Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real (Postcolonial Literatures)

Decolonising Gender

This innovative study challenges a possessive or colonising approach to questions of gender. Through an illuminating selection of cross-cultural readings from African and queer writing to a shamanistic Shakespeare, Decolonising Gender offers:  a way out of some of the current deadlocks of feminist theory  an anti-essentialist approach to gender in which both male and female readers may address a consciousness of the feminine  a platform for postcolonial and postmodernist thinkers to engage in a dialogue around the status of the performative in regard to the other  a new theory of poetic realism in both canonical and postcolonial literatures;  a re-reading of the Enlightenment legacy in terms of postcolonial liberation theory  a comparison of contemporary debates on the real across disciplines Negotiating a path between feminist theory’s common pitfalls of essentialism and constructivism, Caroline Rooney argues convincingly that by rethinking our understanding of gender we might also equip ourselves to resist racism and totalitarianism more effectively. Caroline Rooney is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research at the University of Kent. She is the author of African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and, with Vera Dieterich, of Book Unbinding: The Ontological Stain (Artworlds Press, 2005).

POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonised areas, and will include material from nonanglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. The series will also include collections of important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new research intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include:

1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction Seeing with a third eye Brenda Cooper

8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939 ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ Evelyn O’Callaghan

2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

9 Postcolonial Pacific Writings Representations of the body Michelle Keown

3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry Making style Denise deCaires Narain

10 Writing Woman, Writing Place Contemporary Australian and South African fiction Sue Kossew

4 African Literature, Animism and Politics Caroline Rooney

11 Literary Radicalism in India Gender, nation and the transition to independence Priyamvada Gopal

5 Caribbean–English Passages Intertextuality in a postcolonial tradition Tobias D-ring

12 Postcolonial Conrad Paradoxes of empire Terry Collits

6 Islands in History and Representation Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7 Civility and Empire Literature and culture in British India, 1822–1922 Anindyo Roy

13 American Pacificism Oceania in the U.S. imagination Paul Lyons 14 Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific Reading history and trauma in contemporary fiction Susan Y. Najita

15 Writing Sri Lanka Literature, resistance and the politics of place Minoli Salgado

18 English Writing and India, 1600-1920 Colonizing aesthetics Pramod K. Nayar

16 Literature of the Indian Diaspora Theorizing the diasporic imaginary Vijay Mishra

19 Decolonising Gender Literature and a poetics of the real Caroline Rooney

17 Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel National and cosmopolitan narratives in English Neelam Srivastava

20 Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography David Huddart 21 Contemporary Arab Women Writers Anastasia Valassopoulos

Postcolonial Literatures makes available in paperback important work in the field. Hardback editions of these titles are also available, some published earlier in the Routledge Research strand of the series. Titles in paperback include: Postcolonial Studies A materialist critique Benita Parry Magical Realism in West African Fiction Seeing with a third eye Brenda Cooper

The Postcolonial Jane Austen You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry Making style Denise deCaires Narain

Readings in Postcolonial Literatures offers collections of important essays from journals or classic texts in the field. Titles include: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris Andrew Bundy

Decolonising Gender Literature and a poetics of the real

Caroline Rooney

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business # 2007 Caroline Rooney All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rooney, Caroline. Decolonising gender : literature, enlightenment, and the feminine real / Caroline Rooney. p. cm. – (Postcolonial literatures ; 19) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 1. African literature (English)–Women authors–History and criticism. 2. English literature–History and criticism. 3. Femininity (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5. Realism in literature. 6. Feminist theory. 7. Performative (Philosophy) 8. Postcolonialism in literature. 9. Postmodernism (Literature) I. Title. PR9340.5.R66 2007 820.9’9287–dc22 2007018404

ISBN 0-203-93359-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 978-0-415-42418-9 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-203-93359-6 (ebk)

For Maurice Granville Brook Rooney

Contents

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

1

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

13

2

What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment?

44

3

Radiance or brilliance

75

4

The other of the confession: the philosophical type

93

5

The other of the confession: women of Zimbabwe

126

6

Shakespeare the shaman

162

7

Sisters of Marx: a conclusion

190

Notes

218

Index

234

Acknowledgements

Chapter one began as a collaborative project with Andrew Bennett, Geoffrey Bennington, Timothy Clark, Peggy Kamuf and Nicholas Royle, and an earlier version of it appeared in The Oxford Literary Review, 23, Special issue on Monstrism (2001). A few sections of Chapter four have been developed from parts of the following two earlier articles: ‘Reservations . . . Concerning Libido Theory and the Afterlife of Psychoanalysis’ in Angelaki, 9: 1, Special issue on Hotel Psychoanalysis, ed. Sarah Wood (April 2004); and ‘The Scriptless Script’, with Vera Dieterich, in art-omma, 11, Special issue on Art and Text, ed. Jaspar JosephLester and Sharon Kivland (2006). My thanks to Vera Dieterich for permission to print the still from her film that appears in Chapter four. This film was originally screened at our presentation ‘The Word Divides the Hand from the Hand’ hosted by Sheffield Hallam University and the Site Gallery in 2005, and I am indebted to Vera Dieterich for the inspiration afforded by her work and for the opportunities to collaborate on it. These occasions have been fruitfully enabled by Sharon Kivland. I much appreciate her productive initiatives and on-going leads. The photograph that appears at the end of Chapter one was taken by Spencer Scott and I thank him for the care he took over it. For permission to quote from Miriam Thali’s Between Two Worlds, I would like to thank Broadview Press. For permission to quote from Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, I would like to thank University of California Press. The friendly and prompt assistance of my editors at Routledge, Polly Dodson and Liz Thompson, together with their team, has made it a pleasure to work with them on the production of this book. In the writing of it, I have benefited from stimulating connections with and much valued support from a number of friends and colleagues. In particular, my warm thanks go to: Maggie Awadalla, Ouamar Azerradj, Jennie Batchelor, Karoly and Vessela Borossa, Glenn Bowman; Becky and David Clarke, Jo Collins, Elizabeth Cowie, Rana Dayoub, Rod Edmond, Mary Evans, Neil Gascoigne, Mary Golubeva, Ben Grant, Catherine Grant, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Herd, Lyn Innes, Gerald MacLean, Victoria, Tats, Achilles and Alexander Mavros, Martin McQuillan, Jan Montefiore, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Forbes Morlock, Joke Murray, Kaori Nagai, Hania Nashef, Susheila Nasta, Marion O’Connor, Benita Parry, Ranka Primorac, Sirish Rao, Dave Reason, Felicity Rooney, Nicholas Royle, Clemency

xii

Acknowledgements

Schofield, Angela Smith, Helena Torres, Scarlett Thomas, Dennis Walder, Sarah Wood, and Anastasia Valassopoulos. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Donna Landry for her finely attuned and attentive readings of four of the work’s chapters, and for her sustaining advice and encouragement throughout the work’s progress. Finally, I am really grateful to Julia Borossa for the generosity, harmony and counterpoint of her listening and responding, as well as for getting me to listen. This book is dedicated to my father with my deep love and deep respect. He was the first one to understand what I was trying to say in it.

Introduction

Recent feminist theory has been much concerned with the Scylla of constructivism and the Charybdis of essentialism. In the former position, the reality of the feminine tends to be denied or disavowed, being considered as but the projection of cultural ideologies that are performatively acted out. In the latter position, the reality of femininity tends to be affirmed reactively or retrospectively, as the reified negation of its negation. This book aims to consider how both positions may be seen as perhaps compromised by too literalising a logic. In the case of constructivism, ideas, ideals and norms of the feminine are literalised in their performative enactment. And, in the case of essentialism, the signification of femininity is taken to equate literally or in a constative manner with what is signified. This work will offer both a critique of theories of the performative and detailed readings of literary texts, particularly in terms of a poetics of the real, in order to explore how we may move beyond the difficulties that have just been outlined. In Western culture and beyond, the real has often been designated by the feminine. This pertains both to the materiality of nature, land, the body, and so on, and to the real in a more mystical sense as may be found in certain Lacanian accounts of femininity and strands of feminism concerned with the feminine divine.1 This work maintains the view that it is because the real is ultimately an undivided totality that this material/spiritual dichotomy arises on a cultural level. What is explored in relation to literary texts is how figures of the feminine are repeatedly used to point to or show up the real but without this amounting to a determinable identity. In particular, what literary texts render uncertain is whether the feminine figures in question serve to refer to the real as something beyond them or whether the real is perceived as, in part, feminine. While it is a matter of interpretation without closure as to whether the feminine real is read literally, metaphorically or metonymically, this work will propose, reveal and explore an ostensive designation of the feminine real beyond the already widely considered performative modes of femininity. In order to address what is at stake in this ostensive gesture, it is necessary to confront the resistance towards the positing of a reality of the feminine. Conventionally, when not a signifier of the real, ‘woman’ has often been the signifier of loss, lack, absence and death. However, it may be said that this formulation

2

Introduction

serves to universalise and even make absolute what may be, more narrowly, specific instances of loss or lack. That is, it could be maintained that those who posit the non-being of the feminine are perhaps positing the non-being of the feminine for themselves. Here, the supposed non-being of the feminine could pertain to a masculinist structure of disavowal or entail forms of repression of the other so that, with such conditions, the emphasis then comes to fall on femininity as a fabrication, construction or fantasy of some kind. Ironically, it could be masculine lack that leads to the construction of femininity in terms of lack and groundlessness in accordance with an ideological inversion of the reality. It does, for instance, seem obvious or evident that some femininity is lost at male puberty, whilst femininity may be also culturally repressed. What is more enigmatic is the question of knowing what this femininity may be. If men traditionally have accorded themselves a paradoxically privileged position in discourses that attempt to define the feminine, this would seem to be because they might be able to claim a certain retrospective, even if uncertain, knowledge of what may have been lost whereas those who do not undergo loss of the feminine could find it difficult to specify what of themselves, what of their overall state of being, is feminine as such. Lacanian psychoanalysis tends to define the feminine in terms of jouissance which is taken to mean feminine sexuality. From a study of literary texts, it seems more apt to speak of a less specific joy-in-being and a freedom of spirit that may or may not be eroticised. To an extent, for I will also qualify this, a position emerges in which the masculine know of the feminine what they cannot know in the present (a consideration implied by deconstruction) while the feminine ‘know’ femininity without knowing what they know, as Lacan asserts.2 This would make femininity slip elusively between the cracks of sexual difference as it were: however, this position should be modified for it does not adequately account for what we may know of the feminine, as will be explained further on. Given that femininity arguably entails a certain capacity for joy-in-being, it may also give rise to covert forms of envy and resentment. This possibility of envy is something that is also registered by Lacanian psychoanalysis, as discussed in the first chapter of this book. In my view, this particular envy of another’s joy-in-being can help to explain the psychosomatic aetiology of misogyny, together with aspects of homophobia and racism (given the perception or stereotypes of gays as indeed gay, and other races as more feminine or childlike, irrespective of what may actually be the case). Eric Gans in Originary Thinking proposes that appropriative envy or resentment is a primary definitive trait of humanity where he tacitly equates humanity with a certain masculinity. Gans’s thesis strikes me as a highly reductive one, however, the reason that I draw attention to Gans’s work is because he maintains that an ostensive use of language arises in relation to this envy. He writes the following of the appropriative will and its forestalling: in violation of the dominance hierarchy, all hands reach out for the object; but at the same time each is deterred from appropriating it by the sight of

Introduction

3

all the others reaching in the same direction [ . . . ] The center of the circle appears to possess a repellent, that prevents its occupation by the members of the group, that converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign.3 The ostensive gesture concerns a use of language that attends to an awareness of a reality beyond the linguistic utterance. In this, it exceeds the performative whilst also not functioning in a descriptive manner. Gans gives the example of the cry of ‘Fire!’ in the present immediacy of a fire.4 Such a use of language is to alert us to what really is immediately the case without attempting to contain that reality within the linguistic formulation or assertion. It is precisely important that language in such instances be understood as pointing to an awareness or consciousness of what unavoidably or undeniably is beyond the utterance. Gans argues that this ostensive use of language arises for humans so that they can warn each other of dangers and the particular danger that Gans is preoccupied with, as already indicated, pertains to objects of envy or appropriative desire. For Gans, such objects are potentially prey and have to be screened off from or, as it were, ‘pre-sacrificed’ by the group for its harmony in order to minimise predatory behaviour. However, if we need to foreclose here, should it not be a case of condemning predatory behaviour rather than of excluding those that may be the objects of predatory behaviour? It could be said that the cross-cultural taboos against incest and cannibalism specifically concern the foreclosure of the predator as one who preys on his or her own kind. Furthermore, what is especially reductive in Gans’s theory is that he does not consider how admiration can be the effective antidote to envy and that an ostensive use of language may be used in other ways, for example, to point out something beautiful, striking or in some way noteworthy that the group may wish to appreciate together or exercise curiosity towards rather than appropriate in violent competition. What does interest me is the use of language to express a consciousness of what it does not contain. An ostensive use of language may be compared with the Levinasian usage of the grammatical form: il y a.5 According to Arthur Cools, for Levinas the il y a pertains to what precedes writing and, for Levinas, this is ‘the existential density of the void itself ’.6 It could be said that Levinas may thus be concerned with a presenting/absenting of absence that has some significance as regards a femininity posited in terms of absence. Regarding the question of femininity, it would not be a case of saying what a woman is or of performing, theatricalising, ritualising femininity but of admitting ‘there is femininity’: not as a generalisation but according to the specific eventful occasion of awareness. In addition, Heidegger’s notion of aletheia or unconcealment may be of relevance to the disclosure of reality at stake.7 However here, and with Gans’s thesis in mind, Levinas is aptly perplexed by Heidegger’s desire to cast ontological authenticity in terms of mineness.8 My book strongly resists the conflation of authenticity with mineness for political reasons as well as philosophically. Being certainly cannot be made a possession of the self. Whilst I note these possible

4

Introduction

tangents, they remain provisional and peripheral in that Heidegger and Levinas tend not to engage with questions of sexual difference. In this book I do affirm the feminine real, however, my argument aims to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism. My assumption is that you do not have to be a woman to be conscious of the feminine and that a consciousness of the feminine can itself be feminising for either sex. A real consciousness or awareness of the feminine may itself be considered to constitute a feminine consciousness or awareness. Rather than positing the feminine as an object of study (structurally, a rather masculinist enterprise), this book engages with a ‘consciousness of the feminine’, maintaining that double genitive, as a question of other-consciousness distinct from masculine or Hegelian self-consciousness. This is important, for I think that to be conscious of the reality of femininity in yourself is to turn round on yourself in a directing inwards of desire that could occasion madness. With respect to earlier points, the masculine blind spot may be said to be the study of the feminine through lack as an objectified thing whilst the feminine blind spot may be considered to be an inability to locate the feminine in oneself. A way around these aporias is thus to attend to a consciousness of femininity as a matter of conscious of the other, other-consciousness. The feminine may be conscious of the feminine-other if not of a femininity ‘in’ the self (and there is a rather queer inflection to this that the third chapter will entertain). In addition, an exploratory consideration that runs through this work is that the feminine pertains not to inwardness so much as to a laterality of inter-connection. So, this is what ‘decolonising gender’ may be said to be about: a non-possessive, non-self-conscious capacity to notice or be aware of the feminine and of the real more widely. This book investigates how a consciousness of the feminine may arguably be a matter of a less repressed consciousness than is usual for self-centred and individualistic middle class subjects, as could be a question of freedom of spirit. As already indicated, it also sets in play the notion that this awareness may be a matter precisely of our connection to others and to a reality that is fluid and uncontainable. Kelly Oliver’s orientation in The Colonization of Psychic Space is an important one, namely: ‘We need a theory that operates between the psyche and the social, through which the very terms of psychoanalysis are transformed into social concepts.’9 Oliver also aptly states: ‘We are not born with feelings of self-governance. Rather, they are the effect of sublimation and idealization.’10 However, I tend to disagree with Oliver’s argument that this individualising sublimation and idealisation is the clear antidote to depression where she maintains: ‘The inability to sublimate leads to depression and silence.’11 Whilst there may well be instances where this would be valid, it is also possible to consider depression conversely as a matter of excessive individuation, sublimation and idealisation as accompanies the loss of the feminine real, the loss of connectedness to the other, the excessive separation from collective being and being in the world, and the inability to love. I think Hamlet may be seen to treat of depression or melancholia precisely in terms of a loss of connection with the real, and will unfold this understanding in the sixth chapter of this book. Oliver treats of an alienated Western (American) society in which depression is highly

Introduction

5

pervasive. She also engages with Fanon’s work in terms of a melancholia that arises through colonial oppression. However, for Fanon the way out of colonially inflicted pathologies was not through sublimation but through socialist and grassroots liberation struggles. Moreover, it can be suggested that the dominant affect of Black Skin, White Masks is not so much one of melancholia as one of rebellious or protesting anger. ‘Under the paving stones, the beach’. This is one of the famous slogans of the student and worker revolution of May ’68 in Paris. This slogan captures the movement’s spirit of the rejection of the sacrifice of existence to the excessive work demands of capitalism together with a desire for connection with the real, ‘the beach’. I allude to May ’68 because I wish to address Roland Barthes’s famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ which he wrote in the moment just prior to the student and worker uprising. It is important to emphasise that Barthes’s essay precedes the moment of May ’68 because it would be a mistake to see this text as automatically symptomatic of or as partaking of the ’68 ethos. I would even go so far as to maintain that, if anything, this text could be part of what the students may have been reacting against as regards the hyper-imperative of a capitalist performativity felt to be claustrophobic and suffocating. The reason that I wish to consider this essay by Barthes is because it may be proposed that this essay is the one that serves to introduce J.L. Austin’s philosophy of the performative into French theory which in turn has had its considerable impact on the popular uptake of the performative within the American theoretical humanities. What Barthes writes is: The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered – something like the I declare of kings or I sing of very ancient poets . . . [For the modern scriptor] the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.12 That the ‘rare verbal form’ of the performative has become so disseminated testifies to the persuasive influence of Barthes’s essay. Yet have we been somewhat misled? This question is raised because the apparent strong appeal of Barthes’s position is the dispensing with authority when it could be contrarily argued that Barthes’s advocacy of the performative may well serve to enable an authoritarian logic, even if unintentionally so (as is most likely to be the case). Let us, then, deconstruct. In the above, Barthes emphasises a sovereignty of language, especially of the first person, the transcendental ‘I’. The sovereign here is not this or that human

6

Introduction

being but a faceless, impersonal position of authority. This could constitute a bureaucratisation and managerialisation of linguistic utterance where the ‘I’ acts as the bearer of an authority rendered untraceably enigmatic. Authority, generalised, becomes unlocatable. In addition, language is given an institutional power in that it institutes or inaugurates that of which it speaks. Barthes wants to say that this is anti-theological but I am not so sure. The order ‘light’ is given, and then there is light? Or, less magically, there is a ‘because I say so’ effect. That is, there is something logocentric at stake in this if the logos is given as the originating word or sign of origin. According language a precedence over reality can indeed foster an omnipotence of word and thought, one that can seek to literalise itself in an authoritarian manner. Barthes not only transfers an authorisation become groundless the linguistic medium but he also transfers a certain presence to language in that he maintains that the tense of the performative is the simple present. The fact that Barthes uses the simple present as a formula – ‘I declare’ rather than the present continuous ‘I am declaring’ – has certain implications. Language is thus cut off from the moment and process of its utterance in an idealisation of presence that can infer an ontologising of language itself. This is something that Adorno associates with the rise of authoritarianism in fascism, as I will consider in the fourth chapter.13 The word becomes habitual or eternal: now and forever, like a logo or brand of endless originality. In fact, Barthes’s theory could be subjected to a Marxist critique for it constitutes a certain commodification and fetishising of language. For Barthes, works of art are like commodities in that they appear mysteriously on the stage and appear to speak all by themselves owing nothing to productive processes outside them such as the labour of their historical authors. Barthes fails to address the difference between the author as a creative practitioner and authority figures. With this, he does not take into account in his essay the fact that creative writers have often written to contest the dogmas of authority and tradition. It may be said in Barthes’s favour that he was trying to work against the authoritarianism of a naturalisation of the ideological. The performative may serve to critique a constative essentialism in significant ways but it is not thereby necessarily emancipatory. As I have begun to indicate, the performative can be used to facilitate auto-legitimations that are beyond challenge and to promote ‘conformativity’. And, simply speaking, a writer who may work to idealise nature – or to give form to soma and affect – is not the same thing as an authority figure who tries to naturalise ideals. What is interesting about the way in which ‘The Death of the Author’ privileges a performative theory of writing is that this is done so as to foreclose the mentionability of a reality of the feminine. Barthes begins his essay by citing Balzac as follows: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instictive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’14 Barthes wants to say that this statement cannot be accorded any source. It could be said that any seemingly essentialist statement could have served Barthes’s purpose but I think it is telling that he chooses this very one. He seems to use

Introduction

7

the self-referentiality of the performative to deny not only the voice of the writer but a consciousness of the feminine, of the other, of the real. If he is indirectly seeking to make a case for a performativity of gender available to all, as well as a case for the critic as artist, I have no objection to such strategies which could be welcomed as democratising. What would be problematic, however, would be the attempt to render this performativity absolute through censoring any awareness of the feminine. This would imply a resentful attitude towards the existence of the feminine whereas the attitude in Balzac’s literary statement seems conversely a rather admiring one. Moreover, this statement about ‘woman herself ’ actually turns out to be about a paradoxical lack of essentiality given that the feminine is designated as unpredictable, variable, ungraspable: non-conformist. When Barthes has the critic or reader usurp the place of the creative writer, this could be seen as a retrospective colonisation of the origin, colonisation being such a belated claim to possession. That said, another possibility presents itself, and it is one that I would prefer to credit. It may be said that a so-called author is a receiver – witness, listener, reader and so on – to begin with. The ‘author’ may be thought of as a receiver of the signatures of all manner of beings. Here, the signature of the writer would be not a mark of ownership but an acknowledgement of receipt. This is a consideration attended to in a number of chapters of this work. Anti-colonial liberation theory and postcolonial theory have widely registered the significance of the political power of the performative. For instance, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Albert Memmi, Homi Bhabha and Edward Said have all significantly broached the performative formations of identity in colonial theatres of power. However, postcolonial theory has extensively treated this as a matter of critique rather than an occasion for celebration given material inequalities and questions of power. It may be said, generally speaking, that what enables such a critique is a sense of the gap between lived realities and performative enactments. Edward Said’s deliberate distancing of himself from post-structuralist thinking is something that he has explained in terms of his reluctance to give up on the author and on the real. Thus, for Said, the fact that the Orient is a construction with performative effects does not mean there are no Middle Eastern realities that we would be capable of noticing and the fabrication of the Orient cannot simply be attributed to the authorless workings and internalised legitimations of language. Said, in the context of affirming Derrida’s philosophical brilliance with some reservations, goes on to state: ‘a text is a process not a thing; this is one of the main arguments of Beginnings, especially as I was also trying to demonstrate the connection between a text’s materiality (as process) and the human effort expended on its behalf [ . . . ] our great failing as critics today is that we never seem to be able to reconnect, rejoin our analyses, our critefacts as I call them, to the society, agencies, or lives that produced them.’15 Said also states: ‘in Orientalism, I never talk about discourse the way that Foucault does in The Archeology of Knowledge, for example, as something that has its own life and can be discussed

8

Introduction

separately from the realm of the real [ . . . ] I try to make discourse go hand in hand with an account of conquest, the creation of instruments of domination, and techniques of surveillance that were rooted not in theory but in actual territory.’16 Thus, a performative politics that would admit to no reality beyond itself could serve to screen the fact that inadmissible motivations may be at stake, for instance, appropriation of the life sources or material resources of others. Albert Einstein, in his ‘Why War?’ correspondence with Freud, raises the question that war might be explained not in terms of the irrationality of the uncultured masses but in terms of the educated middle class’s loss of awareness of reality. He writes: ‘Experience proves that it is rather the so-called ‘‘Intelligentzia’’ that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form – upon the printed page.’17 This claim resonates strongly with Adorno’s claim that it was the intellectual classes that paved the way for fascism.18 War cannot simply be explained by aggression for its militarism is thoroughly programmed and its operation takes the form of tele-technoperformativity. What Jean-Luc Godard’s footage of war in his anti-war film Notre Musique makes strikingly evident in visual terms is that war consists of a split between ‘heads’ or leaders issuing commands and a mechanically performative and ritualistically programmed body of soldiers carrying out those orders.19 The leaders are thereby ‘absolved’ of the violence in not carrying it out themselves whilst the soldiers are absolved of responsibility in that they are merely performing orders. Godard’s film also serves to offer a critique of the self-referential postmodernist image as that which may actually serve to singularise history in the denial of the living histories of others. What further seems to be at stake in the alienation from reality that Einstein speaks of is the hypocritical attempt to justify the war machine through what Adorno refers to as a ‘jargon of authenticity’ and what Srinivas Aravamundan speaks of as a ‘theolinguistic supplement’.20 The theologising of language and of techno-performativity seems to serve as a would-be subliming operation or transcendence set up against the realities of life, death and violence. In her study of Palestinian literature, Clemency Schofield shows how women writers tend to position themselves against certain strands of the masculine nationalist discourses of idealism and saviour-heroism through more realistic and down-toearth approaches to the national struggle. Quoting Hanan Ashrawi, Schofield states: ‘Women’s insistence on ‘‘the preservation of life and rights’’ supplies a vital counterbalance to masculine war myths, myths that are inclined to overlook the damage war inflicts on vulnerable bodies and to subsume individual rights under national imperatives.’21 In this book, the emphasis is on how writing may direct our attention to questions of the real without affecting either to produce or to serve as representative of the reality in question. Regarding this, I am interested in certain aspects of Romantic and Modernist writing that have been somewhat eclipsed.22 I am more widely concerned with identifying a particular aesthetic, one that I call

Introduction

9

‘poetic realism’. This term is used to refer to literature that attempts to address the real not so much in an objectifying, representational way but in a manner that accords particular significance to states of consciousness. In keeping with the epistemic upheavals that have been introduced by quantum physics, what is at stake is not so much a case of adequate models of reality as quite radical insights into how it is that questions of the real are inseparable from consciousness. Thus, physicists such as Erwin Schro¨dinger and David Bohm came to develop a particular interest in consciousness – as might seem surprising for the hard sciences – with respect to a creative approach to the real.23 I am interested in the expressions of poetic realism because these offer suitable instances for an enquiry into the idea of reality as consciousness of reality (distinct from selfconsciousness). Whilst in constructivist terms, Judith Butler posits her logic of the performative in terms of the deformation of already given norms and forms, there is an aspect of literature, particularly of poetry, that is conversely prospective. Grigorio Agamben argues for the literary significance of potentiality as well as impotentiality in his Potentialities, and David Bohm affirms that the potential is the real.24 Here, potentialities that have no pre-existing or established form may be realised in moments of consciousness. Reality may be realisation, although in psychoanalytic literature this experience is also called ‘de-realisation’ because it is a disruption of the expected or of habitual consciousness. Freud’s experience of the Acropolis as unexpectedly and startlingly ‘for real’ is a classic example of this.25 The significance of this consciousness of reality is that it challenges the overly formalist or formulaic aspects of the performative as regards a literalisation of speech acts. Although this book offers a critique of the performative, this certainly does not amount to anything like a rejection of performativity but only to a contestation over the extent of its domain and an enquiry into its de-humanising and authoritarian dimensions. There are aspects of the performative that I much welcome and, with respect to this, it seems important to distinguish between the mechanically conformative and forms of the performative that may be considered to be theatrical and ironic.26 It may be said that what makes for this distinction is that in the former case there is no reality acknowledged outside the performative formula as non-event whereas ironic and theatrical forms of performativity depend on precisely a sense of the gap between performance and reality: the performance is understood to be merely a performance because there is an awareness and acknowledgement of a reality that it does not encapsulate. In the fourth chapter of this work, poetic realism is drawn on in an attempt to deconstruct deconstruction’s advocacy of the mechanically performative whilst in the last chapter I endorse Gayatri Spivak’s critique of Specters of Marx. I should point out that this by no means constitutes my overall approach to deconstruction, if there could be such a thing. Rather, I merely wish to tackle some of what I have found to be the more questionable aspects of Derrida’s generalisations of the spectral and the performative, in the hope of contributing to the debates he has initiated, and also to confront some of the more reductive deployments of a techno-performative deconstruction that may be said to ignore what in Derrida’s

10

Introduction

work actually seeks to resist closure. Beyond this, there is a more dynamic approach to deconstruction to be noted that I am not adequately able to engage with in this work due to the constraints of its selected lines of questioning.27 These lines of questioning involve the consideration that even though Derrida tends to posit diffe´rance as groundless, diffe´rance and deconstruction can perhaps only operate in deferred relation to a holism of the real. In this respect, I would not see diffe´rance in terms of, say, a single substance differing from itself but in terms of the rendering explicate of an implicate potential. In addition, it is worth noting in passing that in ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ Derrida entertains the notion that the journey of deconstruction could surprisingly be understood in terms of a desire to return to reality or in terms of a non-transcendental resurrection that is a touching down, a coming to land.28 This is presented in terms of the hatching of moths from cocoons, amongst other motifs, and so may further imply the fortuitous timing of worldly reunions. This work is also concerned with a critique of the Western Enlightenment as serving to foster an illusory ideal of individual autonomy that is at odds with postcolonial emphases on collective emancipation that attend to both gender and class in recognition of our differential interdependencies. Deniz Kandiyoti in ‘Identity and its Discontents: Women and Nation’ has persuasively written of how nationalisms manipulate women as boundarymarkers and also serve to configure woman in terms of backwardness (be this reviled or celebrated).29 Two counter-strategies may be proposed here. First, if femininity is a matter of liminality and thereby also connection for either sex, femininity may be deployed in a cross-border manner to contest delineations of the proper and property. Second, the masculinist positing of an explicitly or implicitly feminine authenticity as a matter of backwardness may be said to be an utter illusion or quite irrational. The feminine real cannot be said to be in the past: it is only ever that which may or may not accompany us. So, it is impossible to locate this reality in the past and there is, therefore, no authenticity to return to. What is at stake can but be a matter of what abides, even in an eclipsed or invisible way, in never becoming past. In the contestation of backward-looking nationalisms, what needs to be affirmed instead is the possibility of lateral, crossborder ties for the sake of unpredictable futures. It is important to point out and stress from the outset that the collective cannot be singularised and that attempts to do so are often destructive. I am not convinced by arguments that maintain that the singular does not refer to the single in that the desire to cling on to the very terminology of singularity seems suspect. If we want to refer to the creative or to the unique, why substitute another term? What is so compelling about ‘singularity’? The philosophical heritage of the term would seem to concern a monadism or monism of substance (being) that could be traced back to Leibniz in his attempt to negotiate the non-duality of Spinoza’s thinking. The singularity of the monad as single substance is not to be confused with non-duality. Non-duality pertains not to oneness as singular but rather to what is not yet separate and thus entails a potential for duality, plurality and difference. This is what I mean by a holism (rather than monism) underlying

Introduction

11

the advent of difference: I see the term diffe´rance as pertaining not only to an economy of traces but to the flickering, fluid underlying connections between what is spaced apart. The history of Enlightenment thinking is comprised of both its rational humanist and mystical strands. Regarding this, so-called humanism and socalled mysticism could be thought of as two sides of the same coin or sheet: the recto and the verso. Given such a perspective, it would be futile to deny one or the other side. It would also be futile to attempt to bring them onto the same plane for such a would-be totalisation would be a structural impossibility. This recognition constitutes a logic of complementarity that is explicitly addressed in the final chapter of this book, although there with respect to the Marxist attempt to invert Hegelian idealism. Perhaps it is necessary to accept that the real and the ideal operate in an inverse relation to each other without seeking to finalise any given over-turning. Apart from emphasising the inter-dependence of the collective against individualist illusions of autonomy, the trajectory of this book is to work past resistances to avowals of the feminine and the real in order to address the distinction between what works/performs as a woman and the woman who works. This is more generally a case of the distinction between labour as a commodity and labour as a matter of real lives. Positing labour as just a commodity in denial of realities serves to relegate real lives, especially feminine lives, to the status of the expendable. And, obviously, ecological considerations are pertinent here too. Whilst my main sources and influences may be specified in terms of literature, critical theory and postcolonial discourse, this work shares some tangents with the school of critical realism that takes off from the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar.30 These tangents include: an affirmation of the inter-connectedness of the ontological that firmly rejects a position of ontological monovalence; an affirmation of the reality of potentiality; and a concern with an ethics and politics of emancipation. I regard these positions inter-implicated. In feminist terms, both Carrie Hull and Catherine Belsey critique constructivist feminism through an appeal to the real, and my work may thus be considered as part of a wider impetus. Hull offers a persuasive account of the affinities that a constructivist feminism has with nominalism, regarding a categorical distrust of categories, and of the affinities that performative theories have with the conditionings and ritualism of behaviourism.31 However, in accusing Butler of nominalism and behaviourism, she overlooks Butler’s engagements with Hegelian self-consciousness and the psychoanalytic unconscious. Hull’s approach is deliberately generalised, as it argues for the efficacy of sexual categorisation. However, I still think we have to maintain the gap between epistemological categories (as indeed constructions) and the ontological, as well as to take on objections to objectifications. Awareness of being cannot just be given in an objective form. Regarding the above, my own work is concerned with the need for the close engagement of readings. In her critique of constructivist feminism, Belsey maintains:

12

Introduction In Judith Butler’s case, what looked at first like the dream of freedom turned out in practice to be a form of determinism [ . . . ] Cultural constructivism reckons without the real, however, and the something missing in culture itself which makes thought go on endlessly. The sense of an alterity beyond culture, pushing and pulling it out of shape, permits us to escape the cultural determinism and the cycle of repetition.32

I tend to agree with this broad assessment as my first chapter will hopefully substantiate with further attention to questions of resistance. Regarding a feminist approach to questions of the real, this book pays particular attention to the work of Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. As implied by Belsey’s statement, reality cannot be adequately defined inasmuch as it constantly upsets the definitive. It pertains to an elusive creativity beyond us and yet in which we may partake, and it is this that perhaps serves to both dissolve our knowledges and permit new coalescences, concresences and constellations. I will end this brief introduction with two quotations. The first is from J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and is a statement made by Susan, the colonial female subject, with reference to the colonised subject. The second is from Fadwa Tuqan’s autobiography and concerns the conditioning of her upbringing against which she had to rebel in order to emancipate herself as both a woman and a poet. ‘I say he’s a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal. I say he’s a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman.’33 The woman had to forget the word ‘no’ existed in the language, except when she repeated, ‘There is no God but God’, in her ablutions and prayers. ‘Yes’ was the parroted word instilled in her from infancy, to become embedded in her consciousness for the rest of her life.34 So, let us get going.

1

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece. Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’1 Freud placed in the forefront of ethical enquiry the simple relation between man and woman. Strangely enough, things have not been able to move beyond that point. The question of das Ding is still attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping, at the centre of our desire. I would say – you will forgive the play on words – that we need to know what we can do to transform this dam[n]-age into our ‘dame’ in the archaic French sense, our lady. Jacques Lacan, Se´minar VII2

The episteme is out of joint. This work begins with such a fracture. In Twilight of the Clockwork God, John David Ebert makes the point that the Jains who continue to survive in modern India today maintain an ancient cosmology that in its beginnings is contemporary with Minoan Crete. He likens the views of the Jains to the mythopoeic image of Gaia upheld by today’s scientists, including Brian Swimme, and he writes: ‘Both the Jains’ image of the cosmos as a Goddess and Swimme’s autopoeic universe are quite different from the clocks and steam engines of classical physics, for they envision a universe that is alive and sentient, bursting with creativity [ . . . ] In the mechanistic universe, there is nothing new under the sun and no real creativity ever takes place.’3 Ebert’s book documents the ending of the mechanistic episteme and constitutes a platform for the ideas of contemporary groundbreaking thinkers across a range of disciplines including mathematics, biology, cosmology, medicine and psychology. In his introduction to the book, the physicist F. David Peat writes: John David Eberts’s Twilight of the Clockwork God is a valediction, a funeral oration to a dream that died [ . . . ] This part-dream part-nightmare should have been laid to rest by the great scientific revolutions of the early twentieth century, culminating in the current explosion of interest in Chaos Theory. Today we are no longer passive observers of a cosmos created by a Clockwork God but full members of a participatory universe. Our abilities

14

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud to predict and control the world are strictly limited. And we know that only those systems which are open and responsive to their environments will, in the long run, survive. [ . . . ] Yet in other areas of life, the mechanical universe keeps ticking on. Its ticks can be heard in our schools, hospitals, legislatures and seats of government. (p. ix–x)

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault delineates the anthropocentric episteme of late modernity in terms of the figure of man as a self-positing empiricotranscendental doublet within a deterministic analytic of finitude.4 He further dramatically predicts that this episteme, with its privileged configurations of, we could say, techno-scientific humanism, is nearing its end. While this work of Foucault’s created a stir at the time of its publication, the humanities seem not to have quite registered how pertinent Foucault’s words may be from the point of view of the sciences, as disseminated by Ebert, Peat and others. Rather, it is in the theoretical humanities that a certain ideology of techno-humanism has seemed to flourish or at least maintain itself, both overtly as well as in not so obvious ways. What I wish to do in this chapter is first to explore how the widespread performative theory of gender depends on a pervasive logic of anthropocentric techno-rationality, a position that serves to generate a certain Calibanisation, or rendering monstrous, of racial difference. I also wish to address the possible ontological reality of the feminine, that which is beyond the performative, in terms of an ethics of the collective, that is, in terms of friendship, loyalty, solidarity: sumud.

The episteme is out of joint: the idealist-literalist continuum Signatures of all things I am here to read James Joyce, Ulysses5 De Signatura Rerum [The Signature of All Things] Jacob Boehme6 Peut-on-aimer la sculpture Shona? La sculpture Shona n’existe pas. Pierre-Laurent Sanner, Revue Noir, 287

I will begin with some anecdotes concerning what I wish to refer to as ‘the idealist-literalist continuum’. Some years ago, I had a conversation with an art restorer from England about Shona sculpture. He confessed to me that this sculpture made him feel queasy because he saw it as monstrous. This surprised and puzzled me because I do not myself see Shona sculpture in this way, and it had never occurred to me that it could be seen in such a way. Some years later, I had another conversation about Shona sculpture, this time with a European sculptress. She, too,

From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

15

said she found this sculpture unsettling because she, she too, saw it as monstrous. ‘How so?’ I queried, and went on to suggest: ‘Surely you are looking at it far too literally?’ The perception of monstrosity may be said to be an effect of a certain literalism. This literalism is not merely an emphasis on or belief in a literal reality, but that which either attempts to literalise or materialise an ideal or, else, seeks to idealise what is seen as a literal reality. This idealising-literalising logic can be explained with reference to the figure of the double, the do¨ppelganger. ‘Qui parmi nous n’est pas un homo duplex?’8 writes Baudelaire. Who, amongst us, is not a double? If we are all doubles, this is obviously not literally the case, but only true in a manner of speaking. However, in a literature of the double the duplicity of the self is bizarrely actualised: Jekyll and Hyde.9 Moreover, the way in which this literalisation occurs is often through the expression of a wish or desire that comes true whereby dreamy words turn into nightmarish realities. For example, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll, speaking of his and man’s duality, wishes that he could attain a perfect singularity of being where this wish gives rise to the deformed form of Hyde. Or, in the case of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Dorian wishes that he might remain forever young and change place with his portrait. His magical speech act is all that is needed to effect the deed. What is desired in these instances would seem to be an invariance of form, a perfect permanence, a permanent perfection, which in realising itself brings about a deformed other ‘self ’ but a ‘self ’ that is neither an other nor a self. Although what effects this is an act of speech, a magical omnipotence of thought, it is also the strange case that doubles are often presented to us as botched scientific experiments. Dorian Gray is said to constitute a scientific experiment, first on the part of Lord Henry while he comes to take himself as an experiment, as Hyde is for Jekyll. Desiring perfect self-identity, desiring to be the origin of himself, scientific man experiments on himself to produce a monstrous clone. ‘Qui parmi nous n’est pas un homo duplex?’ writes Baudelaire. Who is not a double man, a male duplex? Who: amongst us? My hypocrite, my twin, my brother? A literature of the double is a bachelor literature, a literature of the same-sexed who wish to remain single. The double is, at once, father and son. In H.G. Wells’s ‘The Story of the Late Mr Evlesham’10 (sham self/selves), a young man aspires to become the fatherly figure he worships, a famous scientist. Expressing this wish, he is then drugged to wake up to find himself trapped in the aged body of the illustrious scientist, while the father-figure then appropriates the youthful self. Father as son, son as father, word made flesh. The desire for self-immortalisation in these fictions of the double reveals itself to be a death drive. Doubles commit suicide. This unintended effect of an intended permanent perfection, perfect permanence, shows that what man takes to be ‘mortal nature’ is not, is not mortal nature, that is. The inverted lesson of the double is that what is taken to be merely dead or deadly is in truth what makes for life. A literature of the double is not only a fiction. In fact, that is what it says: this is no fiction. There is a scientific literature of the double to be found in a certain discourse of genetic technology, to which we can now turn.

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From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

Genetic research, in some ways, relies on a logic of the double. The presence of the absence of a gene (say, Hyde) can give rise to a mutation that serves to establish the normativity of its presence (say, Jekyll). Or, as Enrico Coen writes: It’s like learning a language backwards, removing words and seeing which objects disappear. If I breed a lot of normal red-flowered Antirrhinum (snapdragon) plants and find a mutant with white flowers, I can say a gene signifying red has been altered. If I find a bald mutant mouse, I might conclude that a gene signifying hairs has been altered. In all these cases, the effect is the opposite of what the gene normally signifies because it reflects a defect in the gene.11 Simply, the norm is established by means of its mutant opposite, its abnormal double. Matt Ridley in his ambitious book, Genome, wishing to tell the story of various genes, finds that he is repeatedly dependent on telling us the stories of diseases, which is something that seems to frustrate him. Much as he wishes to separate the healthy from the defective, the defective returns to plague the normal and healthy. (It is not unlike Freud’s self-defeating attempts to separate the death drive from the pleasure principle, in a work which also recapitulates a scientific fiction of the double.) Ridley maintains that his own capital rule is (a rule given in capital letters): ‘GENES ARE NOT THERE TO CAUSE DISEASES’.12 It is a rule that Ridley repeatedly finds himself compelled to repeat: ‘Remember: GENES ARE NOT THERE TO CAUSE DISEASES’ (p. 263). But what if, following the warnings of a literature of the double, the desire for perfect health revealed itself to be a death drive? What Ridley wants to say is that: ‘Genes R us’. Not only this, the cover of his book features the cut-out shapes of chromosomes so that pinkish and orangey shades from the page beneath the cut-outs show through. When the cover is turned, we see that the pinkish and orangey chromosome blobs turn into the photograph of the face of the author, Ridley himself. This might be: ‘Genes are me’. The subtitle of the book is The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. While the approach is clearly intended to be jokey, Ridley seems, rather narcissistically, to find himself elected to be the one human being to write the autobiography of the human being, the word of DNA made flesh. In the opening chapter, he states: Among six thousand million people on the planet, I was privileged enough to be born in the country where the word [DNA] was discovered. In all of the earth’s history, biology and geography, I was born just five years after the moment when, and two miles from the place where, two members of my own species discovered the structure of DNA and hence discovered the greatest, simplest and most surprising secret in the universe. Mock my zeal if you wish; consider me a ridiculous materialist for investing such enthusiasm in an acronym. But follow me on a journey back to the very origin of life, and I hope I can convince you of the immense fascination of the word. (pp. 11–12)

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DNA, then, is or appears as the logos, original word of creation, and although Ridley speaks of himself as a zealous materialist, his approach to DNA is yet a highly onto-theological one, that is, specifically with respect to the patriarchal interpretations of religion. DNA, that chemical word, would seem to be both a literalisation of the original logos or godhead and a literality to be worshipped as such. Since there is not the time to explore Ridley’s literalism in any detail, just a few indications of it will be given. Whilst Ridley admits that to think of DNA as a blueprint, an architectural plan, would be ‘too literal’ and too technological (in his words, ‘blueprints are too literal for genetics, because each part of a blueprint makes an equivalent part of a machine’, p. 7), he nonetheless goes on to state the following: Entering the new world of genetic embryology sometimes feels like a Tolkien novel; it requires you to learn a massive vocabulary. But – and here is the wonder of it – you do not need to learn a new way of thinking. There is no fancy physics, no chaos theory or quantum dynamics, no novelties. Like the discovery of the genetic code itself, what seemed initially to be a problem that could only be solved with new concepts turns out to be a simple, literal and easily understood sequence of events. (p. 184, my emphasis) With this deterministic literalism, what is bracketed off here, foreclosed, are questions of creativity – the existence of such a thing and what it might be – that both quantum physics and literature might serve to give us novel ways of thinking about. Ridley’s fixation on the idealist-literalism of the word could be thought of as logo-centric, where ‘logo’ would translate in the capitalist sense of the brand and branding. Throughout his book, a book intended to inform the general public, Ridley speaks of DNA as a recipe, a set of instructions or an instruction manual, a digital programme which gives rise to a step-by-step process of mechanical selfassembly.13 Enrico Coen, who is not a science journalist like Ridley but an actual scientist in the field of genetic research, devotes his book, The Art of Genes: How Organisms Make Themselves, to explaining how such popular metaphors are misleading. Coen states: When someone is being creative there need be no separation between plan and execution. We can have an intuitive notion of someone painting a picture or composing a poem without following a defined plan. Yet the outcomes of such creative processes – the painting or the poem – are not random but highly structured. In this respect, I want to suggest that human creativity comes much closer to the process of development [of organisms] than the notion of manufacture according to a set of instructions, or the running of a computer programme. (p. 13) Although Ridley admits that there is no central authority (‘dictator’ it could be said) in the making of organisms (p. 175), unlike Coen, he yet subscribes to the

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From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud

notion that DNA constitutes a preformed word or text that serves to instruct the mechanical reproduction of organisms. This logo-centric conception is implicitly a phallogocentric one too, problematically since of course both maternal and paternal DNA combine in the making of organisms. (At one point, Ridley tries to persuade us that paternal genes work to colonise the female body for paternal reproduction, omitting to explain at this point how and why it is that the maternal egg and maternal genes serve to start the development of the organism: that is, if it were just a matter of the male colonising the female for his auto-reproduction, why would the maternal genes start up the growth of the embryo, which is what they are said to do?)14 Ridley cites Richard Dawkins as follows: ‘We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment’ (p. 123). From Coen’s point of view, this is a falsification, one that well might fill us with astonishment. Coen writes: We naturally equate development with someone consistently following instructions. But in my view this is misleading . . . The process of development is much more like making an original than manufacturing copies, in the sense that the final product, the adult, is not there from the beginning but gradually emerges through a highly interactive process in which each step builds on and reacts to what went before . . . [T]he fertilised egg has no detailed sense of what the final picture will look like. (p. 179) So, instead of a process of mechanical self-assembly, we have a creative autoresponding process in which form as form is not pre-given for the ‘original form’ is the emergence of the creative process and is original inasmuch as there is this process. For what is to follow, it needs to be pointed out that creativity is capable of accommodating reproducibility, necessarily so, but that reproducibility as merely reproducibility is not creative although errors in the copying process can always occur. In the publishing world, these errors are aptly called literals. It could also be noted that non-mechanistic reproducibility, that which engages the attention of contemporary science, is holographic in nature, the whole being mirrored in the parts. I wish now to turn to a consideration of how what has been raised so far might be considered in terms of the ways in which an idealising-literalising logic continues to replicate itself in the philosophical inheritances of the theoretical humanities, with further respect to questions of self-authorisation and what, in tandem with self-authorisation, is said to be unspeakable. Here, the unspeakable may be a category used to subsume those unentitled or unauthorised to speak.

The unspeakable speaks: ‘ . . . ’ Would that be a marvel, a fright, an impudence, a cry in the night, an incredibility, a stroke of inspiration, an unwelcome interruption, a surprise conception, a moment of utter self-doubt? Do you hear it? How do you hear it?

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It is specifically Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone that is to be engaged with in this section, where it could be pointed out that in the play, Antigone, Antigone is referred to by the chorus as the monstrous, raw, cannibalistic,15 as in European racist discourses Africans sometimes are so designated. Butler also considers Antigone in terms of the unspeakable. At this outset, I should state that, having written on ‘Postcolonial Antigones’ with reference to the Lacanian and Hegelian readings of Antigone, I came to approach Butler’s use of Antigone with some curiosity as to whether it would reflect or accord with an anti-colonial logic or site of resistance as regards the anti-colonial significance that has been strangely accorded to this literary figure.16 As Nelson Mandela states: ‘It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle.’17 Moreover, as mentioned by Elisabeth Roudinesco, underlying Lacan’s reading of Antigone is the fact that he happened to be partially addressing his step-daughter, Laurence Bataille, whilst she was in prison for her activism in support of the FLN during the Algerian liberation struggle.18 Thus, what is to follow is inflected with these anti-colonial concerns in mind. At the outset of Antigone’s Claim, Butler states that in coming to engage with Antigone with the displaced political status of Antigone in mind, she found herself surprised then to find how canonical readings of Antigone do not attribute a political significance to her figure but rather tend to treat her as a ‘prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it’19 (p. 2, emphasis in text), and this is to be Butler’s emphasis. In brief, Butler attends to what she calls ‘kinship trouble’, regarding, I think, a governing capitalist logic of a politics of the ‘same kind’ or abstract equality. Towards the end of this chapter, I will re-configure this question in terms of an ethical condition of the potential for the co-existence of what cannot be standardised. Antigone’s Claim begins with what sounds like an emphatic claiming of Antigone. In less than two pages we get: ‘I began to think about Antigone, as I wondered . . . ’, ‘It seemed to me that Antigone . . . ’, ‘But who is this ‘‘Antigone’’ that I sought to use . . . ?’, ‘As I hope to show . . . ’, ‘But let me recount my steps for you’, ‘I am no classicist . . . ’, ‘I began to read Antigone . . . ’, ‘I found something different . . . what I had anticipated’, ‘What struck me first . . . ’. What follows is that Antigone is somewhat made over into Butler’s own image as she is turned into a heroine – or, as it turns out to be, hero – of the performative speech act and emerges as something of an alibi for queer families or non-normative familial social arrangements. As will be seen, my concern with this is that Antigone may pertain to what cannot be personalised or privatised, a broad question of collective existence. Butler begins her exploration of Antigone through attending to what she calls ‘Antigone’s claim’. While Antigone breaks the law in burying her outlaw brother, what especially interests Butler is that Antigone claims to have done this deed, she lays some kind of possessive claim to it. Significantly, the word ‘claim’ conflates an act of speech with an originating moment of ownership. Butler’s argument serves to suggest that the unpublished work cannot really be said to have an author, and that authorship is established through publication in the arena of

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the law. She writes: ‘In fact, the deed seems to wander throughout the play, threatening to become attached to some doers, who could not have done it, disowned by others who might have done it. The act is everywhere delivered through speech acts [ . . . ] The only way that the doer is attached to the deed is through the linguistic assertion of the connection’ (p. 7, my emphasis). Is that so? Or might it be that when we write we cannot help signing selves, idioms, existences, the impression of others on us, irrespective of any claims to copyright? Butler also writes of Antigone’s claim: ‘she answers a question that is posed to her from another authority [ . . . ] what I [she] will not deny is my [her] deed – a deed that becomes possessive, a grammatical possession [ . . . ] another deed in the very act of claiming, the act of publishing one’s deed, a new criminal venture [ . . . ]’ (p. 8). What is to be noted for further consideration is that authorship is firmly conflated in the above with official authorisation: the performative speech act specifically has the function of authorisation, the rendering authoritative of authoring. Origination thus becomes a matter of making a retrospective and possessive claim to originality (‘a new criminal venture’, an originary injustice, an origin of injustice). This laying of a retrospective claim to the origin is very much a colonising, capitalising move, one that serves – in the moment it is made – to disentitle the possible co-originality of others or to thwart a potential sharing of sources. Antigone’s supposed claim would seem to be an officialising speech act that linguistically – through ‘grammatical possession’ – actualises ownership, possibly an adoptive process. Contentious as this colonising Antigone may be, for Butler the fascination with Antigone seems to lie in the criminal or defective replication of a patriarchal and logo-centric claim to originality, one itself that could be considered criminal and defective. She writes: ‘Interestingly enough, both Antigone’s act of burial and her verbal defiance become the occasions on which she is called ‘‘manly’’ by the chorus, Creon and the messengers’ (p. 8). Thus, Butler perceives a claim to originality as manly, where the further issue is that while the possessive rhetorical claim may well be manly (the Joycean issue of paternity as a legal fiction), the actuality of creativity may well be beyond this. In the play itself, when Ismene says she will claim to have done the deed too, Antigone explicitly rejects this as mere performative rhetoric as opposed to committed, albeit unpublicised, activism: ‘Who did the work? . . . / I have no love for a friend who loves in words alone’ (lines 610–12, my emphasis). It is thus a case of someone claiming to have participated in a work, an act of labour, political or otherwise, after the event, when they at the time of urgency or emergence they did nothing. Or, vaguely, it could relate to the fetishisation of the radical as after-image, icon, fashion. What could be added to Butler’s above observations is that Antigone is also contradictorily perceived to be too much of a woman by the manly Creon. If she is seen as manly in her behaviour by some, this presumes that to deny authority is the same thing as to usurp it. Although this can be the case, it is not necessarily so, for instance, when it is a matter of acknowledging the gap between credited truth and reality. For example, I may say I doubt the truth of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but I would not

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thereby be constructing another truth so much as raising the question of the adequation of said truth to reality. In the contortions over ‘Antigone’s claim’, what Butler seems to be eager to do is to give the rhetorical speech act precedence over an action that would otherwise precede it so that the speech act appears to be the originating phenomenon. This is a matter of attempting to defend the logo-centric theory of performativity, together with the theory of gender as performativity, from the ways in which Antigone and Antigone might occasion a call for a re-thinking of such theories. When Antigone acts to bury her brother, she acts to affirm his existence, his having existed, and with this her own existence in that the brother and the sister are conjoined, co-conjured, interdependent, similar but not identical beings. This simple and double affirmation of existence just is, or unavoidably arises, because Creon’s edict against any recognition of Polynices’ death serves to deny that he ever existed: it is as if he never existed. Shifting this to another context briefly, the concerns might be made more intelligible through opening them out onto the Argentinian situation of the Disappeared and their relatives (los desaparecidos, and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Mothers of the May Square) where this essay has, in particular, the work of Catherine Grant in mind.20 This historical occurrence is being drawn on to make two points. First, it is often women who come to the fore to protest against such disappearances, erasures or disavowals of being. Second, with respect to the photographs of the Disappeared, offered as proof of the existence of those photographed, while they are haunting they cannot be treated as if they were merely phantasmatic representations: the point is that they are not mere representations or copies for they show the undeniable reality of one who has uniquely come into existence. In the play, Antigone, there is much emphasis on undeniability to be noted. These are some of the striking instances: ‘He’s my brother – deny it as you will – / Your brother too’ (lines 55–6); ‘She’s the one – she did it single-handed’ (l.425); ‘She’s the one. With my own eyes I saw her.’ (l. 447); ‘There is that plain and clear’ (l. 449); ‘She stood up to it all, denied nothing’ (l. 484); ‘I did it. I don’t deny a thing’ (l. 501). Butler goes on to consider the readings of Antigone offered by Hegel and Lacan. As she observes, Lacan associates Antigone with an ineffaceable what is, while (as Antigone’s Claim does not seem to take up), Hegel associates her justice with a difficult ‘just is-ness’, so to speak, that his reading works to reject. Butler writes: But consider that, pace Lacan, Antigone in standing for Polynices, and for her love of Polynices, does not simply stand for the ineffaceable character of what is. First of all, it is the exposed body of her brother that she seeks to cover, if not to efface, by her burial of dust. Second, it seems that one reason that standing for her brother implicates her in a death in life is that it abrogates precisely the kinship relations that articulate the Lacanian symbolic, the intelligible conditions for life (p. 53).

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In place of the double affirmation, double avowal, we are given a double negation, double disavowal, where the ineffaceable or undeniable is inverted into what is not and what is not: here, it is the sister (not symbolic father) who is said to efface or erase the outlaw brother, and the symbolic father who then presents himself to effect the absence of the sister, the feminine becoming ‘death in life’. It is also said twice in Antigone’s Claim, that Antigone’s act is one of rivalrous competition with her brother. It is said that she ‘replaces’ and ‘territorializes’ the brother, usurping masculinity as she ‘idealizes’ it, with her act appearing to ‘establish her rivalry and superiority to Polynices’, in that Antigone sees a glory in her act (p. 11); and it is further said ‘Antigone assumes Creon’s sovereignty, even claims the glory destined for her brother’ (p. 23). First of all, it is rather difficult to see the fate of Polynices, the absolute outcast, as a glorious one. Second, this reading implies that Antigone is only opportunistically and callously faking compassion for the brother, outcast, exile, refugee (if he is more truly her rival whom she wishes to efface) for the sake of the glorification of her own reputation in sovereign terms. So, a rivalrous, territorialising, capitalising Antigone emerges. Butler is hardly going along with the play as Sophocles wrote it, if the play is about the love between brother and sister, as most would accept as being the case, but her greater concern is to play off Hegel and Lacan against each other. She explains that there are aspects of each of their readings that she wishes to refute and aspects of each that she wishes to retain and re-work. Schematically, for the sake of brevity, what could be said to emerge is the following: 1 What Butler wishes to reject of Hegel’s reading is his alignment of Antigone with the feminine (e.g. p. 36), and what Butler wishes to retain of his reading is his confinement of Antigone to the sphere of the family (not the political sphere but that of ‘the prepolitical subject’, p. 35). 2 What Butler wishes to reject of Lacan’s theoretical framework is his privileging of the symbolic over the social (p. 19), and what she wishes to retain of it is Lacan’s notion of inheritance in terms of the compulsion to repeat an ‘aberrant signifying chain’ (p. 58). Condensing this yet further, putting this together, what is possibly being put forward, as the text could be drawn on further to support, is that a masculinised daughter-figure is to take the place of the father, patriarchal origin, serving to institute socially her own aberrant signifying chain. This ‘manly daughter’ is one who will not merely take the symbolic position of the father (whereby presumably nothing would change) but be capable of becoming (something like?) a father in social actuality: hence, possibly, Butler’s semi-identification of Antigone with lesbian families. Maybe it is that, for the first time in history, women will be fathers, actually so. Butler disdains what she considers to be a liberal position of empty formalism: [C]onsider the liberal gesture in which one maintains that the place of the father and the place of the mother are necessary, but hey, anyone of any

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gender can fill them. The structure is purely formal, its defenders say, but note how its very formalism secures the structure against critical challenge. (p. 71) What thus seems to be sought is something more literal than this formalism. It would be something more than merely acting out the position of ‘mother’ or ‘father’, but – in this context of gay and lesbian families – what? A transsexual surgery of phallic mother and enwombed father? Is the desire to do away with gendered roles or gendered roles, or even both? Leaving aside these questions of disavowal for the moment, on the one hand, what seems to be at stake is the desire for social recognition of gay families, beyond legal formalities: well and good, this deserves support, but how extending that institution of private property to gay families will end the Western logic of the family and bring about wider social transformations begs a number of questions. And then, there is the gay family and the gay family, recalling the irrepressible refrain of an old gay anthem: ‘We are family! All my sisters – and me!’ If this were to be a more constructive engagement and less of a critique, I would have liked to pursue inversions of the private and the public, though it could briefly be said that we all leave our original families in the desire to discover others, familiar-unfamiliar associations beyond ‘the family’, sympathetic strangers of various kinds. On the other hand, or on another level, there seems to be some bid in Butler’s work on the family towards becoming the aberrant heir of the Western (or at least Hegelian) philosophical tradition. It will be necessary to look more closely, albeit selectively, at the unfoldings of Butler’s somewhat puzzling claims. Butler notices that Lacan protests against Hegel’s inability to read the poetic (p. 46). It seems true that Hegel is inept in this regard, deaf to the poetic. Hegel serves to refuse the poetic logic of the play – as relies on understanding the actual significance of the brother-sister relationship – in favour of his own ideological stakes. Put another way, Hegel’s reading of the play concerns the endorsement of an intellectual authority at the expense of the workings of creative intelligence. The quantum physicists, David Bohm and David Peat, formulate an astute and very helpful distinction between the intellect and intelligence as follows: The word intelligence is often used in a general and fairly loose way today, but some of its original force can be found in the Latin root intelligere, which carries the sense of ‘to gather in between.’ [ . . . ] In this sense, intelligence is the mind’s ability to perceive what lies ‘in between’ and to create new categories. This notion of intelligence, which acts as the key creative factor in the formation of new categories, can be contrasted with the intellect. The past participle of intelligere is in fact intellect, which could then be thought of as ‘what has been gathered’. Intellect, therefore, is relatively fixed, for it is based primarily on an already existing scheme of categories. While the intelligence is a dynamic and creative act of perception through the mind, the intellect is something more limited and static.21

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The free play of the creative intelligence is said to be capable of generating and dissolving categories, while the intellect fixes categories into, thus, their reproducibility. What I should like to stress is the temporal distinction: the intellect is belated or retrospective in relation to the intelligence which depends on a capacity for conjoining and synchronicity. What this is thus pointing towards is that the brother-sister relationship concerns a synchronicity that is displaced by a privileged logic of inheritance in the name of paternity. Butler and other commentators on Antigone puzzle over the unique significance that Antigone accords to her brother when she says that while she could get another husband, she could not find another brother. Whilst this is often treated as a social, ethical and familial question, I think it could be understood on a poetic level. Where the diachronic axis of signification concerns substitution, the synchronic maintains a resistance to substitution through an intuition of ‘the all-at-once’. If Polynices were a signifier, he would be the word that stands for the value of each word and thus all words and their possibilities of combination beyond the logic of substitution as governed by exchange value and successive, singular linearity. Butler aptly picks up on instances where Hegel’s reading clearly departs from Sophocles’ play: the play itself is not being read. It would even be possible to go so far as to suggest that Hegel manages completely to invert the original Antigone in forcing Antigone to become the representative of family values, that is, family in the domestic sense, where Hegel requires an opposition between family and state, private sphere and public sphere. What Butler does not point out with respect to Hegel’s reading of Antigone in the Phenomenology is that the moment at which Hegel feels it necessary to turn to a reading of Antigone is when he is thinking about individual and universal proprietorship, implicitly an ethics of capitalism. Hegel introduces the question as follows: ‘Suppose the question is: Ought it to be an absolute law that there should be property?’22 Just ‘Suppose’? His discussion of absolute laws, the conflict between the authoritarian Creon and the rebellious Antigone being over the absolutism of the law, follows on from this. In short, it could be proposed that Antigone needs to be entirely re-written in order to erase the opposition to the bourgeois family of man, man’s definition of himself in terms of ownership, and the generalisation of this to the proprietorship of the Western family of Man. What could be at stake in Hegel’s ideology is a rather violent self-contradiction: what becomes proper to man, his property, his attribute attributable to him, is . . . the feminine. Thus, Hegel refutes the play by explicitly trying to make of Antigone a kind of interiorised goddess, goddess of the domestic or a domestic goddess, that favoured trope of a certain right. It could be added that what a partial internalisation of or intersection with the feminine may more accurately produce is a form of self-irony, as will be explained in the next chapter, with respect to Foucault’s re-working of Kant. As indicated, where Butler takes issue with Hegel is not really over his alignment of Antigone with the family (the private sphere of the family, whatever its variable social organisations might be, or more broadly an economy of the domestic, the economic as the domestic) but over his treating of her as a woman. Throughout her own reading, Butler is at pains to emphasise and maximise a

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certain masculinisation of Antigone. Here are some of the many instances: ‘Antigone is to love no man . . . but in some senses she is also a man’ (p. 61, as in the sense of ‘butch’ or what others? And what, then, of Antigone’s feelings for Haemon, as well as for her brothers and father?); ‘Antigone is the brother, the brother is the father’ (p. 67); ‘she leads him’ (p. 61, the daughter comes before the father); ‘She has thus taken the place of nearly every man in her family. Is this the effect of the words that are upon her?’ (p. 62, well, it is, at least, the effect of Butler’s words upon her). That said, what this reveals is the impasse of Hegel’s position: a masculine attempt to co-opt the feminine merely converts the feminine into more of the masculine. That is to say, the dialectic of this possessiveness inevitably fails. Moreover, this could also indicate that there is something possibly feminine about freedom of spirit: not just for women but for everyone. Or, that which we could call ‘feminine’ here is that which escapes colonisation by the properly masculine. Equally, it would be possible to conduct this debate in non-gendered terms through just referring to Antigone as a signifier for freedom of spirit. Regarding Butler’s attempt to masculinise Antigone, you could possibly call Antigone androgynous – and, in this, resistant to androcentric determinations of sexual difference – but not really manly, the two things not being the same: where the former affirms the existence of the feminine, together with the masculine, the latter emerges as the will-to-negate this. A quick way of illustrating this difference would be to refer to the distinction between Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). In Hall’s text the heroine as hero is a woman called Stephen Gordon who, believing in the superiority of the masculine, identifies herself with the male sex and affects male drag. She literalises herself as a man through performance: ‘I say I’m a man, claim this sex, and – lo and behold – I am as good as being a man’ (the only drawback being, [s]he discovers, that she cannot father children). Woolf ’s Orlando is conversely a lad who turns into a lady who is flirtatiously feminine whilst retaining her former laddishness. This, in a text written to challenge patrilineal inheritance, is accomplished through a mockery of masculine auto-generation: ‘Truth! Truth! Truth! . . . he was a woman.’23 The difference between these two texts can also be explained with reference to their styles. Hall’s text is very earnest in style and deeply pious: the serious, filial style of virtuous man or the virtually true man, although the text also fails in its being serious and thus becomes amusingly camp or unwittingly parodic. Woolf ’s text is written in the style that we call ‘literary’, among other things: it is playful, punning, witty, irreverent, spirited. Whereas the deforming of the norm in Hall’s text is the uncontrollable side-effect of a will-to-conform, in Woolf ’s text, the tricksterism or subversive mimicry is the disobedient realisation of the non-coincidence between official truths, authoritative stances, and realities. The third lecture of Antigone’s Claim is entitled ‘Promiscuous Obedience’. It would seem that Butler conceives of this much more according to the manner of Hall’s text rather than that of Woolf ’s. What could clarify this question of obedience is that there is a distinction to be made between a logo-centric performativity and creative performance. Logo-centric

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performativity is precisely the performativity of a repetition compulsion, a capitalist, bureaucratic performativity or a techno-performativity such as we find in those Teaching Quality and other such assessment exercises that express themselves in a rhetoric of effectivity and efficiency: ‘say what you do; do what you say you do’. This performativity is obviously (surely?) not the same as creativity. Yet Butler tends precisely to conflate these two things which is to the detriment of creativity, as well as a peaceful rebelliousness, hence her repeated and emphatic insistence on the ineluctability of the compulsion to repeat and her struggle with the reduction of the potential for transformation to deformative mutations of the norm. In Gender Trouble it is written: ‘The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside constructed identities . . . The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition . . . ’24 In Antigone’s Claim, it is written: ‘the norm has a temporality that opens it to a subversion from within’ (p. 21); and ‘[T]he father’s words are surely upon Antigone . . . She transmits those words in aberrant form . . . ’ (p. 58) Whatever happened to Woolf ’s ‘Society of Outsiders’? It is here with us still, less to come than what abides, as will be explained further on.25 Earlier it was pointed out that Butler’s discussion of ‘Antigone’s claim’ serves to conflate authorship with authority or an officialisation of origination. Further on in the text, Butler writes: Within the theatre the word is acted, the word as deed takes on a specific meaning; the acute performativity of words in this play has everything to do with the words taking place within a play, as acted, as acted out. There are, of course, other contexts in which words become indissociable from deeds, such as department meetings or family gatherings. (p. 65) You can thus see that Butler brings together, as if she were talking about essentially the same thing in different contexts, creative performance and the logocentric officiating speech act, within literalising rituals. Everything would therefore seem to occur within a scene of representation with no creative sources, no being outside an ineluctable script of prescriptions. Although Butler concedes that Antigone problematises this, she keeps re-subjecting Antigone to an economy of representation as repetition compulsion. Butler immediately goes on to state: ‘The particular force of the word as deed within the family or, more generally, as it circuits within kinship, is enforced as law (nomos). But this enforcement does not happen without a reiteration – a wayward temporal echo – that also puts the law at risk of going off course’ (p. 65). A logic of the double, do¨ppelganger, seems to be dictating this. Indeed, that is just how Butler reads Antigone in relation to Creon, for she states that Antigone is not merely Creon’s opposite but also that which mirrors him (p. 10), replicates him but in a deformed way. I think that Butler is forced to construe Antigone as a sort of Hyde figure in relation to Creon as a Jekyll figure inasmuch as she assumes a manly Antigone who – just like Hyde – can but be a deformation of the human norm instituted by the idealisation of man. She writes: ‘Antigone represents not kinship in its

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ideal form but its deformation’ (p. 24), which as in the case of the double constitutes something of a crisis of representation, deformed other selves (Dorian’s portrait de-composes and Hyde is described as deformed). If you take the ideal form as your premise and starting-point all you can do is to de-form it. But this has a long history, thinking of Aquinas wondering of God why he created the feminine as the defective counterpart of the masculine.26 It is also the case that the dynamic of the double is one of a will-to-conform to ideals (Jekyll) that gives rise to the assertion of a negated will (Hyde), producing another effort at conformity producing another struggle to escape this (and so on), where this rational and idealistic desire to be rid of self-contradiction only leads to selfdefeat: in fact, it is the very fixation on ideality that produces the contradiction in the first place. Man’s cloning of himself brings about a double-headed monstrosity, or so it is said in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf states: [W]e may all join in that pious hope [expressed by Mussolini that eminent men, industry, finance and Fascist corporations are to foster a creative writer to come], but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion . . . Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.27 It is here that Woolf introduces, as antidote, her theory of creativity as androgynous: sometimes misread by those who do not see that Woolf is talking about creativity – be it the creation of poems or new life – and not about socially constructed sex-conscious identities. The figure of the androgyne may be said to offer us the co-existence of a dual and indeed multiple potential, this infinite or open actuality of potentiality, neither bounded plenitude of being nor sheer void, as opposed to the literalised virtuality and impossible would-be singularity of the double. The performativity that Butler addresses conveys a logic of the mechanical. In Antigone’s Claim, drawing on a formulation from David Schneider, it is suggested of Antigone’s act as ‘aberrant repetition of the norm’ that it constitutes ‘not a form of being but a form of doing’ (p. 58). This form of doing without form of being – doing without being? – would in terms of the predominant logic of Antigone’s Claim be mechanical motion: the inanimate as ex-animated. And Antigone’s Claim speaks of theatrical performance in these terms: ‘In the theater we watch those who are buried alive in a tomb, we watch the dead move, we watch with fascination as the inanimate is animated’ (my emphases, p. 49). The theatre as no longer what is called live performance, the quick slip in the sentence itself from the buried ‘alive’ to ‘the dead’, dying before our eyes? Without realising it, Butler is here coming up with – to speak of creative performance – the very terms in which Marx speaks of the commodity and capital: animation of the inanimate and/or inanimation of the animate, where the distinction is important to this debate. Animation of the inanimate, the dance of a thing by remote control,

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could be somewhat uncanny, or an entertainment, and, yes, there is that pervasive virtuality. But, rendering or treating the animate as inanimate is something else. It is to treat life as if it were death and the living as if they were dead. I do not think that Marx is simply freaked or repelled by the commodity, as Derrida implies – as if he were an innocent seeing the performance of an electric gadget for the first time, ooh, demonic magic – but that he considers that it is inhumane, monstrous now as in cruel (as opposed to crude, raw), to treat things as if they were of more worth than human beings, to treat commodities as if they literally were beloved children or lovers, and living beings as if they were merely machines or things. I will return to this reading in my later consideration of Specters of Marx in the final chapter. This is the opening sentence of Capital – and I am grateful to Forbes Morlock for this cutting and for the following cuttings: ‘The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense [ungeheure, monstrous] accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity.’28 A little further on capital is referred to as an animated monster [beseeltes Ungeheurer], (CW, 28, 398) and it is stated that: ‘Through the incorporation of living labour-capacity into the objective components of capital, the latter becomes a monster endowed with life [belebten Ungeheurer], and begins to function ‘‘as though it had love in its bosom’’’ (CW, 34, 415). This monstrosity of capital and the commodity is that of the economy, and Butler attributes to Antigone both this monstrosity of the animated-inanimate, the performing automaton, the child-clone, and that of the paternal double, the self-replicating genius. In contradistinction to this capitalist logic of a class of the ideally normal and a class of the monstrous, the following two positions could be maintained. You could say that inasmuch as we are not clones, every normal human being is a monster as unprecedented. And you could say that the commodity-clone, as opposed to natural beings, is the only monstrosity as the deformative difference of a single origin. After I had published this critique of Antigone’s Claim in its initial version, Butler produced a work entitled: Undoing Gender.29 Is that intended as something of a retraction of the ‘doing gender’ or ‘performing gender’ that her work has hitherto argued for? Unperforming gender? Is not gender both a question of live performances and certain realities? That we are spirited biological-technological hybrids means that we are irreducible to the machine, the ‘survival machines’ of Ridley and Dawkins. What this ‘survival machine’ implies is the inflexible subjection of the potentialities of being to the survival of the machine or: God-the-Machine. Bohm and Peat, rejecting a ‘generally mechanistic and reductionist worldview of science’, distinguish between creative intelligence and what they see as the misnamed artificial ‘intelligence’: ‘Very probably it will be possible to simulate an unlimited number of aspects of the intellect, which is after all a relatively mechanical crystallization of the intelligence. In this sense, the proper description of these studies should be called artificial intellect’ (emphasis in text, pp. 220–1). Even if this were not scientifically the case, for Bohm and Peat are not dogmatic given all that remains uncertain and even unknowable in such debates, it remains possible to identify a

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discourse in which disavowals of creativity can be seen to be symptomatically linked to the idealisations of a technological permanence or transcendence as a means of sublating or sublimating fears of mortality. What needs to be allowed to be said is that there is a generative capacity outside the order of representation and of iterability thought of in terms of a repetition compulsion. The logos, here, is not a willed ‘let there be’ but a willing ‘let be’. What Butler’s ‘theatre of representations’ has trouble with is the fact or act of composition or the processes of emergence, which could also be thought of in terms of conception and growth, gestation. Where Lacan aptly speaks of ‘Being itself ’ and ‘the ineffaceable character of what is’ in his discussion of Antigone, considerations of the act or process of composition or emergence could also be introduced. The act of composition could be said to be writing. Or dancing. Or weaving. It is not writing as the written or spoken word, it is prior to that, it is the forming of the word. Now this act of composition can be witnessed in the text even as the act of composition is also outside the text. Thus, there is something outside the text, a being-in-the-act-of-writing, writing as a verb before the hypostatisation of the noun, before the ‘text’. Instead of ‘a form of doing’ without ‘a form of being’, this is: a being in the act of forming, or being in the act of forming anew, a being in the act of creating. I would agree with the attention to the verb form that Butler effects but the verb surely pertains to the ontological? To respond, to co-respond, to dance, for instance? This coming into existence is what can be seen in Shona sculpture, explication of an invisible implicate potential. What you thus see are spirits. Well, I or some of us do.30 Moreover, this sculpture may be said to offer an affective response to all manner of being and beings: a reception of the signatures of all things. Aristotle interestingly points out of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that the deed of patricide is a´ koco&, ‘alogos’, that is, it takes place ‘outside the piece’, outside representation and prior to the staged actions.31 Moving away from Aristotle’s positing of this in terms of the impossible or irrational, this could be understood to point to a gnostic truth, namely, that prior to or outside the paternal logos, written word of creation, there is no paternal origin or single transcendental origin but despite this absence of man (in his isolation) at the origin, there is yet originality or creativity, a being of writing, a writing of being, a writing being or beings. Antigone’s deed, that of burying her brother, is also ‘alogos’, occurring outside the piece. There would thus seem to be an a-logical or unauthorisable link between the denial of paternal origin and the affirmation of the brothersister bond of co-origin or non-duality. In literary history, the brother-sister relationship does signify a poetic creativity or it symbolises a synchronicity that cannot itself be formalised or objectified within a staged/spaced scene of representation. Romantic poets are rather preoccupied with this. Goethe said of Byron’s incestuous love for his sister that it could not be more poetical.32 What is poetical is not a literal incest so much as a feeling of universal sympathy associated with the sister that Byron writes of in his ‘Epistle to Augusta’.33 And, of course, the poetic significance of the brothersister relationship is treated by Wordsworth.

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From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud Some silent laws our hearts will make, Which they shall long obey: We for the year to come may take Our temper from to-day. And from the blessed power that rolls About, below, above, We’ll frame the measure of our souls: They shall be turned to love. Then come, my Sister! come, I pray, Wordsworth, ‘To my Sister’34

And Antigone speaks of such implicit or unwritten laws, affirming too: ‘I was born to join in love’. (Presumably this does not oblige us to say that the above poem comes from the effect of Sophocles’ words upon Wordsworth, leading to his aberrant repetition of them.) What I wish to note about this statement, ‘I was born to join in love’, is that Sophocles seems possibly to be saying something about the feminine aspect of the real that calls for consideration. It is that whilst the masculine may be suggested to be an impetus towards self-separation, the feminine comes into being as that which conjoins: ‘I was born to join in love’. I wish to consider the possibility that whilst there is a reality of the feminine, it cannot be separated out into an essence in that its essential non-essence is a question of communality or conjoining or yoking. The feminine would not thus constitute some alternative Absolute but that which offers access to an ‘infinite totality’. The ethical significance of this will be returned to in this chapter. Tiresias, another androgyne, accuses Creon of committing a double symmetrical violation of the sacred: ‘[you] ruthlessly lodged a living soul within the grave / then you’ve robbed the gods below the earth / keeping a dead body here in the bright air, / unburied’ (l. 1187–90). For there to be new life, the dead must be buried within and by the living, not the living buried within death or what is deadly. Butler points out that Antigone’s name can be construed of as Anti-Generation, and this could be considered to be the nature of her fate for Creon in that he denies being as conjoint in putting Antigone to death which leads to him losing both his wife and child. However, this self-sterilisation on the part of Creon is because Antigone guards a generativity upon which the temporal paternal principle of generation depends: a sort of Ante-generation. Moreover, the acknowledgement of the generative order is bound up with an acknowledgement of death and an insistence on mourning, as is the case with Antigone, in contradistinction to the will to self-permanence. Acceptance of individual mortality pertains to the value of the whole. Butler also wonders about the obscure paternal curse that runs through The Theban Trilogy. Let us give it another go, not as a question of the performative this time, but as a question of the shamanistic facts of life, so to speak. It begins with Laius and his resistance to mortality: he wanted no son to succeed him. He wanted all life for himself so his curse was against new life,

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against the newborn. Thus Oedipus had no option but to kill the unyielding man opposed to his very existence. However, the famous case of Oedipus is more cryptic than that, where it is necessary to depart a little from the way in which Freud interprets the play. Is not Oedipus a young man who does not wish to grow up? In this, he would yet recapitulate his father’s resistance to temporality and ageing. The killing of the father could be seen as a rejection of mature manhood and the crossroads in the play may be understood as the crossroads of male puberty: Freud ignores the fact that Oedipus is not a child. In this reading, Oedipus’ desire for his mother would pertain to a taboo desire to retain or remain on the side of the femininity of boyhood. Although Oedipus cannot but become a man, there is a sense in which he is reluctant to ‘cross over’ and thus castration would be what he invites upon himself. He tries to defy the reality of sexual difference which is what the Sphinx’s riddle is probably about. As a riddle, the legs at stake are not literal. Rather, the ‘four’ of youth signifies the androgyny of the co-existence of masculine and feminine. The ‘two’ of adulthood signifies the post-pubertal divergence of the sexes. The ‘three’ of later life concerns a mitigation of the polarities of sexual difference with age. That said, the brother-sister ethos of Antigone serves to supplement the temporal linearity of the riddle. As will be shown further on, this concerns a synchronicity that may never be surpassed. So, the gay family? If Antigone points to the sacredness of fertility or generativity both natural and mysterious, how can gay parents claim this for themselves? Unmentioned in Antigone’s Claim, poignantly so, is that gay couples as gay couples are infertile (sharing thus something of a constituency with other couples who are infertile as couples, more than with the families of AfricanAmericans with whom Butler prefers to associate them). Whilst Antigone’s Claim wishes to erase the divide between the symbolic and the social, Butler invokes the new familial social formation in terms of the same-sexed and singleparented/parenting (pp. 69–73). This is precisely the Hegelian idealist logic of the family, same-sexed, single-parented immaculate conception, but the difference is that it is now to be literalised as a social actuality. Butler wishes to challenge ‘a heterosexual organisation of parenting at the psychic level’ (p. 69), but it is the straight mind that is ‘homosexual’ or monosexual in its conceptions, as Derrida’s Glas shows in its own reading of Hegel on the family, concept of the family, and of conceptuality as familiality, alongside the ‘poetic queer’ or ‘queer poetic’. Ironically then, queer thinking might need to be precisely a thinking of inversion, a ‘heterosexualisation’ of the psyche or psyche and soma – that is, Woolf ’s theory of creativity – as that which idealist philosophy represses. Moreover, the law of the father or an idealisation of paternity in terms of the proper, the logo, ownership, can do nothing about the unwritten laws of fertility, upon which paternity, and maternity, would depend. Butler’s use of Antigone does genuinely and importantly try to engage with social ostracism: the treating of certain lives as if they were unliveable. However, it is politically confusing, in many ways, to conflate the cause of the (assumedly) middle class Euro-American gay family with African-American families of a

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possibly more marginal status and, further, with the predicaments of migrants, exiles and refugees, where the point of conflation seems to presume that these others will be or will want to be single-parenting or somehow same-sexed families.35 Antigone’s Claim touches on the fact that the families of slaves had their own children denied to them (p. 73). However, it is one thing to have the children you give birth to taken away from you as if you were not their mother or father (problematically, Butler objects to Orlando Patterson’s protest against the denial of natural paternity to African-American men as the wrong way to literalise parenthood, p. 73), and another to be in the situation of wanting to adopt a child. There is also the danger of a slip here into treating the slaves or the African-Americans as if they too were infertile as couples. Moreover, one reason for the homophobia expressed within some African-American communities and some African societies is that African-American and African men protest, probably confusedly, at the way a conservative Western-European psyche persistently not only criminalises them but homosexualises them. There are also differences to be observed between the needs and requirements of raising a family and working for wider radical social transformations or working for the greater common good: not that Butler would not concede this, just that these differences are not brought up in her discussion of under-privileged families yoked with unconventional families as a basis for social transformation. What is missing in this is an analysis of class, and given Butler’s reference to migrant and refugee families, what is also missing is a consideration of foreign policies, cross-border politics, international politics, anti-capitalist movements, the vague and blurred kinship between the African-American family, the migrant family and the gay family seeming to be based on a putatively mutual desire for social acceptance by a conservative America. At the same time, the ethnicisation of the gay family seems to be a way of rescuing it from the suspicion of its wanting to be ‘normal’. Imagining a contemporary American Antigone, I see her asking the awkward ‘impossible’ or repeatedly censored questions about America’s criminalised or outlawed brothers and sisters (beyond an African-American scene). When I first wrote this, I particularly had the Palestinians in mind. However, since then, it has become a wider matter of ‘the Arabs’, ‘rogue nations’ and ‘fascist Islam’: the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Iranians. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler concerns herself with the construction of ‘unliveable lives’. But does not the epistemological privilege derive from a denial of the ontological: a denial of real lives? This has certainly been an on-going concern of liberation theory and postcolonial theory, namely, that lives are real lives and not, after all, constructions, Orientalist or otherwise.

Sumud For Lacan contra Hegel, Antigone’s significance is indeed ontological, a matter of the reality of life, of both being and non-being. Unlike Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, in her reading of the play, does acknowledge that Antigone has to do

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with the real beyond the performative. However, Copjec, in a chapter entitled ‘The Tomb of Perserverance’ in a book entitled Imagine There’s No Woman, yet seems to be in favour of deliberately burying/transcending at least some of the reality in question. The reality in question concerns Antigone in terms of her affective yoking capacity: ‘I was born to join in love’. In contradistinction to this, Copjec sees Antigone as autonomous and unconcerned with the other, stating: ‘She gives herself her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority.’36 There is a certain resonance to this interpretation but it begs the question of Antigone’s loyalty since it would be problematic, as we shall see, to think of her as merely loyal to herself. Copjec has the following observation to offer: [A]lthough Antigone and Creon may be equally stubborn in the performance of their duties, this stubbornness, according to which fantasy structure it enters, admits of a fundamental distinction that Lacan will use to ruin the symmetry that Hegel so carefully constructs. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud warns us not to conflate Fixierbareit, which is an inexplicable fixation that persists despite every external attempt to dislodge it, with Haftbarkeit, ‘which is perhaps best translated by ‘‘perserverance’’ but has a curious resonance in German, since it also means ‘‘responsibility’’, ‘‘commitment’’’. It is this distinction introduced by Freud that lies behind and undergirds Lacan’s insistence that Antigone, and she alone, is the heroine of Sophocles’ play; her perseverance in carrying out the burial of her brother is ethically different from Creon’s fixation on enforcing the statist prohibition against his burial (emphases in text, p. 16). This quality of perserverance that Lacan admires may well be seen in terms of commitment and loyalty. We could speak of it as solidarity. That is its ethical and political significance. After all, that is what Lacan was covertly addressing in angling his Se´minar VII at his step-daughter with her support for the FLN. And what I think this solidarity pertains to is the realisation that our lives are conjoined, as I began to touch on earlier. Copjec, however, uses Freud to reject such a notion, as follows: ‘There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others, toward ‘‘vital association’’, which would allow ‘‘the community of [subjects to] survive even if individual [subjects] have to die’’; a notion Freud dismisses as the ‘‘Eros of the poets and philosophers’’’ (p. 32). Well, this is admittedly the Eros that interests me, while it is an Eros irreducible to sexuality. The ontological includes but is irreducible to sexuality as such in spite of a certain Freudian shrinking of the ontological. This Eros has a collective affective and ethical significance that I wish to explicate shortly, but I would first like to present it in terms of its more erotic aspects through a consideration of what it feels like to fall in love. Well then, what does it feel like to fall in love? All of a sudden, you feel incredibly present. Being in love, aptly termed, makes you feel incredibly and undeniably present. And is it not the presence of

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the exciting other that makes you feel so present, so alive? Whilst a sceptical attitude towards presence seems to have prevailed for some time in the theoretical humanities, what of this sadly forgotten experience of falling in love? Do we not feel an immediacy, a glorious aliveness, an undeniability? Moreover, it enables us to understand that presence may always be a matter of co-presence. When the lover is absent, this feels like a rupture, a painful absence where you might want to sing ‘every time you go away, I die a little’.37 Or, as Cleopatra says: ‘Give me to drink mandragora [ . . . ] That I might sleep out this great gap of time / My Anthony is away’.38 This gap in time is also the gap of time which can evaporate when the other returns and co-presence continues. Together, it feels like eternity. ‘Eternity was in our lips, and eyes’,39 in the words of Cleopatra. The poets are well aware of this Eros. As for the philosophers, the Symposium says it all.40 Aristophanes in his myth of the androgyne gives us to understand love as the yearning for an original co-presence. Socrates and Diotima take this further by having us understand that this is a yearning for the immortal, for a being beyond or outside time, a being not subject to time. This needs be understood to be not a question of self-immortalisation but of a being beyond the inevitable mortality of the self, such as we might hear in the poetic declaration: ‘the love I feel for you cannot die.’ Forever Eros. Having dismissed the Eros of the poets, Copjec, drawing on Badiou, argues that we have yet to find a way to secularise the infinite. However, there’s always been love poetry, as well as poetry and music more generally. For Freud and Copjec, it seems that there is only a sex-death drive, with the emphasis on death, Copjec maintaining at one point: ‘death, and only death, is the aim of every drive’ (p. 32). What Freud terms Haftbarkeit is in Spinoza’s terms conatus. Conatus is not a drive towards self-preservation as it is sometimes misunderstood to be, and less a drive than a drive-resistant perserverance in being. It concerns that which never goes away, a very gentle, humble persistence. Think, for instance, of what the River Wye is for Wordsworth. Although this is not tangible in an objectively concrete sense, it is certainly something that we can feel and if it is experienced, adherence to it and others who feel it is automatic. There is nothing we can do about it. The erotic dimension of the ontological opens out onto something wider here concerning other forms of tender, abiding, dedicated allegiance. Forbes Morlock writes of this non-solid solidity in the cinema of Claire Denis.41 What has been spoken of as perserverance, loyalty, solidarity pertains to what the Palestinians call sumud. Helena Schulz has drawn attention to the importance of sumud for the Palestinians as has the pro-Palestinian Israeli activist Jeff Halper, whilst it is quite widely evident in Palestinian literature, notably in the poetry of Darwish, as explored by Clemency Schofield.42 Liana Badr, speaking of a story of a Palestinian refugee camp, states: ‘In the story of Tal el-Zataar I found another face, one contrasting with the horrors of war, one radiating spontaneity, solidarity and steadfastness, the roots of collective sentiments with which the Palestinians held on to their memory and identity.’43 This may be

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juxtaposed with the conclusion to a recent re-telling of Antigone by Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao, one done from the visionary perspective of Tiresias and that is striking for the terms in which Antigone’s significance is summed up: Perhaps Antigone’s death was not wholly in vain. For in holding steadfast to her beliefs, did she not question powers far greater than herself ? And in going to her death unafraid, she bore the consequences of her actions willingly, is this not a triumph of freedom?44 Furthermore, in southern Africa, this ethos of sumud pertains to what is called unhu. In The Book of Not, Tsitsi Dangarembga writes: Unhu, that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and how to preserve and accentuate life’s eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now call ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also.45 It is for this quality that Mandela, speaking of compassion, fellow feeling, found Antigone significant for the South African liberation struggle. The basic point is that when humanity tries to make outcasts of certain people, maintaining an ontological monovalence, that is when the community of being counter-asserts itself. It does this not so much in a voluntaristic way but automatically since it is a reality that cannot be altered or denied by any human mandate or law. Does Copjec seriously wish to consign this perserverance to the tomb? I am not sure if that is her meaning, but if so, all I can say is that it is ultimately beyond her mandate: how efface the ineffaceable character of what is? Less dramatically, it could be said that sumud concerns an ethics of radicalism and liberation rather than an ethics of the capitalist middle classes. Sumud in a middle class context would be drastically inauthentic, but that case scenario should not be the basis for universalising a middle class ethics. It can be pointed out that Freud is not quite so dismissive of a poetic Eros after all. This is what he writes to his friend Romain Rolland, the writer, peace activist and musicologist: I revered you as an artist and as an apostle of love for mankind many years before I saw you. I myself have always advocated the love of mankind not out of sentimentality or idealism but for sober, economic reasons: because in the face of our instinctual drives and the world as it is I was compelled to consider this love as indispensable for the preservation of the human species as, say, technology.46 Whilst Freud allows for differing ethical horizons, the ethics that the Lacanians, including Copjec, tend to promote is an ethics of sublimation. Philippe Van Haute in ‘Death and Sublimation in Lacan’s Reading of Antigone’ argues that Lacan aims to replace an ethics of ‘the sovereign good’ with ‘an ethics of sublimation’,

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and that Lacan’s deployment of Antigone is directed to this end.47 For Van Haute, Antigone is accorded the significance of what for psychoanalysis is ‘the Thing’, the supposedly horrifying Thing. This sounds rather like Kant become science fiction: the Thing, the Blob, the Alien, the Matrix. Drucilla Cornell’s account of the Thing in Lacanian thought provides some useful insights.48 From Cornell’s overview, it would seem that man suffers from a primordial lack, a non-relation to the primordial Thing, the thing itself or what presents itself of the real for thought. According to Cornell, the Thing is not so much the real but what of the real that male desire aims at in trying to think or signify the real. And Van Haute says that Antigone has the status of the Thing aimed at. Can’t we then just say that she’s beautiful and desirable? But, no, we can’t for this positive existence of the feminine is said by the theorists not to be: she/it isn’t. Regarding man’s primordial lack in relation to the Thing, this is given as a hole in his being. This Lacanian manque-a`-l’eˆtre is what the feminine comes to signify, to letter as opposed to ˆetre: she takes on the significance of his hole, gap, slash, etcetera. It also seems that this hole in being has the capacity to become what Cornell, following Lacan, calls an ‘internal cesspool’. (Don’t you sometimes just want to laugh?) Just as the hole is accorded a feminine significance, so is the internal cesspool. Sublimation occurs in relation to this situation whilst there are different versions of what it entails. One version is that the idealisation of women serves to cover up the horrible hole and the cesspool that femininity would otherwise signify rather than be. Another version is that sublimation is what makes up for the lack in being through the drive to symbolise the real on a cerebral level: imagine there’s no woman. In terms of such analyses, Antigone would seem to be placed on a cusp between abstract idealisation and non-being: gone the reality either way. Van Haute begins to broach an alternative very fleetingly when he speaks of Antigone in terms of ‘dignity’ – not the intellectualising or idealising of desire but the ‘raising’ of it in terms of according it dignity: as could be a question of love? He writes: ‘In the image of Antigone, we know, one comes into contact with the Thing [ . . . ] Tragedy elevates the object to the dignity of the Thing.’49 He does not develop this, but I hope to take it further in later chapters, exploring how this dignity may be a question of affirming the other’s desire (or lack of it) and thus their freedom. I think that Lacan may be more radical than some of his Lacanian followers and that his ethics may be trying not to be so much a recapitulation of misogyny – feminine holes, cesspools, Madonna-ideals or abject refuse dumps – as the start of an anti-misogyny where Lacan attempts with all his audacity to return projections to their masculine senders. Thus, the feminine would not be non-being and absence so much as the male sex’s own felt lack of femininity: as Cornell points out, how can you lack something that utterly is not, is just nothing? Moreover, the internal cesspool would seem to concern a particularly masculine sense of shame and degradation that should not be projected onto women. One thing that the Lacanian commentators on Lacanian ethics ignore, somewhat routinely and strangely, is that Lacan angles his whole Ethics (Se´ VII)

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against what he calls Lebensneid. Cornell, however, pays attention to how Lacan’s ethical concerns are strongly bound up with questions of covetousness, quoting Lacan; of which the following is an excerpt: ‘[T]he thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment [Thou shalt not covet it], for without the law the thing is dead.’50 For Lacan, Lebensneid is implied to be an envy of another’s perserverance in being, an envy of what Copjec speaks of via Freud as a suspect vital association. Lacan writes: ‘Lebensneid is not an ordinary jealousy, it is the jealousy born in a subject in his relation to an other, insofar as this other is held to enjoy a certain form of jouissance or superabundant vitality, that the subject perceives as something he cannot apprehend by means of even the most elementary of affective movements.’51 For Lacan, those who lack this freedom of spirit may resort to sadistic violence in an attempt to appropriate it from others or, it could be said, resentfully destroy it. Lacan is not simply against ‘the good’, as some of his followers are, but rather he correctly understands it cannot be a sovereign/ kingly/phallic principle. In fact, part of Lacan’s audacity is that he associates the good with the feminine (for men or women) in his work on mystical jouissance. It would seem to be for this reason that Lacan unfolds his ethics in relation to the alternatives signified by de Sade and Kant alongside Antigone who represents therefore not the drive but the target of the drive: be this a target of possession or of renunciation. It is as if we are faced with a rather extreme schematism of the dangers of predatory sadism versus a Kantian renunciation or sublimation. In the rejection of violent sadism, the ethics of psychoanalysis would seem to emerge as an ethics of acceptance of what cannot be changed, a bio-ethics of endurance, one way or another. Whilst there is certainly something to be said for this acceptance of reality, an acceptance of both what is possible and what is not possible, I think that the schematism of such an ethics is rather too stark and ignores further possibilities of both natural and social desire. We can still appreciate and even participate in what we cannot own? My own views on these ethical questions will unfold across this book with more hopeful and less sexually divisive elaborations whilst I wish now to draw on a couple of further instances of the Eros of the philosophers and poets in order to go on maintaining the affirmation of such. Is not reality beautiful? I do not think this is an idealisation. This is just how it does manifest itself in the most mundane and everyday of ways. In this respect, some lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish called ‘On this Earth’, will be offered. Darwish writes: We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread, at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh, and the invaders’ fear of memories. [ ... ]

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From monstrosity and techno-performativity to sumud We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth, mother of all beginnings and ends.52

Some Lacanians might want to say that the Lady in the poem constitutes an idealisation or sublimation that serves to cope with the horror of the Thing or cover up an internal cesspool, and so on, but others would not see it that way at all. Reality is not some Thing out there. We are in it, it is all around us and it is quite earthily lovely. If you see it as it is – as it is – you do just see it that way. The real is not some object so much as a consciousness of reality. Moreover, I do not think there is a significant difference between the words in Darwish’s poem and the reality they refer to. If the aroma of bread is given as good, maybe that’s just the case: it is a good aroma if your nose tells you so. Regarding the epigraph from Lacan at the opening of this chapter, the ‘dam-age’ or ‘damn age’, may be transformed not into ‘Our Lady’, as the idealised pure woman, but through certain feminine realisations which would enable us to see beauty on this Earth without needing to possess it. Darwish’s poem does go on to address the desire for a Palestine that would presumably be owned but we might see it instead as: liberated or allowed to be. When Darwish talks about ‘My Lady’, as he does in the poem, and the Lacanians about the ‘Thing’, and to quote Cornell’s reprise of the discourse, it is ‘the yucky Thing’, you know it is the same thing or being they address: only in terms of different consciousnesses. It concerns an anamorphotic or pharmakonical twist. Antigone: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ (line 697) Macbeth: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (I.i.1). The point now to be established is that the techno-idealist vision of the world is basically the chiasmatic inversion of a poetic realist vision. Van Haute gives us to understand that those who posit the Thing are those who are ego-bound, stating: ‘In the experience of the beautiful, we are for a moment, as it were, cut loose from this world. The self-absorbed ego is here confronted with its own outside.’53 What this reveals is that for some (I stress this because Van Haute tries to universalise his position) the world is usually the self and the self ’s projections. Techno-idealism projects mental sublimations onto the world and either does not see it for real or else sees reality as foul, as the repressed or abjected, apart from the possible moments of aesthetic shock that Van Haute broaches. The poetic realist is in the world and does not think its reality so much as respond consciously to it. The latter is a question of engagement with others, all manner of other beings, and the environment or surroundings. It is perhaps obvious that this book favours a poetic realist approach to a Lacanian ethics of the real, although the latter is not simply to be dismissed for there’s more than one ethics, as well as more than one way of reading Lacan. If ‘woman’ is for the idealist a signifier of the foul, for the poetic realist the figure of the feminine may both function as a signifier of the real in general, though in the affirmation/admiration of it, and specifically ostend or point to an avowed reality of the feminine, depending on the context. Antigone does not signify ‘woman’ but either a feminine consciousness of the real or a real

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consciousness of the feminine: as available to both men and women. She signifies a state of awareness, other-consciousness, rather than a thing. If an ethics of psychoanalysis differs from or supplements a philosophical ethics, this is broadly because an ethics of psychoanalysis is a rather gloomy one of resigning us to our discontents, as would sometimes be necessary or would be necessary for some, rather than a matter of the pursuit of happiness and the good. Aristotle’s ethics, oriented towards human happiness, pertains to friendship, as discussed by Derrida in The Politics of Friendship. I want to suggest that here again we have an emphasis on loyalty, steadfastness, solidarity, commitment, sumud. In fact, Aristotle emphasises loyalty – be´baios – as a defining quality of friendship, translated by Derrida as fidence, a confident fidelity. Since my discussion of Derrida’s reading of Aristotle needs be brief, it will restrict itself to the most salient points in relation to those raised by Antigone. The following selection from Derrida’s commentary on or paraphrase of Aristotle is surely pertinent: I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death [ . . . ] I feel myself – and in advance, before any contract – borne to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to) love; it is thus that I feel myself loving.54 That is more or less what Antigone says, where ‘born’ and ‘borne’ chime usefully, and it is significant in the above that this requires no prescription, no contract, no performative measure or, as Derrida might say, it is an unconditional condition. In fact, what he does say is that it is a matter of: ‘the limit as the absence of limit.’ (p. 12) Derrida further notes: ‘This philı´a, [love] this psukhe´ [animate life] between friends sur-vives’ (p. 13) Derrida, wanting to temporalise the synthesis or the synchronicity of love or co-presence, maintains that this survival is temporal or in time for it survives the ‘living present’. However, you could also say that the living present is that which goes on being without submitting itself to the passage of time. Nonetheless, what matters one way or another is what goes on being, be this interpreted in terms of an axis of temporal continuity (being after being) or a horizontal axis of synchronous continuity (an on-going being with being). In the following commentary, Derrida allows for both possibilities, writing: In primary friendship, such a faith must be stable [ . . . ] it must endure the test of time. But at the same time [ . . . ] it is this faith which, dominating time by eluding it, taking and giving time in contretemps, opens the experience of time. There is no reliable friendship without [ . . . ] the confirmed steadfastness of this repeated act of faith. Plato, too, associated philı´a with the same constancy and steadfastness. The Symposium recalls a few faithful examples. A friendship that has become steadfast, constant or faithful (be´baios) can even defy or destroy tyrannical power (p. 15). Similarly, the steadfastness of Antigone could be seen as pitted against tyrannical power.

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This pertains further to two aspects of a yoke effect. Derrida speaks of a being under the yoke: a question of submission, we could say, of being to time. The yoke effect could also, however, pertain to a being yoked to the being of the other beyond time: a non-duality that resists temporal severances. First, what I should like to state again of this steadfastness is that it is to be contrasted with the performative. As a way of illustrating this yet further it can be pointed out that a character similar to that of Antigone is that of Cordelia in King Lear where both characters serve to symbolise the quality of steadfastness in opposition to performative obedience, this obedience not only to the paternal word but to the paternity (original authority) of the word. Cordelia, as is well known, refuses to perform in accordance with the paternal demand, that which would seek to command love, whilst it is she who turns out to be the loyal daughter, in fact, precisely because she refuses to perform. Her sisters, Goneril and Reagan, performatively and ritualistically engage in speech acts of love and fidelity and pretend to act this out when in reality it soon transpires that they feel very little if anything. They love in words and they perform for the sake of their own personal advancement, which is precisely what Butler sees Antigone as doing rather than understanding that she could well be the very antithesis of this. Derrida notes how Aristotle contrasts true friendship with what we would today consider in terms of bourgeois values, writing: ‘Why are the mean, the malevolent, the ill-intentioned (phauloi) not, by definition, good friends? [ . . . ] Because they prefer things [pra´gmata] to friends. They stock friends among things, they class friends at best among possessions, among good things’ (p. 19). Second, what could be said of the steadfastness in question is that it is not only an ethical precondition but that which requires a certain realisation. I think that this is clearer in Aristotle than in Derrida’s reading of him. For Aristotle, ethics are bound up with their realisation in political praxis: ethics constitute the condition (e´xis) for politics and the political serves to make good the ethical. A contemporary instance of this activism will be suggested. I am thinking of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, the two activists who lost their lives in their support for the Palestinian struggle. Corrie interposed herself between an Israeli caterpillar bulldozer and a Palestinian home targeted for demolition and was crushed to death for this. Hurndall interposed himself between an Israeli bullet and a Palestinian child, saving the child’s life but losing his own. They did not simply affirm their support in words alone but made good their steadfastness in moments of extreme crisis. Whilst Derrida speaks of a friendship that proves itself in time, this implies that time itself is the proof. In the cases of Corrie and Hurndall, the enduring loyalty was not so much persisting in an ethical stance over time but a matter of commitment to the present in the present that yet eternalised their solidarity with their Palestinian brothers and sisters. This eventuality helps to explain the significance of Antigone’s deed as a commitment beyond words, beyond words that would take themselves as sufficient proof or as enactments of themselves. So does Butler father or re-author a feminised Hegel? In a way she does. This is her conclusion, which I wish to print out substituting ‘the African’ for where

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Butler writes ‘Antigone’ (especially since Butler considers that Antigone constitutes a scandalous substitution, passim). The following is given to point to the difference between an anti-colonial Antigone (‘It was Antigone who symbolised our struggle’) and one sifted through the legacies of a colonial logic. So, here is Butler’s conclusion, with a scandalous substitution: Who then is [the African] within such a scene, and what are we to make of her words, words that become dramatic events, performative acts? [The African] is not of the human but speaks in its language. Prohibited from action, she nonetheless acts, and her act is hardly a simple assimilation to an existing norm. And in acting, as one who has no right to act, [the African] upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human, implicitly raising the question for us of what those preconditions must really be. [The African] speaks within the language of entitlement from which she is excluded, participating in the language of claim with which no final identification is possible. If [the African] is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage (p. 82). It is scandalous, where this kinship trouble has its wayward temporal echoes within colonial discourse: although Butler’s stance is basically one of sympathy for the ‘not of the human’. Nonetheless, it remains a little patronising. What is proposed is ‘a new field of the human . . . when the less than human speaks as human’ (p. 82) So, what is this new humanism to be that takes ‘the less than human’ as its premise? It is as if Antigone is a monkey to whom Butler generously wishes to extend human status, within humanity as an uber-species, rather than Antigone being already a human animal in a world of kindred species. And who is the ‘we’ referred to above? Who arrogates to themselves the authority to formulate the human, and why is it that ‘we’ need to do this? And how can there be some deemed to own human language with others obliged to borrow from these owners of it? Who has patented the language? What I finally wish to draw attention to regarding the above substitution is that if you disavow the feminine in favour of a masculinist monovalence of being, this can produce a Calibanisation or rendering monstrous of other races. If you posit the human as the masculine in an attempt to disavow the feminine, the fact the feminine exists in its inevitable differential co-positing with the masculine, means its return is assured, but in this exclusivity of the human, it can only return as that which does not belong to the human race: it returns in the guise of the foreign race/species. It is the disavowal of the feminine that serves performatively to divide humanity into alleged sub-species. And it is perhaps the disavowal of the feminine that serves to pit man against man, as man seeks either to finally incorporate or finally expel the feminine in a drive towards a singular time of self-continuity. Moreover, a humanist or species monovalence of being serves to suppress our lateral connections not only across races but with other species and with our surroundings. Then, much less sweepingly, the predicament of Antigone’s Claim could be understood to be the predicament of academic feminism

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in general. That is, the female intellectual is accorded a privileged masculine status that places her at a remove from subaltern others for whom she then tries to account.55 And does not this become a matter of deconstructing idealist philosophy in favour of new realisms, anti-capitalism and a hoped for postcolonialism? For Butler, Antigone constitutes a surprising case of the unspeakable speaking. The unspeakable speaking could be heard in two ways, at least. It could be the unspeakable as the unprounceable, YHWH, so: God speaks! Or breathes? YH, in-breath, WH, out-breath. Such a reading could be a matter of expressions of the sacred, barely pronounceable if at all, but it would be difficult to construe this in terms of man’s lesser self or his belated aberrant copy, although it may yet be that which questions his auto-idealisations. Perhaps you just have to laugh. The unspeakable speaks: bourgeois theory, a matter of those who are not supposed to speak, or supposed not to speak, but they do. An excerpt from Miriam Tlali’s Between Two Worlds (a novel that was first censored from publication and then published as Muriel at the Metropolitan) provides a suitable cheeky retort regarding rebellious unspeakables who cannot be shut up. It would be unfair to angle the following excerpt against Antigone’s Claim given its concerns over social ostracism and social death, whilst Antigone’s Claim bears all the hallmarks of a liberal discourse: that is, given the pervasive tension in it between the compulsion to conform and genuine questions of conscience. The excerpt below concerns the times at which it becomes necessary to speak defiantly; the novel being about coming to reject complicity with what you realise you do have to, given unavoidable circumstances, finally oppose. The following edited extract from the novel concerns a scene in an office in which Muriel, a black South African who works alongside two white South African women, together with her friend Adam, gets into a quarrel with the white South Africans.56 Hear, here goes: Mrs. Kuhn shouted at the top of her voice, ‘Shut up, you two!’ Then turning to Mrs. Stein, she said, ‘I can’t stand those voices . . . those baboons there, sitting and talking.’ ‘But we are not making any noise, Mrs. Kuhn. Adam was just telling me . . .’ I tried to explain. ‘Shut up,’ she said! ‘I don’t care what he’s telling you. And don’t you dare answer me back!’ ‘I’m just trying to explain that . . . ’ ‘What are you, after all?’ [ . . . ] ‘What do you mean, what am I? I’m a human being, of course,’ I said [ . . . ] Mr. Bloch tried to take control. ‘Adam, shut up, man. You talk too much!’ ‘Yes, that’s her fault. She makes him cheeky like that.’ [ . . . ] I sat there listening to Mrs. Kuhn’s ravings. ‘Just because she knows a bit of English, she thinks she can say just anything.’ I replied, coolly, ‘Thank God I did not have to pick up my English in your kitchen or your backyard!’ [ . . . ]

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Mrs Kuhn turned to Mrs Stein and said, ‘She thinks she’s like us, you know.’ I answered, ‘That’s an insult, Mrs. Kuhn,’ I replied. ‘I don’t think I’m like you. I don’t want to be like you. I’m very proud of what I am. You’re too small, too full of hatred. You are always occupied with issues that don’t matter!’ It was almost quiet now. [ . . . ] Any moment now I shall have my pass-book signed off and with that – unless I find another job within a short time – will go my ‘right to be in the magisterial district of Johannesburg for more than seventy-two hours’ [ . . . ] I remembered what my husband had once said to me, ‘They are omnipotent; they have the power of life and death over us.’57 And what you see or are about to see below is not a reproduction. See if you can be a seer.

Figure 1 The Beginning (sculpted by Juliette Mapuranga)

2

What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment? What is enlightenment?

This chapter will concern itself with a re-evaluation of Kant’s essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) Kant’s essay is itself not so much the opening up of a new impetus for thought but, rather, a pause for reflection on the implications of the drive towards increasing rationalisation and secularisation that had been unfolding from the Renaissance onwards in accordance with the establishment of modern science. The reason that I wish to draw attention to this essay is that it serves to define emancipation against what we would today speak of in terms of the performative. Therefore, Kant’s concerns in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ remain of relevance, even if controversially, as registered in Foucault’s unsubversively ironic ‘What is Enlightenment?’ written in 1984, two centuries after Kant’s essay. Finally, whilst Kant and Foucault interpret enlightenment only in terms of a Western modernity, this chapter will open up the question yet again through introducing a more cosmopolitan and feminine approach to it with particular reference to the interventions of Asada Akira, a thinker as influential in the Japan of the 1980s as Foucault has been in the postmodernist West.

What is enlightenment today? The eighteenth century from Spinoza to Foucault Let us begin with a recapitulation of Kant’s main points. Kant opens his essay with a highly economic and succinctly elegant definition, given to us in italics: ‘Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority.’1 The rest of the essay may be read as an explanation of that opening statement. Before we move on, what could be noted of Kant’s compressed definition is that enlightenment is given to us in humanist terms – the human being’s – where the minority, immaturity or childhood, of the human being is given to us as not natural but as something we have committed ourselves to; it would seem that the human being has infantilised itself. Kant goes on to specify the self-incurred minority or lack of maturity in terms of submission to the direction of leaders, authorities, and experts of various kinds. It would seem that the hegemony of what Kant terms ‘guardians’ does not so much impose itself on the minors but that the minors (actually a majority)

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invite domination out of passivity and laziness. Kant writes with a note of irony or even sarcasm: It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book that understands for me, a spiritual advisor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides on a regimen for me, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if I can only pay; others will readily undertake the irksome business for me. That by far the greatest part of humankind (including the entire fair sex) should hold the step towards majority not only troublesome but also highly dangerous will soon be seen to by those guardians who have kindly taken it upon themselves to supervise them; after they have made their domesticated animals dumb and carefully prevented these placid creatures from daring to take a single step without the walking cart in which they have confined them, they then show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk alone. (p. 17) Minors seem to be both dependent on the maternal – nurture, care – and the paternal – leadership – whilst these timid, passive beings are characterised in conventionally feminine terms. This domesticated state is one that comprises not only all of the female sex but some of the male sex, so whilst it is a feminised condition it is so only in a manner of speaking. As already noted, it appears that the domestication of the human animal is an infantilisation of itself. I once saw a documentary about the taming of animals, in particular, wolves, which showed that humans tame animals by preventing them from growing up: the young animal is forced into a condition of dependency from which it cannot emerge and thus it fails to develop the extent of the mature animal’s capacity to fend for itself. Kant further depicts the process of domestication in terms of a certain mechanistic reliance that prevents freedom of movement, stating Precepts and formulas, those mechanical instruments of a rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of an everlasting minority. And anyone who did throw them off would still only make an uncertain leap over even the narrowest ditch, since he would not be accustomed to free movement of this kind. (p. 17) For Kant, we impose a mechanistic dependency on ourselves that we need to free ourselves from for the sake of a greater fluidity and flexibility. Strikingly, our technological progress is seen to be bound up with what today we speak of in terms of the performative – the enactment of precepts and formulas – and Kant gives us to understand that the ritualistic obedience of this performativity is, unsurprisingly, proto-authoritarian. Kant goes on to formulate – only he wishes to escape the formula – an antidote to our immature enslavement in terms of a free use of reason, ‘public reason’, as opposed to a technological and technocratic one, ‘private reason’. This has already been suggested in the opening paragraph: ‘Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus

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the motto of enlightenment’ (p. 17). This audacious use of reason is what is contrasted with a limited techno-bureaucratic performativity, Kant commenting: ‘Now, for many affairs conducted in the interest of a commonwealth a certain mechanism is necessary [ . . . ] Here, it is, certainly, impermissible to argue; instead one must obey’ (p. 18). For Kant, there is thus the partial practical necessity of a mere acting out: it is potentially a sanctioned hypocrisy for you do not have to believe in what you do, you just have to do it.2 How familiar. Nonetheless, it has to be said that we cannot escape a degree of the conformative-performative. What is stranger to us is Kant’s usage of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’, as Foucault notes, speaking of the distinction that Kant makes as ‘surprising’, and commenting that ‘term for term’ the private/public distinction is ‘the opposite of what is ordinarily termed freedom of conscience’.3 That is, whereas we would normally consider freedom of conscience to be a private and individual matter, and term our participation in the socio-economic sphere as ‘public’, Kant reverses this terminology, or we have reversed it. Thus, again as Foucault observes, ‘freedom of conscience’ is not to be thought of as a personal matter. Rather, it becomes a matter of something like access to a collective, possibly cosmopolitan, forum of intellectual exchange that will serve to enlarge our cognitions. Freedom cannot thus be assumed to be a matter of voluntarism or individual autonomy but emerges as something more co-operative; with the previous chapter in mind, we might consider it in terms of an emancipation through a politics of friendship. Kant’s conclusion is worth reflecting on: A greater degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s freedom of spirit and nevertheless puts up insurmountable barriers to it; a lesser degree of the former, on the other hand, provides a space for the latter to expand to its full capacity. Thus when nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell, the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the calling and propensity to think freely, the latter gradually works back on the mentality of a people (which thereby becomes capable of freedom in acting) and eventually even upon the principles of government, which finds it profitable to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in keeping with his dignity. (emphases in text, p. 22) First of all, Kant here proposes a ratio, as does Plato in his indication of the importance of dialectical reasoning. Whereas for Plato the ratio is between intellection and opinion, for Kant it is between freedom of spirit and civil obedience. For Kant, more of the latter yields more of the former. It is paradoxical, as he implies, yet this seeming paradox underlies a widely assumed contract. That is, it is a democratic assumption that as long as we are not behaving in an antisocial manner, we should be allowed to express ourselves critically and creatively. Of course, there would be some difficulties with this. For example, can we repress ourselves and yet be free? Can we live in one way and think in another, given that Marxism assumes that our consciousness is determined by

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the way we live? At any rate, what does seem to be at stake is maintaining a certain reservation, perhaps like that of the Marranos in Spain. What exactly is the ‘hard shell’ Kant refers to? It would, post-Freud, seem to be the superego or the shell of our obedience to civil or manmade law which may be distinct from what we might otherwise truly or ‘inwardly’ think or feel. (The term ‘inwardly’ is problematic in that, as indicated, the freedom in question may be an inter-subjective matter, as will be discussed further.) In Hamlet, the paternal ghost is/appears as precisely a hard shell: a mechanical suit of armour. At any rate, this hard shell is what is said to mask or guard or defend a living seed of nature, where nature is given to us by Kant in the feminine and associated with care and tenderness. Nurturing this germinal nature is to be our means of resisting our reduction to being treated as no more than machines or as cogs in a machine. However, this germinal nature is what Kant wishes to equate with freedom of thought begging the question of its naturality, as regards the conditions of culture: although why not think of thinking as a natural activity? Ferenczi sees that as soon as a creature begins to reckon with its environment, it begins, albeit primitively, to think.4 Kant’s analytical structure is clear but what remains rather blurred is the vaguely implied yet unarticulated question of gender in the engenderment of reason or the thinking sap. Moreover, Kant’s essay seems to depend on and yet breeze over the question of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Is maturity a matter of achieving manhood/authorial status or is it a case of reserving something from paternal imperatives that may be overly demanding or censoring? Although Kant implies that the immature state is feminised, being one of passivity, it is yet man’s domestication or enslavement of himself as man: a feminising masculinisation. In this, man may be said to give rise to himself as a double, producing himself at once as dominating master and submissive slave. Then, in mitigation of this, we have this ‘seed’ that is at once seminal (masculine), potentially child (of either gender), and given to us on the side of an explicitly feminine nature and yet a seed of mind to be reserved from this feminising masculinisation. What to make of this mixture? Given that we are supposed to accommodate ourselves to a masculine social order, the audacious Kantian message could be that we ought not fully and truly surrender our undomesticated or freely feminine or, perhaps better, androgynous, nature but secretly retain some of it. Is there therefore some cryptic reservation, some nature reserve at stake? Moreover, Kant’s rhetorical blending of nature and mind is suggestive of a non-separation that evades the law even as we may need to fake obedience to its injunction to repress ourselves. I will return to further considerations of gender and enlightenment after a reading of Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ However, what is perhaps useful about Kant’s essay is its very indeterminacy, one that would allow for both those wishing to leave childhood behind and those who have their daring or rebellious reservations about what it means to be grown up. Foucault’s essay begins with a slight contextualisation of Kant’s where he briefly reflects on the missed encounter between Kant and the Jewish philosopher

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Mendelssohn who also replied to the question, as first posed in a newspaper, and whose publication was only noticed by Kant at the time of his own work going to press. Foucault makes an observation regarding this missed encounter that I am rather at a loss to interpret. It is: With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift, the German Aufkla¨rung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny – we now know to what drama that was to lead. (p. 33) The attempt to bring German thought and Jewish thought together leads to the holocaust? Since I do not know exactly what is meant by Foucault here, even as he thinks it so obvious as not to require an explanation, I will offer a diversion instead towards a speculative response further on. Kant’s article evades the historicity of the concept of enlightenment. It would be impossible to enter into a presentation of the intellectual history of the European Enlightenment that precedes Kant here; nonetheless a slight indication of what this could entail can be given. Mendelssohn, whilst a philosopher with a commitment to revealed religion, was all the same, according to Jonathan I. Israel in his book, Radical Enlightenment, an admirer of Spinoza, Mendelssohn maintaining that without Spinoza ‘philosophy would not have been able to extend its borders so far’.5 And it is said that ‘Mendelssohn depicts Spinoza as the strategic precursor of Leibniz and Wolff, the real inventor of key concepts vital to the Leibnizian–Wolffian system, which he then considered the definitive answer to both British empiricism and French freethinking and the supreme manifestation of German depth and genius in philosophy’ (p. 658). What Israel’s work shows very convincingly is that it was Spinoza – whose works were disseminated within Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – who was the philosopher treated as the most audacious and controversial of Enlightenment thinkers in the latter part of the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century in Germany and beyond. It is Spinoza and his German adherents who provoke outcries against free-thinking and scared denunciations, leading to censorships and even public book-burning rituals. This backlash can be seen in the following commentaries from Israel’s detailed historical study: Long judged one of the most acute of Spinoza’s early adversaries, Musaeus agreed with those who thought Germany was confronting a new and deadly peril, an insurrection of philosophical ‘fanatics’, sworn to enthrone Naturalismus in place of the sacred faith of Christ. Both community and State were gravely imperilled by the ‘great siege engine of irreligious philosophy’ introduced by the Tractatus [Spinoza’s], a form of sedition which attacks faith, undermines social stability, perverts law into licentiousness, and subverts the state by means of ‘freedom of thought’ (p. 631).

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Loescher judges Spinoza uniquely harmful and disruptive because he alone among modern writers provides an ostensibly coherent, philosophical framework for amalgamating body and soul and identifying matter with spirit, daring to call Nature ‘God’, thereby assembling in an integrated system elements found in the rest only incoherently and fragmentarily. (p. 633) And so on. Israel also comments that: ‘A curious feature of the early penetration of Spinozism in Germany was its linkage to a discussion of traditional Jewish mysticism, or cabbala’ (p. 645). That is, the significance of Spinoza lies in the combination of rationality aimed against dogma with a mysticism, or nondualist philosophy, distinct from mainstream religious authority and orthodoxy. Perhaps, it could be said that the European Enlightenment begins in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Catholic Spain, followed by the expulsion of the Moors in 1505. Of this, Frances Yates comments: Thus two whole populations, embodying two great civilisations, were cut adrift from their homeland to wander as exiles [ . . . ] Thus, as so often, Europe took a wrong turning and wasted the spiritual resources which might have been used constructively. For of all the countries of Europe, Spain was the best placed for making a liberal approach to the three great closely related religions.6 This said, what Frances Yates’ own acclaimed research reveals is that this exilic culture of Jews and Moors, leads to the spread of a potent mixture of mysticism and science, magical thinking and mathematics, in particular, as regards the dissemination of the Jewish Cabala leading to the formation of a Christian Cabala in Renaissance Italy and beyond. Yates shows too how the Christian Cabbala fuses with the Rosicrucian Enlightenment to produce what she terms ‘the occult philosophy’ of the Elizabethan age, of crucial significance to Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon and the development of Puritanism, where this Rosicrucian and occult philosophy also flourishes in Germany. This might seem rather removed from Kant’s attempt to answer the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ but the point is that the free-thinking in question concerns not only the development of a scientific culture but also the attempts on the part of those in power to censor an occult, rather mystical philosophy associated with the very development of science. The point is also that there is an exilic consciousness to be reckoned with. We can bring this back to Kant via Spinoza. Spinoza was ex-communicated from the orthodox Jewish religious community in Amsterdam because of his mystically inspired yet atheistic and scientific philosophy. In Enlightenment and Action from Descartes to Kant, Michael Losonsky states: The defense of freedom of speech is not new to Kant. Spinoza already defended it in his Theologico-Political Treatise, and his defense is not based in law or morality, but in his metaphysics and psychology. Inner conviction cannot be controlled, and inner conviction and speech are bound tightly together.7

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For Losonsky, what differentiates Spinoza from Kant is how this inner conviction is arrived at where ‘freedom of speech’ can mean different things. Losonsky cites from a letter written by the English Quaker William Ames to Margaret Fell in 1657, concerning a meeting with Spinoza, as follows: Theare is a Jew at amsterdam that by the Jews is Cast out (as he himself and others sayeth) because he owneth no other teacher but the light and he sent for me and I spoke toe him and he was pretty tender and doth owne all that is spoken; and he sayde that to read of moses and the prophets without was nothing tow him except he came toe know it within: . . . I gave order that one of the duch Copyes of thy book should be given toe him and he sent me word he would come toe oure meeting but in the mean time I was Imprisoned. (p. 132) As Losonsky explains with further evidence, for Spinoza, the so-called inner light of subjective conviction is crucial to knowledge of the truth. This is surely an accurate reading of Spinoza, despite possible hesitation over the term ‘inner’, and I agree with Losonsky that for Spinoza this conviction is arrived at through inspiration and that Spinoza’s theory of the mind is thus part of the tradition of enthusiasm. Losonsky writes: What separates Spinoza from Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke is the nature of this inner conviction. While for Descartes, Hobbes and Locke voluntary deliberation and decision could lead to the inner conviction needed for proper understanding [ . . . ] for Spinoza the inner conviction needed for proper understanding involves the renunciation of will and the reliance on the automatic activity of our intellects. (p. 133) Spinoza writes: ‘it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something of itself in us.’8 What I wish to suggest is that the conviction in question could be related to the quality of steadfastness, perseverance, sumud, discussed in the previous chapter. It is not therefore something individualistic but potentially a matter of friendship or communality and thus to posit it as ‘inner’ is insufficient. In fact, it may be that it can only be said to become ‘inner’ when denied expression. Moreover, it is my speculation that this conviction or resoluteness may well pertain to the exilic consciousness of the Jewish community that Spinoza was part of even as he was ostracised for his anti-authoritarian non-conformity to written scripture or the letter of the law. In trying to broach the suggestion made by Foucault concerning the fateful convergence of Jewish and German philosophical traditions, the above speculation will be developed a little further. If the Jews have posited themselves as a chosen race, this would seem to be bound up with their exilic condition. That is, as outcasts, the Jews could have assumed the role of being the bearers of the denied universality of being, our being in common. Today, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish addresses, it is the Palestinian people who are being

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put in this position. Those without a home are obliged to become a spiritual people of the outside, yet they symbolise therefore a true unity of being beyond any notion of the proper or what can be owned or privatised. Regarding the Nazi Germans, it could be speculated that, envious of the Jewish community in its very community ethos, they sought to usurp the Jews as a chosen race and a spiritual people. The Nazis theologised the political in an insane and inauthentic way, as discussed by Adorno at length, and it could be said that this is because they adopted an authoritarian and highly possessive stance towards what in itself would be a freedom of spirit.9 They tried to include the cosmic in the national, or in Kantian terms they tried to privatise the public. The freedom of spirit in question thus needs to be international and utopian. It has to be for everyone: it cannot eventually be located and nationalised. Whilst this constitutes a broad speculation, it concerns a historically recognisable phenomenon that repeats itself. For example, as I have explored in some detail elsewhere, whilst the anti-colonial struggle for Zimbabwe was in the spirit of a wider universality, when Mugabe and ZANU came to power, the ruling party tried to colonise for itself the spirit of anti-colonial resistance, that is, to colonise liberation in tandem with a spiritualising of ethnic politics.10 Something similar could be said to have been happening in Israel where the Israelis see themselves as waging an endless war of emancipation but in the exclusive name of Israel. It is as if the Israelis still cannot register that they are no longer the universal exception, God’s people: it is as if they are trying to include this permanently exceptional status that comes of exilic consciousness within the borders and ethos/ethnos of national property. While this argument would require further historical substantiation, the basic philosophical point is that liberation is not something that can be owned and unity of being cannot be logo-centrically singularised. Jacqueline Rose importantly addresses the differing strands of Zionist ideology, including a problematic strand of, say, cosmic nationalism, in The Question of Zion.11 Israel in his lengthy study of the reception of Spinoza as the most radical philosopher of the Enlightenment tries hard to play down the mystical Spinoza in favour of an atheistic and naturalistic Spinoza. He wants to construct Spinoza as a hard-line or mechanistic materialist, a considerable bending of the text as can happen in readings of Spinoza that emerge from such a bias. It is quite plausible to see Spinoza as an atheist in that he does not believe in a personal God. In contemporary terminology, I think that Spinoza’s God-as-Nature is certainly not a transcendental subject but yet a creative intelligence that pervades nature and that we can gain an understanding of through our own natural being. Israel’s Spinoza is in danger of being re-written in the more Newtonian terms of the positing of a merely mechanistic nature but without this even being set in motion by Newton’s ‘clockwork God’. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri turn from a brief consideration of Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ to a fleeting consideration of Spinoza, interestingly, since there’s no mention of Spinoza in Foucault’s essay (or Kant’s). They say:

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What is enlightenment? The fifth part of Spinoza’s Ethics is perhaps the highest development of the modern critique of modernity [ . . . ] Never before had philosophical thought so radically undermined the traditional dualisms of European metaphysics, and never before, consequently, had it so powerfully challenged the political practices of transcendence and domination. Every ontology that does not bear the stamp of human creativity is cast aside. [ . . . ] At times, setting out from this high level of development, Spinoza’s thought does attempt to confront reality, but the ascetic proposal halts, stumbles, and disappears in the mystical attempt to reconcile the language of reality and divinity. Finally, in Spinoza as in the other great modern critics of modernity, the search for an outside seems to run aground and propose merely phantasms of mysticism, negative intuitions of the absolute.12

I share the enthusiasm of Hardt and Negri for Spinoza but some of the terminology in the above is quite misleading or at least very questionable. First, to speak of the rejection of ontologies that do not bear the stamp of human creativity is problematic in two respects. I would say that Spinoza engages with a creativity that very explicitly goes beyond the human which is precisely why he equates God with Nature: this is neither a religion nor a humanism. Then, to speak of the ‘stamp’ of human creativity is to suggest an imprinting mechanism as if creativity consisted of pre-established human-based designs, an implicitly idealist and technical – indeed dualist – way of considering things. Further, Hardt and Negri’s positing of a language of divinity and a language of reality is problematic in a reading of Spinoza since for him the divine or mystical is the real, although it is the case that Spinoza eventually gives up on the attempt to express this, perhaps realising that what is at stake is something too elusive and yielding to be fixed in concepts, precepts, formulae. For Hardt and Negri, the mystical is merely the phantasmatic but this would not be Spinozist. According to Spinoza, humans impose their imaginations and fictions on nature, where the task is instead to try and understand or at least accept the reality of nature’s workings both through a more scientific approach and through attending to states of human consciousness and affect. This is a reason for Spinoza’s on-going relevance in a philosophy of physics (Einstein)13 as well as of neurobiology (Damasio),14 whilst Spinoza has also been regarded as a precursor of psychoanalysis (Salome´ and Freud).15 Moreover, Spinoza is routinely denounced for ‘his perverse denial of spirits, ghosts, spectres, and apparitions’.16 It is not that Spinoza is lost in the phantasmatic but that there is a difficulty in the communication of his sense of the ontologically real. It is also for this reason that Kant’s emphasis on ‘freethinking’ as a matter of a public not private discourse becomes significant. Losonsky observes: While Hobbes enslaves the citizen to a human sovereign at the expense of one’s service to inner conviction, Spinoza frees the citizen from bondage to human sovereigns by enslaving him to the divinely inspired voice of inner conviction. Unfortunately, Spinoza’s liberty is limited to those with resolute

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minds, and it appears he has nothing to say for those that have little or no inner conviction. (p. 157) With respect to this, Kant’s emphasis on public reason serves to suggest that the sharing of ideas might possibly help us towards the discovery of not so much an inner than a dialectically arrived at conviction. Nonetheless, there would remain a possible impasse between the critical intellect addressed by Kant and the inspirational access to a creative intelligence as required by Spinoza. This is a genuine dilemma; nonetheless, Losonsky’s objection problematically implies that knowledge has to favour certain psychological or psychosomatic dispositions over others in order to be treated as authoritative. Against the possible bias of this stance, it is questionable to assume that reason is simply cut off from experience with the latter as merely dubious: rather, different ways of participating in the world entail different ways of thinking about it. Thus, no one has a complete knowledge and there are always limits to the extent to which we can be forced to think in the other’s terms – certainly for a Spinoza as much as a Hobbes – even as we may try to extend our capacities. Ethically speaking, it may be said that freedom depends on the recognition of a reality principle that would mitigate against the coercive, even violent, production of an homogenised subject. Such a reality principle would give recognition to the differences and deferrals of states of being and desire as affect the way we think and so entail deference. The reason that Spinoza may be said to be a significant precursor for both Freud and Damasio lies in the fact that he does not divorce the mind from soma, desire and feeling. Foucault’s essay will now be returned to. Foucault maintains that ‘the Enlightenment is the age of the critique’ and that Kant’s ‘little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise’ (p. 38). Kant is usually seen as striking a tacit bargain with King Frederick II, the Great, promising obedience in exchange for freedom of speech. Given Foucault’s endorsement of a politically canny and historically aware Kant, it is strange that his own essay does not really address its own historicopolitical moment of the mid-1980s. Rather Foucault, drawing attention to Kant’s sense of the contemporary, almost seems to position himself as Kant’s contemporary. He does this through the following gesture: ‘Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history’ (p. 39). Thus, as modernity becomes an attitude or, as Foucault also suggests, an ethos, it acquires a degree of transcendence over the historical. Foucault proposes, as regards a modern consciousness, that Baudelaire is the most exemplary of . . . well, what? . . . of thinkers? of poets? That is to say, Foucault’s casual and unexplained elision of the poetic and the philosophical calls for attention. It is of Baudelaire’s essays that Foucault treats; nonetheless it is important to bear in mind that they are the essays of a practising artist in the elaboration of a creative attitude. Foucault pays particular attention to Baudelaire’s essay on the artist Constantin Guys, and he says that for Baudelaire:

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‘being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting [ . . . ] perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it’ (p. 39). Are we back to the poetic or mystical apprehension of being or ‘the thing itself ’? How does this fit with Kant’s scepticism? Incidentally, Baudelaire features in an encyclopaedia of mysticism associated with a stance of nonduality, as follows: French poet, and the primary creative force behind modern French poetry [ . . . ] Baudelaire’s great importance lies in his sense that the exploration of the world outside and of the inner world are one and the same thing. In his sonnet ‘Correspondences’ he writes of the interrelatedness of all things, the universal symbolism, the interaction of all the senses with one another and with the spirit. So the artist’s task is to express and clarify the consciousness which acts within the material world, but at the same time transcends time and space. Baudelaire was fascinated by the occult, and by the effect of drugs, and wrote a work called ‘The Poem of Hashish’.17 Immediately after this entry on Baudelaire, Charles, comes an entry on: ‘Bauls. A movement in Bengal, independent of Hinduism and Islam, mainly among the lower castes. The word means ‘‘madcap’’. The aim is freedom, sometimes expressed through the Sufi concept of FANA, dying-to-self.’ It continues with: That is why, brother, I became a madcap Baul. No master I obey, nor injunctions, canons, or custom. Man-made distinctions have no hold on me now. I rejoice in the gladness of the love that wells out of my own being, In love there is no separation, but a meeting of hearts forever. So I rejoice in song and I dance with each and all That is why, brother, I became a madcap Baul.18 I feel almost certain that Spinoza would have rather liked these madcap Bauls who share with him a rejection of external religious observances and the affirmation of love of being. And Foucault? Whilst Foucault steers us in the direction of a certain poetic mysticism with Baudelaire, he almost immediately, after a dangerous moment, veers away from this. This is the dangerous moment: ‘Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to ‘‘heroize’’ the present’ (p. 40). The danger is that, as touched on earlier, the desire to conflate non-self-centred freedom of spirit with heroism as a centralising idealisation of the self, the proper, could have fascist or irrational implications. Luckily, this danger is averted by Foucault, not that he registers it, as he goes on to explain that this heroism is not for real in that it is ironic. He writes: ‘This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain it or to

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perpetuate it’ (p. 40). Foucault goes on to propose: ‘For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it as otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is’ (p. 41). I am not exactly sure how this works, whilst I remain open to the suggestion, but it seems that we are to be moved away from an actual experience of the present to a more imaginative recollection of it and with this move towards the imaginative we also are taken in the direction of narcissism. Foucault does not use the term ‘narcissism’ but I think it is appropriate for what he says in the following: To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme [ . . . ] the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and his passions, his very existence, a work of art. [ . . . ] This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself. (pp. 41–2) Whilst there is certainly an appeal to this self-preoccupied dandysme or artful and imaginative narcissism, you cannot really say that it is the same thing as inspiration, as Foucault implies. In fact, what is important to what is being set out here is the sense and proposition that there is a certain ratio to be maintained between creativity, of the somatic or inspired sort, and narcissism. The more creative, the less narcissistic; the more narcissistic, the less creative. If we take the madcap Bauls, their inspired creativity is reliant on a dying-to-self, or a self-abandonment. What is implied by Foucault is that the dandy lets go of or represses some of this ‘freedom of spirit’ whereby the dandy would have a certain fetishistic relation to inspiration. The problem is that Foucault wants to avoid this in that he both maintains that he is not talking about ‘fashion’ in talking about the modern attitude to the contemporary and that the dandy is other than the flaˆneur or, we could say, commodity-seduced browser. However, let us take an example of a dandy, Oscar Wilde’s imagining of Dorian Gray.19 It is Dorian Gray’s destiny precisely to become a work of art and to treat of himself as an experiment. Moreover, Dorian Gray is fetishistically obsessed with creativity even as he himself is not an artist. In Wilde’s story, it is the modest and unassuming Basil Hallward who is the artist, lacking in ego, like the Keatsian poet and unlike the more theatrical dandies. The one significant difference regarding Foucault’s re-formulation of the dandy to be mentioned is that Dorian Gray is a hedonist whilst Foucault’s dandy is an ascetic. There is an intense poignancy in reflecting on Foucault’s essay with its muted sense of its own times, the period when the gay community was being ravaged by illness and death, and with the threat of mortality hanging over Foucault himself. It gives a different charge to the desire to seize something eternal out of the fleeting present that the essay expresses, or to the haunting question of becoming image, becoming ghost.

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In referring to the dandy as the characteristic figure of enlightenment, Foucault is referring to work of his that he carries out elsewhere in his late attempts to re-think the ethical, in particular, the work that informs The Care of the Self.20 The trajectory of Foucault’s own work does rather beg the question of ethics, and in his late turning towards ethics he adopts a conciliatory stance toward Kant that is somewhat surprising given Foucault’s more rebellious anti-humanist critiques of Man. What transpires in Foucault’s re-reading and re-writing of Kant is a strange blending of himself and Kant: Foucault as Kant and Kant as Foucault. Foucault maintains, reasonably enough, that one does not have to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ (the European) Enlightenment (as the simplistic would have us be). Foucault says this is a blackmail that we should refuse, rightly so, especially given that Kant defines his enlightenment in terms of the maintaining of a critical or flexible attitude beyond the obligation to be obedient. Foucault then extends this question to whether the Enlightenment needs be a humanist project, and Foucault considers that the two exist in a tension with each other. But there seems to be a certain amount of special pleading in this part of his essay; it is certainly not argued through and Foucault rather shrugs the irksome question off. What I would like to suggest is that Foucault offers us what is implicitly a different kind of performativity to the rather authoritarian techno-performativity objected to by Kant. Foucault’s performativity is a theatrical self-fashioning, an art of the self, and ironic or rather Camp in sensibility thereby making clearer what is somewhat indeterminate in Kant’s position. It seems to me that theatrical performativity differs from techno-performativity in that the latter literalises an ideal or pre-given sign whilst the former mimics the real or plays with the gap between image and reality. This explains Foucault’s emphasis on a transformation of the present. Similarly, irony depends on a sense of a gap between appearance and reality. What becomes flamboyantly visible here is the sense of reservation that I was trying to draw attention to in Kant. Let me then make a blatant suggestion. A feminine freedom or frivolity is not just given up in a transition to serious, dutiful, manly maturity but lightly maintained. In fact, it may be that through some repression its renounced expression creates an inwardness but an inwardness that produces something of a comic mask or an act. By way of examples, it could be said that this ironic persistence of the feminine is to be found in ‘the attitude of modernity’ of Byron and Jane Austen, who have a similar theatrical sense to that of Wilde. In contradistinction to techno-performativity, theatrical performativity has something lively about it showing it to have some kind of relation to both nature and the real. My point is that there is no theatrical performativity without the real. In fact, it is the disappearance of the real within postmodernist culture that has resulted in there being no means of keeping theatrical performativity distinct from technoperformativity: postmodernist theory conflates the two in its rather generalised deployment of the performative. I would say that this conflation possibly constitutes one of the reasons that the left has drifted towards the centre and the right, the conformative.

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What Byron, Austen and Wilde could be said to share is a strong sense of the gap between awareness of social norms, rituals, manners, etiquette, conditioning, and so on, and awareness of fluid and fleeting real life as irreducible to any of these formulations. What Susan Sontag theorises in her aesthetics of Camp is relevant to these writers as well as to Foucault. Sontag writes that: ‘not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive.’21 It thus relies on a certain combining or inter-qualification of artificiality and authenticity. Whilst Camp is mocking and playful, Sontag also maintains: ‘Camp is a tender feeling’ (p. 119). Sontag both maintains that ‘Camp is the modern dandyism’, (p. 116) whilst situating its origin in the eighteenth century. This delightful, ironic and theatrical Camp sensibility may also be said to have its political variants in twentieth-century liberation struggles where a humorous, sometimes painfully humorous, gap is opened between colonial officialdom and lived experience. This sensibility, comparable to a Camp one, can be found in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Emile Habiby’s Saeed the Pessoptimist, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not.22 I will offer a reading of Dangarembga’s novel in a later chapter. My above comments constitute an attempt to tease Foucault out. What Foucault goes on to propose, very deftly, is that whilst Kant had to determine the necessary limits for the renunciation of transgression, his heirs are then faced with the question of determining the limits that can be transgressed. He states: ‘The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’ (p. 45). It is a very clever move because with this Foucault is able to have us see that his own project of the transgressions of or challenges to given limits is not an over-turning of the Kantian one but its logical development. Foucault writes: ‘I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (p. 47). With this Foucault becomes himself Kant’s audacious philosopher. But are we still talking philosophy, do you think? I am thinking of the selfexperimenting Dorian Gray (in the text it is explicit how his project is to take himself as an experiment), and I am thinking of how, for example, the adventurous experiment with things such as drugs, sex, parachuting and scuba-diving as a means of pushing the limits of themselves. However, I think that through engineering a continuity between himself and a contemporary Kant, Foucault also rather loses sight of the late twentieth century and what it would mean to pose Kant’s question today. So let us re-open it.

What is enlightenment today? Delirium in Japan Let us begin with the question of maturity posed by Kant. Foucault maintains: ‘I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood’ (p. 49). What is the nature of this potential impossibility? Is it because there is no such thing as

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mature adulthood? Is it because there will always be minors, indeed with each new generation, or because there is no longer any difference between the mature and immature? Could it even be that the mature do not really wish to mature, mature finally, as long as they live? In order to reflect on aspects of such questions, this will now take an essay by Asada Akira into account. As a means of introducing Asada, I will make extended use of an essay by Marilyn Ivy, ‘Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan’.23 Ivy begins by considering a controversial speech by Nakasone Yashuhiro, leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic party, in which Nakasone makes a case in the mid-1980s for Japanese superiority on the basis of the Japanese nation’s speedy dissemination of an abundance of information which he claims makes of Japan: ‘a very intelligent society – much more so than America’ (p. 23). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Ivy sees Nakasone’s speech as symptomatic of a ‘paranoiac delirium’ as it sweepingly tries to sketch out a world historical glory for the Japanese race. Ivy sees that Nakasone treats information and intelligence as ‘Nature itself ’, presumably inducing a hallucinatory conflation of the phantasmatic with the real. With this alarming start, Ivy proceeds to the Japanese educational scene, with its postmodernist ‘problem of knowledge as an informational commodity’ (p. 25). She then goes on to state: I want to focus neither exclusively on Lyotard’s knowledge as learning nor on knowledge as discourse, but rather on a more limited conception of knowledge: on knowledge as chi, the Japanese word that indicates knowledge as acquired through intellectual cultivation, but which has recently come to designate something akin, I think, to ‘theory’ in American literary-critical circles. (p. 25) Now I have to intervene here for, within and in spite of cultural limitations, I understand something different by ch’i. And I would like to assure you that the one thing ch’i is not is theory. But I am not a Japanologist and it may be that in postmodern Japan ch’i has oddly come to assume the American meaning of ‘theory’. This aside, it seems to me that it is the Chinese notion of ch’i that is at stake, with the historical influence of Chinese philosophy on Japanese culture. Ch’i may be defined as follows: ‘Ch’i. The Chinese word ch’i literally means ‘‘air’’, ‘‘power’’, ‘‘motion’’, ‘‘energy’’ or ‘‘life’’. According to T’ai Ch’i theory, the correct meaning of ch’i is ‘‘intrinsic energy’’, ‘‘internal energy’’, or original, eternal and ultimate energy’.24 It is capable of changing from one formation to another: Yin Ch’i or Yang Ch’i. However, it is also maintained that the translation of ch’i as energy should be thought not so much in terms of substance as in terms of rhythmically flowing movement. The medical anthropologist Margaret Lock explains it to the physicist Fritjof Capra, as follows: ‘The word literally means ‘‘vapor’’ and was used in ancient China to describe the vital breath, or energy, animating the cosmos. The flow and fluctuation of ch’i keep a person alive, and there are definite pathways of ch’i, the well-known meridians, along which lie the acupuncture points.’25 And Capra writes:

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Ch’i is not a substance, nor does it have the purely quantative meaning of our scientific concept of energy. It is used in Chinese medicine in a very subtle way to describe the patterns of flow and fluctuation in the human organism, as well as the continual exchanges between organism and environment.26 It is this ch’i knowledge – however you wish to translate it – that Ivy sees becoming commodified in the work of Asada Akira. The thought of it being equated with critical theory is actually rather funny, in that, if anything, it would be the undoing of critical theory, theory’s repression-subliming of energies for the sake of conceptual thinking. Or, theory would have to become dancing or yoga or t’ai ch’i or other means of ‘going with the flow’. Or, it would need to make of itself a very slinky, inky, fluid writing. In 1983, the year before Foucault wrote his ‘What is Enlightenment?’Asada published a book entitled Ko-zo- to chikara (Structure and Power), that without prior publicity sold about 80,000 copies within a few weeks bringing fame and acclaim to its author, newspapers heralding a ‘new academism’. Ivy writes: ‘Office workers, university students, artists, musicians – everyone bought the book’ (p. 26). According to Ivy, the book offers an exposition of post-structuralist thought concentrating on Lacan, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, with Nietzsche and Spinoza in the background, and it is said: ‘Deleuze and Guattari [ . . . ] have influenced him more directly than Derrida’ (p. 27). I think this is more than circumstantial, as I will return to. Structure and Power has a preface published separately in 1981 in a special edition of Chu-o- ko-ron (Central Review), dedicated to discussing the status of the university today. Ivy writes: ‘The preface is really an inquiry into the possibility of the university, and into the nature of knowledge’ (p. 27). It – Asada’s project – can thus be identified as very much an enlightenment enquiry. Asada addresses the kind of students who study obediently for the sake of their private lives (career ladder, and so on), offering a challenge to them. In Kantian terms we could say that the university has thus become a place of merely private reason. Asada speaks of two modes of knowledge that dominate the university today, knowledge as an object, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or knowledge as a means: what the Frankfurt school would see as instrumental knowledge. Ivy glosses the argument as follows: ‘Knowledge for knowledge’s sake, however, often arrogates to itself the status of religion, clearly revealed by the sciences today. On the other hand, knowledge as a means degenerates into a bourgeois tool for advancement, as a mere route for success as bureaucrat or doctor, in order to live an upper-middle class life. It is an impoverished choice’ (p. 28). Indeed, it is, although I should like to keep apart the equation of ‘doctor’ and ‘bureaucrat’. Asada’s attitude regarding questions of enlightenment strikes me as far more contemporary and daring than Foucault’s, the work under consideration by the two of them being written at the same time, where Kant maintains that public reason ought to be cosmopolitan in its reach. Whereas Foucault looks back to Baudelaire’s reaction to nineteenth-century capitalist society, as do so many

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others, Asada looks, with a cross-cultural perspective, at the state of the university around him. And with this we can see how Kant’s expectations have not only been unfulfilled but even utterly eroded. For a start, what Kant terms private reason, that is, technological reason, has not been minimised as Kant had hoped but has been massively maximised, progressively colonising the space to be reserved for public reason. Increasingly, education becomes a matter of obedient performativity, and the one place supposed to guarantee freedom of thought and its expression becomes increasingly managerialised and privatised. Then, it is also the case that ‘objective knowledge’ is treated like a religion, especially by the scientist-guardians, and hence Latour is right to protest at his being ‘gagged’ in the wars over who is allowed to speak of science. Scientific research is not, as Einstein argued, cleanly divorced from a sense of the religious inasmuch as it deals with creation and life. However, the issue is other than this. It is that scientific authority is often used to promote clandestine values as being objectively the case. For example, whilst Richard Dawkins rails obsessively against religion, for him biology becomes a kind of disguised religion in that his thinking of the genome is imprinted with a patriarchal logocentrism: the kind of logic treated in the previous chapter. Much more widely, Donna Haraway offers a critique of the authoritarian religious attitude offering itself as pure science in her book, Modest_Witness.27 The stir caused by Asada’s work is that it tries to offer something of an exit, a way out, this being the term – Ausgang – Kant uses: for Kant, enlightenment concerns finding a way out of both obedience to theological authority and technologised reason. And this, says Ivy, is where ch’i comes in, although it really concerns the outside. Ivy writes: ‘The text from that point on is a defence of knowledge as ‘‘play’’ (tawamure; yu-gi) [ . . . ] and a ceaseless turn to the ‘‘outside’’ (gaibu)’ (p. 29). It seems that what is envisaged is the allowance for creativity. Ivy says that: ‘The rhetoric is emancipatory’ (p. 29). This recalls Kant’s appeal to a freedom of spirit, although Kant is not really a playful writer or a thinker turned towards the outside, but nonetheless, an admirable, sober thinker of the inside. Asada finds his precursors in Spinoza, in Nietzsche’s joyful wisdom or gay science and in Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal nomadic thought. I am deliberately following Ivy’s discussion of Asada since I am interested in the way that she presents him; a more direct reading of Asada will be offered further on. It should also be pointed that there is little of Asada’s work available in translation, a neglect including, unfortunately, Structure and Power. Ivy tries to account for the book’s immensely popular appeal by maintaining that the book’s ‘perceived difficulty’ was linked with ‘the youth and verve of its author’ (Asada being only twenty-five when he wrote it), thus in Kantian terminology, maturity combining with immaturity as youthful energy. Ivy sees this in terms of ‘the myth of the tensai, the ‘‘genius’’’ being built up around Asada, where he is interviewed for a magazine series called ‘Gods of the Young’ (p. 30). Asada is revealed to have no books in his apartment but, being a musical prodigy, a piano. Ivy comments: ‘The genius is a figure of knowledge without effort, of productivity without labour [ . . . ] There is thus a magical circuit which collapses

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production and consumption in an effortless generation of language’ (p. 30). Are we to understand this as: capitalism is under threat? With this freedom of creativity, with this auto-generativity of the young, with this self-renewing expenditure of language, capitalism is under threat: collapse of labour and consumer in this. That is part of its unintentional yet moralising subtext since what is objected to is the undermining of honest, sweated (only it is here cerebral), labour. However, to be fair, Ivy is attempting to deploy an anti-capitalist or Marxist argument. Closer to Ivy’s argument is that Asada is the opium for the labouring masses: he offers them the illusory dream of creativity replacing labour. There is a point to this, but some might maintain the truth about capitalism is that workers must surrender their creativity for the sake of supervised, mechanical labour, according to production plan, so that commodities, as opposed to works of art, can be produced. However, what Ivy writes is: ‘If all commodities are fetishes, then Structure and Power is a particularly fantastic one, and what it fetishistically replaces is intellectual labor’ (p. 31). That is to say, she equates the ‘magically’ (inspirationally) produced book with the ‘magically’ (appropriatively) produced commodity. In this equation, it seems that for Ivy there can be no inspired/inspiring ‘work’, only work that is really work: the implication is that either Asada’s intelligent playfulness is faking work or that it is faking play. Ivy goes on to speak disapprovingly of Asada’s reading habits: Asada has compared the new technique of reading to eating hors d’oeuvres or snacks. Reading, eating, and consuming here become conflated – it’s all a matter of incorporating something, but incorporating it lightly, without undue investment [ . . . ] As we have seen reading can be replaced by an ‘encounter’ with a book, which sends out ‘signals’; one ‘picks up’ the book. In place of reading one need only take the book to bed. (p. 31) Well, that describes my reading habits quite plausibly. Not being a Japanologist nor a philosopher, how else can I account for the morsels of Kant, Foucault and Japanese postmodernist thought I have snacked on: yes, they winked at me from the shelves and I just fell for them in passing. And then, all those unread books by the pillow that I and you dream of reading and so find in our dreams. It must be a generational thing, these dilettantish reading habits. Ivy goes on to cite from Frigga Haug’s ‘corrosive expose of commodity aesthetics’: ‘Thus a whole range of commodities can be seen casting flirtatious glances at the buyers, in an exact imitation of or even surpassing the buyers’ own glances, which they use in courting their human objects of affection’ (p. 31). But surely it is too easy to produce a simple equivalence here, no question-mark. I might fall in love with an elegant pair of shoes, and you could ridicule me for doing so, but if I were to confess a love of the beauty of Baudelaire’s poems or to being excited by the spirit of Asada’s critique, would this be as ridiculous, in need of corrosive exposition? Hopefully not. The implication of the above is that Asada’s readers have only a narcissistic interest in giving themselves the aura of young intellectuals by cruisily ‘picking up’ his book, but even that is not

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so bad. Imagine Deleuze selling a hundred thousand copies in a week and all the commuters on the tube snacking for a while on Le pli instead of Harry Potter . . . but before this gets too delirious, let us hear what Asada has to say. Asada’s essay ‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale’ is partially a response to Ivy’s reading of him.28 Excusing himself for not being a Japanologist, being the object of such a study, he offers to give a parodic and schematic (Ivy describes Structure and Power as very schematic) sketch of his own analysis of Japanese capitalism. Asada begins: When Marilyn Ivy discussed Nakasone Yashuhiro’s transhistorical delirium, I recalled an almost equally delirious discussion, I had with Fe´lix Guattari during his visit to Japan. We talked about capitalism’s global trajectory: elderly capitalism, adult capitalism, and infantile capitalism. (p. 274) It is a delightful essay. Elderly capitalism concerns old Europe, found in countries ‘which developed an early mercantile capitalism, countries where a transcendental value system like Catholicism still remains. Such a value system is a vertically centralized system, supported by the Subject, with a capital S’ (p. 274). And this delivers the familiar series: God, the King, the father, or in economics, gold. Industrial ‘adult’ capitalism is given to us as a more dynamic system and is associated with Britain and America, where relative competition replaces fixed positions and roles. In adult capitalism, ‘everyone competes with his neighbor as the model/rival’ where this is internalised so that the subject begins to compete with himself. Asada says that this internalisation of, we could say, ego ideal and the consequent formation of the superego, gives us Foucault’s empirico-transcendental doublet. Actually, this figure of the double begins to emerge in late eighteenth- and in nineteenthcentury Gothic literature as precisely the beginnings of a kind of fictional critique of the humanist Enlightenment. Foucault’s formulation of the empiricotranscendental doublet draws on the background of this literature. Thus, this humanist subject of finitude is a Jekyll and Hyde, the subject ‘which, internalizing paternal instance through ‘‘Oedipalization’’, has come to make itself its own colony’ (p. 275). What could be added to Asada and Guattari’s observations is that the double is at once ‘father’ and ‘son’, the adult as this contradictory collision of the elderly and infantile. Moreover, neither can escape each other: the rebellious son cannot escape the punitive father while the would-be serious father cannot escape the embarrassing would-be son. In literature, this ends in suicide, so it may be a kind of death drive capitalism that Asada addresses, as Marx maintained of the ultimately self-destructive dynamic of capitalism. Asada writes: ‘If we call this subject the adult, modernization is precisely a process of maturation’ (p. 275). But what could make maturity impossible, Foucault being sceptical about the attainment of this maturity, is that the father-self would be bedoubled with its son-self. Is not to want to get rid of the son-self, girlish-boyish self, either to want to get rid of liveliness or of the unconscious? Asada goes on to argue that Japan was modernised without maturing: ‘Japan did not at all mature. Far from it’ (p. 275). In Japan:

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there are neither tradition-oriented old people adhering to transcendental values nor inner-oriented adults who have internalized their values; instead, the nearly purely relative (or relativistic) competition exhibited by otheroriented children provides the powerful driving force for capitalism. (p. 275) Without patriarchal logocentricism, without the no-of-the-father, there would be no repression, thus endless play and youthful creativity. It sounds utopian; Asada: ‘Is this utopian [ . . . ]?’ (p. 275) What it is is hilarious for it leads to a parody of Hegel’s culmination of world historical spirit revealing itself as our absolute infantilisation. Asada writes: ‘Is this the goal of capitalism’s history as a process of infantilization which might as well be called a parody of Hegelian world history? Of course, it can never be anything like that: but this very negation must be uttered with a burst of laughter. And, we might add, after laughing, that it is a playful utopia and at the same time a terrible ‘‘dystopia’’’. (p. 276) Asada explains that: In fact, children can play ‘freely’ only when there is some kind of protection [ . . . ] And this protected area is precisely the core of the Japanese ideological mechanism – however thinly diffused a core. It is not a ‘hard’ ruling structure which is vertically centralized (whether transcendental or internalized), but ‘soft’ subsumption by a seemingly horizontal, centreless ‘place’. Here we can recall, as ideological expressions of the Japanese ideology, various stereotyped theories about the Japanese people. Despite frequent argument about Confucian patriarchy, the Japanese family is an essentially maternal arena of ‘amae’, indulgence, and both the father and the children are softly wrapped in it (in other words, the mother is forced to provide that kind of care). (p. 276) What is interesting is that it is proposed that there is the allowance of a generationless, playful creativity as long as it unfolds within a prescribed socioeconomic order of domestication, which would still beg the question of a freedom of spirit. And this is what Asada, in effect, further attends to. He goes on to propose: While European kings and nations, based on the principle of ‘yu,’ presence, contain conflict between individuals and the whole, and have no other choice to repeat collision through striving to expand the self in space, the imperial household as the place of nothingness contains Japan like an empty cylinder which pierces time; and inside of this, on the basis of zettai mujunteki jiko doitsu (absolute contradictory self-identity) which exists between atomism and holism, individuals will each find a place and participate in ‘holonic’ as opposed to holistic, harmony. (p. 277) In other words, the formerly holistic unity with being as no-thingness, ‘unthingly’, is replaced by an identification with the machinic as the cosmic. Or absolute thingness becomes absolute through the usurpation of no-thingness. Thus, creativity

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would be totally walled into the mechanical with no relation to the outside, and Asada does state that in Japanese society creativity exists solely for the sake of the electronic and technological. The dystopia of this infantile capitalism is that humans become totally enslaved by the technological totality which they live and die for, existing only to keep the Japanese imperial machine going. In contradistinction with these frenzied and techno-tamed children, the infantilisation of American capitalism remains more self-centred, more adult-adolescent. Marilyn Ivy in her essay on Asada also devotes attention to the phenomenon of Japanese creative types making advertisements that are completely detached from the products they are supposedly advertising being instead just autonomous works of art. This is an inversion of what tends to happen in late capitalist Western culture. That is to say, in Western culture, art and advertisement tend to fuse on the level of the iconic or narcissistic image, the level of the commodity fetish, as in the work of Andy Warhol, whereas in the situation described by both Ivy and Asada, the making of art can flourish in the marketplace by merely pretending to be logo-centric: or, condensing this, in the West non-art pretends fetishistically to be art, whilst in Japan, art pretends to be non-art by offering itself in place of and in the milieu of the advertisement or designer thing. The slippery point is that capitalism itself is thus here totally faked, given a non-logocentric culture just pretending to go along with the logo-centric structure of capital. With the Kantian pact in mind, as long as you are instrumentally obedient, you can express yourself as you please, but it is Asada’s point that this does not amount to freedom of spirit in that there is no longer any true sense of an outside or of the real. In maintaining that Japanese society is not logocentric in that it presumes no transcendental presence or originating Being, no authorial Subject, Asada and other Japanese intellectuals such as Karatani Ko-jin, have argued that it does not stand in need of deconstruction in that it is, in a sense, already deconstructed. On a visit to Japan in 1984, Derrida, in conversation with Asada and others, makes the point that Japan in absorbing Western culture is likely to have absorbed and internalised – Derrida’s term is ‘integrated’ – some of its structures, and he also remarks: ‘I have my doubts about whether we can say that deconstruction is a direct element in Japanese-type thought. Certainly, Japanese often say that Buddhist thought or the Zen of Do-gen was already a kind of deconstruction, but I wonder if that is so.’29 Indeed, it is not so, and, amongst other things, this is because deconstruction is rather more narcissistically orientated30 and reliant on the subject than Buddhism with Buddhist enlightenment being a matter of a certain egolessness or non-containment. Suzuki puts this very starkly: ‘The individual ego asserts itself strongly in the West. In the East, there is no ego. The ego is non-existent, and, therefore, there is no ego to be crucified’31 (p. 113), or, less dramatically, no ideal ego to be deconstructed. Derrida goes on to state: ‘If that phenomenon of Asada were nothing more than a repetition of deconstructive elements already found within Japanese thought, then it shouldn’t have called down such an enormous response in contemporary Japan.’32 This, it could be pointed out, is a rather narcissistic statement on

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Derrida’s part since Asada’s success is being attributed to a deconstruction that comes from the West not the East, that is to say, to Derrida’s own work. But, as pointed out by Ivy, Asada is not drawing on Derrida so much as Deleuze and Guattari together with Nietzschean and Spinozist strands of Western thought. It could be that Asada’s appeal lies in his combining of elements of Western and Eastern philosophy in a non-deconstructive way. This returns us to the significance of ch’i where ch’i is not reducible to Western theory. It is the case that, loosely speaking, there could be said to be deconstructive elements in Asada’s work. He treats of the undoing of binary oppositions but does so, in Ivy’s terms, through attending to ‘relations of exchange’ rather than with ‘language itself in its rhetorical twists and turns’ (p. 26). I think what could be at stake are different approaches to the ontological. Derrida works with an understanding of the ontological that is based on the opposition of presence and absence where he tries to deconstruct this opposition in favour of the virtual and the spectral. Asada, working with the notion of ch’i, is assuming an understanding of the ontological in terms of flows of energy – this being the ‘power’ of Structure and Power – implying too, the transformations or relations of exchange between Yin and Yang as conjoined complements not discrete opposites. Since this is conjectural, I will offer, in the manner of Asada, a fairy-tale approach to the difference at stake. Let us take the following set of oppositions: being: true man

non-being: false woman

A deconstruction of them would challenge the masculine as the sign of presence, as nothing but the rhetorical ‘sign’ of presence, turning true or virtuous man into virtual man. There would be no further appeal to presence so that this virtual man would remain on a par with artificial woman; both would be derivative and there would be no origin, the origin having been deconstructed. The difference between the virtual and artificial would also be somewhat blurred. However, from the point of view of ch’i, or in Taoist terms, anything that you do to ‘true man’ would immediately transform ‘false woman’ because they are not really spaced apart but pertain to non-duality or shared substance. Thus, if you render ‘true man’ as ‘virtual man’ this would transform ‘false woman’ into something else. Let us say that the partial diminution of presence – signified by ‘true man’ – as spirit or energy would at once give us something like ‘spirited woman’. metaphysical opposition: true man~~~~~~~~~~false woman deconstruction: virtual (false) man~~~false (artificial) woman complementarity: virtual (spectralised) man~~~spirited (de-spectralised) woman Deconstruction halts at what would be indeed a phantasmatic spacing for a dialectic of complementarity, or for Buddhism or Taoism, where in a more dynamic view any movement on one side would be at once accompanied by a

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movement on the other in, perhaps, a rhythm of being and exchange, its energy dance. What I am producing here is a fairy-tale, not so much an unreal as a sort of magical, improvised non-analysis, but it can be argued more seriously as this work will eventually come to do in a reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx in a later chapter. Asada ends his fairy-tale in the following way: Can this be the absolutely contradictory self-identity between the ‘old’ and the ‘infantile’ which is achieved at the end of world history? Naturally, of course, such a vision is nothing but an extreme form of idealist perversion. At this point, the idiocy of it all is already evident. Or should I say, so that this vision will collapse by itself, I have purposely continued to engage in a grotesque parody. What remains to be done is to dismantle this perversion thoroughly, and from there to produce a realistic analysis. That work, however, is something I would like to undertake together with you, who know Japan better than I do, in future discussions. Can you hear me laughing? (p. 278) Yes, and you laugh. Asada’s short critique is one of the funniest I have read and you can hear and feel the tremors of its laughter all the way through its unfolding. The humour is partly due to the delirious twist given to Hegel and to the whole ethos of Western maturity. However, it is also a Joycean–Foucauldian type of laughter, that is to say, it is the self-deflating laughter of a brilliance of mind at its own audacity. And, furthermore, what is funny about Asada’s piece is that it is not exactly a work of dutiful critical labour. It is more truly the inspired and disinhibited expression of one operating a bit more lightly than the serious and laborious critic (without any hostility towards the latter). And now, let us urgently attend to the disappearing outside and the possibility of more realistic engagements.

The wilderness or counter-history Hardt and Negri aptly note: ‘In the end, Foucault’s philosophical critique of the Enlightenment returns to the same Enlightenment standpoint. In this ebb and flow between inside and outside, the critique of modernity does not finally go beyond its terms and limits, but rather stands poised on its boundaries’ (p. 184). They go on to state: ‘The process of modernization, in all these varied contexts, is the internalization of the outside, that is, the civilization of nature’ and they cite Jameson maintaining that postmodernism ‘‘‘is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’’’ (p. 187). This is how Hegel would have wished it, seeing it as humanity’s task to replace nature with a ‘second nature’, in effect, the completely holonic, technologised, domesticated late capitalism described by Asada (only for Hegel, it would be a more authoritarian, more masculinist, more logocentric version). In accordance with this extreme loss of the outside, Hardt and Negri consider that the racism of our times, the imperial racism of globalisation, is one that operates in accordance with a strategy of inclusion rather than exclusion. It

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could be said that inclusion may well be the ideology, but it is certainly not always the practice. Moreover, and this pertains to the former point, it seems absurd to proclaim that there is no more nature, that it has gone for good, and that humans can dispense with it. Can the postmodernists not feel the sun or the rain on their skin? Are there no more wolves? Whatever happened to the beach, the beach beneath the paving stones? Multitudes are in touch with nature and, of course, the natural world, cultivated or not, continues to exist. Indeed, why would there be so much fighting over natural resources if all we have is nonnature? Asada is careful to offer his dystopian holonic world as a fairy-tale towards a more realistic analysis. It seems to me that Hardt and Negri are using a ‘nature gone for good’ as a screen for a partial predicament, possibly that of Western intellectual urbanites somewhat out of touch with the real. Why not address this crisis as such? Hardt and Negri’s concerns are with the inclusion of postcolonial subjects, that is, with a pervasive Westernisation through institutionalisation. They argue, as I myself have elsewhere (also following a Deleuzian-Guattarian line of thinking), that the Oedipal family is now everywhere in the Western world.33 In Kantian terms, there is the intensification and increase of private reason and the shrinking of freedom of spirit. Hardt and Negri argue that with this, let us say, omni-domestication, subjectification is a constant project of the social construction of identities accompanied by the sense of an on-going crisis in terms of the breakdowns of institutions: with this, identities and institutions constantly have to be reinforced. They write: One should not think that the crisis of the nuclear family has brought a decline in the forces of patriarchy. On the contrary, discourses and practices of ‘family values’ seem to be everywhere across the social field. The old feminist slogan ‘The personal is the political’ has been reversed in such a way that the boundaries between public and private have fractured, unleashing circuits of control throughout the ‘intimate public sphere’. (p. 197) Thus, an irresolvable dialectic of constantly renewed subjectification and its breakdown, its ‘corruption’ in Hardt and Negri’s terms, is produced. Butler’s theory of gender trouble would I think fit into this model, and more generally, theories of techno-performativity and its perversions. Hardt and Negri end their chapter on imperial inclusion with an epilogue entitled ‘Refusal’, what this chapter has less extremely considered in terms of ‘reservation’, choosing as exemplary figures here Melville’s Bartleby and Coetzee’s Michael K.34 Of Bartleby they state: His refusal is so absolute that Bartleby appears completely blank, a man without qualities or, as Renaissance philosophers would say, homo tantum, mere man and nothing more. Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more. (p. 203)

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Everyone likes to have a go at interpreting the enigmatic Bartleby, and, it being my turn: is not Bartleby rather a sort of death drive? First, he is, as mindless copyist, one compelled merely to repeat, the kind of technologised labour that Kant characterises in terms of man stripped of his dignity. I think it is astute of Hardt and Negri to frame their chapter with Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ for this reason. Then, second, Bartleby’s becoming despirited machinic labour deprives him not simply of the will to work but of the will to live: and he just dies autonomously as the only possible remaining expression of his dignity, that is, autonomy. This ‘homo tantum’, this isolating and reductive singularisation of man within capitalism, with no way out of its imprisoning structures, is the negated inversion of the unstoppable Spinozist desire-to-be. All that remains of this desire-to-be is the choice of death. Of Coetzee’s Michael K, Hardt and Negri write: ‘Michael K. [ . . . ] is also a figure of absolute refusal. But whereas Bartleby is immobile, almost petrified in his pure passivity, K is always on his feet, always moving’ (p. 203). Michael K’s refusal is indeed different from that of Bartleby’s since he refuses to be brought into the domesticated enclosures of colonised labour. He is like a nomad of the desert. The narrator he encounters within the story, however, considers that Michael K must give up his ties with the maternal and with the land in order to be brought into history, so he is faced with the Hegelian injunction to enter the master-slave dialectic of Empire for the supposed sake of his historical progress towards maturity. What is rather fantastic or phantasmatic about Michael K is that he is a character that seems to derive from a Kafkaesque or Beckettian absurdist tradition as signified by his name (and ‘Bartleby’ is a precursor of such a tradition), who is yet implicitly a rural African or, more broadly, native. What is possibly being a bit mixed up here by Coetzee is the hyper-domesticated absurdist man with the ‘wild-child’, gentle nomad. Nonetheless, it is the case that Michael K is an outsider with some freedom of movement in contradistinction to the death-tending paralysis of Bartleby. In terms of South African literature, his precursor could be said to be Olive Schreiner’s Waldo from The Story of an African Farm who is a rural labourer as well as itinerant worker but who also has a Bartleby side in that he just dies spontaneously where, unsaid, the intolerable situation that he is imprisoned in is that of a deeply racist and sexist society.35 In Waldo’s case, the only way open to him of bettering himself is one of enslaving himself to an inhumane society which he refuses to do. It is interesting to compare these figures of ‘Refusal’ as conceived by Western writers with their putative counterparts in African literature. For example, in Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi, after an ethnic conflict, two characters become exilic nomads of the African bush and can be seen as exemplifying a freedom of movement prior to the colonisation of African labour.36 What Plaatje shows us is instructive for what his text reveals is a brother-sister relationship or an equal partnership between its two free-spirited male and female protagonists. In Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, the pre-colonial nomadic hero rescues a woman from her enslavement to a narcissistic character that personifies Death and in this novel too free-spiritedness and freedom of movement are given to us in terms of

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an equal partnership between the masculine and the feminine.37 It is not, however, only in African literature that you can discover this rendition of the horizontally mobile, far from it. Pauline Melville treats of this nomadic brothersister relationship in terms of a refusal of and flight from both monotheism and colonialism in The Ventriloquist’s Tale.38 Other examples would be possible. The point is: dare to think or think to dare, it looks as if freedom of spirit, freedom of movement, have something feminine or androgynous about them, for either sex. In Globalization: The Human Consequences, Zygmunt Bauman persuasively argues that capital becomes ever more spectral and virtual in its speedy techno-mobility where this exempts the shifty elites from their responsibility to the earthbound locals and their localities. Bauman writes of the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distance: ‘It emancipates certain humans from territorial constraints and renders certain community-generating meanings exterritorial – while denuding the territory, to which other people go on being confined.’39 It is also said: The global travels of financial resources are perhaps as immaterial as the electronic network they travel – but the local traces of their journeys are painfully tangible and real: ‘qualitative depopulation’, destruction of local economies once capable of sustaining their inhabitants, the exclusion of the millions incapable of being absorbed by the new global economy. (p. 75) Thus, this hyper-techno-mobility is indissociable from the destructiveness that affects the excluded locals and their environments even as the elites go on trying to dissociate themselves from their responsibility for the terrible predicaments they not only neglect but bring about through neglect. Hardt and Negri want to emphasise rather how Empire forces mobility on labour. This is true for some, where Bauman’s analysis is: Vagabonds are travellers refused the right to turn into tourists. They are allowed to neither stay put [ . . . ] nor search for a better place to be. Once emancipated from space, capital no longer needs itinerant labour [ . . . ] And so the pressure to pull down the last remaining barriers to the free movement of money and money-making commodities and information goes hand in hand with the pressure to dig new moats and erect new walls (variously called ‘immigration’ or ‘nationality’ laws) barring the movement of those who are uprooted, spiritually or bodily, as a result. (p. 93) So the vagabonds end up immobilised in camps and prisons. Thus, freedom of movement as cosmopolitan free-spiritedness recedes more and more as movement becomes more and more technologised. Capital manifests itself as the mere performative techno-mimicry of spirited mobility whilst labour is either increasingly subjected to technologisation or paralysed. Hardt and Negri state: ‘Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community.

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This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community’ (p. 204). Yes, indeed, regarding the general sentiment, but, as I have been indicating, the lines of Hardt and Negri’s arguments fail to engage sufficiently with what might be necessary in the analysis towards this. Whilst they dismissively regard postcolonial studies, together presumably with its feminist concerns, as simply part of the assimilation they address, they fail to explain what would mobilise the above sentiment. How do you square humanity? How does man multiply with man? Would ‘homohomo’ then turn out to be yet another instance of the Western male double? Carla Hesse in addressing Foucault’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ rewriting of Kant points out: ‘while Kant had many eighteenth-century interlocutors, to my knowledge the first person to define her philosophical project as a rewriting of Kant was Isabelle de Charrie`re Belle Van Zuylen.’40 Charrie`re’s novel or philosophical tale, Trois femmes, Three Women, is a response to Kant’s ‘On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory But is of No Practical Use’, and Hesse sees it as a feminist critique of modern subjectivity and the categorical moral imperative. Kant, in his essay, excludes two categories of individuals from the originating contract, these being women and servants, on the grounds that women and servants – by nature? – lack the capacity for maturity or autonomous self-determination. Charrie`re’s response is to imagine three women thus excluded from the self-regulating moral community being faced with a series of ethical dilemmas where they have to act in ways that clandestinely transgress man-made regulations and values, which they have no real obligation to in that they are excluded, indeed foreclosed, from their constitution. Hesse comments: In the end Charrie`re’s story becomes a story of how these three women constitute their ethical life beyond the laws of men. Trois femmes, as scandalized readers recognized at the time, was the story of a band of outlaws; a story of the ethical life of women beyond the laws of propertied men. Charrie`re’s three women band together through self-election and form an outlaw community based upon the ethical principle of total sacrifice to one another, and a reservation of the right to bend rules that they had no part in creating. (p. 94) Hesse observes that whilst Foucault positions himself as ironic author in relation to Kant there is this yet more radical feminine position of the outsider. It is also noted that whilst Charrie`re considers the question of the possible assimilation of the outsider, the turning of women and servants into masculine insiders, it is a position she rejects. There is actually a tradition of this alternative outsider ethics amongst women writers and thinkers. For example, Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas is a work very close to Three Women in its position. Woolf, addressing an educated man’s antiwar fund-raising requests of her, proposes an Outsiders Society.41 When Jacques Derrida proposes a new international in Specters of Marx, it is noticeably along the same lines as Woolf ’s Outsiders Society, not that Derrida is necessarily

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aware of this. That is, Derrida imagines a non-nationalistic, non-institutional association of the anonymous.42 Woolf eschews any glorification and mesmerisation by the media, ‘the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity’, proposing: ‘we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public means in public but with private means in private. Those experiments will not merely be critical but creative’ (p. 130). Woolf ’s demography is problematic because her analysis is predicated more along gender lines than class and she clearly fails to challenge the private/public demarcation. With this, her position is implicitly a middle class one that remains oblivious to working class or subaltern needs for empowerment in the struggle for survival. Ipshita Chanda in ‘Feminist Theory in Perspective’ treats of the need for material empowerment in postcolonial contexts whilst also maintaining a critical stance towards the liberal notion of the self-empowerment of the individual. She states: ‘Empowerment consisting of elements of self-confidence, inner strength, the ability to control life inside and outside the home, seems to assume a self-contained individual whose social location and context has no effect on her.’43 It may be said that this notion of ‘the self-contained individual’ is, in its formation, both a middle class and a masculinist one. Where Kant sees guardians as desired by a female population – the entire female sex, he says – too passive to think for themselves, Woolf gives us to understand that guardians are those who thwart the feminine out of what she calls ‘an infantile fixation’ (p. 150). This especially concerns self-appointed guardians who possessively and pathologically curtail the freedom of women, seemingly out of envy and jealousy of the feminine. Moreover, the paradox that Woolf indirectly reveals is that what the guardians are actually trying to guard is something like femininity of their own, femininity that they supposedly and secretly own and that women are supposed not to have any idea of being alienated from themselves. In this light, or resentful gloom, suppression and control of freedom of spirit would be posited as ‘democratic’ in that everyone would be equally handicapped. But at what cost? The cost would be a pathological society: call it ‘paranoid democracy’. And, Woolf is indeed addressing the racist and sexist paranoias of war-mongering modern societies. The recent film, Hidden (Cache´), addresses this question of a modern politics of paranoia.44 In brief, the racist paranoia of a middle class Frenchman is traced back to his Oedipal rivalry with a young Algerian boy who had claimed his mother’s affections. This situation is juxtaposed with that of the man’s son who is going through puberty. The son is paranoid in imagining that his mother is having an affair. The loss of femininity entailed in the process of puberty leads to the paranoia that a ‘foreign man’, a fantasy enemy, is stealing a femininity that properly belongs to the self. That is the psychic structure of this misogyny and racism as it reflects a hidden psychosomatic condition. In contradistinction to this, what I am trying to argue is that the femininity in question does not belong to a self. It is not something anyone owns and it can perhaps only be experienced as a question of freedom. In a strange article entitled, ‘ . . . and pomegranates’, Derrida partially blames war-mongering and rape on the over-valuation of an intact, pure,

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sacred femininity.45 I do not quite go along with the logic of this argument: women are violated because they are valued as sacred? However, it is the very irrationality of this that the essay engages with, given that Derrida notes that there are those who, in claiming to defend the sacredness of life, are willing to violate life. And, because this holy intactness is seen to provoke male violence, which I think is rather a matter of resenting the otherness of the other, Derrida’s strategy seems to be to deconstruct it with a degree of scorn. What I wish to argue here is that the assumption of femininity as some kind of intact kernel or inner sanctum, internal possession, may be based on a certain unaddressed misunderstanding in the first place. Like so many, Derrida focuses his critique on the question of femininity as sacred, and on the sacred more generally, rather than on the problem of positing this sacredness as an inner possession. Instead, my suggestion is that whilst there is femininity, be it seen as sacred or not, it is not to be located in a you or a me, but rather between us. It could, for instance, be my recognition of your freedom, or yours of mine. Freedom of spirit always recoils from or reserves itself from over-possessiveness: it is not for the grasping. Nonetheless, it is this delusion of an inner kernel – that Zˇizˇek posits as an illusory kernel of the real46 – that does appear to be operative in torture and rape where the assumption is precisely that the ‘inner’ feminine freedom of spirit can be yielded up to a thus deified masculine omnipotence. Now, can you tell me, did Kant do his own grocery shopping, cooking and washing up? I am trying to picture it. Did he do his own laundry? Or, did he, like a child, rely on mere minors, women and servants (the ‘lazy’ he calls them) to do these things for him? Did he independently depend on them so that he could devote himself to thinking – not for women, servants, natives, if he is not to be one of those patronising, all-advising guardians who think for others too ‘passively’ servile to think for themselves – but devote himself to thinking unlazily, industriously, for himself ? All right, my hypocrite reader, I am playing facetiously. Now seriously, there is beyond Foucault’s ethics of ‘the care of the self ’, an ethics of the care of the other, of life not your own: the care of children; the care of the ill and injured; the care of the elderly; the care of animals; the care of the environment; the care of the poor; the care of the friend and of the stranger and migrant. This is obviously not about self-focused self-development, Kantian or Foucauldian. And yet such an ethics of care in practice is not without enlightenment. Kant’s emphasis on maintaining a critical relation to a techno-performative society remains significant as does Foucault’s attention to the theatrical cultivation of the self. However, the modernity of Modernism goes beyond the ironic Campness, so to speak, of the modern attitude of the eighteenth century. What Baudelaire foresees in his appreciation of Guys could be said to be Modernism’s rediscovery of the real, of duration, of stream-of-consciousness. Perhaps the significance of the real consists in our being conscious and solicitous of the being of the other? It may be proposed that the critical spirit that Kant addresses comes about through repression and suppression of the feminine where the paradox that

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arises from this is that the critical spirit then objects to the condition of its emergence in the form of a general protest against general servitude. Kant protests against such a servitude whilst bypassing the whole question of labour and his own reliance on it, even as his essay presumes a split between the valued work of reason and despised menial work. Foucault does go beyond Kant in that the feminine would actually be less suppressed in the figure of the dandy and this seems to give rise to the scope not just for speaking one’s mind but for daring, transgressive and experimental behaviour and lifestyles. Such would allow for gay liberation whilst the freedom of spirit in question could extend to political activism of various kinds. Foucault does not address the question of the servitude of others in his essay, although he was of course himself a political activist. Where in this emancipation discourse, actually this discourse of selfemancipation, is there any consideration of socialism? And what would occur if the feminine were yet more liberated than in Foucault’s version? Would this be the next step or steppe in this counter-history, the one that is running counter to capitalism? I would like here to refer to Donna Landry’s article, ‘Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History’, an article that explores the possibilities of peasant socialism on the Russian steppe as revealed in the work of Platonov. Here, Kant’s much stressed ‘freedom of movement’ is more than a metaphor as it concerns a real movement in which semi-nomadic horsemen are engaged in the restless seeking out of a collective spirit, one that might itself be thought of in terms of a joyous free-wheeling movement. Of this movement, Landry writes: ‘there is an abandoned energy in this display of directionless forward-goingness.’47 Regarding this, if labour seeks liberation, it perhaps seeks liberation from the tyranny of time and such a liberation is a question of non-directed, non-commanded movement. In later chapters, I hope to explore what may be called a ‘synchromatic’ movement in its difference from the performative. As to the question of servitude, Landry proposes an alternative, one ignored by the self-focused liberations of Kant and Foucault. Commenting on a passage from John Milton’s A Brief History of Moscovia, Landry writes: The horse ‘stands all this while in the open Field,’ an image of brutal exposure, yet remains not only healthy enough to be serviceable, but apparently does his job willingly and obediently: ‘yet does his service.’ The horse does not ‘serve’ the rider as a mere instrument, but ‘does his service,’ a neatly courteous expression [ . . . ] The equestrian partnership is a dignified relation between non-identical but similar beings bound together by mutual feeling, by attachment – each becomes a metonymy of the other.48 So, this being of service to the other is able to free itself from the indignity of the master-slave relation – a relation anti-colonial thinkers such as Albert Memmi insist is an indignity for the master at least as much as it is for the slave – through fellow feeling. We find our dignity – the dignity Kant seems to seek

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against the instrumentalising of ourselves – in being willingly of service to others and we can only be willingly of service to others if they are not going to exploit, deceive or abuse us. Whereas the freedom that Kant treats is the exercise of criticism at conformist techno-performativity, a self-criticism, and whereas the freedom Foucault treats of is the theatrically performative, a self-fashioning, Landry’s attention to both freedom of movement and freedom of service in Platonov’s work may be said to go beyond this towards questions of fellow-feeling and co-operation, an alter-autonomy. Ultimately, there’s no such thing as selfemancipation. There’s only socialism. This is not to say that a degree of assumed individual autonomy is not desirable, for obviously it is, but that we should remember and insist on its eventual illusoriness in doing justice to the interdependence of our ineluctably different yet also similar existences. In her conclusion to the impressive set of essays collected in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, Kate Soper comments: ‘on the issue of autonomy, the objection is not that Enlightenment culture placed objects in the way of women attaining independence, but that it made a fetish of the idea itself, promoting in the process an ideology through which all individuals were encouraged to overlook their actual ties or dependency on others, and men, in particular enabled to justify their detachment from the sphere of domesticity and reproduction.’49 Soper also interestingly points out that it is the women of the period who are often to be found challenging the ‘yes-men’ of their society, ‘daring to think’ and advancing ‘public spiritedness’ against conservative familial sentimentality.50 Therefore, the freedom of thought advocated by both Spinoza and Kant – be the source of this thought inspiration or reason (and surely both are desirable in their different ways) – is not just for self-realisation but for necessarily collective movements of emancipation.

3

Radiance or brilliance

This chapter consists of an experiment. It began when I was given an invitation to write on ‘the blind short story’, something I had never contemplated before. In searching out short stories that had to do with blindness, I encountered a certain fascination with radiance: either a blinding radiance or a blindness to radiance. I became interested in this treatment of radiance, as a complement to brilliance, in terms of how literary texts might try to approach or gesture towards forms of enlightenment. One of the things that presents itself as a difficulty here is that radiance is unamenable to theorisation or criticism. It is at once evident and mysterious, indefinable yet recognisable. Regarding a poetics of the real, these stories pose a challenge in terms of their knowing naivete´, their naive consciousness, and offer an opportunity to explore the workings of an ostensive mode of writing. What is at stake in this mode of writing are the ways in which a text might give us a consciousness of ‘what is’ – or ‘what may be’ – in its non-definability, nonformality, non-conceptuality. In the words of Yves Bonnefoy, this consciousness may be a case of what you see when you ‘lift your eyes from the page’.1 The resistance to conceptualisation and formalisation that this chapter seeks to confront is furthermore an evasion of generalisation and genre, and so the literature in question is quite queer. This queer writing transgresses the generic but less by means of the performative (or enactments of the iterable) than the ostensive (or encounters with the off-page or off-stage). Can literature be revelatory in a non-metaphysical or non-theological way? Related to this, what an affirmation of radiance and brilliance serves to question is the pervasiveness of spectrality. This is not an epistemic question. You cannot say what radiance or brilliance is for nothing presents itself. That is the interesting point. Nothing presents itself. Clearly. Audaciously, riskily, experimentally.

The blind short story If you give me radiance, I’ll give you brilliance

The blind short story . . . what’s that? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a go. So, I’m in the dark, I’m in this darkened room. Oh, I know where I am, because I’ve been here before, with Aristotle. He says that when we’re in the

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dark, sitting still, we sense something, a movement, beyond the senses, and that what this is is time.2 But that’s not going to get us very far, for everyone knows that stories, narratives, have to do with time. Still, hold on, sensing without the senses, there’s something to pause over in that. And with his head over his shoulder turn’d He seemed to find his way without his eyes. (Hamlet, II.i.97–8) This is Ophelia observing Hamlet seeing but not seeing her, sight without sight. Such phrasings recall Blanchot’s aphorism, generically, the x sans x.3 Blanchot has a short story about strangely wounded vision; you could see this coming, some will have thought of it, ‘La folie du jour’, ‘The Madness of the Day’.4 You’d be hard-pressed to paraphrase this text, which is given to us as a story-less story, but it concerns a narrator, one who is completely and wonderfully affirming of life in all that it gives us to enjoy and to suffer, who then has an intimation of the end beginning and an experience of glass being crushed into his eyes. This fatalising but not fatal accident leads to a film being placed under his eyelids: ‘they slipped a thin film under my eyelids’ (p. 11), whereas prior to the accident he says of his joy in life: ‘All that was real: take note.’ (p. 11). A clear reality, and we should take note, is thus followed by a vision questionably rendered filmic. With this, the narrator both begins to die and finds himself attached to or accompanied by a daughter. This daughter is called the law where this law is distinguished from paternal law: ‘Behind their backs I saw the silhouette of the law. Not the law everyone knows, which is severe and hardly agreeable; this law was different’ (p. 14). I agree. But when, if ever, will others see? (The silhouette, by the way, is a silhouette of light behind those who eclipse it.)5 The daughter is desirous of the narrator’s glory, although he could lead to ‘discord, murder, destruction’ (p. 16) and although he seems to give himself over to destitution and feels unable to use the boundless talents being accorded to him. The male authorities in the ‘story’ keep insisting he explain or render an account of his experience to them but he knows it is useless and resigns himself with: ‘A story? No. No stories, never again’ (p. 18). The madness of the day is not something you can narrativise, even though you can testify to it: ‘I was face to face with the madness of the day’ (p. 11). We can’t think this madness or folly, but does it yet have a genre? In the masculine, it would seem to be serious, psychosis; in the feminine, it would seem to be folly, light-headedness, silliness, daffiness, absurdity. The madness or the folly could be partly a question of the imposition in which the narrator is accorded brilliance and adulation without having done anything to deserve this: no Odyssean story of heroism here. On the one hand, it is, as Foucault suggests, ‘madness as the absence of the work’.6 There’s more to this psychotic side, but let it wait. On the other hand, there’s something a little ridiculous in such a situation. It is like those bosses whose companies are failing and yet who are awarded or award themselves vast salaries for no reason but just because, in the approximate words of a

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shampoo advertisement, they’re worth it. ‘Just because I’m worth it!’ – funny or tragic? We will come back to ‘La folie du jour’, but after a detour. King Lear. Lear asks his daughters for their unconditional adoration. Goneril and Reagan promptly and obediently comply. Cordelia, the impossible one, thinks there is something inappropriate in Lear’s request. She says to her father: You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? (King Lear, I.i.98–102). So, she hints that there is something wrongly incestuous in the nature of this demand. Cordelia is then disinherited and exiled, ‘by the sacred radiance of the sun’ (I.i.111), Lear says. What follows is that Lear is cruelly treated by the daughters who so lavishly and slavishly praised him but who emerge as having sadistic sovereign ambitions of their own. With their crazed behaviour, tormented by it, Lear goes mad. Gloucester, the other father figure in the play – and King Lear must be one of the most harrowing plays ever written – has his eyes put out. How does the blind short story go with tragedy? Somehow, it does. I think it was Derrida’s Specters of Marx that made me think of that for there he superimposes Hamlet and, through the Freudian uncanny, ‘The Sandman’, and since this is convincing, apt, a new genre seems invented or successfully hybridised: the blind short story as tragedy, tragedy as the blind short story. Lacan said of tragedies that they begin as they are about to end.7 As soon as they get going, it’s all over. This puts me in mind of Beckettian melancholic wryness: one minute we’re here, and the next, gone . . . ooo . . . aaah, (yeah, little Ernst, fort/da). But I didn’t get to the end of re-narrating King Lear. (Sometimes I have offered the schoolmarmish advice of ‘don’t re-narrate the text’, but, eat my words, that advice is too sweeping, indeed too general, for there’s something to be got out of just taking texts as they come). The final tragedy is that Cordelia is killed and, with this, Lear can suffer no more, and he dies. There is nothing that can be done about this: it is unbearably sad. What increases the sadness in all the bleakness is how sweetly tender Lear and Cordelia are towards each other in their moments of reconciliation before it all ends. Here, for instance: Lear. Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? [ . . . ] For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. Cor. And so I am, I am. (King Lear, IV.vi.52–70) Walter Benjamin draws attention to the relation between tragedy and allegory.8 Freud says that daughter figures have a particular significance for man in his old

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age.9 We could selectively put this together, in a ratio towards reason, and say that as the father equals ‘age’ the daughter equals ‘youth’. If so, the taboo against father/daughter incest that Lear might be unconsciously violating is that he is age seeking to appropriate, in the figures of his daughters, youth. It is as if he is trying to reverse time’s arrow, and so Cordelia’s protest against this in fact constitutes loyalty to the law of the father as a law of temporal succession. However, it is more than this necessity of temporality, if we are to get the tragic effect. This would also concern ‘The Madness of the Day’. Yet we will stay with temporality for the time being . . . ‘time being’, that’s a strange phrase. Hamlet in his derangement says to Polonius: ‘for yourself sir, should be as old as I am – if like a crab you / could go backward’ (Hamlet, II.ii.203–4). The time is running backwards? Age and youth reversed? Can this not try to enlighten a little? Perhaps, slowly. There is a brilliance you or we, humans, may achieve in time. But this brilliance is something that has to be deserved. It does not just fall into anyone’s lap. It is something that, as our fathers tell us, has to be worked for in time. You just can’t steal it, and if you’ve earned it, it will come, it will come. Kleist’s ‘The Marquise of O —’10 is rather other to Blanchot’s ‘The Madness of the Day’ regarding this sense of the just workings of time. In Kleist’s story, a handsome Count rescues the Marquise of O—, during a siege, and she blacks out at this moment, a blind one. It’s marked in the text in this manner: she faints. ‘And then –’ he calls the doctor. Some time later she finds she’s mysteriously pregnant. Now, what do you think happened? That’s right, we all think that, he must have. Just before she discovers her pregnancy, the hero ardently offers to marry her but she is reluctant, and when she knows she is with child she still strongly resists his attempts to woo her. We proceed through the story as the Marquise, exiled from her family, attempts to find the culprit or right wrongdoer through advertising her plight and asking the father to present himself. At this point, the Marquise is momentarily tricked by her mother into believing that a lowly stable-groom has offered himself as the father. The fact that she readily accepts the lie proves her innocence as ignorance in that the Count has confessed his culpability to the parents. Even then she violently resists the man. For the reader the mystery is why the obvious answer, the one that presented itself to us right at the start, is being so deferred. Why is the woman being so obstructive and unable to reach the most logical conclusion? The couple do marry though and live happily, and then one day the Count asks his wife why she had so evaded him as if he were a devil and seemed even prepared to accept the most vicious character rather than him. Her reply concludes the tale as follows: ‘she answered that she would not have seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in him at their first meeting’ (p. 113). Up until the end, we have been following the story from a retrospective narrative perspective, let us say, a masculine one – ‘it must have been him’ – and then suddenly it ends as it begins but by now giving itself the elided or eclipsed feminine vision: all at once, in no time. At the end, we see for the first time what she saw for the first time, this being: radiance, radiance or original vision. And then, too, we perhaps understand: it could not be him.

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Well, consider it through her eyes . . . what if her vision were of the daughter of ‘The Madness of the Day’, seeing or sensing her dazzling light? It would seem impossible that such a being could impregnate her. Actually, at the beginning when she first encounters the aristocratic soldier it is said: ‘To the Marquise he seemed an angel sent from heaven’ (p. 69). I think the initial inclination is to interpret this as meaning that he appears to her as a noble redeemer. However, Kleist’s story works also to accord a feminine significance to what it means to be an angel as the Marquise is repeatedly described in such terms. For instance, her mother says to her: ‘you are purer than an angel, you radiate such innocence that my corrupted soul could not believe’ (p. 104). This radiance is also, however, elaborated erotically, although not in a phallic manner, when the Marquise is re-united with her father in a rather strange or transgressive scene, one that vaguely brushes on aspects of King Lear. The mother comes upon the father with the daughter in his arms, lying with her eyes shut as if she’s passed out, and he is said to be ‘pressing long, ardent, avid kisses on to her mouth, just like a lover!’ The passage continues: His daughter said nothing. He said nothing; he sat with his face bowed over her, as if she were the first girl he has ever loved; he sat there holding her mouth near his and kissing her. Her mother felt quite transported with delight; standing unseen behind his chair, she hesitated to interrupt this blissful scene of reconciliation which had brought such joy back to her house. Finally, she approached her husband, and just as he was again stroking and kissing his daughter’s mouth in indescribable ecstasy, she leaned round the side of the chair and looked at him. (p. 107) In this scene, both mother and daughter feign unconsciousness. The daughter’s eyes are said to be ‘tightly shut’, indicating an effort, while the mother is behind the father’s back, unbeknownst to him and yet rapt in observation. The feminine constitutes the unconscious of man, that which the subject usually represses, but here the repression is being faked in order that it may be lifted so that the father can fleetingly experience something that is otherwise withheld from him. That is why despite the eroticism, it is not a phallic occurrence, and why all the characters can share in it whereby joy is brought back to her house. If this were happening in his house, you can imagine it would be a gothic scene of demonic vampirism and frighteningly uncanny. The mother, looking on, does not censor the occurrence but gladly participates. However, when her gaze is upon his, the spell breaks: when he sees that she sees him. It is said that while her gaze is not cross, his becomes ‘cross’, cross at being crossed. He is, quite simply, interrupted and thus brought back into time, yes. Back into time? I’m afraid I think I do mean that. The epiphanic opening ellipsis in the narrative, ‘And then –’, also suggests a radiance outside time. And, it might be that the mutual silence of father and daughter, as given in the extract, is tantamount to the non-narrativisable ‘no stories’ of ‘The Madness of the Day’. In the story, numerous possibilities of desire are in play, including whether either the Marquise or the Count may be a bit queer. Once the marriage has

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taken place, however, the Count is said then to set about wooing the Marquise properly, which is what finally wins her over. That is, he has to earn her love or strive for it in some way whereby she then can admire him for his proven brilliance. Previously, he just kept presenting himself to her in a rather ‘just because I’m worth it’ way. As for Kleist, he has to work brilliantly at giving us a narrative that might convince us of his original vision of radiance whereby the text just evaporates into the air. Brilliance is spectral, the art of resurrection. The Count keeps returning like a ghost, like a real ghost. After rumours of his death, it is said: ‘Count we shall certainly go on thinking you are a ghost, until you have explained to us how you rose again from the grave’ (p. 75). Ghost upon ghost. ‘Finally, towards nightfall, the Count reappeared’. (p. 81) There are many of these countless count effects, regarding whether you can count on the count or he on you, regarding a count me in or a count me out, of the accountable or unaccountable, of what counts or may be counted. Aristotle says numbers count but that it is time which is counted.11 In a scene where mother and daughter are sharing female secrets (as both sexes have their secret-sharing), it is written: Her mother remarked with a laugh that she would no doubt be giving birth to the god of Fantasy. The Marquise replied in an equally jesting tone that at any rate Morpheus, or one of his attendant dreams, must be the father. But the colonel returned to the room and the conversation was broken off, and since a few days later the Marquise felt quite herself again, the whole subject was forgotten. (p. 74) So? Men, or those in a subject position, father unconsciously or from the unconscious, in a ghostly manner. But what they do not know is that the unconscious – as feminine – is yet conscious whilst men dream, that is the joke. For Lacan the unconscious is often this trickster. What seems implied is that whereas the subject might be absent from the scene of conception, and can but begin by returning like the count, as Derrida says of spectres, women . . . women. . . . shall I go on? This scene between the women is not really ghostly but supposed to be rather funny, that is, if you are a woman, and probably as irritating as stifled women’s titters if you are not, the colonel returning. Who is the Marquise when she is not quite herself ? Who in this interval between women? Radiance, angel, radiance? And being unconscious of radiance is what gives birth to fantasy and stories. It is a funny thing this lesbian conception. . . . And then – well, you can read it either way. You can read it as masculine immaculate conception, man conceiving the child without the woman (she as unconscious), fantastically or phantasmatically, and you can read it in terms of a certain feminine conception without the man (or a principle of knowing selfhood), amusingly. It is amusing in that this deflates, through showing up, the theatricality of our egos. Kleist allows for the story to be inverted, possibly depending on what it means for a woman to be not quite herself or a man to be

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not quite himself. I think, uncertainly, the emphases might be as follows: not quite herself; not quite himself. At least, it can be said that the feminine Kleist plays with the androgyny of writing, and that the original epiphany is of the angel as androgyne. The ellipses in the text must especially reflect the difficulty of representing angelic radiance, rather than being a case of an inability to represent the sexual act. Speaking of queerness, there is a minor, perhaps quite specialist, tributary of blind short story, the Sapphic blind very short story, a narrative blindness regarding radiance. Rene´e Vivien in ‘Prince Charming’ tells a brief story about a brother and sister, ‘copper blond’ Bela and ‘reddish blond’ Terka.12 Bela, the brother, woos and weds the silvery Sarolta and it is said: ‘The candles brightened the red highlights in Bela’s blond hair. The incense curled towards him, and the thunder of the organs exalted and glorified him. For the first time since the beginning of the world, the Groom was as beautiful as the bride’ (p. 23). What gets more Kleist-like is that the narrative begins to not say at this point with a whole lot of airy elliptical dots: ‘his blond hair . . . ’; ‘Here the story becomes a little difficult to relate . . . Several months later, the real Bela Szechney appeared . . . He was not Prince Charming, alas! He was only a handsome boy’; ‘He furiously sought the identity of the young usurper . . . And he learned that the usurper in question was his own sister, Terka . . . Sarolta and Prince Charming have never returned to Hungary’ (p. 23, all these ellipses are in the text). So the radiance escapes, maddeningly or not. Of course it is elusive, or so we think – rather, and so we think. Katherine Mansfield has a Sapphic very short blind short story, less than two pages, called ‘Leves Amores’.13 Rather, it is ambiguous given that the sex of the narrator is not specified; either way, in its reception it tends to be treated as a queer story. In it the narrator goes to collect a woman for a date from a shabby and drab hotel room. It is observed: A dull grey light hovered over everything [ . . . ] she, too, looked dull grey and tired. And I sat on the bed and thought: ‘Come this old age. I have forgotten passion, I have been left behind in the beautiful golden procession of Youth. Now I am seeing life in the dressing-room of the theatre. (p. 25, my ellipsis) The two go off to the Opera and then return to the hotel, where the possibly unspoken thoughts of the narrator are rendered as: ‘Was Youth dead? . . . Was Youth dead?’ (p. 25, ellipsis in text). Yet again, the question of radiant being lies in the interval, the interval between was and was. Back in the room, the woman says she is glad the night has come and it is said: ‘I did not ask why. I was glad too. It seemed a secret between us’ (p. 25). Again, it may be this question of a feminine secret, but one of a knowledge of non-knowledge: glad without reason. As the woman lights a little candle, the story ends with: The light filled the room with darkness. Like a sleepy child she slipped out of her frock and then, suddenly, turned to me and flung her arms round my

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First, to say that the candlelight fills the room with darkness is rather striking. In one sense, it is visually exact because when you light a candle in a shadowy room it creates a concentrated pocket of light that thus seems to darken rather than lighten the surrounding gloom. Beyond this, what is suggested is an inversion of darkness and light – the light filling the room with darkness – which is what gives us the lifting of repression, as light turns to dark, dark turns to light: whereby the dark unconscious miraculously brightens to sheer radiance. It happens like that in life and in this story: in life and in this story. The repression lifts. The seemingly sleepy, seemingly childlike feminine drops its veil, is naked, and turns to full blooming radiance. With this, everything comes to life in an animistic way, animistic but not insane. It is difficult to convey this inexplicable happening, as Blanchot’s ‘narrator’ insists, but it can be given a go. In the above extract, you can see that representation is no longer seen as representation. Actually, an indirect route will be tried here. When you stand in front of a painting by Matisse, it may be that you cease to see it as a painting, a painting of something, a representation referring to an elsewhere. In the process of not trying to read it but just to receive it, you might find yourself beginning to see as Matisse saw in the very moment he was first painting what he was painting. Rather miraculously, Matisse is able to give his way of receiving to us, and with that it is possible to collapse the distance between you regarding the painting and Matisse in his studio before something to paint, the canvass evaporating. Objectively, the painting remains a painting, but subjectively you are transported into a way of experiencing the world. Thus, if you look away from a Matisse painting it is possible to find that the experience of it transfers itself to your surroundings of which you become hyper-conscious, hyper-aware. That is to say, certain art enlivens or rejuvenates us where this is not just a metaphor. It really happens. But for this to happen it seems you have to lose momentarily a sense of spectrality, a spectrality of sense. As opposed to a commonsensical sensing without the senses, which is what we do when we think, it would be a matter of sensing with the body. And yet, this somatic consciousness may be very nearly incorporeal as if you could feel the shimmering air in the shimmering air. It would be just an experience of being enlivened or maybe being unexpectedly seduced. Moreover, although this is subjectively experienced, and this is important, it is not an experience of the self as ego. It is rather the subjective experience of the subjectivity or being of another, or of a being beyond the ego; for Matisse too. Nobody owns this magic. It seems to be passed on in the intervals or lapses of the ‘I’ or egos. I am wondering if it might be the crypt illumined?

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In Mansfield’s story, the hotel room is objectively the same room before and after the couple go to the Opera. What seems to happen at the end of the story is that the lifting of repression enlivens everything in the surroundings for the narrator in an ecstatic being-besides-self. Paradoxically, the narrator initially thinks of dwelling in the drab dressing-room of the theatre of life, when it is in this room as an undressing-room that life is given. Heidegger-the-obscure, is this the clearing?14 Finally, if you can bear this for just a bit longer, we can glance at one more Sapphic very short blind short story, before trying to make just a little sense, if that is at all possible, of what has been unfolding. This story is ‘Before Dark’ by Proust.15 In the story a woman who has suffered a gunshot wound, wishes to make a confession to a friend, Leslie, whose sex seems rendered deliberately ambiguous although there are hints that Leslie may be a gay man. The woman, Franc¸oise, maintains that although she may lose her reputation she ‘cannot suppress the need for truth’ (p. 3) and that concerning this truth she is yet ‘completely in the dark about it, luminous as the moment is’ (p. 4). It is this stupefying question of knowledge of non-knowledge. She goes on to confess her lesbianism saying: The cause of such love lies in a nervous alteration which is too exclusively nervous to involve a moral content. We cannot say because most people see things we call red as red that those who see them as violet are mistaken [ . . . ] In truly artistic natures, physical attraction or repulsion is modified by contemplation of the beautiful. Most people turn from jellyfish with disgust. Michelet, sensitive to their colours, gathered them with delight. (my ellipses, p.5) First, it is suggested that you cannot rule out the possibility of an experience that some may have simply on the grounds that it is not your experience or not a common experience. Second, it needs to be said that the artistic experience of radiance (a Michelet sensitive to the clear colours of the jellyfish) does not belong to any one form of being: you can encounter radiance in a Count, in a woman, in a jellyfish, in a blade of grass or in a pear tree. Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ ends with the narrator being blissfully transported by a shining pear tree.16 Third, this issue concerns the poetic real rather than the ethical; it is not in itself a question of what is right or wrong. However, inasmuch as it concerns a poetic apprehension of life, questions of the sacred might arise. Proust’s ‘Before Dark’ goes on to deliver a second confession. The wounded woman utters these deathbed last words: ‘It was I, in one of those moments of despair which are so natural to anyone who really lives, it was I who . . . shot myself ’ (p. 6 emphasis and ellipsis in text). Are emphases and ellipses inversions of each other? Is it a case of a pushing through the fabric of the text in one direction or another?17 At any rate, we rejoin the tragic aspect of the blind short story at this point. What ‘Before Dark’ indicates to us is that too much aliveness is . . . unendurable. It can hardly be sustained and it cannot last in our temporal existences. Duration: the unendurable.

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With this suicidal confession that follows the earlier confession, too alive to live, Franc¸oise dies, but the death is given to us as both an ecstatic and intensely moving experience by the narrator: ‘And never had we so much pain, so much pleasure’ (p. 6). It reminds me a little of the powerful reconciliation scene of King Lear and of the narrator’s strangely ecstatic experience of dying in ‘The Madness of the Day’ and of Kleist’s bizarre father-daughter scene. In these scenes there seems to be a combination of grieving, often an outpouring of tears, and ecstasy. Moreover, it is a case of strangely shared deaths, combined death-ecstasies, or visions thereof, of male and female figures. A possible interpretation of this is that the I-narrators or usually male characters signify our egos and that the usually female characters signify life. It is fluid in this way, given the ambiguities of gender that have been pointed out on both sides. Nonetheless, what is significant here is the relation between the ego and life. This was the tragic effect that I wished to address beyond just the necessity of temporality: a happening in no time. And what happens in no time is: life. Such a realisation can but plunge us into feelings of awe and terror and pity. And, perhaps too, bewilderment, considering that the spatio-temporal is implied to not be a priori. Cordelia is Lear’s life, allegorically speaking. However, you cannot really say his life for he does not ultimately possess this life beyond the possibility of its loss. It is rather that which accompanies him to the bitter end, as the faithful Antigone does a blinded Oedipus. The ego may be blind to life, and as ego is blind or blinkered, but life is nonetheless always there beside it. This reading is of a somewhat gnostic nature, and if it does not seem too unintelligible, you will also see that the life that accompanies us, our egos, does not age or date. Finally, I think I see what the poets might mean by ‘the eternal feminine’. However, it yet remains also a question of androgyny. I say that because, tentatively, I think the feminine exists as attachment, possibly only as attachment. What could be at stake is a conjoining of consciousnesses in a non-duality. Moreover, it is also not just a question of the ego as blind but of what it may not be possible to see objectively. It should also be said that delightful radiance in itself is not tragic. It is rather our relation to it that is potentially so. And it seems that what renders the tragic event is either the closure of an attempt to appropriate radiance definitively or the closure of its utter renunciation. Don’t seize it; don’t give up on it; stay open to its possibilities. Beyond being a desire for radiance, it would be radiance as this desire: a desire that can neither be renounced nor satisfied by some object. As regards deconstruction, with its logic of spectrality, what might be said of this radiance? For a start, there would be Derrida’s own reading of ‘La folie du jour’, his essay, ‘The Law of Genre’.18 In this essay, Derrida explores a logic of invagination, what I have here been touching on in terms of inversion (bearing in mind that queers, in the discourse of sexology, used to be called ‘inverts’). Simply speaking, given a lack of time and for the sake of an observation, what Derrida does with Blanchot’s text is to turn it inside out and outside in, and inside out and outside in, regarding its enigmatic nature. It seems to me that one

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of the questions that might be at stake in this is whether the feminine is to be located on the inside or outside the masculine. What is further at stake would be the question of whether radiance has a genre. In truth, while this survey is so oversimplified, nothing could be more persistently exercising than such questions. Returning to Blanchot’s text, initially the radiance seems to be within the doubly affirmative narrator, but with the accident it (or she) appears to him on the outside as a silhouette of light or a halo or an aura, a surroundings, a proverbial ‘silver lining’ to a cloud. What is strange about the accident is that although the narrator has been wounded in the eyes and despite the fact that doctors insert film over the eyes and bandage them, he continues to ‘see’ the day. How so? We want to ask like the doctors. I think a viable answer could be that he apprehends or experiences the day because he has been blinded. That is, normally sight is the privileged sense, as Plato maintains, in that it requires a separation of perceiving subject from perceived object.19 Thus, it or the eye corresponds with the ‘I’, with all that follows of the spectacle and the speculative. However, if sight is no longer the privileged sense, then it may be that the sense of separation from the world disappears with the feeling of contact with all that is around you. With respect to this, there is the account of the eye operation by He´le`ne Cixous that Derrida reads in ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’.20 There, the removal of myopia by laser treatment gives the experience of seeing the world for the first time but where this is offered in terms of a removal of a barrier between eye and world whereby the eye is said to touch the world. What is implied is a seeing by the body rather than the mind. It could be a case of a body consciousness as elaborated in the poetics of Cixous and Monique Wittig. Derrida treats of the law of genre in terms of it being inextricably bound up with the improper, excessiveness and non-belonging. I think this is a matter of the singularity of a law that in establishing itself as the proper also differs from itself and thus becomes improper: a perversion of the law. Derrida writes: ‘In mock-playing herself she recites; and she is born of the one for whom she becomes the law.’21 This would seem to be the case, while what also intrigues me about Blanchot’s text is the positing of two laws as distinct from each other, as cited earlier: ‘this law was different’ (p. 14). In the course of writing this, I came upon Spinoza stating the following: ‘The word law, taken absolutely, means that according to which each individual, or all or some members of the same species, act in one and the same determinate manner. This depends either on a necessity of nature or on a decision of men.’22 Spinoza goes on to affirm: ‘We see that this natural divine law does not require ceremonies [ . . . ] For the natural light requires nothing which that light itself does not reach [ . . . ] Those things which are good only by command and institution [ . . . ] cannot perfect our intellect and are nothing but empty forms.’23 The law of the daughter as life could be aligned with natural necessity as distinct from the ethical laws of human societies. There would thus be a law of the real and a law of the right (as in the duality of Antigone’s unwritten laws and Creon’s ethical law).

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Coming back to Derrida, I would say that the other law, so-called law of the daughter, is still a question of the improper but where, in the considerations that I wish to raise, this would be a matter not so much of the perversion or contamination of the law (a perversion that this is not dismissing, where it is just introducing other considerations, ones of inversion), but rather of what cannot be owned or the inappropriable. Thus, as suggested earlier, radiance does not belong to any one form or genre; it has no proper genre, hence its evasion of formalisation. Actually, what I would like to entertain is that for the law of the proper to become improper in establishing itself, there needs be a prior or distinct law or necessity of the improper (a-proper), or non-belonging. However, to call this a ‘law’ is admittedly problematic for it would concern an unpredictable necessity. In Derrida’s Specters of Marx, there is a possible allusion to ‘The Madness of the Day’ in what follows: Hamlet curses the destiny that would have destined him to be the man of right, precisely [justement], as if he were cursing the right or the law itself that made him the righter of wrongs, the one who, like the right, can only come after the crime, or simply after [ . . . ] ‘The time is out of joint’: such would be the originary corruption of the day of today, or such would be, as well, the malediction of the dispenser of justice, the day I saw the light of day.24 Seeing the light of day here is a matter of being born into temporal disjunction, with ethical questions dependent upon this, as opposed to an encounter with radiance.25 Specters of Marx is obviously concerned with the economic, the domesticated, and the thought occurs that radiance cannot reasonably show itself there, that is, if radiance pertains in some way to undomesticated or unowned nature. Derrida aptly addresses the economic in terms of pervasive spectrality, of course, where the Freudian uncanny is enlisted and thereby Freud’s reading of ‘The Sandman’. In ‘The Sandman’, it is the character of Clara to whom radiance is clearly attributed. However, as Samuel Weber has observed of Freud’s reading of ‘The Sandman’, Clara is unobserved by Freud who thus recapitulates the failing of Nathanael to see her.26 The inability to see this radiance of being may be related to Hamlet’s cryptic inability to see Ophelia, as cited at the outset of this essay. In Hamlet, this is given to us in terms of Hamlet’s backward looking or retrospective gaze. Therefore, I now wish to offer a prospective reading of ‘The Sandman’, a feminine or androgynous one, before returning later to Hamlet. Freud reads Nathanael’s story from the retrospective perspective of the adult man, one who fears de-masculinisation. The letter that Clara receives from Nathanael in lieu of her brother allows Clara to follow Nathanael’s story from his early childhood to the present, a reading from a feminine perspective. With her, we learn that the child Nathanael’s first fears concerned the story of a birdman, for the Sandman is given to us as such, a bird-man who steals eyes from

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children for the sake of his own children. The eyes in this reading do not signify the penis, as in Freud’s, but eggs. Visually, don’t eyes resemble eggs? Yolks/irises in the whites? This would make some sense of the story in that the Sandman as male bird needs to steal eggs, ova, if he wants children of his own. (But the Sandman as bird could indeed signify the phallus, as in Freudian symbology.) Thus, Nathanael fears some obscure theft of something feminine from him that is implied in the necessities of adult sexual reproduction. He fears becoming a man. The next stage of this unfolding concerns the appearance of Coppelius, the father’s shadowy friend, on the scene. Nathanael’s initial strong reaction to Coppelius is one of revulsion at his appearance where the detailed description of Coppelius is emphatic concerning the impression of ugliness given. Here, it might help to imagine the young Nathanael as having choirboy looks, an angelic or girlish beauty. We might then surmise that Nathanael experiences a frightened intimation that he could stand to loose his prettiness in turning into an adult man. As a loyal son, he sees no ugliness in his father and his fears concerning growing up into adult manhood are projected onto Coppelius. However much Nathanael might semi-consciously fear a puberty of which he yet knows nothing, it is not something he is capable of averting. He tries to hide from Coppelius but still Coppelius, or masculine maturity, literally seizes hold of him and convulsively shakes up his body in a traumatising manner. With this, Nathanael goes through puberty. It is hinted that Coppelius is in league with the father in a workshop of reproduction and this recapitulates the imperative of the Sandman: a virilisation necessary to sexual reproduction. Nathanael goes on to sublimate his former feminine narcissism or lost androgyny in his intellectual studies at which stage he is introduced to Spalanzani and Coppola, figures suggestive of a scientific metaphysics. Spalanzani works on producing an automaton, Olimpia, and while a veritable multiplicity of meanings can be given to Olimpia, all the manmade meanings you like, she could be specifically understood in terms of man’s idea of nature or our intellectual attempts to master the nature that otherwise uncontrollably seizes hold of us. Here, nature is reproduced in the form of a mechanical model, assembled from parts and set extrinsically in motion. She/it reminds me of the Newtonian concept of nature as a machine got going by a clockwork god. What this model of nature lacks, however brilliant it may be, is a sacred radiance, certainly from the point of view of the poets. Whilst Nathanael unconsciously feels that he has lost a youthful, androgynous radiance, Clara tries to reassure him, indicating to him that he paranoiacally exaggerates the virilising role of the shadowy father figures. Furthermore, she indicates that she – in effect, life – is right there with him, that is, she affirms that he has not really lost her and that she still has her eyes. Freud ignores this statement of hers, where it would sound odd for Clara to be heard as affirming that she has not lost her penis or penises. Nathanael’s fears, however, have some justification as the ending shows us, but first, this will attend to some of the import of Clara. I think that in this story Clara could well be the pharmakon. First, she is androgynous in that she is capable of taking her brother’s place, as in Vivien’s

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sister-brother relationship. Second, her radiance is given to us as inspiring art: she is said to stimulate the painters. Like Michelet’s jellyfish in Proust’s story, her clear being illuminates colour and the pharmakon is, as Derrida observes in Plato, pigment or pictorial colour. This living translucent chromatism is what the mechanical formalism of Olimpia would seem to be without, together with a rhythmic flexibility: sap. H.D. in ‘The Wise Sappho’ reflects on the meaning of Sappho’s work being summed up as ‘Little, but all roses’, and she writes of this very short radiance: ‘‘‘Little but all roses’’ – true there is a tint of rich colour (invariably we find it), violets, purple woof of cloth, scarlet garments, dyed fastening of a sandal, the lurid, crushed and perished hyacinth, stains on cloth and flesh and parchment [ . . . ] I think of the words of Sappho as these colours, or states rather, transcending colour yet containing (as great heat the compass of the spectrum) all colour.’27 Does this version of ‘The Sandman’ have anything to do with Marx? I think it does. As far as Marx is concerned, there is more than one materialism. Without being able to discuss this adequately, in ‘The Materialist Conception of History 1844–47’, Marx rejects a reductive mechanical materialism and writes: The first and most important of the inherent qualities of matter is motion, not only mechanical and mathematical movement, but still more, vital lifespirit, tension, or, to use Jacob Bo¨hme’s expression, the throes of matter [ . . . ] Matter smiled at man with poetical sensuous brightness [ . . . ] In its further development materialism became one-sided [ . . . ] Sensuousness lost its bloom and became the abstract sensuousness of the geometrician [ . . . ] Science can only give a name to these phantoms.28 Since Hegel may well have been Marx’s source for his interest in Boehme,29 let us turn to him. Hegel considers Boehme to be the first German philosopher and, in considering Boehme’s apprehension of the source of being in terms of light and heat, cites him as follows: the light or the heart of the heat is in itself a pleasant, joyful glance or lustre, a power of life . . . and a source of the heavenly kingdom of joy. For it makes all things in this world living and moving; all flesh, trees, and grass grow in this world, as in the power of the light, and have their light therein, viz. in the good.30 Whilst Hegel admires and is indebted to Boehme, he rejects his pantheism, as well as that of Spinoza and that of the Romantics, basically in favour of selfconsciousness. Engels tries to reverse Hegel’s appropriation of the dialectic for Man with his Dialectics of Nature. Boehme’s intoxication with radiant light is everywhere to be found in mystical writings, whilst of course both Boehme and Spinoza were ex-communicated by institutionally orthodox religion. Freud, himself no mystic, writes in a note a year before his death: ‘Mysticism is the obscure self-perception of the realm outside the ego, of the id.’31 This is

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accurate in that it addresses the ecstactic ‘besides the self ’ or as Freud says ‘outside the ego’; it may be a perception by the self but it is not a perception of the self but of what is not the self. For Freud, this is ‘obscure’ – a term Hegel repeatedly uses of Boehme – but for others it is clearer as an experience of radiance. However, it remains questionable if the ‘besides self ’ may be merely reduced to the id or unconscious for it seems further to be an experience of nonobjectifiable and non-personal otherness (what I earlier attempted to speak of in terms of the subjectivity of the other). Hegel is critical of Boehme’s failure to clearly conceptualise the experience of clarity32 but this is not Boehme’s fault because ultimately this cannot be done for it is not that which can be conceptually contained. Hence, maybe, a Kantian leapfrog over Hegel. Returning to ‘The Sandman’, Clara is perceived by Nathanael to be a fiery circle. The birdlike Sandman is said to live on the moon. Thus, we can glimpse in the story the resources of worldwide brother-moon and sister-sun incest myths, where sometimes the sex is reversed into brother-sun and sister-moon, as Janet McCrickard has explored in detail.33 And there are the many Claras, Clares and Clarissas in literature. There is Isabel Allende’s mystical Clara in The House of Spirits; Nella Larsen’s Clare in ‘Passing’, associated with red and gold flame; Keri Hulme’s visionary child in The Bone People, Simon P, whose secret name turns out to be Clare; Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway who fears the loss of radiance with ageing, and so on. And then there are all those O’s, of eyes and eggs and female nothingness, phantom pregnancy or conception: being as void, void as being. All those clear rings, clearings, clear hearts. Marquise of O, Olimpia, Ophelia, Anna O. We draw rings around the nothing-to-see? But we feel it, the beautiful feeling, don’t we? And what to mark it with but the merest, most meagre, least telltale of letterings: o. Walter Benjamin writes: If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree, not in our brains but rather in the place we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and ravishment. Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock of birds in the woman’s radiance. And as the birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety.34 Perhaps we are then all, all of us, divine blemishes, ontological stains or ruins of the divine, as would be in keeping with Benjamin’s theory of tragedy.35 Well, that is about it, although this has not been able to add to the theory of the short story, the theories of this genre as one of temporal narrative punctured by poetic epiphany. And yet, what perhaps emerges is that the blind short story is an especially literary genre, the story of stories, yes, I see at last. So, a theory? No theory. That is how to end this: no more theory, not ever again, no. However, there was something I learnt in the course of writing this, something

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important, something that frightened me and that I have yet to convey. In the course of reading these stories, I sometimes imagined ‘brilliance’ and ‘radiance’ as two discs, where you could cross over from one to the other or cross them over. And at one point, in reading the ending of ‘The Sandman’ when the two discs were crossing, one over the other, I had a strange, fleeting sensation of vertigo, sensing a spiralling movement, even as the immediate impulse was to resist it, which I did and it went. This ‘drawn in’ moment of reading made me realise what the ending of ‘The Sandman’ could be about, Nathanael’s vertigo and fall, and all that stuff about spinning dolls. At the end of the story, the figure of Coppelius looms up and is aligned with the figure of Clara: there is a superimposition of brilliance and radiance. It is this super-imposition that creates a spiral, a spinning energy like water going down a drain. You intuit it could be a dangerous occurrence, one that failing resistance to it, could, I believe, go so far as to suck you into madness. Brilliance and radiance are not to be super-imposed. They are not to be conflated. It is this eventuality that might give us the Homeric danger of Charybdis: the whirlpool. So, look out for those whirlpools, spirals, spinning eddies, which crop up, or rather cave in, all over literature. There’d be Yeats’ fascination with spinning gyres, a fascination that Yeats claims was shared by Flaubert who, according to Yeats, at the time of his death was planning to write a story called ‘La spirale’.36 And it was Yeats who introduced Pound to ‘the vortex’, Pound going on to develop Vorticism (and consider what happened to the unfortunate Pound). Furthermore, Nietzsche, all too Dionysian, sings of those who are drawn to fling themselves into the whirlpool: ‘Suddenly and deeply to find themselves sink into a feeling as one would into a whirlpool! To allow the reins to be torn out of one’s hands and to look on as one is driven who knows where!’37 What could be further added to this series is Derrida’s observation that Foucault is enigmatically interested in a spiral of the duality of power/pleasure. Imagining what Foucault’s elaboration of this spiral (persistently emphasised in the original) would be, Derrida conjectures: The theme of the spiral would be that of a drive duality (power/pleasure) that is without principle. It is the spirit of this spiral that keeps one in suspense, holding one’s breath – and thus keeps one alive. The question would thus once again be given a new impetus: is not the duality in question, this spiralled duality, what Freud tried to oppose to all monisms by speaking of a dual drive and of a death drive that was no doubt not alien to the drive for mastery? And, thus, to what is most alive in life, to its very living on [survivance]? I am still trying to imagine Foucault’s response.38 If I may intervene, in what plays itself out between Foucault and Derrida over questions of madness, the spiral might be composed of two dynamic countercirclings that, if conflated, collapsed into one, would lead to destructive madness: the madness of a self ’s desire for itself ? However, there remain interminable

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questions of terminology to be attended to – and, for a frisson, how about the dual helical structure of DNA? The folly of radiance is its unamenability to thought; but the serious madness would be getting sucked into the coincidence of radiance with brilliance. Therefore, I think that the relationship between the two needs to be a ratio: the more you have of one, the less of the other. This ratio might be what reason is. If so, you cannot bring the brilliant conceptual thing or machine that is Olimpia together with the radiant being that is Clara: this would be madness, in fact, it would be the madness of the day. Would this then constitute the point of an irreducible difference, beyond what may deconstructed, even as it would justify diffe´rance? What do you think? Since I am avoiding a theory, I will offer you a story instead. It’s called ‘The Hobgoblin’.39

The hobgoblin A hobgoblin was stalking Europe, or so the citizens of Europe thought. Some had claimed to catch sight of it prowling about on the fringes of the city. They described what they thought they saw: its talons like knives, its red teeth and dripping claws, its dreadful flowing greenish locks, its yellow flashing eyes. Though there were disputes over the this and the that of its horrid appearance, all were agreed it posed a deadly threat. So, the concerned city elders made plans for the building of a high-walled fortress. Civic funds and mandatory labour were channelled to this end. Quite soon, the city lay in the chill, deep shadows of grey, concrete ramparts. Still, the elders thought that these walls might fail to be enough. Some of the curious or stupidly reckless might sneak their way out through one the exits, failing to close the door behind. So it was decided networks of surveillance had to be set in place. And then, since those who had never seen the hobgoblin might grow airily sceptical, an industry of legends had to be got in motion, each to outdo the others in imagery and narratives of devastation. Thus, life in the metropolis became increasingly an affair of fear and gloom, overhung by the thought of the creature beyond. Then, one day, a troubled young man by the name of Jake Benedict fell to pondering the state they were in. ‘We can’t go on living like this,’ he thought. ‘It is too depressing. We’ve swathed ourselves in the cold dark, and the air that we breathe is stale and dank. Someone must free us from this demon. Someone must go out and slay it. Or, failing that, then someone must satisfy it with the bold sacrifice of their life.’ He soon considered that that ‘someone’ had to be himself. So, one night, with spiked alcohol, he drugged one of the guards by one of the exits and, just before dawn, he wriggled out into The Outside. Fingers of sun began to awaken the jewel-bright world. Birdsong burst out at the signs of radiance. ‘So this is ‘‘poetry’’’, laughed Jake, gulping in the cool fresh air. Just as he was about to completely forget his mission, out of the corners of his eyes, he caught a quick sight of IT. It dazzled and bristled – a tiger! Jake, ready with knives, pounced. It flexed and spiralled away – a snake! Jake rushed on after it.

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It bunched and furred up like a cloud – a ram? Jake lounged again, and yet again, it sprung off and changed its shape. ‘What is this?’ cried Jake in frustration. ‘It’s a devil of many disguises. I’ll never, ever catch it!’ So our hero decided that the only thing he could do was to offer himself to it. He laid down his weapons and stood quite still: which was a hard thing to do as waves of adrenalin coursed through his body. Yet he stood his ground. And then, all of a sudden, he saw. He saw it. It was crystal clear and it flowed ceaselessly. It was crystal clear, flowed ceaselessly, and yet he could see it perfectly. It absorbed all of his attention, its lights sparkled with more subtle colours than he’d ever been aware of, and it filled him with a peaceful elation. Never had he seen anything more beautiful. He could have stood there forever, and perhaps would have, had not a bird flown over, casting its shadow on the crystal stream, so reminding Jake of other things in the world. Regretfully, he thought he had better return and dutifully report back home. He tried to scoop up a piece of hobgoblin to take back to show to his fellows, but on so doing, it gently slipped away through his fingers. ‘The uncatchable, indeed,’ noted Jake. Back he went, but as he tried to creep into the city, he was seen and seized by a guard who immediately set up the alarm of ‘Traitor!’ Now, this story has two endings and how it ends is up to the reader, each and every reader. First, the unhappy ending. Jake is hauled before the elders who are furious with him for jeopardising the safety of all, endangering the massively built-up haven into which they had poured so much. Jake’s attempts to speak of seeing the hobgoblin in its beauty are denounced as outrageously deceitful utterances designed to get himself off the hook. His excuses enrage the elders further who sentence him to death. He undergoes public execution, whereafter many cautionary tales grow up around ‘The Outlaw Benedict’. While in secret he becomes a counter-cultural hero for some, none ever dare to repeat his feat and evermore stringent security measures are devised against the hobgoblin. And that’s it. End of story. Now, the happy ending. Jake is hauled before the elders who are furious with him. He offers to do penance for his transgression, promising to tell his story if the punishment is not too drastic. The elders, admittedly curious, agree. Once the penance is over, Jake explains to the citizens that the hobgoblin is, relief, no danger at all. It is beautiful and it is peaceful; it does not want to come Inside, it wants to stay on the Outside, and it just cannot be caught anyway. So, they have nothing to fear. They can now pull down the ramparts and use the bricks to build new houses for the homeless and the poor. They can all get on with their lives, creating a city devoted to peace and art. Which ending, as said, is up to each reader. So, where was I? No more theory? Well, I’ve had my turn, now it’s your turn. Go on, dazzle me. If you give me brilliance, I’ll give you radiance

4

The other of the confession The philosophical type

I remember once giving a lecture about Derrida, and one of his disciples came up to me and said: ‘You made a mistake: you can’t use the word ‘‘reality’’ when you talk about Derrida.’ Edward Said, ‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life’1 It may be proposed that the way to deconstruct the performative is through a poetic realism. The performative is already supposed to be a deconstruction of the truth, and although I do not promise we can go beyond this, I hope that we can. This chapter will begin with a section, ‘The Other Side of Writing’, that serves not only as a prelude for it but as one for the sixth chapter’s attempt to address Hamlet as a scene of writing. In particular, what is broached is that writing does not only involve a ghostly temporality but a synchronicity of the real. The chapter will then move on to consider a few aspects of Derrida’s treatment of the performative and the confessional. I say ‘a few aspects’ since, given that so much of Derrida’s work concerns questions of the performative and the autobiographical, a thorough approach would be impossible. Since my reading is to be necessarily selective, its main impetus may be outlined in terms of a concern over the pervasiveness of the performative particularly as regards questions of power. More specifically, whilst the deployment of the performative often justifies itself in terms of a challenge to authority, the question is whether it may more covertly serve to preserve the ideological from critique. That is, might the promotion of a universalisation of the performative serve as a means of determining the sayable so that its assumed fictiveness may actually be a means of tacit authorisation and legitimation? And if authority is rendered fictive, does this then serve to silence those who would appeal to realities and questions of reality?

The other side of writing This section is to consider deconstruction’s assumption of the ghostliness of writing and visual representation through attending to what I am calling ‘the other side of writing’, a notion that is to be gradually elaborated in the course of this exposition.

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Bernard Stiegler introduces an interview with Derrida called ‘Spectographies’ through referring to Roland Barthes’ remarks on the photograph. Barthes is cited as writing in Camera Lucida: ‘[I]n photography, I can never deny the thing was there [ . . . ] From a real body that was there proceed radiations that come to touch me, I who am here. The duration of the transmission doesn‘t matter.’2 So, there is the fact of a real being, undeniably so, and the registering of this fact may be said to be like an angelic visitation or an experience of radiance in which time and space are annulled. Barthes says that the delay or deferral is of no import, and equally it could be added that the image as image disappears. This could be said to be a mini-enlightenment: the other arrives to touch me and I feel not their absence but suddenly their presence. Stiegler does not comment on what Barthes says. In fact, he seems to cite the words without taking them in, for he goes on to align Barthes’ remarks with statements made by Derrida in Ghostdance that are actually at odds with Barthes’ sense of miraculous immediacy. Derrida is quoted as saying: ‘To be haunted by a ghost is to remember what was has never lived in the present, to remember what, in essence, has never had the form of presence. Film is a ‘‘phantomachia’’.’3 Derrida, presented by Stiegler with his remarks and those of Barthes, immediately notices the discrepancy and he comments: ‘When Barthes grants such importance to touch in the photographic experience, it is insofar as the very thing one is deprived of [ . . . ] is indeed tactile sensitivity [ . . . ] The specter is first and foremost something visible [ . . . ] it is not tangible.’4 Derrida begs the question posed by Barthes, namely, how it is that the real presence – not the ghost – of another may touch us, even if we have not hitherto encountered this other being. Presumably, what would be at stake would not be the return of something but rather its endurance. I would say that I rather agree with Barthes. When, for instance, I read a letter, I don’t just see the words. The words have varying weights, tones, vibrations, and so on, and it is possible to genuinely feel these imprints, pressures, impressions in the course of reading. It is possible to actually feel the writing or the image as it grazes you, rains on you, indents you. As Barthes notes, there are real emanations that go from sender to receiver in no time. However, this does not mean that Derrida is wrong to insist on the spectre as not tangible; it would just mean that what we call representation is not purely a visual experience and that Derrida seems to concentrate, quite pervasively, on the visual. In the interview ‘Spectographies’, Derrida goes on to speak of the spectre in terms of the trace as that which has never been present. In common understanding, a trace would seem to be a trace of something and as such seem to have the status of a copy. Yet Derrida problematises this in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ by saying: ‘Life must be thought of as a trace before Being may be determined as presence.’5 He also writes; ‘It is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic [ . . . ] in the first time of a contact between two forces, repetition has begun.’6 For Derrida, the trace would not be a trace of something prior to it and would thus, assumedly, be but the trace of itself. Well, physically tracing the word TRACE would just give you the word TRACE, and yet in the simultaneity of those letters we might glimpse another

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word, such as: CREATE (the anagram of ‘trace’). Create or trace, trace as create? I would like to refer here to a work by Vera Dieterich, an artist with whom I have collaborated on questions of trace-creation.7 The work in question is a film clip of the hands of two different people who are facing each other, both engaged in creating a joint script. Between them there is a glass page and each hand holds a pen. The two hands attempt to write together on either side of the sheet of glass and the movement of these two writing hands attempting to synchronise themselves is what is filmed. Below is a still from the film. In this clip, might we see something like a primal scene of writing? How might it even perhaps resonate with Michaelangelo’s famous creation scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Is it that the word as the act of writing is a movement in mid-air that would need to be registered by another, responded to as closely as possible, for a script to appear? Perhaps writing, in its inception, would be such a movement of synchronised correspondence. It might begin in gesture and dance, in the animated choreography of an improvisation. You’d mime, through a hesitating and precipitating anticipation, the unpredictable. Mime the unpredictable. In this clip of the hands writing, what we don’t see is the word, the gramma, the technical sign. We do not actually see the mark or trace. We see only the movement of writing. The movement of writing effaces the written writing. There is a gap, an elision. When Vera Dieterich first spoke to me of making this film, I tried to imagine the scene of writing in my mind. What I visually imagined was intriguingly different from what I eventually saw. That is, I imagined one hand writing from left to right, say, the word TRACE. I saw then the facing hand having to follow this movement from right to left. While one hand would write from West to East, the other hand would write from East to West: the difference, for instance, between writing in English or writing in Arabic whereby each direction would posit the other as writing backwards. Written backwards, the word TRACE gives us the French word E´CART which means ‘gap’ or ‘discard’, as in discarded cards. Every word or trace is a

Figure 2 Film still – image of hands (Vera Dieterich, 2006)

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vague gap or precise stencil of what it traces or effaces. Either you see the hand or hands writing or you see the written words, text: each is the trace or gap of the other through a chiasmatic inversion. The chiasmus at stake may be the crossing over from an animation, a feeling, to a visible form. For Merleau-Ponty, according to Luce Irigaray, ‘the look would be a variant of touch’,8 and this is a matter of chiasmatic inversions, inverted crossovers. Irigaray writes of Merleau-Ponty: ‘Indefinitely he has exchanged seer and visible, touching and tangible, ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘things’’ in an alternation, a fluctuation that would take place in a milieu that makes possible their passage from one or the ‘‘other side’’’ (p. 133). Irigaray reads Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible to explicate a progressive movement that serves to occlude, in her view, sexual difference. Beginning with the tangible, the tangible is said to be what we are immersed in like a bath or sea, and Irigaray likens this to an intra-uterine state: a sightless embrace within the womb. This state of being immersed in that which we cannot see is emerged from to allow for vision, and vision comes to envelope the seen. What Irigaray suggests is that in this account vision takes over the terms of the tactile whilst leaving the tactile behind. Irigaray writes: Reduction of the tactile into the visible . . . Fulfilment of the idea, of idealism, under its material or carnal aspects. A way of talking about the flesh that already cancels its most powerful components, moreover those that are creative in their power. (p. 146) This is considered to be a privileging of sight, but one that appropriates the tactile in its cancelling of the tactile: vision embraces instead of touch. For Irigaray, this displacement is recapitulated in what Merleau-Ponty says of language. She writes: Language, languages find themselves constituted like another ground, or rather like a circular matrix, with which the subject maintains permanent exchanges, from which he receives himself . . . Moreover he calls his language his ‘mother tongue’, which is the sign of a substitution rather than a reality. (p. 147) Thus, for Irigaray, a self-sufficient masculinised matrix of the visible and language or signification substitutes for and ideally replicates a maternal matrix of touch and symbiotic nourishment or exchange. The tactile is invisible for Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty, however, it could be suggested that sight and touch are not necessarily successive or competing senses. One may give a sense of the other. In the film that I have just referred to, one hand, one blind pen begins its writing movement from an inner impulse or else an impulse of seeking out the other. The other takes on the role of sight and attempts to trace its partner. One leads in blindness; the other sees without knowing where it is going. It may remind us of Antigone leading her blind father, Oedipus, the filial follower leading the leader. Jean-Luc Godard says of his film-making:

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Music expresses the spiritual, and it provides inspiration. When I’m blind music is my little Antigone; it helps to see the unbelievable . . . What interests me is to try to see music – to try to see what one is hearing and to hear what one is seeing.9 We may see as hearing, see as touching, touch as seeing, and so on. There may be two different instances of the ungraspable, ungraspable rather than intangible, to contend with here. One might be that of the text of abandoned, ghostly signifiers, a text without its moment of writing, its movement. The other would be that of a movement without imprisoning form, thus irreducible to any written text or image. The signifier may be severed from what it signifies, but what does the signifier write on or with if not some pool of immersion and emergence, some liquid skin or inky sap? In ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, Derrida sets up a certain opposition between the event or creativity and the machine stating: ‘It is difficult, however, to conceive of a living being to whom or through whom something happens without an affection getting inscribed in a sensible, aesthetic manner on some body or organic matter.’10 Thus, the supposition is that for there to be an event there must be a living consciousness that, by means of inscription, affects another living consciousness. However, Derrida sets this up in order to defy it for he wishes to maintain that the inanimate machine, with its programmed repetition, is not incompatible with the unforeseeable or creative event. He writes: And if one day, with one and the same concept, these two incompatible concepts, the event and the machine, were to be thought together you can bet that not only [ . . . ] will one have produced a new logic, an unheard-of conceptual form. In truth, against the background and at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster. (p. 73) But has not this monster of the future, one of mechanical creation, already been thought of in Frankenstein’s fantastic offspring? Derrida makes use of a typewriter metaphor. He cites de Man as follows: ‘The machine is like the grammar of the text . . . the merely formal element without which no text can be generated’ (p. 153, Derrida’s emphasis). What is machinic is that writing is conceived of as a formal ideal, an ideal of form, a design that is supposedly capable of generation. Thus, the formal letters of the typewriter imprint themselves in the text. However, it is the subtext of this that Derrida attends to in drawing attention to the inky or fluid typewriter ribbon. What Derrida implies is that the fluid ribbon – which he hints may be likened to a silky feminine skin – is made use of by ideal forms to mechanically imprint and materialise their images. The fluid ribbon or liquid life would be effaced as the trace traces only itself. Edmund White writes of a certain disagreement between Derrida and Jean Genet over writing. He says: ‘When Derrida once argued that the typewriter would become so familiar that it would not insert itself between the writer and

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the page, Genet resisted this idea and insisted that one could only truly write by hand.’11 He´le`ne Cixous also disagrees with Derrida over this, as we’ll come to, for she regards a writing by hand – as opposed to typewriting – as creatively enabling. A writing of the hand may obviously make use of instruments – a pen, a brush, a camera, scissors, and so on – but there is a certain difference that may be clarified. With a machinic writing the rhythms of the body are subject to the machine, whereas in creative practice the instruments are subject to the rhythms of the body. When you type you are obliged to separate each key, one by one, but when you play a piano you can make chords. For Bergson, mechanical movement is produced through a chopping up into bits as opposed to the flow of duration. Here then is a diagram of what is at stake. I THEORY (from concept or formal design to page) formality of the letter, type >>> moving stream, ribbon >>> materialised print II PRACTICE (chiasmus of the E´CART-TRACE) moving stream, hand writing >>> inscription