Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading
JEREMY FERNANDO
Raading Blindly Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading
JEREMY FERNANIO
�� -----:::c-CAMBRIA PRESS AMHERST, NEW YORK
Copyright 2009 Jeremy Fernando All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), with out the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to:
[email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 20 Northpointe Parkway, Suite 188 Amherst, NY 14228 Cover concept by Michelle Andrea Wan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fernando, Jeremy. Reading blindly: literature, otherness, and the possibility of an ethi cal reading / Jeremy Fernando. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60497-633-5 (alk. paper) I. Reader response criticism. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Literature- Explication.
4. Literature-Philosophy. I. Title. PN98.R38F47 2009 801'.95-dc22 2009028207
For Brendan Quigley, who taught me how to write (even as I remain completely blind to it); Neil Murphy, who unveiled my blindness to reading, in reading, and when reading; and Werner Hamacher, who once told me to "trust no one-not even me-and just read for yourself" Thankyou for being my teachers, my mentors, and most of all, my dear friends
If the serpents had written History they would have proudly related how their ancestor had belonged to woman. And it was during love dispute between woman and her companion, a dispute god had every interest in no one ever knowing he had been the adulterous cause, as for any oriental god, that the jealous companion violently seized her serpent. But serpents are a people with no writing and it is god who has the word. -Helene Cixous, La
Who could well say: "I fear we cannot rid ourselves of God, because we still believe in grammar " A believer, still ...
a friend of men! But if you still believe in grammar, it is because the idea of being able to rid yourself of god fills you with terror. Fear of no-life , fear of life. -Helene Cixous, La
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Stumbling Around in the Dark
Introduction: On Reading: A Pact With the Devil
xi
1
Part I: Blindness
15
Chapter 1: Blindness, or What Is This No-Thing We See?
19
The Book as a (Death) Sentence
25
Blind Ethics , or Close Your Eyes (to) See the Third Literary Theory and the Erasure of Texts
31 41
Chapter 2: The Contr act: Venus in Furs, or How to Read the Other A Question of Violence; A Statement of Terror
51 52
A Question of Reading , or "Art Lies in the Gap Between the Painting and the Viewer"
56
"What Is To Be Done?" or How to Read While Maintaining Radical Otherness
62
The Reader Before the Law, or What Is My Right of Inspection
67
READING BLINDLY
x
Part II: Reading(s)
83
Chapter 3: Rereading Miller:
J Stands Before the Law
85
Forever Undecided, or "Who Is the Who That Is Reading?"
89
Reading and Testing: Reading as Testing
92
Putting J Back Before the Law
95
Chapter 4: Reading
Roland Bartlres, Rereading Roland Bartlres (Writing Roland Bartlres)
101
Reading (Writing): How, What, and a Secret
III
Do This in Memory of Me
113
Chapter 5: Only Fiction Is Stranger Than Fiction
Part Ill: Tlte Reader Chapter 6: Reading. Or Just Gaming. Spinning, Mixing, Scratching, Cutting, Stabs...
121
129 133 139
Bibliography
155
Index
161
About the Author
167
STUMBLING AROUND IN THE DARK
I was on that journey and nearly at Damascus when about midday a bright light from heaven suddenly shone round me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" I answered: Who are you, Lord? and he said to me, "I am Jesus the Nazarene, and you are persecuting me." The people with me saw the light but did not hear his voice as he spoke to me. I said: What am I to do Lord? The Lord answered, "Stand up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told what you have been appointed to do." The light had been so dazzling that I was blind and my companions had to take me by the hand; and so I came to Damascus.' After the crucifixion, this is arguably the most important scene in Christianity. In fact, one can argue that in the context of
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Christianity as a concept, this scene is more important than the death of Jesus. For it is only with Paul that the term Christian comes into being:2 the birth of Jesus itself would have fulfilled the condition of his coming; in this sense, his death is superflu ous.3 The movement from a title ("Jesus the Christ" or "Jesus the Savior") to a name ("Jesus Christ," where "Jesus" and "Sav ior" become one and the same) required not so much his death, but rather a betrayal, much the same way as the movement from name ("Julius Caesar") to a title ("Caesar") also required one. In this sense, the two key figures in the formation of Christianity are Judas and Paul; Jesus being the medium through and in which it was created. Judas' betrayal moved the name into a singular; Paul's writings transformed the singular into the universal. But for Saul to be created, Saul had to first move through a period of blindness, and it is this that we must look at for the moment. The first question that arises from the above passage from the Acts of the Apostles is, if "the people with me saw the light," then why did they not go blind, as Saul did? After all, he claims that "the light had been so dazzling that I was blind." Either he had been seeing a "light from heaven" that was different from the light his companions saw, or he was lying (Saul didn't have the best of reputations), or he was mistaken about the cause of his blindness. For if it was not the first two possibilities, then would the case be that Saul's blindness was not caused by the light, but rather by the "voice [that] spoke to me" that his com panions "did not hear"?4 In this sense, does Saul need to be blind to the Word in order that he can truly discover what the Word is? In order for Saul to fulfill his role of being the "chosen [one] to know [God's] will, to see the Just One and hear his own voice speaking,"5 he would first have to be blind to all that was being written (and perhaps even said) about God. This was the only
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xiii
way in which he could transubstantiate himself from a Pharisee into the first Christian: the movement from Saul to Paul required a momentary blindness. There is already a hint of the manner in which the blind ness would affect Saul earlier in the passage, when he answers a question ("Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?") with another question ("Who are you Lord?"). It is not so much that he did not hear the question but that he was able to discern what the "voice" was really asking: the "voice" was not looking for a reason for Saul's persecution (after all, as God, wouldn't (S)he already know why?) but for an acknowledgment that (S)he was God. It was this that Saul recognized in his response; even while he was asking who the voice that was speaking was, he had already acknowledged it as "Lord." It was through his blindness that Saul could truly see the "will" of "the Just One." What draws both Judas and Saul together is the motivation in their actions. One can never really ask what their personal intention is-that is never knowable-but one can posit (or at least hypothesize) the traces that can be found in their actions. Both Judas and Saul betray their existing situations, the result of which is a creation of something new: without their betray als, the names "Jesus Christ" and "Christian" would not exist. But it is not that their betrayals are in opposition to their situa tions. What Judas and Saul have done is to be blind to the overt reading of what their situations demand (obey Jesus unques tioningly and be a good Pharisee, respectively) to listen to the secret message that no one else wanted, or perhaps was able, to see, to hear ("Jesus had to die in order to fulfill the prophecy" and "the coming of God was precisely the coming of the Chris tian," respectively). When Jesus asks Judas, "Are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?"6 it wasn't a question ing of the
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appropriateness of the gesture: after all, one cannot betray in the absence of love.7 In order for Judas to act in fidelity to the work and life of Jesus, he had to betray him-he had to be blind to the overt teachings, all the laws, and also all the other disciples. In the same way, Saul had to betray the laws of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish laws, and his training and life as a Pharisee in fidelity to this "voice" that no one else could hear. A similarity can be found in the case of Bq..ltus and Julius Cae
sar: the betrayal and murder of Caesar had to happen in order to preserve the state; it was Brutus' love for what Caesar worked and stood for that resulted in his having to kill Caesar to pre vent him from destroying his own creation. In this sense, both Judas and Brutus betrayed the ones they loved in fidelity to what both Jesus and Caesar, respectively, stood for: Brutus and Judas betrayed Caesar and Jesus for the persons they were becoming, for becoming persons who were other to what they had stood for. Since both betrayals were a response to what the other now stood for, they were a response in fidelity to the other-perhaps an imagined other, a perfected other, a deified other, even, but nonetheless an other-which suggests that the acts were initiated by Jesus and Caesar themselves, almost as if Judas and Brutus were called by Jesus and Caesar to betray the Jesus and Caesar they had become. In Jesus' case, this seems obvious enough: someone had to betray the Son of Man in order that he could be crucified and resurrected. His transfiguration from man to deity required the betrayal; Judas' role was to respond to this call. One could argue that Judas' betrayal of Jesus had to occur; other wise, Jesus would have become God on earth (after all, he was building a following). In order to prevent that from happening (which would have been Jesus' usurpation of God the father), Judas had to respond to Jesus by betraying him, murdering him.s In Brutus' case, one can argue that his murder of Caesar was
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xv
a response to Caesar's name itself, as Avital Ronell elegantly argues in The Test Drive: The very thing meant to do away with Caesar reasserts his name. If Brutus was able to cut Caesar down, his act could not amount to a cut initiated by him, one might say, because the cut is Caesar in his defiant totality; from his birth Caesar bears the naming name of the cut. The act of independence was prescribed by the name of the other.9 Brutus' role was precisely to bring the caesura to its full poten tial. If one considers Paul's role from this angle (the bringing to the fullness of potentiality the name of Jesus Christ), then per haps Saul's betrayal of the Pharisees was only the first moment: in order to complete the movement from Jesus the man to Jesus the universal God (which Judas begins), Paul had to betray Jesus the deity himself. Since only Paul had heard the "voice," in effect he is now not only Pythia but the Oracle itself (at least in the case of Pythia, there were priests that were translating her words, there were others privy to understanding, interpreting the divine words; in Paul's case, he was both receiver and transla tor, legislator and executioner).10 In order to catholicize Jesus, Paul had to become God himself: in order to create the universal Jesus, what Paul had to first do was totalize the Word, to cement a particular version of the Word, to write out all other versions. Since Paul is the only one who heard the "voice," whatever he claimed is true, or, more precisely, all of Paul's statements are truth-claims, constative statements: by staking a claim to the "voice" (which no one can dispute, no one else having heard the "voice"), Paul is, in effect, the "voice." W hether Paul's action was driven by a self-centred motive, a selfish motive (to become an apostle, a specially chosen one, to become the undisputed leader of the Christians, etc.), or whether it was a response to a
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call of the divine, a response to the "voice" of God, a response to the other, will never be known: we will always remain blind to Paul's intent. All that we can discern is that this betrayal of God by becoming the voice of God himself was necessary in order to universalize the Christian. Hence, in our reading of Paul, Paul himself will always remain blind-opaque, invisible-to us. All that we can ever know is about Paul: we will never know the character of Paul, but instead, all we know is th,e character Paul. One might also consider the fact that Paul did not author the
Acts of the Apostles; the only potential author ever suggested has been Luke," as he is considered a close companion of Paul (being from Antioch, there is a chance that he might even have been present at the first use of the term the Saul-and later Paul-of the Acts
Christian). In this sense, of the Apostles is a char
acter in the narrative of the author. Interestingly, nowhere in his own writings does Paul mention the fact of his blindness. In fact, the closest he comes to doing so is when he states that after being chosen by God, he "went off to Arabia ... [for] three years ... and later straight from there back to Damascus";12 in this case, there is yet another blindness, a blind spot of three years about which nothing is known. Could it be that Paul had to sup press the fact that his "vision" was one of blindness, that his vision of God was precisely one of nothing? Instead of being enlightened, all he had was momentary darkness. Assuming that the author of the Acts ofthe Apostles is consis tent, why is there, then, an inconsistency between the narratives in Acts 9:3-9 and the passage which we have been reading? For Acts 9:7 states that "the men traveling with Saul stood there speechless for though they heard the voice they could see no one," which contradicts Acts 22:9, which states, "the people with me saw the light but did not hear his voice as he spoke to me." This reopens the possibility of Saul's non-truth-telling, but
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xvii
a more interesting consideration is why such an obvious incon sistency was left in place. Is it simply an indirect way of sug gesting that there are different "voices" that can be heard, or is this another blind spot in the text? If we read both Acts 9 and Acts 22 as being true, then the reason for Saul's blindness is ultimately unknown; Saul and all his companions see the light and hear the "voice," but only Saul is blinded as a result. In this sense, even the reason for his blindness is now unknown to us. And it is in this situation of absolute blindness-Saul was blind, whilst blind to the cause of his own blindness, as we are too-that the Christian is born. It is in this blindness that the third-the Christian-that ruptures the binary opposition of Jew-Gentile is born. It is in this blindness that a new term (the
Christian) was born with in the existing system of thinking (Juda ism); in Alain Badiou's terms, this would be an instance of a true event, where there is a new potentiality that opens up within an existing conception, an existing space, an existing world. For it is not as if with the coming of the Christian that Judaism was overthrown: the fact that they are similar for the most part sug gests that Christianity is a new conception of Judaism, one in which the Jew-Gentile opposition no longer is crucial. The key moment would be the gesture of imagination-where something is done without any a priori knowledge of the consequences. After all, Saul had no idea that his moment of blindness, of not seeing, of not-knowing-his illegitimate leap of faith-would lead to the birth of a new term, a new possibility. Only in this way might something new occur.J3
xviii
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I. Acts 22:6-11. All references to the Bible are taken from the Jeru
salem Bible. 2. The first known use of the term Christian can be found in Acts 11:26"It was at Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians."
3. It is Islam that recognizes the pointlessness of the death on the cross (and even the resurrection): Isa goes straight to heaven (his movement from human to divine did not require death). The dif ference between Islam and Christianity is precisely the movement of his name: in Islam, Isa does not move from a singular into a universal, but from an individual name to a universal title.
4. There have also been interpretations that Saul was in the centre of the light-it "shone around" him (Acts 22:6). Even if this were so, it does not change the fact that the cause of his blindness was not so much the light but something other than that.
5. Acts 22:14-15. 6. Luke 22:48-49. 7. If there was no love, then it would merely be an act of complic ity to murder. It is only with love that it is a betrayal, for in every betrayal, there is the break of a previous commonality, singular plurality (where two singular persons were linked by a common idea, goal, belief). In this sense, the betrayal is always a double betrayal, of the other person and also of the idea, and in this dou ble betrayal, love itself is shattered.
8. In a way, this was the logic that was explored in Jesus Christ Super star (music and lyrics by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice): in the musical, it was Judas who realized that Jesus was becoming too much of a superstar, and hence had to betray him in order to save Jerusalem (which was Jesus' intention in the first place).
9. Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 310. An excellent meditation on loyalty, betrayal, and love in Brutus and Cordelia from Julius C aesar and King
Lear, respectively, can be found in The Test Drive, 307-310.
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xix
10. Paul is constantly referring to himself as one who is "called to be an apostle, and specially chosen to preach the Good News" (Rom.: 1-2), ignoring the fact that he wasn't actually one of the twelve "appointed by God [ no less] to be an apostle" (I Corinthi ans: I); "an apostle who does not owe his authority to men . .. but who has been appointed by Jesus Christ and by God the Father who raised Jesus from the dead" (Gal.: I). In other words, Paul laid claim to the appointment of interpreter of the Word of God: since he was the one who heard the "voice," one can construe that he has appointed himself as the interpreter of the Word. II. "The only identification of the author ever suggested by the church writers is St Luke, and no critics ancient or modem have ever seriously suggested anyone else. This identification was already known to the churches about the year 175 AD as shown by the Roman canon known as the Muratorian Fragment.. .and is supported by internal evidence: the author must have been a Christian of the apostolic age, either a thoroughly hellenised Jew or, more probably, a well educated Greek with some knowledge of medicine and extremely well acquainted with the LXX and Jewish things in general. Lastly, and more significantly, he had accompanied Paul on his journeys judging from his use of the first person plural in Part 2 of the Acts, and of all Paul's companions none is more strongly indicated than Luke." Introduction to The Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament, 195. 12. Gal. 1:15-19. 13. This will be explored in greater detail in the chapter "Blind Ethics, or Close Your Eyes (to) See the Third." Badiou discusses the "true event," amongst other places, in Being and Event (2006).
Raading Blindly
INTRODUCTION
ON READING A PACT WITH THE DEVIL
How does one read properly, that is, ethically? In an examination of this question, a questioning of the ques tion, there is an obvious link between the terms how and ethi cally; both involve choice, and choosing. Whenever a "how" is invoked, the subject has to choose between one or more options. However, for a situation to involve ethics, there must be a choice made in which the singularity making the choice is responsible to and for all the other(s) in that situation: it is this singularity, this particularity, which makes the choice a proper one. There is a crucial difference between the choice in the situation of a "how" and the choice in an "ethical situation." The choice in "how" involves alternatives which are already laid out before us: hence, the decision made is calculated, calculable, part of a system. In a true ethical situation, the choice is always made in a moment of
2
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blindness: the outcome (and even the situation leading up to it) is unknowable.' So is "how to read properly, ethically," and then, more pre cisely, "how to read as if each reading is a singular situation," an impossible question? Or, if not an impossible question-after all, we did ask it-then perhaps a question that can only remain a question, one that cannot be closed off, be completed, and, by extension, be theorized (in the �ense of forming a complete theory about it)? Ethical reading is a conception of reading as a space of (and for) negotiation. The moment of reading is the moment when the "how" and "ethics" collide; one can never read in a vacuum (both the text and the reader have their respective historicities), but in order to read, the reader must be free to respond fully to the text. In this way, we face two contradictory demands: one must read as if for the first time, that is, without any precon ceived notions of reading or of the text, but at the same time, it is impossible to read without any prior knowledge of reading and this makes the situation aporetic. After all, we are born into reading; reading precedes us, and much of reading relies on con ventions. But it is precisely in this space that the negotiation and choosing take place. Each decision, and each choice, is tempo ral, and each instance of reading is a new one-no two read ings will be the same. It is within this space, this temporal-and singular-space, that reading can occur as a singularity, and in which a potentially new reading can occur. If each reading is temporal and hence potentially new, it opens up this question: Is a virginal reading possible? Can one read as if reading for the first time?2 This brings into question the sta tus of memory and forgetting with respect to reading. Clearly, memory is part of the process of reading: one must remember the rules of language, and one must also remember what one
On Reading
3
has read prior to reading what is in front of one. One must also always keep in mind what is ahead of one. This is especially true when one is reading to unearth the movement of thought in a text, when one is attempting to unveil the different registers in the text: one must speculate what is not-yet-read, one must remember the future, for otherwise, one cannot project how what one is currently reading fits in with respect to the entire text.3 However, in order to open these registers, to allow these different readings to potentially surface, one must also forget what one has read, what one is reading; otherwise, one is merely reiterating what one already knows. At every point of reading that responds to the potentiality of the text, there must be a for getting that occurs prior to the reading: each time one reads, no reading takes place if one does not forget. It is precisely the double function of forgetting and memory that results in language being both general and specific simulta neously (and the two never being able to be reconciled). It is only because forgetting is the very basis of language4 that there is the possibility that at each reading, a unique reading, a new reading (a reading as if reading had never before occurred) might occur. It is forgetting that allows for the single instance of a new read ing, but at the same time, it is memory (of language and, more precisely, grammar and its rules) that allows for reading to take place at all. Hence, every act of reading is when memory and forgetting collide: every act of reading is aporetic, as one has to both remember and forget at the same time. Each time reading occurs, one is not just reading the text for the first time, but also reading for the first time. It is forgetting that ensures that each reading is potentially a virginal reading: not a first reading in the sense of an original reading, but a first reading in the sense of there never being a second reading, there never being a repeated reading. After all,
4
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is not the hymen another shield, another veil, another blind, one that only appears to be broken, split, ruptured, only to reveal that one is within folds, layers, all of which reveal and unveil and hide at the same time? Like the splitting of the veil in the temple, all that is revealed is that the secret of God remains, an unknown, an unknowable, which can only be sometimes glimpsed. Of course, the problem with forgetting is that it cannot be willed, determined, decided; it happens to one. In ot�er words, one cannot count on forgetting, call on forgetting; not only does it happen to one, one might not even know, ever know, that forgetting has taken place. And once it has, there is no object to forgetting: the moment one can designate an object that is forgotten, one is back in the structure of memory. In other words, there is no referentiality to forgetting. Hence, one can never actually know of forgetting; it is always beyond the realm of knowledge. And since reading that is not merely a preconditioned hermeneutical decoding is premised on the possibility of forgetting, this suggests that we can never quite know when, or even whether, reading itself occurs. This suggests that reading can no longer be constituted in the classical tradition of hermeneutics, as an act of deciphering meaning according to a determined set of rules, laws: this would be reading as an act where the reader comes into a convergence, at best, with the text. In fact, reading can no longer be under stood as an act, since an act by necessity is governed by the rules of reading. Reading must be thought of as the event of an encounter with an other-an other who is not the other as identi fied by the reader, but rather an other that remains beyond the cognition of the self. Hence, reading is a prerelational relational ity, an encounter with the other without any claims to knowing who or what this other is in the first place; an unconditional rela tion, and a relation to no fixed object of relation. As such, it is the ethical moment par excellence.s
On Reading
5
Since reading is an event of ethicity, it interdicts any precon ditioned detennination of the encounter. As such, it cannot be conceived as a phenomenal event. This is due to the fact that a phenomenal event is what appears to the senses-a theory of appearances-and is determined by its correspondence to an existing conception; the event is subsumed under the self's "knowledge." What the reader encounters may only be encoun tered before any phenomenon--or at least, the point of encoun tering is always already beyond the reader's knowing. Hence, reading occurs as a nonphenomenal event, or, more precisely, as the event that undoes any possible theory of phenomenal ity. The scene of Saul's blinding demonstrates this, as it is not a blinding by a phenomenon but rather by the very source of phenomenality itself, which remains invisible, undecipherable, and ultimately unknowable, irreducible to any concept of under standing or reason. Hence, it is the blinding not only of the sub ject of cognition-Saul-but also of the object of cognition; it is the event of a double blinding, an encounter that is completely beyond cognition, that is unknowable, that is in exception of everything that is known. As such, at every encounter, each reading is an event of full potentiality, where nothing can be known except the fact that it is the event of an encounter. It is this potentiality that Saul saw when he was blind; it is this potentiality that was embodied in the new name of Paul. How ever, in order for the movement from Saul to Paul-in order for Saul to become Paul-there is a necessary gap, a space, a blind spot (whether it is three days or three years is irrelevant) in the narrative; it is this gap, this unknown, that opens up the space for the becoming, for the Christian. It is not possible to say what this site of negotiation, this third that lies between the Pharisee Saul and Paul, is. The gesture of imagination, this leap that is required to move from Saul to Paul-a transubstantiated Saul, exactly the
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same and slightly different at the same time-is not one that can be defined; it can only be described, narrated (and only after the event). After all, the first time we are made aware of his new name is in Acts 13:9-"Then Saul, whose other name is Paul." It is not as if Saul had suddenly shed his old self and is now a new being: Paul is his other within his old self, Paul is the becoming Christian of Saul. In other words, Paul is the gap, the space within Saul himself, the site of becoming that is th� Christian. All that can be said is, perhaps, what this site of negotiation is not; in this sense, at best, all that can be said is proscriptive. This is precisely because the space of imagination is not an object, but rather, the space itself is what is being imagined: it is the imagination of the possibility of the third, the third that is always in a state of becoming, that allows this transubstantiation to take place. This space of imagination, this imagination of a space, is what allows for reading to take place. After all, reading is never done, it is constantly becoming.6 It was Saul's positing of the possibility of a space between the Jew and the non-Jew that gives rise to the term Christian. It was Saul's blindness to the fact that one cannot know the will of God-he had to act according to the "voice" that he heard, that only he had heard, and act according to this event, this singularity that cannot be explained-that allowed for the Christian. In order to act, Saul had to read the "voice" in blindness-posit a reading that is ultimately illegitimate and unverifiable. Hence, the ques tion that continues to haunt the work of Paul, the question that cannot be answered, will always be, what did the voice say? There is an echo of this in the eternal question that haunts the Bible itself: "Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"? This is the question that is unanswered, and never answerable: after all, no one will know what God said to the woman. Even if we accept the validity of her words, "But
On Reading
7
of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, 'You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death"'8-and there is no reason to do otherwise-the question of whether this was really what God said remains. After all, a prohibition almost always gives rise to a temptation to defY. In this sense, one can question whether it is the serpent that tempted, or whether it was really God who set the scene in the first place. In fact, the serpent is telling the truth when it utters, "No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods know ing good and evil,'''' which is precisely what happened. 10 After eat ing the fruit, "the eyes of both of them were opened,"" the result of which is that Yahweh God acknowledges that "man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil."'2 In order for woman and man to become like God(s), they had to first tum a blind eye to Yahweh's order to not eat from that tree. One might also consider the exchange that is needed in order to obtain the knowledge of good and evil. Yahweh God's admo nition to man is, "You may eat indeed of all the trees in the gar den. Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die."'3 In this sense, one can take it that both woman and man consume the fruit in the full knowledge that they are sacrificing their lives in exchange for the "knowledge of good and evil": it is their gift of death that was required in order for them to become "like one of
US."14
More than just the fact that
they had to ignore Yahweh God's command, in order to become like the God(s), they had to listen to the question and decide for themselves: to gain the knowledge of good and evil, they first had to choose. This is a choice that is made in blindness, for they knew not what they were choosing: after all, one can hardly claim that they, before knowing what good and evil were, were making a cognitive choice about good and evil.'s
8
READING BLINDLY It is this pact with the serpent-the pact that God and the ser
pent have in secret-that sets the scene for the woman to know of the fruit: after all, if God created everything and has full knowl edge of everything that is to happen, then both the serpent and the question are also of Yahweh's creation.16l t is this secret pact (even though the serpent is a creation of Yahweh, Yahweh still needs its complicity in this matter: full knowledge does not necessarily equate to full control) that opens the possibility o£!he woman eat ing the fruit in the first place. One must not forget that it is she who first ate of the tree; it is she who made the blind choice by positing the possibility that perhaps God didn't really mean not to eat from the tree. It is this pact that maintains the possibility of questioning and, more importantly, the possibility that humankind can choose for itself, can have access to the "knowledge of good and evil." It is also the question that ensures that we can continue reading-as knowledge can never totalize-that reading itself can continue. What this suggests is that a prescriptive answer to the ques tions (how to read properly, that is, ethically; did (s)he really say that?) is impossible, for every statement would only hold true in a particular moment, a particular situation, a singular moment. After all, at her moment of choosing to eat of the tree, all the woman could do is to posit whether God really said that or not; there is no certainly, only a possibility or a momentary potential ity for it to be true. It is these moments, these singular particu larities, that we will listen for (we cannot always see them, for they are hidden somewhere in the text, within the text, with the text). All we can hope to do is to listen out for these moments, these details, for as Jean Baudrillard reminds us, there is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment. Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious.
On Reading
9
Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness. Like the fragment, it only has to be elliptical. It only has to be an exception. Every singular image can be reckoned exceptional. And it puts an end to all the others.17 It is only in blindness that we can see exceptions; it is only in exceptions that we can see when we are blind. Only through think ing in terms of the peculiar, the particular, the absurd, even, can we perhaps puncture the flattened book, rescue the text, the unread, the unreadable, such that the book can never be read, such that reading can continue.ls Perhaps to do so, we must first attempt to wrest the real from the reality principle To wrest the image from the representation principle. To rediscover the image as point of convergence between the light from the object and the light from the gaze.19 The fragment is precisely where we can find reading as the event of an encounter. For it is only when each encounter is taken as an exception (and, by extension, that exception is the norm) that reading as an ethical event can be begun to be thought. If each encounter with the text is an encounter with a fragment, then no unity can be established; by extension, there cannot be an over arching whole which can establish itself as a rule and hence pre condition the event of reading. Hence, each event of reading is a reading of a fragment, each reading is itself a fragment, each event of reading is also an event where reading itself is constituted. There is much to learn from the proverb, "The devil is in the details": it is the small things, the fragment, the particular, that prevents any totalizing logic from taking place, from unifying itself, from solidifying itself. Perhaps in this light, or darkness,
READING BLINDLY
10
there must be an attention to, a reading of, the small, the unno ticed, the little, and a blindness to a large, the whole. In this way, there is a potential for the mysterious and the wonderful to appear, and perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the phantoms that haunt the text. After all, one can only see ghosts with the third eye. But first, perhaps we must begin to think of what this blindness that we are thinking of is in the first place. A�d, perhaps more accurately, what this blindness that we are thinking of is not. Is it when we do not see that we are blind, or is it that we are blind when we do not see: is blindness what we do not see, or does blindness shape what we see in the first place? In order to exam ine the question, how does one read properly, that is, ethically? one is faced with the issue of blindness and what it is one does not see, cannot see. Hence, we have to first examine blindness itself and its relation to reading. Since there is a link between see ing and knowledge (captured perfectly in the phrase "Seeing is believing"), we have to reflect on the relationship between what we can and cannot see, and, more specifically, if what we cannot see is always already part of what we see. This would open the consideration of the possibility of knowing and the very limits of knowledge itself, after which we will read texts that attempt to think reading itself, that attempt to think the possibility of read ing. For if we only attempt to speak of-write about-reading without reading anything, we might then just be speak-writing of everything but reading. By attempting to read, perhaps we can begin to meditate on what the text is as such, what the object that we are reading is (if it even is an object), and how we can start to approach it. And since reading is the relationship between the reader and the text, we must then turn our attention to how read ing affects the reader; the effects of the text, and reading, on the body, in the body, of the reader. In this way, we might be able
On Reading
11
to begin thinking of how both the reader and the text read each other, write onto each other, into each other. However, we must begin at the beginning, by taking a detour through blindness-and what blindness entails in the first place. After all, if we refuse to acknowledge what we cannot see, refuse to see that we cannot always see, we might remain stumbling around in the dark.
READING BLINDLY
12
ENDNOTES
I. Of course, to deny that an ethical situation is also historical-it
has its ghosts that continue to haunt it-would be silly. However, at the moment of decision, of choosing, one has little choice but to be blind to both the historicities (leading to the choice) and the potentialities (of the choice), and acknowledge the double blind ness of choosing. 2. Is this even a question for the introduction, one that must be asked
from the very beginning, or must it be left to the very end-an invitation to begin again, to start again, to read again-a question that can only be uttered when the reading is over, when the text is finished, a question that can only be known at the very end? Can you really ask a question about beginnings, about origins, without an idea of the end in mind? Or, another way to put the question: is there a possibility of a beginning without the notion of an end? In this sense, the question of origins is not just an archeological project but always a teleological one as well. 3. Reading in this form is always a reading of the specific with rela
tion to the general-reading the particular text in relation to the universal book. The assumption here, of course, is that there is a totality which is the book to be referenced against, to be compared with, to be kept in mind. This suggests, then, that reading can only occur the second time one looks at a text, or, even more radically, that each reading is always a second reading. 4. The only time one has to utter something is in its absence: if the
object that was referred to were present, then there would be no necessity to utter the signifier. The very recollection of the signi fied to one's mind is premised on the fact that it was momentarily forgotten; otherwise, there would not be a remembering that was taking place. If the signified were already in one's mind, it would be purely knowledge. Hence, the very condition of language itself-the fact that one has to refer to something, and communi cate this to someone else by language-is, precisely, forgetting: if one never forgot, there would be no need for language at all.
On Reading
13
An excellent instance of the thinking of the status of memory and forgetting can be found, among other places,in the writings of Werner Hamacher, including "Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutic Circle in Schleiermacher" in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Meridian, 1999),44-80. 5. l owe much of this analysis to a conversation with Werner Hamacher. 6. It is perfectly apt that the term read both signifies the past and the present tense of the same process. In reading, there is the collision of both the past and the present, memory and forgetting; perhaps reading is always a future possibility, a potentiality. 7. Gen.3:1 (italics added). 8. Gen. 3:3. The only recorded words are what God said to man; we only hear of what God said to the woman from her representation and, perhaps, interpretation--of the admonition not to eat from the tree. 9. Gen.3:4-5. 10. It was not the eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge that caused man and woman to lose eternal life, it was the fact that after eating from the tree, they were banished from the garden and so were unable to eat from the tree of life: "See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live for ever" (Gen. 3:22). II. Gen. 3:7.
12. Gen.3:22. 13. Gen.2:16-17. 14. Gen. 3:22. 15. It is this choosing that is blind to both the law and what it chooses-this choice that was made in double blindness-that we will examine, that we will attempt to see. And in trying to think the question,how to read properly, that is,ethically? we will allow the other question, did (s)he really say that? to haunt us, to ques tion us, to question the question itself. 16. In effect, the serpent is the autoimmunity of Yahweh in order to ensure that Yahweh's law would not be fully obeyed, would not
C HAPTER 1
BLINDNESS,
OR
WHAT IS THIS No-THING WE SEE?
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or psychological factors ...Total blindness is the complete lack of form and light percep tion and is clinically recorded as "NLP," an abbreviation for "no light perception."1 When something is written onto a page, there is an inscription made and the page is marked, there is a mark left behind. The only way which we can read that mark is when light reflects from it and forms an image that goes through the pupil and is focused on the retina. Sensory cells from the retina relate the image via neurons onto the visual cortex, which is the part of the
14
READING BLINDLY be a totalizing law: the serpent's question opened the possibility that the woman consumed the fruit, and as a result, humankind became "one of us" and received the knowledge of the God(s) themselves.
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), 103.
18. To rediscover reading as the point of emergence-negotiation, space-between the text and the reader. To think the punctum a point, stop, break, puncture, prick-of the flattened page, the
punctum that lets the text be a text, that allows reading to continue. It is Roland Barthes who never lets us forget that it is punctuation that allows the sentence to stop, pause, but never to settle, as it is punctuation that also breaks, punctures; at best, it is a momentary rest. Barthes' meditation on punctuation and the punctum can be found in many places, one of which is Camera Lucida {I 980).
19. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, \04.
PART I BLINDNESS
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time. -Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, always already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration. This dimension of the ruinous simulacrum has never threatened-quite to the contrary-the emergence of a work. It's just that one must know [savoir], and so one just has to see (it) [voir ca]-Le., that the performative fiction that engages the spectator in the signature of the work is given to be seen only through the blindness that it produces as its truth. As if glimpsed through a blind. -Jacques Derrida, Memoirs o/the Blind:
The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
20
READING BLINDLY
brain that processes the information. But the only way in which the image is formed is for some of the light to be absorbed by the image itself (otherwise, all we would see is pure light, an imageless brightness). This means that there is always some part of the object-the letter, the word, or the series of words-that remains unseen, that remains in the dark. What we are interested in is this residue, this that is left behind the ghost of the word that remains unseen: perhaps the only way which we can see the dark is to be blind in the first place. Just because something does not appear to be there does not mean that it isn't there, does not mean that it isn't experienced as being there. In many cases, something that is absent--or, more precisely, that appears to be absent--can affect us just as much as something that is present: I placed a coffee cup in front of John and asked him to grab it [with his phantom limb]. Just as he said he was reaching out, I yanked the cup away. "Ow!" he yelled. "Don't do that!" "What's the matter?" "Don't do that," he repeated. "I had just got my fingers around the cup handle when you pulled it. That really hurts!" Hold on a minute. I wrench a real cup from phantom fin gers and the person yells, ouch! The fingers were illusory, but the pain was real-indeed, so intense that I dared not repeat the experiment.2 If an absent limb can affect one, can it really be all that absent? Is it not the trace of the limb-be it via psychological effects, or even physiological ones3-that continues to haunt the body: the spectre of John's fingers that continue to be with him, inscribing them selves into his body, but this time not necessarily within his con trol? John's spectral fingers are absent in a cognitive sense-he no
Blindness, or What is This No-Thing We See?
21
longer can control them with his brain-but are very much present, slipping in and out of his presence and disappearing the moment he attempts to directly confront them. Here one must consider if a phantom limb has effects only because one has a memory of its sensation, a memory of the sensa tion that was caused by stimuli to the limb before its absence. In other words, is the sensation felt by the patient merely that of a psychological effect? Or, more precisely, is the sensation felt by the patient the result of both the memory of the limb and also the for getting of the fact that the limb itself is missing? For if the missing limb remains in the consciousness of the patient, then would it not be unlikely that (s)he feels a sensation in it? If the sensation is trig gered by an affect of memory, this suggests that it must be beyond merely physiological stimuli; since all external stimuli are absent, it is almost as if the patient feels the sensation because there is an anticipation of what is to be felt. This is perhaps a similar sensation to that one feels just before one is tickled: the only way in which one can feel ticklish even before actual physical stimuli is experi enced is because one knows what feeling ticklish is. In effect, the ticklishness is anticipated and then is felt by the person.4 This might be why the most successful attempts to treat patients with phantom-limb pain have involved the imagination. One such instance is the "mirror box" that was created by Vilayanur S. Ram achandran and colleagues. A "mirror box" is a box with two mirrors in the center, one facing each way. A patient inserts her or his hand into one hole and her or his "phantom hand" into the other. When viewed from an angle, the brain is tricked into seeing two com plete hands. The "mirror box" treatment is based on an observation that phantom-limb patients were more likely to report paralyzed and painful phantoms if the limb was paralyzed prior to amputa tion. The hypothesis is that every time the patient attempts to move her or his limb, (s)he receives sensory feedback that the limb is
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paralyzed. Over time, this feedback stamps itself into the brain such that even when the limb is absent, the brain has learnt that the limb (and its subsequent phantom) is paralyzed. Hence, the patient feels discomfort or even pain because the phantom limb is in an uncom fortable position or is paralyzed. If the brain is tricked into seeing two complete hands when the hand that is present moves, the brain thinks that the phantom limb is also moving; in this way, the per son can "move" her or his phantom limb, and so the brain no lon ger recognizes it as a paralyzed limb.s More recently, virtual reality has been used to treat sufferers of phantom-limb pain; by attaching the present limb to an interface that shows two limbs moving, the somatosensory cortex is tricked again.6 Both the "mirror box" and the virtual-reality interface (developed by the University of Man chester) work on the same principle of visual-kinesthetic synesthe sia, except that the illusion is stronger in the latter. It is through the use of imaginatioll-not accepting the absence as a lack but rather as a spectre that is present but cannot be encoun tered directly-that the symptoms suffered by phantom limb patients can be treated. This is not merely the creation of a "substi tute formation" in the sense that Freud himself asserted, which is "the manufacturing of a [formation] which recompenses the subject for his loss of reality."7 In Freud's case, the "substitute formation" allows one to ignore the cause and simulate one in order to treat the symptom(s); as long as the patient believes that one is treating the "cause," the symptom(s) will go away. This use of the imagina tion is more radical as the concept of the cause--rigin-is done away with: it matters not if the limb in question is present or absent (phantom); both are treated as if they are one and the same. The line between the real and the virtual is erased. In fact, all amputees, and all who work with them, know that a phantom limb is essential if an artificial limb is to be used.
Blindness, or What is This No-Thing We See?
23
Dr Michael Kramer writes: "Its value to the amputee is enormous. I am quite certain that no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it." Thus the disappearance of a phantom may be disastrous, and its recovery, its reanimation, a matter of urgency.... One such patient, under my care, describes how he must "wake up" his phantom in the mornings ...Only then can he put on his prosthesis and walk. g It is thus the imagination that allows for the birth of the third term, the phantom-real limb, the limb that is virtual but which treats the symptoms of not only the real (absent) limb, but also the virtual (phantom) limb. It is the imagination that not only bridges the gap between the real and the phantom but more radically allows for the real-virtual, the virtual-real, to exist. In this manner, what cannot be seen can potentially be experienced, be momentarily glimpsed. However, even though the imagination is the space in which treatment of phantom-limb pain takes place, one can never deny that there is physiological aspect. Even as there must be a for getting of the fact that the limb is absent, one cannot completely forget the limb as well; if that were so, there would be no mem ory of its sensation at all. Hence the phantom-limb sensation is neither purely psychological nor physiological. Here, we have to tum to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and consider his claim that what has to be understood, then, is how the psychic deter mining factors and the physiological conditions gear into each other: it is not clear how the imaginary limb, if de pendent on physiological conditions and therefore the result of a third person causality, can in another context arise Ollt of the personal history of the patient, his memo
ries. emotions and volitions.')
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This suggests that sensations are neither purely from external stim uli nor purely from internal cognition: there is rather an interplay between the two, where the body discovers itself via the world and also discovers the world through itself. Hence, the phantom limb "is not the mere outcome of objective causality; no more is it a cogita tio. "10 Lying in the indistinct space between cognition and external
stimuli, the sensation felt by the patient is similar to a reflex-an action that is neither merely a reaction to stimuli nor fully cogni tive. In fact, "reflex movements, whether adumbrated or executed, are still only objective processes whose course and results con sciousness can observe, but in which it is not involved."11 The reflex does not arise from objective stimuli, but moves back towards them, and invests them with a mean ing which they do not possess taken singly
as
psycho
logical agents, but only when taken as a situation ...The reflex, in so far as it open itself to the meaning of a situ ation, and perception; in so far as it does not first of all posit an object of knowledge and is an intention of our whole being, are modalities of a pre-objective view ...12 Hence all cognition--evel)' act of knowing-
