Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature

Jacques Derrida is undoubtedly qne of the foremost figures in the development of twentieth-century literary theory. The ...

Author: Timothy Clark

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Jacques Derrida is undoubtedly qne of the foremost figures in the development of twentieth-century literary theory. The school of 'deconstruction' that has grown out of his work has been either absorbed into the corpus of modern literary theory, or more recently criticised for its departures from the original texts of Derrida in whose name it is practised. Timothy Clark's innovative book traces instead sources of Derrida's practice of 'literature' as a form of philosophical thinking in the work of Heidegger and Blanchot. It offers a welcome stylistic clarity in a field beleaguered by its philosophical and linguistic difficulty. Clark gives close readings of key texts including Heidegger's Conversation on a Country Path, Blanchot's L' attente l'oubli, and Derrida's Pas and Signsponge, and widens the scope of his discussion of philosophical cultivations of 'literary' forms to include in addition the issues of creativity, influence and responsibility and the work of Lyotard and Levinas.

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, BLANCHOT

DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, BLANCHOT Sources of Derrida's notion and practice of literature

TIMOTHY CLARK University of Durham

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West zoth Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Victoria 3 I 66, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1992 Parts of this text have already appeared in MLN, 101 (1986) © The Johns Hopkins University Press, and as 'French Heidegger and an English Poet: Charles Tomlinson's" Poem" and the Status of Heideggerian Dichtung', Man and World: An International Philosophical Review, 20 (1987), pp. 305-26, © Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. The latter is reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Pu blishers. First published 1992

A catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library Library ofCongress cataloguing in publication data Clark, Timothy, 1958Derrida, Heidegger and Blanchot: sources of Derrida's notion and practice of literature / Timothy Clark. p. ern. Includes index. ISBN 0 52 I 40539 4 (hardback) 1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Deconstruction. 3. LiteraturePhilosophy. 4. Heidegger, Martin, 188g-I976. 5. Blanchot, Maurice. 1. Title. PN98.D43C5 199 1 801'.95'092 - DC20 91-25237 CIP ISBN 0 52 I 40539 4 hardback

Transferred to digital printing 2004

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For Joel andfor Georgia

Contents

Preface Abbreviations

page xi Xlll

Introduction Overcoming aesthetics: Heideggerian Dichtung

20

2

Blanchot: the literary space

64

3

Derrida and the literary

108

4

The event of signature: a 'science' of the singular?

150

Postscript: responsibilities

Notes Index ofnames Index ofsubjects

IX

Preface

The intellectual debate that continues to surround the term 'deconstruction' has now become broadly divided into two camps. On the one side we see deconstructive readings absorbed easily into introductions and anthologies of critical or literary theory. 'Deconstruction' is one package amongst others in an increasingly less controversial field. On the other hand the past five years have seen a series of books which forcefully argue that what often passes as 'deconstruction' bears little relation to those texts ofJacques Derrida in whose name it is often given. These studies proceed to give variously oriented readings of Derrida's work in its relation to, for example, Hegel, Heidegger or Freud. In fact, 'Derrida studies' has become an elusive subdiscipline practised by a small group of thinkers in which radical claims about literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis often seem undercut by the sheer difficulty and erudition needed to follow the progress of the arguments. The result, for the reader, is an increasing sense of two things: (a) of the proportional relationship between difficulty and a feeling of arbitrariness and, correspondingly, (b) a certain amount of dullness. 'Derrida studies' seem in increasing danger of becoming an arcane minority interest located somewhere between French studies and a sort of literary-history of philosophy. When writing on texts in which the very possibility of metalanguage is a vexed issue, the mode of one's own study itself becomes of importance. It is well known that terms such as 'clarity' or 'lucidity' are metaphors that too easily mask prejudice. However, to cultivate maximum accessibility can also, I believe, give one's writing a maximum openness or even Xl

Xll

Preface

vulnerability; hence it may become one way in which a text of this sort can aim to be responsible. The earlier sections of the first three chapters are written at a pace designed to make them readable by relative newcomers to the field and to prepare them for the more involved issues of later sections. The issue throughout is why the literary work of art assumes such lively importance in the work of Heidegger, Blanchot and Derrida, three thinkers who form, to a qualified degree, a distinct community of meditation. Indeed, an odd point to have emerged recently is that those essays by Derrida that concern the literary text are quite different from the better-known deconstructions of philosophical thinkers. I t is in attempting to trace the nature and rationale of this difference that this essay tracks Derrida's neologism, litterature, from the work, almost exclusively, of Heidegger and Blanchot. What is at stake in these texts, I believe, is nothing less than an attempt to follow through new and previously elided forms of coherence in argument and thought (other than and inherent in logical coherence) as they impose their own emergent necessity in certain texts. All translations not otherwise acknowledged are my own.

Abbreviations

Heidegger BT

Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980

Conversation

'Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking' in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 58-90 Nietzsche: Vol. One: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1981 Nietzsche: Vol. Four: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi. New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1982 On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1971 Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1971 What is Called Thinking, trans.J. Glenn Gray. New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1968

N,

I

N,

IV

WL PLT WT

Blanchot L'ao

E1

LV PF Le pas

L' attente I'oubli, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1963 L' entretien infini, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969 Le livre venir, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1959 La part du feu, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1949 Le pas au-dela, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1973

a

Xlll

Abbreviations

XIV

SL

The Space ofLiterature, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, Nebr. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982

SS

The Siren's Song: Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, Sussex : Harvester, 1982 Derrida

Diss Gr Fh LG LO MP P RM S

Sh

WD

Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press and London: Athlone Press, 1981 Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974 Les fins de l' homme ; a partir du travail de Jacques Derrida. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981 'The Law of Genre', trans. Avital Ronell. Glyph 7 (1980), pp. 202-32 'Living On', trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1979, pp. 75- 176 Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, Ill. University of Chicago Press and Sussex: Harvester, 1982 Parages. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986 'The Retrait of Metaphor', trans. F. Gasdner et al., Enclitic 2, 2 (1978) Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1984 'Schibboleth', trans. Joshua Wilner, in Midrash and Literature, ed. Stanley Budick and Geoffrey Hartman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986 Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1978

Abbreviations

xv

Levinas

TI OBBE

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exterionty, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, I g6g Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Ig81

Introduction

What has made literary or critical theory more than another fashion in the discipline of literary study is the fact that the possibility of theory in general has repeatedly been at stake. Nevertheless, much modern literary criticism and literary history, even a lot of what passes as 'new historicism', remains implicitly committed to positivistic assumptions that there is some easily accessible literary object to be described,' classified, related to general cultural processes, etc. These positivist assumptions of literary history overlook one major question what sort of object is a literary text? In fact, the mode of being of the literary is, in itself, a virtual repudiation of positivism. It does not take' deconstruction' to tell us this. That the literary text is not an object is one of the arguments of Roman Ingarden's classic The Literary Work ofArt of 1931.1 A similar conclusion is to be found in chapter 12 of Rene Wellek's and Austin Warren's Theory ofLiterature (1949).2 This chapter, written by Wellek and heavily indebted to Ingarden, demolishes various accounts of the literary text as any sort of empirical or psychological entity. It is not (a) an artefact like a piece of sculpture, that is, the physical page(s) or book, (b) the real sounds uttered by someone performing the text, (c) the psychological experience of hearing or reading it, (d) the experience of the author in creating it, (e) nor, finally, is it the totality of readers' experiences or even quite what all of them have in common (which would be merely a lowest common denominator) . Wellek concludes that a text is only a matter of' norms' which serve as 'a potential cause of experiences' (p. 150). This,

2

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot

however, is less an answer to the question than an acknowledgement of the empty space left by the various failures of the positivist approach. For Maurice Blanchot, 'The only positivity of the literary space is the strangeness of its approach. It does not exist, but its persistence ... is uneliminable.t" The mode of being of the literary work of art - this phrase announces a question that remains badly addressed. This is in spite of the considerable industry devoted to literary theory and questions of the nature ofinterpretation. The phrase announces, perhaps more succinctly than many others, what is at issue in those various texts ofJacques Derrida which remain the focus of many debates in the literary field. Indeed the question of the mode of being of 'literature' attains such force in Derrida's work that it challenges received notions of ontology and being itself. It becomes a question which renders everything it touches questionable. Hence in the question 'What is literature' the 'is' itself becomes part of what is at stake. 'What is literature' cannot automatically be subsumed within the philosophical question par excellence,' what is?' - this is the claim. If this is so, however, then clearly what Derrida calls the' literary' or litterature cannot be too easily assimilated to what is normally meant by the term, even if this is where one has to start. 'Literature' can no longer be understood as a 'what' of any familiar kind either. All three words of the question (' what is literature? ') implicate themselves as at stake in its asking in an almost paralysing way. Martin Heidegger's question of being is alone in granting to something 'literary' a force analogous to the claims for 'literature' made by Derrida. Indeed, it has recently been recognised that Derrida's project is unintelligible unless its continual questioning proximity to Heidegger's is borne in mind." However, the precaution already stated in relation to Derrida applies no less to Heidegger. What he terms Dichtung (' poetising ') is not to be confused with what one already understands by 'poetry' or 'fiction'. Both Derrida's litterature and Heidegger's Dichtung attempt a leap outside what these terms have come to designate in the past few centuries. Nevertheless, it is with the mode of being of the literary as

Introduction

3

more commonly understood that this study begins. Only such a beginning can provide a threshold to understanding the more radical notions of Heidegger and Derrida. Why did the' literary' become such an active field of debate, even outside of the strictly literary departments of universities? In the English-speaking world the philosophy ofscience remains the most prominent area of this overflow of the literary, especially in relation to the variously holistic and relativistic positions adopted by such diverse philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty." Here the 'literary' was meant only in the sense of fictional language, language that has suspended its claim to refer directly to any existing state of affairs. This became of importance in proportion to the degree that thought had undermined a naive representationalist view of language as unproblematically describing reality. The' literary' emerged in the fractures left by the failures of the positivist and reductionist programmes. The holism/relativism that led to the blurring of distinctions between literal and figurative, fictional and non-fiction etc., can be schematised to the following two basic tenets. The first is that of the indetermination of data. Contrary to inductivism (the attempt to deduce general laws from unproblematic and merely observed' facts ') it was argued that the apparently descriptive terms of an 'observation' statement are as 'fallible as the theories they presuppose and therefore do not constitute a secure basis on which to build scientific laws and theories'. 6 This is because' observation' statements are not neutral but can only be made in the language of some theory. The meaning of basic concepts is not derived from experience but (already) from some theoretical framework, through which alone the selective observation of any discrete thing or characteristic becomes possible. Common sense and ordinary language, on this view, have no privilege. They constitute, as it were, only an imprecise and open-ended mode of theory, not an unproblematic picture of 'things as they are'. Because one can no longer say that meaning is quite derived from observation it becomes clear that the same data could be 'explained' equally well in a number of theories, which may even

4


be incompatible. 'Observational findings can be reinterpreted, and can perhaps even be made to lend support to a point of view that was originally inconsistent with them' (Feyerabend)." Observation no longer seemed to provide a secure basis on which to decide between one interpretation of phenomena and another. Correspondingly, the existence of any straightforwardly representational language became problematic. Theories acquired a certain' literary' tinge. 'Meta-language' is impossible. A second tenet of the dominant holism/relativism was the diacritical nature of meaning. No datum is meaningful in itself; this meaning is defined by its relation to the totality of the theory. The' meaning ofevery term we use depends upon the theoretical context in which it occurs' (Feyerabend )." The word 'force' in one theory is thus not, strictly speaking, the same as the word 'force' in another. Theories and interpretations seemed thus incommensurable, not only with the supposed 'facts' (the first tenet), but also with each other. Finally one could no longer say quite what the theories were 'about'. The 'about' became redundant as the notion of truth as the correspondence of language or concept to the world collapsed, leaving only the notion of truth according to a pragmatic or coherence model (what 'holds together'). The quotations given above all stem from discussions in the philosophy of science. However, many controversies in literary theory followed similar lines. Indeed, philosophers such as Richard Rorty have long been assimilated to the debate and a contentious school of new pragmatist critics grew up largely working around the journal Critical Inquiry. Questions such as the following still define many debates: Are interpretations of texts validated by appeal to some pregiven sense' in the text' or are they (like 'theories' for Feyerabend and others) only readings of something that no longer has an objective nature in itself? 'Objective identity' is pitted against the play of language or societal construction." Problems about the nature of the object in the theory of science come to seem equally, even especially, to apply to the 'literary object'. Much literary criticism styling itself deconstructive remains

Introduction

5

stuck in the impasses of this particular argument - the negation of positivism and its derivative notions of representation. J. Hillis Miller's reading of Wallace Stevens' 'The Red Fern' is a striking instance of this impasse. It works through narrowly positivist assumptions about language and does little more than invert thern.!" Miller's reading follows from his acceptance ofa definition of' literal' language as the' the match of the word with the perception of the things'. Miller relates this notion to Stevens' poem, which exploits a red fern as an image for daylight and the sun. He then argues (a) that 'sun' is not 'literal' because the sun cannot be directly observed and, (b) that Stevens' figure of the red fern is also' strictly speaking' nonsense, because the image of day as a plant' does not make sense as the description of any empirical phenomenon' (p. 157). On these grounds, Miller claims that the poem enacts 'the unsettling freedom of language from perception' (p. 156)! It affirms, he concludes, the necessity of recognising that' literal' reality (the sun, for instance) is only expressible in a series of verbal substitutions. This argument, manifestly absurd in precis, is merely the inverted image of positivistic assumptions of extraordinary naivety. Even the logical positivists (who would at least allow for the use of scientific instruments in viewing the sun!) did not employ so narrow a concept of meaningful reference. Another view of Derrida's work which may be challenged is that it concerns 'literature' as an unassimilable mode of language because it breaks down the distinction between text and criticism. Jonathan Culler gives a lucid example of this kind of argument in his introduction to Identity of the Literary Text (pp. 3-15), contrasting this new work with the previous orthodoxy. The latter, so-called 'new criticism', stemmed from a combination of the desire to establish criticism as an exact and independent discipline with many positions on the nature of the literary work of art taken over from Romantic aesthetics. In Culler's words, the new critics valued a poetic work as a 'unified whole, autonomous and self-conscious' (p. 1I). The conception of the object of study as an artefact in this manner entailed an exclusion of all considerations deemed extra-literary, extra-

6


aesthetic etc. According to Culler, the notion of a poem (say) as ideally an autonomous object leads to a valorisation of a certain reflexivity or 'self-consciousness' as the ground of the poem's identity. A peculiar blend of empiricism and formalism is the result. Culler writes, echoing the genesis of new-critical concerns in Romanticism and German Idealism, 'moments of selfreferentiality are often regarded as key moments in establishing the identity of a literary text, just as self-knowledge and selfconsciousness have been central to conceptions of personal identity' (p. I I). I t is this constitutive reflexivity that Culler questions. He argues that 'these moments of self-consciousness or referentiality', whose existence he doubts no more than did the new critics, do not establish the text's identity in terms of selfcontainedness and self-consciousness. Rather, they disrupt completely those same notions. The poem analysed is John Donne's' Canonization', chosen because ofits virtually paradigm status for new criticism. In The Well- Wrought Urn l l Cleanth Brooks argues that Donne's poem is 'a major achievement of the poetic imagination that also describes the sort of imaginative achievement it is'. The poem thus enacts what it describes as a 'self-contained fusion of being and doing' (p. I I). Donne celebrates himself and his mistress in , Canonization', describing the' pretty room' to be built in verse as a home for their love, the 'well-wrought urn' that will preserve their ashes. This' urn' (an image for the poem itself) will become an object of adoration for lovers in posterity, as Donne and his love become models ofwhat love itselfshould be; Wee can dye by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombes and hearse Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse; And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes; As well a well-wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombes, And by these hymes, all shall prove Us Canoniz'd for love; (p. 12)

For Brooks the poem, as it unfolds, becomes the very' pretty room' it describes - 'The poem itself is the well-wrought urn

Introduction

7

which can hold the lover's ashes' (p. 13). Thus Brooks establishes that reflexivity which he takes as constituting the text's 'identity' . How does Culler complicate Brooks' reading? Reflexivity is extended, as it were, by the interposition ofa second mirror. We read: if the poem itself is the well-wrought urn, then one of the principal features of this urn is that it portrays people responding to the urn. If the urn or hymn is the poem itself, then the predicted response to the hymn is a response to the representation of a response to the hymn. (p. 13)

The text can be read as embodying a structure of potentially endless reflection/repetition in which it encompasses any response to it as already part of what it is about. The distinction between the poem' itself' and the response to it becomes now an unstable one. Indeed, Culler argues, Brooks responds much as the poem already represents. He canonises the' Canonization' using a phrase from the poem as the title of his own book. The poem becomes a paradigm of what a poem should be according to new-critical criteria. Moreover, in Culler's reading the fact that the poem incorporates an interpretation of itself skews the reflexivity valued by Brooks into a structure of 'transference' whereby the text comes to encompass already all those who would interpret it, overflowing the limits that critics might desire to assign to it: If the urn is also the combination of urn and response to the urn, then this structure of self-reference created a situation in which responses such as Brooks's are part of the urn in question ... The critic who claims to stand outside the text and analyse it seems hopelessly entangled with it, caught up in a repetition that can be described as discovering structures in the text that (unbeknownst to him) repeat his own relation to the text, or as repeating in his interpretation a relation already figured in the text. (p. 14)

It should be clear from this account that Culler's instance of a deconstructive reading is only beginning to address the question of the iden tity of the literary text. I t is not a 'deconstruction' of reflexivity at all. On the contrary, reflexivity is generalised into a structure whereby the poem (in a parody of the Hegelian

8


system) 12 includes within itself its own readings! Furthermore, the notion of a poem as self-representing no more questions a text's identity and autonomy than one mirror is broken by having another placed in front of it. This was already clear in the fact that, far from questioning the existence of these 'moments' of textual self-consciousness, as a reader of Derrida might expect, Culler argues merely that they have a different implication from that assumed by the new critics. Finally, this kind of reading is reductive insofar as it concentrates on only one stratum of the text, reference, to the exclusion of all the others. It is not difficult to see, however, that a strategy of generalising this supposed reflexivity can lead critics to a position in which they can feel happy to repeat some of the radical claims of Derrida's books. Thus one could claim, on the basis of reading any text as containing within it an allegory of its own reading (hardly a difficult thing tc? do), all the following: (a) that, representing itself within itself, the text disrupts the opposition of part and whole, the part being' larger' than the whole, etc.; (b) that, by including its interpretation within itself, the text disrupts the opposition of inside and outside, its outside already being in ternal and vice versa, thus (one might claim) the text overflows normal boundaries; (c) that, by including its in terpreters as already interpreted the text subverts all attempts at critical mastery, incorporating a kind of ineluctable blindspot at the very place where one thinks to grasp it - and so on. At this point it may prove salutary to cite a few rather strong sentences from an interview with Derrida.l" The citation serves to dissociate what he calls' deconstruction' with arguments that run along such lines as that we are inescapably defined by our own 'interpretation schemas ' and that any attempt to get outside them to some 'objective reference' is necessarily foredoomed etc. : Every week I receive critical commentaries and studies on deconstruction which operate on the assumption that what they call 'poststructuralism' amounts to saying that there is nothing beyond

Introduction

9

language, that we are submerged in words - and other stupidities of that sort. (p. 123)

On the contrary, Derrida valorises language, not as a play of diacritical marks, but as the site of something totally other, by which is meant something analagous to the annunciation or 'arrival' of being itself. Without attempting a less portentous definition at this point (the aim of the rest of this study), the following quotation from Derrida's interview with Kearney should at least serve to stake out the context of the questions being posed and to dissociate them from too hasty a correlation with debates in literary theory and elsewhere. Deconstruction does not claim that language is not referential: it searches' for the" other" and for that in language that is the" other" of language' : Certainly, deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed. I t even asks whether our term 'reference' is entirely adequate for designating the 'other'. The other, which is beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a 'referent' in the normal sense ... But to distance oneself thus from the habitual structure of reference ... does not amount to saying that there is nothing beyond language. (Kearney, Dialogues, pp. 123-4)

This is so obviously different from notions of deconstruction embodied in, say, Miller's reading of Stevens or from anything in Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction or from the pragmatist position that it becomes difficult to start analysing quite where the divergencies lie. One broad difference is that the concerns of deconstructive literary critics (like those of the philosophers of science they resemble) are broadly epistemological- the concern is the problem of language's claims to true representation or the aporias of interpretation - whereas Derrida's concerns, broadly speaking, are ontological. One hesitates to counterpose such sweeping terms as 'epistemology' and 'ontology' in a context where their relation must ultimately be at issue. Nevertheless 'the mode of being , of the literary is a phrase which encapsulates the concern of Derrida's work on Mallarme and others as accurately as may be done at this provisional stage. Both Miller and Culler remain tied to positivist assumptions

10


that can be seen to have been surpassed in chapter 12 of A Theory ofLiterature. For Miller, the literary is tied to the positivist order of 'literal' facts insofar as it is defined entirely in terms of its relation to that realm (namely, its not fitting its contours). For Culler, the literary is an object, albeit of a peculiar sort, an object whose supposed self-reference enables a weird ascription to it of characteristics usually reserved to subjective consciousness (namely, the anticipation of its readers). Derrida's work does not, I contend, admit of description in terms of the epistemological issues raised by Miller and Culler. Rather, it is more accurate to assert, in this respect, that the 'text', as Derrida intends it, is no sort of object at all, and to recognise the provenance of Derrida's 'readings' in Heideggerian attacks on traditional philosophy for its focusing of issues relating to facts in the world while passing over the issue of the world as such. Deconstruction, in Derrida's interview with Kearney, is not a form of scepticism either, but' an openness towards the other' (p. 124). What of this' other'? The notion has its provenance in several aspects of the so-called 'end of idealism', the demise of the postulate, constitutive of philosophy in its traditional sense, that the real is knowable, that is, essentially rational.!" 'To say that the real is essentially knowable is to say that it is nothing but essence or meaning. Idealism reduces being to "meaning'" (Garry Madison, p. 248). Accordingly the task of philosophy is conceived as the elucidation of the correlation (already postulated in the very notion of knowledge) between human understanding and being. The' other', provisionally speaking, is what knowledge must concern itself with once the disjunction between being and knowing is acknowledged. The stress on alterity underlines that what is to be 'known' no longer falls within the scope of the received understanding of knowledge. Arguably an ancient counter-tradition (from' the PreSocratics to Nietzsche) has always contested the claims of idealism. In the present context, however, Heidegger provides the vocabulary within which Derrida's 'other' can be sketched. For Heidegger, both understanding and being have to be conceived in terms of a finitude and contingency that 'meta-

Introduction

I I

physics', as the primary manifestation of idealism, cannot, per se, assimilate. Neither human being (Dasein) nor the world Heidegger argues - have any essential nature separable from the contingencies of their existence; their existence cannot be grounded in any understanding of essence, that is, understood in a philosophical manner. The attempt to ground the world and our conceptions in a reflexive act of reason finds itself encompassed by something other (non-rational), which it cannot incorporate, yet within which it moves. This brings Heidegger to a reconsideration of the postulate that underpins modern science, the principle ofsufficient reason - the principle that, for any phenomenon, reason can be rendered. Indeed, the possibility and limits of science are recurrently at stake in the three thinkers with whom this study is concerned. These issues first come to the fore in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), to which it is now necessary to turn.i" While (for some readers) the argument can only be a familiar one, it is crucial to trace several of its steps here in order to draw the lineaments of two notions fundamental to subsequent chapters (the hermeneutic/Heideggerian notions of 'world' and of 'language '). In attempting an analysis of the mode in which we encounter our everyday world - the mundane stream of common experience - Heidegger found himself breaking with his master, Edmund Husserl, who was elaborating a brand of transcendental idealism. The world, Heidegger showed, does not really appear to us as an 'objective reality' as commonly believed. The latter comes into being only by a process of abstraction from 'ordinary everydayness'. The world shows itself around us primarily as a field of practical involvement, within which human concerns are already implicated. 'What we encounter as closest to us ... is the room; and we encounter it not as something "between four walls" in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this the "arrangement" emerges, and it is in this that an "individual" item of equipment shows itself' (BY, p. 98). Heidegger characterises the primordial mode in which things appear for us as 'readiness-to-hand " a realm of potential usages and human

12


significances. Our world is primarily a world of 'equipment'. 'In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement. The kind of Being which equipment possesses must be exhibited' (BY, P.97). Moreover, any piece of equipment only functions as part of a total context of things, tools, tasks (hammer, nails, wood, bench, shed ... ). Strictly speaking 'there "is" no such thing as an equipment' (BY, p. 97). To the being of any piece ofequipment belongs a totality of equipment without which it could not be itself (what would a hammer be without nails, wood etc.?) 'Equipment is essentially "something-in-order-to'" (BY, p. 97); a form of reference elsewhere constitutes its being. To 'be' at all, it must 'exist' in terms of inhering in a world, the totality of practical involvements that make up human existence. Its essence does not precede its existence. In a later work, Heidegger gives an account of how' know-how' relates to the world: A cabinetmaker's apprentice, someone who is learning to build cabinets and the like, will serve as an example. His learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he has to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood - to wood as it enters into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches ofits nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. (WT, pp. 14-15)

The world presents itself to Dasein or human being as a holistic field of practical involvement, a total equipmental context within which no thing is except as that context lights it up. It is Dasein's concern for its own being, as it manifests itself in its practical concerns, that grants to the world its articulation in things and their coherence. Correlatively, Dasein, whose world this is, cannot be conceived on the model of a subjective consciousness confronting and grasping an objective outer reality. Understanding is an 'I can' before it is an 'I think'. Human consciousness', therefore, is not to be conceived as something 'mental', disembodied and yet also somehow connected with the physical world. Dasein is essentially its existence, 'Being-in-the-world'. 'Being-in-the-

Introduction world ... amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-tohand ofa totality of equipment' (BT, p. 107). There is a superficial similarity between this hermeneutic conception of the world and the notion that no term of an inquiry makes sense except insofar as it inheres in a chain of other terms. However, the latter remains a narrowly epistemological dilemma. The Heideggerian 'world' is inescapable, not as a conceptual presupposition but as a transcendental horizon. Hence, for instance, the difficulty of answering a question such as 'what is the" world"?'; for the' world' has to be conceived as the horizon within which the question' what is x?' could alone make sense or have any purpose. It is presupposed in the question as the total equipmental context through which alone any thing can light up as what it is. Hence: The world itself is not an entity within-the-world; and yet it is so determinati-ve for such entities that only insofar as 'there is' a world (es Welt gibt) can they be encountered and show themselves, in their Being, as entities which have been discovered. (BY, p. 102)

The' world' (as the correlate of human existence) itself has no essence and cannot be deduced. Its unmotivated upsurge is itself a refutation of the philosophical faith in the rationality of being. Heidegger's analytic of Dasein was only the main part of a much more encompassing project - a reopening of the forgotten question of the 'meaning ofbeing'. The analysis of how a world is opened up in Dasein's pre-reflective involvements, allowing things to appear as what they are (i.e. in their being) through such a movement of disclosure, was to be a first step into an inquiry into being itself. This inquiry would displace the traditional accoun t of being in terms of categories (q uali ty, q uan ti ty, relation etc.) applied to the totality of entities. In Being and Time Heidegger aimed to understand being as granted through the temporal structure of Dasein's inherence in a world. However, with the controversial turn (Kehre) in Heidegger's work, Dasein loses this central position (see chapter I). There is no place to analyse the Kehre. It is sufficient at this stage to stress with Paul Ricoeur that Heidegger's thought does not alter drastically.l" A philosophy of art and language comes

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot to occupy something like the crucial position occupied in Being and Time by the analytic of Dasein. The Da of Dasein, the' there' in which world and being are articulated, becomes the site of language. It is language, or rather a new notion of' primordial' language, that comes to make up Dasein's practical involvement in a world. Language, no less than the' world', is seen as a quasi-holistic field that cannot be quite objectified precisely to the degree that it provides the precondition and medium of any such objectification. Heidegger's work on language has, crudely speaking, been received in two ways, the first of which tends to minimise Heidegger's break with' idealism', the second to exacerbate it. The hermeneutic philosophy of Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur is by far the better known of these two fields of inquiry. Gadamer endorses Heidegger's argument that' Language is not one of the means by which consciousness is mediated with the world ... [and] by no means simply an instrument, a tool.'!" (A view that side-steps at once problems associated with the dominant holistic/relativistic position in Anglo-Saxon philosophy and literary theory, which is predominantly instrumentalist). Language becomes rather the site of a transcendental mode of questioning into the conditions of the possibility of experience. In sum, a pre-theoretical correspondence of human understanding and world is understood as inherent in language, if it is hearkened to in a new manner. Gadamer writes: The agreement about things that takes place in language means neither a priority of things nor a priority of the human mind that avails itself of the instrument of linguistic understanding. Rather, the correspondence that finds its concretion in the linguistic experience of the world is as such what is absolutely prior.l"

One of the most prominent aspects of hermeneutic thought has become the arguments with the claims of so-called 'artificial intelligence' and related attempts to express language and human understanding as manifestations of a formal system. Hubert Dreyfus, in particular, has demonstrated that language and' commonsense' involve a non-theoretical, non-objectifiable

Introduction interlacing of body and world that no formal system could capture. Even the simplest conversation rests on an implicit nexus of holistic know-how that cannot be captured in discrete parts.!" This notion of a pre-theoretical' belonging' of human-being and world, inherent in language, is neither Blanchot's nor Derrida's. Nevertheless, it is a context for much of their work on the literary text. These two names serve to demarcate a second mode of thought in debt to the later Heidegger's work on language, a mode of thought either little recognised in comparison to hermeneutics, or (in Derrida's case) often misconstrued. The vocabulary of Derrida's interview with Kearney is Heideggerian (' the other ... is beyond language and ... summons language '). Derrida's concerns are not merely linguistic, at least in any familiar sense of language. They concern the quasi-transcendental relation of language to a notion (' the other ') that occupies much the same place (within yet beyond language) as does Heidegger's notion of being.f" In this respect language might be said to be metaphysical in the strictly etymological sense of passing beyond nature, beyond entities, meta ta physika. Hence one reads in Derrida's interview that deconstruction, far from speaking of imprisonment in language etc., 'is, in fact saying the exact opposite' (Kearney, Dialogues, p. 123), that is, it is in a meditation upon language that our best hope of engaging alterity lies. Perhaps the most schematic way of summarising the divergence between Derrida and Anglo-Saxon holism/relativism is the following - whereas the latter assumes that language is an entity, a part of (human) nature and a tool of human subjectivity (understood either individually or en masse), for the former language is at the forefront of the question of being itself. The mode of being of language is a problem that opens upon the 'other' and the question of being in general. Ultimately however, as with Blanchot, the texts Derrida analyses or performs involve something other even than being - 'The other, which is beyond language and which summons language' (Kearney, Dialogues, p. 123).

16


In an essay of 1957, 'Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity ',21 Emmanuel Levinas writes of 'two directions the philosophical spirit takes' (p. 47) and defines them in terms of their differing ideas of truth. First, he argues that' Truth implies experience. In the truth a thinker maintains a relationship with a reality distinct from him, other than him' (p. 47). Such a truth involves a movement away from the familiar and mundane towards otherness. Such a truth is a form of experience, though not an empiricism: 'For experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature' (p. 47). In Levinas' highly schematic account, the other is related to the postulate of the necessary inadequacy of any concept or notion to what there is. Accordingly, thought should try to render itself a heteronomy, a continual suspicion of itself and an openness to alterity: it 'would be concerned with the absolutely other' (p. 47). However, philosophical thought may also be defined, and indeed almost always has been defined, as an autonomy, involving a notion of truth as 'free adherence to a proposition' (p. 47), and of the project of knowledge as maintaining the freedom of the thinker by reduction of what is strange or other to the known: '[ w]hat else is this freedom but the thinking being's refusal to be alienated in the adherence, the preserving of his nature, his identity, the feat of remaining the same despite the unknown lands into which thought seems to lead' (p. 48). In itself Levinas' essay is a simplification, a schematisation of existential possibilities as they present themselves to, or challenge, the condition of thought. However, it does serve to introduce one of the recurrent questions of this study: how can one practise a heteronomy? If to welcome the other is to experience the non-familiar, unforeseen, the incalculable, or that in relation to which any concept is inadequate, how can thought or language affirm it except in negatives? Is not the concept of the other, or the notion of a language that correlates with the other, a contradiction in terms? It is because the heteronomy at issue is so completely elusive that the misreadings of Derrida's work as a form of extreme scepticism or even nihilism are so difficult to avoid. Yet it is not a question of rejection of logico-systematic forms of reasoning per se, whether in favour of a supposed

Introduction

17

relativism or paralysing epistemological aporias. It is rather a matter ofreading or writing according to new elusive, heteronomic forms of 'coherence', as binding in their way as the more familiar constraints of logic. At the conference on his work at Cerisy in I g80, Derrida affirmed of Heidegger : Je crois qu'il y a deux coherences chez Heidegger: chaque fois qu'il est oblige d'expliquer quelque chose et qu'il veut etre entendu, il passe un compromis avec la coherence logico-systematique ; mais cette coherence-Ia est en articulation, compromis, negociation avec quelque chose qu'elle ri'epuise pas; c'est cette ouverture tres enigrnatique qu'il faut interroger. (Fh. p. 52). [1 believe that there are two forms of coherence in Heidegger: each time that he is obliged to give an explanation of something and wishes to be understood, he makes a compromise with the logico-systematic notion of coherence; but that particular coherence is in linkage or compromise or negotiation with something else which it does not exhaust. It is this very enigmatic opening that has to be examined.]

I t is here that 'literary' modes of language assume their significance. What modes of thought and coherence can some literary texts be seen to embody? One should no longer understand' literature' as determined by the author's subjective imagination as opposed to the logical models of coherence that ideally determine a philosophical text. In response to Kearney's question as to whether literature can provide access to the 'other' as a non-lieu of philosophy, Derrida answers with a qualified affirmative: I think so; but when I speak of literature it is not with a capital L; it is rather an allusion to certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts, certain texts which make the limits of our language tremble, exposing them as divisible and questionable (Kearney, Dialogues, p. I 12).

Derrida then refers to the works of 'Blanchot, Bataille or Beckett'. Derrida, then, is not primarily interested in the institution of literature itself, but only with' certain texts which make the limits of our language tremble'. Most literature, he acknowledges, is as metaphysical through and through as any philosophical text. The name of Mallarrne serves to mark the

18


emergence of litterature in Derrida's limited, specialised sense (in referring to Mallarme in this way, Derrida follows Blanchot). Moreover, Derrida seeks to practise a form of 'literary' or heteronomic philosophical writing that would engage otherness in a way inaccessible to theoretical texts. This is also the most striking difference between Derrida's work and the seemingly similar work of Paul de Man, whose mode is clinically theoretical. Perhaps the most exciting aspect ofthe concern with' literary' modes of language as exposing the limits of philosophical models of coherence has been a revival of the dialogue form in philosophy itself. Indeed, in the three thinkers whose' dialogues' are discussed here, the dialogue has perhaps taken on a novel excitement, its form itself bearing a radical implication it has not possessed since the Socratic dialogues. Moreover, in many respects, most of the innovations being made or advocated recently in relation to the presentation and 'style' of philosophical argument may usefully be regarded as contemporary varieties of the dialogue form. (One may refer to Derrida's use of double columns of type in Glas (1974),22 Blanchot's mixtures of dialogue fragments with prose meditation in his work since 1960 and Heidegger's transformation of the 'path' oflanguage. ) Dialogue has always served as a convenient tool for the exposition of arguments, playing off various theses and countertheses against each other in situations of contrived meeting. Of more interest, however, are other characteristics of historical manifestations of the form that may be listed as follows: (I) The dialogue, as a dramatic form, necessarily embodies an event, possessing thereby a certain ethical force. It is often an implicit model of community. In this respect one notes that many dialogues are set in a prison (Plato's Phaedo, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius or Sir Thomas More's A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation). (2) Correspondingly, dialogue has an inherent relation to pedagogy and issues of intersubjective influence. Freudian psychoanalysis has been recognised as a radical rejuvenation of dialogue here, if not of its written form, in this respect.f" (3) Most importantly, albeit rarely and elusively, dialogue engages with the possibility of maieutics;

Introduction

19

namely, the discipline ofthe exchange itselfallows the midwifery of new, unanticipated ideas in the very course of dialogue itself. These are ideas of which the whole dialogue-event, rather than any particular participant, is the' author' (though Plato would have it that the ideas were implicit in unremembered form in all of the interlocutors). However, since one is invariably dealing with a written form, the actual efficacy of maieuties in, say, one of Plato's dialogues, is an open question. Levinas pinpoints this issue when he writes that 'the Platonic dialogue is the reminiscence of a drama rather than the drama itself' (OBBE, p. 20). One could go further and regard Socratic midwifery as merely Plato's pedagogicjietion. However, a major characteristic of the modern dialogues at issue in this essay is that these problems become obsolete in a novel reconfiguration ofmaieuties. From Heidegger's pathbreaking revival of the dialogue form in the I950s, through Blanchot's notion of the recit or narrative, through to texts such as Pas and Signsponge by Derrida, the following will be the issue: 'il y a peut-etre des pensees plus pensantes que cette pensee qu'on appelle philosophie '24 [' There are perhaps thoughts more thoughtful than the thinking that goes by the name of philosophy.']

CHAPTER I

Overcoming aesthetics: Heideggerian Dichtung

Although the aesthetic category' literature' is relatively modern, 'it is nonetheless true that the whole history of the interpretation of the arts of letters has moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened up by the concept of mimesis' (Derrida: Diss, p. 187). That the literary is a mimesis (imitation) of some sort seems self-evident, whether it be a mimesis of 'reality', 'ideas', 'emotions', or even, in a formalist mode, 'itself'. Before the nature and limits of this conception can be examined, some preliminary distinctions must be made. First, mimesis and' representation' are not to be too easily identified. The later discussion of Heidegger concerns a notion of mimesis that could not possibly be translated in terms of' imitation' and 're-presentation'. Secondly, the notion of 'representation' is itself not univocal. For the purposes of the present discussion, two senses of' representation' may now be distinguished. A useful starting-point is to follow Heidegger's analysis of representation in relation to Descartes's Meditations, its establishment of the cogito me cogitate as the ground of modern metaphysics. The traditional account of the Meditations runs along something like the following lines. In his attempt to establish a sure basis of knowledge against the dominance of dogmaticism and prejudice, Descartes submitted himself to a course in radical doubt. The question was asked, is there anything which I cannot cast doubt upon, anything which can serve as a solid ground of knowledge, a necessary truth? After purging himself of various apparent certainties (the existence of an external 20


2I

world, even the truths of mathematics), Descartes found the famous axiom cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) to be alone indubitable. Whatever I doubt, I am conscious of myself doing so - I think and therefore my own being is ensured. Indeed, insofar as all doubting is a mode of thought, no scepticism can really shake the cogito. Even if I am totally mad, I still think and must be. If science is to be set on a sure path of certitude, Descartes concluded, all its propositions must achieve the same indubitable evidence as this axiomatic starting-point. Heidegger's more exacting reading (though not unchallengeable) is more patient than the usual summary of Descartes. The analysis may be schematised into four points from Nietzsche, volume IV. First, the cogito is representation properly understood. It is not to be translated and too narrowly identified as 'thinking', even in the manner in which Descartes is normally conceived as a 'rationalist' in histories of philosophy, that is, reducing all percepts, feelings etc. to modes of thought. Heidegger writes: 'In important passages, Descartes substitutes for cogitare the word percipere (per-capio) - to take possession of a thing, to seize something, in the sense of presenting-to-oneself by way of presenting-before-oneself, representing' (N, IV, pp. 1°4-5). Secondly, cogitare is not just 'thinking', then, but the 'presenting to oneself of what is presentable' (N, IV, p. 105). If this is so then cogitare jrepresenting is most truly itself when the presentation is assured beyond doubt - 'The cogitare is always " thinking" in the sense of a "thinking over" and thus a deliberation that thinks in such a way as to let only the indubitable pass as securely fixed and represented in the proper sense' (N, IV, pp. 105-6). Doubting, therefore, as a familiar aspect of Cartesian meditation, is inherent to representing as a making-secure, a grasping. Deliberative thought is directed towards the indubitable. Representing, as the cogitare, accepts nothing as true that does not have the status of certitude in grasping or measurement. Key aspects of the methodology of modern science find intellectual grounding here. Thirdly, every representing of anything is inherently a representing of a 'myself' - cogitare is a cogitare me cogitare.

22


Representing is essentially'" self"-representing'. Nevertheless, the 'self' is not represented in the manner of any object, such as a table or chair. Unlike the table or chair (Heidegger's example is the Freiburg cathedral), the selfis not an object in the sense of standing-opposite in representation (a Gegen-stand). The 'I' is comported in a more essential manner: In the immediate intuition of something, in every making-present, in every memory, in every expectation, what is represented in such fashion by represen ta tion is represen ted to me, placed before me, and in such a way that I myself do not thereby really become an object of a representing but am nonetheless presented' to me' in an objective representing, and in fact only in such representing. (N, IV, p. 107)

If Heidegger does not use the term' reflexive' to designate the inherence of the ego in representing, it is because the ego is corepresented in a distinctive manner. It is involved 'not subsequently, but in advance', as the condition of representation. Consciousness of an object is inherently self-consciousness and the latter provides the very ground of all representing. It is thus that the ego emerges as the subject of representing - 'The self is sub-iectum' (N, IV, p.u od). Heidegger observes that 'subject', as a translation of hypo-keimenon has no inherent relation to human consciousness. I t originally meant 'what under-lies and lies-at-the-base-of, what already lies-before of itself' (N, IV, p. 96), that is whatever retains identity beneath differing attributes. This grounding function is fulfilled by quite different notions prior to modern metaphysics. For Aristotle the subject is substance. It is only, broadly speaking after Descartes, that consciousness and the' subject' become synonymous. Finally, cogito as representing essentially embraces' feeling', , sensing', 'imagining' etc. All these notions inhere in Cartesian metaphysics insofar as each comports the appearing of some sort of object (real, ideal or psychic) to a subject. The supposed opposition between empiricism and rationalism seems superficial when juxtaposed to the exact definition of representation, which comprehends each. Hence, in the literary context,' 'emotion', , imagining' , 'aesthetic reception' would all be modes of representing.


23

One may conclude this definition of representation with a summarising citation from Heidegger: Cogitare is representing in the fullest sense ... we must COnjOIn in thought the following essentials: the relation to what is represented, the self-presentation of what is represented, the arrival on the scene and involvement of the one representing with what is represented, indeed in and through the representing. (N, IV, p. 109)

One may now turn to representation as more commonly understood. Problems of' representation' in its non-specialised sense can be summed up in such philosophical packages as 'how does language reflect reality?' or 'how does thought relate the world to human consciousness?' Representation names the problem of relating subject and object and reconciling what are understood as their opposed modes of being (e.g. 'consciousness' on the one hand and 'material things' on the other). Clearly, representation in this sense is an epiphenomenon of the more complex notion. It is not possible, therefore, to present Heidegger's work on poetic language in terms of questions of reference, 'fiction' or 'representing reality' or other' problems in literary theory'. It engages rather with representation in the exact sense, undermining thereby any obvious common ground on which to stage a debate with representation in the more familiar sense. One consequence of this is that Heideggerian Dichtung becomes part of a meditation not' in' but against aesthetics itself. In Nietzsche, volume I, the section entitled 'Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics' helps explain why this must be so: Now, since in the aesthetic consideration of art the artwork is defined as the beautiful which has been brought forth in art, the work is represented as the bearer and provoker of the beautiful with relation to our state of feeling. The artwork is posited as the' object' for a 'subject'; definitive for aesthetic consideration is the subject-object relation, indeed as a relation offeeling. (N, I, p. 78)

If Dichtung is to constitute an overcoming of aesthetics therefore, it is clear that it should have to comprise the following

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot characteristics: (I) it would have to be something other than an object in the sense of an object of consciousness and hence (2) neither address itself to a subject in the post-Cartesian sense nor (3) risefrom the action of any subject. Needless to say, these are heavy demands. In a relatively classical manner (which has been compared to the arguments of Hegel's Aestheticsv.: the question of 'art' is subordinated by Heidegger to the question of 'truth'. This ancient relation of art and truth serves to detach art from the reductive notions of 'feeling', 'creative genius', 'aesthetic consciousness' dominant in the neo-Kantian tradition of aesthetics. Dichtung is described as a mode in which truth 'happens'. This talk of truth 'happening' is rather nonsensical if one understands' truth' as the correspondence ofa proposition to an existing state of affairs. 'The cat is on the mat' is (within the context of its utterance) either true or false. It is not an event of any sort. However, this notion of truth as correctness in assertion is to be understood only as a function of representation in its precise sense. It dissimulates, so Heidegger argues, a more primordial notion of 'truth' legible in the Greek word aletheia, for which 'truth' is the accepted translation. A-letheia: the private alpha suggests an alternative translation as 'unconcealmen t' or 'dis-closure', not 'truth' as correctness in representing but' absence of concealment' (lethe). Did nothing show or reveal itself as such it could hardly become the object of any representation and so 'true' in the sense of correctness. Following Heidegger's analysis of the German word Schein and scheinen given in Being and Time (1927) (B T, pp. 51-5) and An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953),2 the English word 'appearance' may further clarify this dichotomy of 'truth' and , aletheia'. 'Appearance' may mean (I) an 'appearance', something that appears, any entity or phenomenon; (2) 'semblance' in the sense ofillusion, something that hides or deceives, capable of representing falsely. However, these two senses are only possible on the basis of a third, (3) 'appearance' (or 'appearing ') in the sense of showing or phenomenality in general. 'Phaenomenon' in Greek means' that which shows itself'. Were


25

there no appearance/showing generally, no phenomena, and certainly no illusory phenomena, would be thinkable. It is a matter of a relatively indeterminate showing, in which' semblance' and 'objectivity' are of equal status insofar as both merely appear. This drifting realm is a precondition of all perception and representation and challenges the mode in which, after Descartes, 'reality' has become synonymous with certainty. This third sense of appearing is akin to aletheia in Heidegger's interpretation of the phenomenology latent in the ancien t Greek language. Of the Greek phainesthai, in ' A Dialogue on Language' (1959) (WL, pp. I-54) one of the speakers in the dialogue observes: The Greeks were the first to experience and think of phainomena as phenomena. But in that experience it is thoroughly alien to the Greeks to press present beings into an opposing objectness; phainesthai means to them that a being assumes its radiance, and in that radiance it appears. This appearance is still the basic trait of the presence of all present beings, as they rise into unconcealment, (WL, p. 38)

Similarly, it would be false to transfer modern problems in the philosophy of perception or representation to ancient Greek thought. For the latter, humankind does not face the world, rather it is faced by the phenomena themselves in their disclosure. Derrida also notes that there is no equivalent in ancient Greek for the modern 'representation'. 3 What is involved, however is not some return to the Greeks. The dialogue speaks of thinking 'what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner' (P'39)' This applies, for example, to the important Greek term mimesis, to which we now turn as a notion to oppose to 'representation '4 and further situate it. In the early stages of' The Double Session' Derrida offers a brief recapitulation of Heidegger's account of the history and meaning of the concept of mimesis, considered as the frame within which the notion of literature has always been defined. First, Derrida summarises that concept of mimesis which Heidegger privileges in his phenomenological interpretation of ancient Greece:

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot even before it can be translated as imi ta tion, mimesis signifies the presentation of the thing itself, of nature, of the physis that produces itself, engenders itself, and appears (to itself) as it really is, in the presence of its image, its visible aspect, its face. (Diss, p. 193)

Mimesis thus considered is in accordance with a notion of truth as aletheia, uncoveredness, the simple appearing of what is present in its appearance. In fact, as Heidegger demonstrates, this simplicity is nothing of the kind (see below). Secondly, Derrida refers to the more familiar sense of mimesis as imitation. Insofar as what is involved in this notion is the imitation or representation of something already in some way apparent this traditional sense of mimesis is thinkable only on the implicit basis of mimesis as apparentness. To employ a strategy that will become increasingly unavoidable as this study progresses, we can best move on in this analysis of Heidegger by looking back and meditating on the thinking already undergone in the previous paragraphs, attentive not to the results of that thinking but to the further implications at work in the process of thought whereby they were reached. In using one word as a pun or a double of itself (mimesis/mimesis) Derrida is emulating something like Heidegger's practice of a 'step back' out of representational thinking, namely, meditation on the term' mimesis' teases out of it two (at least) senses, one of which (mimesis as apparentness) emerges as a presupposition eclipsed in the very concept of the other (mimesis as imitation). It is as if the two terms bore to each other a relation offigure and ground, with the oddity here that the ground disappears as the foregrounding of the figure. As we will see below, Heidegger is attentive to such a double structure of figure and/ as ground in language itself. The question of the essence of language is intimately bound up with the so-called Kehre, or turning, in Heidegger's thought after Being and Time (1927).5 The latter had approached the question of being through an analytic of Dasein's pre-reflexive access to a world. It is through Dasein's various .moods and concerns that a world lights up and things appear as what they are. Yet, despite its radical force, such a philosophy is not as much a break from Cartesian subjectivism as it may at first appear. Dasein's pre-reflexive understanding remains part of a


27

subject-centred metaphysic." 'Being' is still understood on the basis of the human attitude towards entities (as they are uncovered by our concerns, whether practical or theoretical). The more fundamental question, however, must remove Dasein from this central position and attend to that openness or clearing whereby entities show themselves and where Dasein is both granted a world and appears to itself on the basis of that world. With the Kehre, the question of being and world no longer takes Dasein as the central point of reference. Heidegger's essays preoccupy themselves with the passing of being to a world through language, considered fundamentally as other than a human instrument. Moreover, by Sprache as a primordial 'saying' is not meant that field which is normally the object of linguistics. Kockelmans writes: by language he means everything by which meaning [is brought] to light in an articulated way, regardless of whether it is done concretely, by means of the sentences of a language in the narrow sense of the term, or through a work of art, a social or religious institution, and so on."

The 'world', understood as the totality of possible references and meanings handed down in a culture, is mainly a function of 'language' in Heidegger's sense: 'man and thing can be "connected" meaningfully only within the world that addresses itself to us in and through language'. 8 Heidegger's claim that' language speaks' and not humanity is at first sight quite preposterous. There is certainly no question that Heidegger is claiming that language could somehow remain or be effective without human speech. However, it is 'not merely the product and result of human speaking'9 (Kockelmans) . As a clearing and opening-up of a world, it is language that grants the interwovenness of being and humanity as well as the articulation of things in a world. Language takes on a transcendental status. It is both Sprache and Sprache (speech and the condition of speech, figure and ground). However, this 'transcendental' status is both complex in itself and, according to Levinas, Blanchot and others, questionable in some respects. The nature of this relation of the empirical and transcen-

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot dental, human speech and language supposed as 'primordial', is a major issue throughout this study. At the risk of considerable simplification one can venture that the relation between what Heidegger terms Dichtung and language more commonly conceived as representation is one of , ground' to 'figure' in the mode of the relation between the first and second forms of mimesis or of Sprache. On the one hand there is language considered simply as the imitator or signifier of what is already there, the kind of language that may admit of abbreviation or translation into a merely formal logic; on the other hand, Heidegger claims, there is a 'poetic' element in language that summons to presence that which it names, a force that brings the apparent into its own to stand unconcealed before us. Furthermore, the former is derivative as a curtailed mode of the latter. Heidegger writes in 'The Thing' (1951): (PLT, pp. 165-86) 'Man can represent, no matter how, only what has previously come to light on its own accord and has shown itself to him in the light it brought with it' (PL T, p. 171). Language may not be grasped or conceptualised as an object (as the representational notion oflanguage would have it) precisely because it is through language that objects come to light and stand in the openness of presence. Conceived according to the phenomenological (or Greek) sense of truth as aletheia (uncoveredness) (as against truth as adequation in representation), language would not so much signify as show!" or, rather, give to appear: Language speaks in that it, as showing, reaching into all regions of presences, summons from them whatever is present to appear and to fade. We, accordingly, listen to language in this way, that we let it say its saying [Sage] to us. (WL, p. 124)

Language considered as re-presentation both depends upon and dissimulates language as a mode of appropriation, bringing things to being and being to things. It is dependent because without the appearances effected in the more' primordial evocation nothing could appear to become subsequently the object of any representation. It dissimulates insofar as the instrumental conception of language as a means of communication perpetuates, not only the illusion of its own non-


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dependence upon a more originary presentation, but also the dichotomy of subject and object, an antagonism whose basis in a common 'element' (apparentness in general as it were) is effaced. Exploiting a metaphor little utilised by Heidegger, despite its helpfulness, language is not merely an entity upon the stage of the world, it is that stage, that 'space' in which alone things become apparent. The 'nature' of language is thus that of effecting a peculiar crossing or interlacing of the ontic (pertaining to entities) and the ontological (pertaining to being). Let us now turn to Dichtung (poetising) itself in Heidegger's conception, considered as a mode of language that he relates closely, with certain forms of thinking, to the essential force of language as saying (Sage) and hence not simply to be correlated with 'fiction' or 'poetry'. How does Heidegger distinguish between Dichtung and the realm of letters generally? Dichtung is far from being' poetry'. I t is rather a new notion of the poetic as at sway in the being oflanguage : 'Language itselfis poetry in the essential sense.'ll Arguing that the modes ofpresencing in other arts, buildings and technology are ultimately determined by the unconcealment effected in language, Heidegger's lectures on poetry and art set up an implicit hierarchy. First one may mention those works (of craft or letters) that merely embody the objectifying dominance of modern metaphysics - works in which being manifests itself as 'reality', as an object of representation semiotics etc. In this context appears Heidegger's denigration of what he calls' literature' in What is Called Thinking (1954) and of much more modern art elsewhere :12 People everywhere trace and record the decay, the destruction, the imminent annihilation of the world. We are surrounded by a special breed of reportorial novels that do nothing but wallow in such deterioration and depression. On the one hand, that sort of literature is much easier to produce than to say something that is essential and truly thought out; but on the other hand it is already getting tiresome. (WT, p. 29)

Such' literature' is seen as only another manifestation of the dominance of a subjectivist metaphysics. It merely serves up various representations and world-views. The dominant mode

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot of reading texts in terms of the opinions and historical place of their authors would presumably also seem, if not mistaken or unimportant, at least 'inessential' to Heidegger. Similarly, linguistics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence etc. are all embraced by Heidegger's critique of the technical or instrumental understanding of language (whereby it becomes part of the technology of communication). Like Cartesian metaphysics in general, these regional fields would be seen as impossible without the more primordial, pre-reflective realm with which Dichtung proper is associated. This is language which truly inaugurates a 'world' and gives to things their appearance and significance: Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Sophocles, are they literature? No! But that is the way they appear to us, and the only way, even when we are engaged in demonstrating by means of literary history that these works of poetry really are not literature. (WT, p. 134)13

Let us now turn to Heidegger's reading of a particular poem, 'A Winter Evening' by Georg Trakl (' Language' (1959), PL T, pp. 189-230). Concerning the lines 'Window with falling snow is arrayed / Long tolls the vesper bell', Heidegger writes: The speaking names the winter evening time. What is this naming? Does it merely deck out the imaginable familiar objects and eventa-snow, bell, window, falling, ringing - with words of a language? (PLT, p. Ig8)

In insisting 'No', Heidegger grants an ontological status to language: This naming does not hand out titles, it does not apply terms, but it calls into the word. The naming calls. Calling brings closer what it calls. However this bringing closer does not fetch what is called only in order to set it down in closest proximity to what is present, to find a place for it there. The call does indeed call. Thus it brings the presence of what was previously uncalled into a nearness. (PLT, p. Ig8)

It is obvious that what is called does not become present in the sense that objects in the room are present at hand. Heidegger insists that the poem neither describes a winter evening that is somehow already there, nor does it 'attempt to produce the


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semblance, leave the impression, of a winter evening's presence where there is no such winter evening' (PL T, p. 197; emphasis added). What would be traditionally called the fictive status of this language has become Heidegger's bizarre notion of' calling' into' proximity', 'nearness'. Simply stated, 'proximity' names a pre-theoretical implication of Dasein and world such as was described in the introduction. Thus Dichtung effects a bringing of things to a world and of a world to things - its call' invites thing in, so that they may bear upon men as things ... Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide' (PL T, pp. 199-200). In Dichtung things affect us not as objects of consciousness but in terms of what provisionally might be called their' sense', 14 understood as a foregrounding of the relatively holistic nexus ofinherence in a world whereby any thing is individuated in its participation. 'Proximity' then, has little to do with spatial or temporal distance, measurable in yards or hours. The achievements of modern telecommunications are capable of shrinking distance to and from each continen t of the planet. Yet this does not touch 'proximity'. The latter is not an ontic notion at all, designating this or that entity or their relation. The term is ontological, pertaining to being, paradoxically naming something which ontically is the most far and least noticed. Yet for Heidegger this constitutes what makes up an essential definition of the human as Dasein. Kockelmans' observation condenses the complexity of the matter - 'it is not we who presuppose the non-concealment of beings, but that the non-concealment of beings (i.e. being) puts us in such a condition that in all our propositions we always remain within non-concealment' .15 The proximity, whereby the event of unconcealment is given in a world, is precisely that 'open region' that Cartesian representation (and, to a degree, the Dasein of Being and Time) must presuppose: 'representation places itselfin the open region which it traverses as representing' (N, IV, p. 109). Furthermore, this presupposition is not the prepositing of any concept, it is itself pre-representational, the elided condition of representation. What is most intractable in Heidegger's discussions of poetry, especially perhaps when taken into an Anglo-Saxon context, is

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot their luring resemblance to certain cliches of empiricist thought. Heidegger would thus be conceived as rejecting conceptual representationalist thought in favour of an attentiveness to thought or language as an experience. Even David Krell, a translator of Heidegger, discussing Heidegger on 'rhythm', seems seduced by this traditional valorisation of the' concrete' or 'living' over and against the 'abstract' or 'derivative' .16 Indeed some of Krell's account seems a distortion ofHeidegger into a merely 'incarnationalist' metaphysics - what Derrida calls 'one of the most typical and tempting metaphysical reappropriations of writing' (Diss, p. 206). In short, the poem as representation gives way to the poem as enactment. Thus Krell cites the dictum of MacLeish, 'A poem should not mean / But be', without acknowledgement that this is a cliche of Romantic aesthetics. Krell continues, 'the earlier couplets of MacLeish's poem, which enact the Being of the poem, are therefore much more thought-provoking than the assertory conclusion!' (p. 3 I ; emphasis added). Krell is exemplary here of the manner in which Heidegger has frequently been misappropriated. An examination of the issue of Boundary (1976) devoted to Heidegger bears this out. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, for instance, while adumbrating the initial steps of Heidegger's view of language, moves too quickly to an account of the poetry of Denise Levertov. Rosenfeld asserts an all-to-easy conflation of image and being. Of Levertov's 'Relearning the Alphabet' (1970) he insists that' It records and is a coming-into-being of heightened and primary experience.t'" This has perhaps far more to do with Biographia Literaria (1817) than with Martin Heidegger. Whereas Heidegger stresses the ontico-ontological difference, Rosenfeld descants of union and coalition: language and being are coterminous: 'the being oflanguage ' and' the language of being , coalesce. It is poetry that unites them, hallows and celebrates the union, then retreats back into the worldless, where it resides until summoned again by a new Orpheus. (p. 546)

This kind of reception of Heidegger's reading of poetry is the chief reason that the affinity between Heidegger's and Derrida's accounts of the literary remained largely unexplored until only


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a few years ago. It has become necessary, as a countermeasure, to affirm the radical effects of Heidegger's work. Heidegger's argument with metaphysics was its inability to think the difference between being and entities. Rather, the being of entities, whereby things appear at all, is itself considered merely according to the model of another or supreme entity, for example, substance, first cause, summum ens- as if the world had the mode of being of an object encountered in the world. By the same token the difference between being and entities passed into oblivion. The structure of this on tico-ontological difference is necessarily a most peculiar one. The distinction between a rose and (its) being is clearly a problem totally distinct from that of the difference between one rose and another or any other two entities. The structure of this difference arises from the following considerations: first, it is only as (in) being that the realm of entities may be present or be at all. Secondly, being, thought rigorously in terms of its difference from any entity, is no-thing and may never be perceptible in the way of any entity. The whole, as it were, is other than the sum of its parts, but does not exist separately from them. Derrida, in the early sections of 'The Double Session', clarifies this bizarre interplay as 'the ambiguity or duplicity of the presence of the present, ofits appearance - that which appears and its appearing - in the fold of the present participle' (Diss, p. 192 ) . Being, as the appearing (as distinct from the entity which becomes so a pparent), necessarily disa ppears in the very unveiling of that which it makes present. Being withdraws, never becoming present, through the very structure of presentness-athand which it effects. This then, is the structure of the illusorily simple notion of mimesis as the coming-into-the-open of that which is apparent. Following Heidegger's analysis of the Greek term phusis for being, one must insinuate the fold of the presentparticiple in to this first sense of mimesis: Mimesis is then the movement of the phusis, a movement that is somehow natural (in the nonderivative sense of this word), through which the phusis, having no outside, no other, must be doubled in order to make its appearance, to appear (to itself), to produce (itself), to

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unveil (itself) ; in order to emerge from the crypt where it prefers itself; in order to shine in its aletheia. (Diss, p. 193)

As the brackets already suggest, being qua disclosure is precisely that which does not appear in that which is disclosed (entities). Presence or disclosure thus has, paradoxically, a structure of withdrawal. In what is disclosed disclosure itself is erased. Language, considered as a mode in which being is passed over to entities, thus participates in a structure of disclosure or appearing that may never itself become an object. It is precisely in the disclosure of objectivity that the appearing is erased in what becomes apparent. As a mode of presencing, language can never become a simple object of representation. It is a transcendental horizon. Thus we remain, Heidegger writes in the 'The Way of Language' (1959) (WL, pp. 111-36) 'committed to and within the being of language, and can never step out of it and look at it from somewhere else' (WL, p. 134). Moreover, Dichtung's 'call' and 'command', as a vocative and an imperative, are modes of language that break away from the almost universal philosophical treatment of language as if its nature were solely descriptive, propositional. The essence of language is not propositional form, but an openness to the resonance ofa nexus ofrelations and senses from out ofwhich the 'real' and the' human' emerge. It effects an ontico-ontological difference in that it is through language that things stand revealed in their being. Necessarily, however, the term 'revealed' should be considerably complicated. To anticipate Derrida's terminology in 'The Double Session' the structure of the ontico-ontological difference may be described as a 'fold '. An entity becomes apparent in an appearing (being) which withdraws in a structure of erasure as folding- back. Language is itself a fold of this structure in that, in its every effect of bringing to presence, it withholds itself and may not appear as an object. 'The Nature of Language' (1959) (WL, pp. 57-108), informs us: There is some evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itselfin words - in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds


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its nature in this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language. (WL, p. 8 I)

Any conceptual attention to language is thus to be renounced from the very first ('We do not merely speak the language - we speak by way of it' (WL, p. 124). Where this 'step back' out of representational thinking leads is the major question. What other' deeper' modes of coherence govern thought once one has left logico-systematic forms behind? Heidegger's proposal is that it is primarily a matter of a transformation of language itself and of our relationship to it. Above all, it is necessary to learn not to attempt to objectify or reify language but to learn a careful mode of phenomenological attention - a letting-be of language: Instead of explaining language in terms of one thing or another, and thus running away from it, the way to language intends to let language be experienced as language. In the nature of language, to be sure, language itself is conceptually grasped - but grasped in the grasp of something other than itself. (WL, p. I 19)

To be attentive to language in this sense is to hearken to its call or command, its Saying of the difference whereby world and thing are carried over and appropriated to each other in the movement of disclosure as withdrawal. Heidegger is thus hypothesising Dichtung as a mode of language which we cannot ourselves invent, but which can be attended to as a letting-be of language that would also be a letting come of being or world, that openness within which consciousness finds itself. This account of poetic language as a mode of bringing a world to disclosure is almost invariably that referred to when Heidegger and poetry are at issue. However, to turn to many of Heidegger's essays on poets after reading, say, the account of Dichtung in The Origin of the Work of Art (a lecture of 1935) is to encounter something unexpected. One often does not find a detailed account of the mode of world elaborated in or by Dichtung (as we do see in relation to the winter evening in Trakl's 'poem}. Instead, Heidegger will read a poem in terms that constitute a form of reflexive interpretation, namely, in relation to what the poem enacts of Dichtung itself. The

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot movement of appropriation in Dichtung, not any world thereby brought into its own, is the concern. In his essay on Stefan George's' The Word' (' Words' (1959), WL, pp. 139-56), Heidegger narrates George's undergoing of an experience with language, an experience in which something called' renunciation' is learnt as the genuine stance of the poet. A 'treasure' sought for within the poem turns out to be nothing less than the word or Dichtung itself. However, this treasure, somewhat paradoxically, is only treasurable insofar as the poet renounces any attempt to possess it, to have' words under his control as the portraying names for what is posited' (WL, p. 147). In effect, George learns the force and necessity of the 'step back' into the calling of language itself - 'I t is only the word at our disposal which endows the thing with Being' (WL, p. 141). The efficacy of this renunciation is attested, according to Heidegger, by the power of George's poem itself, which is not merely about language in the mode to be renounced. It is also a song in the sense of the movement of renunciation itself: the relation to the word must also undergo a transformation. Saying attains to a different articulation, a different melos, a different tone. The poem itself, which tells of renunciation, bears witness to the fact that the poet's renunciation is experienced in this sense - by singing of renunciation. For this poem is a song. (WL, p. 147)

Heidegger's long fascination with Holderlin relates to his understanding of Holderlin's poetry as a mode of renunciation as song. Heidegger chooses Holderlin as particularly suitable for a consideration of the essence of poetry because this is precisely Holderlin's own concern, not as the matter of poetics, but as a poetic saying of the essence of poetry. Correspondingly, one reason why Dichtung is so elusive a term in Heidegger is owing to the fact that the term Dichtung might often be accurately glossed as a Dichtung of Dichtung, just as Holderlin is valued as the supposed poet of the poet, a poetical saying of the essence of poetry (note the double genitive). Given that Dichtung cannot be conceptualised without reduction to what it renders possible this strategy, however idiosyncratic it at first appears, seems the only genuine option if thinking is to approach poetry.


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Dichtung names something that cannot be described without continual recourse to negatives. I t is not fictional language in the sense of being figurative or representation of any sort. I t is not the utterance of any author. Even if one admitted humanity as the inventor of language it could never be described as inventor of the nature of language. 'Poetic language is the language that speaks by itself and in order to say nothing other than the Saying of language itself' (Henri Birault) .18 It is understandable that all the poets Heidegger discusses write in German. However, while acknowledging that Heidegger also refers to Sappho and other Greek writers in respect of Dichtung, this privileging of German also recalls Heidegger's assertion that old German and Greek possess a uniquely close relation to the essence oflanguage itself. 19 Despite Heidegger's apparent prejudice this assertion need not, I think, be questionable in principle. At issue in Dichtung is a mode of language that may be turned upon itself to 'let speak' its own essence and there is no reason why any particular historical language should not be more or less 'poetic' than others in this respect. However, Heidegger's assertion concerning German is not only unargued but also, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has demonstrated, inseparable from Heidegger's German nationalism, a cultural emulation of ancient Greece that formed the basis ofHeidegger's long allegiance with nazism.f'' One response to the vast questions raised here would be to recall Maurice Blanchot's argument that texts which constitute a form of transcendental thinking, a saying of their own sources of being, have become to a degree characteristic of the literature of the last two centuries (see below). Another response, now frequently pursued, is to give minute analyses of the readings Heidegger actually performs ofTrakl, Holderlin and others. These analyses usually draw attention to nodes of resistance in Heidegger's texts, often related to the philosopher's politics, either from his Nazi period or the evasive quietism of his later work.f! I propose, however, to follow a third possibility, namely to cut Heidegger at this point and consider what he says about Dichtung in relation to a poet he does not discuss. Since the hypothesis at issue concerns Dichtung as something operative

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot beyond Holderlin, Trakl etc., this move (which is arguably just the sort of leap Blanchot and Derrida make in their own work with the literary) focuses the issues at stake in an immediate way. As an English-language example of almost didactic simplicity, whose ambitions in some ways are parallel to those of George's poem, I turn to a small text by Charles Tomlinson, entitled simply' Poem' .22 The text, which I propose to exploit as a kind of test case, consists of five stanzas, opening as follows: POEM

space window that looks in to itself a facing both and every way colon between green apple: and vase of green

Two preliminary remarks are necessary before considering this text in detail. First, the Heideggerian attention to Dichtung is in no sense a 'reading' in the sense of any sort of delineation of the psychological experience of reading. Insofar as language is ontico-ontological it is not an entity nor the possible object of any psychology. Furthermore, the notion of' experience' is itself to be overcome, at least in the sense of the presentation of something to an 'I'. Secondly, there is no interpretation. 23 Nothing is to be referred to any other field in any attempt to subordinate the singing in language under any concept. To be attentive to the presencing oflanguage itselfis to read' Poem' so as to hold and keep open, as far as can be, its' window / that looks into itself'. Such 'openness', the forwarding of the unconcealment in language itself, is the peculiar effect of Dichtung, One may compare one of Heidegger's attempts to instance language as the event of appropriation whereby space and time come into


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their own. Heidegger writes, simply, 'Of space it may be said; space spaces' (WL, p. 106). 'Poem' begins: space window that looks in to itself a facing both and every way

The extraordinary opening-out and decentring effect of these first two stanzas suggests the efficacy of Dichtung as a mode of appropriation. Moreover the stanzas are particularly' songlike' to the degree that something is happening other than the representation of any object. The title (' Poem '), as a neartautology, already suggests the degree to which the effect of these opening stanzas is itself the matter of the poem. To that extent, the' meaning' of' Poem' would be not a description of space bu t the poem's own affect as an analogue for the openness of space itself. To concern' space' is not to take an entity and re-present it, for space itself cannot be rendered an object in that manner. To the same extent, that aspect of language that does not pertain only to entities becomes unusually effective. The' reading' suggested above must be firmly distinguished from a possible misunderstanding. It would not be a matter of saying that the 'meaning' of 'Poem' is itself or 'poetry', founding its suggestiveness for an understanding of Heidegger on that basis. Thus, following the model of 'deconstruction' given in the introduction, one might read the final stanzas as , Poem' representing itself: invisible bed and breath ebb and air-flow below an unflawed irridescence of spiderweb

The 'spiderweb', as poetic text, would be understood as

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot appropriating space in the sense of rendering its invisibility apprehensible. This kind of allegorical reading, however, has nothing to do with Dichtung in Heidegger's sense. The' meaning' to be enacted in relation to Dichtung is neither a matter of selfrepresentation nor the cratylic illusion of onomatopeia or other aspects of the subjective experience of reading. The' meaning' is no more than the enactment; reference, as it were, without a referent. Moreover, insofar as one cannot really answer the question, 'What is enacted?', 'enactment' remains an unsatisfactory term. It is as if' Poem' were finally evoking nothing but its own evocation, its status as song - 'window / that looks in to itself / / a facing / both and / every way'. If Dichtung is to be understood as effecting an ontico-ontological difference, the mutual opening-up of world and thing, 'Poem' may be read as a Dichtung of Dichtung in terms of this opening-up itself as distinct from any object. Similarly, the project of determining the' meaning' of being is quite remote from any notion of'meaning' current in AngloAmerican philosophy. In accordance with Heidegger's general stance in relation to phenomenology, it is not a question of actively comprehending the sense of phenomena so much as letting the being of that comprehension itself speak'" in the movement of language upon its own' act'. Henri Birault writes in relation to this Saying: This language is without identity and without voice, inconsistent and sovereign; it has nothing behind it because everything is still in front of it; it shows without proving, gives without regulating, solicits without commanding, signifies without indicating.f"

Rather than signifying anything it is a question of the field upon which the possibility of any signification may arise. Heidegger's , readings' of Holderlin, Trakl and others cannot then be readings in any accepted sense. They move even towards an eschewing of their own textual status in favour of a listening, a reception, silence. This reception, moreover, is not trying to lead anywhere in the sense of establishing a meaning or an interpretation. We are led, Heidegger claims, only to where we already are, that' proximity' or 'nearness' whereby Dasein has a world and appears to itself.


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The necessity of eschewing all metalanguage is apparent in the bizarre stylistic innovations of Heidegger's work, with its meditations on guide phrases such as ' the being oflanguage : the language of being , or catachreses such as 'world worlds', 'space spaces' or 'time times'. 'Space spaces' is not' about' space in any objectifying manner. It is an attempt to enter the prior giving of space/time in the event of being in/as Dichtung. Dichtung in the sense elucidated therefore could be described, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's words, as 'the transcendental pure and simple'. 26 Dichtung, so conceived, has strictly speaking no nature proper to it as such. It could not be subordinated to the question 'what is?' It is no-thing. It is the articulation of an entity in its being, whereby it appears as what it is. What Dichtung would finally concern, then, is the status of this 'as' itself, and, correlatively, all postulations of identity, difference and contradiction which rest upon it. Two summary points present themselves here. Both underline the vast distance of Dichtung from received notions of the literary or 'aesthetic experience', 27 whether it be the 'experience' of creating a work or that of receiving it. First, Dichtung clearly cannot be described as any kind of intentional object. The phenomenological notion of intentionality, while not itself reducible to the subject-object dichotomy, maintains by definition its bipolarity. Dichtung, naming the open clearing whereby any object can emerge for any subject, could not be reduced to the status of that which it renders possible. Correlatively, Dichtung does not arise from any meaningbestowing act. It cannot be simply created. It is the non-human daimon, as it were, within the activity of poets; something received and not bestowed. Had the conditions been different, it is easy to imagine a scandalised critical public in the face of claims of the' death of the author' in Heideggerian writings. What is important in poetry is not only, or even primarily, owing to human agency, but to the other, namely, the movement of ecstasis which consciousness undergoes in the very performance of a catachresis such as 'space spaces' or the various lines of ' Poem' . It will have already become clear that one of the major

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot consequences of Heidegger's argument would be a revision of many of the technical terms applied to the analysis of language. One cannot, for instance, refer to understood figures of speech ('metaphor', 'simile', 'hyperbole' etc) without simultaneously being reminded of their implication in the very concept of language to be overcome - a 'metaphor' is precisely defined by way of its differentiation from literal representation. Hence my tentative use of the term catachresis. One priority of any putative 'Heideggerian poetics' then, must be to sketch out a rhetoric of Dichtung. Clearly, such a rhetoric would differ from received definitions. It would do so somewhat in the way that aletheia differs from the conception of truth as adequation. Correspondingly a rhetoric of Dichtung would also have to confront recent arguments that this very notion of aletheia is a vacuous one. One might argue, for instance, that compared to the notion of truth as adequation, aletheia is an empty generality. The issue here would be multiplicity. In relation to the traditional concept, the truth of a proposition is a function of the range of the entities to which it corresponds (i.e. if any of these entities differed from their account in the proposition then that proposition would be false). Hence truthas-correspondence is a notion whose multiplicity is necessarily equal to that of reality itself, with all its variety and nuances. On the other hand, one might argue aletheia or 'uncoveredness ' has no such multiplicity - 'apparentness' remains a mere generality. Richard Wolin even goes so far as to argue, on related grounds, that' all we are left with is an unexalted, positivistic affirmation of" givenness ", "beings in their immediacy", "disclosure as such"'. 28 In sum, to agree with Wolin would be to forestall any putative rhetoric of Dichtung before it might even be outlined: every figure would have the same tedious measure mere uncoveredness. There are two aspects to a response to Wolin. First, to argue that aletheia is a mere generality is to assume, wrongly, that it exists separately from and prior to the range of entities uncovered. There is no clearing or openness otherthan in its establishment in things or a work of art. Consequently, aletheia would have no less a multiplicity than truth-as-correspondence.


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There would be no one aletheia. Arguably, however, Heidegger does not think through all of the implications of this (see below). Secondly, there could be no one Dichtung. As the Riss or differing itself of the on tico-ontological difference, Dichtung is not present, rather it gives presence, without being discernible separately from that which it effects. This may be presumed to be one basis of Heidegger's insistence that all language is basically dialect. He writes: 'It is just as much a property of language to sound and to ring and vibrate, to hover, and to tremble, as it is for the spoken words of language to convey a meaning' (WL, p. 98). These issues of the materiality and plurality of language will recurin chapter 3. If we turn back now to the issue of a putative rhetoric of Dichtung we find that Heidegger, in his readings, employs terms such as 'metaphor' or 'image' but always with considerable reservations as to their received meanings. The tendency of his essays on poets is to perform a studied fragmentation of the text, meditating on it word by word and phrase by phrase. This way of reading finds an implicit defence in a section of What is Called Thinking, in which Heidegger defends the profundity of some remnants of the Presocratics despite their seemingly' primitive' or fragmented syntax. They employ paratactic structures that juxtapose related words without the use of grammatical connectives. These 'missing' connectives, as it were, are often signified by colons in modern versions of the fragments, as in the following of Parmenides: 'Needful: the saying also thinking too: being: to be'. Heidegger affirms this seeming lack of coherence: 'For the saying speaks where there are no words, in the field between the words which the colons indicate' (WT, p. 186). Heidegger's readings of poetry perform a slow-motion fragmentation of texts that effectively renders them paratactic in an analogous way. This teases out of individual words and phrases their specific' dichterisch' force. It is this mode ofdwelling meditatively with or 'in' a text that makes up the undeniable obscurity ofHeidegger's readings. Their refusal to translate the words of the text into more general terms renders them veritable anti-commentaries in this respect. In 'Language in the Poem' (1953) (WL, PP.159-98),

44


Heidegger describes the relation of an image ofTrakl's (the blue of the sky) to what Trakl terms the 'holy' (readable as Trakl's particular configuration of being) : Animal face Freezes with blueness, with its holiness

'Blue is not an image to indicate the sense of the holy. Blueness itself is the holy, in virtue of its gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself' (WL, p. 166). The peculiar quality of the sky's blueness - its self-veiling character ofdepth, its strange interplay of darkness and illumination - seems at first to be an image in the familiar sense for the withdrawal of being in a structure of revealing/ concealing. This is by no means the case, however. The image can be no representation in the second sense of mimesis as imitation. The sky is not an image for being in the manner of an externally related matter - rather, through these words, the ontological structure of the sky is brought forward in all its uncanniness. As Heidegger writes in regard to Holderlin (in ''' ... Poetically Man Dwells ... ", (1954) (PL T, pp. 2 I 3-29), the poet does not describe the mere appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. (PL T, p. 225)

It would be less accurate to say that something is revealed in this language than that the sky becomes present as an appearance that tantalisingly conceals. Yet what is imaged here, being/appearing, is itself no-thing. It is no more than the very structure of selfconcealment in a world it effects (' that which in its very selfdisclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself'). The sky in its appearance is made, through these words, to undergo a trembling in its very phenomenality. In this trembling the meaning of being as that which withdraws in its uncovering is undergone. 'In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain


45

what it is - unknown' (PLT, p. 225). In short one might conclude that being, as the appearing that must remain invisible in that which it renders apparent, is unveiled in figurative language according to a simple interpretation of the first sense of mimesis as presentation. This would be a superficial conclusion however, for two reasons. First, being itself (the appearing) could never become the object ofany language precisely because it is structurally in withdrawal. One cannot say, then, that poetry unveils any meaning of being. Second, language is itself the' medium' of this appearing/concealing. This latter structure, therefore, cannot be language's object, rather the figures both effect and are a structure of appearing/concealing. Language, as we have seen, is for Heidegger a granting of presence (as withdrawal) and may not be objectified. It would seem, then, in a structure not dissimilar to that of the mise-enabyme that preoccupies Derrida.f" that poetic figures engage in a fold of revealing/concealing over themselves, a fold in which neither language nor being is but as a 'gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself' (WL, p. 166). Rather than reaffirm the traditional notion ofpoetic language as ontologically derivative in relation to what is, it becomes necessary to conceive a mirroring that brings forth its seeming , original'. Consider Heidegger's discussion of the' image' of the pond in Trakl's 'Ghostly Twilight'. The' image' does not image, it is no longer a secondary repetition: On a black cloud, you Drunk with poppy travel The nighting pond, The starry sky. Always the sister's lunar voice Sounds through the ghostly night. (WL, p. 169)

Usually it would be said that the pond' portrays' the night sky. However, through the appropriating nature of language a bizarre reversal takes place - 'But the night sky, in the truth of its nature, is this pond' (WL, p. 169). Moreover, the supposedly

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot familiar phenomenon of night, in contrast to night as brought into its own through the mirror of the pond, is itself' a mere image, the place and empty counterfeit of night's nature' (WL, p. 169). It is not a case of a simple entity (the night) being doubled in the image. Rather something single, in becoming double through the pond, is revealed more truly in its nature (Wesen). The image is no longer a doubling but is in a peculiar way originary. The literary figure is a covering that obeys the unique structure ofwithdrawaljunveiling in the sense of mimesis as apparentnessjdissimulation. A Heideggerian reading, therefore, could not or should not argue or reach conclusions about a poem in the manner of representational thought, affirming a, denying b etc. On the contrary, the way into the question of language must become a transformation of this path itself. Thus one should not strictly speak of a Heideggerian 'concept' or 'view' of Dichtung which would at once efface the issues at stake. The poem, as the reading inhabits it, comes into its own in a specific displacement of the realm of conceptuality. It is a transformation of thinking that may be called a passage from one' site' to another: 'One site is metaphysics. And the other? We leave it without a name' (WL, p. 42). If Dichtung is to be conceived of as a movement of appropriation that cannot be represented or conceptualised without being eclipsed, what sort of task is left for thought to perform, and what of the mode or language ofHeidegger's own work? The issue of the relation of thinking and poetry and their relation to language as Sprache is one of the most obscure in Heidegger's euore. Commentators usually refer to Heidegger's enigmatic assertion of the proximity of poetry and thinking and this as meaning' that the two dwell face to face with each other, that the one has settled facing the other, has drawn into the other's nearness' (WL, p. 82). Proximity - as that space where we already are - is the saying to which poetry and thinking both relate, yet as complicatedly distinct modes. To think or to say the relation and the difference between poetry and thinking must result in a mode of argument that is no longer 'philosophical' in recognisable ways but which relates anew to the


47

sources of both philosophy and poetry. This issue, I believe, is enacted most fully in Heidegger's revival of the dialogue form for his meditations. As a peculiarly hybrid mode of language it is uniquely suitable for staging the Auseinandersetzung of philosophy and literature. Nietzsche's reading of the Platonic dialogue is an essential reference here. In The Birth of Tragedy we read that the dialogue form is 'a mixture of all extant styles and forms' and 'hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry 'v'" Surprisingly however, Heidegger's own brief accounts of dialogue dwell little on its problematic, hybrid generic status. A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer (1959) stages a movement that reads as a briefdeduction of the inevitability of dialogue as the mode of a thought that wishes to eschew treating language as its object. Such a meditation could be a 'speaking from language' (WL, p. 5 I). This speaking-from could no longer be any form of monologue since, as an attempt to enter the mode of language that sustains thought, the process of thinking itself no longer has any simple or undivided enunciation. Language would relate to itself, nonreflexively, as both addressor and addressee (according to the figure and ground structure outlined above). Dialogue seems ideally fitted to a conception of thought as a 'hearkening to' language, and of thought as a movement, an activity, at work for as long as the dialogue itself is maintained (as opposed to the elaboration of conceptual results). In this respect Heidegger's dialogues already anticipate Blanchot's conceptions of narrative (as opposed perhaps to certain conceptions of poetry) as ineluctable in the articulation of being. In itself, and from its Socratic beginnings, the dialogue frustrates too precipitate a will-to-know or to conclude. Conversation on a Country Path (first published 1959) is like one of Plato's sceptical dialogues in that its only content is its own movement as an exercise of clarification in moving toward a more enlightened inconclusiveness. Conversation on a Country Path has three speakers, chosen to instantiate modes of thought, a scientist, a scholar and a teacher. These modes of thinking, interrelating with each other, are drawn ambivalently into the space of a common question of

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot being. As a dialogue on the sources of thought itself the conversation undertaken becomes less and less an exchange about a shared issue and more and more concerned with the essence of conversation itself, the common horizon of thinking that draws the three together (see WT, p. 179). Since being cannot be presented, the issue in discussion, or rather in enactment in the language ofdialogue, is described as a peculiar form of waiting. This waiting is intransitive (since being is no object) and it must continually interrupt itself in order to be renewed, as the dialogue moves from speaker to speaker, each intervention being a clarification that turns us back to the nature of waiting itself, a renewed voiding of conceptuality and supposition that becomes the only conceivable mode ofprogress. I quote at length because of the importance of this notion of the wait to a discussion, in chapter 2 of this study, of Blanchot's L'attente l'oubli (1963): Then we can't really describe what we have named. Any description would reify it. SCHOLAR: Nevertheless it lets itselfbe named, and being named it can be thought about ... TEA C HER: ... only if thinking is no longer representing. SCIENTIST: But then what else should it be? TEA C HER: Perhaps we now are close to being released into the nature of thinking ... SCHOLAR: ... through waiting for its nature. TEACHER: Waiting, all right; but never awaiting, for awaiting already links itself with re-presenting and what is re-presented. S C H 0 LA R: Waiting, however, lets go of that; or rather I should say that waiting lets re-presenting entirely alone. I t really has no object. SCIENTIST: Yet if we wait we always wait for something. S C H 0 LA R: Certainly, but as soon as we represent to ourselves and fix upon that for which we wait, we really wait no longer. TEACHER: In waiting we leave open what we are waiting for. SCHOLAR: Why? TEACHER: Because waiting releases itself into openness ... S C H 0 LA R: in to the expanse of dis tance ... TEACHER: in whose nearness it finds the abiding in which it remains. (Conversation, pp. 67-8) SCIENTIST: TEACHER:


49

The movement of the dialogue from speaker to speaker enacts a hearkening to the saying in language itself. Thought is nourished by an interaction with Sprache in which the recurrent turning of language, often just one word, upon itself makes up a syntactical movement whose effect is to dislocate the word from its received sense in favour of an intransitive saying. Hence, the word' wait' becomes both intransitive and a peculiar neologism, rewritten as a kind of ontological performative. It is a matter, one might say, of the verse in conversation. The freq uency of unfinished sen tences in the dialogue also testifies to the movement of language into a non-assertive, non-propositional mode. Hence, accordingly, the mystery as to where the thinking takes place, if indeed such a question really retains much sense. It is not a psychological process that takes place in the 'minds' of the interlocutors and is then sent into the exchange. Thinking is the movement, the turning' inside-out' of language, of the dialogue itself - die Sprache spricht. Hence the three speakers at one point find themselves perplexed as to 'who' first suggested the term 'releasement' in relation to the intransitive wait of thought (p. 7 I). Interestingly, the emphasis on thought as an activity, a 'stepping back' towards its own sources, tends here to a mode of philosophical teaching as drama. Correlative with this is the notion, explicit in the dialogue between an 'Inquirer' and a Japanese speaker and words, that the movement of language in dialogue is, to a degree, untranslatable. If philosophising is dramatic its Darstellung, its self-presentation or enactment, is far more than the inessential dressing-up of concepts that might be otherwise parsed or understood. In the dialogue, the disposition or narrative unfolding of the thinking is itself a primary matter of thought. It is here that one finds the most cogent answer to Derrida's critical account ofwhat he terms a certain nostalgia in Heidegger, the hope that being could find its true expression in one word (MP, p. 27).31 Rather, narrativity and an implicit recognition of inconclusiveness are inherent to this form of thought. We read that' the way mentioned was more the course of the conversation than the re-presentation of the specific objects we spoke about' (Conversation, p. 69).

5°


Such a dialogue correspondingly eschews traditional philosophical demands for clear definitions, distinct deduction, trenchant contradiction etc. Other, elusive forms of coherence and constraint are at issue, modes of coherence that risk cultivating what, superficially, may appear as mere ambiguity. What is Called Thinking affirms of Plato's dialogues that they are inexhaustible. They do not offer themselves to the possibility of a correct or fixed reading (pp. 71-2). Earlier in the same discussion, Heidegger affirms that 'all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation' and that this openness is not 'merely the residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity which we properly ought to strive for but did not attain' (p. 71). This novel exploitation of the dialogue form responds to questions of methodology in the essay 'Concerning "The Line'" (1956).32 There Heidegger argues that there will be no transcendence or movement beyond metaphysics and its attendant nihilism unless the language of metaphysics is itself transformed. This does not just involve a rejection of one terminology (e.g. terms such as 'transcendence', 'beyond ') for another. It is not a matter of passing over some hypothetical line dividing one mode of thought from another, but a transformation of the notion of the line itself. Received language is to be given over to the demands of another mode of coherence: The meaningfullness of language by no means consists in a mere accumulation of meanings cropping up haphazardly. It is based on a play which, the more richly it unfolds, the more strictly it is bound by a hidden rule (p. 105).

As Conversation instantiates, this transformation of language in thought, as it performs the step back, must continually reaffirm itselfin reiterated meditations on the movement of transformation itself and a reiterated refusal to reify this relation by thinking it in terms of pre-given relata. The term' wait' thus no longer has an object, nor is it the action of subjective consciousness. It is an entry into the relation of being which it itself constitutes, enacting the peculiar non-linear temporality of Dasein's relation to Being, as schematised, for instance, by Rhodolphe Gasche : 'Le rapport n'est done pas a penser a partir de ce a quoi il donne


5I

naissance (l'etre et l'homme), mais a partir de I'etre comme rapport' [' The relation is thus not to be thought on the basis of that to which it gives rise (being and man), but on the basis of being as the relating' (Fh, p. 140)]. Similarly in 'Concerning "The Line"', Heidegger begins to eschew the term 'Being' as suggesting some realm that might exist apart from the human relation to it even as, paradoxically, it makes possible such a relating. 'If turning-towards belongs to "Being" and in such a way that the latter is based on the former, then "Being" is dissolved in this turning' (p. 8 I). Heidegger proposes that the terms, 'Being' and 'man' be dropped. ~ which Heidegger proposes instead, not only negates the notion of 'Being' as standing in itself but inscribes within it the intersecting lines of the movement of relating itself. Likewise, the movement of crossing over the line is replaced by a topological metamorphosis of the line itself, in a movement of crossing-out that not only alters a noun (Being), rendering it a verbal zone of relation; it also anticipates, in a schematic way, the syntactical twisting movement whereby language in dialogue (' the wait ') is transformed. Dialogicity comprises' being' as relating to itself (as language) in this topological transformation of the line. Robert Mugerauer has argued that the dialogue is not itself an exercise of transformation of this sort on the grounds that' the whole dialogue is Heidegger's composition '.33 Clearly, this position would deny the workings of anything like maieutics in the dialogues at issue here. However, it may be challenged by two considerations: first, Plato's account of thought as a dialogue of the soul with itself already pIuralises even the single interlocutor in dialogue.i" This dislocation of the centrality of consciousness is all the more emphatic in Heidegger's notion that human Dasein is dialogic in its being, such that one cannot say its being. Dasein, in (its) being, is in no sense its own. Thus, aside from complex questions of language at issue here, Heidegger could hardly begin to subscribe to the notion of composition used by Mugerauer, namely, the presentation, in a form of fiction, of a person's thought. Secondly, a form of a maieutics may be shown at work in the dialogue, one similar to that implied by Heidegger when, at the opening of' Time and

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot Being' (1969), he writes that' The point is not to listen to a series of propositions, but rather to follow the movement of showing'.35 The dialogue form, because of its proximity to drama, is remarkably suited to such a mode of attention. It employs in a controlled way what Manfred Pfister calls a fundamental characteristic of drama, that is the performative nature of all language onstage (' dramatic dialogue is spoken action ').36 Indeed the woodenness of dialogues by Berkeley, Hume and others is owing largely to their inability to either contain or utilise this aspect of staged language. Heidegger's dialogue, on the other hand, depends upon it in a very novel manner, giving its language an economy, precision and force reminiscent, perhaps, of Beckett's provocatively similar drama of waiting, Waitingfor Godot (1953).37 The maieutics or midwifery here, then, is not based on a notion of Platonic reminiscence but on the call for a disciplined mode of reading, such that the movement of thought at issue takeplace in the time ofreading. The reader of Conversations will need to engage in a mode of reflexive attentiveness to the path of language itself, in the turns and counterturns that serve to empty certain words of their presupposed conceptual content, and so participate in a movement in which language is not only the sole ' action', bu t this 'action' is in turn sole determinan t of language. It would be an unfolding in which one could say that 'form' and 'content' were indistinguishable were it not that language approaches its' act' asymptotically in a process that is both ceaselessly renewed and without closure. Thus the teacher interrupts the scientist to prevent the sense of 'waiting' from being foreclosed, and is then in turn interrupted, yet continued, by the scholar - and so on. In effect the dialogue is a recurrent exploitation of the paratactic such as Heidegger affirms in the Presocratics. In this way Heidegger's dialogue works as a mode of maieutics, effective at the time, each time, of its reading, and thus it overcomes certain apparent limitations of the dialogue as a written form.i" At least this would be the ideal - an issue to which we will return. It should be acknowledged that strong arguments exist that formulate Heideggerian Dichtung as an aspect of language that


53

either does not exist or that may be comprehended in a quite different way. In effect, the rest of this study concerns just such arguments. However, before moving on to Blanchot and Derrida, it is valuable to defend Heidegger against two accounts directed specifically against his notion of Dichtung, accounts which seem inaccurate but which allow some major distinctions to be made. These arguments against Heidegger are (I) that Heidegger is merely rehearsing a Romantic position on literary language and (2) an argument of Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard that what Heidegger terms' Being' is an effect, merely, of certain formal properties of discourse. To take the first objection: in many respects Heideggerian Dichtung does read like a version of the notion of 'Romantic' poetry elaborated by the German Romantics. August and Friedrich Schlegel seem to anticipate Heidegger in, for example, their advocacy of a return to Greek conceptions. Poetry should be understood not primarily in terms of its content or its conformity to inherited models but in terms of its relation to those creative processes that brought it forth (the imagination, poesis as creation itself). A poem is to be affirmed as a manifestation of' that one poem of the Godhead of which we too are part and flower' (August Schlegel). 39 Romantic poetry, as a poetry of poetry, will accordingly surpass all particular genres and determinations of language in order to speak their common essence as the essence of the world itself. The distinction between the work of philosophy and the work of art has also to be understood afresh: The philosophical organon is thought as the product or effect of a poesis, as work (Werk) or as poetical opus... Philosophy must effectuate itself - complete, fulfill, and realise itself - as poetry.?"

The difference between Heidegger and such German Romantic positions is often elided in modern commentators on Heidegger's work. Even Gerald Bruns, reacting against his earlier study of Heidegger in terms of a Romantic orphism, can argue that' To belong to language means that we disappear into the event of way-making as conscious disappearance into place, as spectatorship is dissolved by participation, as speaking turns into

54


listening, or as the dancer is carried away by the dance."" The notion of 'letting-go' to language, as Bruns describes it, is coming dangerously close to a naive celebration of a unity between reader and text, spectator and art-work, as ifHeidegger were elaborating another version of the Romantic overcoming of the dualism of subject and object in the activity of their common ground. Several points suggest themselves in answer to this Romantic reading. Conversations ona Country Path demonstrates Heidegger's dealing with language to be a 'letting-go' that nevertheless entails a difficult and exact discipline. Language undergoes, in dialogue, a peculiar movement that displaces it from those very notions of representation, communication, and even reflexive activity or positing by which it is normally understood. There is no disappearance of the participants of the dialogue into the event of language. Their participation is an exacting and necessarily unconcluded tracing of a non-representational region effective in the very language of the dialogue. Yet, as language also effaces that region, the dialogue's syntactical selfannulment must thus be continually renewed. Correspondingly, Bruns' Romantic account in the same study of the difference between conceptual thought and the mode of attention Dichtung demands should not be allowed to stand. Of the thinker's supposed disappearance into the 'way-making without why', Bruns writes: 'But of course philosophy was invented to keep this from happening' (p. 173). Heidegger, on the contrary, reads received philosophy as itself a manifestation of being (in occlusion). Bruns' account is redolent ofa dubious 'romantic' dichotomy of constraint and liberation.V This is not how Heidegger conceives the relation of thought and poetising. The dialogue enters the space of relation between the two and affirms an exacting interplay in which thought, as it releases itself to the way-making of language, yet continually interrupts itself to take stock and give form to the movement undergone, and this very interruption comes itself to make part of the dialogue or path of language into which thinking may further release it. 43 There is a complete interdependence of Dichten and Denken in this movement into' that which regions', even as they remain,


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perforce, quite distinct one from the other. The hollowing-out of language at issue is a form of stop_go,44 both movements being essential to the self-transformation at work. Let us turn now to the second argument with Heideggerian .Dichtung. The stanzas of Tomlinson's 'Poem' seem determined to produce the absolute minimum ofrejerence. What results is an effect that seems to emphasise language's power to show or to point, while barely showing or revealing anything other than the space of appearing itself - 'space / window / that looks into itself'. It is possible to relate this effect to a critique ofHeidegger suggested by Paul de Man in his Allegories ofReading (1979) 45 In an ambitious footnote de Man suggests that what is really at stake in Heidegger's question of being is 'rhetoricity' or, more helpfully 'the formal structure of representing'. 46 Heidegger's account of Kant would thus be turned against Heidegger himself. Dichtung would concern' not something represented but the formal structure of representing as such, and this formal structure alone makes it possible for anything to have been represen ted' .4 7 An argument extremely similar to de Man's has recently been propounded by Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard. He attempts a restatement of the Heideggerian 'ontological difference' within a theory of speech-acts. The argument is most fully developed in The DijJerend (1983),48 though my quotations are sometimes derived from a briefer presentation of the issues given elsewhere.t" Lyotard's restatement is in terms of the nature of locutions (' phrases '), which may be broadly understood as speech-acts, at least for purposes of the present account. Lyotard insists on the degree to which locutions are not merely statements that refer to other statements or to a sense or referent; they are also actions that position, implicitly, their speakers and receivers precisely as the speakers and receivers ofeach message. Thus the sentence 'You are to go to London tomorrow' situates the speaker in a position of authority vis-a-vis the addressee. This situation may be either corroborated or challenged by the manner in which subsequent locutions position their utterers (' yes, certainly', 'who the hell are you to tell me what to do',

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot 'are we sure that's a good idea' etc.). Lyotard's example in this respect is a memorable one in which an order is comically resituated - 'the officer cries Avanti! and leaps up out of the trench; moved, the soldiers cry Bravo! but don't budge'.50 Locutions are not just messages passing from sender to receiver. Each co-presents a whole contextual universe of references, senses, addressee and sender which remain at stake in the manner in which the locution is received. Either party is thus positioned, as it were, by the locution itself to the extent that one cannot situate the speaker as the origin of the locution, rather the reverse: A sentence (phrase) is not a message passing from an addressor to an addressee independent ofit. Both are placed or situated in the universe presented by the sentence, together with its referent and its sense. Presenting sentences as messages is what a sentence does."!

According to this argument, an order (as a performative locution) is not primarily an order because cif the authority of its speaker, rather the speaker has authority to the extent to which his speech functions as an order. That is, its status as an order is a function of its connection to another locution, that situates it. Lyotard then proceeds to submit this element of presentation in locutions to a movement of thought which, crudely speaking, is something like a theory of types. The problem centres on the attempt to grasp the presentation active in any locution. One cannot do this except by another locution which would situate the first as its object: The presentation contained by a sentence-token is not presented in the universe it presents. It is not situated. However, another sentence-case can present it in another universe, and so situate it. 52

Lyotard illustrates this relation of positing and effacement in his account of Aristotle's consideration of time, as given in the Physics, IV. 53 Lyotard contrasts an initial aporia concerning the status of the instant with Aristotle's concluding definition of time as the number of movement in respect of the ,'before' and , after' - that is, he argues that our idea of time stems from the measurement of physical change.


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To take the aporia first; this is essentially a rehearsal of one of the famous paradoxes of Zeno concerning space and time. The aporia arises from the attempt to think of time on the basis ofnow (nun), that is, as a series of present instants which succeed each other. This, however, has the weird consequence of excluding the temporal altogether: for the temporality of time cannot inhere in the instant itself, but only insofar as it is evanescent, giving way to another. No series of discrete instants will give anything like a model of time. Zeno's paradox relating most explicitly to time, the paradox of the' Arrow', runs as follows. Zeno argues that the arrow in flight must in fact always be static. If any instant of the arrow's motion from A to B is taken, the arrow, occupying in the air a space equal to its own length, must, at that instant, be stationary. No motion can be conceived there, for that would have to encompass duration and no longer the instant under consideration. This must apply, perforce, to every instant. Thus at no point of its flight can the arrow be said to move. The motion either does not take place or it takes place somehow between one instant and another, that is, in no time at all. Zeno, a pupil of Parmenides, is said to have employed this argument to demonstrate that time and change are unreal and that all that truly exists is the' One'. Aristotle's problem was to show at which point the argument is false. Lyotard's argument is a re-formation of Aristotle's solution in terms of his theory of locutions and the dichotomy of presentation and situation. 'The now is precisely that which does not maintain itself' (Le maintenant estjustementce qui nese maintient pas).54 The instant, which never quite is in the sense of being present, becomes thus assimilable to Lyotard's model of a presentation that can never be represented without, by the same movement, being effaced or situated. Its occurrence is thus never quite present. This non-occurring occurrence, as it were, also suggests in turn Heidegger's notion of Ereignis as the' event' that gives being, yet itself is not. Every presentation, or every instant, so considered, would be the singular occurrence of an es gibtjthere is that may never be conceptualised and whose withdrawal was inherent to it. Secondly, moreover, Lyotard contrasts the aporias concerning the instant with Aristotle's concluding definition of

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot time as the 'number of movement'. This definition may be understood as exemplifying the realm of locutions as situated. In this model the instants remain but situated in relation to each other along a linear series, that is, as the referents of a more encompassing description, namely time defined as the measurement of change. The implication of Lyotard's dichotomy of presentation and situation is that the ontological difference is an effect of the nature of locutions. No presentation may be conceptualised without by that very movement being effaced, becoming only the situated object of another presentation etc. Likewise, Lyotard continues, being does not present itself but as an entity and, no entity itself, it must at the same time be conceived as concealing or withdrawing itself in this very movement of (non)manifestation as an entity: The presentation contained could be named: Being ... A presentation can be presented as an instance in the universe of a sentence [i.e. thus effaced as a presentation] : Being as a being. But this sentence itself contains a presentation which it does not present.P"

Being, on this account, is a problem generated only by the very structure of representation. 'Being' is only another name for what de Man calls the' formal structure of representing', both presupposed and elided in any attempt to grasp it. 56 It is an illusion posited only in consequence of the incommensurable relation between presentation and situation. There is more at stake in some implications of Lyotard's argument than may at first appear. If language as 'presentation' and language as 'situation' are truly incommensurable and language can never, as it were, 'say' its own' act', then not only much of Heidegger becomes vacuous, but also those texts of Blanchot and Derrida treated in this study. A putative rhetoric of Dichtung concerns precisely the way in which the essential agency of language may' speak' within the realm of that which it renders possible (see WT, p. 186), a project both Blanchot and Derrida, in their way, endorse. Close examination of Lyotard's argument suggests two things. First, his theory of locutions emerges in many respects as a restatement of Heidegger's argument, reinforced by a broad


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knowledge of analytic philosophy. Secondly, however, the attempt to situate Heidegger contains simplifications that should not be allowed to stand. To substantiate these points I propose to turn back to the text used earlier as an instantiation of Heideggerian Dichtung, Tomlinson's 'Poem'. To take the . . openIng once again: space window that looks into itself

A question against Lyotard suggests itself at once. How many locutions is one dealing with in these six words? One for each line? One for the totality of the stanza itself or something in between? Little in The Differend is of any help with this question. Lyotard speaks throughout of locutions already taken as separate. Where, however, in thesesix words, does one locution end and where, if there is such a point, is the point of the effacement of one presentation in another? The answer from The Differend, I believe, would be that the number of locutions here would be determined only by another locution (in the commentary) that would situate the locution(s) at issue and so decide on their number of its own fiat (the parallel with Aristotle's account of time should be noted). However, given that the effect of the opening lines of ' Poem' is a kind of hovering phenomenon of revealing/concealing, the following question presents itself: is there any mode of locution after these lines that could correspond to the Heideggerian ideal of letting language be? This is, in effect, an old question about meta-language. For Lyotard, while there may be no comprehensive meta-language that might situate the totality of language as its object, the distinction between language and meta-language is constantly at work in his argument in a more subtle way. The dichotomy between presentation and situation retains both the mutual exclusiveness and the difference in kind of language and metalanguage. In fact what Lyotard does is to pluralise this distinction, such that the movement between locution and meta-locution becomes, for him, the very dynamic of language. Derrida, however, in a qualified reaffirmation of Heidegger, argues of language that' its essence cannot appear through any

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other instance than that of the very language which names it, says it, gives it to be thought, speaks it.' Language is not an open-ended series of locutions (analogous to mathematical sets with relationships of mutual inclusion). Rather, 'Language speaks of and by itself, which is something quite different from a specular tautology.l'" It is a matter ofa linguistic transformation without meta-language (see P, p. 57). Close examination of' Poem' shows any distinction between language and meta-language, however minute, becoming redundant in a configuration of words more complex than Lyotard could accommodate. 'Space' - the effect of this word, like the title (' Poem') itself, is one of a minimum determinancy. It names nothing but, explicitly, an absence of content - only space. The second word becomes in advance, therefore, more than usually attributive. To use Lyotard's terms, the presentation effected in the first line must lose its indeterminacy in being situated by the second. The almost-emptiness of' space', however, becomes merely the' two-dimensional' transparency of'window'. Once more the content posited seems virtually nil. It is as if the only occupant of the stage were the stage itself and its structure of showing. 'Space / window / that looks into itself' - the 'window' as a medium with its two sides and defined boundaries (inside and out, observer and observed) is turned in the third line into a dimension of unstable and decentred 'depth'. I t effects a kind of return to the openness of 'space' but at the same time considerably complicates its structure, as if, so to speak, 'space' were being said to be 'within' itself, an account that must be admitted to have a definite affect, even if this is conceptually a nonsense. The effect of the third line (' that looks into itself') is thus barely a reflexive one. This is because this' itself' has never admitted any more definition than the bizarre movement described. Moreover, the term 'medium', insofar as 'space' is itself the medium of the last line as well as its (indeterminate) subject, remains inadequate. It connotes something mediated, which it would be 'between', and there is almost no such thing in this case. The poesis effected in 'Poem' is' not then a presentation effaced at each turn. It is rather the relation itself


6I

whereby the lines both influence and undermine each other, at least in respect of determinate representation. The final line therefore merely holds open with renewed insistence the indeterminacy of the first, an effect further intensified by the second stanza: space window that looks into itself a facing both and every way

The weakness in Lyotard's theory stems from a simplification of Heidegger's account of the event of appropriation as it is effective in language. Ereignis is not the continuous rising of new presentations even as each is effaced or retroactively determined or situated (' Being as being' according to Lyotard's reformulation). Ereignis is the continually self-differing relation of one to the other, presentation to situation. Heidegger writes: The appropriating event is not the outcome (result) of something else, but the giving yield whose giving reach alone is what gives us such things as a 'there is,' a 'there is' of which even Being itself stands in need to come into its own as presence. (WL, p. 127)

Dichtung is neither side of the ontological difference (being/ beings). I t is the rift (Riss) or relating of that difference itself. Lyotard's formulation of the duplex nature of locutions (' presentation/situation ') is therefore an inadmissible reification. The ontological difference, as that Saying which relates (world to thing and thing to world) in dif-fering, would have to be defined in Lyotard's terminology more as the play or movement of locutions. I t is surprising, moreover, to find Heideggerian Ereignis assimilated by Lyotard to an adaptation of the Aristotelian account of time - as if the latter were not a principal object of criticism from Being and Time (1927) to Time and Being (1969). Ereignis is not the continuous rising up of presentations even as each is effaced. It is not describable according to any linear

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot model of succession or retroaction. Time and Being concerns nothing but the very multi-dimensionality of the structure of presencing. The basic linearity of Lyotard's caricature would have to be juxtaposed to this complex temporality, a daunting comparison not to be undertaken here. It must suffice to say that the linear succession of locutions would have to give way to the multi-dimensional gathering of the ecstases of time for which the model of successivity would be quite inadequate. For Lyotard a presentation (I) is succeeded by its effacement as the situation of another (2) which in turn, etc. Is it not the case, however, that in 'Poem' the word 'space' affects or situates the presentation 'window' at least as much as 'window', as the attributive term, situates' space', although the latter precedes it? The same movement of relating in both or several 'directions' is at play through' Poem', as it would be throughout any instantiation of Dichtung- 'a facing / both and / every way'.58 The distinction between a locution and a metalocution (which in turn etc.) is completely unworkable here. For Heidegger, however, the presencing in language enacts a complex structure of temporality. Dichtung is a gathering of the ecstases of time toward the unconcealment of world and thing. It should hardly be surprising, therefore, that Dichtung is described by Heidegger according to a notion of 'rhythm', stressing its temporalityt" Language corresponds to its poetic essence to the degree that its issuing forth also relates back, in the mode of an echo, to the primordial Saying of appropriation itself. George's 'renunciation', for instance, must become' the transformation of Saying [sic for 'saying'?] into the echo of an expressible Saying whose sound is barely perceptible and songlike'. 60 The notion of 'rhythm' that Heidegger offers in relation to Trakl and elsewhere is of course a new notion, better conceived as a form of dialogicity. Of the poetic site of Trakl's work, the difference that determines the world effective throughout his poetry, Heidegger writes: From the site of the statement there rises the wave that in each instance moves his Saying as poetic saying. But that wave, far from leaving the site behind, in its rise causes all the movement of Saying to flow back to its ever more hidden source.I"


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To conclude, Lyotard's restatement of the ontological difference employs Heidegger's argument on language in novel ways, opening some fascinating passages to analytic philosophy. In the end, however, Lyotard simplifies Heidegger inadmissibly. The DijJerend does not provide the critique of Dichtung it seemed to promise.

CHAPTER 2


ecrire, 'ce jeu insense d' ecrire' [Mallarme] Ecrire, l'exigence d'ecrire : non plus I'ecriture qui s'est toujours mise (par une necessite nullement evitable) au service de la parole ou de la pensee dite idealiste ... mais I'ecriture qui, par sa force propre lentement liberee (force aleatoire d'absence), semble ne se consacrer qu'a elle-rnerne qui reste sans identite et, peu a peu, degage des possibilites tout autres, une facon anonyme, distraite, differee et dispersee d'etre en rapport par laquelle tout est mis en cause. [Writing, 'this insane game of writing '] [Writing, the exigency of writing : no longer the writing always placed (by unavoidable necessity) at the service of speech or of so-called idealist thought ... but the writing which, through the slow liberation of its genuine force (an aleatory force of absence), seems consecrated only to itself, which remains without identity and which gradually gives rise to possibilities of quite another nature, an anonymous manner of being and relating, vacant, deferred and scattered, by which everything is put in question.]

Among those things placed in question by such a radical notion of writing are the ideas of God, the Self, the Subject, Truth, Unity and of the Book or Work. This hyperbolical, even portentous, series of claims may well have a familiar sound to readers of Derrida. The quotation, however, is not from Derrida, but from Maurice Blanchot, the preface to L' entretien infini (1969). Indeed, most aspects of Derrida's work find what seem to be close analogues or precedents in Blanchot's work, though in fact the relation is far more complex than that. Heidegger's later work is a necessary point of reference for an understanding of both Blanchot's critical and literary 64

Blanchot: the literary space output." At first reading both seem impenetrably obscure, yet Heidegger's importance may be borne out in many ways. It may first be traced in Blanchot's account of how the literary has become, in the last two centuries, a quasi-transcendental space, the 'saying of being'. This conception, overlapping without coinciding with Heideggerian Dichtung, provides the context within which Blanchot's own literary auore has been produced. It is these literary narratives (to which we will turn at the end of this chapter) that engage most fully and challengingly with Dichtung and the possibility of a new practice of language as a heteronomic discipline of thought. L' entretien infini sketches major metamorphoses in the E uropean notion of literature since the eighteenth century. A radical conception of writing, associated with Mallarrne, is traced to Romantic notions of language as they opposed themselves to Enlightenment models. At this time, as is well known, language and poetry become very much bound up with the notion of voice. This was not simply because' voice' was supposedly related to the intimacies of subjective life, and so with notions of poetry as self-expression etc. Rather, the Romantic conception of the poetic voice also incorporated non-subjective elements of a sort now more closely associated with writing, namely, a relation to the daimonic or non-human element in poetry. Blanchot stresses notions of the writer as hearkening, in inspiration, to a voice that is less his or her own than lent. This' voice' is a voice of no one, the echo of something unknown yet at work in art, perhaps even manifest in insanity (' Holderlin, dans la folie, "rleclamant" a la fenetre, donne un organe a cette voix' [' Holderlin, in madness, "ranting" at the window, lends an organ to this voice'] (EI, p. 386). This highly schematic sketch serves to introduce Blanchot's concern with how something 'other', something acultural, comes to assert itself in literature. Literature becomes the space for an elusive, transient' voice' upon which it turns to find its own genesis. One thinks, for instance, of Shelley's' Ode to the West Wind', in which the poem uncertainly confronts the wind as an impersonal voice that is yet the poem's own inspiration, origin and momentum.f "Voice ' becomes inseparable from the idea of the work's source as that with which the work is most

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engaged. The transcendental turn in modern literature underlies, for Blanchot, the concern with symbolism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The symbol marks the site of the work's opening towards transcendence - 'Ie symbole restaure le pouvoir du sens, le symbole etant la transcendance me me du sens, son depassement ' (El, p. 387) [' the symbol restores the power of meaning, the symbol being the very transcendence of meaning, the surpassing of it ']. One result of this movement in excess of the letter of the text is that literature breaks from its understanding as any sort of representation of the mundane or visual order. It becomes an order in its own right - "L'ecriture cesse d'etre un miroir' ['Writing ceases to be a mirror'] (El, p. 387). The space of the text, with Mallarrne, becomes no longer one of voice, but of writing, whose force is always to break away from narrowly representational constraints. Blanchot's grand claims for writing exist, paradoxically, side by side with muted corroboration of Hegel's famous statement that art is a thing of the past. 3 This assertion, too easily misunderstood, was made knowingly in the age of Goethe, Beethoven et alii. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that art has become something now felt to be continually in need of defence and justification. Indeed, the very proliferation of books, museums and libraries is part of this decline, as is the inflation of the artist as 'creator' or personality and the prevalent subjectivising of the aesthetic into states of feeling, either expressed or received." Blanchot's concerns, moreover, are incompatible with any species of humanism. He completely eschews study of literature in terms of 'culture', 'art' or 'society'. 'Culture', he writes, is 'based on the notion of humanism, the notion that man is naturally reflected in his works and never distinct from himself' (' Ars Nova', SS, p. 18g). Despite the volume and difficulty of Blanchot's work, a recurrent movement of thought, albeit with some risk, can be traced throughout. Blanchot, no more than Heidegger, does not attempt to write about language. Language is rather, as it were, doubled upon itself to let speak, not a discourse about anything, but the' essence' of language itself - though it must be added

Blanchot: the literary space that' inessentiality' is the most prominent trait of this' essence'. This ambition is entirely in accord with Blanchot's account, in Le livre a venir (1959), ofa common trait in significant modern literature : Valery ecrit: ' Mes oers n'onteupourmoi d'autre interet que demesuggerer des riftexions sur le poete", et Hofmannsthal: 'Le noyau le plus interieur de l' essence du poete n'est rien d'autre que le fait qu'il se sait poete', Quant a RiIke, on ne Ie trahit pas si l'on dit de sa poesie qu'elle est la theorie chantante de l'acte poetique. (LV, p. 269) [Valery writes: 'My verses have had for me no other interest than to suggest to myself reflections on the poet'; and Hofmannsthal: 'The inmost kernel of the essence of the poet is nothing other than the fact that he knows himself a poet.' As for Rilke, one is not misrepresenting him to say of his poetry that it is the theory, in song, of the poetic act.]

Literature has become its own principal concern. This is not to say that it has become reflexive in the mode of poetry about poetry or some notion of formalism. Rather, Blanchot argues that poetry has become the field of a transcendental mode of questioning into its own conditions of possibility (' Ie poerne est la profondeur ouverte sur I'experience qui le rend possible' (LV, p. 269) [' the poem is the depth open upon the experience which makes it possible']. Moreover, the state of being of the literary comes to challenge received notions of being itself. Blanchot eschews the dominant subjectivising and historicising approach to literature and renders it the field of a life-long meditation on the borders of philosophy and religion - "l'ceuvre est le mouvement qui nous porte vers le point pur de l'inspiration d'ou elle vient et ou il semble qu'elle ne puisse atteindre qu'en disparaissant' [' the work is the movement which carries us to the pure point ofinspiration from which it comes and where it seems that it can only reach it by disappearing'] (LV, p. 272). This movement has obvious affinities with the movement/ withdrawal of being in Heideggerian Dichtung. There are major differences, however. Dichtung concerned a sending of being that even though most fully realised in certain poets, is not to be entirely identified with language in any received sense but which must be associated, broadly speaking, with anything of

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significance for Dasein. Blanchot, however, also shows minute concern with literature in the narrower sense. In the following statement on Blanchot by Emmanuel Levinas, 'literature' might be substituted for' art' with almost no loss: Deja pour Heidegger l'art, au-dela de toute signification esthetique, faisait luire la 'verite de l'etre ' mais il avait cela en commun avec d'autres formes d'existence. Pour Blanchot la vocation de l'art est hors pair." [For Heidegger already art, understood in a non-aesthetic sense, made the 'truth of being' shine out, but it had that in common with other forms of existence. For Blanchot, the vocation of art is without equal.]

Literature, moreover, is strictly an affair of letters, of writing. For Blanchot to write is not essentially a profession or even a 'cultural activity'. I t is a vocation pursued with religious intensity; indeed it is less a vocation than an existential condition. Blanchot is nevertheless fully aware of much that seems far-fetched in this notion of the writer: How can a life be wholly dedicated to the task of arranging a given number of words in a given order? This is perhaps harder to understand. But let us grant that it is the case. Let us grant that for Kafka writing is not a question of aesthetics, that his aim, far from being to create a viable literary work, is his salvation and the accomplishment of his life's mission. (' Kafka and Literature', SS, p. 3 I)

This' salvation', however, is barely anything of the kind. I t is the antithesis of pseudo-Romantic notions of art as selfrealisation or self-expression; nor is the writer any sort of religious visionary. Qua writer one is in fact noone. A writer is not a representative of 'us' or the human condition. Writing is a confrontation with a nothingness beyond entities. There are affinities between the writer's self-effacement in Blanchot and Heidegger's notion of the poet's renunciation of language as an instrument. In 'The Essential Solitude', we read: To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, anymore that he can appeal to you, or even introduce another's speech. Where he is, only


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being speaks - which means that language doesn't speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being. (SL, pp. 26-7)

However, 'being' becomes no longer adequate as a term for what Blanchot intends. This inadequacy is best expounded through consideration of the place that writing comes to occupy in Blanchet's thought, in marked contrast to what Derrida has termed Heidegger's phonocentrism. 6 'Wri ting' displaced Dichtung in Blanchet's account of the movement of appearance as withdrawal that makes up what is distinctive in the literary: L' ecriture ne commence que lorsque le langage, retourne sur luimerne, se designe, se saisit et disparait, (EI, p. 390) [Writing only begins when language turned back upon itself, marks itself, grasps itself, and disappears].

The nature of Blanchot's divergence from Heidegger stems from his relation to two distinct movements of thought at work in France in the past four or five decades. Both would tend towards a displacement of Dichtung by' writing'. First, Blanchot, with his friend Georges Bataille, was engaged in an interpretation of Hegel's dialectic that sought to recuperate much that remains urgent in Hegel's thought without ascribing to his systematised idealism. This resulted, in the I 940s, in Blanchot's various accounts of thought, language and conceptuality in terms of a notion of writing linked up with a quasi-Hegelian form of negativity. Secondly, this novel conception of writing matched, with what must have seemed remarkable serendipity, many Mallarrnean notions of literary writing. What emerged was a meditation in which' literature' and the act of writing come to occupy a privileged place in questions of the nature of being and humanity. It remains, now, to put some flesh on these schematic bones. There are several reasons why, for Blanchot, negativity should be associated with writing. Writing, as distinct from speech, has its raison d'etre in functioning beyond the moment of its genesis - the Iliad is readable despite the absence of Homer himself. A written text necessarily negates the presence of both its author

7°


and reader in opening itself to an unlimited horizon of future readers: 'To write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself. It is to destroy the relation which, determining that I speak toward "you", gives me room to speak within the understanding which my word received from you ... To write is to withdraw language from the world' ('The Essential Solitude', SL, p. 26). To write is to enter into the antithesis of' selfexpression'. I t is a renunciation. This implication of writing with negation emerges, almost in passing, in an early section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), an unavoidable reference for any account of'Blanchot." The occasion is Hegel's critique of' sensuous certainty', that is, the doctrine that true knowledge is constituted only of whatever can be immediately perceived, for example, the apparent certainty with which I can assure myself of the existence of the table by reaching out and touching it, here and now. All that remains certain is the this, here, now. However, this view is easily questioned by the simplest of thought experiments in respect of the meaning of such terms as 'this', 'here' and 'now'. Hegel writes: To the question: 'What is now?', let us answer, e.g. 'Now is Night'. In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale."

'Now', although it may seem to do so at the moment of utterance, does not derive its sense from the instant it seems to pick out. It is for Hegel a universal whose meaning, paradoxicall y, is inseparable from a negation of the very sense-certainty which it seemed both to designate and to derive from. It is a 'neither This nor That, a not-This', hence a universal. 9 Language itself, as the game with writing shows, is inseparable from negation. It prevents us, in referring to the immediate environment, from ever quite saying what we mea~ (' it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean ') .10

Blanchot: the literary space The negation that transforms the terms 'here', 'now' and 'this' cannot but also apply to the term' I': sense-certainty experiences the same dialectic acting upon itself as in the previous one. I, this' I', see the tree and assert that' Here' is a tree; but another' I' sees the house and maintains that' Here' is not a tree but a house instead. 11

The same solution also applies. The 'I' is not what I feel of 'myself' 'here' or 'now'. I t is also a universal - 'when I say " I ", this singular "I", I say in general all "Is"; everyone is what I say, everyone is 1'.12 Writing here, for Hegel, only instantiates a moment of negation essential to both language and concept-formation. Thought would be impossible without this component of distancing and negation. Blanchot writes: 'This is what Hegel has shown. "The life of the mind begins with death'" (SL, p. 252). For Hegel, nevertheless, negation is only one moment in the movement of his dialectic. If sensuous certainty proves untenable, it is only negated in favour of a higher, less inconclusive, notion of knowledge. Thus the negativity essential to language is both recuperated and contained in an emergent universality. 'I' becomes everyone qua rational. It is important to notice the movement of reasoning in Hegel's argument. There is a thesis - that knowledge is only of the immediate in sense-certainty - that, by the very act of reasoning from it, becomes a self-contradiction; the now and this become not-now, not-this. Furthermore, rather than resting in this refutation, thought moves back to dwell upon the movement of concepts it has just undergone and this self-consideration is the emergence of a newly totalising concept, the now and this as universal. Thinking progresses as the necessary evolution of new and more-embracing concepts determined out of the reflexive meditation of thought upon the implications of its own activity. Writing is hence, for Hegel, only a transitory moment in the reconversion of negativity to positivity. However, Hegel elides the fact that his negation of the terms 'here', 'now' and 'I' is not primarily a movement into universality - the negation is actually accomplished through their being read or written at

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another 'here' or 'now' or by another 'I'. The process of reflexive mediation, which is the path of thought, moves through writing and reading, whose own status goes unacknowledged. The newly written (or read) terms would themselves give way to negation by similar readings/inscriptions. A mode of being a realm of analogy or imagery - emerges here between the particular and the universal, something neither one nor the other (cf. Blanchot's notion of the neuter) even as it is a precondition for both. The ideality of the sign, the written mark, is not that ofa universal yet neither is it that of mere sense-data (ifit were, all reading would be faced with an endless diversity of marks, rather than recognisable words). This paradoxical quasi-ideal materiality is what makes up Blanchot's notion of 'writing'. Insofar as writing here is what the Hegelian dialectic must negate (even as its movement must depend upon the mode of being of that which it negates) it becomes a form of otherness that, de jure, must condition the notions ofnegation and raising to the universal. In many respects, the notion of writing which Blanchot develops in this argument closely anticipates Derrida's work on the ideality of the written sign at the end of the fifties. Derrida's introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry'? concerns the question of how language may embody and transmit universal ideal objects, such as the truths of geometry. Writing, Derrida argues, with and against Husserl, both (a) marks the negation of immediacy and makes possible the universal in its transmissibility yet (b) by its finitude and quasi-materiality, prevents that universal from attaining the status ofa pure ideality. Henry Staten gives the following useful redaction of the argument: Husserl himself is aware that there is another level of ideality between the material substance of the sign and its meaning, the ideality of the signifier of 'verbal corporeality' ... Derrida's argument is that this ideality of the signifier makes it impossible to split the sign into a worldly or material side and an ideal side, and that, consequently, existence of the sign cannot be bracketed in favor of its ideality.l"

Since the notion ofdialectical recuperation in Hegel is no longer admissible, both Blanchot and Bataille anticipate Derrida by writing extensively about 'nothing', 'death' and 'night' as


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forces that cannot be quite tamed or mastered in a concept (' death' is already a condition of the possibility of any concept L'" 'Writing' thus becomes partly the name for a negativity that cannot be mastered, or reconverted to a positivity. It also becomes a strange mode of the transcendental. Hence it will be necessary, finally, to discard the term 'negativity', since it may no longer quite be defined by opposition to its antithesis. In associating writing with irrecuperable loss'? - of consciousness, presence and meaningBlanchot in the mid-fifties already anticipates Derrida on writing and Zas ashes. There is nothing novel in associating writing with death - an inscribed name is projected into the future and thus somehow spared death. More disconcerting, however, is Blanchet's notion of' culture' as made possible by a force of privation it can never overcome. To write becomes to engage oneself with a dead time at the heart of all continuity, a radical discontinuity not to be escaped. The' I' that writes cannot be, after Hegel, any sort of immediately intuited subjective life; yet neither, after Bataille, can it be a universal, rational 'I' (everyone qua rational). Blanchot associates the genesis of writing with an impersonal 'iI' ('he' or 'it' in Frenchj.!" Here and now similarly become indeterminate without becoming universals- ('The time of timelessness is not dialectical': SS, p. 105.) What remains is what Blanchot names the' space of literature ': 'a time without negation rather than a negative time - an indeterminate time when here can just as well be nowhere' (SS, p. 105). Mallarme is a recurrent point of reference for Blanchot.P Indeed, notions of writing and negativity and the writer's peculiar relationship to absence find analogues in much of Mallarme's work. Summarising Mallarme in La part du feu (1949) Blanchot writes: A quoi tend l'ecriture? A nous liberer de ce qui est. Et ce qui est, c'est tout, mais c'est d'abord la presence des 'choses solides et preponderantes ', tout ce qui pour no us marque le domaine du monde objectif. Cette liberation s'accomplit grace a l'etrange possibilite que nous avons de creer du vide autour de nous, de mettre une distance entre nous et les choses. (PF, p. 46).

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[To what does writing tend? To free us from that which that is. And that which is is no less than everything, but first and foremost, it is the presence of' things solid and preponderant', everything that marks for us the realm of the objective world. This liberation is accomplished thanks to the strange potential we have of creating a void around us, of placing a distance between ourselves and things.]

Mallarme, for Blanchot and Derrida, serves as a name to mark all that is most challenging in the literary. 19 The introduction to L'entretien infini dates from Mallarme, "I'experience de quelque chose qu'on a continue a appeler "Jitterature" [' the experience ofsomething which one continues to call" literature" '], adding moreover that it is also with Mallarme that' literature' demands to be written in inverted commas (El, p. vi). In Mallarme's complex anti-natural and anti-representational development of symbolism, writing becomes the freedom to negate' that which is' in favour of what he termed the 'ideal', a term best left undefined at this point. The resonances of this view for Blanchot's are clear enough. For Mallarrne, the negation inherent in poetic language is conceived in terms ofpurification : 'A quoi bon, dit Mallarme, la merveille de transposer un fait de nature en sa presque disparition vibratoire selon lc jeu de la parole, cependant, si ce n'est pour qu'en ernane, sans le gene d'un proche ou concret rappel, la notion pure' (requoted from PF, p. 37) ['To what good, says Mallarme, the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its vibratory near-disappearance, in accordance with the play of the word, ifit is not in order that the pure notion may emanate from it, without being hampered by a close or concrete recall.'] For Blanchot, however, there is no purification into the ideal. The deathliness in language is described in terms of ghostliness and decay. Mallarme's idealised poetic flower gives way to the odour of a Lazarus between life and death.f" This is that side of Blanchot's work that Derrida often engages. A word is neither totally absent, nor present, it lives on as a kind of life-in-death. In an early essay in La part defeu (1949), Blanchot's account of the language of fiction adapts what is essentially Mallarme's distinction between everyday, mundane language and the 'pure' writing of poetry. Moreover, this dichotomy is itself not


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unlike Heidegger's opposition ofinessential, everyday language, conceived as a tool of communication, and essential language as Dichtung. Blanchet's proximity to Mallarme at this time is apparent, nevertheless, in the fact that his own essay centres on the question of the symbol and symbolism. 'Le langage de la fiction' opens with the contrast between the language of everyday and that of a fictional narrative. A sentence such as 'Le chef du bureau a telephone' [' the head of the office has phoned '] in a day-to-day situation seems identical with the same sentence in the opening chapter of a novel (Kafka's The Castle in fact). This identity of form, however, hides a vast difference in their modes of being. In the first instance the words would be embedded in a context of familiarity (the office, the people in it and their interrelations etc.) into which they would instantly disappear. I already know who the boss is, what the boss might want, the consequences for me etc. - my implicit knowledge is ultimately infinite: lecteur conscient des mots significatifs, je n'ai presents a l'esprit ni les mots que je lis et que leur sens fait disparaitre, ni ce sens que nulle image definie ne presente, mais un ensemble de rapports et d'intentions, une ouverture sur une cornplexite encore a venir. (PF, p. 80) [as the reader conscious of meaningful words, I have in mind neither the words I am reading - and which their meaning makes disappear - nor that meaning itself, which no definite image presents, but an ensemble of relations and intentions, an opening upon a complexity yet to come.]

In contrast to such everyday language, which has the value only of a sign (disappearing before what it represents), the same sentence in a novel takes place in a vacuum: lecteur des premieres pages d'un recit, et quelle que soit la bonne volonte realiste de l'auteur,je ne suis pas seulement infiniment ignorant de tout ce qui se passe dans le monde qu'on m'evoque, mais cette ignorance fait partie de la nature de ce monde. (PF, pp. 79-80) [as the reader of the first pages of a narrative (and whatever the good realist intentions of the author) I am not only infinitely ignorant of everything that happens in the world evoked to me, but this ignorance forms part of the nature of that world.]

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot I t is a truism that the sole means of access to the 'world' of the narrative is the narrative itself. Yet the implications of this draw Blanchot on. This poverty or lack of context, he argues, is not contingent but of the essence of fiction. This has a double consequence: (I) the senses of the words suffer from a certain lack or deficiency while, at the same time, (2) taking up the sole power of originating what they seem to represent. The words alone project what they merely seem to re-present. The language offiction, constituted by such privation, seems then a more explicit mode of the negativity already at work in everyday language. To that extent it may already be seen as showing the 'essence' of language to a greater extent than mundane discourse. Literature clearly does not interest Blanchot in any of the respects in which writing is held to be mimetic. This is perhaps the point of greatest resistance in Blanchot's texts, both 'literary' and' critical', as well as Heidegger's essays concerning poetry. For both, literary texts are not, in the end, about something. They are that' something' themselves. In Blanchot's peculiar reading of the myth of the sirens, for example, the myth represents nothing: 'This is not an allegory. Every narration secretly resists the encounter with the Sirens, with their enigmatic song whose power resides in its flaw' (SS, p. 61). Is it correct, then, to describe Blanchot as anti-mimetic? Not quite. His notion of writing must be conceived between the following two positions: (I) 'mimetologism', the notion that a literary work imitates something, by reference to which it is understood; (2) 'literarity' in the sense first isolated by the formalists; the notion that the work, representing nothing, yet presents itself as a verbal artefact. (Both these positions, one might add, would clearly fall in the scope of the notion of representation in the full sense expounded by Heidegger in his Nieizsche.i This dichotomy leaves no obvious third space. However, it is such a space that 'Ie langage de la fiction' attempts to sketch. Blanchot differentiates 'allegory', 'myth' and 'symbol'. Allegoryoffers fictive language as the instrumental sign ofa series of discrete ideas (a return, in fact, to 'the ideal -of quotidian


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prose' (p. 83)). Myth, on the other hand, supposes no separation of sign and referent; meaning cannot be disembodied from the agents of the mythical narrative. It is as if the myth would ideally return the reader to a primitive state in which thought had not learnt the trick of abstracting from physical things. The symbol, however, is Blanchot's principal concern. Here the negativity inseparable from language becomes primary. The meaning of a symbol obviously exceeds its immediate superficial sense, but not in the clear determinate manner of allegory. A symbolic narrative negates the particularity of its objects by imbuing them with a more universal significance. The sense of a symbol is a 'global' one. Blanchot means by this not' le sens de tel objet ou de telle conduite pris a part, mais celui du monde dans son ensemble et de I' existence humaine dans son ensemble' (PF, p. 83) [(not) 'the meaning of such-and-such an object or such-and-such conduct taken separately, but that of the world in its totality, of human existence in its totality'.J This may even lead to the ambition to read a symbolic fiction as the realisation of "le sens originel de l'existence' (PF, p. 84) [' the original meaning of existence ']. Symbolism embodies then a further aspect of negativity over and above the bracketing of real existence that makes up fictive language. Blanchot refers the symbol to Sartre's notion of imagination, conceived as a mode of negativity specific to humanity. " In the empiricist tradition, 'imagination' was usually understood as a faculty of the mind, conceived as synthesising images which, though derived from experience, may be reordered in a quite unprecedented way. Thus a man's body may be imagined with the head ofa cockroach, or a planet placed within the orbit of Mercury. In the empiricist model, nevertheless, there remains a basic continuity between the image and the world: it is all a matter of rearrangement. For Blanchot, however, after Sartre, this account omits something essential - that is, the fact that imagination is made possible by the ability to detach, as it were, reality from itself, that constitutive re-move whereby imagination negates given states of affairs. It is a power of bracketing, capable of even sidestepping the world itself. The distancing constitutive of

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot imagination becomes' lejeu sans lequel il n'y aurait ni image, ni imagination, ni fiction' (PF, p. 84) [' the play without which there would be neither image, nor imagination, nor fiction ']. 'Imagination' is thus far from being the ability to conjure up an image 'in the mind' in the absence of the object: son mouvement est de poursuivre et d'essayer de se donner cette absence merne en general et non plus, dans l'absence d'une chose, cette chose, mais, a travers cette chose absente, l'absence qui la constitue, Ie vide comme milieu de toute forme imaginee et, exactement, l'existence de l'inexistence, Ie monde de l'imaginaire, en tant qu'il est la negation, le renversement du monde reel dans son ensemble. (PF, p. 84) [its movement is to pursue and to try to render itself this very absence in general, to render no longer, in the absence of a thing, that particular thing, but through that absent thing the absence which constitutes it, to render the void as the milieu of every imagined form and precisely, the existence of inexistence, the world of the imaginary insofar as it is the negation, the inverting of the real world in its totality. ]

Symbolic narrative suggests the possibility of a position between 'mimetologism' and 'literarity'. One can be attentive to something in symbolic narrative that neither renders itself up in the illusion of representation nor exists in the mode of a verbal artefact. The literary may be taken in terms of the constitutive re-move itself, a literary' space' that cannot be objectified or turned into any species of meaning. A symbol's inherent excess "depasse toujours toute verite et tout sens ' (PF, p. 8s) [' always passes beyond all truth and all meaning']. This renders Blanchot's Mallarrnean essay a kind of crude harbinger ofdeconstruction, an affirmation ofnegativity similar to Hillis Miller's observation of 'the unsettling freedom of language from reality' (see above). The symbol's excess is also the impossibility of any simple thematism: elle [l'imagination] implique une absence absolue, un contremonde qui serait comme la realisation, dans son ensemble, du fait d'etre hors du reel. II n'y a pas de symbole sans une telle exigence et cette exigence, en action derriere tous les mouvements du recit, l'empeche, par sa negation perpetuellement active, de recevoir un sens determine, de devenir seulement significati£ (PF, p. 84)


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[it (the imagination) implies an absolute absence, a counterworld that would be, as it were, the realisation in its entirety of the fact of being outside the real. There is no symbol without such a demand, and this demand, at work behind all the movements of the narrative, prevents it, by its perpetually active negation, from receiving a determinate meaning, from becoming only meaningful.] (emphasis added)

The symbol, become a narrative, is read as the negation of the possibility of a narrative with a determinate referent, and yet likewise the account (recit) of that negation: 'Le symbole est un recit, la negation de ce recit, le recit de cette negation' (PF, p. 85) [' the symbol is an account, the negation of this account, the account of this negation ']. The symbol, so considered, becomes no-thing, only the shuttle of' sa negation perpetuellementactive' (PF,p. 84) ['its perpetually active negation']. Itis paradoxical, being the very condition of possibility for the narration which it also yet paralyses: la negation, elle-merne, apparait tantot comme la condition de toute activite d'art et de fiction et, par consequent, celle de ce recit, tantot comme la sentence qui en prononce l'echcc et l'impossibilite, car elle n'accepte pas de se realiser dans un acte particulier d'imagination, dans la forme singuliere d'un recit acheve. (PF, p. 85) [the negation itself appears sometimes as the condition of the whole activi ty of art and fiction and, therefore, that of that narrative (rleit), at others as the sentence which pronounces their failure and impossibility, for the negation does not allow itself to be realised in a particular act of imagination, in the singular form of a finished narrative. ]

At this point it is prudent finally to drop the term' negativity' as slightly misleading.V As the mere opposite of 'positivity', 'negativity' remains too Hegelian in its implications. In his later work Blanchot affirms: 'Deux opposes, parce qu'ils ne sont qu'opposes, sont encore trop proches l'un de l'autre' (£1, p. 8) [' Two opposites, because they are only opposites, are still too close to one another ']. Blanchot needs to find a term which connotes the other as dissymmetric, less assimilable: 'Un neant plus essen tiel que Ie Neant merne, Ie vide de l'entre-deux, un intervalle qui toujours se creuse et en creusant se gonfle, Ie rien comme oeuvre et mouvement' (£1, p. 8) [' A nothingness more

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essential than the Nothing itself, the void of the between, an interval which continually hollows and extends itself, the nothing as work and movement.'] This new notion of negativity would neither name a logical relation between concepts in the construction of a philosophic system, nor the negativity of dialectical materialism. Both notions would remain, from Blanchot's perspective, intra-worldly. In suggesting, among others, terms such as 'the night beyond the night' or (less portentously) the' neuter' or the' literary space/spacing' (' l' espace litteraire'), Blanchot's 'other', like Sartre's 'negative', is concrete, not abstract. U ncontained by any system or any conceptual or empirical limit, it is a species ofinfinity, or, better, ofin finitising. A later essay, "Mallarme's Experience' (1955), is beginning to interrelate Mallarmean writing and Heideggerian Dichtung in an explicit way.23 Blanchot's reading concerns the notion of the work, a term of major force in Mallarrne yet also in Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1935-6). Mallarmes essential or poetic language is, like Dichtung, defined both by its non-instrumentality and by its quasi-transcendental structure: The poetic word is no longer someone's word. In it no one speaks, and what speaks is not anyone. It seems rather that the word alone declares itself. Then language takes on all of its importance. It becomes essential. (SL, p. 41)

In Heidegger's essay, the work was' the setting itself into the work of the truth of the being'. More fully, it was 'not the reproduction of some particular being that happens to be present at hand at any given time; rather it is the representation of the general way in which such being comes-to-presence'. 24 For Blanchot, however, although' the poet produces a work of pure language, and language in this work is its return to its essence', the work is an intransitive saying. It is not the appropriation ofa world but 'the language of mute being' (SL, p. 4 2 ) . The work, however, is more than an artefact in which 'nothing is reflected but the nature of words , (SL,p. 42). The work is concerned, in an inward twist, with its own source, its work-being. As with the notion ofsymbolic narrative elaborated earlier, the work becomes a space in which' nothing' is realised, or rather in which the passage from' all to nothing' (SL, p. 43)


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is ceaselessly at work. On the one hand words seem, in reference, to make' arise' what they summon, yet the totality of things only appear' as things that have vanished' (SL, p. 43). Their vanishing is their mode of presence' here' and' now'. Hence the ceaseless passage which, Blanchot argues, dominates Mallarme's Igitur, with its topic of suicide. The mode of being of the literary text becomes, as a consequence, a strange intransitive saying, an affirmation of itself that is also ceaselessly a passage in to self-negation : The work of art reduces itself to being. That is its task: to be, to make present' those very words it is... There lies all the mystery' [Mallarrne, letter to Viele-Griffin, 8 August 1891]. But at the same time it cannot be said that the work belongs to being, that it exists. On the contrary, what must be said is that it never exists in the manner of a thing or a being in general. (SL, p. 43)

The work involves something over and above beings, without inviting identity with Heideggerian Dichtung. It is a realm at which 'the complete realization of language coincides with its disappearance ... everything is word, yet the word is itself no longer anything but the appearance of what has disappeared' (SL, P.44). Blanchot terms this realm 'the imaginary, the incessant, and the interminable' (p. 44). Rather than appropriating a world, this is a realm where nothing is happening. So far in this chapter the literary space has been described mainly in a schematic, deductive way, that is, certain arguments about the nature of language have been entertained and their corollaries sketched. Blanchot, however, both in his critical essays and his literary productions, recurrently engages with the manner in which this weird' space' or 'distancing' 'manifests' itself, or affects or disturbs literary practice. If it is fair to characterise Blanchot's work in terms of a quasi-transcendental turn whereby literary language is made to speak its own (non) essence, it is equally fair to ask how, in particular cases, this might come about, and be discernible. The turn is all the more problematic in that language is, for Blanchot, essentially non-manifest. How to make absence speak? This is the torment of our language, he writes - when its nostalgia turns it back towards the lack which, paradoxically,

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot constitutes its very ability to discurse (£1, p. 50). To speak or write at all seems to efface the very realm one sought to speak of. A recent text observes, against the famous dictum of Wittgenstein: 'In the end, in order to be silent, it is necessary to speak. But with what sort of words?'. 25 Clearly the other can only become 'perceptible' through a sort of interference or disruption of received notions of Ianguage.f" Two modes of disruption may be considered. Mallarme is again prominent in this question. As we saw, Blanchot valued Mallarrne's texts as breaking free from the constraints of representation. The essential nature of language, rather than being harnessed to mimetic or cognitive ends, was set free to effect itself in its own textual space. Once representation is eschewed, the order of the text need no longer submit to the sequentiality of mundane time. Peter Dayan writes, contrasting Mallarrne with a novelist, 'in Averses au Critique, Mallarrne defines his literature as that which abstracts and recreates, uses images and words as images and words to weave its patterns, as stylized as ballet, while the novelist, instead, refers to nature'. 27 The literary work may thus eschew the apparent linearity ofday-to-day time and, similarly, notions of beginning, middle and end. Blanchot's notion of literary space, after Mallarme, is the opening up of a different dimension, diverging from the geometry of physical space. Imitation becomes the creation of' something that could never have physically existed' (Dayan, p. 43). Dayan analyses the modality of the referent in Mallarme's verse in terms of Mallarme's notion of poetic transposition. Language does not quite abandon the' real word'; representation is transposed into another space. The word no longer refers to an object in the concrete world; its reference survives only for its evocative qualities and the contribution the word makes by its semantic resonance and formal properties. The word is inscribed in an open context where it plays or, in a loose sense, rhymes in many directions at once. Thus the Mallarmean poet will avoid linearity and accord novel importance to layout, spacing, punctuation etc. Poetry thus comes to say nothing beyond itself: Transposition,

Blanchot: the literary space on Blanchot's reading, is a metamorphosis of the referent tantamount to its destruction. Mallarme's metaphors, for instance, refuse themselves any solidity or obvious decipherability - 'Ie monde des images, que Mallarme recherche, est une fuite, une negation plutot qu'une affirmation d'images' (PF, p. 40) [' the world of images which Mallarme pursues is a flight, a negation rather than an affirmation of images ']. Figures succeed each other in such a manner as to prevent any being read as picturing states of affairs. The verse substitutes received syntactical relationships with relationships of a subtler nature that give language the sense of a movement or a trajectory, a movement in which the passage itself counts more than any point of rest (PF, p. 41). Derrida, in Dissemination, similarly refers to movements of signs in Mallarme's texts as figures in ballet, pirouettes etc. (Diss, p. 240). Turning briefly now to this study's recurrent test case, it is not difficult to see how a reading of Tomlinson's' Poem' might attend to a similar disruption of linearity and representation. The poem seems expressly designed to open a space within space: space window that looks in to itself

The term 'window', impossibly looking into itself, violently displaces itself from any representationalist reading and is given over to the 'imaginary' in Blanchot's sense. The text, lacking anything like a recognisable sentence structure with a main verb, offers itself flatly, as a sort of flat. Blanchot defines his notion of the' neuter' partly in terms of this pre-propositional aspect of language (E1, p. 448) - that is, words that do not affirm or deny anything about the world, but which are allowed to offer themselves to literary space according to the formal and semantic resonances they open Up.28 There is at the same time both a spacing and a neutralising: 'colon / between green apple: / and vase of green'. The poem seems suspended in the very movement towards the literary space that renders it possible:

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot II y aurait un ecart de temps, comme un ecart de lieu, n'appartenant ni au temps ni au lieu. Dans cet ecart, nous en viendrions a ecrire. (Le pas, p. 100) [There would be a dislocation of time, as there is a dislocation of place, yet belonging neither to time or to place. In this dislocation we come round to writing.]29

The major concern, however, of any attempt to confront the paradoxes of Blanchot's quasi-transcendental turn, and indeed the notion of heteronomy itself, must be Blanchot's own literary practice, in particular those strange texts known as his recits or , narratives ' . The definition Blanchot gives of the recit (a term already unique to French literary culture) in the mid-r qyos forms part of the increasing engagement at this time with Heidegger's later work. 'The Siren's Song' (LV, pp. 9-8; SS, pp. 59-65) distinguishes between the recit and the roman (' novel '). The latter is defined by way of its aim of entertainment, of turning' human time into a game' (SS, p. 6 I). Blanchot also refers to the seriality of the novel; in the case of a story of Ulysses and the Sirens this would be a matter of the unfolding of his journey as a coherent series of literary episodes. This definition of the novel would remain reductive, even silly, were it not set up entirely by way of contrast to the recit, a mode of language to which the novel is understood as embodying a resistance. Blanchot stresses the humanism inherent (according to him) in the notion of novel as a mode of 'human time' engaging with human emotions (SS, p. 6 I). The recit, however, is alien to such humanism. As a mode of writing that can be provisionally termed both 'reflexive' and 'intransitive', it emerges as a revised mode of Heideggerian Dichtung, reminiscent of the literary practice ofHeidegger's later essays. Blanchot states that the recit tells the tale of a single event (for instance of Ulysses' encounter with the sirens, or Ahab's with Moby Dick). It is a tale that, superficially at least, may' seem to conform' structurally, to the conventional narrative trend'. A distinction, however, begins to emerge in the fact that the event at issue is unusual, even marvellous, and not subject to either the

Blanchot: the literary space laws of ordinary time or ordinary reality (' nor, indeed, to any reality' (SS, p. 62)). In terms of Blanchot's own recits at least, one can gloss the term 'marvellous' by reference to what Entretien infini calls the 'limit experience', an experience that takes consciousness and language to the limits of their possibility; an encounter, either sexual or traumatic, which is too immediate to be mediated by language and thus remains heterogeneous to the very narratives which it sets in motion.i''' This distinguishes the recit from the novel 'which only repeats credible, familiar events [and] is benton preserving its ficti tious character' (SS, p. 62). Blanchot's differentiation of the recit from fiction here as 'benton preserving its ficti tious character' brings us to the crux of the issue. To the implicit objection that Ulysses and Ahab undergo their encounters infiction comes the rejoinder that the event at issue in the recit is not distinct from its taking place as the recite Like Dichtung the recit eschews notions of representation, whether fictional or not, as inadequate to its own linguistic mode: We shall miss the point of the narration [recit] if we see it only as the exact relation of an unusual event which has actually taken place and which we try to report. Narration [le recit] is not the account of an event but the event itself, its imminence [' l'approche de cet evencment '], the site where it will occur [' le lieu OU celui-ci est appele a se produire '] - it is a happening about to happen whose magnetic power may enable the narration [recit] to happen. (SS, p. 62; LV, p. 14)·

The recit seems to be reflexive: it is the event it narrates, it enacts narration. However, the preceding passage and the one below force certain complications and qualifications: I t only' relates' itself, and this relation, at the same time as it takes place, produces what it relates, and is only possible as a relating if it realises/enacts what happens in this relating, for it includes the point or the level where the reality which the recit 'describes' can ceaselessly merge with its reality as recit, justify it and bejustified by it. (SS, p. 63; LV, pp. 14-15. Translation modified)

This paragraph, already so much more complex than the Blanchot who wrote on Mallarme and symbolism, bears analysis at length. The recit, in its relation, produces itself as its object,

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yet' object' is clearly inappropriate, for it is no more than the process of relating. This seems, at first sight, a notion of enactment, as if the movement of the text had something like the status of music, its signifier and signified at one. This is not the case. However greatly the paragraph tends to a conflation of the recit and its related event, it equally insists on keeping them separate in a relation of mutual dependence or constitution in which each 'justifies' the other. Topologically, the movement between this recit and its event is that of a spiral whose spiralling inwards is ceaseless, asymptotic. Hence the importance of the phrase 'sans cesse' (' ceaselessly') omitted in Rabinovitch's translation - the movement of relation 'includes the point or level where the reality which the recit describes, can ceaselessly merge with its reality as recit' (emphasis added). To ceaselessly merge is a process inherently unfinished in which the recit and its event never fully merge. The account of the recit reads, at first, solely as a rather eclectic piece of literary theory. However, there is also an implicit dialogue with Heideggerian Dichtung, engaging broader issues, such that, for example, the distinction between the literary and the philosophical becomes untenable. The relation of the recit and its event involves a transformation of language akin to that described by Heidegger in terms of a 'step back' from representationalist language. The domain into which the step directs itself does not, Heidegger argues, pre-exist that very movement; it is no more than the transformation wrought in the language that performs the step. Accordingly, a paradoxical temporality constitutes the space opened up in the recit. It seems both 'genesis' and 'result' of the work. The paradox results from Blanchot's rejection of notions of subjective creation or authorship in respect of what is most essential in the literary. Heidegger serves as a clear analogy here. For him, the creative 'act' must be considered with reference only to the projection of being of the art-work itself. The artist responds to an inherent project in the emerging work.i" His labour is to let-be the work's projection. 'Creation' is thus a movement of unconcealment in which the human' creator' is necessary yet strangely marginal. Clearly the dominant ap-

Blanchot: the literary space proach to literary texts in terms of the views, achievement and place of their authors is totally alien to Heidegger's inquiry. Blanchot's account seems sometimes to stress the neutral space (or 'dead time') as a consequence of the achieved work: 'it is what the work realizes, how it affirms itself, the place where the work must" allow no luminous evidence except of existing" [Mallarme]' (SL, p. 44). At other times, this central inertia seems described as the work's source and starting-point - ' the point anterior to all starting points, from which nothing ever begins ... in which the work, through the artist, becomes the concern, the endless search for its origin' (SL, p. 44). There is no contradiction here. Just as the achieved work resists a linear reading (beginning, middle, end) (see below), so its genesis is a movement of play whereby the neutral space is opened up by the language it also renders possible: Narration [' le recit '] is movement towards a point which is not only unknown, ignored and strange but such that it seems to have no prior reality apart from this movement, yet is so compulsive that the narration's [recit] appeal depends on it to the extent that it cannot even' begin' before it has reached it, while it is only the narration [recit], and the unpredictable movement of the narration [recit] which provide the space where this point becomes real, powerful and appealing. (SS, p. 62)

More concretely, Blanchot writes of Herman Melville's Moby Dick: 'It is quite true that Ahab only encounters Moby Dick in Melville's novel. But it is equally correct to say that such an encounter is what enables Melville to write his novel' (SS, p. 63). The work is the effecting of its being through the writer, not the creation of an author. The writing responds to an impulse 'pertaining to and concerned with the very world which expresses, represents and exposes it' (SS, p. 210). Reference to an essay by Levinas entitled 'Reality and its Shadow' (1948) 32 may clarify further the nature of Blanchot's divergence from Heidegger, especially in relation to his use of the term' the imaginary'. Blanchot's dissociation of art from the notions of truth and cognition to which, in Heidegger, they are still subtly subordinated finds a precedent in Levinas' contention that art is 'a totally independent ontological event'

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(p. 3). It is a realm of images, not concepts, and eschews 'scientific cognitions and truth' (p. 3) just as it 'does not involve Heidegger's "letting-be'" (p. 3). Levinas' argument rests largely on a notion of resemblance as what constitutes an image. Resemblance evidently is the mode in which an image relates to its object. However, this resemblance is not to be conceived as an addition to its object, of an ontological derivativeness. It partakes of the object itself. Resemblance is possible because beings themselves are affected with a certain non-being: 'A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image' (p. 6). Levinas seems to be recalling Heidegger's argument that the notion of phenomenon, in the sense of that-which-shows-itself, must embrace and accept the possibility of semblance and dissembling as inherent to it. Whereas Heidegger tends to affirm an identification of art with the movement of unconcealing, Levinas relates it to the ineluctable movement of resemblance/dissimulation or concealment. Non-truth or lethe 'is not an obscure residue of being, but is its sensible character itself, by which there is resemblance and images in the world' (p. 7). The imaginary is an allegory of the real which reality bears on its face, a distance inherent to the realm of proximate things themselves :'The consciousness of the absence of the object which characterises an image is equivalent to an alteration of the very being of the object, where its essential forms appear as a garb that it abandons in withdrawing' (p. 7). Levinas' essay, 'Reality and its Shadow', also allows a certain clarification of the peculiar temporal movement of the recite Levinas dismisses as inadequate discussions as to the priority of reality over art or vice versa (' does art imitate nature or does natural beauty imitate art?' p. 7). The 'image' - the realm of art - is already a form of the non-real in the real. 'There is not first an image - a neutralized vision of the object - which then differs from a sign or symbol because of its resemblance with the original; the neutralization of position in an image is precisely this resemblance' (p. 8). Thus the distancing inherent to the sign or symbol for Blanchot is already at work in the image. Accordingly, if one returns to the notion 'of the recit in Blanchot's essay on Marcel Proust, one finds the argument that


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what was granted to Proust in his peculiar experience of time and' memory' was an encounter (like that of Ulysses or Ahab) wi th imaginary space as the being of literature; literary spacing. Blanchot's account of Proust's consciousness relates to the metamorphosis of time in to an imaginary space (the space peculiar to images) and an ever-changing absence uncluttered by events, unobstructed by presences, an incessantly reborn vacuum: that remoteness and distance which are the space and origin of metamorphosis: the place where psychology is redundant because here there is no psyche, where that whichis innerbecomes outer, becomes image. (SS, pp. 68-90; emphasis added)

What writes is less Proust as a personality than' le tout autre' ['the totally other'] as 'l'exigence merne d'ecrire' ['the very exigency of writing '], the movement of literary spacing which makes use of the name of Proust to affirm itself in its incessant appeal (LV, p. 254). Blanchot's argument with psychoanalysis is also implicit in this account of Proust. While he is enthusiastic about psychoanalysis as a radical new form of the dialogue, Blanchot argues that Freud and his followers are too ready to thematise the unthematisable by bringing to a halt the movement of incessant alterity in dialogic language. Blanchot's notion of the recit then emerges as a reworking of Dichtung partly indebted to Levinas' early essay on exteriority and imagery. Blanchot's account of Proust, for instance, recalls Levinas on the' exteriority of the inward' which we experience as a form of alienation in the imaginary world of dreams (p. 4) Let us turn finally to a remarkable tour de force, L' attente l'oubli [Waiting Forgetting], a recit by Blanchot of 1963. One path into this text is the issue of dialogue, also, as was seen, a fascination and an opportunity for Heidegger at this time. Indeed, this ricit is arguably a form of literary practice that stems in many ways from Heidegger's experiments with the dialogue form. Dialogue, Blanchot writes in an essay of 1963, 'Traces', 33 has usually been a form inherent with a kind of violence, at work in the constraints it imposes on the interlocutors as it forces them to speak and listen in turn. (One remembers Thrasymachus, sweating angrily in Plato's Republic!) Such an account necessarily leads to the question of the possibility of a new form of dialogue that would renounce a context of power: 'une

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expression sans autorite et, par ainsi dire, sans pouvoir' (p. 477) [' an expression without authority and, so to speak, without power ']. Could such an irenic language be achieved in or as dialogue? L' attente l' oubli reads as if it were written in response to that question. It is not itself a dialogue through and through, but something more complex, in which dialogue constitutes much of the text and the situation of dialogue the matter of all of it. Its 'situation' is an interchange between two barely defined characters of either sex for whom the violence inherent to dialogue and language is continuously at issue. Like those recits already discussed, this one is an encounter. Its site is a slightly long, anonymous apartment room, occupied by the male speaker. The two speakers, together in this confined space, interact in a relation of acute tension, attraction and repulsion. If it is difficult to characterise these voices, and other metavoices that arise in the text in the mode of a strange form of selfcommentary, that is because what is at issue in their relation is nothing in particular, only that relation itself. It is a matter of language as the horizon both of proximity and distance and of the transformations in the notions of the self and of relationship that may be undergone in a transformation of language. While the text might seem to follow the roughest form of linear unfolding in enacting the vicissitudes of this transformation, the use of a peculiar variety of tenses and of forms of repetition renders it an instance of a skewed temporality. The event between the two 'is a happening about to happen whose magnetic power may enable the narration [reeit] to happen' (88, p. 62) even if this event is also but the transformation of language that is the recit. 34 The recit, which may be read indifferently as a mode of literature or of philosophy, is, like Plato's dialogues, a hybrid form. The recit enacts, though that is too simplistic a word, Blanchot's own complex debate with two contemporary thinkers, Heidegger and Levinas. This enactment is all the more remarkable in that, at first sight, much in these two thinkers is incompatible. I will consider both in turn. One apparent model for this recit is the dialogues of Heidegger, whose notion of releasement in/through language


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also suggests itself as the possible new kind of dialogue sketched by Blanchot in 'Traces'. The complex rhetoric of the 'step back' may be read as a helpful model for the relation of recit to (its) event in Blanchot. Part of L' attente I'oubli is constructed from a paper given by Blanchot at the Festschrift for Heidegger's seventieth birthday (' L'attente ').35 Indeed the notion of I'attente is often indistinguishable from the notion of the wait, or waiting in Heidegger's Conversation on a Country Path, as a few extracts from L'attente l'oubli bear out: Des qu'on attendait quelque chose, on attendait un peu moins. (p. 23) [As soon as the wai ting was for something, one was wai ting a li ttle less.] L'attente solitaire, qui etait en nous et maintenant passee au dehors, attente de nous sans nous, nous forcant a attendre hors de notre propre attente, ne nous laissant plus rien a attendre (p. 31) [The solitary waiting, which was in us and is now passed to the outside, a waiting that is ourswithout ourselves, forcing us to wait beyond a waiting that would be our own, leaving us nothing more to wait for.] (emphasis added)

It is a matter of waiting in relation to 'Ce qui se derobe sans que rien soit cache, ce qui s'affirme mais reste inexprime, ce qui est la et oublie ' (p. 83) [' That which conceals itself while yet nothing is hidden, that which affirms itself but remains unexpressed, that which is there, yet forgotten.'] Some of the recit, indeed, is practically a French translation of fragments from Heidegger. For instance, a sentence of Heidegger's poetic meditation 'The Thinker as Poet' (1954) (PLY, pp. 1-14) reappears, translated but with otherwise only a minor alteration, in the Blanchot: 'In thinking all things become solitary and slow' (PLY, P.9) becomes 'Dans l'attente, toute parole devenue lente et solitaire' (p. 53) [' In the waiting, every word is become solitary and slow.'] How is the recit, then, other than a French version of Heideggerian dialogue, a dialogic step back in which language turns upon itself, tries to void itself of its propositional form and hence render its own movement an arrival of the other? Closer examination of the recit reveals the degree of Blanchot's

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot divergence from Heidegger. This divergence is not in the matter of an opposed theory of language (though one can find such a theory elsewhere) but in the demands of a form of linguistic practice whose movement emulates that of Heidegger's dialogues but whose turnings seem, for all that, to acknowledge a necessity not avowed by Heidegger. In L' entretien infini the movement of language undergone in the recit finds definition in terms of another concept of rhythm: 'En ce tour qui est Ie rythme, la parole est tournee vers ce qui detourne et se detourne ' (EI, p. 43) [' In this turning which rhythm is, the word is turned towards that which turns away and which turns itself away']. L'attente l'oubli is replete with fragments that illustrate this notion ofrhythm : 'Par l'attente, ce qui se detourne de la pensee retourne a la pensee devenue son detour' (p. 8 I) [' Through the waiting, that which turns itself away from thought returns to thought, a thought become its turning away']. In this sentence thought is said to think something which essentially eludes any approach, and hence it comes to affirm the very elusiveness thus undergone as both itself the' matter' that seemed to be the subject of the sentence and also as the process of thought now recognised as the movement of that sentence itself, a sentence without an object. We read: 'Ce qu'il pensait se detournait de sa pensee pour le laisser penser purement ce detour' ['That which he was thinking of turned itself away from his thought to let him think purely that movement of turning away']. Rhythm is thus a name for this self-annulling syntax, as a sentence that turns on itself in a Moebius-like topology. It is a movement of turning-away that becomes its own concern. Rhythm in this sense can only repeat itself in a twisting syntax that continually annuls itself, annuls to renew itself. Hence it conforms to the splayed temporality in which the 'object' of l'attente is both always to come and always absolutely past, irredeemably at work as the very movement of that thought that would try to reify or capture it: La pensee de l'attente: la pensee qui est l'attente de ce qui ne se laisse pas penser, pensee que porte l'attente et ajournee en cette attente. (p. 101)


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[The thought of waiting: thought as the wai ting for tha t which does not let itselfbe thought, a thought that the waiting bears with it, yet which is deferred in that waiting.]

Rhythm, with its temporality, whereby l'attente is inseparable from the oblivion and effacement of that of which it is the wait (l'attenteis l'oubli) clarifies the skewed temporal relation, at issue in 'The Siren's Song', between a recit and the event which it narrates/is. There is no merging of the two, however inseparable they may be, but instead a constitutive movement of detour as approach. In this movement language, turned upon its own eventhood, yet emerges as the turning away from/ as that event even as it 'approaches' it. Such a knot-like structure differs from Heidegger's practice with language perhaps only in that the looser threads in Conversation on a Country Path have been pulled tight. That is to say that Blanchot ruthlessly follows to its conclusion the movement of thought and syntax in Heidegger's dialogue, and thereby comes to eschew those residues of phenomenological language ('unconcealment', Liehtung) that remain prominent in Heidegger. L' entretien infini, read as conceptualising the movement of thought as language in the recit, explicitly dissociates the notion of dialogue at issue from all metaphors visibility and invisibility: Elle [the language in rhythm] est la plus franche en son travers, toujours persistant dans l'interruption, toujours en appelant au detour, et ainsi nous tenant comme en suspens entre le visible et l'invisible ou en deca de l'un et de l'autre. (EI, p. 43) . [Language in the turnings of rhythm is the most clear-cut in its very failings, persisting always in interruption, always calling for a new trajectory, and thus holding us in a sort ofsuspense between the visible and the invisible, or on the side of both one and the other.]

This argument, instantiated in the recit, is at the centre of Blanchot's claim (with Levinas) that Heidegger does not successfully break with autonomic forms of thought. Diehtung only foreshadows a dialogic practice of heteronomy. 36 L' entretien infini concerns itself with a postulate as old as thought itself but which, it is argued, 'writing' finally brings into disrepute. This is the postulate that being is essentially

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unified and continuous. Discontinuity, multiplicity, alterity are accordingly considered secondary: L'Un, le Merne restent les premiers, les derniers mots. Pourquoi cette reference a l'Un comme reference ultime et unique? En ce sens, la dialectique, l'ontologie et la critique de l'ontologie ont le meme postulat: toutes trois s'en remettent a l'Un. (£1, p. 34) [The One, the Same, remain the first words and the last. Why this reference to the One as the ultimate, unique reference? In this sense, dialectics, ontology and the critique of ontology have the same postulate: all three relate themselves back to the One.]

Blanchot's claim that Heidegger does not really consider or question this postulate is reaffirmed by Derrida's argument, in 1968, that a certain magnetisation can be seen at work in Heidegger's texts, a magnetisation towards a rhetoric of homecoming, authenticity and belonging (MP, p. 130).37 In his reading of Holderlin, for instance, Heidegger affirms, 'we are a conversation, that always means at the same time: we are a single conversation '.38 Similarly, Trakl's poetry was said to gather towards the unique site of that poet's work. A motif, derived probably from Levinas.i'" runs throughout L' entretien infini: "parler c'est n'estpas voir' [' to say is not to see ']. Heidegger's account of language remains one instance of what Blanchot argues to be an almost universal conflation oflanguage and vision in Western thought. 'Seeing' has been privileged in accounts oflanguage. This is because sight seems to grant a form of unmediated contact with the world: Voir, c'est se servir de la separation, non pas comme mediatrice, mais comme un moyen d'immediation, comme im-rnediatrice. En ce sens aussi, voir, c'est faire l'experience du continu, et celebrer le soleil, c'esta-dire, par-dela le soleil: I'Dn. (£1, p. 39) [To see is to make use of separation, not as a mediary but as a form of the immediate, the non-mediated. In this sense also, to see is to have the experience of the continuous, and to celebrate the sun, that is to say, beyond the sun itself: the One.]

This understanding of sight is in itself highly dubious. Apart from arguments against the naive ascription of immediacy to


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sense-perception, it must be admitted that we can neither see everything nor all sides of anyone thing at any time. Language, on the other hand, seems to present itself as precisely a realm of such freedom. In speech we can transgress the limits of perception and speak of the dark side of the moon. This is that very 'freedom' in language discussed earlier in terms of negativity. Metaphors of light, however, dominate the manner in which this negativity has been understood. Language considered as re-presentation seems a kind of perception at a distance: it is as if, in language, one could somehow see all four sides of a cube at the same time (El, P.40). We speak of language disclosing states of affairs, of' making oneself clear' or of something being' evident'. Blanchot, correspondingly, opposed a strain of phenomenology in Heidegger's thought, in particular the notion of aletheia and of truth as a structure of revealing/ concealing (E1, p. 4 I). This dichotomy of revealing and concealing suggests a privileging of the metaphorics of light and the corresponding postulate of unity. Blanchot, on the other hand, addresses a spacing or distancing in language which is neither manifest nor non-rnanifest.t'' Consequently he comes to understand Heidegger's thought as a foreclosure or a sublimation of the neuter (see £1, p. 441). The radical worldlessness of Blanchot's neu tral spacing (between or as the recit and its event) is inescapable. This apparent alignment between Blanchot and Levinas might suggest that the thought of Levinas might be of considerable relevance to a reading of the recite I t is to Levinas that we now turn. There is neither space nor time to give here anything other than the most schematic outline of Levinas' philosophy, except as it relates directly to the questions of language here at issue. Levinas argues that Heidegger's work, far from constituting the looked-for heteronomy, is only another late embodiment of an effacement of alterity recurrent in Western thought. Levinas even argues, rather questionably, that Heidegger's thought thus capitulates to a tradition of imperialism, cruelty and pride.t! The issue is one of ethics and its status in philosophy. Our

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relation to the other person, Levinas argues, cannot be encompassed in terms of knowledge or truth. Responsibility on the part of the knower precedes, even makes possible, any relation of knowing. All questions concerning the nature of things or being in general, Levinas argues, take place in a situation that is first of all ethical ... Language, in any form, is primarily a dative saying to an other, an openness of relating to the transcendance of the other. In Levinas' own terminology, the word is a saying (to), an ethical event, before it is any form of a said (propositional content) .42 To treat language with regard only to the latter, that is, philosophically in the familiar sense, is to foreclose the relation to alterity and transcendence. Levinas is not elaborating a form of empiricism - asserting that any piece of language always in fact finds itself in an ethical situation. He argues that the ethical relation constitutes the very signifying dimension of language, whereby it is language at all. The action of making contact precedes, makes possible and exceeds all determinate communication. The other, in this sense, is transcendent to thought, it imposes ethical demands that do not obey a cognitive regime. 43 In relation to Dichtung itself, Levinas would clearly differentiate himself from the effacement of singularity that is claimed to be inherent in the movement of language, an effacement in favour of meaning or presentation of a world. Similarly, one would be asked to reconsider the argument that language itself is essentially what speaks or what should be hearkened to, for the principal reference for Levinas of the phrase, 'the other', is the other person. Totality and Infinity argues of Heidegger : To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent (the ethical relation) to a relation with the being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing). (TI, p. 45)

Ethics, as the face-to-face relation to the other that is always presupposed in any thinking, is a non-representational, nonthematisable realm that envelops philosophical arguments concerning truth, knowledge, language etc., even as its status is necessarily eclipsed in such thematisations.

Blanchot : the literary space

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How does intersubjectivity manifest itself in Heidegger's Conversation or in Blanchot's L' attente l'oubli? In Heidegger's dialogue the movement of language from one interlocutor to another had only the function of a certain spacing, almost as if the turn from one to another could be replaced by a mark of punctuation. Indeed in the quotations given here from L' attente l'oubli, the twisting between phrases that took place through an interchange of speakers in Heidegger is instead performed by the peculiar self-annulling syntax. Intersubjectivity is at issue in Blanchot in a way not envisaged by Heidegger. Much of the dialogue - with its refrain' Fais en sorte que je puisse te parler' (p. 26) [' Act in such a way that I could talk to you '] - concerns the impossibility of dialogue: L' entretien infini defines l'attente not only as the' l'attente qui mesure la distance infinie' (£1, p. I 12) [' the wait which measures the infinite distance '] in language. It is 'I' a ttente qui mesure la distance entre deux in terlocu teurs ' (£1, p. 108) [' the wait which measures the distance between two in terlocu tors ']. The dialogue form is inherently suited both to investigate and enact the dative aspect of all language. Normally, the interlocutors exchange words in reference to a common object or proposition. In L'attente l'oubli, however, the concern, as the dialogue turns repeatedly in meditation upon its own condition of being, is often the dative element of language itself, that openness to the transcendence of the other person as an alterity effaced in received notions of recognition or of communication as exchange between the known positions or persons. However, Blanchot's text differs from anything written by Levinas at this time in its being written in a dialogic, non-theoretical or performance mode and, correspondingly, in the complexity and subtlety with which it enters the difficulties of overcoming language as representation. Interestingly, Levinas has never employed the dialogue form. His work repeatedly attacks notions of dialogue or maieutics understood, with Plato, as reminiscence.t" One may surmise, then, that for Levinas to employ a form (the dialogue) whose nature cannot but establish a relation of comparison between two interlocutors (e.g. I and other) would necessarily be to employ a cognitive meta-position (namely, that of the written text as a whole) in an unacceptable

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way. Even Heidegger's dialogues would be embraced by this repudiation, for Heidegger accords priority to the moving together of the interlocutors into the region of a shared question, a question whose ontological status effaces the ethical singularity of the speakers.t" It is precisely this form of absenting of one's language from an ethical relation to a transcendence it cannot encompass that would obliterate the allocutive dimension at issue. Blanchot's recit, however, will be seen to deal with this problem in its various ways, for instance by fragmenting the dialogue, skewing any sense of overall chronology and reiterating at intervals the discipline of a dialogue that would be a form of contact without exchange or communication. Nevertheless the discipline of the recit also imposes, I believe, recognition of necessities in language that embody a considerable complication of Levinas' dichotomy of le Dire and le Dit, necessities which Blanchot formulates in L' entretien injini in 1969. L'attente, then, is a discipline of language that would attempt to open itself, in each interlocutor, to the alterity of the other. By a continual annulment of language understood in terms of propositional content, and concomitant notions of communication as exchange (le Dit) the discipline would give space to a movement of pure signifying itself (Ie Dire) as the elusive condition and nature of language. L' attente enacts repeatedly, in a series of self-interrupting renewals.t" a becoming intransitive of language such that a sentence remains solely as a trace ofits own movement towards the other, a movement Derrida has analysed in the' word' 'viens' [' come thou '] as it marks Blanchot's recits," The recit then approaches its event, an event which would be the unconceptualisable alterity of the other person, even in the context ofa seemingly mundane crossing of paths. The dialogue turns repeatedly about the difficulty of this discipline of encounter: 'Tout changerait si nous attendions ensemble.' 'Si l'attente nous etait commune? Si nous lui appartenions en commun? Mais ce que nous attendons, n'est-ce pas cela, d'etre ensemble?' 'Qui, ensemble.'


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'Mais dans l'attente.' 'Ensemble, attendant et sans attendre.' (L' ao, p. 43) [' Everything would change if we were to wai t together.' - 'Yes, if the waiting were shared? Ifwe both belonged to it? But that is what we are waitingfor, isn't it, to be together?' - 'Together, waiting, bu t not waiting for anything'.]

The difficulty is that of embodying a form of togetherness that would not make up what is usually called a 'relationship', namely, a totality of some sort that would encompass the interlocutors and constitute a neutralising of transcendence or otherness. It is a matter of a discourse that would, so to speak, signify without signification or representation, to use a form of self-annulling syntax (x without x) recurrent in Blanchot. 48 Indeed the answer to the question is already implicit here. This very piece of syntax itself embodies the peculiar' performative' force of language that, as with Heidegger's Conversation, makes up the only' action' of the text. The phrase' relation without relation' is not merely self-negating. It differs from, say, 'both a and not a', by leaving a certain non-semantic surplus, a relating that is no more than the very movement or event undergone in thinking through a phrase like' relation without relation' or those accounts of l'attente already cited. [' Through the waiting (l'attente), that which turns itself away from thought returns to thought, a thought become its turning away.'] Such an event cannot, of necessity, be conceptualised, only repeated anew each time. This is because the language that attempts to speak l'attente is turned upon its own impossibility in such a way that the linguistic event in its self-presentation (le Dire) is also and ineluctably its representation as its disappearance. Ceaselessly repeated, it is a matter of this self-dislocation ui] as language itself as I'attente. Only thus, in an affirmation of apartness, alterity, and dissymetry can the two interlocutors in any sense be 'together'. Levinas, in his short book Sur Maurice Blanchot (1975), gives a reading of L'attente I'oubli as dramatising a movement from the thought and language of autonomy to a thought and language

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that is a welcoming of the other, a genuine heteronomy. Levinas interprets the' initial' situation of the two interlocutors in terms of a notion of closure, an imprisonment in autonomic modes of thought. The modern apartment in which they speak is both oppressively anonymous and yet over-familiar, claustrophobic: Le langage est ferrne comme cette chambre. 'Comme ils etouffaient ensemble dans ce lieu ferrne OU les mots qu'elle disait ne pouvaient plus signifier que cette cloture. Ne disait-elle pas seulement cela : "Nous sommes enferrnes, nous ne sortirons plus d'ici".' (p. 35) [Language is closed like this room is. 'How they suffocated together in this closed place where the words that she spoke could signify no more than this very closure. Was she not saying only that: "We are enclosed, we will not get out of here". ']

'Phenomenon and Engima' (1957)49 considers the issue of a language that could relate to alterity without reduction: Everything depends on the possibility of vibrating with a meaning that is not synchronised with the speech that captures it and cannot be filled into its order; everything depends on the possibility of a signification that would signify in an irreducible disturbance. (p. 63)

It is a matter, one might say, of a discourse that would signify withou t signification (to em ploy the preposition 'withou t' (sans) in a manner peculiar to Blanchot and Levinas, expressing a putative excess to received notions of sense and representation). Levinas introduces a term now better known through its adoption by Derrida, the trace: What would be needed would be an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated, instead of a reference that rejoins it. Such is a trace, in its emphasis and desolation. (p. 65)

If the other interrupts received orders of representation, it cannot be itself represented without reduction to the order it interrupts. Accordingly, it is a matter of keeping open the force of interruption itself. In terms of the distinction, introduced earlier, between the saying tle Dire) and the said ile Dit),


IOJ

language should attempt to identify itself as closely as possible with the former. 'Faire signe, sans que ce soit pour quelque chose' (Sur Maurice Blanchot, P.39) ['To signal, but not in respect of any referent. '] L' attente, as we saw, enacts repeatedly in a series ofself-interruption renewals, a becoming intransitive of language such that a sentence' means' solely as a trace of its own movement toward the other. Levinas writes of a wordless language that would exist, minimally, as merest contact between the interlocutors, as the precondition of communication without signifying anything in particular (Sur Maurice Blanchot, p. 41). He quotes the following extract: 'Elle donnait l'impression, quand elle parlait, de ne pas savoir relier Ies mots a la richesse d'un langage anterieur. lis etaient sans histoire, sans lien avec Ie passe de tous, sans rapport me me avec sa vie a elle, ni avec la vie de personne.' (p. 24) [' She gave the impression, when she was speaking, of not knowing how to link her words to the riches of a pre-given language. Her words were without history, with no connection to the past of any of them, without relation even to her own life, or to anybody's life. ']

, L' attente', on this reading, is a term that designates the exercise of transformation that language undergoes to metamorphose the closure inherent to it, a giving up of in ten tionali ty and subjectivity. Blanchot's terms (' l'attente', 'l'oubli') in no way represent states of mind in the received sense; rather, the two in terlocu tors, like butterflies emerging from a chrysalis, detach themselves from the self of Cartesian subjectivity. Eschewing the ontological for the ethical, Levinas argues, they move' beyond being', finding 'a door' (p. 38). They achieve a relation of proximity in separation that is a mutual recognition of the other (' N e rien a ttendre et tou t ou blier - le contraire de la su bjectivite ' (p. 37) [' Waiting for nothing, and forgetting everything - the contrary of subjectivity.'] Accordingly, towards the end of the recit we read: Quand il Ia tien t, il touche cette force d ' approche qui rassemble la proxirnite et, dans cette proximite, tout le lointain et tout le dehors. (p.IIS)

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[When he holds her he touches that force of approach that draws proximi ty to itself and, in tha t proximity, everything dis tant and outside.]

Blanchot's conflation of Heidegger and Levinas is not, it will emerge, an unjustified one. There is a strong correspondence between the demands on language made by both thinkers, whatever the stated differences. For both it is a matter of a movement oflanguage or thought upon its sources of possibility, and a concomitant abandonment of the transitive on accusative in language. However, Blanchot, both in L' entretien infini and in his recit, finally endorses neither Heidegger nor Levinas completely. L' attente comes to open up a more complex, third movement of thought or of language as relating. This third movement arguably encompasses, even as it questions, both Heidegger and Levinas. This issue has been covered in relation to Heidegger, so how, finally, does the recit diverge from Levinas' reading? Blanchot's differences from Levinas stem, one might say, less from the taking of another conceptual stance than from thinking through the relations at issue in Levinas more fully. The first section of L' entretien infini, 'La parole plurielle' [' the plural word '], consists of a dialogue, relatively traditional in form, in which certain arguments of Levinas are opened out in the process of interchange. There is not a disagreement with Levinas, rather, Blanchot proceeds, as with Heidegger, by thinking through the nature of a relation (that of transcendence and of proximity as distance) distinct from a concentration on the relata. 'Relation' here, as language, affirms the separation of I and other (the separation which constitutes language qua relating), even if, as communication, it always tends to seem a means of equalising the incommensurable. Moreover, since it involves a relation of the other to me (qua other) as well as of I to the other, the relating is two-way, without being symmetrical (p. 100): Quand Autrui me parle, il ne me parle pas comme moi. Quand j'en appelle a l' Autre, je reponds a ce qui ne me parle d'aucun lieu, separe alors de lui par une cesure telle qu'il ne forme avec moi ni une dualite


10 3

ni unite. C'est cette fissure - ce rapport avec I'autre - que no us avons ose caracteriser comme une interruption detre, ajoutant maintenant: entre I'homrne et l'homme, il y a un intervalle qui ne serait ni de I'etre ni du non-etre et que porte la Difference de la parole, difference qui precede tout different et tout unique. (EI, p. 99) [When the Other person speaks to me, he does not speak to me as a me (in the accusative). When I relate to the Other, I reply to that which does not speak to me from any determinate place, separated from the Other by a caesura such that the Other forms with me neither a duality nor a unity. It is this fissure - this relation to the other - that we have dared to characterise as an interruption of being, adding now the following: between person and person, there is an interval which would be neither of being nor non-being and which the Difference of the word sustains, a difference which precedes everything different and everything unique.]

The result of thinking through the dative relation as language, and language as the condition of a relation to the other, is similar to Heidegger's transformation of the line between Dasein, being and language - Pautre (the other) no longer names one or other of the interlocutors. It names the relating itself as the element of proximity in separation, approach as distantiation, a togetherness without relation. It is 'rien d'autre que le rapport mime, rapport de l'un a l'autre qui exige l'infiniti' (EI, p. 105) [' nothing other that the very relation, the relation of one to the other that demands infinity']. More precisely: 'l' autre alaJois est le rapport d'inaccessibiliti al'autre, est I' autre que ce rapport inaccessible institue, est cependant la presence inaccessible de I' autre - l'homme sans horizon - qui seJait rapport et abord dans l'inaccessibiliti mime de son approche' (EI, p. 105).50 [' The other is at once [a] the relation of inaccessibility to the other, [b] the other which this inaccessible relation sets up, and yet [c] the inaccessible presence of the other - the person without horizon - that makes of itself link and access in the very inaccessibility of its approach ']. Consideration of the movement of relating in itself leads the dialogue to the thought that' Autrui n'est pas, en effet, Ie mot qu'on aimerait retenir' E1, p. 99) ['The Other person is not indeed, the term which one would like to retain.'] For language as the horizon of the proximity in separation between the

1°4


interlocutors Blanchot prefers the term, the neuter (' le neutre '), taking care to dissociate it from the notion of neutralisation as a reduction to the same, repeatedly the object of Levinas' critique. The neuter designates language in the mode of a double, even multiple irreciprocity. There is no equality between I and other: "le neutre n'annule pas, ne neutralise pas cette infinite a double signe, mais la porte a la facon d'une enigme ... ' (£1, p. 101) [' The neuter does not annul, it does not neutralise this double sign infinity, but it sustains it in the manner of an enigma ']. In Lepas au dela (1973) Blanchot meditates on the report that there is a written sign in Chinese which means, alternatively, either' man' or 'two'. This would neatly affirm the dialogicity inseparable from the human, always both itself and other. Yet the meditation goes on: Mais il est moins facile, plus important peut-etre de penser 'homme', c'est-a-dire 'deux', comrne I'ecart auquel manque I'unite, Ie saut du 0 a la dualite, le 1 se dormant alors comme l'interdit, l'entre-deux. (Le pas, p. 57) [But it is less easy, but perhaps more important to think' man', that is to say' two', as the dislocation that lacks unity, the leap from to duality, the I thus giving itself as inter-diction, the between.]

°

If Levinas eschews the dialogue form, Blanchot's affirmation of it as a considerable body of his recit itself marks a divergence between these two thinkers of heteronomy. The necessity of thinking the relation of language itself in a way that denies Levinas' concept of an alterity absolved from relationship, affirms the relating itself as a dis-location. I t always 'exceeds itself' in what Derrida would call a movement ofsupplementary logic. 51 I t is not the alterity of an otherness transcendent to relationship. Hence, in Blanchot, Levinas' conception of language as a relation to transcendence is rewritten in terms of the realm he names elsewhere' writing' or the' space of literature'. There is an implicit qualification also of Levinas' account of the other in terms of sheer transcendence. 52 The neuter, by way of contrast,


10

5

is a 'rapport sans rapport' (£1, p. 104). [' a relation without relation '] : l' Autre ne se laisse penser ni en termes de transcendance ni en termes d'immanence. Experience dont on ne doit pas se contenter de dire que le langage seulement l'exprime ou la reflete, car eUe ne prend origine que dans l'espace et lc temps du langage. (£1, p. 101) [The Other does not let itself be thought either in terms of transcendence or in terms of immanence. An experience which one must not be content to say that language only expresses it or reflects it, for it only arises in the space and time of language.] (emphasis add ed)

In a recent essay of homage to Levinas, Blanchot follows an account of Levinas' thought with the somewhat subversive comment, 'Perhaps all this is a gift of literature' (Face to Face, p. 49). One also notes, with some irony in relation to Levinas' somewhat egocentric reading of L' attente l' oubli, that the situation of the two interlocutors in that recit corresponds very closely to an earlier account by Levinas of the mode of time embodied in a novel: A novel is not ... a way of reproducing time; it has its own time, it is a unique way for time to temporalize ... The characters of a novel are beings that are shut up, prisoners. Their history is never finished, it still goes on, but makes no headway. A novel shuts beings up in a fate despite their freedom. (' Reality and its Shadow', Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 10)

In the light of this account, one could offer, lightly, a humorous in terpretation of L' attente l' oubli the reverse of Levinas' rather too simple affirmation of the ethical. One could read it as a text in which the two characters, in their claustrophobia, descant on the fixed or paralysed mode ofexistence ofcharacters in a novel. Levinas, though, wavers between reading the recit as a fable and simply identifying the literary with saying ile Dire). 53 Elsewhere in L' entretien infini Blanchot takes up Levinas' concentration on the spoken word as a movement towards transcendence, whereas in fact this movement in language is to be found to a higher degree in writing (£1, p. 82). If one turns back to the recit, in fact, one finds that the relation of the two interlocutors is one of writing, the woman dictating to the man,

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who nevertheless also writes on his own account. The incommensurability in language, apparent also in the spoken dialogue, is intensified in the disjunction between what is said (by her) and what is written (by him) even if it is a matter of a repeti tion of the 'same' words. By reading L' attente I'oubli as an enactment ofhis own thought, Levinas tends to overlook the most important thing about it it is a recite Like those texts of which Blanchot writes in relation to the recit in general (Ulysses and the Sirens, Orpheus and Eurydice), L' attente I'oubli is an encounter. Similarly, it exists as the encounter to which it 'refers' and which takes its being only from being narrated. This is manifest in the manner in which the text, divided as it is into discrete fragments of uncertain chronology, skews narrative time by way ofa series of repetitions that form quotations from other parts of the text both' earlier' or 'later'. The resulting effect is that the event narrated (or the narration as event) is both past, to come and yet continually under way in this' deferred' mode. L'attente I'oubli, accordingly, can hardly be read as the mere enactment of any sort of thought, including that of Levinas. The attente itself is not represented, it is only as the movement of the recit as it turns repeatedly upon the detour of its language. L' attente is a discipline of language in which the movement of relating is continually and necessarily eclipsed in the language it vehicles. Correspondingly, those' meta-voices' that rise out of the dialogue to comment on it are neither determinately separate from the voices' in' the dialogue nor the same. L' attente as a movement of self-dislocation in language is inherently its own eclipse in self-commentary. This same logic of selfdislocation applies to the place of I' attente. The meta-voices ask: "Ou attendent-ils? lei, ou hors d'ici?' - 'lei qui les retient hors d'ici. ' - 'A l'endroit ou ils parlent ou a l'endroit dont ils parlent?' - 'C'est la force de l'attente, maintenue en sa verite, que de conduire, OU que l'on attende, au lieu de l'attente.' (p. 140)

[' Where are they waiting? Here or outside of here ?' - 'A "here" that holds them outside of here. , - 'At the place where they are speaking or a t the place of which they speak?' - 'The force of the wait, sustained


1°7

in its truth, is that it leads wherever one is waiting to the place of the wait.'] (emphasis added)

Blanchot's notion of the I'attente (as l' oubli) relates then to both Heidegger and Levinas and does so in a similar way. Blanchot thinks through Heidegger's notion of the wait in language in such a way as to render it an intransitive movement perpetually interrupting itself and its mode of self-renewal, its skewed temporality, a testimony not to the elusive phenomenality ofHeidegger's 'region' or being, but to an absolute past: proximity as distantiation, l' attente as I'oubli. By a similar discipline of thought, namely, thinking through the nature of a relation without a prior conception of the relata, Blanchot, while endorsing much of Levinas' account of Heidegger, goes beyond Levinas in working through the dynamics of language as a heteronomy. While endorsing Levinas in arguing that it is solely on the basis of an experience of the other person that alterity in general becomes thinkable, Blanchot's notion of the neuter, as a problematic condition for any relation to alterity (£1, p. 103), deprives the other of the form of transcendence it retains in Levinas' thought. The neuter: neither Heidegger nor Levinas.

CHAPTER

3


It is still common to introduce Derrida's work either as a radicalisation of structuralism, especially in relation to the diacritical nature of the sign, or as a continental version of the holism/relativism prominent in Anglo-Saxon philosophy. The term 'post-structuralism', symptomatic of this reception, still obscures, however, the exact nature of the provenance of Derrida's writings in the French philosophical-literary scene, where Heidegger and Blanchot are inescapable. In 'Force and Signification' (1963) (WD, pp. 3-30), Derrida gives an account of structuralism. In addition he offers an opposing account of literary language which is broadly in line with the work discussed in the previous two chapters. Literary language is characterised mainly with reference to ontological questions. As with Heideggerian Dichtung, the literary is peculiar in relating to that which is in excess of any entity - 'the essential nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within language' (WD, p. 8) : The pure book, the book itself, by virtue of what is most irreplaceable within it, must be the' book about nothing' that Flaubert dreamed of... This emptiness as the situation of literature must be acknowledged by the critic as that which constitutes the specificity of his object, as that around which he always speaks. (WD, p. 8).

In itself this passage is indistinguishable from much contemporary work by Blanchot. The consideration that this absenceof-any-entity may never become the object of any representation renders the literary a peculiar structure of appearance as withdrawal. The critic, 'since nothing is not an object', must be 108


log

concerned with 'the way in which this nothing itself is determined by disappearing' (WD, p.8). This genesis of a literary text in a movement of effacement is what Derrida calls 'force'. I t is 'force' that is then opposed to the fixation on 'form' that characterises structuralism, whose assumptions concern 'Force and Signification'. This account is so far very unlike recognisable descriptions of , deconstruction' . Derrida does not speak, for instance, of analysing the' exclusions' and' incorporations' of a text which 'render the system constitutively dependent upon factors it cannot integrate or comprehend' (Samuel Weber).! Derrida's treatment of texts by Mallarme and Blanchot, moreover, is quite distinct from his readings of philosophical figures. An essay such as 'Ousia and Gramme' meticulously examines the formation and interrelation of philosophical concepts (in that essay, the concept of time) to reveal the working of an a priori law of dysfunction in the constitution of metaphysical concepts. This is that aspect of Derrida's work that can be said to have become almost familiar, approaching, in Positions.' the status of a method of deconstruction (with all the attendant dangers of such a notion), namely, a form of dialectics greatly indebted to Hegel, but refusing to subsume the work of negativity in the universal. Derrida's treatment of the concept of 'literature' is an instance of such a procedure. Whereas literature is a concept constituted, for example, by its opposition to philosophy and its concepts (truth/fiction, literal/figurative), Derrida both (a) reverses this supposed priority of the philosophical by demonstrating that something 'literary' is ineluctably active in the formation of philosophical concepts and (b) thus forms thereby a new term, 'literature' conceived outside the concept which previously contained it. Derrida's dealings with certain literary texts, however, do not concern concept formation in quite this way. Jonathan Culler writes: Derrida's own discussions ofliterary work draw attention to important problems, but they are not deconstructions as we have been using the term, and a deconstructive literary criticism will be primarily influenced by his readings of philosophical works.f

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This remains a rather bizarre situation. Even if one of the effects of Derrida's work is to make tremble the borderlines between the literary and the philosophical, the distinctive tenor of his essays on people such as Mallarrne, Joyce, Ponge, Celan etc. is lost, even in such useful studies as Culler's own On Deconstruction. Moreover, although Derrida has endorsed the work of Paul de Man as complementary to his own," their treatment of literary texts is markedly different, despite a tendency for critics to assimilate the two. To sketch the distinctive nature ofDerrida's treatment of the literary is the main ambition of this chapter. 'Force and Signification' underlies the proximity ofDerrida's essays on literature to Blanchot's : I. Writing is 'inaugural' insofar as it emancipates meaning from the contingencies of the immediate context and directs it towards a horizon of unforeseen possibilities: 'It creates meaning by enregistering it, by entrusting it to an engraving, a groove, a relief, to a surface whose essential characteristic is to be infinitely transmissible' (WD, p. 12). 2. 'Free' language is defined in terms recalling Mallarmc's contrast between poetic and mundane discourse. Writing, since it is constituted by the suspension ofimmediate reference, isfreed from instrumental notions of language. Unburdened of its nature as a sign-signal, or as a tool of communication, writing 'says what is, thereby referring only to itself, a sign without signification' (WD, p. 12). It is thus 'born as language' in an essential relation to nothing. (' Heidegger says of pure speech that it cannot be conceived in the rigor of its essence' on the basis of its 'character-as-sign (Zeichencharakter)', 'nor even perhaps of its character-as-signification (Bedeutungscharakter) ' (WD, p. 13). Literary thought is the thought of this oddly constitutive nothing. 3. I t is again a question of' the other'. As with Blanchot and Heidegger, this term names the event in poetry, meaning and inscription which escapes human control, grounding or anticipation. We are not very far from Blanchot's account of Mallarme on pure speech: 'nobody speaks it and nobody is what speaks it but it is as ifspeech talked to itself' (SS, p. 113; emphasis added). For Derrida similarly, writing involves 'the point at which the other is found' (WD, p. I I). The other is engaged in


I I I

writing in terms of an ineluctable secondarily in written meaning - for even in being inscribed the written presents itself as simultaneously read through the resonance of significations unanticipated in the act of inscription. For Derrida, consequently, 'Meaning is neither before nor after the act' (WD, p. I I). The other names the space 'of deferred reciprocity between reading and wri ting' (WD, p. I I ). I t maybe related to what Derrida discusses elsewhere in terms of the middle voice (MP, p. 9) : 'the other ... maintains both the vigil and the backand-forth motion, the work, that comes between writing and reading, making this work irreducible' (WD, p. I I). Writing is not here overtly part of a critique of the phonocentrism of Western metaphysics [see Gr, first published 1967]. It is related mainly to an anti-instrumentalist notion of language and consequent questions concerning the mode of being of the literary text." A radical conception of writing, heavily indebted to Blanchot, precedes both the words 'deconstruction' and , grammatology', if not perhaps the practice they sketch. Much of the obscurity surrounding Derrida's work stems perhaps from the fact that, in accordance with the programme outlined in Positions, his notion of litterature is a neologism). 6 Indeed, as Derrida writes in 'Outwork' (1972) (Diss, pp. 3-54), the notion is specifically opposed to the received concept: why should' literature' still designate that which already breaks away from literature - away from what has been conceived and signified under that name - or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably destroys it? (Diss, p. 3)

As with Blanchot and Heidegger however, this neologism (like Dichtung or recit) names something that relates to questions of essence elided in the more familiar term. Thus litterature names what is radically 'literary' in literature, rather than a new practice of writing altogether. Again, Mallarme's name serves to place the emergence of this radical practice of writing, whose concerns far surpass those of literary criticism. Litierature provides a 'non-lieu or u-topos' from which to approach that other ofphilosophy that is the peculiar concern ofdeconstruction. It is a term more applicable to some texts than others. Derrida refers 'to certain movements which have worked around the

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limits of our logical concepts, certain texts which make the limi ts of our language tremble' . Having already men tioned Mallarrne in this respect, Derrida then refers to 'the works of Blanchet, Bataille and Beckett'. 7 Derrida's reading of Mallarmes Mimique exemplifies the irruption of litterature within Dichtung. Derrida's reading has two principal antagonists. First, he engages with other writers on Mallarme, specifically Jean-Pierre Richard, in an attempt to displace Mallarmc's central concept of the 'ideal' from thematic, neo-Platonic readings. Rather the 'ideal' becomes an intra-textual movement incompatible with a positive ontology. Secondly, Mimique is engaged with a less obvious but insistent argument with Heidegger. The text is introduced as questioning not only received notions of mimesis as imitation, but also the Heideggerian reading of mimesis as the appearance of being Dichtung, in short, though it is not explicitly named as such. A brief resume of Mallarrne's text is necessary. Mimique purports to be a transcription, from gesture into language, of a monodrama consisting entirely of a mime. One Pierrot mimes (in retrospect) his plotting and eventual murder of his wife by tickling her to death. He re-enacts the series of events, miming the actions of both the murderer and victim in turn. Derrida, after Mallarme, focuses on the odd temporal structure of Pierrot's gestural writing: 'he mimes - "in the present" - "under the Jalse appearance of a present", the perpetrated crime' (Diss, p. 200). Derrida points out three remarkable traits of this performance. First, the mime must be divorced from the classical understanding of mimesis as represen tation - 'There is no imita tion. The Mime imitates nothing. And to begin with, he doesn't imitate. There is nothing prior to the writing of his gestures' (Diss, p. 194). He does not repeat a present already prescribed. The mime is an originary 'writing' (or so it seems) in the sense of production. Pierrot, in the mime, is both producer, product and, most oddly, the stage itself or scene of production. 'The his trion produces himself here. Right here - "A veracious histrion was I of myselfs"" (Diss, p. 198). The booklet which Mallarme describes (Pierrot Murderer oj his Wife) is not a script but an inscription after the event, of a mute writing which is gestural


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and which imitates nothing. Second, because Mimique does not accord with the classical notion of mimesis as imitation it does not follow that it obeys the phenomenological sense of mimesis as the unveiling or presentation of a present appearance. Derrida insists that' There is mimicry. Mallarme sets great store by it' (Diss, p. 206). Pierrot mimes, alludes to, a perpetrated murder , under thefalse appearance of a present'. The mime thus retains, in its structure, a movement of reference that is also, as in the first trait, a movement of production. It is this seeming paradox that brings us to the third trait. Mimique seems to incorporate, dissimulate or contaminate both received senses of mimesis. Mimesis as representation is displaced in the structure of a mime which nothing precedes, which is thus a form of originary writing. At the same time, however, the mime as 'originary writing' is also a structure of allusion and imitation. So, although nothing precedes it, this gestural writing could no longer be strictly termed 'originary'. Mimesis (sense one) dissimulates mimesis (sense two) and vice versa. It is a structure termed by Mallarme 'a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or themirror' (quoted in Diss, p. 206). Derrida stresses the structural peculiarities of this operation: We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing; faced, so to speak, with a double that doubles no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference. (Diss, p. 206)

Mimesis not only mimes but is itself what is mimed. Mimique has thus come to disrupt the Heideggerian account of poetic language in relation to the ontico-ontological difference. In particular, the primary sense of mimesis (the appearing of the appearance) must lose the priority which Heidegger accords to it. The displacement which Derrida brings to the structure of appearing (mimesis sense one) as a movement of (self-)effacement can be followed in terms of the recurrent question of the stage. This theatrical model neatly raises the question of the invisible 'medium' through which a presentation becomes apparent. If the geometry of the stage is a square, everything hinges on the

I

14


fourth, open or 'missing' side. This is the side that does not appear: The opening already goes unnoticed as opening (aperity, aperture), as a diaphanous element guaranteeing the transparency of the passageway to whatever presents itself. While we remain attentive, fascinated, glued to what presents itself, we are unable to see presence as such, since presence does not present itself, no more than does the visibility of the visible, the audibility of the audible, the medium or 'air', which disappears in the act of allowing to appear. (Diss,

PP·313- 14)

In almost any of those essays in which the question of literature is to the fore, this theatrical model is one of Derrida's principal resources. It is prominent in the two essays in Antonin Artaud (especially 'The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation' (WD, pp. 232-50)) as well as 'Dissemination' (Diss, pp. 289-366) and 'The Double Session' (Diss, pp. 175-286) and is also implicit in Derrida's forceful versions of dialogue. The' stage' becomes a philosophical and specifically a Heideggerian space. It engages with being in terms of its ambivalent status between appearing and signification, concerning as it does that 'presence (which) does not present itself... which disappears in the act of allowing to appear' (Diss, P·314)· In Mimique the stage is a particularly strange set-up, since it is Pierrot himself. However, the staging, far from becoming the invisible fourth side of a scene of representation, has become here itself the only occupant of the stage. What might seem to be sim pl y presence (mimesis sense one) here ' represen ts' itself. Moreover, what is represented and referred back to does not pre-exist Pierrot's mime, the act of referral. By the same token there is no representation, no correspondence between some pre-existent theme and its signification. Signification, without anchoring, envelops the totality of what seems to take place even as it produces it. 'This speculum reflects no reality; it produces" reality-effects'" (Diss, p. 206). All that seems staged is the visibility of the visible - 'Nothing but the many-faceted multiplicity of a lustre which itself is nothing beyond its own fragmented light' (Diss, p. 208). The implication of this reading is that the visibility of the

Derrida and the literary visible or the presence of the present is only an effect of the structure of the fold. When nothing is staged but the stage itself the illusion of theatrical depth must be dispelled. The fourth side of the square of the stage is a mere surface - the reality-effect of a structure of inter-referral: 'The presence of the present only forms a surface' (Diss, p. 303). The immediacy of Pierrot's presentation becomes an effect of a structure of difference. There is no temporal present that might anchor the movements of referral. He mimes, 'under the false appearance of a present', the deliberations that led up to a crime supposedly perpetrated at the time of the mime. The 'action' of the murder itself, therefore, is temporally complex to an extraordinary extent - an anticipation of what will have already taken place. Nothing simply is at hand or happens in the difference of the various tenses of the mime's movements of referral: Such difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the center of the present. The present is no longer a mother-form around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present). (Diss, p. 2IO)

Mallarme's curious stage may thus be related to the more general questioning of Heidegger on time given in Ousia and Gramme (1968).8 In short, the Heideggerian gathering of the ectases of time towards the presence of the present must give way to a movement of irreducible temporalisation and to paradoxically unanticipated after-effects. Whereas' Ousia and Gramme' reached a similar conclusion on time through a meticulous analysis of Heidegger's concept and its relation to Aristotle and Hegel, in 'The Double Session' similar conclusions as to a dysfunction in the concept of time are legibly at work as the mode of being of Mallarrne's text. In the initial analysis of the two notions of mimesis it was argued (after Heidegger) that the second, as re-presentation, was derivative in respect of the first, presence, the appearance of the present in its appearing. Mimique, however, not only challenges this derivativeness but scrambles the distinction between presentation and representation. Mimique therefore

I

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questions Heidegger's valorisation of the former against the latter, as well as Heidegger's anti-modernist dichotomy of Dichtung and mere 'literature'. Writing on Holderlin, Heidegger contrasts mere 'copies and imitation' with the 'genuine image' of which they are variations. Poetic images maintain a peculiar phenomenal force. The' genuine image' 'lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the invisible in something alient to it' (PL T, p. 226). In this structure of appearance/ dissimulation, something comes to be. In Mimique, however, it is necessary to argue that nothing takes place, or is presented. Derrida's work challenges the' genuine image' as a mere effect of mirror-play. 'No present in truth presents itself there, not even in the form of its self-concealment' (Diss, p. 230). For Heidegger language has a precarious ontological function in its effectuating the appearance of a world in its being. Language would thus have a remarkable privilege, most potently in poetry, in making available the meaning of being, even if the latter is so elusive and complex a structure as that of the concealing/revealing already discussed." For Derrida the fold never is - in the present -; it has no proper, literal meaning; it no longer originates in meaning as such, that is, as the meaning of being. The fold renders (itself) manifold but (is) not (one). (Diss, p. 229)

This has the effect of rendering litterature something that cannot be subordinated to any metaphysics or would-be philosophy of literature. Derrida's argument against thematic criticism in 'The Double Session' is relatively familiar ground and need only be briefly characterised here. If litterature is truly aside from being, and if nothing is simply present in its structure of mimetic play, the determination within a literary text of a subject-matter is always necessarily compromised for two reasons: (a) such a determination succeeds only by ignoring precisely the literary dimension of the text, and (b) it becomes, in its small way, an act of unscholarly violence by resisting the indeterminate realm which the would-be thematic content yet needs, in order to appear. '[T]here is no essence of literature [litterature], no truth of literature, no literary-being or being-literary of literature' (Diss, p. 233).


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It remains to extend Derrida's rewriting of Dichtung beyond the particular case of Mallarrne's Mimique. The textuality of Heidegger's own essays may provide, not surprisingly, our chief Issue. 'Language itself is poetry in the essential sense' (PL T, p. 74). This quotation from 'The Origin of the Work ofArt' (1935) has become familiar. What, however, is the status of this sentence itself? It is clearly not poetic. Any consideration of the question of the distinction between the language of the thinker and the language of the poet must finally come up against the question of the status ofHeidegger's own language. The latter is, after all, the medium (if that is the word) through which alone the question of being has been opened. Any consideration of the question of the textuality of Heidegger's work must acknowledge Erasmus Schafer's Die Sprache Heideggers (1962).10 The attempt to hearken to the meaning of being (in the sense of 'meaning' instantiated by Tomlinson's 'Poem ') renders inadequate the normal logical procedures of argument. Schafer analysed Heidegger's extraordinary use of language, with its 'circular arguments', oxymorons, tautologies etc. Schafer's work thus inaugurated what is perhaps the most urgent kind of work in relation to Heidegger - the formulation of a 'rhetoric' of Dichtung insofar as the language of the thinker attempts to enter into this poetic essence (Wesen) of language. 'Rhetoric' must, as chapter 1 argued, be firmly disassociated from received connotations. It does not concern any formulation of the linguistic tropes of persuasion, since there is no question of this' rhetoric' as the expression of a subjectivity. 'Rhetoric' would, rather, connote the rhythmic movement described in chapter 1 in relation to language as a mode of appropriation, at work in such 'guidephrases' in Heidegger as ' Language is the house ofBeing " 'time times', 'space spaces', 'the being of language: the language of being'. The area in which this putative rhetoric has been most fully .sketched is that of 'metaphor' especially in the work of Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor (1975)11 and, more exhaustively, by Derrida in 'The Retrait of Metaphor , (1978). Heidegger's repeated guide-phrase' Language is the house of Being ,12 is not metaphorical in any received sense. One does not

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simply come to understand some unknown (being) through comparison with a known (house) nor does the former become more 'concrete' or 'immediate' through its relation to the latter. For only being, as it is effective as the appropriating power of language, gives the familiarity of house as matter for thought. This is not to say, however, that the 'metaphorical' relation of house and being is simply reversed - that being is what speaks of and illuminates the house. Being is barely any less unfamiliar through this peculiar linguistic operation whereby the appropriation at play in language is brought to bear, as it were, upon itself. 'Language is language', 'space spaces', 'time times' - these apparently simple tautologies would also function within the mode of the peculiar' rhythm' of appropriation only slightly more legible in the phrase' Language is the house of Being'. 'The Retrait of Metaphor' is not restricted, however, to simple elucidation of Heidegger. Certain questions arise, especially concerning textuality, that become more and more difficult to assimilate to Heidegger's statements on language. Derrida moves in this direction first by emphasising the paradoxy resulting from the mutual implication of' metaphor' and 'metaphysics', taking as a starting-point Heidegger's argument that' metaphor' exists only within metaphysics and its instrumental understanding of language. Two points suggest themselves: (I) Insofar as metaphysics is coextensive with the oblivion of being, could one not say that all the terms by which metaphysics designates the being of beings, determining it as a supreme entity, first cause etc., are metaphorical, that is, standing in a merely figurative relation to that which they (mis)represent? (2) At the same time, however, one must insist that the words 'figurative' or 'metaphorical' remain quite inadequate, belonging as they do to the very metaphysical realm they were designed to delimit. Being, as nothing, could be described neither literally nor metaphorically : 'Being being nothing, not being a being, it cannot be expressed or named more metaphorico' (RM, p. 2 I ). The rhythmic structure described above in relation to the seeming 'metaphorical' status of' Language is the house of Being , must perhaps then be complicated. Acknowledging the degree to which such turns of


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language effect an entry into the presencing of language itself, nevertheless one must acknowledge that their catachretic movement also witnesses a kind of doubling of metaphor. as this withdrawal of the metaphoric leaves no place free for a discourse of the proper or the literal it will have at the same time the sense of a re- fold (re-pli) , of what retreats like a wave on the shoreline, and of a return (re-tour) , of the overcharging repetition of a supplementary trait, of yet another metaphor, of a double trait (retrait) of metaphor, a discourse whose rhetorical border is no longer determinable according to a simple and indivisible line, according to a linear and indecomposable trait. (RM, p. 22).

The most pertinent reference here would be to the textuality of Heidegger's essays themselves - to the very language that in its attempt to make resound, as an essential silence, the Saying of appropriation in language, yet must do so through the proliferation of texts, through human saying. 13 The urgent question would be that of the finitude of being, the necessity or the transcendental's relation to the empirical - the movement between a text and that which renders it possible even as that text tries to speak it. In 'The Double Session' the necessity of a supplementary trait (i.e. of yet more re-presentation even in the structure of presentation itself) is traced in the curious notion of the 'remark'. I t names the manner in which the two notions of mimesis are folded upon each other in such a way as to escape the pertinence of notions of truth as either adequation or aletheia (Diss, p. 193). In 'The Law of Genre' (1979) this re-mark is described more closely in relation to the procedures of literary criticism. It may be provisionally defined as a generic marker. 'The Law of Genre , defines the re-mark in terms of the element of a text that, over and above functions of representation or signification, marks it as readable, legible as a text ofsuch or such a type. As such, it is 'absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry or literature. this re-mark can take on a great number offorms and can itself pertain to highly diverse types. It need not be a designation or' mention' of the type found beneath the title ofcertain books (novel, recit, drama). (LG,

p.

2 I I)

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This re-mark of the text as such and such and legible necessarily pervades the totality of the text. It is always necessary, insofar as readability is to be possible, and need not be explicit. As was discussed above, Dichtung concerned the structure of the ontological difference whereby things become present as such. I t inhabits and constitutes that 'as' itself. Derrida's remark, it may be seen, also concerns such an as. Marking a text as a text of a certain sort and as readable, it designates the possibility of reading, legibility or articulable experience itself. The peculiarity of the re-mark, however, is its relation to what it designates: Let us take the designation' novel' as an example. This should be marked in one way or another, even if it does not appear ... in the explicit form of a subtitled designation, and even ifit proves deceptive or ironic. This designation is not novelistic; it does not, in whole or in part, take part in the corpus whose denomination it nonetheless imparts. Nor is it simply extraneous to the corpus. (LG, p. 2 12)

Marking a text as such or such, the re-mark constitutes a 'supplementary and distinctive trait, a mark of belonging or inclusion, [which] does not properly belong' to that which it presents - 'The re-mark of belonging does not belong' (LG, p. 2 12). I t is in this non-belonging that a break with Heidegger's valorisation of Dichtung must take place. Moreover, the disruption Derrida brings to the as structure exemplifies his notion of litterature in terms of' certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts'. 14 It remains to return to 'Poem' one last time, where questions concerning the re-mark may be asked and its meaning clarified. One notes at once the relative legibility of the re-mark in the text's opening, its title: POEM

space window that looks in itself a facing both and every way


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The text consists of a series of attributes, falling as it were from the top of the page in a vertical column. '[S]pace' thus admits of a series of elaborations line by line. However, as has already been noted, it is equally possible that the series finds its head in 'POEM' itself, the title, and that' space' is thus but the first in a series of attributes of poetry. These alternatives, ofcourse, affect everything else in the poem. 'Poem', as was argued in the first chapter, could be read as unusually effective in its relation to 'Saying', the aspect of language as 'the appropriating showing which disregards precisely itself, in order to free that which is shown, to its authentic appearance' (WL, p. 131). 'Poem' seemed to emphasise language as Dichtung - that is, not as the representation of any apparent entity, but as the realm of appearing itself. The colon in the following stanza would concern precisely the appropriation in language itself: colon between green apple: and vase of green

This account was nevertheless, it now emerges, an idealisation, even as it attempted to correspond to all that is most elusive in Heidegger's notion of Dichtung. There is a species ofre-presentation and, paradoxically, it must be conceived as a condition of any presentation or unconcealment effected in the words of' Poem'. Certain of the textual movements traced in Mimique recur here, but now in a manner that allows of some generalisation in respect of the relation of littirature to literature. The re-mark, legible as the possible alternative reading that would incorporate the title at the head of the text, envelopes the scene of aletheia, as indeed legibility itself must envelop language in its evocative power. The colon in the third stanza is, for instance, comparable to those colons Heidegger discusses in relation to Parmenides or his own guide-phrases, such as 'the being of language: the language of being' .15 I t is the difference itself that is re-marked, that' between' which gives rise to world and thing, being in beings, while yet not being separable from that to which it gives rise. The colon would be a mark of this

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conjunction as dehiscence, appropriation and expropnation. Nevertheless the colon is not only effective in 'Poem' as a mark of punctuation (:), it is also named (' colon '), as indeed it is named in all Heidegger's commentaries, though always in a manner that suggests this additional re-marking of the colon as accidental to the appropriation itself. This is not just a psychological matter - that one would not have attended to the appropriating play if Heidegger had not re-marked it in a commentary or reading. Nor is this re-mark, whereby Dichtung appears as represented, an idiosyncratic characteristic of texts such as 'Poem' or Mallarrne's Mimique. It is a necessary trait ofany text, constituting textuality as such. To that extent, it would not merely be a case of Dichtung appearing as represented but also a case of Dichtung inhabiting a certain kind of re-presentation in order to appear. Paradoxically, it is possible to suggest that' Poem' provides a means with which to question Heidegger's understanding of Dichtung precisely to the extent that it seemed so evident or convenient an instantiation of it. I ts effect of foregrounding language's power to show or to point, while barely showing or revealing anything except this unconcealing itself, is nothing if not are-marking. There is no unmediated aspect of language except to the degree that the stage of appearing is itself touched by the necessity ofrepresentation. This is a good point at which to return to Heidegger's Conversation on a Country Path and reopen the issue of the hybrid nature of dialogue. What is to prevent someone dismissing this dialogue as merely a fictional in teraction offictional characters? Clearly, it is only the argument that language itself, unfolding itself in the twisting movement of a dialogue on dialogue, is guided by the question of what calls it. Thus the constraints of this directive would form a subtle yet absolutely decisive distinction between (mere) fiction and the heavily disciplined progress oflanguage in the dialogue. The whole authority of the text, its embodiment of a novel form of coherence rests here. However, as 'Poem' suggests, the question to be directed against Heidegger concerns the necessity by which the movement of language toward' that which regions' requires a form of


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fiction or a species of representation in order to take effect. The dialogue needs the catachresis of a phrase like 'that which regions' or 'the wait' even as it presents itself as a reappropriation of the essence of language that would render received notions of metaphor inadequate in the very work done by such phrases opened out in the syntax of the dialogue. It is thus not quite accurate to describe, as Heidegger does, Dichtung as that Saying to which the just response would be a phenomenological hearkening that would attempt to preserve what was giving itself prior to any conceptualisation. If Dichtung is to contain within itself the necessity of its being heard, then , listening' would be a less accurate term than 'reading' to describe the element of relation to Dichtung. Would this not also be the import of the 'supplementary trait' analysed in 'The Retrait of Metaphor'? Moreover, without the re-mark as an essential potentiality in language, there could be no aletheia, no presentation: The re-mark of belonging does not belong. It belongs without belonging, and the 'without' (or the suffix '-less ') which relates belonging to non-belonging appears only in the timeless time of the blink of an eye [Augenblick]. The eyelid closes but barely an instant among instants, and what it closes is verily the eye, the view, the light of day. But without such respite, nothing would come to light. (LG, p. 212; emphasis added)

What is ineluctable is not primarily language commonly conceived as representation, mirroring a realm of objects, nor yet language as presentation, rather, as it were, a mirror that faces inward in the re-mark ' this is a text ofsuch and such a type'. This is a precondition of any letting-be of language in the sense demanded by Heidegger: 'the letting-be, the truth that lifts the veil screen - is already regulated according to a mirror' (Diss, P.314). Similarly, insofar as it pervades the text, or any phenomenon, as its very readability, the re-mark also marks something (de )constitutive that obeys no referential or phenomenal function. Many of the peculiar movements of reference traded in 'The Double Session' are already at work in the early sections of Of Grammatology, especially in that section explicitly devoted to the

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot question of signification and its standing in the wake of Heidegger's work. Derrida recapitulates in these pages the manner in which being, qua gift of presence, may never become simply the theme of any language. Derrida writes that the concept of representation must be displaced: The necessary, originary, and irreducible dissimulation of the meaning of being, its occultation within the very blossoming forth of presence ... all this clearly indicates that fundamentally nothing escapes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing. (Gr, pp. 22-3)

Yet this lack of difference between signified and signifier is not the simple presence of something in itself. Dissimulation is the concern in Grammatology, mimicry in Mimique. More peculiarly, it is not a case of the presence of anything (sense one of mimesis) or its representation (sense two) but something that is between and neither while it yet envelops both - 'What is lifted, then, is not difference but the different, the differends, the decidable exteriority ofdiffering" terms'" (Diss, p. 2 10). Derrida employs the term 'hymen' to underline certain paradoxes here, designating as it does both marriage and its consummation and also the female membrane that tokens virginity. Two provisional conclusions seem to offer themselves. First, that there is no Dichtung in the sense required by Heidegger, only its effect or illusion within a machine of textuality. Secondly, and more provocatively perhaps, that there is in ' Poem' nothing but Dichtung. Nothing takes place but the stage itself. Moreover this (non) taking place remains a necessary element in any text or in 'experience' itself. Nothing is there to be read except readability itself, which is tantamount to unreadability. No reading could encompass this' ground' 'which makes it possible that" there is" a text, that is, a readability without a signified (which will be decreed to be an unreadability by the reflexes of fright) , (Diss, p. 253). This mere readability renders the literary a kind of genreless genre (or' not a genre but all genres'), 16 standing in a quasi-transcendental relation to other genres and denying them their closure. Derrida formulates this in terms of the' postcard', utilising both the fact that postcards remain both always open to be read and of minimal content:


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As soon as, in a second, the first stroke ofa letter divides itself, and must indeed support partition in order to identify itself, there are nothing but post cards, anonymous morsels without fixed domiciles, without legitimate addressee, letters open, but like crypts.l"

In the previous chapter, Blanchot was introduced as working through some implications of the truism that, in a literary text, the sole means of access to the world of the text is that text itself. It projects what it seems (only) to represent. Blanchot's essay then attempted to inhabit the space within mimesis itself, opening a field to be embraced neither by mimetologism nor formalism. Derrida's Mallarrne is clearly analogous - Mimique projects what it seems to represent and simultaneously represents that projection. An intra-literary space thus comes to embrace the whole literary text, effecting an epoche or suspension. This then is perhaps how litterature can' still designate that which already breaks away from literature' and even' implacably destroys it' (Diss,p. 3 I) even as it names something inseparable from the being of the literary. For Derrida, no less than Blanchot, there is no phenomenological reduction to meaning, only a reduction of meaning, including even the Heideggerian 'meaning of being'. Let us turn then to the complex issue of the relation between Blanchot and Derrida. At first sight, Derrida's litterature emerges as a notion which differs from Blanchot's concept of the recit mainly, and importantly, in its explicit range of reference and Derrida's more systematic attention to the challenge of its inherence in philosophical thought. Similarly, when one turns to Derrida's best-known texts on Blanchot, his readings of the recits, Lafolie dujour (1973) and L' arret de mort (1948),18 one finds a movement oftextuality such as is schematized in the argument on the re-mark (which itself emerges in an essay on Blanchot) - a form ofHeideggerian step back that, since it 'performs' itself the movement to which it is given over, skews distinctions of 'act' and 'representation' in a configuration of decentred temporality. Oddly enough, it is Derrida's sustained work on psychoanalysis, and the transformations oflanguage and conceptuality it entails, that emerges as among his closest to Blanchot, even though Blanchot's own writing on psychoanalysis is minimal

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and mildly dismissive.I'' For Derrida, psychoanalytic theory takes on the peculiar mode of being of a Blanchot recite In 'Speculations: On Freud', 20 the issue is partly the extent to which the content of psychoanalytic theory might be said to anticipate deconstruction, the way, for instance, the notion of the unconscious denies authority to any philosophical valuation of the self-evident as the foundation of judgement. Thus it becomes problematic to name or identify any psychic phenomenon as such, since' as' must become complex - what may be 'pleasure' to the unconscious may seem' pain' to consciousness. However, aside from these confirmations, Derrida is fascinated by the questionable status of psychoanalytic theory itself, somewhat in the manner, surprisingly enough, of some detractors of its claims to scientific status. For Derrida, however, the issue is ultimately to affirm a notion of l' oubli more radical than Freud's. Karl Popper's argument is perhaps the best-known attack on the claims of psychoanalysis to be a science;" A theory, he argues, ifit is to be regarded as having specific content, must be testable, hence falsifiable. Indeed the more a theory makes specific claims that, in principle, could be open to falsification, the more content, multiplicity or explanatory power the theory possesses. Correspondingly, a theory that does not admit of falsification is vacuous, precisely what Popper describes as the status of psychoanalysis. The very ease with which psychoanalysis overcomes its critics (by redefining phenomena in its own terms, reminding us that the unconscious does not regard negatives or attributing the resistance of critics to forms of psychic repression) is exactly what may be seen to damn it. Because it can always reformulate and answer every objection, it always says nothing. In Derrida's reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), it is just this sort of equivocation as to objectivity that relates Freud's text to liiterature and yet gives it a unique interest that can finally be opposed to Popper's dismissal, based as it is on assumptions of a logical-positivist kind. Freud's concern in this text is not to state a thesis but, as he puts it, to speculate on whether or not there is any evidence that the basic tenet of


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psychoanalytic theory, the pleasure principle, is sometimes transgressed. Freud's use here of the term' speculation' marks his peculiar relation both to philosophy and to empirical observation. To speculate is neither to engage in philosophy (whose tendency to anticipate psychoanalysis without performing its experiments seems to irritate Freud), nor is it merely to annotate observed phenomena (p. 38 I). I t is this speculative mode of writing, self-legitimating even in its inconclusiveness, that brings Freud into the 'literary', non-falsifiable realm. Derrida notes, 'the site of this provisional floating is indeed language' (p. 38 I). Moreover, since no conclusion is reached, 'this provisionalness is irreducible'. The situation is further complicated by two considerations. First, Freud refers to psychoanalytic theory as if it were an established body of work, determinate and generally acknowledged. This masks the fact that this theory remains his own creation and that its status, even as he writes (it) is continually at issue. Derrida notes, accordingly, the tensions surrounding those observations recorded in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for these are known to have concerned Freud's own grandson and daughter, people with whom he was intimately involved in a way that might seem to question the pretended objectivity of the narrative. Secondly, there is a peculiar homology between the phenomena observed and the very movements of Freud's athetic or speculating language. The young boy (whom we know to be Ernst, Freud's grandson) is observed to engage himself in a game in which he throws a spool, attached to a piece of string, beyond the edge of his bed, out of sight, and then, with a sigh of pleasure, pull it back, articulating as he does so sounds which the onlookers (Freud and his daughter) interpret as the German words fort (gone), followed by da (there). In the same way Freud's meditation on whether or not the pleasure principle is transgressed, in this game or elsewhere, moves backwards and forwards in a structure of indefinite repetition, like the child's game. It is as if either the discourse were on the end of the thread, or the game a projection of the discourse. Any possible attempt of psychoanalytic speculation to ground itself by

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reference to phenomena is undermined insofar as those phenomena seem bound up in the text's own dynamics. In sum, as Derrida's various allusions to Blanchot indicate (pp. 260, 285), Freud's speculation is caught up in the movement of language tha t Blanchot narrates in terms of the relation of a recit to its event (' that which turns itself away from thought returns to thought, a thought become its turning away' (L' ao, p. 8 I)). Given Derrida's argument on the re-mark as tampering with genres of discourse, this conclusion as to the indeterminacy which engages psychoanalytic theory in its attempt to identify, constitute and legitimate itself need not surprise us. Indeed the fascination of psychoanalysis becomes precisely its almost explicit status, despite itself, as a science at the margins of the possibility of science, an issue that will be re-engaged in the next chapter. Derrida's first and most provocative treatment of Blanchot, Pas (1976) (P, pp. 20-1 16), follows those texts ofHeidegger and Blanchot, studied earlier, in being written in dialogue form. While so far this chapter might seem to have been leading to the conclusion that much of what Derrida has to say on the literary is 'implicit already in Blanchot', the very notions of originality and influence implicit in such a conclusion are at work in Pas in such a way that Derrida's surrender to Blanchot's fascination becomes in itself an unprecedented kind ofheteronomic writing. At issue is the following conundrum: granted that Blanchot's recits are a kind of performance (narrative as event), can they be read in a way that acknowledges their status as performances which are, irreducibly, non-present, non-thematisable? How can one not reduce them to the enactment of some thought or philosophical system? This is the question around which Pas is magnetised. It concerns a difficult, if radical, form of nonobjectifying approach to a text. The issue is reading and the difficulty of conceiving it in non-representational terms (unlike, for instance, reader-response theorists or the work of Roman Ingarden with their theory of the text as an intentional object partly constructed in reading). For Heidegger, confronting the same issue, reading, as we saw, must itself perform a kind of step back, thereby engaging itself in a novel form of maieutics. But what of reading in Blanchot, or, more convolutedly, reading


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Blanchot? A brief account of this matter must precede any account of Derrida's Pas, a dialogue which enters into, or , performs', the reading ofBlanchot according to Blanchot. Blanchot's concern, as with Heidegger, is only partly to question current accounts of reading, namely, reading as cultural assimilation, interpretation, evaluation, or relating to the writing of literary histories etc. Rather, Blanchot homes in upon the place of reading in the ontology of the work, delineating a region glossed over and obscured by the very familiarity of literary or cultural activity. Reading, as discussed in The Space ofLiterature, is essential to the freeing of the work from the merely instrumental or communicative notion of language. Prior to its being read, a work remains the product solely of its author. A book seems to lack in its very material solidity the separation which, for instance, sets off at once a work of architecture or painting. Reading, freeing the work from its author and opening it to an anonymous horizon of public readability, grants the work this necessary separation: 'to read is not to write the book again, but to allow the book to be' (SL, p. 193). It is only as being read that the work comes into being in its essential separateness: 'Reading simply" makes" the book, the work, become a work beyond the person who produced it, the experience that is expressed in it and even beyond all the artistic resources which tradition has made available' (SL, p. 194). Reading is thus a kind offiat, a Lazare veniJoras. Blanchot, one must remind oneself, is not here speaking ofreading as a subjective experience, but as a necessary aspect of the being of the work itself if it is to become the event of its self-affirmation. There is no subject-object dichotomy here: Blanchot's notion of the 'work' cannot be contained within any naive idea of an objective entity to which reading adds itself as the subjective consciousness of that same entity. Reading 'makes the work become a work' (SL, p. 194). This account, while producing problems of its own, sidesteps at once a great deal of the contemporary critical debate about objectivity and relativism in interpretation. Reading is the place of a violent rupture' between the book which is there and the work which is never there in advance' (SL, p. 196). It moves us from the familiar world about us

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot 'where everything has more or less meaning' 'into a space where, properly speaking, nothing has meaning yet, toward which nevertheless everything which does have meaning returns as towards its origin' (SL, p. 196). Effecting a difference between familiarity and its hidden (non) ground, reading makes up a rewritten version of Heidegger's ontological difference, as if, one might' say, its space were the strange topology ofrelation between being and/as Dasein in Heidegger's dialogues or in the essay 'Concerning the Line'. It is described repeatedly as a welcoming, a 'yes' which, responding to the work's call, 'makes of the welcome the sheer delight whereby the work proclaims itself' (SL, p. 196).22 Moreover, reading is inaugural in that it affirms and lets play the negativity or distancing inherent to the literary sign. A distance is opened in the work with respect to its own positivity, the reader's or any determinate context. This distance, for Blanchot, 'constitutes reading's innocence' yet also 'defines its responsibili ty and its risk' (SL, p. 201), for the distancing that reading opens up may also be vertiginous. This seems to be the source of institutionalised recuperation of the work, whereby it is 'said to be good or bad with respect to morality ... rich or poor with respect to culture' (SL, pp. 201-2). Something of what such recuperation forecloses persists, however, in the sense that the work escapes time or in 'that halo of absence so characteristic of the presence of masterpieces' (SL, p. 203). The task of Blanchot's reader then becomes to affirm the lack of repose inseparable from a successful work. The reader must resist the reception of the work in terms of representation, author's views etc., and hold open the singularity of the work as an 'event' in being: 'the work never ceases to be related to its origin ... the incessant experience of the origin is the condition of its being' (SL, p. 204). The work remains a , violen t Iiberty'. It communicates itself as an affirmation of' the empty and indecisive depth of the origin' (SL, P.204), a 'contentless affirmation' (SL, p. 206). If reading for Blanchot is a mode of saying 'yes' to the work - a form of step back into its imaginary space - it is not surprising that Derrida's Pas affirms the reading lifBlanchot as

Derrida and the literary a double 'yes' ('oui, oui', the last words of the dialogue). However, the doubleness hence introduced is a subtle one, engaging also with notions of what commentary is according Blanchot. The' double yes' in Pas performs a notion of reading already schematised by Blanchot in his work on the notion of commentary. Why are there commentaries?, he asks. By this question Blanchot is not asking a more or less empirical question, whose answer might be that some people are better readers than others or that institutions for teaching literature produce a demand for students' guides etc. Rather, the question concerns the concept of commentary and what it implies. Why seek to repeat the work? Does not such an attempt suggest, paradoxically, that what the commentary repeats is yet somehow missing in the work it comments on - how can one dare to speak on a work without implying that the work itself is something silent, incapable of speaking for itself? (£1, p. 570). There is a certain non-coincidence with itself whereby the work is able to appear at all. Commentary would thus concern a movement of supplementary logic whereby a new word would attempt to fill this space whereby the work speaks. The need for commentary thus appears to be a structural necessity for any work, as Blanchot implies by referring to literature written in a different historical epoch, before the commentors themselves had established their reign. In grand heroic epics, for instance, commentary also appears, but in the interior of the work itself. Such works often redouble themselves internally several times, as episodes are repeated or amplified. Commentary is not a practice exterior to the work so much as part of a textual economy within the work itself whereby it relates to itself, presents itself and comes into being. Blanchot briefly defines the unique work as 'ceIle qui n'est complete que s'illui manque quelque chose, manque qui est son rapport infini avec elle-rneme, plenitude sur le mode du defaut ' (£1, p. 572) [' that which is only complete if something is lacking to it, a lack which is its infinite relation with itself, plenitude in the mode of a flaw']. Blanchot offers an account of Kafka's unfinished novel, The

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot Castle (1926). It is a peculiar aspect of the literary that books which comment on themselves in the manner of The Castle do not thereby reduce the need for further exegesis. Rather they amplify it - 'Plus une ceuvre se commente, plus elle appelle de commentaires' (£1, p. 572) [' The more a work comments on itself, the more it calls for commentaries ']. The more the book reflects back upon itself, the more its centre (the 'itself') becomes enigmatic. This observation must have at least equal force for Blanchot's own recits as it does for Kafka's novels. The Castle concerns a man in his thirties, known only as K, summoned as a land-surveyor to a mysterious small state dominated both geographically and politically by a castle. The castle remains unapproachable and oddly unaccountable, though its influence and machinations pervade the village at its feet. There K tries to find out his tasks, or whether or not he should have been summoned at all, becoming engaged to be married in the process. The atmosphere is one of anxiety and isolation as mundane events succeed each other in unintelligible ways. Although Kafka's text, unlike, for example, Cervantes' Don Quixote, is not explicitly about books and commentary, the question of writing pervades its very structure, 'puisque l'essentiel du recit, c'est-a-dire l'essentiel de la peregrination de K. ne consiste pas a aller de lieux en lieux, mais d'une exegese a une exegese, d'un commentateur a un commentateur' (£1, p. 576) ['since the essential matter of the narrative, that is to say the essential matter of K's peregrination does not consist of going from place to place, but from exegesis to exegesis, from commentator to commentator']. No possible reading of K's 'real' relation to the castle remains adequate or final. The book seems essentially, as well as just contingently, unfinished. Blanchot here contrasts sharply with Heidegger's account of the ideal of commentary in relation to Holderlin. For Heidegger 'the explanatory speech must break up each time both itself and what it has attempted', and 'every exposition consists in vanishing away together with its explanation in the face of the pure existence of the poem'. 23 This account, disappointingly, does justice neither to Heidegger's actual practice nor to the


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issues it raises. For Blanchot, however, commentary enters into the neutral work-being of the work. Its 'structure' or 'movement' is epitomised in Gertrude Stein's statement, 'a rose is a rose is a rose'. On the one hand this seems a tautologous repetition; on the other it affirms the beauty and uniqueness of the rose by refusing to define it in terms of anything except itself. At the same time, however, both the rose and being (a rose is a rose is arose) are given over to the dead time of literary space, with its peculiar movement of (self) detour (£1, p. 504). By implication, then, Pas should give up instrumentalist or thematising ambitions in favour ofa text that resonates with (or says 'yes' to) the neutral work-being of the work. Commentary should be a form ofJascination by the work, in the unique sense of 'fascination' established in Blanchot's auure (see below). Like much of L' attente l'oubli, Pas is in dialogue form. Two voices, one male and perhaps somewhat expository, the other female and more sceptical, converse on the matter of Blanchot's texts. My analysis divides into three sections.

I Insofar as a recit must be understood as a mode of Dichtung, to read it as expressions of a personal subjectivity would be altogether naive. The notion of a commentary that would leave a text 'as it is' would also be inadmissible. Commentary is inherent in the movement of the recit itself. As one of the speakers in Pas remarks, even if one quoted everything by Blanchot the whole would still be missing. The simultaneous demand for reading and the ineluctable violence that any reading must embody come together in the concept of 'interruption' in Derrida's recent work. There can be no irenic or purely heteronomic language. A commentary, such as Pas, accompanies/ interrupts the 'original' text in the manner of the necessary implication of the other within the same. No text has any solidity or coherence without the interruption of the other.i" Pas, and a later dialogue on Levinas (see below) are marked by voices that repeatedly interrupt each other. (Indeed, in retro-

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spect it is possible to note how well a notion of interruption of this kind could be applied to the paratactic mode ofHeidegger's dialogue. ) Pour entrer en rapport avec l'autre, il faut que l'interruption soit possible; il faut que le rapport soit un rapport d'interruption. Et l'interruption, ici, n'interrompt pas le rapport a l'autre, elle ouvre Ie rapport a l'autre. (Derridaj'" [To enter into relationship with the other, interruption must be possible; the relationship must be one of interruption. And interruption here does not interrupt the relation to the other, it initiates that relation. ]

Blanchot, in Le pas au-dela, sets the frame for a deconstructive intellectual history, affirming the inherence of reading or commentary in the' retroactive' constitution of a text's sense: nous savons que l'oeuvre, dans sa nccessite historique, est toujours modifiee, transforrnee, traversee, separee delle-rneme, rendue a son dehors, par toutes les oeuvres qui semblent ne venir qu'apres elle. (Le pas, p. 54) [we know that the work, in its historical necessity, is always modified, transformed, traversed, separated from itself and returned to its outside by all those works that might seem only to come after it]'

Much of Derrida's 'originality' in relation to the literary lies in readings ofHeidegger and Blanchot which can have the result of making his 'own' work seem derivative. The very status of this work reads thus as an effect of the other as the space 'of deferred reciprocity between reading and writing' (WD, p. I I). In Derrida's idiom, the signature to a text does not take place 'until' that text is read. I ts reception is an ontological necessity and risk, not a matter of empirical history. Hence a text is always 'open', its sense always both in arrival, to come (a venir) and in a process of retroactive constitution by the accidents ofits 'future '. The commentary need not even have been written after the text it may be seen to comment on. In 'Living On' Derrida reads Blanchot's L' arret de mort through Shelley's fragment The Triumph of Life (1822), arguing that 'One text reads an-


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other ... Each" text" is a machine with multiple reading heads for other texts' (LO, p. 107). Shelley and Blanchot thus become part of a dialogue in which the text of each acquires meaning in its relation to the other, affirming textuality as 'an irreducible process of opening/closing that re-forms itself without let-up' (Diss, p. 337). Correspondingly, Pas forms part of that reconfiguration of the dialogue form with which Derrida was engaged in the 1970s, coming as it does between Glas (1974) and The Post Card (1980). It is thus altogether appropriate that Pas should be, in many respects, an imitation of L' attente l'oubli, in which the movement towards an affirmation of dialogicity, a 'plural word' as constitutive oftextuality in a skewed form of temporality, becomes not only a matter of the relation between the two interlocutors but also between 'Derrida' and 'Blanchot'. Pas opens with the word viens (come), both an address from the male interlocutor to his female counterpart and a quotation from Blanchot. The term is transformed, in meditation, into a term for dialogicity or the parole plurielle at work in Blanchot's recits. The homology with Heidegger is immediately apparent: viens ri'echange rien, il ne communique pas, il ne dit rien, ne montre, decrit, definit, cons tate rien, a l'instant ou il se prononce, rien qui soit quelque chose ni quelqu'un, objet ou sujet. (P, p. 26) [viens exchanges nothing, does not communicate, it says nothing, shows, describes, defines, states nothing, even at the moment it enunciates itself, nothing that might be a something or someone, an object or a subject].

For Heidegger, Dichtung concerned that clearing whereby Dasein was both granted a world and determined in its selfconception. Viens, as a vocative, rewrites this notion in terms of those issues of singularity and the ethical that have been read in Blanchot (see P, p. 79). Viens, correspondingly, does not relate to general manifestation of a world. In accordance with Blanchot's argument in 'La parole plurielle' it is inherently plural, 'chaque fois un evenernent singulier' (P, p. 27) ['each time a singular event ']. Similarly it comprises an element which is ethical,

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot dative and relates to exteriority and alterity (' beyond being', Derrida writes). It is a relating that institutes related poles without, being itself singular each time, thereby neutralising their otherness or their incommensurability. Moreover, in accordance with that dislocation of Heideggerian Dichtung traced in Blanchot's recits, viens is inherently' literary', already a citation. It calls 'itself' in a movement or demand of (self) commentary: II n'appelle merne pas quelqu'un qui serait la avant l'appel. Dire qu'il appelle l'appel, qu'il s'appelle, ce serait plus juste pourvu qu'on n'y entende aucune reflexion speculaire. (P, p. 26) [I t does not even call anyone who would be there before the call. To say that it calls the call, that it calls itself would be more accurate, provided one doesn't understand thereby any sort of speculative refiexion. ]

As this cita tion already suggests, viens also serves to name the repea ted call of the wait in L' attente I'oubli and its peculiar selfhollowing syntax. I t is the appeal to which the' yes' of a reading delivers itself, even as that appeal delivers itself to it. 26 The other term exploited in meditation until it too names the textuality of Blanchot's recits is pas, which can be either an adverb (' not ') or a noun (' step '). The resonances of this word move in many directions. I t touches the notion of the 'step back' as a transformation of language and skews it according to the syntax of l' attente or of Mallarme's Mimique, into a step that is not a step, but a neutralisation. There is no motion, only a mime of it. 27 Pas is very insistent that the syntax of the term pas is not to be understood as any form of word-play, for this would be to lapse once more into a reading of the text in terms of an author's subjective manipulation. The term, as it were, imposes itself, in proportion as one thinks through the nature of the heteronomy at issue. One cannot approach the other as other except, paradoxically, by affirming its alterity in terms of an approach that would be an intensification of our distance from any approach (a 'pas de-Ioignement ' (P, p. 37) ) [a 'step or stop of distancing ']. Language, responding to the call' of an other which it cannot represent, may' approach' alterity only in a


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movement of self-dislocation in which a dialogue' on' Blanchot becomes a new form of genreless writing which as yet has no name. l'autre disloque l'opposition du proche et du lointain, sans pourtant les confondre. II assujettit la presence phenomenale a sa demarche. (P, P·37) [In its double step [of approach as distancing] the other dislocates the opposition of the near and the far, withou t however confounding them. It subjects phenomenal presence to its movement.]

It relates to, or embodies, what might seem to be a pragmatic self-contradiction, reminiscent both of ancient controversies on the status of 'nothing' as a referent and also of a point made earlier in respect of Dichtung, the relative inefficacy of negatives in poetic language. To say the word' not' (pas) of anything is still to speak and to leave in language that trace or footprint (pas) of one's approach (through negation) to the other. The result is a composite term whose overall movement is far more complex than either affirmation or negation. Thus pas is not only a concept in which are held together the double movement of approach and distancing that skews and displaces Heidegger's notions of the ontological difference and the' step back '. [PJas should not be understood as naming any concept of writing or of neutralization (P, p. 52). Rather, it performs it. The masculine speaker traces the way in which pas works in Blanchot's texts, especially Le pas au-dela (1973), at the time his most recent publication. The term is read as being twisted upon itself (' step-not ') in a syntax of paralysis analogous to the neutralising syntax at work in Blanchot's use of the preposition sans (' wi thou t ') in phrases such as rapport sans rapport, nous sans nous etc. Pas, and sans, as terms which' do' what they' describe', or which are the 'events' they 'relate', thus embody in one 'word' the movement ofa recit as a whole, as well as the dialogue that embodies its fascination! Correlatively, the terms viens, pas and sans name the relation of readers to Blanchot's texts as their fascination draws us into the literary spacing, the knot of proximity as separation by which the recits themselves are magnetised. 'Fascination' is the

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot name Blanchot gives to the movement of writing that, withdrawing itself from received determinations of space and time, draws the reader, by virtue of its very powerlessness, into that other or literary space. There it affirms itself' in the indeterminate milieu of fascination , (SL, p. 32). Pas affirms that viens may be read as a word for this fascination - the need to identify, without identification, with the text's allure. Hence to be drawn into the fascination of these texts is to undergo a relation to Blanchot in which both Blanchot and the reader are drawn into a dialogue beside themselves, like two figures in a Blanchot recit. In the following quotation from Pas the person addressed as 'tu' (' you-thou ') becomes indeterminately both the second voice in the dialogue, yet also' Blanchot '. The pas of approach flickers between tu and il, 'thou' and 'he'. Tu me fascines, je t'aime. La fascination, qu'il decrit, ne l'oublie pas, qu'il analyse, explique et produit sans cesse aussi, ce n'est pas la sienne, au plutot, il fascine des lars qu'il est aussi sous la fascination (comme le je de Celui qui ... ) (P, p. 93) 28 [You fascinate me, I love you. This fascination, which don't forget he describes and analyses, explains and also ceaselessly produces, is not his own fascination or rather, he fascinates from the moment when he is himself under the spell of fascination (like the' I ' of The One who does not come along l,vith me.)

As with the relation of Blanchot and Levinas as it may be read in L' attente I'oubli, the dialogue' between' two thinkers becomes itself a form of friendship 'in' a literary space in which determinate identity remains suspended. Thus Pas is not just an 'idiosyncratic re-figuration ,29 of Blanchot but something that need not sound so capricious. I treads Blanchot 'according to' Blanchot's practice of commentary and writing. Ideally, this should not even mean 'applying Blanchot's ideas to his own work' or some merely clever notion of close reading. Rather it should mean a fascination by, or a response to, the call of theother to which the recits submit themselves, realise and hence also efface in a ceaselessly to be renewed movement of stepping back as (self)commentary and vice versa. A non-subjectivist form of influence is at work in which the latter text is under as severe a


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constraint as to the laws ofits own coherence as anyone rigorous argument may be in responding to another.

II The three interlocutors in Heidegger's Conversation remain of indeterminate sex, though one suspects that they are masculine. Pas, like L' attente l' oubli, consists of an interplay of masculine and feminine voices. Both texts thus situate sexual difference as an irreducible aspect of the dissymetry fundamental in language and dialogue. Contra Heidegger, whose Dasein remains unsexed, sexual difference is inseparable from the ontological difference, as an asymmetrical element to be affirmed rather than neutralised.i" Pas is in line with Derrida's project of , resexualizing a philosophical or theoretical discourse' .31 Before this matter can be treated in full, however, it is necessary to consider the notions of community at issue in Blanchot and Derrida. Sexual difference, as a question, is inseparable from the issue of a heteronomic community. One of the most challenging features of the dialogue form is that, as a play of voices, it is implicitly an enactment of modes oj community. It can be read as performing issues or questions of a pedagogic, social or political kind. Indeed, contrary to the received image of poststructuralism in the English-speaking world, a great deal ofBlanchot's work in particular concerns the notion and possibly of community, an issue also engaged in Pas and other late texts by Derrida. Given that almost all available options for conceptualising the social or political rest on the very metaphysical humanism that is to be overcome, this issue remains extremely urgent. Implicit in texts like L' attente I'oubli or Pas is a notion of community related to that schematised in a relatively recent text by Blanchot on Bataille and Marguerite Duras, The Unavowable Community (I 983). 32 The notion of 'community' at issue must reject many of the ways in which community is usually understood, for instance as an entity in its own right or as afusion of individuals in a group. It is a matter of , another form of society which one would hardly dare to call a "community'" (p. 3). This community, affirming paradoxi-

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot cally the impossibility of community, makes up a form of continual 'limit experience '33 whereby any being' within' it puts itself in question and does so through its relation to others: If human existence is an existence that puts itself radically and constantly into question, it cannot of itself alone have that possibility which always goes beyond it, for then the question would always be lacking a question (self-criticism being clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other). (p. 8)34

As with Heidegger's Being and Time it is death that puts human existence most fully in question. However, for Blanchot, this' limit experience' is necessarily the death of another person, a friend - one's own death is not one's' own', since it is not an experience, there is no self to experience it. A relationship that does not close off dissymmetry and which acknowledges the necessary possibility of the vanishing of the other can become a transformation of the self beyond humanist conceptions of the individual. Blanchot writes: [I] t is in life itself tha t the absence of someone else has to be met. I t is with that absence - its uncanny presence, always under the prior threat of a disappearance - that friendship is brought into play and lost at each moment, a relation without relation ... Such is, such would be the friendship that discovers the unknown we ourselves are, and the meeting of our own solitude which, precisely, we cannot be alone to experience ... (p. 25)

For Derrida, it was the death of his friend Paul de Man that brought these issues into a painful focus, leading to affirmations that, if couched in terminology from psychoanalysis, seem almost indistinguishable from those of Bataille and Blanchot: 'the possibility of the death of the other in-forms any relation to the other and the finitude of memory'. Moreover, it is this same possibility that, whether recognised or not, constitutes that trace of alterity within the same whereby we can say' I' or 'we' (' The "me" or the "us" of which we speak then arise and are delimited in the way that they are only through this experience of the other ').35 It would be difficult, and perhaps undesirable in principle, to translate these accounts of an essential mourning, however chastening they may be to notions of the autonomous in-

Derrida and the literary dividual, into any form ofsocial or political programme For one thing, it is clear that such an 'impossible' community is a transcendental concept of sorts and thus already exists as the elided condition for received notions of groups, individuals, nations etc. On the other hand, Blanchot's account does have prescriptive force. I t calls for the performance of an attente that would affirm or become that fraternity or sorority in the essential solitude where we already are, a proximity in separation, responsible to the ever-renewed ethical demands of relationship. Pas affirms, correspondingly, that viens, as inherently self-divided or self-cited, is a vocative whose provenance is the possible death of the other. Its fascination draws the reader into a realm of indentification without identity in which any positive being is sacrificed. In an essay on a recit of Margueri te Duras, Blanchot makes a clear distinction between traditional community, as that deJacto sociality or nature in which we find ourselves, and what he calls elective community (Community, p. 46). This is the community one chooses or makes in what might be called' private life', were not the term obviously inappropriate. Here a form of practical heteronomy seems possible as a community of lovers, friends or artists, together in a mutual if dissymmetric relation to exteriority, a community continually putting its own coherence and being at stake (asking, for instance, ifits identity is based on the exclusion of an otherness it should not disavow). Such a heteronomy must be implicitly a transformation of society and concepts defining it. I t opens a space within space; it is an event in the manner of a literary work (' the renunciation of creating a work, indicating only the space in which resounds, for all and for each, and thus for nobody, the always yet to come words of the unworking (desreuvrement) ' (Community, p. 46). It is easy to see how the notion of a heteronomic community can be brought to bear on some socio-historical phenomena. Racism, for instance, emerges as a vicious and exclusive manifestation of the law of the same. However, the possibility of heteronomic thought still seems overly schematic and abstract in this field. Heavily indebted to Bataille's experiments with communism, the thought of Blanchot and Derrida is limited by

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot being preponderantly a debate with one phenomenon, namely fascism and questions of Jewish identity. Disconcertingly, notions of a heteronomic community can read as little more than an inversion of an understanding of fascism. Jean-Luc Nancy, for instance, has recently given an illuminating definition of fascism in terms of what he calls' immanentism " that is: 'a condition in which it is the aim of a community of beings in essence to prod uce their own essence as their work (fEuvre) , and moreover to produce precisely this essence as community' .36 It is also notable that while opposed to fascist thought, conceptions of a heteronomic community retain its strong homology between communal and aesthetic form, however radically redefined the latter may be in this context. To return, however, to the issue of sexual difference, is to find both Derrida and Blanchot affirming an essential relation between a possible heteronomy and a certain feminism. For Heideggerian Dasein the crux of its existence is not itself, but the relation to being that both decentres and constitutes it. The speakers of Blanchot's recits, and those of Pas in relation to Blanchot, likewise find themselves dislocated from any putative certainty with which they might assume their being, personality or character and say' I'. A recurrent situation in Blanchot's recits is that in which a masculine narrator or voice finds himself in a relation that dislocates identity and au thority. This dislocation takes place by encounter, in a neutral genre of relation, with an interlocutor both asymmetric and feminine (' la loi', 'la parole', 'la pensee ', 'la voix '). One suspects that the strange relation of thought and Dichtung in Heidegger is what is repeatedly engaged and transformed in these encounters. In 'The Law of Genre' (1979) Derrida recounts the relation between the narrative voice, which is marked by ambivalent masculine and neutral traits, caught up in the movement of a recit (La folie du jour) that narrates an event that is but the impossibility of its own narration, and a feminine element, the law (' la loi '). The narrator is submitted to the demand from various figures of authority to constitute himself as an 'I' and given an account of what has happened to him, yet this is an impossible demand insofar as it is both encompassed and undone by the self-dislocating and intransitive movement of the


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recite In a relation without relation, the law, with the demands made in her name, and the narrative voice are inseparable if distinct in a proximity in separation. For the law is made possible in the double yes of a recit which, while it exceeds all demands for identity of propriety, yet needs the law whereby to affirm itself as that excess or dislocation. The law is not merely transgressed but out-lawed, transformed, in the very movement that transgresses it. Heidegger's meditation on the' limit' is pertinent here. The very movement whereby any strict limit or boundary (as to genre or identity) is affirmed is also that whereby the law and the narrative voice attain a strange non-difference, 'the contiguity without contact of the hymen' (LG, p. 226). Derrida affirms, in this indeterminacy as to sexual difference, a plural voice which may be read as a sexual re-marking of Blanchot's notion of la paroleplurielle (' him, her, I, we, the neutral genre ... ') (LG, p. 226). In Reino Virtanen's Conversations on Dialogue'? there is an interesting discussion on the relative absence of female interlocutors in examples of the dialogue form. One of the speakers in Virtanen's text observes that a woman's presence, by introducing' tensions' (p. 41) would disrupt the strict discipline necessary to dialogue: 'the presence of women will inevitably change the dialogue into drama' (p. 41). In addition to this reminder of how dialogue has always been an arena of power, Virtanen's speaker comments that dialogues including women have usually concerned' not metaphysics nor epistemology, but love and marriage' (p. 42). Clearly, L' attente l'oubli and Pas attempt to introduce sexual difference as both affirmed and transformed in the tight discipline of the exchange. Thus, Virtanen's sentence also allows another reading: the feminine elements (la parole, la pensee) in the dialogue mark the recit as a form of hymen between philosophy and theatre, neutralising both in favour of the viens that gives rise to them. It is a matter, in Pas, of a 'movimentum, un moment feminin' [' a feminine movimentum or moment '] : il annonce ... la difference sexuelle avant tout autre determination, tout autre identification. Et comme elle ne se determine, ne s'appelle qu'a partir du viens qu'elle lance et renvoie, I'eloignernent du viens instruit le pas de difference sexuelle. (P, p. 81)

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[it announces ... sexual difference before all other determinations, all other identifications. And since it/she (' La difference sexuelle ') is only determined or called on the basis of the viens which it both projects and returns, the distancing movement of the viens guides the pas of sexual difference.]

In 'Choreographies' (1982) Derrida sketches a notion of community thinkable according to this heteronomic 'pas de difference sexuelle'. Such a community would be a rather utopian 'indeterminable number of blended voices, [a] mobile of non-identified sexual marks whose choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each "individual", whether classified as "man" or as "woman" according to the criteria of usage' (p. 76).

III Much of Pas is anticipated in many ways by Blanchot. However, during the dialogue there is increasing prominence given to a notion largely distinctive to Derrida and which still forms the least understood and assimilated aspect of his work - ' the signature'. Whereas a signature usually refers to a mark that signifies both authenticity and property, in Pas it forms part of a sceptical reconfiguration of these notions. Pas affirms that its final object, in submitting itself to the fascination of Blanchot's texts, is not to elaborate the law that governs the movement of his recits but to approach slowly' I'evenernent de sa signature' (P, p. 43) [' the event of his signature ']. 'Signature' is a term which designates what may be termed the force and individuality of an auore whereby it becomes a singular event of being (Dichtung thought in its singularity). I t is a matter of tha tissue often claimed to be ignored by so-called 'poststructuralists', of what it is that makes one text different from another, the power of a certain' individuality'. The signature thus marks the text as a whole, as it singular nature. The introduction to Parages, the collection of work 'on' Blanchot of 1986 in which Pas reappears, stipulates that Blanchot's euure can be read as being marked internally by 'un nom dont on ne sait plus a qu'il revient, a quel auteur ou a quelle langue' (P, p. 17) [' a name which one no longer knows


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to what or to whom it refers, to what author or to what language ']. The very title of Derrida's text, Parages, refers to a signature effect in Blanchot's eucre, the recurrence of words comprised of the letters 'pa, par, para, ra, rage, age' (P, p. 17). As this instance already tells us, the 'signature' need not relate to the letters of an author's proper name (Fh, p. 229) (though some parts of Pas do make that connection) : 'Ie nom que nous lui connaissons peut servir de cache, a ses yeux ou aux notres, pour un tout autre nom travaillant son texte en silence' (P, p. I 13) [' the name by which we know him can serve to conceal, from his eyes or ours, a completely other name working his text in silence ']. What is the provenance of this obscure concept? In many ways it is already implicit in 'The Double Session' in an account of an issue that often recurs in meditations on poetry - does the signifier or the signified dictate the progress of text? Do rhythmic and formal constraints determine' what is said'? It has often been said that Mallarrne, without apparently having made any actual innovations in this domain, constructed his entire literary praxis out of the necessities of verse and rhyme: that is, once these two concepts have been transformed and generalized, upon repercussion set off among signifiers, which are in no way dictated or decided in advance by any thematic intentionality. (Diss, p. 277)

This is not Derrida's argument. It might seem at first that the dissociation of aspects of language from instrumental notions of communication or representation must lead to an assertion of the 'autonomy of the signifier'. Indeed, thinkers like John Caputo have given just such an argument.i" However, it is necessary to recognise that the semiotic concept of' the signifier' is inextricably bound up with the Cartesian notion of representation at stake throughout this study. For instance, assertions of the' autonomy of the signifier' involve a dichotomy of the material and the ideal, the argument being that the former (in the shape of certain phonemes or graphemes) often determines the latter. This emphasis on 'the free play of the signifier' remains, however, a form of positivism, since the issue of the materiality and causal efficacy of the' signifier' itself, and its supposed opposition to the signified, is not raised or

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot considered. Pas insists that this distinction is 'en rade' (P, p. 52) [an' abandoned ' one] for the' graphemes' that make up the signature are prelinguistic, on the very border of language and the convoluted 'pas' beyond it, the viens of the other. I t is a matter again of the' strange non-difference' between signifier and signified. Although' The Double Session' is not explicitly engaged with Blanchot one notes how closely this play of non-difference and the hymen resembles the relation between the recit and its event. Moreover, the ideal of 'rhythm' or 'rhyme' Derrida expounds could equally well be formulated as re-citation between and enveloping signs: Rhyme - which is- the general law' of textual effects - is the folding together of an identity and a difference. The raw material for this operation is no longer merely the sound of the end of a word: all 'substances' (phonic and graphic) and all 'forms' can be linked together at any distance and under any rule in order to produce new versions of' that which is discourse does not speak '. Diss, p. 277)

Theorists of poetry are familiar with the interplay offormal and semantic aspects of a text in which, for instance, a formal analogy between two terms may suggest a thematic resonance, a resonance which in turn imposes formal constraints on the text in progress. What interests us is the element of this relation itself - an indeterminate' realm' in which neither yet both' signifier' and' signified' can be said to be the motive force, according to the peculiar non-difference at work, say, in Mallarmes Mimique: 'in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing' (Gr, p. 23). I t is a hymen between chance and necessity. Herman Rapaport has usefully drawn attention to a stylistic feature of Blanchot's essays inseparable from the movement of thought they perform: paranomasia or the repetition of similar signs or letters in different words.i" Rapaport cites such phrases as 'et q u' a la vue qui s'ouvre s'ouvre'; although the repetition of such terms as I'attente and pensee in L' attente I'oubli equally enacts a movement of thought in paranomasia that performs the skewed temporality of the recit. Rapaport's attention to' this stylistic feature in Blanchot suggests a reading of Derrida's work on the signature as an extension of this practice. It is possible to


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hypothesise how such a notion of the signature could be understood to emerge in meditations stemming from Blanchot's writings even if such a notion seemed absent from Blanchot's auure itself. The' signature' may be related, first of all, to the repeated dissociation of the work-being of the work from the notion of a subjective act of creation. For Blanchot, the writing of a recit is a process skewed temporally in such a way as to make terms like 'creation' and' representation' seem hopelessly clumsy. It also eschews questions of a starting-point or simple genesis for the work. Hence one can only talk, without blending them, of the emergence of a recit as an event, the event in the recit and the event as a projection of the recite The literary spacing unfolds in this non-linear interplay. Derrida's notion of the signature can be read as adding some specificity to this general account in accordance with the notion of' rhyme' sketched in relation to Mallarrne. Whereas Blanchot's essay on the recit is couched at the relatively general level of a story, such as that of Ahab and Moby Dick, Ulysses and the Sirens, Derrida deals with far less prominent yet powerfully determinant graphemes and phonemes whose emergent resonance provides the dynamic, as it were, of the text. 'The Double Session', elaborating the emergence of what can be called signature effects in Mallarrnc, refers to graphic or phonic 'traces', 'traces left by an echo, imprints of one phonic signifier upon another, productions of meaning by reverberations within a double wall. Two with no one' (Diss, p. 274). A signature would thus inhere in the text as traces of its movement of its emergence, as tokens of an irreducible facticity or contingency in the work-being of the work, fossilised in the completed text. (From today's perspective, this event of signature reads as another case of largescale effects resulting from extreme sensitivity to initial condi tions.) 40 Derrida affirms: 'Ecrire, ce serait produire ce ' nom' , une signature qui ne peut pas etre connue avant d'etre produite (rnerne si elle est la marque de l'histoire d'un sujet) , (Fh, p. 229) [' To write would be to produce this' name', a signature that cannot be known before it is produced (even if it is the mark of the history ofa subject).']

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot To complete this chapter, a few last sceptical questions. How does Derrida's mode of writing in Pas, and, as we shall see, his essay on the poet Francis Ponge (Signsponge) differ from a merely sceptical or 'playful' refiguration that merely turns the poetics of each writer upon their own practice and raises thus a series of vertiginous questions analogous to the well-known paradoxes of self-reference? Given that the progress of these texts consists mainly in an affirmation of the impossibility of their saying the other that concerns and makes them possible, a sceptic might push toward a debunking conclusion - namely, that the affirmation, say, ofa mode of knowledge (l'attente) as forgetting its very object as its sole mode of adequation to it (l'oubli) is no more than a reductio ad absurdam of the project's starting-point! Heidegger's notion of language as something whose essence 'cannot appear through any other instance than that of the very language that names it '41 is thereby shown, a sceptic might argue, to be incoherent, and the texts of Blanchot and Derrida only deluded performances of that fallacy known as petitio principii, or begging the question. Since Signsponge, the topic of the next chapter, is the most complex of those texts by Derrida to be written as a performance of this turn of language upon its own essence (a complexity apparent in the almost total lack of attention it has received), a brief recap of certain basic stages of the argument traced so far will be in order to answer our hypothetical sceptic. How on earth, one might ask, did we reach a position in which it seems that a text of such obscurity is justified? The approach to a heteronomy outlined in this study has moved, summarising briefly and with omissions, as follows. I. Being-in-the-world is not reducible to, or understandable in terms of any entity. Rather, it is the sense of entities that becomes unveiled through Dasein's own being. While no-thing separable from entities this' being' is a movement of disclosure in which appearances become articulable within a meaningful world. 2. Language is an essen tial element of this movement of disclosure of a world. Accordingly, it cannot be understood only in the traditional way, as an entity or object in the world. As a


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condition for the possibility of objectivity language cannot, entirely at least, become the object of any representationalist meta-language. This transcendental force of language can only be approached, non-objectively, by way of a mode of language that tries to hearken or resonate to its own sources or genesis. It must become an intransitive saying of saying, whatever the extraordinary stylistic innovations this demand requires. 3. If one concedes, with Levinas and Blanchot, that Heidegger's version of this twist of language upon itself, Dichtung, does not eschew vestiges of phenomenology (namely, in Heidegger the transcendental element of language is stiII being determined, however subtly, by way of certain phenomena in the world) then Heideggerian aletheia and disclosure must be reconceptualised as a mobility or dislocation of/in language and this syntactical twisting itself is alone the peculiar (non) essence of language as a form of non-phenomenal spacing. The necessity of this divergence from Heidegger is underlined by the need to answer the transcendence of the other as the other person. 4. What results, therefore, is a practice of waiting that, necessarily eschewing meta-language and indeed 'language' itself in its received sense, tries to 'twist its tongue to speak the non-linguistic conditions of language " 42 affirming itself as other, as self-dislocation. Moreover, it does so, not just to let resound or come the event of language alone, but, given the transcendental status of language, it must affirm its movement of selfdislocation, its perpetually becoming other, as the giving of our sense of space and time (' here' and' now') as the singularity of a vzens.

CHAPTER

The event

ofsignature:

4

a 'science' singular?

of the

One major reference for Derrida's notion of litterature is the philosophy of science. Indeed there are three ways (at least) in which the literary may be said to embody a limit to forms of scientific representation. (I) As we have already seen, Derrida's litterature names a quasi-transcendental movement which thought must undergo in conceiving logic, objectivity or calculability. Moreover, insofar as it skews the structure of identification itself (whereby x is taken as x), it necessarily affects the pertinence of logic etc., and restricts their possible scope. Derrida's interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, for example, relates precisely to its relatively explicit entanglement in questions of representation, rendering it, willy-nilly, a 'science' of the borders of the scientific. (2) Recent attention in scientific theory to the issue of complexity has involved engagement with phenomena for which no explanation, in certain senses, can be forthcoming - these phenomena are so complex that any adequate model of them would have to be as complex as those phenomena themselves! Explanation in terms of some underlying equation or algorithm is debarred. This debate forms a suggestive context for Derrida's interest in the works of james joyce, Finnegan's Wake (1939) in particular.! joyce's practice was to cultivate the greatest possible synchrony (or simultaneous mutual influence) between every fragment of his text, employing several languages at once in a programme that opens up a literary space of both minimal linearity and maximal resonance of signification. Such a textual mechanism is more complex than any conceivable computer, even at a time when the daunting complexity of some computations is raising analogous


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questions as to the limits of explanatory modelling. The complexity of Finnegan's Wake, however, forms only an extreme instance of something that informs the literary in general. (3) In his work from the mid-seventies, Derrida has repeatedly raised the possibility of a science of the singular of the uniquc.f May the literary be related to the issue of singularity as that which resists subsumption into general laws? If the multiplicity of idioms, dialects and language did not present itself as a masterable multiplicity, but as an irreducible one, philosophy and science would meet a fundamental check. I t is not surprising therefore, that in affirming a putative science of the contingent and singular, translation should occupy a conspicuous place, either as translation between languages or, as in most of ' Schibboleth' and Signsponge, translation from one order (the idioma tic) to another (conceptuality, generality etc.) . These three issues as to the limits of science are related to what Derrida sees as a dominant strategy that constitutes much of Western thought. In 'Tympan', which functions as a sort of preface to Margins of Philosophy, this is outlined as follows. Thinking assumes a hierarchy insofar as ' the particular sciences and regional ontologies are subordinated to general ontology, and then to fundamental ontology' (MP, p. xix). This is, among other things, a reference to Heidegger, for whom the question of being becomes the sole essential field, the fundament of others. In itself concern with this strategy of thought may seem somewhat abstruse. Nevertheless, given the mutual implication of metaphysics and technoscience, the ramifications are large. Derrida's argument anticipates, for example, the subtext of anxiety that marks a recent book by the cosmologist John Barrow, Theories of Everything (1991), which sceptically weighs the possibility of a total scientific theory of the universe." Barrow observes that much of the compulsion behind the drive to unify physics may be related to a heritage of monotheism. He also writes: 'It is worrying that so many of the concepts and ideas being used in modern mathematical description ... are just refined images of rather traditional human intuitions and categories of thought' (p.69).


Signsponge and much ofDerrida's work might be characterised in terms of a refusal or transformation of that broad strategy of thought outlined in Margins oj Philosophy - the manner of being of a swallow or a washing machine comes to challenge the jurisdiction of any would-be encompassing science !4This is not only what renders Signsponge dangerously close to being unin telligi ble (one should be wary of seeing this particular treatment of Frances Ponge in Signsponge as any sort of example of a more general method). It also constitutes the most potent resistance to any attempt to formulate Derrida in terms of a system. Rodolphe Gasche's The Tain of the Mirror (I g86), for instance, elaborates various' infrastructures' in Derrida's work (' differance ', the' re-mark' etc.) to show how they constitute a 'system being being'. 5 Whatever the value of this work (and this present study could hardly have been undertaken without it), its general systematising and generalising reduction to 'fundamental' areas remains alien in spirit and radicality from work such as Signsponge, in which questions of ontology cohabit with sponge towels, washing machines and manure in a provocative way. Moreover, this irreducible status of the idiomatic becomes one of the most prominent characteristics of the literary text. Much of Pas and Signsponge, from the retrospect of the IggOS, bears fascinating comparison with the phenomenon ofjractals to have emerged in chaos theory. Fractals are topological structures, representing mathematical relations, remarkable for their disregard of scale, that is the configuration of a small part of the structure repeats that of both larger portions and anticipates those on even smaller levels, in principle ad infinitum. One paradoxical aspect of fractals is their manner of complicating notions of boundaries - it is possible to envisage a finite space , bounded' by a line whose length, on examination, may expand indefinitely. Fractals thus seem a suggestive analogy for the term pas in Pas or, in Signsponge 'ponge', terms in which the 'syntax' or rhythm of an euore is seen at work in one' word' or even its constituent letters. Conversely, the euore emerges as that event of signature writ large. Accordingly, in this chapter, the term 'fractal' will be introduced to illuminate the problems related to notions of instantiation or exemplification (as when a


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detail of a text is said to exemplify a broader issue). The force of using this term is that one thus avoids affirming the dichotomy of the contingent or particular as against the conceptual or general that constitutes the notion of exemplarity. The putative science of the singular attends to poetic language as the hypothetical site in which this form of alterity may affirm itself. Heidegger's work on the nature of the thing, and individuation, is an indispensable reference here. It was argued in chapter 1 that claims that Heidegger's notion of aletheia (and consequently Dichtung) is a vacuous generality may be easily refuted. There is no one aletheia, precisely because it should not be abstracted from the particulars whose apparentness it makes up. Heidegger's argument on the individuation of things reads a development of this point. 'The Thing' (1954)6 and What is a Thing (1967) 7 dissociate the thingness of things from received descriptions. Elsewhere, Heidegger summarises these as (I) a conjunction of substances and attributes, (2) a conjunction of form and matter or (3) a manifold of sensory qualities. Heidegger's account of the thing situates it in terms of an uncentred movement of appropriation itself. It brings into unconcealment the regions around it even while being brought to presence in turn by them. In 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1954) Heidegger instances this appropriating movement, called thinging, with a phenomenological description of a bridge: The bridge swings over the stream' with ease and power'. I t does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. (PLT, p. 152)

As a subordinate mode of Dichtung (which, as was seen, is not to be understood in too narrowly linguistic a sense), the bridge, no less than genuine poetry, summons to proximity. In Heidegger's account everything is a thinging in the manner of the bridge, a mode of unconcealment. It is the thing, as experienced by


Dasein, that grants us a sense of' place' and' world', realms from which the metaphysical tradition derives objectified notions of space and time. Blanchot and Derrida argue that Heidegger also resists that plurality in aletheia that, by rights, must be seen as inherent in it. For Derrida, the name of Heidegger's resistance is partly what Heidegger formulates as 'the history of being , - the notion that Western metaphysics can be conceptualised in terms of the basic and unbroken way in which being has 'held sway' since the Greeks, aletheia becoming attenuated to representation. Accordingly 'Sending: on Representation' (1982) traces a general strategy in relation to Heidegger: I have tried to retrace a path opened on a thought of the envoi [sending of being] which ... did not gather itself to itself as an envoi of being through Anwesenheit, presence and then representation."

Derrida then discusses a pre-ontological difference of the kind already delineated in relation to Mallarme and Blanchot. Heidegger's gathering of being becomes ineluctably pluralised and of an indeterminate provenance in accordance with the notion already at work in the word viens. The envoi becomes a renooi: Everything begins by referring back (par le renvoi), that is to say, does not begin; and once this breaking open or partition divides, from the very start, every renvoi, there is not a single renvoi but from then on, always, a multiplicity of renvois. (p. 3 24) 9

In this notion of the renvoi, Derrida is describing the event of being itself in terms of a multiple singularity. There are no things in general, only a multiplicity ofrenvois. Correspondingly, any distinction of transcendental and empirical (imaged in terms of the relation of 'ground' and 'figure' in chapter I) seems both pluralised, reversible and consequently indeterminate in the way of the strange 'non-difference' Derrida reads in the literary (see p. 124). This argument with Heidegger is at work in Derrida's affirmation of the idiomatic or singular character of the literary text. 'Schibboleth' takes up these questions in terms of the poetry of Paul Celan, his association of poetry with commemoration and dates, taken in their singu-


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larity. Of one date in particular (the twentieth of January), Celan writes: Perhaps one should say that each poem has its own zoth of January inscribed within it? Perhaps what is new in the poems which are written today is just this: that here, most clearly, one seeks to remain mindful of such dates. (Sh, p. 3 10)

Throughout both Celan's 'Meridian' and Derrida's essay the term 'date' is not to be too hastily conflated with 'calendar date'. Rather it designates the singularity of what Derrida terms the renvoi. Celan's own work, as a book by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has affirmed, is in continual dialogue with Heidegger's later thought.!" The debate with Heidegger implicit in Derrida's account seems plain enough: 'A date is not something which is there, since it withdraws in order to appear' (Sh, p. 315). It cannot be subordinated to' the question given in the form "what is"?' (Sh, p. 315). However, 'but perhaps there are (gibt es) dates' (Sh, p. 315). In Signsponge Derrida's affirmation of the singular and idiomatic concerns the nature of the' signature' and the' proper name'. Preceding Pas by one year, Signsponge reads as a meticulous and difficult working through of the notion of the event of signature that makes up the singularity of a text. Why is Francis Ponge in particular of such interest in this context? Ponge's work may be related to tendencies in post-war philosophy in France which oppose Heidegger's account of the thing with an emphasis on singularity and carnality of a sort antipathetic to Heidegger. Levinas, for instance, affirms human sensibility, its welcoming of the corporeality of the world in terms that do not read things only in terms of the articulation of a world. Hence Levinas argues that the enjoyment concomitant with human sensibility relates to a world understood differently, as concerning' a set of autonomous finalities which ignore one another' (TI, p. 133). Ponge's 'poetics' also differ from familiar notions of mimesis and writing by its demand, ultimately, to represent things as the impossible, the unrepresentable. This demand has at least three facets.


I Ponge's poetics may be read as a revision of the cliche that mimesis concerns the' imitation of things'. Derrida attempts to disengage this preoccupation with the thing from two prevailing critical simplifications. I t is a matter of something that can no longer be captured within a notion of mimesis as the imitation of an object by a subject - 'The thing is not just something conforming to laws that I discuss objectively' (S, p. 12). Although it is unmentioned in Signsponge, this approach is similar to that of Levinas and his argument, contra Heidegger, that things have singular being and are' not only means, but ends, correlates not only of a practical intention, but [to be affirmed] in terms of desire and sensibility' (Alphonso Lingis, introduction to Levinas' Collected Philosophical Papers, p. xxviii). Similarly the emphasis on pleasure in Ponge recalls the manner in which Levinas analyses the erotic as a form of relation that seeks, not to appropriate the other to oneself, but to affirm strangeness, proximity in separation. Ponge correspondingly is not a phenomenologist whose work would only attempt a selfeffacing attention to 'the things themselves' purged of the imposition of human meanings. Correlatively one must not assume that the' things' of Ponge's texts are anthropomorphisms, projections of human affairs upon the blankness of' mere things'. It is a matter rather of subjecting oneself to what Derrida calls the' law of the thing' - its impossible demand for an impossible representation: Beforehand, the thing is the other, the entirely other which dictates or which writes the law, a law which is not simply natural (lex naturae rerum), but an infinitely, insatiably imperious injunction to which I ought to subject myself... The thing remains an other whose law demands the impossible. (S, pp. 12-14)

The 'thing' is hence the imperative, the viens of the singular and other. Ponge's poems attempt to embody a radical attitude toward things, meaning by 'things' things-at-hand, 'their way of encumbering our space, of coming to the fore, or making themselves (or appearing to be) more important than our way


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of looking'. Derrida quotes, for instance, the following passage from Third Person Singular. Ponge affirms: 'One should have, in any case, the fewest possible preconceived ideas. I t is best of all to take up impossible subjects, which are also the nearest subjects: the sponge-towel ... On subjects of this sort, no preconceived ideas, none that are clearly stated.' (S, p. 94)

Ponge's demand for an absolute respect for the contingent and unique may rightly be described as impossible insofar as the demand can only be made in and upon language as an element of irreducible negativity and generality. One simplified statement of Ponge's relation to things may suffice at this stage mimesis of the inimitable as the inimitable. I t is this impossible demand that engages Ponge in a transformation of language that relates his work to the heteronomic programmes of Blanchot and Derrida. What is the manner of Ponge's response to the impossible 'rage for expression' of the thing? From the mute intimidation of its singular distance the thing has to be, as it were, inhabited by the poem, its in transigence loosened in to the play of q uali ties, association, nuances etc. that it comes to suggest. This is not a general method, however, since it varies with each object. Ponge writes' I favour one technique per poet, and even, at the limit, one technique per poem - which its object would determine' (quoted in S, p. 58). Each object is thus equally a mode of insignificant writing, a style to which the text must give itself up. As the thing is given up to language, the language-thing or emergent poem becomes partly aerial, porous, urged out of its alien intransigence. Various viewpoints and contexts of things are juxtaposed in a kind of montage, a dance of variously compatible characteristics. Alternatively, one thing is juxtaposed to another in such a way as to bring out the singularity of both. Ponge's preference is for objects of the kind of crystals, hard, separate, self-contained and distinct. Such objects become an affirmation of defined qualities from out of a context of amorphousness - not water, for instance, but a standing glass of water, not mud but stones. Of the objects of the kind disliked by

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot Ponge, the sponge is an example that recurs throughout Derrida's lecture. Only the most provisional quotation is necessary at this stage: the sponge ... finds itself condemned in contrast to the orange ... because the sponge remains undecided and undecidable. Not because it holds the dirty and improper, but because it is sufficiently equivocal to hold the dirty as well as the clean, the non-proper as well as the proper. (S, p. 64)

All the little techniques to make the proper thingness of the thing announce itself constitute a process of transformation. Jean-Pierre Richard has described this change of the object (objet) into an ob-game (ob-jeu), comparing it to the movement of eidetic variation in Husserlian phenomenology - that is, the isolation of the proper essence of a thing by attention to what remains invariant in varied aspects of it. l l However, the analogy with phenomenology must remain a remote one. First, as has been seen, the thing is no longer an object and hence cannot quite become an object of description either. Secondly, Ponge uses the' medium' of representation in such a way as to make the text something slightly other than mimesis as imitation of any thing. This may now be taken up in more detail. II Representation of the thing in its singularity must result in the correlative demand that the text engaging that thing become appropriately idiomatic and unique. To a degree, then, the poem may become a thing in the same sense: After appealing to the idion, and to the' unique circumstances' which, 'at the same moment', create 'the motive for making me seize my pencil' ... for describing things' from their own point of view', so as to give 'the impression of a new idiom' - he explains the conditions under which, 'later on, the complete work of an author' may be 'considered a thing in its turn': 'not only a rhetoric per poem' or 'a manner per year or per work'. (S, pp. 56-8)

Ponge's corpus is dominated by the demand for the proper (propre - 'clean' as well as 'proper '). The proper is at once meant in the double sense of both propriety and property. The


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thing dictates' a description ofitself, or rather a writing of itself' (S, p. 46) that would be totally appropriate to itself. Secondly, this idiomatic writing would become the thing's own in the sense of having appropriated this writing by its demand for mimesis. The writing would thus be both appropriate to and appropriated by the thing, which would be both signer and signed, object and description. In effect, Ponge takes to its logical conclusion the programme sketched in the introduction - that the art-work, eschewing understanding in terms of concepts, imposes by its own singularity, a mode of reception proper to it, participation in its mode of being as a form of non-propositional, particular knowledge, knowledge that involves a shift in the concept of knowledge. This programme results in a drastic practice in relation to what is usually called 'style'. Ponge affirms many of those aspects in a language that, outside the work of representation and meaning, are normally considered as thingly. Language itselfis an object, and a text by Ponge invariably treats language as one of things which must be minutely described (in language). Indeed, Gerard Genette reads Ponge in terms of a sophisticated mode of cratylism which produces an effect of adequacy or fitness between things and their mimesis in words, considered as things. 12 Surprisingly this fitness in what is usually thought of as the materiality oflanguage rarely concerns onomatopeia in Ponge, phonetic analogy. Rather things, as insignificant writing, are related to (a) the graphic form of words (e.g. the vertical' I' in 'PIN', the pine tree). Hence in the poem 'L'Hultre' (' The Oyster ') the French circumflex becomes part of a weird iconography, thickening the texture of the poem in a novel mimesis; and (b) the semantic thickness of words, their columns in the dictionary. The transformation of the objet into an objeu can also entail a playful exploitation of etymology. This (fictive or otherwise) enables the quidditas of the thing to be loosened up. Like the washing machine of one of his own texts, Ponge's operation is a rendering proper of the words, that is, they come to seem' right' for what they name. Poetry embodies a particular knowledge. Hence proper names become even more proper. Gerard

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Genette, in his summary, enumerates 'Claudel entre clame et claudique, ou Braque entre Bach et Baroque' (p.378) ['Claudel between clame and claudique, or Braque between Bach and Baroque ']. Similarly, common nouns, as well as proper names, can open ou t in a fan of anagrams. Hirondelle (' swallow'), for instance, becomes "horizondelle ' , 'ahurie donzelle' or 'horizon d'ailes' (P.379). In this way a description of the name can become wings across the sky (across the page) of the text. The resul t of this peculiar practice ofwriting is a series of texts that, no less than Mallarme's, eschew any simplistic thematism. The distinctions of signifier and signified, form and content, become non-pertinent. Serge Gavronsky writes: To isolate the signified has been an historical bias (an ideological one) ; to stress the signifier as the pre-eminent definer of the literarity of the text is a structural parallel where, through a substitutional (paradigmatic) operation, one model (the signified) is replaced by another, similar model (the signifier) ... [Ponge's is] a new form of wri ting, one that Henri Meschonnic has called' form-meaning' .13

Genette, following Gerard Farasse, reads Ponge's '14 JUILLET' (' 14 July') in terms of this cratylic programme of blending things and their narnes.J" The result is a certain indecision as to whether indeed the text concerns the thing, its name, or both. '14JUILLET' seems at first sight to be a description of the kind of festival scene one might expect to find on Bastille day. Yet this 'description' may be offered up to a reading guided by nothing less than the graphic form of the title itself, as well as various related anagrams and etymologies. Henc~\ the 'I' of '14' becomes a pique (' pike '), the '4' a flag draped over a bayonette ... and so on. Thus the poem is also' about' its title in a manner that exploits, to an unusual extent, non-referential or 'insignificant' strata of the work. Analogously, concerning a poem' on' the river Seine, we read 'let's blend ... those notions of river and book! ... confound without shame the Seine and the book which it ought to become!' (8, p. 136). A poem of Ponge's, occupying, as Gavronsky says, the very hyphen between signifier-signified, hovers between the status of a proper name and that of a description. The more the text thickens itself with insignificant graphisms, anagrams, peculiar


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etymologies etc., the more it escapes the conceptual generality of language and moves towards the thingly status of a proper name, with its would-be singular reference. At the same time, to remain readable, a certain generality is necessarily maintained in the text, which might thus read as a description. However, writing according to a programme whereby name and thing ceaselessly re-mark each other, the poem and a description of its (the thing's) name may become barely distinguishable, as in ' 14 JUILLET'. Name and description, description of the thing and of the name of the thing, blend into the abyssal writing of the text: he disguises every proper name as a descri ption and every description as a proper name, showing, by way of this ruse, that such a possibility, always an open one, was constitutive of writing, to the extent that literature works it over on all sides. You never know whether he names or describes, nor whether the thing he describes-names is the thing or the name, the common or proper name. (5, p. I 18)

III A text should not only properly represent a thing in its (impossible) idiom, it should also, at the same time, bear the unique idiom of its author. A Ponge text should be properly by Ponge and unmistakably his own: He will have speculated as no one else on the proper, the proper way to write and the proper way to sign. No longer separating, within the proper, the two stems of propriety and property. (5, p. 28)

This is not narcissism or even quite the ambition to 'make one's mark' or to 'make it' in the superficial sense. It is more a submission to the law of the thing in one's own case. Thus' proper' writing becomes the production of texts that one is prepared to publish in one's name. This emphasis on idiom underlies the assertion that philosophers such as Hegel do not write proper texts, that is, they are unprepared to sign in their own name rather than in the name of generalities and universalities, such as 'truth' presumably: Every philosopher denies the idiom of his name, of his language, of his circumstance, speaking in concepts and generalities that are necessarily improper. (5, p. 32)

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot Proper literary writing thus becomes inseparable from proper signing, not only in the sense of writing in one's own name but also in the sense of affirming contingencies that together can make up the singularity of an idiom. Hence the affirmation of (a) the contingency of having a certain name (' Francis Ponge ') and no other, (b) of writing in a certain language and (c) at a certain time and space (to date is also to sign). Moreover, rather than speaking of the writer' having' these contingencies, it is more accurate to speak of the idiom being had by the name, language, time and place etc. Among these contingencies affirmed in the name of an idiom, the first, in particular, is prominent in Signsponge - the relation of a writer, his texts, to the proper name. If Ponge has some privilege in these questions, it is perhaps because his idiosyncratic poetics affirm contingency (e.g. having a certain name) as, paradoxically, an essential trait of poetic texts. Thus the re-marking of proper names as descriptions, and vice versa, noted in the previous section in relation to the thing, applies equally and at the same time to the relation between' Francis Ponge' and the text. Numerous graphisms, anagrams, etc., throughout the corpus, testify to an affirmation of the signature of the writer throughout. This is not an eccentric mode of narcissism; it is part of the programme of rendering proper and the incision of an idiomatic style. In terms of the argument given at the end of the previous chapter, one might say that Ponge's ambition is to render his signature, in the received sense, a signature in the sense of the forceful singularity of a work. The affirmation of the contingencies that make up an idiom amounts, finally, to the programme of signing twice- that is, not only putting a name at the base of a text but rendering its matter incontestably one's own in its particular qualities, hence dispensing with the need for signature in the first sense. In relation to the proper name, the signature becomes monumentalised as the text: yet' Is the signature gained or lost by becoming a thing?' (S, p. 26). One can already see the complexity with which mimesis is interwoven in this multiple performance: that (I) the thing be represented in its singularity in a text which, submitting itself to this demand, (2) becomes itself (another) 'thing' in the same


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sense even as (3) it bears the mark of its 'author's' unique imprint and idiom. This can be restated in terms of signing and signatures, taking 'signature' in the familiar sense of the making of a unique and authenticating mark: he will have taught us all the ways ... all the operations by which one can make of one's signature a text, of one's text a thing, and, of the thing, one's signature. (S, p. 20)

The programme, then, would be to make thing sign itself in/as the text; and yet at the same time to make the text/thing into one's own signature. This complex programme must be acknowledged as impossible. For one thing, all talk of' making the thing sign' is very dubious. In fact the thing (la chose) becomes a 'terrible mistress, all the more tyrannical in that she remains silent, in that I have to give her even the very order that shegives to me' (S, p. 16; emphasis added). In the contract between Ponge and thing, the latter is unengaged even in the very imperative 'received' from it. Moreover, insofar as he is a 'thing' of the same singularity at any instant, 'Ponge' is no more engaged than the thing. The project is only a 'mimetic quasi-hallucination', the attempt' to appropriate the other to oneself, while leaving it as it is', 'to let it sign for itself while signing in its place, in its name' (S, p. 138). It would seem initially to be a matter of seizing the signature of the thing by signing and constituting it 'in an idiomatic grammar, in a new writing' (S, p. 132). Derrida quotes, by way of example, from THE SWALLO WS or in the style of swallows: Steel-tipped quill, dipped in blue-black ink, you write yourself fast ! ... Each one, impetuously flung into space, spends the better part of its time signing space. [ ... ] They depart from us and do not depart from us: no illusion. (S, pp. 132-4)

Yet neither the swallow nor Ponge quite achieve idiomatic presentation here, for reasons to be clarified in what follows. In schematic terms this non-taking place of the proper that seems to thwart Ponge's programme concerns, as in the previous chapter, the inseparability of mimesis from the mise-en-abyme.


Mimesis occupies Signsponge as a question no less than it does 'The Double Session'. The 'thing' discussed obliges one 'to reconsider mimesis through and through ... ' (S, p. 4). Relatively late in the lecture Derrida introduces Ponge's 'Fable', a text of only two lines which yet is one 'fit to blow up everything, discretely, irreplaceably' (S, p. 102) - 'By the word by this text therefore begins / Whose first line tells the truth' (S, p. 102). One may recognise here a movement of generalised reference such as emerged in Mimique in the previous chapter, a displacement of mimesis in both the sense of imitation/representation and in the phenomenological sense of the showing of what is apparent, (self) presentation. One can retrace this movement en abyme in 'Fable' in a schematic fashion (' By the word by this text therefore begins / Whose first line tells the truth'). (a) The poem enacts what it says. It does what it claims to - that is, beginning by the word' by'. Yet (b) it also represents what it does, referring to itself in a (self)designation that yet seems to constitute it. (c) Thus one can no longer claim that it quite' does' what it says, since what is done is only a representation of doing. Yet this represented doing is not the object of imitation as an external designation. It re-presents nothing, rather it 'is' only as this unstable passing into each other without differentiation of 'doing' and 'representing'. Reference, mimed, thus becomes bottomless without a referent. I t is not reflexive because there is no 'itself' as a referent: its mode of being is this shuttle without differentiation or identity of 'doing' and 'representing' that (de )constitutes it in the first place. 'Fable', although only two lines long, announces the' structure' or 'movement' that governs the mimetic hallucination in Ponge's poetry - the demand for impossible representation, proper signing and, above all, the way in which the language that submits itself to the thing to render its idiomatic nature is ineluctably also a language that describes or teaches this transformation (just as, in Heidegger, Dichtung cannot but become a Dichtung of Dichtung). Derrida names this abyssal movement, one so productive of writing even as it constitutes wri ting's au then tic difficulty, the 'allure' (cf. Blanchot's 'fas-


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cination '). Of the sponge-towel as paradigm for the 'inaccessible thing, the impossible subject' we read: The story of the sponge-towel ... is indeed a fable ... a simulacrum and effect of language (Jabula) but such that only by means of it can the thing as other and as other thing come to pass with the allure of an inappropriable event (Ereignis in abyss). The fable of an allure (1 give the name of ' all ure ' to the action of something that comes wi thou t coming, the thing that concerns us in this strange event) where nothing takes place except as it does in [' Fable ']. (S, p. 102)

Heideggerian Dichtung has become here a fabulous or abyssal movement of language in which the singularity of the thing, the other, is affirmed as the narrative of its own impossibility. The poem remains, as the singular trace of this pas. The swallow, for instance, is a style of being as a style of writing - 'Every swallow unceasingly throws itself, - unerringly exerts itself - in the act of signing the heavens, according to its species' (S, p. 132). The thing is made to re-mark itself as writing and writing attempts to mark itself wi th the singular idiom of the swallow. The bird's flight becomes not only an activity 'figured' as the writing ofa paraph across the sky - the writing of the poem is figured in the bird's flight. The event and its narrative blur into each other in a mimetic hallucination, each re-marking the other abysally. The meaning of the poem is no longer some secure referent (the , real' or 'imaginary' swallow) ou tside the text. Nor is this overflowing of the signature commensurable with any reading of a formalist sort. ' 14 JUILLET' is not only' about' its name. The 'meaning' of the text is not, in a movement of self-reflection, , itself' or 'writing'. I t refers neither to another thing, nor to itself, but to itself as that other, in the shuttle of a strange' nondifference'. This hallucinatory something/nothing is hence the mode of being of THE SWALLOWS or in the style ofswallows. As they write themselves in the sky, across the page, the reference of this script becomes unplaceable: The reflexive t' (yourself) [tu t' ecns vite!] turned back on itself, selfreferenced, clearly indicates that it has to do with a signing script, and yet the reference has flown away in this aerial traffic, in this graphic putting of the thing into orbit. (S, p. 132)

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One could speak of an elision of meaning in the text, not because of some deficiency, ambiguity or gesture towards the unspeakable, rather because of an excess of meaning, almost tan tamoun t to its elision, in the semantic particularity of the poem.l" Moreover, because a Ponge poem inhabits the graphic form of things, and their names, with various anagrams, (fictive) etymologies etc., this strange non-difference envelops the distinction of names and things (as with' 14 JUILLET'): 'You never know whether he names or describes, nor whether the thing he describes-names is the thing or the name, the common or proper name' (S, p. 118). Ponge's poetic practice, then, is inseparable from a miseenabyme. A pure signature, whether of writer or thing, would be a pure event of unique and unrepeatable (self) designation, necessarily 'meaningless' because valid only for this-thing-now. Such a signature, equivalent to nature, is impossible. The demand of singularity is similarly impossible. However attentive one tried to be to the singularity of a 'thing', an element of generality is inescapable. The singular event is always exemplary, its own commentary. That is to say it suggests, as an example, the paradoxial possibility of a 'singular event' in general. In fact, the thing is in a double- bind in this respect. (I) Its singularity consists in its resistance to generality, to becoming an example. Therefore one might say that the thing preserves its force by refusing to exemplify. (2) Yet one could equally well say that its singularity consists in a hyperbolic mode of exemplarity. The more it refuses to exemplify the more exemplary (of singularity) it must become. The more it exemplifies singularity the less it does so, and vice versa. I t is as if an alogical fractal structure were duplicating itself on both lesser and greater scales. I t is a matter of things that ... are always examples without example of singularity itself, the necessity of the arbitrary and the contingent, like each of his texts, each of his signatures, always unique, without example and yet repeating indefatigably the (same) thing, the same. (S, p. go)

The scene of the signature is that of a 'same which is not identical', of Ereignis in abyss: 'The signature is the placement


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in abyss (of the proper) itself: exappropriation' (S, p. 132). Derrida is anxious at once to dissociate this double-bind of the thing's signing from' a metaphysics of the proper or the near or, again, of presence , (S, p. 98). The thing rather involves, in a series of quasi-parodic allusions to Heidegger, 'the nearest thing as the impossible thing, the most available and the most denied, the always other or the other-thing which makes of the thing a thing, the thingness, shall we say, of the thing' (S, p. 92). 'Exappropriation', then, connotes the double-bind of the nonevent of Ereignis in abyss. Nothing would properly take place in the sense of being either purely singular or purely general. One can now envisage how a rethink of 'the thing' can lead to an account that places Heidegger in abyss. The 'here/this/now' of any thing in its singularity would no longer be the appropriating reflection described in Heidegger's 'The Thing'. The' thing' would be possible only in the allure, the pas (step/stop) already delineated. This' displacement' of Heidegger is the context in which to situate the importance of Ponge's poetic practice: The structure of the placement in abyss, such as he practises it, seems to me to repeat this scene every time: every time, but every time in a necessarily idiomatic fashion. (S, p. 50)

In 'The Object is Poetics' (1967) Ponge similarly affirms that each thing is in itself a singular event of being ('But what, luckily, is being, after all? Only a succession of ways of being. There are as many objects. As many as blinkings ofan eyelid ') .16 What Ponge's peculiar manner of writing concerns, then, is a textual' event' that, in the torturous' structure' of the mise-enabyme, provides an openness to the other - singularity in the force of its intervention, even as that same intervention effaces its (absolutely) singular status. There can be no purely other. Moreover, insofar as language is also the condition of its affirmation, one could say that the other must become impure through generalisation in order toappear. The idiom is even, it may be argued, an effect of that which seems to overcome it. Irene Harvey writes that the 'pure idiom' is a concept formed a posteriori' which perhaps points beyond language rather than back ... and which therefore is a product of language, albeit

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exceeding the latter";" Ponge's poetics is also inseparable from a mise-en-abyme because a signature is ineluctably are-mark. This aspect of the text, however, is most usefully introduced by way of his later essay on dates. Like the proper name or signature, the date, in idea, is unique and idiomatic. Yet, to be readable at all, a date must, so to speak, have effaced its putative singularity in its repeatability within the calendar. The antagonism of singular and general is particularly acute in the case of dates, whose repetition is inscribed within them by virtue of their functioning within the cycles of the calendar. A date necessarily emerges as the very negation of that which it names in its singularity. This is the structure of its readability. Without that, the date would be no more than an undecipherable mark, not a date at all in fact: The date effaces itself in its very readability; it must efface in itself some stigma of singularity in order to outlast, in the poem, what it commemorates; in this lies the chance of assuring its spectral return. And since this annulment in the annulation of return partakes of the very movement of dating, what must henceforth commemorate itself is the very annihilation of the date, a kind of nothing - or ash. (Sh, P·318 )

This 'ash', however, is a long way from being a pure nihilation of the date. The iterability that makes up a date means that the singularity illusorily at work in one' 23rd of February' gives way, not to a general anonymity, but to the 'same' date, another' 23rd of February' in years before and after. By virtue of its own inherent repeatability any 'one' date gathers the potential to commemorate more than one event - is there one or many 23rd of Februarys, even if one speaks of the same year? Celan's 'In Eins' (All in One), containing, as it does, four languages in relation to 'one' date, opens that date to the possibility that such a multiplicity 'in dispersed places ... at different periods, in foreign idioms, may have conjoined for the same anniversary' : IN EINS

ALL IN ONE

Dreizehnter Feber. 1m Herzmund erwachtes Schibboleth. Mit dir,

Thirteenth of February. In the heartsmouth an awakened shibboleth. With you

The event of signature: a 'science' of the singular? Peuple de Paris No pasaran

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Peuple de Paris. No pasaran (Sh, p. 319)

The incalculable multiplicity within the date effects a suspension of determinate context. Poetic idiom, as dating, necessarily becomes characterised by those two other facets of the literary outlined at the opening of this chapter - as an undecidable remark of'itself' a date takes on a complexity that could never be modelled: it gathers together ... a more or less apparent and secret conjunction of singularities which share and divide [se partagent], and in the future will continue to share and divide [se partageront] the same date. (Sh, p. 3 26 )

The date seems caught between two modes of ash or nihilation

- (I) that 'incineration' inherent in its becoming totally singular and hence unreadable and non-recurrent; (2) the nihilation inseparable from its repeatability and readability. Celan's poems move in the space of these extremes. Ifsingularity is re-marked by its potential for incalculable reference to other dates etc., it remains, nevertheless, a 'singular remarking' (Sh, p. 314; emphasis added): Radicalizing and generalizing, we may say, without artifice, that poetic writing is dating, through and through. I t is all cipher of singularity, offering its place and recalling it, offering and recalling its time at the risk of losing them in the holocaustic generality of recurrence and the readability of the concept, in the anniversary and the repetition of the unrepeatable. (Sh, p. 336)

This same economy of the singular and general, whereby the singularity of an event is both effaced and yet also preserved in a novel impure alterity, is at work in the conjunction of signatures in Ponge's poetic practice. The programme, as we saw above, was to 'make of one's signature a text, of one's text a thing, and, of the thing, one's signature' (S, p. 20). I t seems at first that the signature of the thing, in its very conditions of appearance, was necessarily effaced in the generality of language. However, one can no longer strictly speak of the' generality of language' or of language in general.

17°


This is not only because the whole tenor of Ponge's text is towards the idiomatic and non-repeatable. After reflection on Ereignis in abyss one can speak of language in general no more than one can speak of 'being in general'. Indeed, it is here, perhaps, that the most radical trait of Ponge's concern with singularity rests. Ereignis, exappropriated, becomes indistinguishable from the event of the singular in its double-bind. What seems to efface the signature of the thing/writer cannot be the generality of language but another signature, the signature of the other which, correlatively, is equally affected in its coitus with the first. The idiom of the textual event (whereby thing and proper name re-mark each other) rests in what is called the 'countersignature' into which both signatures (of writer, of thing) are drawn and effaced. Or rather, since this' effacement' is their very condition of appearance, the contrast between thing and writer is one in which 'what is exchanged is not something determinate to be signed at the end, but the signature itself, all by itself' (S, p. 126). The countersignature becomes then a name for the text itself, its impure idiom. If Signsponge were a merely theoretical text one could break off at this point in the analysis, having traced the complex argument as to the structure and genesis of that resistant hymen of the singular and general that makes up a literary text, and concluding: When each text has secured the countersignature of the other thing, it merely finds itself provided with its own irreplaceable idiom, hence with a signature detached from the permanent name of the' general' author. (S, p. 128)

Signsponge does not only theoretise about the possibility of a science of the singular, it also attempts to put such a thing into practice. A science of the contingent emerges as necessarily a science of borders. In this respect a brief consideration of the notion of boundaries in the philosophy of science is in order. It has long been an assumption in the philosophy of science and in scientific practice that phenomena can be explained reductionistically; that is, it should, in principle, be possible one day to explain psychology in terms of biology, biology in terms


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of chemistry and chemistry in terms of physics. This hypothesis, also known as the' Unity of Science', has come in for much discussion recently. Hilary Putnam, for instance, has cogently challenged reductionism, arguing that although higher-level phenomena may in some cases be deducible from lower they cannot be so explained.t" For instance, an 'explanation' might be attempted on the atomic level of why a square peg cannot pass through a small round hole but can through a larger one. Yet such an explanation would belie its name in embracing an amount of detail that would bury understanding' in a mass of irrelevant information'. On the other hand, it is an explanation to point out 'that the two macro-objects are approximately rigid and that one of the two holes is big enough for the peg and the other is not' (p. 206). Moreover, even deduction of higher level phenomena from lower is often itself im possible : Given the micro-structure of the peg and the board, one can deduce rigidi ty. But given the micro-structure of the brain and the nervous system, one cannot deduce that capitalist production relations will exist. The same creatures can exist in precapitalist commodity production, or in feudalism, or in socialism, or in other ways. (Putnam,

p. 2°9)

The deduction is impossible here because of what Putnam terms 'boundary conditions', that is, capitalism depends for its existence on conditions which are accidental from the point of view of physics. Consequently, 'the laws of capitalism have a certain autonomy vis-a-vis the laws of physics ' (p. 209). What is 'accidental' within one field becomes what is essential, even formalisable in another: 'Evolution depends on a result of microsctructure (variation in genotype), but it also depends on conditions (presence of oxygen, etc.) which are accidental from the point of view of physics and chemistry' (p. 209). There is evidently a question of how and to what end 'boundary conditions' are delineated in the various regional fields which they partly constitute. Because his primary aim is to question aspects of reductionism, Putnam does not consider the issue of where the' accidental' stops, how it is defined or how it undergoes transformation into something non-accidental in any

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particular field. This is a fruitful lacuna, however, in which to situate Derrida's putative science of the contingent. A prominent aspect of this putative science must be a concern with limits, parerga - 'boundaries', very much in Putnam's sense of the term. Since 'science', as normally understood, is inseparable from a raising up of the singular into the general, it is not surprising that the most noticeable' limit' considered is that between singularity and universality. We have already traced, in Signsponge, the economy of relations whereby singularity and universality emerge. If philosophy, literary criticism and received notions oflanguage are inseparable from a seeming effacement of singularity, one must also affirm that with equal necessity 'Philosophy, hermeneutics and poetics can only be produced within idioms, within [different] languages, within the body of events and dates' (Sh, p. 337). Similarly, 'Whether one knows it or not, whether one acknowledges it or conceals it, an utterance is always dated' (Sh, p. 3 I 3). This argument underlies much of the close textual and historical scholarship (often of the best traditional sort) that Derrida often devotes to those texts he is reading. The observation, for example, that Freud's own family feelings and ambitions are inextricably mixed up with the speculations of Beyond the Pleasure Principle does not serve merely to discredit Freud. I t opens the question of the extent to which psychoanalysis may be read as a science of singular effects. It would be dated in a non-pejorative sense that would precisely constitute its interest in challenging the dominant conceptions of science. Indeed, one of the more exciting possibilities Signsponge opens for us is that of a study of the geneses of scien tific theories wi th a view to dating them in this sense, a meditation on the functioning of what Putnam terms 'boundary conditions'. Signsponge, in this respect, emerges as a deconstructive meditation on the borders, say, between 'life' and 'writing', between 'contingency' and 'inevitability' and, of course, between' word' (or name) and' thing'. Signsponge, like Pas with Blanchot, is an attempt to approach the event of signature that constitutes Ponge's work. As part of a putative science of the singular Signsponge attempts to inquire into the link' between a


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given text, a given so-called author, and his name designated as proper' (S, p. 24). In other words, one asks, what effects may be hypothesised from the contingency of a person's having a certain name rather than another? Literary biography begins after' the event of signature' and does not question the status of signing, the relation between the text, the signature and the writer who claims that text in 'his name'. Rather than merely assuming that text x belongs to author y, Derrida sets out to explore the intricacies of this same belonging. This is not a case ofdenying that, for example, Francis Ponge is the author of say, , Le soleil place en abime ', in any normal sense of this text being his. Textual criticism is an empirical affair which elides by nature the field Derrida engages with - that of the structure of non-belonging, non-propriety, that affects any possible signature or proper belonging and which, he argues, makes up its force and endurability. We take up here the notion of' event of signature' that emerged in relation to Pas. Of textual critics Derrida writes: They may wonder whether a certain piece of writing is indeed assignable to a certain author, but as regards the event of the signature, the abyssal machinery of this operation, the commerce between the said author and his proper name ... no question is ever posed by any of the regional disciplines which are, as such, concerned with texts known as literary. (S, pp. 24-6)

In a later essay (' Interpreting Signatures' [19 8 I]) /9 Derrida takes issue with Heidegger's account of the proper name , Nietzsche', as 'nothing other than the name of his thinking' (p. 250), a classical gesture, 'dissociating the matter of life or of the proper name from the matter of thought' (p. 250). This is precisely the assumption of neat boundaries (here between writing and 'life ') that is the object of Derrida's suspicion. Unlike Heidegger, Ponge affirms the apparent inessentiality or contingency of the name. Indeed it becomes inseparable from a certain incision of style (' a law and a typology of the idiom' [S, p.20]): For me, Francis Ponge is someone first of all who has known that, in order to know what goes on in the name and the thing, one has to get busy with one's own, let oneself be occupied by it ... Occupied with his

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name, he has taken account of his engagement as subject-writer-in-alanguage, at work. (S, p. 26)

Hence, throughout Signsponge, Derrida's interest in the monumentalised signature - the idiom inscribed in the text, the scattering of the letters of 'Francis' and 'Ponge' across the corpus. The proper name and the thing, one notes, bear a definite analogy from the beginning. Both are modes of insignificant writing. Ponge's idea of nature as a non-significant script is important here. It is immediately clear, moreover, that the proper name itself occupies such a status. With its ideal of a unique reference for a singular thing, the proper name is strictly outside the generality of meaning that makes up the economy of a language. In 'Des Tours de Babel' we read: The noun pierre belongs to the French language, and its translation into a foreign language should in principle transport its meaning. This is not the case with Pierre, whose inclusion in the French language is not assurcd.F"

I t is the name's insignificance (its singular reference, not to be translated elsewhere) that constitutes its special status. Yet, there is also an 'alea ... between proper name and mother tongue' (S, p. I 16); that is to say the very inscription of a proper name in language always gives it a certain (chancy) capacity for meaning, in terms of anagrams, puns etc. It shuttles across the supposed limit between chance and significance. It is in this area that Ponge plays, affirming the contingency of his name within the graphic form of the text. Derrida notes, for example, 'an entire drama of vocables in pon, which proliferate in his lexicon like so many sigils, or abbreviated, interrupted, and condensed signatures' (S, p. 96). Here the singularity of the proper name inheres in the event of signature that characterises a text. Hence, in accordance with the programme or a proper signing (signifying oneself in the insignificant), Ponge's signature overflows into the text: 'Francis Ponge will have been self-remarked.' This repeated sentence' Francis Ponge will have been self-remarked' (S, p. 8) seems at first to name a straight-


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forward aspect of Ponge's texts, his desire to write only in his name and to produce texts proper only to himself. However, this is complicated by a reconsideration of the word' himself' in this sentence, whose peculiarity is more manifest in the French' sc ' (' Francis Ponge se sera remarq ue.)' The se could well be 'Francis Ponge', the name, expressed in the colossal scattered signature of the corpus. Finally, this might lead one to consider the name as the subject of the remarking. It is one of the effects of Ponge's work to make undecidable whether he is naming or describing the thing or the name of the thing. The name remarks itself throughout in the abyssal overflowing of the signature, a reading no less justified than the others insofar as the contingency which inheres in the relation of the letters of the name to the mother-tongue is something to which the writer is subject. How can one practise a science of singularity? In accordance with the necessity already discussed in relation to Pas (the eschewing of meta-language) Derrida's practice of 'science of singularity' in relation to Ponge is also ineluctably a miming of Ponge himself, whose own practice is already a programme of this singular kind. Derrida's text itself mimes Ponge's peculiar version of mimesis. That is to say that Ponge/' Ponge' becomes the centre of just the kind of poetic meditation that Ponge himself directs to things and names" Hence the lecture is not 'discussing' the relation of poem to thing for Ponge but submitting itself to the law of the thing in the case of the Pongething (i.e. the relation of poem to thing in Ponge). Signsponge becomes the most concentrated and fascinating instance so far of a dealing with a philosophical or literary issue in the performative mode, engaging at once with each of the three ways in which the literary forms an internal limit to the theoretical conceptions of science. Miming Ponge means, first of all, submission to the singularity, the alterity of the Ponge thing in such a way as to produce a text whose idiom would be appropriated by Ponge alone - ' I ought to submit to the law of his name in some way and whatever I may say' (S, p. 18). If the lecture is to be an event of this kind then:

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot I should have to sign, the I would have to sign, and, for that, I should have to do as another, as he. In other words, I should have to give to my text a form that was absolutely singular, idiomatic. (S, p. 25)

Signsponge thus becomes an attempt to make the' Francis-Ponge thing' sign itself as the text proper to it, even as Derrida acknowledges the ineluctable nature of his own idiomaticity. Hence the title, Signeponge, for which' Signedponge' would be another translation. As with Ponge, the text produced would draw towards the impossible status of a proper name, the staging of a unique reference. Yet, miming Pongeian mimesis, this attempt, this event, is already ineluctably en abyme. Hence, on several occasions, Derrida's play with the possibility that (as with Mimique) nothing is quite taking place in the allure of staging the allure. Just as Ponge has engaged Malherbe or Picasso in terms of a play with their names as things, marking their singularity through a ludic emblematisation, so Derrida reflects upon the name' Francis Ponge'. This miming of Ponge not only affirms the contingency ofPonge's style, reading his texts as a dispersed signature of Fr s Pon s etc., it also opens on an idiosyncratic 'science of the alea' or of the contingent. As for the name, 'Francis' may be taken first. How is the idiom and contingency of the thing having a certain name with a certain form affirmed in Derrida's mimetic writing? 'Francis' is related to all the values associated with a desire for the proper e.g. 'frankness', 'freshness', 'Jrancity' and many other words (their relation to 'Francis' is similar in English). Francifying becomes associated with a rendering fresh or proper. It is thus a name for the act ofwriting itself according to Ponge's programme - the incision of an idiomatic style:' To signify oneself in the insignificant (outside meaning or concept), isn't this the same thing as signing?' (S, p. 40). Indeed the letters 'Jr' affirm in their very appearance the alea or chance of bearing a certain name and thereby enact - in their insignificance - the idiom whose programme they represent. Already one can see the text here, 'doing' what it 'represents' in the problematic mode of ' Fable', drawing the whole process into (another) abyss, even in simulation. Even the most 'insignificant' mark has a structure analogous to the double yes


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analysed in the previous chapter. One letter is no sooner inscribed than possibilities of 'meaning' affirm themselves. Its apparent uniqueness - insofar as it can be identified and is hence repeatable - is no sooner affirmed than doubled and transfigured. As we saw in chapter 3, it is not a matter of the 'materiality of the signifier', but of that strange non-difference between signifier and signified whereby any mark is inherently repeatable, its own re-marking. All the complex interweaving of signatures already described is re-enacted and singularly re-marked in emblematic fashion, as it were, in Derrida's own objeu, l'eponge [sponge], the name of the thing closest in form to the proper name 'Ponge'. This is explicitly presented as what constitutes 'the event here, the chance and the interval of this event' (S, p. 64): The sign sponges the signature. The sign sponges, which can be taken, into the bargain, as undersigned in so many ways. [I] The sign sponges, it is a verb, the act of the sign, of the subject' sign' insofar as it sponges (the thing and the signature). [2] The sign sponges, it is a plural noun, in quotation marks if you like, the sign' sponges', [hence 3] as much the name of the sponge which is a sign, as the name of the sign which is also, as we have demonstrated, a sponge. The name of the sponge is a sign, the sponge is a sign. [4] Then too the sign's Ponge [iponge - est Ponge], the proper name of the signer and friend here present and becoming the predicate of the sign ... (S, p. 100)

The quotation is broken off here, though there is more to this vertiginous movement in which language attempts to round upon itself to say, impossibly, the singular relation whose allure sets it in motion. So much is happening here to do with the Francis-Ponge-thing that it is difficult to know where to start. To take the sentence labelled' I ' above - 'the sign sponges' - it constitutes a reaffirmation of the status of the text as what renders improper and impure the signature of the thing (or of the writer). Each is 'sponged', yet not in the sense of being effaced. The improper ('ignoble'-Ponge) aspect of the sponge as a thing is that it holds both clean and dirty water, is neither quite proper nor improper. Correlatively, the word 'sponge' contains the proper name' Ponge' only as a signature which has been 'sponged' or absorbed into the common noun, the sign

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot 'sponge'. Oddly, the aspects of thething become here an allegory for Ponge - of the status of the name ofthe thing. Hence, miming Ponge, the uncertainty as to whether Derrida is speaking of the thing or the name of the thing, for in this textual event these mime each other abyssally - 'The name of the sponge is a sign' yet, inversely, 'the sponge is a sign'. The sponge, the sign 'sponge' and the sponge as 'Ponge' have become, in their inextricable play of relation, not so much an example of the textual event itself as something bearing to it the relation of a fractal to 'itself' on a larger scale. Both are marked with the same event of signature. The one word embodies the abyssal scene of the signature(s) as exappropriation. Hence' the sponge not only constitutes the term of an analogy (allegory or metaphor), but also constitutes in addition, the very medium of all figures, metaphoricity itself' (S, p. 72). As these somewhat vertiginous paragraphs on the' sponge' recall, a corollary of the very notion of a science of the singular is an eschewal of general, conceptual terms. Instead, to do justice to the singularity of the thing at issue, it is a matter of surrendering to the demands of alterity so as to make one's own writing, as it were, a continual act of redefinition and desynonymisation ('The name of the sponge is a sign, the sponge is a sign' (S, p. 100)). The sense of sponge is in flux in the very syntax of every sentence, its meaning is simultaneously metamorphosed and particularised in such a way as to make the language seem, to anyone coming to it cold, almost nonsense. Certainly all received distinctions between literal and metaphoric have long since ceased to apply. The sponge (as the scene of signature) also encapsulates in itself the double bind of the singular already analysed. The sponge (thing) becomes staged in Derrida's analysis of the scene of a mutual contamination of the proper and improper. Hence the' sponge' (the sign) would seem to become an example of what it names, the thing defined by Ponge precisely by its capacity to hold clean and dirty water, the proper and improper. Yet to become an example in so neat a manner would also render it the one exception to what it exemplifies (the abyssal disruption of the proper), for it would then name in a non-


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sponging fashion, apparently conflating what it does with what it names or stands for. Yet is stands for sponging, which therefore it equally exemplifies improperly, precisely because it exemplifies too well. 'Too well' becomes the same as 'too badly' and so on - there is no end to the fractal involutions of this example without example which the sponge becomes. Derrida's miming of the ponge-thing thus takes on a fractal relation to Ponge's own practice of mimesis. Indeed the involutions would only be intensified by the consideration with which we started - that the sponge encapsulates in itself the double bind of the singular already analysed. I t is itself a configuration of the general bind of singularity throughout Ponge's corpus, in fact, by becoming itself an 'example without example' of all the other examples without example. Thus the fractal unfolds again, at ever differing scales: Overflowing with activity, between no one, the sponge. Overflowing with activity between the person, the proper name, the name of the thing, a proper name of a thing or a common name of a person, the sponge. (S, p. 80)

Submitting his text to the other's call, Derrida proceeds to name the law of the Francis-Ponge-thing in terms of the name 'Francis Ponge' itself. 'Francis' (with its associated values of resoluteness, desire for the proper, incision of style) is 'married', the spouse being' Ponge', with all the attendant complexities of the sponge. The desire for the incision of a proper signature has to confront the disruptive necessity of the sponge as instancing the movemen t of exappropriation: Francis and Ponge, a lucky coupling no doubt. But like any happy household, it has a history and passes its time in making scenes. (S,

p.68)

These scenes need not be reproduced here (their complexity is daunting). However, several points of a concluding sort can be made. In submitting himself to the law ofPonge's texts, Derrida has rendered Ponge's name a most peculiar aptness. It designates, uncannily well (in a mimetic quasi-hallucination one might say), the economy of Ponge's poetics - 'Will I have

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caught the whole drift of his work from the accident of his name'? (S, p. 116). This possibility is at once tempered. The singularity ofPonge is both affirmed and qualified. One could write ofDerrida's own performance: ' You never know whether he names or describes, nor whether the thing he describes-names is the thing or the name ... ' (S, p. 118). Moreover, the proper name is only one of an enormous number of variables that constitute the idiom of a text. Indeed, Signsponge contains several precautions which indicate that this relationship between the writer's name and the text(s) should not be too hastily generalised beyond the peculiar projects of Francis Ponge. Elsewhere Derrida ridicules a certain vogue in French thought recently for finding in a writer's name, its graphic form, the 'cause' of much of that writer's thinking.f'' This is a tendency springing mainly from French psychoanalysis. One may not confuse Signsponge with some argument along the lines ofsome hypothetical drive on the part of a writer to inscribe the form of his or her name into the work. Nothing could be more fatuous than to make a general practice of working through a writer's corpus with a view to noting the scattered pieces or letters of a name. Signsponge emerges as a fascinating performance of what a science of the contingent might look like. In the' term' sponge is traced a fractal structure which performs, in a singular way, the overall structure of double bind that makes up the event of Ponge's euore. Similarly it performs the necessary incoherence of any attempt to establish something proper - Ponge's aiuure is a singular event by way of its fractal (' sponging ') border that skews relations of same and other, proper and improper, singular and general. Hence the euure itself, as Signsponge reads it, is less an example of a science of the contingent than an event itself bearing a fractal relationship to other possible objects of a science of the alea.


The latest work which (to my knowledge) Derrida has written in dialogue form engages with the issue of responsibility, a recurrent concern of Blanchot's and ofDerrida's publications of the 1980s. It is urgent to elaborate a notion of responsibility, either in ethics, poli tics or (dare one say) literary criticism, that does not rest upon a discredited notion of subjectivity or representation. The minimalist setting of Heidegger's Conversation and Blanchot's L' attente I'oubli (the country path, the featureless room) give way to no apparent setting at all in Derrida's dialogue upon these issues, 'En ce moment merne dans cet ouvrage me voici' (1980).1 This lack, however, is merely a pparent; the 'setting' (as was implici t before) is 'you' (tu) the reader in the process of reading 'now'. This is something witnessed by the recurrence of token reflexives (' here', 'I', , now') throughout the dialogue or in its title itself. As we will see, the dialogue concerns aspects of Levinas' thought such as were already of concern in the reading of L' attente l' oubli. I t takes place between two voices, marked with masculine and feminine traits respectively, and ends with a lapidary inscription in capital letters which embodies their mutual contamination. The issue, prominent in Levinas' Otherwise than Being orBeyond Essence." is what seems to be a pragmatic contradiction in this work - simply the fact that Levinas writes books at all. How can a thought of responsibili ty to the singularity and al teri ty of the other be expressed in the mode of a philosophical thesis without thus becoming itself, by its own definition, irresponsible and 181

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot reductive? In response to this quandary, the masculine interlocutor in Derrida's dialogue directs himself to the recurrence of moments of (seeming) self-reference in Levinas' text, such as the following: But does the reason characteristic ofjustice, the State, thematization, synchronization, re-presentation, the logos and being succeed in absorbing into its coherence the intelligibility ojproximity in which it unfolds? Does not the latter have to be subordinated to the former, since the very discussion which we arepursuing at this moment counts by its said, since in thematizing we are synchronizing the terms, forming a system among them, using the verb to be ... (OBBE, p. 167, cited in Psyche, p. 171; Derrida's emphasis)

Here, Levinas seems not only to invite but actually to perform a self-refu ta tion, asserting that his own discourse on the other and le Dire is necessarily their very occlusion! However, what resists this envelopment, this total eclipse of le Dire in le Dit, is the simple fact that a 'metalanguage can never hold a discourse upon that which at that very moment it is in the process of expressing' (OBBE, p. 171). Similarly 'The reflection of discourse on itself does not include it[self] in itself' (OBBE, p. 171). This enables another way of reading the text's moments of (apparent) self-reference: And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes. That is true oj the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment. This reference to an interlocutor permanently breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave in thematizing and enveloping all things. (OBBE, p. 170; emphasis added)

The allocutive dimension of all language must have made its address and its claim, to you nevertheless, whether this is acknowledged or not. So, eschewing the dialogue form itself, Levinas' strategy is to open up an apparently traditional kind of meta-language to marks of the ethical dimension(s) that encompass and subtly decentre it. In this way the disciplining of subjectivity that might seem characteristic of dialogue becomes a claim of responsibility to the other affirmed as a transcendental dimension of any text, albeit one normally elided.

Postscript: responsibilities What is of interest to the masculine voice in Derrida's dialogue is less this dative element itself than the problems of writing (about) it. Levinas, he notes, is forced to articulate it by means ofa series of interruptions or moments of self-reference. It reads at one time as an apparent confirmation of the seemingly ineluctable repression ofsaying in the said in any discourse (' the very discussion which we are pursuing at this moment counts by its said' (OBBE, p. 178)), and then again as a form of reductio ad absurdam, or reductio ad punctum, of the totalising power of thematisation (the reference to an interlocutor is a necessity 'true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment' (OBBE, p. 170)). But, as Derrida argues in relation to this text, two occurrences, in series, are needed. Derrida is conceptualising, in this notion of seriature or seriality, a necessity (of interruption) that I have already marked in the dialogic texts of Heidegger and Blanchot. "Seriature' would correspond to (a) the movemen t or turning of the same word (' waiting ') through different interlocutors in Heidegger's Conversation, an exercise in which language itself was metamorphosed; (b) it also corresponds to the self-annulling syntax of L' attente l' oubli, the transformation of a word (l' attente) in to the specific event of its intransitive occurrence. The seriality at issue may thus be read retrospectively in either (a) the necessity of repetition, interruption and continual change of speaker in Heidegger or (b) Blanchot's form of syntax that undoes any reading in terms of propositional content by affirming and negating its terms in succession. Derrida's term seriature, however, marks a slight advance over Blanchot's recit by explicitly detailing the precise manner in which the heteronomous event, as yet also beyond language, needs the very order it exceeds (representa tion) to register its force and manifest itself at all. It is a matter ofa necessary contamination of modes of language. For instance, one can always read these texts in such a way as to deny the performative dimensions at issue, so rendering the Heidegger as a form of meandering wordplay (a view one still hears), the Blanchot a train of hollow conjuring or vanishing tricks, and the Levinas merely a rhetoric of self-refutation or (equal and equally damning) of self-verification. Seriature as the

Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot risk of occultation is a necessity to which the other must submit in order to be thinkable or enter relation at all. Derrida's employment of the dialogue form embodies this necessary contamination in its feminine second voice, a reader of Levinas who insists on reading him otherwise, namely, in terms of an alterity which governs the text in terms disavowed by Levinas' notion of a saying of the purely other. If le Dire, as an appeal to/of the totally other, must risk effacement in its very call then this very risk or contamination becomes an alterity which, paradoxically, must itself be effaced in favour of the totally or purely other. The alterity of Levinas' other thus, oddly, comes to read as an autonomy, an economy of the same, rather than a true heteronomy! The feminine interlocutor argues that this elided, impure alterity is implicated in the treatment of sexual difference in Levinas' conception of the ethical. The form of Derrida's dialogue, being one between voices marked with masculine and feminine traits respectively, is already an affirmation ofsexual difference, against, for example, the neutralisation at work in Conversation on a Country Path. Derrida recalls here a rare gesture on Levinas' part, namely that he writes explicitly as a man and thus refuses the pretended neutrality that is the philosophic norm. Nevertheless, the feminine voice in the dialogue affirms a dissymmetry arguably disavowed even by Levinas. The feminine voice suggests: l'ceuvre de d'E. L. me parait avoir toujours secondarise, derive, l' al teri te comme difference sexuelle, su bordonne le trait de difference sexuelle a I'alterite d'un tout autre sexuellement non marque. Non pas secondarise, derive, subordorme la femme ou Ie feminin, mais la difference sexuelle. (Psyche, p. 194) [the work ofE. L. appears to me always to have secondarised or made derivative otherness as sexual difference, to have subordinated the trait of sexual difference to the otherness of a totally other without sexual marks. It is not woman or the feminine that is made secondary, derivative, or subordinate, but sexual difference.]

To subordinate sexual difference itself, however, is familiarly to allow the dominance of a neutrality that is marked by masculinity, especially in French (' il avant il/elle ... ') [it (=

Postscript: responsibilities he) before he/she] (Psyche, p. 194). The feminine, as the neutralised term, thus emerges as other to Levinas' other: 'L'autre comme ferninin (moi), loin d'etre derive ou secondaire, deviendrait l'autre du Dire du tout-autre' (Psyche, p. 197). [The other as feminine (me), far from being derivative or secondary would become the other of the saying of the totally - other.] This supplementary femininity, as an alterity disavowed by the notion of a purely other, is thus a form of impropriety that occupies the site of that risk of contamination, or necessity of seriality, already affirmed as ineluctable if le Dire is to be legible. Error (lafaute) is necessarily a dimension of any text that would say or perform the unthematisable: La faute aura eu lieu toujours, deja: des que je thernatise ce qui dans son oeuvre porte au-dela du thernatisable ... II y a deja, certes, de la contamination dans son oeuvre, dans ce qu'il thernatise ' en ce moment merne ' du non-thernatisable. (Psyche, p. 200) [Error will always have taken place: from the very moment I thematise that element in his work which goes beyond the thematisable. There is already contamination, to be sure, in his eucre, in what he is thematising about the non-thematisable, even 'at this moment'.]

In reading Levinas otherwise, the feminine voice does not then propose a different reading of alterity: she embodies it as the possibility of contamination by her very act: 'Cette thernatisation irrepressible, je la contamine a mon tour' (Psyche, p. 200). [This irrepressible thematisation, I, in turn, contaminate it.] In this way, 'En ce moment', by employing dialogue form, thus embodies a plurivocity and ambiguity that Levinas' strategy could not contain. Above all, the feminine interlocutor enacts what may be taken as an exemplary form of responsible reading (though the notion of the exemplary used here would need to be modified in the way already outlined). Let us examine what takes place, in, or as, this dialogue. The feminine voice responds, in Levinas, to the call of an alterity whose thought his writing both makes available and occludes. She reads in a way that, precisely by being faithful to Levinas, comes, (un)faithfully, to express an other that Levinas cannot accommodate and whose exclusion gives his text its coherence. This is not to say that she

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finds some contradiction that would discredit or 'refute' Levinas - the framework within which one could still think such notions of the contradictory or of refutation is out of play here. Rather she diverts, extends and reinvigorates Levinas' text by submitting it to the impure alterity that opens it (' that alterity which is beyond language and which summons language' (Kearney, Dialogues, p. 123)). This reworking of Levinas can be related back to the notion of seriature. Whereas it always remains perfectly possible to read Heidegger, Blanchot and Levinas in terms of the very modes of language they put into question, a responsible reading will attend to the singular viens (the other-within-the-same) that sets each text in motion and constitutes its allure or fascination. A responsible reading is one attuned to affirm whatever in a text exceeds the closures of representation. I ts responsibility lies in the fact, underlined by the notion of,.seriature, that any such excess risks effacement as a very condition of its appearance. Hence 'Responsibility carries with it, and must do so, an essential excessiveness.t" It cannot be calculated in advance. It is precisely because it concerns the other as the incalculable that responsi bili ty involves decision. I t cannot be achieved as a resul t of any general system or programme and is always singular. It is fractal, not exemplary. Can these notions of responsibility be tied in with what used to be called questions of literary value? A recent text, 'Biodegradables' (I g8g), 4 devoted mainly to a defence of Paul de Man, relates' the event of signature' (p. 845) such as has been traced in Blanchot and Ponge to the issue of a text's force or richness, gauged in terms of its durability and continuing power to engage interpretation. Derrida can be read as placing the event of signature within a textual economy characterised by two extremes: (a) complete singularity and untranslatability, in which a text exceeds received notions of meaning simply by having none and so becomes unintelligible; (b) complete translatability, the text's meaning being so simple as to be indisputable - in this case Nietzsche's fragment reading' I have forgotten my umbrella' is almost uninterpretable because it lacks the particularity of a context to focus it, instancing a form of 'impoverishment by univocality' (LO, p. go). 'Borderlines'

Postscript: responsibilities (1979) affirms that any text must be situated somewhere between those two poles. 'Biodegradables' goes so far as to argue that there is a certain economic relationship between them to be found in texts of the greatest power or durability: 'What is it in a "great" work, let's say of Plato, Shakespeare, Hugo, Mallarrne, James, Joyce, Kafka, Heidegger, Benjamin, Blanchot, Celan, that resists erosion?' (p. 845). Such texts are notable for both feeding the cultural contexts into which they are transmitted and yet, at the same time, resisting and questioning them. Ultimately, in an oxymoron to which the notion of heteronomy must tend, they are assimilable 'as inassimilable, kept in reserve, unforgettable because irreceivable, capable of inducing meaning without being exhausted by meaning' (p. 845; emphasis added). As the term' biodegradable' suggests, however, the exhaustibility of a text is not infinite. Assimilability as inassimilable is related, rather obscurely, to the event ofsignature as that in the text which is not of the order of meaning, is appropriable by no one and thus it 'joins the universal wealth of the "message" to unintelligible singularity'. This is not, Derrida hastens to add, an affirmation of the merely meaningless or unintelligible in a text, rather' the meaning has to link up in a certain way with that which exceeds it' (p. 846). For example, one might add, the texts of Blanchot are not difficult through word-play or ambiguity. On the contrary, they possess what can be called, oxymoronically, a resistant lucidity. Their nature is not simply to break, disrupt or confuse those rules that make for meaning, system, determinacy etc. It is a matter of 'bending those rules with respect for the rules themselves in order to allow the other to come or to announce its coming in the opening of this dehiscence'. 5 The 'event of signature' names such a procedure in its idiomatic form. The argument in 'Biodegradeables' relating the event of signature to a text's force remains more suggestive than compelling at this stage in its elaboration. The characteristic, 'assimilable as unassimilable', might make, for example, an excellent description of the status of those questions known as 'the problems of philosophy' (the mind-body problem, the question offree will, Zeno's paradoxes and so on). These, even

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as they are disparaged, remain fruitful goads to intellectual work, for it seems impossible either to solve them or to cure the mind of their compulsion. In the present context, however, the event of signature requires conceptualisation in terms that do justice to the complication of boundaries we have traced between the intellectual and the aesthetic. Derrida posits an analogy with music: Music can also, in certain situations, resist effacement to the extent to which, by its very form, it does not let itselfbe so easily dissolved in the common element of discursive sense. From this point of view, at any rate, music would be less' (bio)degradable' than discourse and even than the art of discourse. (p. 847)

The signature-event is thus a specific term for textuality 'as an undecidable process of opening/ closing that re-forms itself without let up' (Diss, P.337), doing so in relation to the idiomatic singularity of what simultaneously gives and exceeds meaning. Derrida might perhaps refer to the economy at work here in terms of the hymen between chance and necessity at work in 'pas' 'ra' in Blanchot or, arguably, in the graphemes of Ponge's name. The text, as the trace ofsuch glottal effects among phonic and graphic elements, gives meaning, exceeds meaning and is always to come (il venir) , on the basis of 'a "formal" organization which in itself has no meaning, which does not mean that it is either the non-sense or the anguishing absurdity which haunt metaphysical humanism' (MP, p. 134). A great deal of the quasi-transcendental movement of language upon itself in Heidegger, Blanchot and Derrida accords with Christopher Fynsk's definition of a responsible text as 'a speech act that takes form and founds itself in a reflection upon its own performance'. 6 Once again the Socratic dialogue suggests itselfas a model here, and would also remind us that the concentration on questions of essence, characteristic of those texts discussed here, need not exclude general political or social matters. Indeed, a responsible text would form by definition a meditation upon its conditions of genesis, raising such issues as those of the institutional frameworks of writing, its embodiment of novel forms of community, intellectual or otherwise, and


18g

above all, as a heteronomy, its necessary incompletion, its renewed questioning of its interpreters and norms of interpretation. 'The more a work comments on itself, the more it calls for commentaries' (Blanchot, E1, p. 572). Correspondingly, a responsible reading will be attentive to that event of signature that makes up the text, and, accepting the ineluctable risk of commentary, will read the text as both dated, open and to come. In this respect it is noteworthy that in terms of difficulty and involution, Pas and Signsponge are about as far as Derrida has been prepared to go in the performance (or dialogue) mode. 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other', largely devoted to Ponge's 'Fable', is written as a traditional lecture and concerns issues of the institutional categorisation of texts, copyright, patent-law, the concept of invention and the limits of techno-scientific control or foresight. Similarly, the issue of the singularity of litterature is here applied to contemporary debates on the status offormal systems and the nature and limits of computers as automatic formal systems. In relation to the notion of invention, for instance, Derrida observes that, whereas in the past inventions arose as a matter of contingent encounter or contrivance, now huge international institutions are devoted to programming and calculating possibilities of invention, exploitation and control. 7 Deconstruction, on the other hand, should attempt to become an 'invention of the other'. Or rather, since the other, as unforeseen, cannot as such be invented, it is a matter of giving oneself over to effects of the incalculable, of giving a 'chance' to the other. Ponge's fable is such an invention: Ponge's Fable creates nothing, in the theological sense of the word (at least this is apparently the case) it invents only by taking recourse to a lexicon and to syntactic rules, to a prevailing code, to conventions to which in a certain fashion it subjects itself. But it gives rise to an event, tells a fictional story and produces a machine by introducing a disparity or gap into the customary use of discourse ... it inaugurates. (Psyche, p. 43)

The accessibility or easy legibility of Ponge's 'Fable', and, to a certain extent, many of Derrida's more recent lectures,

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demonstrates that a responsible text need not be a difficult text in the manner of Pas or Signsponge, however thought-provoking the seeming' simplicity' of Ponge's 'Fable' or Derrida's 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other' may be in the end. One corollary of this argument and the movement of thought at work in texts like Signsponge and Pas is that the term deconstruction becomes increasingly problematic. What does it name? 'Letter to aJapanese Friend' answers this in terms quite remote from the outline of deconstructive method given in Positions in the early I 970S.8 As an affirmation of the other, the very notion of deconstruction as a method seems misguided, since theother is not a concept or the result of a subjective construction. In this text he insists that deconstruction is not a method or an in tellectual position. I t is 'not even an act or an operation' : Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness or organisation of a subject, or even of moderni ty. It deconstructs itself. It can be deconstructed. (r;a se diconstruit.) (' Letter ... " p. 5)

'Qa se deconstruit ', which may be read as displacing Heidegger's guide-phrase esgibt Sein, names here only something like the problematic (apocalyptic) mode of being of any scene of writing, to be either affirmed or repressed. Since deconstruction cannot be anticipated or programmed it is indeed impossible, in the strict sense of not falling within the realm of the possible or the calculable. Is there thus a danger of deconstruction becoming almost indistinguishable from the rather paralysed pietism of the later Heidegger, who argues that no programme of action can inaugurate a new relation to being (' Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness ')?9 Fortunately there is a decisive difference between Heidegger's position and Derrida's similar argument, namely, that we can only make ourselves ready for the advent of the other. Derrida's notion of readiness is an entirely responsible one. It involves the kind of transformation at issue, for instance, in Ponge's 'Fable', which introduces a 'gap into the customary use of discourse' by virtue of a novel probing of the' very boundaries of received language. The inauguration effected is

Postscript: responsibilities made possible by the practice of a paradoxical science of both singularity and limits. This brings us to a second facet of responsibility. The welcoming of the unforeseen must involve a complete reconsideration of the position from which one is speaking. Thinking and risk ought to be inseparable. I t was precisely this, Derrida suggests, that Heidegger forgot, when his thought embraced aspects of Nazism. A refusal of the essential risk in thinking should also manifest itself in any surrender to easy selfpresentation or conclusion. In a recent essay on Heidegger, Derrida writes of 'that risk incalculable for thought and for whoever surrenders to thought, inasmuch as sjhe surrenders to it. Can one imagine a thought wi thou t this risk'? (Comment Donner Raison, 'How to Concede with Reasons', I g8g) .10 Derrida's affirmation that he writes so as to reach the point where he no longer can foresee where he is going is not the piece of irresponsibility for which one might take it. I t is a heavily disciplined strategy to a achieve a form of maximal responsibility.

Notes

INTRODUCTION I

2

3 4

5

6 7

8 9

Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines ofOntology, Logicand Theory ofLiterature, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, Ill, Northwestern University Press, 1973), P·3· Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (first published 1949; Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1973). Ch. 12 was written by Wellek. Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 141. In an interview with Richard Kearney (' Deconstruction and the Other', in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 107-26), Derrida affirms: 'My philosophical formation owes much to the thought of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Heidegger is probably the most constant influence, and particularly his project of" overcoming" Greek metaphysics' (p. 109). See, for a general view of the post-empiricist crisis in the philosophy of science, Ian Hacking, ed., Scientific Revolutions, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton: Harvester and Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana U niversity Press, 1980). A. E. Chambers, What is this Thing CalledScience?, znd edn (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Open University Press, 1982), p. 30. Quoted from Dudley Schapere, 'Meaning and Scientific Change', in Scientific Revolutions, ed. Hacking, pp. 28-59, 48. Schapere remarks that in terms of the argument, Feyerabend's 'perhaps' is redundant in this citation. Ibid., p. 38. Owen Miller writes in the preface to Identity ofthe Literary Text, ed. 192

Notes to pages 5- 14

10

I I

12

13 14

15

16 17 18

Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985): 'Most of the contributors to this volume recognize in varying degrees that, if the text is conceived of as a self-sufficient and autonomous artefact with determinate meaning which it is the task of interpretation to recover, then indeed the notion of identity can no longer hold much sway as a valid concept in literary theory and criticism ... The belief that textual identity is not an a priori given but a process worked out in the act of reading would seem to be a position likely to command fairly widespread acceptance in today's intellectual and cultural climate' (p. xix). 'Impossible Metaphors: Stevens' "The Red Fern" as Example', Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), pp. 150-6 I. The argument concerning the sun reappears at a crucial phase in The Linguistic Moment: Jrom Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 141-2. The Well- Wrought Urn (N ew York: Harcourt Brace, 1947). Compare Stephen Bungay on Hegel's theory of art (Beauty and Truth: A Study oj Hegel's Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)): 'Art is covered by the category of Absolute Spirit ... an absolute relation is a pure self-relation. So Absolute Spirit will be the category of Spirit's awareness of itself, which means that the relationship between the two logical subjects involved will be such that the relationship itself forms part of the reflection: the subject reflects upon himself, and knows it' (p. 28). 'Deconstruction and the Other', in Kearney, Dialogues. See Gary Madison's useful essay, 'Phenomenology and Existentialism: Husserl and the End of Idealism " in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 247-68, 248. See Hubert Dreyfus and John Haugeland, 'Husserl and Heidegger: Philosophy's Last Stand', in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 222-38. 'Heidegger and the Question of the Subject', in The Conflict oj Interpretations, ed. and trans. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 223-35· 'Man and Language' (1966), in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 59-68, 62. 'The Nature of Things' ( 1960) in Philosophical Hermeneutics, pp. 69-8 I, 78. For a succinct introduction to hermeneutics in philosophy, see Paul Ricoeur 'The Task of Hermeneutics ' (1975),

194

19 20

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22

23 24

Notes to pages 15-25

in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Ig8 I), pp. 43-62. See, for instance, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). The term' quasi-transcendental' is used by Derrida to mark how his mode of inquiry is transcendental in the sense of inquiring into the conditions of possibility of entities yet quasi insofar as it does not, like other forms of transcendental argument, provide grounds for those entities. See Psyche (Paris: Editions Galilee, I9 8 7), p. 64 8 . Levinas, 'Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity' in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, I987), pp. 47-59. Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, I974). The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987) may also be considered a radical variant of dialogue form, consisting, as it does, of the truncated half of a written correspondence. For psychoanalysis and dialogue see Shoshana Felman, jacques Lacan and the Adventures of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Derrida, in Didier Cahen, 'Entretien avec Jacques Derrida', Digraphe (1987), pp. 11-27, 18. OVERCOMING AESTHETICS: HEIDEGGERIAN DICHTUNG

For certain affinities between Hegel and Heidegger see J acques Taminiaux, 'Le depassernent heideggerien de l'esthetique et l'heritage de Hegel', in Recoupements (Brussels: Ousia, 1982), pp. 175-208. 2 An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 99-104. 3 'Sending: On Representation', Social Research, 49 (1982), pp. 2943 26, 3°2. 4 Although Heidegger writes frequently of' representation', mimesis is less prominent. A principal source for distinguishing the two senses of mimesis outlined is Heidegger's account of Plato on art. In Nietzsche, volume I, it is argued that mimesis cannot be understood apart from the Greek experience of aletheia. Plato's notorious denunciation of poets is reread in this light. Mimesis does not 1

Notes to page 25

195

primarily mean' copy' or 'imitation' in such a way as to suggest a merely external relation between original and image. I t is rather a mode in which the original itself appears or shows itself, as distinct from any modern (non-Greek) concept of representation. Plato argues, according to the received reading, that art is at three removes from reality. First comes the thing in its idea, those non-sensuous intellectual forms that constitute the essential nature of the universe. Second is the so-called 'imitation' (mimesis) of the ideas in the objects of the world, a table or a house, for instance. Finally the artist imitates these imitations of the idea, producing their semblance in words or paint, mere shadows of shadows. A crude redaction of Heidegger's opposing argument can be given in terms of his meditation upon the word idea, according to his general strategy of re-awakening a phenomenology latent in ancient Greek. In 'My Way to Phenomenology' (1963) in Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), PP.74-82, Heidegger writes: 'What occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of consciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena is thought more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and existence as aletheia ... That which phenomenological investigations rediscovered as the supporting attitude of thought proves to be the fundamental trait of Greek thinking, if not indeed of philosophy as such' (p. 79). Idea, read in Greek, is related to a verb meaning' to see'. It connotes not' form' or 'essence' in any normal sense but' outward appearance'. In order for anything to be what it is it must show in its' idea' what it is. If a bed is recognised as a bed, it is because it shares its idea with other beds, all of which manifest that idea in the mode of wood and other materials. The bed is a mimesis, not as a copy, but as a mode of the idea's (self)manifestation. Furthermore, art is not the shadow ofa shadow, but a more attentuated mode of mimesis as showing, e.g. the idea or 'outward appearance' of the bed appears in paint and canvas. Throughout this study, following Derrida's analysis in 'The Double Session' (Diss, pp. 175-286), this phenomenological notion of mimesis is applied to analysis of Dichtung, well beyond the particular reading of Plato. This procedure, it is hoped, finds justification in the concentration of the arguments it makes possible without excessive simplification. It also allows one to delineate Heidegger's importance in debate on the nature of poetic representation and expression, even as it also highlights a considerable remove from these notions. I take issue with Veronique Foti's claim that' Derrida takes for

Notes to pages 26-9

5

6

7 8 9 10

granted that a representation is a posited image or picture', 'Representation and the Image: Between Heidegger, Derrida, and Plato', Man and World, 18 (1985), pp. 65-78,66. The Kehre, definable as a rejection of the viability of philosophy as foundational thinking, remains perhaps the most controversial issue in the study ofHeidegger, mainly because it is questionable to what extent Heidegger succeeds in eschewing foundational modes of thinking. See Herman Rapaport, Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 9-14. See also Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 85. Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., On Heidegger and Language (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. xiii. Kockelmans, 'Language, Meaning and Ek-sistence', in ibid., pp. 3-3 2 , 9· Ibid., p. 28. Although the example is simplifying, something of this' showing' can be introduced in terms of the inability of some poetic language to deal with negatives. A brief' bagatelle' of Charles Tomlinson, 'Event' (1972), is an exploitation of this inability. From Written on Water (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 38. Nothing is happening Nothing A waterdrop Soundlessly shatters A gossamer gives Against this unused space A bird Might thoughtlessly try its voice But no bird does.

Yet the bird sings, even as 'no bird does'. Something emerges in language unaffected by the positing of a 'no'. A crude sketch of Heidegger's complex notion of Dichtung begins to emerge here. I I Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1935-6), PLT, pp. 17-8 I, 74. 12 For Heidegger's low opinion of much modern art see '" Only a God Can Save Us" Der Spiegel's interview with Martin Heidegger', trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo, Philosophy Today (Winter 1976), pp. 267-84, 283-4.

Notes to pages 30-8

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13 'The more poetic a poet is - the freer (that is, the more open and

14

15 16

17 18 19

20 2I

22

23

ready for the unforeseen) his saying - the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an evermore painstaking listening and the further what he says is from the mere propositional statement' (PL T, p. 2 16). In an interesting account of the notions of 'world' and' transcendence' in the early Heidegger, Gabriel Matzkin writes that Heidegger 'drew a sharp distinction between meaning and physical being. The meaning-process is transcendent to the entities that are interpreted in its terms. This transcendence of the meaning-process means that the entities are understood before they are interpreted. Interpretation presumes the connectedness of the entities to an enframing activity [which is] ... both synonymous with understanding and a necessary condition of our being in a world.' (' Heidegger's Transcendent Nothing', in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play ofNegativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 95-116, 100. Joseph Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), p. 164. David Krell, 'The Wave's Source: Rhythm in the Language of Poetry and Thought' in Heidegger and Language: A Collection of OriginalPapers, ed. David Wood (University of Warwick : Parousia Press, 198 I), pp. 25-50. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, 'The Being of Language and the Language of Being: Heidegger and Modern Poetics', Boundary 2,4, no. 2 (1976), pp. 535-57, 546. Henri Birault, 'Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger', in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph Kockelmans, pp. 147-68, 153. See, for example, Heidegger's practice in 'Science and Reflection' in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 'A Dialogue on Language' gives similar privilege to Japanese, partly since it is a non-European language. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). See above all, Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1990) : also Veronique Foti, '.The Path of the Stranger: On Heidegger's Interpretation of George Trakl', Review ofExistential Psychology and Psychiatry, 17 (1986), pp. 223-33. Charles Tomlinson, 'Poem', in Written on Water, p. 3 I. If there is 'interpretation' in relation to Dichtung it must be firmly

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24 25 26 27 28 29

30 3I

32 33


distinguished from' hermeneutics', including the work of HansGeorg Gadamer. SeeJean-Luc Nancy's dissociation ofHeidegger's work from any hermeneutical search for senses or meanings in Le partage des voix (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1983), especially pp. 13-49. See Nancy, Le partage des voix, p. 30. Birault, 'Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger', pp. 147-8. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Poetique et politique', in L'imitation des modernes: typographies II (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986), pp. 175-200, 194· For Heidegger on 'experience' see Robert Bernasconi, The Question ofLanguage in Heidegger's History ofBeing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press and London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 59. Richard Wolin, The Politics ofBeing: The Political Thought ofMartin Heidegger (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 12 I. Compare the following passage from' Passe-Partout', which serves as an introduction to The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987). In movements of thought that must be carefully distinguished from any so-called paradoxes of reflexivity, Derrida considers the traditional notion of the truth of painting as the simple presentation of what is (mimesis in the first sense), folding this notion of truth and its self-presentation over itself in a mise en abyme. Painting presents: 'truth itself restored, in person, without mediation, makeup, mask, or veil. In other words the true truth or the truth of the truth, restituted in its power of restitution, truth looking sufficiently like itself to escape any misprison, any illusion; and even any representation - but sufficiently divided already to resemble, produce, or engender itself twice over, in accordance with the two genitives: truth of truth and truth of truth' (p. 5). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 60. This is also perhaps the point at which Heidegger begins to elude Blanchot's criticism of the place of etymologies in his thinking, since meditation is a process that transcends attention to individual words. See Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Nebr. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 96, p. 102. The essay is also known by its more recent, ifless apt, title, Existence and Being, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (London: Vision Press, 1959). Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger's Language and Thinking (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1988), p. 61.

Notes to pages 51-5 34 See The Sophist, 263e. 35 In On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 1-24, 2. 36 Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. John Halliday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 6. 37 In Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp. 7-88. 38 Heidegger's Language and Thinking, p. 40. Mugerauer is exemplary in his account of the im plications of the dialogue form in Heidegger: 'When we join it, the conversation is already underway. In fact, it continues a discussion that has been going on for some time. (For example, the characters refer to things they have said before). This indicates (I) that what is being discussed is not a discrete or isola ted matter, but an aspect of a larger topic; (2) that the reader is asked to plunge into a conversation that has been going on who knows how long, since the time of Heraclitus?; and (3) that we might expect that the end of this particular conversation is not the end of conversation itself' (p. 4). 39 From Lessing's Spirit in his Writings, translation from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory ojLiterature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 92. 40 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 36. 41 Gerald Bruns, Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 173. 42 Ned Lukacher elaborates a similar and questionable account in terms of the supposed 'rnateriality' of language as Dichtung in 'Writing on Ashes: Heidegger Fort Derrida', Diacritics, 19, no. 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 128-48, 129, 43 Compare John Sallis's argument about non-metaphysical thinking: 'I t would think what metaphysics was to have thought, Being as Being, but would do so only by crossing over to the clearing that encircles Being. And yet it would think the clearing only by returning to what is encircled, to what shines within the space of aletheia, to what sounds throughout the open enclosure.' Echoes: After Heidegger (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 4 0. 44 This ineluctable necessity of always starting anew and always waiting is surely what rescues Heidegger from critiques such as the following, by David Wood: 'Heidegger seems to be aiming at an ideal coincidence between what skeptics would still call the act and the content of language. And if I am right, it is in the performative use of language that, if anywhere, he achieves this. But this is an

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45

46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Notes to pages 55-8

ideal, one that the sheer materiality of language can never allow to be achieved. Heidegger is projecting on to his linguistic performance an imaginary unity, in a desire as old as philosophy.' The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), p. 3°1. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven, Conn. : and London: Yale University Press, 1979). I refer here only to this specific argument. Elsewhere the relation of de Man to Heidegger is far more complicated. See, for instance, Derrida's essay' Acts: The Meaning of a Given Word', trans. Eduardo Cadava, in Derrida, Memoires: for Paul de Man (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1986 ) . de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 175. Ibid. Lyotard, Le dijfirend (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 101-29. My translations are taken from Lyotard, The Dijferend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minn.: University of Minnesota Press and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 ). Lyotard, 'Presentations', in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 113-35· Lyotard, The Dijferend, p. 30. Lyotard, , Presentations', p. 124. Ibid., p. 13 I. Lyotard, The Dijferend, pp. 72-5. Lyotard, Le dijfirend, p. 113. My translation. Lyotard, 'Presentations', p. 13 I. One notes that the argument elaborated in The Dijferend and 'Presentations' appears elsewhere in Lyotard's work on 'the sublime'. Looking mainly to Edmund Burke's theory that the sublime is an experience of privation, Lyotard identifies the sublime with the reduction of language or a piece offine art to the indeterminacy of a presentation momentarily without situation, an 'Is it happening?'. I t is a matter of the naked eventhood of the event, the eclipsed condition of representation. Of any event, Lyotard writes: 'Before asking questions about what it is and about its significance, before the quid, it must" first" so to speak "happen", quod. That it happens, "precedes", so to speak, the question pertaining to what happens ... The event happens as a question mark "before" happening as a question.' ('The Sublime and the Avant Garde' in The LyotardReader, ed. Andrew Benjamin


57 58

59 60 6I

(Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 196211,197)· Derrida, Memoires, pp. 96-7. Lyotard also argues that, unlike his' presentation', Heidegger's 'Being' has a determined addressee, namely humanity. However, given the manner which both Dasein, Being and language cannot be abstracted from the relation or dislocation that constitutes them, the term' addressee' seems totally inappropriate here. See, inter alia, ' Words' (WL, p. 149). Ibid., p. 150. 'Language in the Poem' (1953) (WL, p. 16o). 2

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BLANCHOT: THE LITERARY SPACE

Emmanuel Levinas writes: 'Surtout il y a Heidegger, le dernier Heidegger' [' Above all there is Heidegger, late Heidegger ']. Sur Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975), p. I I. See Angela Leighton's reading of the ode in these terms, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 101ff. See Blanchot, SL, pp. 2 I 1-20. See Blanchot's argument against the dominance which the notion of creation still holds over our ideas of art, EI, pp. 589-9°. Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot, p. 19. See Derrida, Gr, pp. 20-2. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Universi ty Press, 1977). See Andrej Warminski, 'Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel', Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), pp. 267-75. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 6 I. Ibid., p. 62. Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. J. P. Leavy (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978). Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 49. See Blanchot on Bataille, EI, pp. 300-22; also Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago, Ill. : University ofChicago Press, 1987), pp. 21953· 'To write is to know that death has taken place even though it has not been experienced', The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 66. See also EI, pp. 48-50.

202


7 See, for example, 'The Narrative Voice or the Impersonal" He " " SS, pp. 213-24. 18 Among Blanchot's essays explicitly devoted to Mallarme are' Le my the de Mallarrne ', PF, pp. 35-48; "Mallarme and Literary Space', SS, pp. I 10-20; "Mallarme's Experience', SL, pp. 38-48; 'The /gitur Experience', SL, pp. 108-19. 19 For Derrida's argument that a radical notion of 'literature' is augurated by Mallarrne, see Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 257-8. 20 For a useful account of this see P. Adams Sitney, 'The Terror of the Text', afterword to Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus: and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), pp. 180-1. 2 I For Sartre on imagination, see Eugene F. Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), pp. 19-33. For some differences between Sartre and Blanchot, see Francoise Collin, Maurice Blanchotet la question de I'ecriture (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971), pp. 168-70. 22 See Collin's discussion of this question in Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'ecriture, pp. 190-221. 23 For the forceful shift in Blanchot's work in the early 1950S see Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 24 I. 24 Joseph J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), p. 134. 25 Blanchot The Unavowable Community, trans. PierreJoris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988), p. 56. 26 See E/, p. 254. 27 Peter Dayan, Mallarme's 'Divine Transposition': Real and Apparent Sources of Literary Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 43. 28 See Francoise Collins, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l' ecriture, p. 180. 29 I t seems to be a common experience of poets that the composition of a poem involves a unique and peculiar sense of space and time. Composition is neither wholly active (there is that aspect known traditionally as 'inspiration ') nor wholly passive (the poet is not an automaton). Instead a kind of middle-voice rules over the interaction of world, language and writer. Tomlinson writes: 'Rhythm, as it is felt in the act of writing, signifies the creation of a continuum, an imaginary space within which words and memories, the given and the possible, can be felt as co-present, I


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38 39 40 41

2°3

held over against each other, yet constantly crossing one another's paths. As the mind attends to the pulsation of the growing poem, it is as if it enters and shares this created space, which, filled by the invitations of movement and sound, seems at once landscape and music, perhaps more music than landscape.' (Quoted from Kathleen O'Gorman, 'Space, Time and Ritual in Tomlinson's Poetry', in Charles Tomlinson: Man and Writer, ed. Kathleen O'Gorman (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1988), P·95· See Steven Shaviro's study, Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille and Literary Theory (Tallahassee, Fla.: Florida State University Press, 1990). Shaviro's book does not always avoid certain pitfalls in discussing the affective and the passionate in Blanchot's writing, namely, a reaffirmation of notions, such as loss of self in passion, that seem dangerously close to late Romantic cliches (so that Shaviro's Blanchot sometimes reads like a weaker D.H. Lawrence). For an excellent account of this see Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 137-9. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Reality and its Shadow', in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 1-13. Blanchot, 'Traces', Nouvelle Revue Francoise 129 (September 1963), PP·472 - 80. For an account of the peculiar temporality of L' attente l' oubli see Derrida, Pas, pp. 27-32. Martin Heidegger zum siebstigen Geburtstag Festschrift, ed. Gunther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959). See Libertson, Proximity, pp. 195-20 I. Compare also Derrida, 'Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/ Heidegger) : Two Questions', Philosophy and Literature, 10 (1986), pp. 246-62: 'Since Aristotle, and at least up to Bergson, it [metaphysics] has constantly repeated and assumed that to think and to say must mean to think and say something that would be a one, one matter' (p. 257). "Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry , (1986) in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (London: Vision Press, 1949), pp. 293-3 I 5, 30 I. See Levinas, Tl, pp. 64-70. For a summary of related divergences between Heidegger and Blanchot see Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'ecriture, pp. 72-7, 186, 199. For Levinas' reading ofHeidegger and Derrida's response to it see

2°4

42

43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50

5I 52


David Boothroyd, 'Responding to Levinas', in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 15-31. For an excellent discussion of Levinas' dichotomy of the saying and the said see Jan de Greef, 'Skepticism and Reason', in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 159-79. 'The face to face is a final and irreducible relation which no concept could cover without the thinker who thinks that concept finding himself forthwith before a new interlocutor; it makes possi ble the pluralism of society.' T I, p. 29 I. See TI, pp. 51, 69, 7 1,98; OBBE, pp. 25, 119· See OBBE, pp. 38-43. The concept of 'interruption' recurs in these discussions of new possibilities of dialogue to name the making of a rupture in language understood as representation, communication etc. Hence the continually self-interrupting movement of L' attente l'oubli (see EI, pp. 99, 106-12). See Le pas (1975), pp. 19-116, esp. pp. 21-32. See ibid., pp. 90-2. In Collected Philosophical Papers, pp. 61-73. Compare Le pas, pp. 14-15: Le rapport de moi a l'autre, difficile a penser (rapport que' rapporterait' Ie il): a cause du statut de l'autre, tantot et a la fois l'autre comme terme, tantot et a la fois comme rapport sans terme, relais toujours a relayer.' [' The relation of myself to the other, difficult to conceptualise (a relation that the neutral he/it would relate back) on account of the status of the other, as sometimes (and yet at the same time) the other as terminus of the relating, at others (and yet also again at the same time) as the other as a relating without terminus, a relaying always to be renewed ']. For' supplementary' logic see Derrida, Gr, pp. 144-52. L' attente l'oubli and La parole plurielle may be read in conjunction wi th the deconstruction of Levinas given by Derrida in 'Violence and Metaphysics' (1964) (WD, pp. 79-153). This essay has now been much discussed, but two features stand out when juxtaposed with Blanchot. Derrida argues that Levinas is wrong to conflate Heidegger with a philosophy of totality - Being is nothing other than the existent or the entity and cannot therefore be said to subsume or efface it. Moreover, the thought of being is a condition of thinking all difference, including that of 1/other. Given that Blanchot, and later Derrida, accept Levinas' questioning ofHeidegger's use of concepts of unity and sameness in

Notes to pages

104-10

his account of being, one arrives at the argument at issue in L' attente I'oubli and 'La parole plurielle': (a) that being in the transcendental movement of language is multiple, singular and self-differing and (b) that this plural word makes possible the otherness of the other even as that other is itself the only condition for the efficacy of the plural word. I t is again a matter of a skewed temporality in which' The Other does not let itself be thought either in terms of transcendence or immanence' (E1, p. 61) and in which the other designates both relation to alterity (inaccessibility) and the alterity this relation makes available, as inaccessible and always to be reaffirmed (see E1, p. 105). For accounts of Derrida on Levinas, see David Boothroyd, 'Responding to Levinas', in The Provocation ofLevinas, pp. 15-3 I ; John Llewelyn, 'Levinas, Derrida and Other vis-a-vis', in ibid., pp. 136-55; Robert Bernasconi, 'Levinas and Derrida: The Question of the Closure of Metaphysics', in Face to Face, pp. 181202. 53 Note, for instance, the unsupported generalisation that all literature is a form of heteronomy (p. 39). Blanchot notes that' Levinas se mefie des poernes et de l'activite poetique ' (E1, p. 76) [' Levinas distrusts poems and poetic activity.']

3

DERRIDA AND THE LITERARY

Samuel Weber, 'The Limits of Professionalism '. The Oxford Literary Review, 5 (1982), pp. 59-70, 60. 2 Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago,: Ill. University of Chicago Press, 197 I ) . 3 J onathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 213. 4 See Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1986). De Man's procedure is to show up the constitutive incoherence of a text by juxtaposing a literal and rhetorical reading and to reveal that the commerce of mutually incompatible interpretations admits of no resolution. Why? They cannot be resolved because no text can itself provide the criterion for the difference between literal and figurative within it. Any such element of the text (its thematisation, as it were, of its own reading) would bejust as questionable in its status as the language whose indeterminate nature it is expected to resolve, i.e. any thematisation of reading could be using' reading' in a figurative way. De Man's procedure, though only crudely summarised here, is markedly different (in its primary interest in I

206

5

6

7

8

9

10

Notes to pages

111-16

an epistemological dilemma) from Derrida's far more obscure concern with an 'other' that both grants and exceeds language. Although, to my knowledge, the point has not been made before, De Man's argument has affinities with aspects of the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein argued, against the ambition (still powerful today) to formalise the epistemic function of language into a reliable calculus, that no sequence of signs contains in itself the rules for its own use of in terpretation. I t does so no more than a signpost 'pointing' West would mean 'West' if people chose to act as ifit meant something else. Yet we have an almost irresistible tendency to read our interpretations of signs into some obscure nature or implicit rule in the sign itself, so rendering ourselves oblivious to the contingent and ultimately ungrounded nature of our interpretations. See G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein : Meaning and Understanding: Essays on the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), esp. pp. 57-59 Derrida's Memoires, for example, contains, as a stage in the argumen t, the following reaffirmation of Dichtung: ' I t is a question ... of taking note (prendre acte) of thefact that language is not the governable instrument of a speaking being (or subject) and that its essence cannot appear through any other instance than that of the very language which names it, says it, gives it to be thought, speaks it. We cannot even say that language is or does something, nor even that it "acts": all of these values (being, doing, acting) are insufficient to construct a metalanguage on the subject of language. Language speaks of and by itself, which is something quite different from a specular tautology' (pp. 96-7). I retain the French as a mark of the term's neologistic status. Interview with Richard Kearney, 'Deconstruction and the Other', in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester U niversity Press, 1984), p. 112. Derrida,' Ousia and Gramme' in MP, pp. 31-67. I have attempted to analyse Heidegger and Derrida on time in 'Time after Time: Temporality, Temporalization', The Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987), pp. 119-35. See Derrida, 'The Ends of Man , (1968), in MP, pp. 109- 36, 134. Compare also Derrida's displacement of the Heideggerian event of appropriation in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/ Eperons, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1979): 'Truth, unveiling, illumination are no longer decided in the appropriation of the truth of being, but are cast into its bottomless abyss as non-truth, veiling and dissimulation' (p. 119). Schafer, Die Sprache Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962); see also

Notes to pages

I

17-3 0

2°7

Schafer, 'Heidegger's Language: Metalogical Forms of Thought and Grammatical Specialities', in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 281-30 I. I I Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation ofMeaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 3°9-13. I 2 The phrase is used throughout' Letter on Humanism' (1949) in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 193-242. 13 See Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis of this difficult question of Heidegger's treatment of the textuality of the thinker's language in "L'Obliteration ' (1973), in Le sujet de la philosophe : Typographies I (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1979), pp. I 13-84, esp. 170-6. 14 Derrida, 'Deconstruction and the Other', in Kearney, Dialogues, p. I 12. 15 See Heidegger, WT, pp. 182-6; WL, pp. 94-5. 16 The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 48. 17 Ibid. 18 'Living on: Borderlines', trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge 1979), pp. 75176; 'Title (to be specified)', trans. Tom Conley, Sub-Stance, 31 (1978), pp. 5-22. 19 See EI, pp. 353-4; Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 271. 20 Derrida, Post Card, pp. 259-409. 2 I Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1968). 22 Once again, as with the complication of Levinas' notion of ethical relationship performed in L' attente l'oubli, the' yes' is a notion to be found in Levinas, but which Blanchot delineates more pointedly in terms of concepts of textuality. In Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence, Levinas affirms: 'The uncondi tionali ty of this yes is not that of an infinite spontaneity. It is the very exposure to critique, the exposure prior to consent, more ancient than any naive spontaneity' (p. 122). (Cf. Le pas, p. 162.) See also Derrida's work on Nietzsche's notion of the' eternal return' in The Ear ofthe Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. C. Leveque and C. V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (N ew York N.Y.: Schocken, 1975) . 23 Heidegger, 'Remembrance of the Poet' (1943), trans. Douglas

208

24 25 26 27

28

2g

30 3I 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

Notes to pages 133-45 Scott, in Existence and Being (London: Vision, Ig49), pp. 253-10, 255· Derrida and Pierre-Jean Labarriere, Alterites (Paris: Editions Osiris, Ig86), p. 26. Ibid., p. 82. See Derrida, Psyche (Paris: Editions Galilee, Ig87), pp. 645-9. Roger Laporte argues that'" Pas" a ou doit avoir simultanernent au moins quatre sens: le pas entendu comme marche, le pas en tant que "ne pas" ou "ne pas encore"; le pas d u passif (de la "passion", de la patience); le pas du passe, quatre acceptions done, mais qui communiquent dans et par l'ecriture. [' Pas' has or should have at least four senses, the pas understood as 'step', pas as in ne pas, 'not', or ne pas encore, 'not yet', the pas of passive (of 'passion', of patience), the pas of the past; four meanings then, but which communicate with each other in and by writing.] Maurice Blanchot: L' ancien, l'effroyablement ancien (Paris: Fata Morgana, Ig87), p. 44· Derrida is comparing the relation of the fascinated reader to Blanchot to the relation without relation of the speaker to a strange other or counterpart in Blanchot's narrative Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (Paris: Gallimard, I953). Donald G. Marshall, 'History, Theory and Influence: Yale Critics as Readers of Maurice Blanchot', in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed.Jonathan Arc, Wlad' Godzich and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. gO-I 55, 134. Derrida, 'Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference', Research in Phenomenology, 13 (I g83), pp. 65-83. Derrida,' Choreographies', Diacritics, 12 (I g82), pp. 66-76, 75. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, Ig88). See the section of EI entitled "L'experience-limite ', pp. 117-4 18. I t is odd that Blanchot does not here correlate a writer's' dialogue' wi th writing with that of self and other, or medi ta te upon their complex relationship, as he does in La parole plurielle (EI, pp. 1-116). Derrida, Memoires, p. 33· Nancy, quoted from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger: Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Iggo), p. 68. Virtanen, Conversations on Dialogue (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, I977). John Caputo, 'The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida: from Uselessness to Full Employment', in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts ofJacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, Ig87), pp. gg-II3.


2°9

39 Rapaport, Heidegger and Derrida (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 104-74. 40 See Margaret Boden's speculations on the relation of' creativity' to the large-scale effects of small-scale events in The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 2 I 7-39. 4 1 Memoires, p. 96. 42 Derrida, 'Me-Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the translation of "The Shell and the Kernel" by Nicolas Abraham', trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics, 9 (1979), pp. 4- 12,10. 4 I

2

3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10 I I

THE EVENT OF SIGNATURE: A 'SCIENCE' OF THE SINGULAR? 'Two Words for Joyce', trans. Geoff. Bennington, in PostStructuralist Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 145-59. 'What could a science of the alea be? ... Weare at the threshold of such a science, which engages itselfin a rather singular relationship with the very name of science' (S, p. I 16). John Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Q,uest for Ultimate Explanation (Oxford: Oxford U niversi ty Press, 199 I ) . Sexual difference is the major question to be treated in this way, namely, in terms of the refusal of a supposedly regional field to be subsumed in a general ontology. See' Choreographies', Diacritics, 12 (1982), pp. 66-76. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain ofthe Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. I 77. For a cri tiq ue of this work along similar lines to mine see Mark C. Taylor, 'Foiling Reflection', Diacritics (Spring 1988), pp. 54-6. Heidegger, in PLT, pp. 163-82. Heidegger, What is a Thing [lecture of 1935-6], trans. W. B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (Southbend, Ind.: Regency/Gateway, 196 7). Derrida, 'Sending: On Representation', Social Research, 55 (1982), pp. 294-3 26, 324. Ibid. For an analogous reading see Nancy, Le partage des voix (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1983), esp. pp. 81-90. Lacoue-Labarthe, La poesie comme experience (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1986). Richard, Onze etudes sur La poesie moderne (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1964), pp. 198-224; Pages Paysages (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1984), pp. 2 I 1-32.

210


12 Gerard Genette, Mimetologies (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1976), PP·377-8 1. 13 Serge Gavronsky, introduction to Francis Ponge, The Sun Placed in theAbyss, trans. Gavronsky (New York, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1977), P·23· 14 Genette, Mimetologies, p. 38 I. 15 See Richard, Onre etudes, p. 222. 16 Ponge, The Sun Placed in the Abyss, p. 36. 17 Irene Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Difference (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 139. 18 Putnam, 'Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology', in Mind Design: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, ed. John Haugeland (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 20519· 19 Derrida, 'Interpreting Signatures', Philosophy and Literature, 10 (1986), pp. 246-62. 20 Derrida, 'Des Tours de Babel', in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165-207, 172-3. 2 I The notion of commentary on Ponge operates according to the same supplementary logic as that' on' Blanchot, for Ponge's texts are already didactic, self-commenting, and hence exemplary according to the abyssal movement outlined in this chapter. 22 Derrida, 'Interpreting Signatures', p. 248. POSTSCRIPT: RESPONSIBILITIES [' Here I am in this work at this very moment '], in Psyche (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1987), pp. 159-202; originally published in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: J. M. Place, 1980). 2 See especially the section entitled 'Scepticism and Reason', pp. 165-7 1. For another account of this issue see Jan de Greef, 'Skepticism and Reason', in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 159-79· 3 '" Eating Well", or the Calculation of the Subject': An Interview with Jacques Derrida, in Who Comes After the Subject, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor andJean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 96-119, 108. 4 'Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments', trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989), pp. 812-73. 5 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other', trans. Catherine Porter, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich I


6

7 8 9 10

2I I

(Minneapolis, Mo.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 2565,59-60. Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 196. 'The Principle of Reason : The University in the Eyes of its Pupils', trans. Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, Diacritics, 13 (Fall 1983), pp. 6-20. 'Letter to a Japanese Friend', in Derrida & Di.fference, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (University of Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985), pp. 1-8. 'Only a God can Save Us', Der Spiegel, interview with Martin Heidegger, Philosophy Today (1976), pp. 267-84, 272. Diacritics, 19 (1989), pp. 4-9,6.

Index of names

Abraham, Nicolas, 20g Ahab, 84,87, 8g, 147 Aristotle, 22,56-7, 59, 61, 115, 2°3 Artaud, Antonin, I 14 Baker, G. P., 206 Barrow,john, 151, 20g Bataille, Georges, 17, 6g, 72-3, I 12, I39-41, 201 Beckett, Samuel, 17,52,112, Igg Beethoven, Ludwig van, 66 Benjamin, Walter, 187 Bergson, Henri, 203 Berkeley, George, 52 Bernasconi, Robert, Ig8, 205 Birault, Henri, 36, 40, I97-8 Blanchot, Maurice, 2, 15, 17- 19, 37-8, 47-8,53,58,64-112, 125, I 28-49, 154,164,172,181,183,186-9,192, Ig8, 202-5, 207-8, 210 Bloom, Harold, 207 Boden, Margaret, 209 Boethius, 18 Boothroyd, David, 204-5 Brooks, Cleanth, 6-7 Bruns, Gerald, 53-4 Bungay, Stephen, 193 Burke, Edmund, 200 Cahen, Didier, 194 Caputo, john, 145,208 Celan, Paul, 110, 154-5, 168-9, 187 Chambers, A. F., 192 Collin, Francoise, 202-3 Culler, jonathan, 5-10, r oq-j o Dayan, Paul, 82, 202 de Greef, jan, 204, 210

de Man, Paul, 18, 55, 58, 140, 186, 200, 205-6 Derrida, jacques, 2-3, 5, 8-10, 15-20, 25-6, 3 2-4, 38, 45, 49, 53, 58-9, 64, 69,7 2-4,83,94,100, 1°5,108-31, 133-48, 15a-2, 154-8, 163-4, 166-7, 172-92, 194-9, 201-10 Descartes, Rene, 2a-2, 25, 3a-1, 101 Donne, john, 6-7 Dreyfus, Hubert, 14, 193-4 Dreyfus, Stuart, 194 Duras, Marguerite, 139, 141 Eurydice, 106 Farasse, Gerard, 159-60 Felman, Shoshona, 194 Feyerabend, Paul, 3-4, 192 Flaubert, Gustave, 108 Foti, Veronique, 195, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 89, 126-8, 150, 172 Fynsk, Christopher, 189, 203, 2 I I Gadamer, Hans-George, 14, 198 Gasche, Rodolphe, 50, 152, 196, 202, 2°9 Gavronsky, Serge, 160, 210 Genette, Gerard, 159-60, 2 I ° George, Stefan, 36, 38 Goethe, j ohann Wolfgang von, 66 Hacker, P. M. S., 206 Hacking, Ian, 192 Harvey, Irene, 167, 210 Haugeland, john, 193 Hegel, Georg W. F., 8, 24, 66, 6g--73, 78, 115, 161, 192-4 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 3, 1a-6g, 76, 212

Index oj names 80- I, 84, 86-90, 92-9, 102-3, 1°7-8, 110-25, 128-30, 132-4°, 142-3,148-9,151,153-6,164-5, 16 7, 173, 181, 183-4, 186, 188, 190-1, 193-'201, 203-4, 206-1 I Hesse, Mary, 192 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 67 Holderlin, Friedrich, 36-8, 40, 44, 65, 94, 116 Homer, 30, 69 Hugo, Victor, 187 Hume, David, 52 Husserl, Edmund, I 1,72, 158, 192 Ingarden, Roman,

I,

128, 192

james, Henry, 187 joyce, james, 110, 150, 187 Kaelin, Eugene, 202 Kafka, Franz, 68,75, 132, 187 Kant, Emmanuel, 55 Kearney, Richard, 9, 15, 17, 192, 206-7 Kockelmans, joseph, 27, 3 I, 196-7, 202 Krell, David, 32, 197 Kuhn, Thomas, 3 Labarriere, Pierre-jean, 208 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 37,4 1, 155, 197-9, 20 7- 9 Laporte, Roger, 208 Lawrence, D. H., 203 Lazarus, 74, 129 Leighton, Angela, 201 Levertov, Denise, 32 Levinas, Emmanuel, 16, 19, 27,68, 87-9,9 1,94-102, 104-7, 134, 138, 155-6, 18I-6, 194, 20 I, 203-5, 206 Libertson, joseph, 192, 202-3, 207 Lingis, Alphonso, 156 Llewelyn, John, 205 Lukacher, Ned, 199 Lyotard, jean-Fran

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