run away, the unique, the living one over there whom I love. (‘Envois’, p. 33)

All of this done by writing, the idea is part of writing, yes, but also the sense of the stupidity and destructiveness of a belief in writing alone. So, here we are in the age of Freud, and while there are distinct institutions and appearances of psychoanalysis, your IPAs and BACPs and so on, there are effects – the ones I want to talk about – that are no longer detectable by the eye. They may be sensed by the kind of storyteller who does not explain, who remembers and reports but does not know. Whose scene is right here. Explanation remains on the outside of that potentiality of the story, scrambling about in the dunes, up and down in the sand, it’s absolutely dry earth and nearby, underfoot or just over there, there is this possibility, the germinative power of the story that I cannot appropriate. Sand under my feet and in my eyes. I am in the outer layer that protects and receives while remaining unchanged, so that beneath there may be a chance of being modified, reached by the world outside but indirectly, in the depths, there where (Freud’s words) ‘the receptive cortical layer . . . has long been withdrawn into the depths of the interior of the body’ (‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, pp. 27–8). There is no contemporary reader, it is all memorability, restance, remains and trust. You could do as Cixous does and ‘imagine that your reader is not yet born’ and that ‘reading will be a descendant. It will only be born just before I die’ (‘On Being Interviewed’, p. xv; ‘The Play of Fiction’, p. 11). Freud gives a different emphasis when he says in ‘Family

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Romances’ that ‘the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations’.19 But there are also relations that skip a generation or two and which are less easily institutionalised than the relation between, say, father Sigmund Freud and son Otto Rank, in whose book, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Freud’s short essay on ‘Family Romances’ first appeared. ‘To Speculate – On Freud’ tells a very sad story about Freud. It is told by Derrida, who writes in ‘Circumfession’: ‘I weep not only for my children but for all my children, why only you, my children?’ (‘Circumfession’, p. 40). Here it is. Mouth to mouth is how stories travel, according to Benjamin: In 1923, then, first operation on the mouth. On the grandfather’s mouth, yes, but also almost at the same time, on Heinerle’s . . . mouth, Sophie’s second son, Ernst’s younger brother. Tonsils. He is the preferred grandson, the preferred son of the preferred daughter. His grandfather considered him, says Jones, ‘the most intelligent child he had ever encountered’. (He did not think as much of Ernst, the older brother.) They talk together about their operation, as if it were the same, of their mouth, as if it were the same, the mouth eating itself and speaking through what it eats. ‘I can already eat crusts. Can you too?’ Following the operation, and then weakened by miliary tuberculosis, less resistant than his grandfather, Heinerle dies. On 19 June, 1923: Freud is seen to cry. For the only time. The following month he confides to Ferenczi that he feels depressed for the first time in his life. (‘To Speculate – On Freud’, p. 334)

What would we make of a sometimes-blind Freud, a partly blind psychoanalysis, or one that goes unmarked? An unanticipated, unanticipatable psychoanalysis? Sensitive. It would not be self-blinded, once and for all, like Oedipus. It would on occasion be blinded by tears. Tears would be its point-of-view. In tears perspective is torn: the tears tear the sense of fixed dimension and the dimensions of representation. Psychoanalysis in tears, in shreds. The threads join again, Derrida tells how hope for the future of psychoanalysis returns, hope for the science, the institution that Freud feels is bound up with Heinerle. The eyes are dried, the grandfather goes back to work. But there has been this mysterious window or water-hole of the tears. According to Benjamin: ‘Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, his stories refer back to natural history’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 151). It’s the everyday that holds the ancient seeds of fiction, including a relation to death, to one’s own death, how we live death, how we share and communicate and fail to share and fail to communicate the obscure and obscuring force of what Freud called the death drive. I want

­132    Without Mastery to end with tears. In some way, any tears will do, anyone’s tears, there are so many, all so important and as Bowen says in The Little Girls one ‘forgets each tear is shed for the first time’ (p. 64). There are tears for Derrida in Hyperdream by Cixous: ‘I bend down, leaning on my brother. That way my tears don’t run down me, they drip into the sand’ (Hyperdream, p. 88). There are tears in Royle’s book Quilt. Where do they go? I’ll quote them: ‘ – These things happen from time to time’, my father says. He is lying on the bed, his single bed alongside the other which, still made up, was my mother’s, dying two years earlier, and the covers are off and I’m trying to get him up and dressed, ready for hospital, but I’m weeping. Tears are streaming down my face making it difficult to see. Unenvisaged, embarrassing. (Quilt, p. 3)

And a little later, still getting ready to go to hospital: I’m blinded: the tears are pouring out of my face. Why merely this word, tears or teardrops, but no others, like Eskimo snow lexemes? Why not a new language invented every time? What’s pouring out of my face has never happened before. (pp. 6–7)

And I was coming to Psammenitus, the story that Benjamin retells, and then goes on to say that what is so wonderful about this story is that no one knows what it means (‘The Storyteller’, p. 148). Psammenitus, the name has in it the samen, the seeds that are in the pyramid. His children are taken from him, but still – his story compels Herodotus, Benjamin and Montaigne to bear some sort of witness to the crime. I’ll recount it: After the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been vanquished and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner. He ordered that Psammenitus be placed on the road that the Persian triumphal procession was to take. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when he subsequently recognised one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning. (‘The Storyteller’, p. 148)

Why am I telling you this? I think it is because of what happens when we weep, when there is ‘lachrymal secretion’ as Freud calls it in Studies on Hysteria, when we weep at a story and we do not know why, or at something very tender, at something beautiful, music perhaps, perhaps

Nightshift    ­133

it might be a song, say ‘Nightshift’ by the Commodores, and we cannot speak – or not so clearly.20 It may concern the fate of nations, it may concern the geomorphic changes wrought by man and their unforeseen and irreversible destructive effects, but it will bring together the course of history, or the disappearing future, at a particular juncture for a particular human being with their own adventure, someone in whom many currents meet, each with a way of imagining their future, with their own children, actual and spiritual children. We weep. We don’t know why, perhaps we are suffering from reminiscences, from something we have repressed coming out from inside, or something more absolutely forgotten, we really don’t know, it’s tears, idle tears, they do no work, no work of mourning, ‘I know not what they mean’ but it’s then, with the secretion from the depths, that we are in the domain of communicable experience.21 Without words, or across them, an experience from somewhere else in us. Tears for nothing. Derrida, like Tennyson, was a ‘child about whom people used to say “he cries for nothing” ’ (‘Circumfession’, p. 39). Are tears the beginning of thinking –

Too Late to Begin?

‘Now, it’s too late for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books. I’m getting to be a old bird, and I want to take it easy. But I want some reading – some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging Lord-Mayor’sShow of wollumes’ (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas); ‘as’ll reach right down your pint of view, and take time to go by you. How can I get that reading, Wegg? By’, tapping him on the breast with the head of his thick stick, ‘paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an hour (say twopence) to come and do it.’1 (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend) With these citations, these references, you authorize the cinder, you will construct a new university, perhaps. (Derrida, Cinders) Is it too late now, is there time to read in the university? I asked the questions years ago. They were rhetorical and intended to inflame. I knew that the university was in ruins.2 Still, I had no intention of stopping shovelling and sifting. It was not that I was looking for something in particular. Like Noddy Boffin in my first epigraph above, I wanted some reading, some fine bold reading. But what I loved was not books exactly, it was the dust itself. It was so fine! The thought of ruin encouraged me. I had read (when I dropped into poetry, burningly all at once, a hunger seizing my heart) that my heart is a handful of dust. That I am soft sift in an hourglass. And that this heart, the ‘my heart’ was in the poem and in me, like a letter folded and slipped into a heart, as one slips an imaginary letter into an imaginary breast-pocket, now lost inside, but a letter still, perhaps readable under certain conditions not entirely known to me, certainly not under the jurisdiction of an ‘I’: no longer property nor

Too Late to Begin?    ­135

simply private. The alphabed was deep in my body, the Grandma who sat waiting in it was indeed out of a book. From long before I had to earn my living or bought a single splendid volume, I lived on, and lived beside, all sorts of phrases and figures from poems and stories. There were words that when they arrived, I knew I had waited for: they named the nameless and taught the unteachable. As when one reads the description of an ‘autodestructive’ quality or power of writing, a virtue capable of writing you, or writing on you, of ‘firing on its own right into the heart’ (Cinders, p. 53). One hears tell of the unheard-of in a sentence that by being a sentence and part of language, engenders the slow, painful understanding from which its action and content proclaim independence. At the same time, something like what Derrida calls ‘a “no” of fire’ installs itself and refuses to yield to the necessity of working at reading (p. 55). He speaks out on the side of fire and ‘my small library-apocalypse’ in books and essays that retain solidity, even for those who understand nothing (‘Envois’, p. 11). Neither the self-consumption or fever of writing, nor its stonily indecipherable capacity to remain, can be taken up into the production-consumption machine. It burns or remains beside it. The most impassioned reader never has to go too far away from a more docile enterprise of workingon, or writing-about. One can pick up cooled-off sentences with bare hands, dig about among names, carry out the work of exegesis and explanation. While I was artificially warmed by my industrious shovelling, fairy-tale characters, begetters-protectors-devourers, marvellously intact, kept things going, drove me on, kept me working, gave rise to all my deadlines, timetables, offices, classrooms and lecture-halls and waited for me at the end, waited only to end it and have done with reading. But there was already ruin-at-work, an undoing: as when commentary or explanation finds words to speak truthfully only when you are addressing no one or someone who cannot at present hear you, or does not understand. When you have nothing to say and no one to say it to, then, with that ‘element of spontaneity which’, Freud says, ‘is so convincing’, a transference can take place.3 You find what you want, in error. I hesitate here over the ‘association of ideas’, a phrase in my epigraph that Noddy Boffin gets by some indirect process from Dickens, who gets it by some process, most likely indirect, from Hume and Hartley.4 Boffin associates reading with gorging and the association comes through in metaphorical reference to gorgeousness, the spectacular gaudy splendour of what volumes are believed to contain. He longs to see and to be reached by something, but what is it? This being reached

­136    Without Mastery ‘right down into’ gets mixed up with downing a pint, so that his ‘pint of view’ will be affected. But it’s hard, between Boffin and the narrator and the author, to know where to locate the ideas and their relation to the words. Their associations are of more than individual significance: they make readable the strange, mistaken, necessary and consequential exchange between the materiality of signifiers and the phenomenality of experience that shapes reading and our attempts to understand it. For Freud, the process of free association in the psychoanalytic session makes it known that such exchanges form us, shape how we think and act. Transference, to which we will return in a moment, was what he believed interfered with the flow of speech. The emergence of thought in its real and necessary unthinkingness and confusion depends greatly on who it is we believe we are speaking to. There are signature-effects that open up relations of address beyond the living present: If one writes in order to call up names, then one writes also for the dead . . . one writes for a specific dead person, so that perhaps in every text there is a dead man or woman to be sought, the singular figure of death to which a text is destined and which signs.5

Now we will go back to where we were, in a kind of narcissistic crisis brought on by reading and writing. It seems egotistical to begin by saying so much about myself . . . but whatever I say to you seems, even in my own ears, below what I want to say, and different from what I want to say. I can’t help it. So it is. You are the ruin of me. (Our Mutual Friend, p. 395)

That is Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend. Is he working for me here, or am I working for him, for Dickens? Perhaps it is for our mutual friend, you, the singular and most capable reader. All reading needs this someone capable of being someone who reads. Without that it will not work at all to work like this, by reading-transferences and the analysis of reading-resistances that are not, or not entirely, reducible to individual psychic origins. My approach perhaps has something in common with that of the psychoanalyst working with the transference: ‘it is one for which there is no model in real life’ (‘Observations on TransferenceLove’, p. 166). But it is no approach at all if it does not bring me to you, you-in-reality, who dishevel all my approaches. And then there is the superego of the other, which is perhaps always what the superego is, installed in the form of an ‘ego ideal’ that arises as it does:

Too Late to Begin?    ­137 from the critical influence of parents (conveyed . . . by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught . . . and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in [one’s] environment − . . . fellow men – and public opinion.6

You hear a voice in Cinders, perhaps talking to itself, to him, to himself, to you, mentioning ‘the grandmother and the wolf for whom you work’ (Cinders, p. 55). What, or who, sends you out, lures you in, sits waiting in the alphabed to get you? An ego ideal or superego? Reality? Necessity? Who do you work for? It is an interesting question these liberal-democratic-capitalist days, these days when the best scientific assessment is that: average global surface temperature will continue to rise during the 21st century by 1.1°C to 6.4°C. Such global warming will cause sea level to rise, and is expected to increase the intensity of extreme weather events and to change the amount / pattern of precipitation. Other effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and the increase in diseases.7

If, as Freud and Derrida lead me to believe, the work of mourning is the paradigm for all work, we could rephrase the question of work: for whom, for what do you mourn? The gorging or gorgeous Lord-Mayor’sShow of wollumes parading past your point of view, and taking time to go by it, are a funeral feast and a procession of mourners, set in motion with the aim of a certain, and certainly mistaken kind of knowing. This deserves closer attention. Mourning, Derrida insists: consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead . . . One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge [Il faut le savoir]. Now to know it is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies – for it must stay in its place . . . Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where – and it is necessary (to know – to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more! (Specters of Marx, p. 9)

The implication is that this ontologising desire is necessary, inevitable, and that it is necessary, desirable, to pay attention to it and know it. The French ‘Il faut’ describes what must be, as well as what should be. The plot of Our Mutual Friend can tell us something about this kind of desire to know and about the meaning of knowledge. The story revolves around identification and misidentification. There is a body pulled from the water, an unknown man who is dead, substituting for a man living

­138    Without Mastery incognito. The dirty waters of the Thames, along with the dust mounds of Harmony Jail, along with the people who make their living there, play their part in hiding the dead and obscuring of the identity of the living. Our Mutual Friend is also fascinated by the question: who do you work for? But before rushing to identify people, places, page-numbers, we might continue to think a little. Continue: as Freud recommends the analyst to do when he is caught the throes of a fiery erotic transference, neither gratifying nor suppressing the craving for love. That is, the wish to get a return, to know what it is one loves, and where it is, finally to kill it, at least in thought, so that it cannot get away, taking your love with it. In the process, we might begin to imagine a manner of reading and thinking, even to imagine a university, that does not always insist on knowing and that is not mainly driven by the acquisition and efficient transfer of knowledge. A university more than ever capable of examining the meaning of knowledge, as well as of diversifying the desire to know in a proliferation of locales and identifications. Such a university is already being imagined. For example by climate change researchers David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith when they insist that ‘a Real University must examine the meaning of knowledge’.8 They adopt Bill Readings’s name for what we have, The University in Ruins. Like Readings, they describe the current model of higher education as dominated by economic globalisation and consumerism: It is a model for credentialism, where a degree demonstrates desirable qualities to the corporate employer such as ambition, persistence, and ability to conform or cooperate. The university degree is the mechanism for winnowing and screening of applicants. The university is geared to serving industry, promoting competition and consumerism, and it squeezes out patterns of thought of no value to the cause. (The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 143)

We might also call it the Mournful University. Such a place has no time, Shearman and Wayne Smith suggest, for factors that might introduce confusion or doubt into the quest to know. Such factors might include complex and resistance-inducing fields of inquiry such as climate change, but would also include approaches to knowledge that require an impassioned − Readings would say addicted − commitment to reading and thinking as something other than the harvesting of information and ideas: ‘the complex time of thought’, he suggests, ‘is not exhaustively accountable, is structurally “incomplete” ’ (The University in Ruins, p. 128). Shearman and Wayne Smith criticise the free-market individualism of research that seeks knowledge regardless of social and other broadly human goals. They identify a pernicious tendency to take knowl-

Too Late to Begin?    ­139

edge for the basic aim of intellectual inquiry, and argue that this model currently dominates universities throughout the world. It prevents universities from focusing on the needs of society as a whole, and especially on addressing the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation that threaten the future well-being of humanity. I would qualify this a little: even where funding bodies (such as the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council) actively promote collective, interdisciplinary research, and introduce sociological, economic, political and ideological factors into their plans and programmes, the liberal competitive and market-oriented model in research (not to mention student admissions and university teaching) continues to decisively shape the intellectual environment of universities. They demand a combination of economic benefit and public engagement and want to make thinking answerable in the short term, as ‘output’. As institutions universities are vulnerable to the general sense that in a time of economic recession, the economy is more important than the larger environment, or a more complex conception of purpose. Noddy Boffin’s delighted discovery of Silas Wegg, a man qualified to get him the reading he wants, reminds us that when thinking, reading and writing are worth our time, they ask for more of it than we have. Reading asks us to reread, to forget our first understanding, to not understand and begin again. At first my own concern about how much time was left for reading had to do with work, with the Boffinesque notion of reading ‘paying’, and with what it meant to be ‘truly qualified’ to read. I was misled by association of ideas and mistook the cause of my concern for an institutional question, something about English in the university. In fact I was someone haunted by dust, set on a never-ending task that just like the others, needed time and elaboration in a number of directions. I also stayed where I was and worked hard at my job but, something in me, nobler and more courageous than myself, refused to thrive in what the university was becoming. Reading is work for no one, an experience beyond the work-play division, inconceivable to the logic of what employers call work-life balance. I have seen the university, where I believed I could read, think about reading and what I read, and also teach reading, being drawn into what every reader of Our Mutual Friend recognises as a pernicious belief in the absolute importance of money and calculation. I read the novel in 2001, when the UK government was pressing values of efficiency, accountability and corporate expansion in Higher Education. Efficiency and accountability were imposed through a national Research Assessment Exercise (now the ‘Research Excellence Framework’) and through periodic Quality Assessment of teaching within universities.

­140    Without Mastery Universities were being measured and described, decisions were being taken, administrative structures shaped and reshaped, in a reductive language that seemed to carry all before it. Professional readers around me were aware of this but too few brought their well-read minds to what was happening. The language of the market asks only to be complied with and compliance was everywhere. Our Mutual Friend warned me against polemic. A ghost came: a virtual warning against identification, that worked by means of identification. When the hard-working teacher Bradley Headstone follows his rival in love, the exquisitely lazy Eugene Wrayburn, through the London streets, he is transfigured by his own aggressive intentions. Disembodied, Headstone looks ‘like a haggard head suspended in the air: so completely did the force of his expression cancel his figure’ (Our Mutual Friend, p. 544). Headstone later makes an unsuccessful murderous attack on Wrayburn. I didn’t want to end up an impotent floating head full of hatred and envy. I knew that the university was not going to be saved or redeemed. It was in Derrida’s words, a ‘tendered citadel, to be taken, often destined to capitulate without condition’.9 There will be no Iliad of the Mournful University and my concern lay both beyond and within the institution. In words I read much later, I was looking for ‘understanding and transformation at the everyday moral, spiritual and historical conjuncture where humankind now precariously resides’ (Frank, ‘Global Warming and Cultural / Media Articulations’, p. 101). The real university, like the university without condition that Derrida writes about, is virtual. I pause here to say that I do not write, and write sometimes in the first person, out of individualism, nor do I study the component impulses and experiences of the individual in order to scale them up and impose them on an understanding of institutions. I am interested in ways of thinking that, like the critical realist work I have just quoted, support ‘the reality of structures, entities and powers at different levels of complexity in the world’, for instance arguing against ‘the reduction of social reality to mere amalgams of individual motivations, powers and tendencies’.10 I write, and this is the action of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, to put knowledge in relation to the irreducible, or ananke, which writing does not reduce to presence or to knowledge. The extensiveness of writing, which is related to its powers of condensation and its inaugural force, offers place to the thinking of global warming, which, according to Cheryl Frank, is theorized as a range of phenomena that are multi-dimensional, multiscalar, and multi-faceted and that really does exist within individual psyches,

Too Late to Begin?    ­141 interactions between people, communities, ecological systems, larger societies and cultures, regions, nations and global expanses. (‘Global Warming and Cultural / Media Articulations’, p. 100)

Our Mutual Friend is a novel about work, about dust and industry, about erotic and intellectual obsession, but it is also about reading. All the novel’s themes are communicated and not communicated, experienced and not experienced, known and not known through reading. It thematises reading, at length. It also thematises actions related to reading: following and performing (someone, or a profession), trailing and being trailed, imitating and parodying, and walking side by side. Beside, as Eve Sedgwick says: permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object. Its interest does not, however depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping and other relations.11

Because of this roomy and leisurely quality, but also because it is about working-for, and who it really is one works for, Our Mutual Friend makes it possible to transpose into its sentences the experience of being pursued by a way of thinking that wants to manage, follow and assess everything and everyone, and which coercively understands everything and everyone to be collectively and individually answerable. Then again, Our Mutual Friend does not follow or correspond to the contours of a theoretical argument about reading. It makes following and reading appear and happen. It discovers, invents and stages these experiences as erotic, desirous, impersonal, violent, murderous, perverse, ludicrous and full of deferrals. The complex open system of a multi-plot Victorian novel perhaps has some analogy to the complex systemic interactions in, through, across climate change, but analogy is too restrictive. It is necessary to differentiate and discriminate precisely. This would be in the interest of the reader or would-be reader. Beyond analogy, there are the questions of whether it might be possible to promote transferential interest in climate change, and how to sustain that interest at an intensity where it can be worked with and on, and not turned into mere business, a task, a denial of the richness of climate change as a condition. Bhaskar’s critical realist project acknowledges that richness when it outlines the need to respond by exploiting ‘preexisting cognitive resources drawn from a wide variety of antecedently

­142    Without Mastery existing cognitive fields in models, analogies, etc.’, and understanding ‘a form of determination in reality, in which several irreducibly distinct mechanisms at different and potentially emergent levels are combining to produce a novel result’ (‘Contexts of Interdisciplinarity’, p. 5). Our Mutual Friend offers two models of teaching based on the two characters Headstone and Wrayburn. Bradley Headstone spoke for me, in a sense perhaps worked for me, when he said how he felt to Lizzie Hexam. He undergoes a kind of transferential emptying. Like the female patients described by Freud, Headstone finds love ‘incommensurable with everything else’ (‘Observations on Transference-Love’, p. 160). ‘Things that have to do with love . . . are, as it were, written on a special page on which no other writing is tolerated.’ Freud is interested precisely in the fact that love can reveal the palimpsestuous nature of the writing that is reality. Headstone says: Yes! You are the ruin – the ruin – the ruin of me. I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you. Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!

That is the way intellectual obsession works. Fierily mournful Headstone is addressing his main object, his passion, a Thames boatwoman who cannot read or write. Headstone is a schoolmaster, and his way of schoolmastering reminded me of Theodor Adorno’s warning against the tendency ‘to turn the university into a school, a people factory, which produces the commodity of labour power in the most rational possible way and enables people to sell it at a good price’.12 Adorno’s remarks seem all the more significant as liberal democracy and its educational institutions continue broadly to fail to respond to the challenge of climate change. Focusing on the sciences, Shearman and Wayne Smith outline what is not being done: The universities would need to reform the curriculum for each scientific subject to provide the student with knowledge of the origins of science, its limitations and responsibilities. [At the moment this responsibility is more often undertaken in history departments.] The teachers would need to have a strong independent voice without fear of reprisals when they spoke of important issues. The funding system would need to provide independent funds divorced from commercial influence. There would need to be research in applied and directed areas that tackled social, community and worldwide problems of concern to humanity. (The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 146)

Too Late to Begin?    ­143

Shearman and Wayne Smith focus on the sciences and social sciences but the study of literature offers good opportunities for thinking that does not conform to the production-consumption model. It seems more important than ever to read. The kind of relation that Dickens had to his actual reading public no longer exists. But something perhaps remains of the imaginary reader to whom he wrote. I once dreamed of speaking to teachers and researchers through Dickens, through Bradley Headstone and others. I imagined inciting a desire to address reality beyond, in, through and especially beside literature. But giving place to the unaccountable power of literature meant taking the risk of having my arguments opened and undone. This got me thinking all the harder. I was compelled to repeat, with Bradley Headstone: ‘whatever I say to you seems, even in my own ears, below what I want to say, and different from what I want to say. I can’t help it. So it is.’ I did not, I do not know who I might be talking to. Headstone learns, or perhaps ignorantly teaches, that there are forms of knowledge that do not empower.13 There are truths that no one wants to know. Dickens introduces Headstone as an easy-access archive of knowledges, specifically, a warehouse. I identified with Bradley Headstone in his relation to Lizzie Hexam, in his ruin. But he is first of all an orderly building that represents an educated and educating self. I take Dickens’s account of him to be a warning about the effects of the commodification of knowledge and an overemphasis on accountability: From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers – history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left – natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics, and what not, all in their several places – this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care; while the habit of questioning and being questioned had given him a suspicious manner, or a manner that would be better described as one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. (Our Mutual Friend, p. 217)

Inside Bradley Headstone’s mind, there are places, specific locations for named kinds of knowledge. Mourning wants to know where the loved one is, wants a place of rest. ‘Let her stay there and move no more!’ Falling for Lizzie Hexam is a terrible unsettling surprise for Headstone: she isn’t on the syllabus. It’s an unaccountable thing. She is not for him, not interested in him, does not need what he can offer. She moves about on land and water. She travels, meets people. Her beauty and force of soul draw other characters to her. She is illiterate, capable, quiet, not reducible to the stock-in-trade of knowledge that Headstone deals in.

­144    Without Mastery In the words of Headstone’s prize pupil, Lizzie’s brother Charlie: ‘What she is, she is, and shows herself to be’ (p. 217). It is hard to imagine anything more enigmatic than that absolute coincidence of essence and appearance. No work, no mourning would be necessary to know such a woman, as if she had the ‘virtue of autodestruction’ able to fire ‘on its own right into the heart’. But what would that knowing have to do with her in reality? Without intending to, Lizzie does something irrevocable to Bradley Headstone, so that he says: ‘You are the ruin of me.’ ‘Ruin’ in the context of relations between the sexes used to carry a sense of the seduction of an unmarried woman. A ruined woman was spoiled goods still up and talking, as in Thomas Hardy’s sardonic poem ‘The Ruined Maid’.14 Inner resources, self-confidence, self-government, control of one’s thoughts: Lizzie spoils all these for Headstone. I would generalise this: reading (especially but not only, reading literature) spoils our secure notions of self-ownership and self-identity. It turns us inside out. One learns this by experience. It is not a fact that can be traded in. It is a foreign body with a tendency to remain, as Headstone puts it, ‘always in my thoughts now’. Reading literature stages this experience with especial awareness of its fictional or poetic status. It alters our relation to meaning and reference. Like the Freudian transference, this suspension of actuality can allow literature to be experienced with a very convincing spontaneity. This forcefulness educates us. Bradley Headstone’s words articulate one effect of the attack of reading and the impression I have long had of being, without my consent, devotedly, irrevocably, angrily, even pathetically attached to literature. My impression has always been that it is too late to do anything about it now. Derrida articulates this at beginning of Signsponge, through a specifically French idiom: In the rhetorical code: an attack, the first piece, designates, in French, the first piece of a text, of a theatrical scene or an act, the intrusive intervention of a preliminary speech act which no longer leaves you in peace, a place or instant that makes the decision for you: you won’t be left alone any more.15

One’s peace is disturbed but by theatre, an act or a speech act. Might this kind of act be a way to get the reality of climate change, and the need to respond, into one’s head? English has an associated sense of ‘attack’, meaning to begin a phrase or piece of music. Something has struck up, like a song, with a catchiness or a hook-line that may mean very little to me, but which sticks in my head. Like love at first sight. Its intrusiveness suggests its singularity; its power of attachment and persistence reminds us of its iterability, of the fact it can recur. It could be a performance – a performance in my head. Or as Dickens para-

Too Late to Begin?    ­145

phrases it in Our Mutual Friend, a Reading. We will come to Eugene Wrayburn’s notion of a Reading later. I associate it with Derrida’s sense that the ‘gripping force of an attack never occurs without a scratch; never, in other words, without some scene of signature’ (Signsponge, p. 4). A signature can mean a number of things here: 1) the affirmation and authorisation of a name, often before the law, 2) the signature-style or author’s mark within their work, and 3) more radically, writing that designates, describes and inscribes itself as an act: ‘I refer to myself, this is writing, I am a writing – which excludes nothing’ (p. 54). Lizzie Hexam refuses Bradley Headstone’s offer of marriage and he reacts violently. They are walking together by a churchyard wall and when she refuses to marry him, he ‘brings his clenched hand down upon the stone with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bleeding’ (Our Mutual Friend, p. 398). Headstone’s hands often seem to have a life of their own or to indicate the extent to which he is beside himself. They are not what appointment committees call ‘a safe pair of hands’. Here this fictional hand seems to be, in Nicholas Royle’s words, ‘trying to get in touch with the inhuman essence of his identity, the very form of his name’ − that is, the stone.16 That force, that scratch, that signature ‘raw and bleeding’ is Headstone’s response to Lizzie’s refusal of marriage. It is one response to literature’s resistance to appropriation. In literature the human and the inhuman encounter one another, violently, inevitably and unexpectedly. We cannot follow the trace, it does not follow itself: ‘at present, here and now, there is something material – visible but scarcely readable – that, referring only to itself, no longer makes a trace, unless it traces only by losing the trace it scarcely leaves’ (Cinders, p. 43). It is infuriating to be expected, to expect oneself, to be able to read. ‘I am ruined’ says Headstone. But still he signs, with his hand, on his hand, left ‘raw and bleeding’ by the stone. Derrida insists, contrary to Headstone’s personal understanding of his own experience of being ruined by Lizzie Hexam, that ‘for the thing . . . attacked in the attack . . . falling into pieces is not in any way ruinous; on the contrary, it monumentalises’ (Signsponge, p. 4). For example it can become a theme, an object of attention. The character Headstone becomes who he is, his identity is formed through this experience of ruin. You may be thinking – what would be the good of talking like this, of talking about ruin, of encouraging people to read, to experience the impossible experience of, say, an attack? It is perverse but there may be some solace in it. Adorno suggests that a kind of perversity, an attention to the impossible and the non-commensurable, can have an effect:

­146    Without Mastery In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name. The circulation sphere, whose stigmata are borne by intellectual outsiders, opens a last refuge to the mind that it barters away, at the very moment when refuge really no longer exists. He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange. (Minima Moralia, p. 68)

This is the freedom of reading, writing and thinking that know how to sustain and play on ruin. Bradley Headstone has no notion of the unanswerable, except as a ruinous person: as Lizzie or as his rival Eugene. They are always in his thoughts. But, and I’ll come back to this, they are not only in his thoughts. They exist outside his mind. They move. They walk near him, just ahead of him or beside him. The speech about ruin takes place while Lizzie and Bradley are walking alongside each other. ‘She moved slowly on when he paused, and he moved slowly on beside her’ (Our Mutual Friend, p. 395). Bradley Headstone has a strange propensity for being attacked by people who have no wish to injure him. Ruined by Lizzie, Headstone also recognises the attacking intrusions of placid, passive, infuriating Eugene. When Headstone goes to warn him to leave Lizzie alone, Wrayburn refuses to be answerable to the warning. His flirtatious insolence drives Bradley Headstone crazy: ‘Was this worth while, Schoolmaster?’ murmured Eugene, with the air of a disinterested adviser. ‘So much trouble for nothing? You should know best, but I think not.’ ‘I don’t know, Mr Wrayburn’, answered Bradley, with his passion rising, ‘why you address me –’ ‘Don’t you?’ said Eugene. ‘Then I won’t.’ He said it so tauntingly in his perfect placidity, that the respectable righthand clutching the respectable hair-guard of the respectable watch could have wound it round his throat and strangled him with it. Not another word did Eugene deem it worth while to utter, but stood leaning his head upon his hand, smoking and looking imperturbably at the chafing Bradley Headstone with his clutching right-hand, until Bradley was wellnigh mad. (p. 289)

As Nicholas Royle’s essay on Our Mutual Friend makes clear, reading, we go mad. We believe and do not believe that the text is addressing us. We are spoken for. We lose our names. We are attacked from beyond knowledge. A little later in the same conversation, the schoolmaster tries to gather himself together: ‘Sir, my name is Bradley Headstone’ (p. 292). Only for Eugene to reply: ‘As you justly said, my good sir, your name cannot concern me.’ The fabulously indifferent Wrayburn passes by the headstone and does not stay to read the name. And yet he

Too Late to Begin?    ­147

does read, in another sense, the figure of Headstone as he stands before him. Note the statue-like or monumental stillness of Wrayburn’s stance: ‘head upon his hand’. Compare the agitation of ‘Headstone with his clutching right-hand’. Wrayburn’s quietness and frozen posture enact, perhaps even parody, Headstone’s name and his actions. Wrayburn almost unrecognisably performs Headstone, even to the smoking that makes visible the other man’s chafing but also lights up the ‘burn’ in his own name. Read like this, an encounter between two distinct characters opens on to a different kind of scene. Headstone becomes harder to see and to separate from Wrayburn. They become text. They become unaccountable to each other, part of each other, other than themselves, both more and less embodied. I am reminded of a passage in Derrida’s Archive Fever – where he describes an archive not as a library or a warehouse of knowledge or any other kind of building, but as ‘spectral a priori: neither present nor absent “in the flesh”, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met’ (Archive Fever, p. 84). The text is not an actual object, not a book, a work or any kind of product. When we read, it haunts us. Later Headstone says ‘With Mr Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I went on’ (Our Mutual Friend, p. 399). He has incorporated his rival as an image, lost the distinction between himself and the person he hates. He is incapable of being beside him without beginning to internalize him. I once had proposals to make the university a less mournful place: I wanted to teach students ways of understanding the meaning of the knowledge of literature. I wanted to talk to them about rhetoric and signification. I wanted to offer them more contact time, because reading is a painful, lonely pleasure. I wanted to make a teaching theme of reading, in the way that currently ‘representations of’ women, empire, the city or whatever are routinely flagged. I advocated quieter libraries, shorter lectures, and more openness about the fact that the teacher doesn’t know how to read and that teaching need not take the form of a trading of knowledge for ignorance. Rooms available for reading groups. Creative reading classes. Assignments to find the most enjoyable piece of writing on a given topic or literary work. Some of this has happened, some not. But now I don’t want to talk about institutions any more; I want to talk about reading. I want to let it move. I want to follow the wayward movements of a text, because it is an experience of necessity that opens beyond the university as it is, towards the necessity of thinking everything in relation to the global future on a finite earth. I’ll go back to the walking which is happening when Bradley makes his speech about ruin to Lizzie. They are walking together: ‘She moved

­148    Without Mastery slowly on when he paused, and he moved slowly on beside her.’ Lizzie, like Eugene, has the passivity and the attack of a good teacher. Leo Bersani has said, apropos his relation to the thought and writing of Michel Foucault: ‘There’s always something slightly funny in sort of walking along with someone – and it’s slightly affectionate and slightly mocking at the same time.’17 The combination of affection and mockery, Bersani argues, helps readers avoid obsessive and appropriative thinking. It can help us avoid an obsessively mournful attitude to knowledge, an attitude of the kind that will only invest in what it can get back. We need more of the lightness with which Bersani recognises: a very bad form of passion, when passion – either in sexual relations or even in intellectual relations – comes to be obsession, and a lot of political passions are obsessions, just as a lot of romantic passions are obsessions. It may seem as if you lose yourself in that kind of passion but in fact it’s extremely self-affirming in a bad sense, an appropriative and tyrannical form of passion. Whereas this other thing, of being sort of laughing a little at that with which you are walking along . . . seems to me to be very good. (‘Beyond Redemption’, p. 185)

Bersani wants what he calls ‘new modes of relating and relationality’ (p. 188). We need these more than ever in deciding how to continue our relation to the earth, and to the complexity and totality of Earth system science: described by Cornell and Parker as ‘an already intensively relational set of systems and subsystems’ (‘Critical Realist Interdisciplinarity’, pp. 28–9). I’ll begin to conclude by quoting Bersani at more length: some of these new modes are ways that exist anyway, but which we seem trained, culturally, not to notice, for example a kind of relation to the other and to the outside . . . in relation to the process of writing, or in the ways I can ‘walk alongside’ Foucault now, or in the ‘formal correspondences’ Ulysse [Dutoit] and I trace in . . . visual art. (‘Beyond Redemption’, p. 188)

I think about Lizzie Hexam and Headstone, Eugene Wrayburn and Headstone – walking alongside each other, sometimes a little ahead or behind, but walking in relation to each other. Bersani goes on: as teachers we have a rare opportunity to experiment with some of the shifts in modes of connecting that I’m interested in. That is what teaching is: it’s a sustained time and space where you do nothing but see how a group of people are going to connect. It’s really extraordinary in that way. In teaching, a certain kind of group work can be done which might slowly disseminate into a fairly significant part of society. It would be a matter of how modes of connectedness subtly change within a society. Literature does this. Literature

Too Late to Begin?    ­149 does finally have an effect on the way in which people instinctively and intuitively relate and connect. And I think teaching also can do that.

There, in teaching, a space already exists for becoming aware of relations. Bersani focuses on social relations, but teaching can also be experienced in terms of a resistant or seductive materiality. Certain experiences of teaching might affect how we imagine our relation to the material world, to ‘the reality of the world external to human ideas’ (Cornell and Parker, ‘Critical Realist Interdisciplinarity’, p. 32). Once my dream, my proposal, was to walk along with each other and with literature. I found myself in a ‘ludicrous’ situation (Our Mutual Friend, p. 542). I found myself there by finding myself in Eugene Wrayburn’s words, in Dickens’s words, also in Plato’s word geloios, ‘absurd’, ludicrous, comic like the people who want to localize and identify the calculations of geometry, resorting to sense-perception because they want to have done with knowing: ‘the way they argue is quite absurd [geloios, ludicrous, comic], and is forced on them [anankaios], I mean, they talk as if they were doing something and making all their terms to fit their activity’ (Republic II, p. 151). I was in the ludicrous situation – of being followed, being held answerable, accountable for something that moved too fast, right to the heart of me and off again, outside again, unknown again, over and over. I was confined on the one hand by what seemed an irrevocable passion for the subject, for teaching English in a university, for a text that will never be mine, and on the other by the strictures of an academic culture of answerability. That culture resonates all too loudly with the inner masters, employers, grandmothers, wolves that are there to make themselves heard and to demand to be served, sometimes in the name of ‘reality’, and at the expense of truth. I return to the connection between reading and performance in Our Mutual Friend. Friendship is there, I notice, the mild positive transference that Freud recommends as the best relational condition for analytic work. Eugene Wrayburn’s friend Mortimer Lightwood is perturbed by his reckless habit of leading the alarming Bradley Headstone on long, pointless night walks through London. Mortimer is afraid that Headstone and his pupil-stooge Charlie Hexam will attack Eugene. Eugene replies, so fine, so bold: You charm me, Mortimer, with your reading of my weaknesses. (By-the-by, that very word, Reading, in its critical use, always charms me. An actress’s Reading of a chamber-maid, a dancer’s Reading of a horn-pipe, a singer’s Reading of a song, a marine painter’s Reading of the sea, the kettledrum’s Reading of an instrumental passage, are phrases ever youthful and delightful). (p. 542)

­150    Without Mastery We have seen Eugene Wrayburn’s ‘reading’ of Headstone. In his weakness he performs and parodies the other man, plays him, makes him mad. In broadly psychoanalytic language, he transfers onto him. Eugene tells Lizzie: ‘You don’t know how you haunt me and bewilder me’ (p. 692). He objects to being treated as Headstone’s rival. Lizzie is out of reach and in any case too disturbing in her unpretentious simplicity to simply be an object or bride for either man. It is important that we object to the deferral, idealisation and erasure of reading, as we might also more privately object to the disturbingness of reading and of literature. We don’t always like what it does to us, where it takes us. Wrayburn objects. He also does something else: he transfers. He tells his friend ‘I own to the weakness of objecting to occupy a ludicrous position, and therefore I transfer the position . . . I goad the schoolmaster to madness’ (p. 542). As one aspect of the ‘ludicrous position’ is being followed, doggedly and threateningly, Wrayburn’s answer is to move around London in a way that is unaccountable. It’s a funny way to think about teaching. Recall Lizzie Hexam’s effect on Bradley Headstone: ‘I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts.’ Ludicrous that, knowing what we know, we do nothing, we do not do all we can to connect, transform, respond to the challenge of climate change. But if this is our position as readers of literature, we could do worse than read, and in our own ways, perform, Eugene Wrayburn’s high-risk ludic response to his predicament. ‘I own to the weakness of objecting to occupy a ludicrous position, and therefore I transfer the position.’ To whom? To an invented or imagined you, composed also of readings, late-loved readings of unanswered pleas and unaccounted-for imperatives, but always again unknown.

Notes

Epigraphs  1. Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 64.  2. Hélène Cixous and Mirielle Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous: Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 39.

Through the Reader  1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 289.  2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Bloomsbury, [1606] 2013), I, iii, 58–60.   3. Claire Colebrook, ‘No Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Change is Not Really Human’, Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), p. 196.  4. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Volume XXII (London: Vintage, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2001), p. 73.  5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1977), p. 3.   6. Alan Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. xviii.  7. King James VI of Scotland, I of England, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597), p. 29. According to Wolfgang Behringer, the worst years of the Little Ice Age, between 1560 and 1660, ‘were the age of the witch persecutions’. Witches were held responsible for climate-induced problems such as ‘childlessness, livestock epidemics, repeated harvest failures, often mysterious diseases. Cows that gave too little milk, sudden death of children, late frosts, persistent rain or sudden hailstorms in summer. The search was on to find someone to blame for such devilry’. See Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate Change, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 129, 130.

­152    Notes  8. David L. Kranz, ‘The Sounds of Supernatural Soliciting in Macbeth’, Studies in Philology 100.3 (Summer 2003), p. 347.  9. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Press Release: ‘Human Influence on Climate Clear, IPCC Report Says’ (Stockholm, Sweden, 27 September 2013) available at http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/docs/ ar5/press_release_ar5_wgi_en.pdf (last accessed 29 September 2013). The full Fifth Assessment Report is yet to be released at the time of writing, but the Working Group I Report, also published 27 September 2013 provides a comprehensive assessment of the physical science basis of climate change in fourteen chapters supported by a number of annexes and supplementary material. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis can be viewed at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/#.Uka5dBaOU04 (last accessed 28 September 2013). Following copy-editing, layout, final checks for errors, and adjustments for changes for consistency with the Summary for Policymakers, it will be published online in January 2014 and in book form by Cambridge University Press in March 2014. 10. Timothy Clark, ‘Editorial’, Deconstruction in the Anthropocene, Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), p. v. 11. Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 164. 12. Shakespeare, Sonnet 65, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale [1609] 1977), l. 4. See also Nicholas Royle, ‘Miracle Play’, Oxford Literary Review 34.1 (2012), pp. 123–53. 13. Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Thompson Learning, [1623] 2006), II, vii, 153–4, p. 228. 14. Jacques Derrida, ‘I Have a Taste For the Secret’, in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 33–4. 15. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 268. 16. Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction: Extinction. Framing the End of the Species’, in Claire Colebrook, ed., Extinction (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), available at http://livingbooksaboutlife.org/pdfs/bookarchive/ Extinction.pdf (last accessed 9 August 2013). 17. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage, [1945] 1999), p. 35. 18. Cheryl Frank, ‘Global Warming and Cultural / Media Articulations of Emerging and Contending Social Imaginaries: A Critical Realist Perspective’, in Roy Bhaskar et al., Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change: Transforming Knowledge and Practice for Our Global Future (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 101. 19. Roy Bhaskar, ‘Contexts of Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change’, in Bhaskar et al., Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change, p. 11. 20. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1789] 1977), pp. 125, 147.

Notes    ­153 21. For allusions to Banquo’s speech (Macbeth, I, vi, 3–10) see Natural History, p. 147. For references to the remaining of birds that in fact migrate, see pp. 58, 91, 94, 138–9, 153–4, 198–9, 234, 241–2. 22. For example Martin McQuillan, ‘Notes Towards a Post-Carbon Philosophy’, in Tom Cohen, ed., Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 270–92; Tom Cohen, ‘Toxic Assets: de Man’s Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary (an American Fable)’, in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, On Benjamin (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 92. 23. Bowen, ‘Preface to The Demon Lover’, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, p. 95. 24. Ecclesiasticus 28: 14 (Knox Bible); 28.12 (KJV). 25. Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives’, trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elisabeth Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 396. Derrida’s essay sends us back to think about temporality. 26. See the discussion of Freud’s ‘narcissism of small differences’ by Marjorie Garber, in Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 53–96. 27. The notion of irreversibility is not anthropomorphism-proof. As Martin McQuillan points out, the ‘irreversible’ in ‘irreversible climate change’ can turn out to mean ‘irreversible in the lifetime of global capital’ (‘Notes Towards a Post-Carbon Philosophy’, p. 276).

Inventing the Reader  1. Robert Browning, ‘Pauline: a Fragment of a Confession’ (1883), in The Poems of Browning Volume I, 1826–1840, ed. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin (London: Longman, 1991), ll. 377–9.   2. HEFCE strategy statement: Opportunity, Choice and Excellence in Higher Education (Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2011), p. 1, available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/about/howweoperate/strategystatement (last accessed 3 July 2013).   3. See the HEFCE Strategic Plan 2006–11, pp. 60–2, 63–7, available at http:// www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_21/ (last accessed 10 January 2011). The language of key strategic risks and key performance indicators (KPIs) comes to the university via the European Foundation for Quality Management, an organisation founded by the CEOs of the following companies: AB Electrolux, British Telecommunications plc, Bull, Ciba-Geigy AG, C. Olivetti & C. SpA, Dassault Aviation, Fiat Auto SpA, KLM, Nestlé, Philips, Renault, Robert Bosch, Sulzer AG, and Volkswagen.  4. Forbes Morlock, ‘The Management of the Pupils’, 9th ESSE conference, Aarhus, Denmark, 22–26 August 2008.   5. Timothy Clark, ‘Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental Politics and the Closure of Ecocriticism’, Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), p. 133.

­154    Notes   6. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), p. 11.   7. Hélène Cixous, ‘Preface: On Being Interviewed’, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, p. xv.  8. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume XVIII, p. 59.   9. J. N. Findlay, ‘Foreword’ to Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. vii. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1835] 1975), p. 939. 11. On the sonority called Klang see Hegel’s Aesthetics, Volume II, p. 643; Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 423, and especially Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1830] 1970), pp. 136–47. On vocal note (Töne), see G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part III of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1830] 1894), p. 136. 12. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ / ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’, trans. Mary-Ann Caws, in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary-Ann Caws (New York: New Direction Books, [1877] 1982), ll. 12, 13. 13. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘In the Event’, in Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 37. 14. T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, [1942] 1968), l. 127. 15. The angel Agathos tells the angel Oinos of ‘the physical power of words . . . This wild star . . . I spoke it – with a few passionate sentences – into birth’. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Power of Words’ (1845), in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume III, Tales and Sketches 1843–1849, ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 1215. 16. Paul de Man, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 92–3. 17. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume IV, p. 278. 18. Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, trans. Frances McDonagh, in Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, [1970] 2007), p. 93. 19. Wallace Stevens, ‘The Creations of Sound’, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 311. 20. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crisis in Poetry’ (1896), trans. Mary-Ann Caws, in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 75. Translation modified. 21. Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1946] 1975), pp. 17–18. 22. See Derrida’s commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind paragraph 459, in Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 9a. 23. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, p. 137.

Notes    ­155 Try Thinking As If Perhaps  1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 74.  2. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 94.   3. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles / Eperons: les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979), pp. 101, 103–5.  4. Jacques Derrida, ‘ “Le Parjure”, Perhaps’, in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 181.   5. Bowen makes it clear how meaningless it would be to try without thinking. A teacher stops Clare reciting Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations Ode’ with ‘too much expression’. Clare responds ‘I thought –’ and Miss Kinmate interrupts ‘Well don’t – try!’ The Little Girls, pp. 74, 75.  6. Maria Torok, ‘The Meaning of “Penis Envy” in Women’, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 50–1.  7. Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), Volume I, 458d, pp. 481–3; Volume II, 527a, pp. 151–3; 581e, pp. 347–9.   8. The selection of the three main definitions of ananke as the common nouns ‘necessity’, ‘compulsion’ and ‘force’ follows a thematic pressure in the work of Plato, Freud and Derrida. These are also the meanings given priority by Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon and the Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary. However, the economical choice tends to suppress the derived senses of cognate words, which may also be strongly relevant. The Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary, for example, tells us that a tertiary sense of anankaios is to be ‘connected by natural or necessary ties’, so that ananke also names kinship, allegiance and friendship. Bowen’s novel, preoccupied by the necessities of friendship and family, provides an ample commentary on ananke.  9. Plato, Republic, Volume II, 616c, pp. 471–3; 617b–c, pp. 473–5. Freud takes up Ananke with a capital ‘A’ in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 45, and ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume XXI, p. 101. 10. ‘Necessity’ is Emlyn-Jones and Preddy’s translation of Ananke, and the one adopted by English translators of the Republic from Benjamin Jowett to Robin Waterfield – who refers to ‘Lady Necessity’. It would be interesting to see the effect of alternative translations of Ananke – as ‘Force’, for example. 11. See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, David E. Orton (Leiden, Boston and Koln: Brill, 1998), section 924, pp. 414–16. 12. To understand necessity as masculine breaks with philosophical tradition and maintains that thinking is a hetero-erotic activity. Attempts to think are precipitated by a desire to appropriate an irreducible element of otherness in a would-be object, regardless of its ‘real’ sex or lack of one. For

­156    Notes Freud and Derrida, following Plato and Nietzsche, Ananke is feminine. My precedent is Bowen’s description of chance as ‘lordly’. 13. Jacques Derrida, ‘Following Theory’, in Life.After.Theory, ed. Michael Payne and John Schad (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 8–9. 14. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 277. 15. Freud, ‘Negation’ (1925), trans. Joan Rivière, Standard Edition, Volume XIX, p. 237. 16. Elizabeth Bowen, Friends and Relations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1931] 1946), p. 84. 17. Pierre Fontanier calls anacoluthon a non-trope. See Fontanier, Les figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, [1827] 1977), p. 315. Derrida cites the definition in ‘ “Le Parjure,” Perhaps’, p. 182. 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘My Chances / Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, p. 360. 19. The exchange appears in full in John Woolford and Daniel Karlin, Robert Browning (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 252–9. 20. Quoted by Derrida in ‘ “Le Parjure”, Perhaps’, p. 182. 21. I am drawing on Agathon’s description of the soft qualities of eros, desire, in Symposium, 196a. See Plato, Symposium, ed. and trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1956), pp. 154–5.

A Mere Instinctive Deconstruction  1. Derrida, Glas, p. 227b.   2. My translation of ‘Je suis contre la licence. Je suis pour l’austerité. Et pour la séverité. Pour la séverité. Et donc la difficulté aujourd’hui, qui est la votre évidemment, c’est de liberer des puissances de transformation, de transgression, n’est-ce pas, sans perdre la séverité.’ Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, ‘Bâtons rompus’, in Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, ed. Thomas Dutoit et Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009), p. 199.   3. Jacques Derrida, ‘Je suis en guerre contre moi-même’, interview with Jean Birnbaum, Le Monde, 18 August, 2004. In English the title was more irenic: Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007).   4. Jacques Derrida, ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 229.   5. Jacques Derrida, ‘+R (Into the Bargain)’, in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 163.   6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Passe-Partout’, in The Truth in Painting, p. 11.  7. Robert Browning, ‘Tray’ (1879), Dramatic Idyls: First Series, Robert Browning: The Poems Volume II, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas Collins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), ll. 18–19.  8. Thomas Campbell, ‘The Harper’, Poetical Works (London: Edward Moxon, 1837), p. 190.

Notes    ­157  9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 162; De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 233; Bennington, Not Half No End, p. 134. 10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Roundtable on Translation’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 116. 11. Robert Browning, ‘Development’ (1889), Asolando: Fancies and Facts, Robert Browning: The Poems Volume II, l. 110. 12. Browning, Letter to Eliza Fitzgerald, 6 September 1881, Learned Lady: Letters from Robert Browning to Mrs. Thomas Fitzgerald, ed. Edward C. McAleer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 125. 13. See Sarah Wood, ‘Dream-hole’, Journal of European Studies 38.4 (December 2008), pp. 373–82. 14. Freud, Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, 3 December 1897 and 9 February 1898, in Sigmund Freud and Marie Bonaparte, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887–1902, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954), pp. 237, 245. See also The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 142, 453. 15. ‘L’os de la jouissance, sa chance et sa perte’ c’est qu’elle doit se sacrifier pour être là, pour se donner son là, pour toucher à son Da-sein’, Glas, p. 289a. 16. Derrida, ‘La parole soufflée’, Writing and Difference, p. 224. 17. Antonin Artaud, Letter to Jacques Rivière, 29 January 1924, in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 34–5. 18. Hegel, Letter to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, 13 October 1806: ‘I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . . . such advances as occurred from Thursday to Monday are only possible for this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire’. G. W. F. Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 114.

Close to the Earth   1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler (London: Longman, [1667] 1998), Book I, ll. 740–6.   2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Kho¯ra’, trans. Ian Mcleod, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 89.  3. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), Book I, ll. 711–16.   4. The story of Philoctetes is told in The Iliad, Book II, ll. 819–26, also in the tragedy by Sophocles, Philoctetes, which Derrida takes up in ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’, trans. David Wood, in On The Name, pp. 137–8. As well as having in common their time as outcasts on Lemnos, both Hephaestus and Philoctetes are wounded in the foot. What one cannot reach by falling one may reach by limping and retracing one’s steps.

­158    Notes  5. Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (New York: Columbia, 1994), p. 118.  6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 20.   7. Derrida, ‘Force and Signification’, in Writing and Difference, p. 34.   8. In ‘Force and Signification’ Derrida reads Feuerbach and Hegel on air and earth, and notes that ‘the problem of the relation between writing and the earth is also that of the possibility of such a metaphorization of the elements. Of its origin and meaning’ (pp. 383–4).  9. Jacques Derrida, Cinders / Feu la cendre, ed. and trans. Ned Lukacher (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 22. 10. Bronislaw Szerszynski, ‘The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human’, Oxford Literary Review 34.2 (2012), p. 168. 11. Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 163. 12. Timothy Clark, ‘What on World is the Earth?: The Anthropocene and Fictions of the World’, Oxford Literary Review 35.1 (2013), p. 7. 13. See Dieter Kurrle and Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig, ‘The Horizontal Hum of the Earth: A Global Background of Spheroidal and Toroidal Modes’, Geophysical Research Letters 35.6 (2008), and Tony Phillips, ‘NASA Spacecraft Records “Earthsong” ’, NASA Science News, available at http:// science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/28sep_earthsong (last accessed 29 July 2013).

Beyond Me Nowhere But This Earth  1. Hélène Cixous, ‘Bathsheba, or the Interior Bible’, trans. Catherine A. F. McGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 6.  2. Nicholas Roeg and John Stezaker, ‘Who Would Believe It?’, Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture 158 (October 2013), p. 239.  3. Dark Glass, film, directed by Clio Barnard (London: Arts Council England and the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund, 2006). The film was part of the ‘Single Shot’ project (2006), curated, promoted and toured by Film and Video Umbrella. Dark Glass can be viewed at http://singleshot.fvu.co.uk (last accessed 28 September 2013).  4. Clio Barnard, in conversation with the author 6 September 2007. Subsequent remarks are quoted from this conversation.   5. ‘Clio Barnard, The Selfish Giant’, Interview with Andreas Wiseman, Screen Daily, 2 August 2013, available at http://www.screendaily.com/features/ clio-barnard-the-selfish-giant/5059362.article (last accessed 27 September 2013).   6. ‘Clio Barnard: Interview with Quentin Falk’, Bafta Guru (October 2010), available at http://guru.bafta.org/clio-barnard-interview (last accessed 20 September 2013).  7. La Jetée, film, directed by Chris Marker (France: Argos Films, 1962).

Notes    ­159   8. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 14.   9. Joyce Crick’s translation of the passage is closer to the German than the Standard Edition, and rather easier to follow. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899 edition), trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 348; Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Gesammelte Werke II / III (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1987), p. 540. 10. Thema, ‘subject, thesis’, from Greek thema ‘a proposition, subject, deposit’, literally ‘something set down’, from root of tithenai, ‘put down, place’. Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert K. Barnhart (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1988), p. 1131.

Edit   1. Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 35; ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, p. 235; ‘My Chances / Mes Chances’, p. 345; Of Grammatology, p. 158.   2. Jacques Derrida, ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, trans. Rubin Berezdivin and Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, p. 189.   3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1840), in Shelley’s Prose, or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), p. 297.   4. Wallace Stevens, ‘Adagia’, in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (London: Faber, 1957), p. 178.   5. James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 319.  6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. xviii.

Reading Matters  1. Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 83–4.  2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Discussion’ after ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, trans. Richard Macksey, in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds, The Structuralist Controversy; the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 272.  3. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’, in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 271–3.   4. Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 91–2. Insister: À Jacques Derrida

­160    Notes (Paris: Galilée, 2006), p. 68. The passage is lettered with vs. Where the translation has to miss them I have added the French word in square brackets.  5. Michael Miller, Drawing Materials and Drawing Techniques: An Introduction (© 1999, 2000, 2001 Michael Miller), available at http:// www.nyu.edu/classes/miller/guide/counterproof.html (last accessed 11 May 2007).   6. ‘Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida: Their Psychoanalyses’, conference organised by Martin McQuillan, Eric Prenowitz and Ashley Thompson, University of Leeds, 1 July 2007.   7. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, p. 353.   8. Prince, ‘When 2 R in Love’, Lovesexy (California and New York: Warner Brothers, 1988).   9. Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 1. 10. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, Gesammelte Werke, II / III (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1987), p. 360. 11. Jacques Derrida, ‘Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor’, in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 52. 12. ‘Le travail que je fais sur ces textes-là, c’est le deuxième, le troisième, le quatrième, le cinquième regard et pour faire apparaître le trésor caché dedans, je me sers d’élément pédagogiques élémentaires. Par exemple, de couleurs. Je peux suivre a la trace par exemple en rouge, en bleu ou en jaune, un signifiant, un phonème qui mène.’ 13. Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 150. 14. Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), p. 46. 15. ‘C’est – comme si de la haut de la dune la plus haut du monde je voyais d’un coup la quantité de temps en tranches de chagrin qui m’arrive, – cette vision intérieure de quantité en détail, un fourmillement d’absences en marche et pas une simple Absence globale et totale mais une procession, un futur, c’est cette révélation physique de la répétition infinie que je ne pourrai pas supporter et que je devrai insupporter et supporter qui a libéré à l’endroit, un équivalent gazeux exact de la catastrophe annoncée . . .’ Hélène Cixous, Hyperrêve (Paris: Galilée, 2006), p. 66. 16. Robert Browning, ‘Popularity’, Men and Women (1855), Robert Browning: The Poems Volume I, l. 36. 17. ‘Cette arme tres dure’, Derrida, ‘Circonfessions’, Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 13.

Some Thing, Some One, Some Ghost (About the Fires of Writing)  1. Badlands, film, directed by Terrence Malick (California and New York: Warner Brothers, 1973).  2. Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, p. 302.

Notes    ­161   3. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 88.   4. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, [1951] 1974), p. 88.   5. John Ashbery, Your Name Here (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p. 3.   6. Chiara Alfano, ‘Strange Frequencies – Reading Hamlet with Derrida and Nancy’, Derrida Today 5.2 (2012), pp. 214–31.   7. ‘Memory regimes have insistently, silently and anonymously prolonged and defended the construct of “homeland security” (both in its political sense, and in the epistemological sense of being secure in our modes of cognition), but these systems of security have in fact accelerated the vortices of ecocatastrophic imaginaries. This leads to what can be called the zone of telemorphosis: that is, how and whether conceptual practices and cognitive rituals, including those of critical theory, have participated in the production of these horizons, and what, today, breaks with that.’ Tom Cohen, ‘Murmurations: “Climate Change” and the Defacement of Theory’, in Cohen, ed., Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume I, p. 15.   8. Tom Cohen, ‘Anecographies: Climate Change and “Late” Deconstruction’, in Henry Sussman, ed., Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume II (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), p. 45.  9. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 36. 10. Robert Browning, ‘St Martin’s Summer’, Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, with Other Poems (1876), in Robert Browning: The Poems Volume II, l. 91. 11. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 13. 12. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (London: Jonathan Cape, [1929] 1985), p. 23. 13. Jacques Derrida, ‘A “Madness” Must Watch Over Thinking’, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 352–3 / ‘Une “folie” doit veiller sur la pensée’, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992), pp. 363–4. 14. See also the occurrence of s’expliquer avec in Cinders, p. 22. 15. Bowen, ‘Pictures and Conversations’, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, p. 266. 16. Shakespeare, Hamlet (London: Methuen, [1623] 2006), II, ii, 183–4. 17. Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: A Biography (London: Avon Books, 1977), p. 74.

Nightshift   1. Commodores, ‘Nightshift’, by Clyde Orange, Dennis Lambert and Franne Golde, Nightshift (Detroit: Motown, 1985).   2. Whitney Balliett, American Musicians: Fifty-six Portraits in Jazz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 407; Samuel Weber, ‘Sidestepping: “Freud After Derrida” ’, Mosaic 44.3 (September 2011), pp. 1–14.

­162    Notes   3. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ (1936/7), trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, Volume III, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 149.   4. Walter Benjamin, ‘Der Erzähler’, Gesammelte Schriften II, ed. Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 444.  5. Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 January 1904, in Ronald. K Hayman, A Biography of Kafka (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981), p. 41.  6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Mnemosyne’, trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Memoires: for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 3.   7. Nicholas Royle, Quilt (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2010), pp. 44–5.  8. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Out of a Book’, in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, pp. 48–9.  9. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 172. 10. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume I, pp. 299; quoted in Derrida ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, p. 251. 11. Derrida, ‘To Speculate – On Freud’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, p. 261. 12. Jean Laplanche and J-B Pontalis, ‘Pleasure Principle’, in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1983), p. 325. 13. Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida and Aliette Armiel, ‘From the Word of Life’, trans. Ashley Thompson, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, p. 173. 14. Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 25. 15. Jacques Derrida and Didier Cahen, ‘There is No One “Narcissism” (Autobiophotographies)’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, p. 199. 16. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Novel Today’, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, p. 20. 17. Jacques Derrida and Catherine David, ‘Unsealing (“the old new language”)’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, p. 119. 18. Derrida, ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, trans. Michael Israel, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, p. 247. 19. Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1909), trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume IX, p. 237. 20. Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895), trans. James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume II, p. 7. 21. Alfred Tennyson, ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ (1847), in Tennyson: a Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1989), p. 266.

Notes    ­163 Too Late to Begin?  1. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1865] 2008), p. 50.   2. Bill Readings’s posthumous book The University in Ruins remains definitive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); see also Oxford Literary Review 17 (1995), a special issue also called The University in Ruins, ed. Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle.  3. Freud, ‘Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915), Standard Edition, Volume XII, p. 162.   4. See especially David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. I. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1739–40] 1975), pp. 23–4. David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, facsimile reproduction (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, [1749] 1976), p. 66.   5. Derrida, ‘Roundtable on Autobiography’, p. 53.   6. Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914), trans. C. M. Baines and James Strachey, Standard Edition, Volume XIV, p. 96.  7. Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC, ‘Global Warming Resources’, available at http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/global-warming/ index.html (last accessed 8 September 2013).   8. David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), p. 143.   9. Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’, in Without Alibi, p. 206. 10. Sarah Cornell and Jenneth Parker, ‘Critical Realist Interdisciplinarity: A Research Agenda to Support Action on Global Warming’, in Bhaskar et al., Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change, p. 32. 11. Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 8. 12. Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 58. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 14. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Ruined Maid’ (1901), in Poems of the Past and the Present, Complete Poems (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 158–9. 15. Jacques Derrida, Signéponge / Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 4. 16. Nicholas Royle, ‘Our Mutual Friend’, in John Schad, ed., Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires and Other Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 47. 17. Leo Bersani and Nicholas Royle, ‘Beyond Redemption: An Interview with Leo Bersani’, Oxford Literary Review 20 (1998), p. 185.

Index

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, 104 Adorno, Theodor ‘Commitment’, 20 Introduction to Sociology, 142 Minima Moralia, 103, 106, 145–6 agency, 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, 86 air, 2–3, 5, 8, 12, 60, 80, 82, 90, 95, 99, 123, 140, 146, 158n Alfano, Chiara, 104 anacoluthon, 26, 29–30, 36–7, 38–41, 61, 156n ananke, 24, 29–32, 33, 40, 41, 43, 52, 140, 149, 155n, 156n; see also necessity angels, 18, 19, 53–4, 57, 59, 78, 97, 154n anguish, 1, 5–6, 78, 107 animality, 18–20, 47, 51, 62, 66, 78, 80, 88–9, 98–9, 109 animals bat, 64 bun-like creature, 121, 122 cat, 45, 47, 97 dog, 43–52 hedgehog, 78, 91 hydra, 18–20 pig, 1, 8, 10–12, 25 shellfish, 98–9 wolf, 1, 11, 25, 46, 47, 137 worm, 78–80, 84, 91 see also birds; deconstruction: animal-like Anthropocene, the, 4, 9, 13, 58–9, 115 aphorism, 12, 25, 60 archive, 9, 12, 30, 41, 62, 72, 97, 107, 110, 143, 147 Artaud, Antonin, 49, 50, 103, 111

Ashbery, John, 103–4 autobiography, 92, 121–2, 126 automatism, 20, 28, 62, 63, 64, 65, 71 Barnard, Clio, 66–74 The Arbor, 67–8 Dark Glass, 67–74 The Selfish Giant, 67 beauty, 20, 55, 72, 77, 95–100, 117, 124, 132, 143 belief, 26, 29, 34–5, 37, 40, 44, 47–8, 55, 59, 60, 63, 71, 79, 83, 86, 98, 106, 108, 112, 121, 130, 136, 139, 146 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Storyteller’, 115, 116, 117–18, 121, 122–4, 130, 131–2 Bennington, Geoffrey, 18, 44 Bersani, Leo ‘Beyond Redemption: An Interview’, 148–9 The Culture of Redemption, 106, 107 Bhaskar, Roy, 7, 141 Bible, The, 3, 9, 10, 66 birds, 91, 95, 124, 134 dream-bird, 124–5 eagle, 21 martin, 7, 12, 51–2, 153n raven, 8 robin, 62 Bowen, Elizabeth Friends and Relations, 36 The Last September, 25, 110–14 The Little Girls, 6–13, 24–41, 132 ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, 6, 8, 11, 12, 104, 105 ‘Out of a Book’, 118 ‘Pictures and Conversations’, 112 ‘Preface’ to The Demon Lover, 8

Index    ­165 breath, 2, 9, 22, 25, 54, 55, 58, 60, 62, 72, 78, 101, 108 Browning, Robert ‘Development’, 45–7 Letter to John Ruskin, 38 ‘Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession’, 14, 16–18 ‘Popularity’, 98–100 ‘St. Martin’s Summer’, 107–10 ‘Tray’, 43–5, 50–2 bubbles, 2, 4–7, 104 Campbell, Thomas, 43 chance, 26, 41, 48, 52, 72, 75, 93, 97, 98, 106, 130, 156n, 157n; see also Derrida: ‘My Chances’ child, 25–41, 43, 45–7, 50–2, 62–3, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73–4, 96, 105, 118, 131, 132, 133, 141, 143, 151n; see also deconstruction: child-like Cixous, Hélène, 42, 49, 54, 66, 85–101 ‘Bathsheba, or the Interior Bible’, 66 ‘Bâtons rompus’, 94 ‘From the Word to Life’, 121 Hyperdream, 96–7, 132 Insister of Jacques Derrida, 86 ‘The Novel Today’, 128, 129 ‘The Play of Fiction’, 15, 123, 130 Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, 91 ‘Preface: On Being Interviewed’, 16, 130 Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 54–5, 75, 93, 100 ‘Writing Blind’, 95 Clark, Timothy, 5, 15, 61–2, 128 climate change, 5–8, 14–15, 103, 104, 117, 120, 128, 138, 139, 141–2, 144, 150, 151n, 152n, 161n Cohen, Tom, 104, 110, 161n Colebrook, Clare, 2, 4–5, 6, 13, 23 Coleman, Ornette, 115 colour, 31, 34, 72–3, 92, 94–5, 97–8, 100–1, 110, 129 comedy, 33, 149 Commodores, 115 correspondence, 31, 48, 130, 134 dance, 56–7, 76, 79–80, 90, 149 death, 1, 8, 18–19, 30, 36, 40, 69, 70, 98, 103, 104, 107, 108–10, 116, 117, 121, 122, 129, 130, 136, 151n death drive, 29, 30, 70, 105, 117, 122, 129

deconstruction, 6, 42–52, 65, 66, 85, 140 animal-like, 20, 78 child-like, 62–3, 65–6 see also Cixous; Derrida Derrida, Jacques Archive Fever, 26, 29–30, 97, 129, 147 ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, 76 ‘Bâtons rompus’, 42, 49, 50, 66 The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, 6, 67, 68 ‘Che Cos’è la Poesia?’, 62–5, 76–8, 82, 118, 123 Cinders, 134, 135 ‘Circumfession’, 120, 131, 133 Counterpath, 122, 125 Discussion after ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, 86 ‘Dissemination’, 24 The Ear of the Other, 44, 49, 136 ‘Envois’, 61, 65, 75–84, 102, 107, 111, 121, 125, 129–30, 135 ‘Following Theory’, 31, 41, 48 For What Tomorrow, 119 ‘Force and Signification’, 89–91 ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, 1–2, 5, 10, 16, 58, 119, 125, 128 Glas, 20–1, 42, 44, 48, 50, 63, 87–8, 100, 120, 157n ‘I Have a Taste For the Secret’, 5 ‘Introduction’ to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, 103 ‘Kho¯ra’, 53, 54, 71 ‘La parole soufflée’, 49–50 ‘Le Parjure: Perhaps’, 26 ‘Mnemosyne’, 116 ‘My Chances’, 37, 83 ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, 9 Of Grammatology, 44, 47, 48, 75, 88 Paper Machine, 93, 94–5 ‘Passe-Partout’, 43 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 24 Politics of Friendship, 34 ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’, 86 ‘+R: Into the Bargain’, 43, 44 ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, 127 Signsponge, 144–5 ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, 85, 87 Spectres of Marx, 105–6, 109–11, 113, 137 Spurs, 28

­166    Index ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, 88, 98 ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, 103, 111 ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, 75 ‘To Speculate – On Freud’, 119, 121–2, 123, 124, 126–7, 128, 131 ‘The University Without Condition’, 140 ‘Unsealing (“the old new language”)’, 125–6 desire, 1, 2, 3, 10, 27–8, 31, 34, 36, 40–1, 44, 47, 49, 75–7, 81–2, 98, 102, 105–6, 109, 110, 112, 113, 137, 138, 143, 156n; see also eros; love dialectic, 5, 17, 33, 46, 127 Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend, 134–50 dictation, 26, 29, 31, 49, 58, 61, 64, 70–1, 76–7, 79, 81, 82, 123, 130 dictionary, 44, 78–9, 82, 155n disappearance, 1, 3, 5–6, 8, 12, 22, 36, 45, 60, 62, 64, 73, 76, 84, 98, 117, 122, 133 dissemination, 1, 9, 67, 68; see also Derrida: ‘Dissemination’; seeds dolls, 51–2, 80, 105 drama, 16, 40, 90; see also theatricality dramatic monologue, 45–6, 107 dreams, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 41, 57–8, 59, 61, 63, 66, 70, 71, 72, 75, 86, 89, 91–4, 100, 101, 103, 120, 124, 125–6, 127, 129; see also birds: dream-bird; Cixous: Hyperdream; Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams drives, 29, 30–1, 97, 101, 105, 122, 129, 131 earth, 2–7, 13, 15, 53–65, 66–74, 82, 89, 95, 97, 104, 108, 109, 120, 130, 147–8, 158n education, 32, 45–50; see also universities Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 19 ellipsis, 2, 38, 77, 79, 80, 87 enantiosis, 25, 42; see also irony envy, 10, 28, 34, 59, 83, 140 eros, 31, 32–3, 34, 39, 40, 47, 97, 112, 117, 138, 141, 155n, 156n; see also desire; love ethics, 24–7, 32–4, 46

failure, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 103, 107, 131–2, 142, 151n falling, 10–11, 51, 53–5, 57–61, 62, 78, 127, 143, 158n family, 10, 43, 47, 70, 127, 130–1, 155n; see also Freud: ‘Family Romances’ fear, 9, 10, 12, 13, 35, 40, 53, 96, 105, 113, 120, 122, 142 film, 68–74, 75–6, 102, 105, 113, 117 fire, 7, 11, 22, 31, 78, 84, 102–14, 135, 144 flair, 44, 88 flesh, 48, 62, 82, 92, 108–9, 111, 121, 147 flowers, 92–4, 100 force, 1–2, 4–5, 8–9, 10, 13, 15, 26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 41, 47–8, 56–7, 64, 69, 86–7, 88, 104, 109, 129, 130, 131, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 149, 155n; see also ananke; drives; necessity; power Frank, Cheryl, 7, 16, 140 freedom, 4, 8, 15, 17, 21, 28, 42, 49, 65, 82–3, 98, 146 Freud, Sigmund, 24, 29–31, 66, 105, 115–33, 136, 138, 149, 153n ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 17, 27, 30, 37, 77, 116, 119–22, 126, 129, 130 Civilisation and Its Discontents, 30, 97, 99 ‘Family Romances’, 130–1 ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, 95 The Interpretation of Dreams, 20, 71, 86, 89, 91–4, 100, 123, 127–8, 135 Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, 47 ‘Negation’, 35, 76, 109 New Introductory Lectures, 2 ‘Observations on Transference-Love’, 142 Project for a Scientific Psychology, 119, 124 Studies on Hysteria, 132 friendship, 1, 9, 11, 12, 25–7, 31, 33–6, 43, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75, 136, 149–50, 155n; see also Derrida: Politics of Friendship; Dickens, Our Mutual Friend future, the, 1–2, 6, 8–9, 12, 14–15, 19, 40, 52, 69, 87, 96, 107, 123, 131, 133, 139, 147

Index    ­167 Garnier, Marie-Dominique, 35 Genet, Jean, 22, 44, 100 ghosts, 40, 102–14, 140; see also Derrida: Spectres of Marx; haunting happiness, 69, 72, 101 haunting, 7, 12, 83, 102–14, 118, 139, 147, 150; see also Derrida: Spectres of Marx; ghosts Hegel, 20, 21, 88, 100, 127, 158n Aesthetics, 17–18 Phenomenology of Spirit, 3, 45 Philosophy of Mind, 22, 154n Philosophy of Nature, 154n Letters, 50, 157n see also dialectic Heidegger, Martin, 48 heroism, 43, 50, 115, 118, 124, 125, 126, 131 hierarchy, 19, 53, 57, 108, 146 Homer, 46, 54, 55, 58, 60 homophony, 19, 65, 77 houses, 10–11, 12, 21, 25, 27, 73, 105, 108–9, 111, 112 burning house, 102, 104–5, 108–9, 113 cedar-house, 99 house-clearing, 116–17 warehouse, 143, 147 women’s house, 100 hubris, 83–4; see also tragedy hypnosis, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 information, 1, 119, 122–3, 138–9 institution, 75, 85, 86, 89, 92, 130–1 interdisciplinarity, 7, 139, 142, 148–9 irony, 25, 27, 38, 42 irrevocable, the, 8, 13, 144, 149 joy, 12, 43, 47, 56, 59, 71, 72, 83, 94, 130, 147 Joyce, James, 81 Kafka, Franz, 91, 116 Kamuf, Peggy, 109 law, 48, 53, 64, 71, 76, 89, 97, 106, 107, 128, 141, 145 letters, 18, 19, 22, 33, 42, 44–5, 63–6, 76, 83, 85, 87, 89–91, 94–5, 101, 111, 160n; see also correspondence; syllables; vocables love, 10, 12, 30, 32–5, 41, 52, 65, 73, 74, 75–84, 89, 95, 102–14, 115,

117, 122, 129–30, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 144, 150; see also desire; eros of beauty, 62 of language, 99 McMullen, Ken, Ghost Dance, 105 magic, 6–7, 56–7, 88, 97, 107, 124, 128 Malick, Terrence, Badlands, 102, 104–5, 113 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 18–20, 22–3 management, 7, 14–15, 141, 153n mark, 22, 23, 24, 29, 35, 36–7, 40, 41, 43, 45, 69, 89, 91, 145; see also trace; trait market value, 15, 138–9, 140 mastery, 8, 15, 18, 20, 25, 43, 54, 57, 126, 128, 142, 146, 149, 150, 157n, 163n masturbation, 27–8 memory, 8, 30, 41, 45, 67, 71–2, 76, 94, 110, 118, 119–22, 124, 161n metaphor, 38, 39, 57, 61, 89, 135, 158n metonymy, 38, 99, 141 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 53–61, 64 monography, 7, 93 Morlock, Forbes, 15 mourning, 30, 77, 98, 102, 105, 117, 132–3, 137–8, 140, 142, 143–4, 147, 148 music, 14–23, 56, 76, 77, 79, 89, 105, 110, 115, 120, 125–6, 132–3, 143, 144 names, 1, 2, 4, 6–7, 11, 20–1, 22, 24, 27, 29–30, 31, 33, 36, 43–4, 45, 47, 48, 53, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 63, 64, 65, 75, 76, 78, 79–80, 83, 86, 87, 96, 106, 110, 116, 120, 129, 132, 135–6, 145–7, 155n narcissism, 5, 11, 110–12, 122, 136, 153n necessity, 5, 6, 18, 24, 26, 28–36, 38, 41, 42–3, 48–9, 52, 58, 88, 95, 103, 112, 113, 119, 126, 128, 135, 137, 147, 155n; see also ananke negation, 25, 34–5, 38, 42, 58, 104, 109; see also Freud: ‘Negation’ Nietzsche, Friedrich The Birth of Tragedy, 56–8, 62 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 89–90, 156n oil, 8, 63; see also petrol ontology, 26, 28, 137

­168    Index performance, 72, 95, 101, 141, 144, 147, 149–50 performance indicators, 15, 107, 153n performativity, 3–4, 7, 28, 49, 69, 141, 144, 147, 149–50 petrol, 102, 114; see also oil Plato, 24, 79, 83–4, 130 Republic, 29–34, 149, 156n Symposium, 40, 156n Poe, Edgar Allan, 18–20, 23, 154n poetic experience, 3–4, 16, 49, 51, 57, 62, 64, 67, 82, 93, 98, 110, 120, 144 poetic writing, 11, 15–23, 34, 38, 44–52, 53–65, 76–7, 82, 93, 97–101, 107–9, 110, 116, 123, 124, 126, 134 power, 3–4, 9–10, 15, 19–20, 22, 34, 37, 38, 42, 53, 56–8, 87, 123, 130, 135, 140, 142–3, 144, 154n; see also ananke; drives; force; necessity precipitation, 61, 63, 137; see also falling prehistory, 9, 66, 103, 114 Prince, 89 projection, 27, 55, 56, 120, 122 proof, 2, 66, 77, 78, 81, 84, 85, 86 counter-proof, 87, 88 proper, the, 1–2, 4, 8, 11, 24, 25, 30, 38, 65, 71, 72, 79, 80, 116 property, 35, 123, 134–5 prophecy, 2–3, 6, 16, 101 reading, 3–23, 24–8, 34–5, 39, 42, 44–7, 49–52, 55, 57–60, 62, 64–5, 66, 73, 75–84, 85–101, 104, 105, 107, 110–12, 116, 118, 119, 120–1, 122, 127, 130, 134–50; see also the unreadable realism, 14, 16, 22, 112 reason, 4, 8, 10, 51, 108, 111, 120 relaxation, 86, 120, 123, 124–5 repetition, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 19, 29, 30–1, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 59, 60, 65, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 87, 90, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 122, 123, 143, 151n rhythm, 22, 58, 60–2, 97, 105, 111, 123, 124, 125 rigour, 38–9, 43, 45, 47–8, 49–50, 83–4, 128 rooms, 21, 41, 100, 101, 103–4, 110–11, 114, 123, 147

Royle, Nicholas, 145, 146 Quilt, 116–17, 132 sadness, 8, 11–12, 72, 131 scholarship, 45, 46, 102, 106, 108, 112 Sedgwick, Eve, 141 seeds, 2, 9, 123, 124, 130, 131, 132; see also dissemination sensitivity, 116, 119–20, 121, 122, 129, 131 sex, 32, 89, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 106, 112, 117, 121, 124, 129, 130, 144, 148 sexual difference, 24, 26, 28, 41, 85, 91, 112, 117, 156n Shakespeare, William, 5 Hamlet, 94, 113 Macbeth, 1–13, 40–1, 153 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 76 signature, 63, 65, 80, 125–6, 136, 145 signifier, 38, 43, 63, 80, 88, 91, 94, 98, 99, 116, 136 skin, 4, 94, 97, 98, 100, 110, 116, 119, 121 song, 9, 11, 14, 16–18, 22, 40, 50, 52, 61, 62, 64, 88, 99, 100, 115, 125, 133, 144, 149, 158n sound, 4, 17–23, 35, 43, 47, 56, 58, 60, 64, 66, 70, 78, 81, 82, 87, 95, 114, 115 soundtrack, 73, 76, 77, 79, 82 see also Stevens: ‘The Creations of Sound’ Stevens, Wallace ‘Adagia’, 79 ‘The Creations of Sound’, 20–2, 53, 117 ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, 100 ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, 62 stories, 6, 9, 25, 34–5, 43, 53–4, 58, 69, 112, 115–18, 122–6, 130–3, 137, 157n sublimation, 102, 106, 112 superego, 136–7 syllables, 21, 50, 60, 63, 78, 80, 82, 88; see also letters; vocables syntax, 19, 26, 38, 39, 40, 60, 96 teaching, 7, 9, 69, 90, 94, 125, 135, 139–40, 142–3, 147–50, 155n tears, 27, 115, 121, 131–3 telepathy, 76, 104, 129 telephones, 72, 79, 96

Index    ­169 Tennyson, Alfred, 133 tension, 48, 96, 103, 104, 106, 107, 120, 125, 129 theatricality, 107, 144; see also drama theoretical fiction, 119, 121, 127–8 thinking, 1–2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15–16, 17, 18, 20–1, 22, 24–41, 42, 44, 49, 50, 53, 56, 61, 64, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 98, 101, 102–4, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128–9, 133, 136, 138–41, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 150, 153n, 155n the thought of the trace, 1, 5, 8, 44, 50; see also trace; trait tomb, 18–19, 64, 88, 103, 123 Torok, Maria, 27–8 and Nicolas Abraham, 104 touch, 1, 28, 43, 48, 68, 70, 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 91, 99, 104, 110, 119, 121, 145, 157n trace, 1, 5–6, 8, 9, 12, 30, 36, 44–5, 47, 48, 50, 57–8, 65, 94–5, 119–20, 121, 124, 145, 147, 148, 160n; see also mark; trait tragedy, 2, 12, 47, 56, 83, 126, 129; see also hubris; Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy

trait, 37, 44–7, 129; see also mark; trace transference, 33–4, 49, 63, 65, 81, 83, 135–6, 138, 141, 142, 144, 149–50 universities, 14–18, 49, 107, 118, 125, 134–50; see also education; institution unreadable, the, 19, 64, 69, 111, 125; see also reading vocables, 18, 64, 80, 87; see also letters; syllables voice, 4, 8, 9, 16–18, 22–3, 31, 47, 56, 58, 61, 63–4, 67–8, 70–1, 77, 85–6, 88, 90, 95, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 111, 115, 126, 137, 142 water, 2, 6, 7, 14, 52, 76, 78, 86, 89, 91, 99, 119, 131, 137–8, 143 weakness, 5, 131, 149–50 White, Gilbert, 7 witches, 3–4, 8, 11, 12, 151n writing, 5, 6–13, 14–23, 24–5, 26, 34–5, 37–8, 43, 44, 45–6, 47–50, 53–62, 65, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81–4, 85–101, 102–14, 115–17, 121–2, 122–4, 125–7, 129–30, 135–6, 140, 142, 145, 148