Metaphor, Translation, and World in Derrida

IDIOMATIC THROUGH AND THROUGH: METAPHOR, TRANSLATION, AND WORLD IN DERRIDA

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by Evan Daniel Foster December 2018

IDIOMATIC THROUGH AND THROUGH: METAPHOR, TRANSLATION, AND WORLD IN DERRIDA

Evan Daniel Foster, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018

This dissertation examines the motif of the idiom in Derrida. It argues that, for Derrida, before language can be thought in its generality, there must be a multiplicity of languages or idioms, each of which, while irreducibly different from its others, is simultaneously irreducibly different from itself. This irreducible difference, or idiomaticity, puts the idiom into an originary state of translation that is paradoxically double. On one hand, the idiom, in differing from itself, is constitutively undergoing translation. On the other, the idiom’s irreducible difference from its others forestalls translation, leaving it in a state of untranslatability that is simultaneously a state of non-self-identity. This non-self-identity I tie to an originary metaphoricity. I argue that, in Derrida, metaphor and translation form a conceptual knot through which a general idiomaticity, which I associate with the possibility of literary invention, may be glimpsed. This idiomaticity I find to be at odds with prevailing accounts of translation such as can be found in contemporary scholarship on world literature, where the circulation of texts across lingual borders is a crucial problem. Chapter one argues work on world literature tends to conceive this circulation against a presupposed horizon of metalingual positing. The translational circulation of literary texts serves to manifest, in essentially dialectical fashion, the synthetic whole of language itself. I link this lingual self-manifestation to the gradual appearance of the world, the transcendental ground on whose basis literary texts belonging to particular idioms may show up and enter into global circulation. Chapter two elaborates, through Derrida, a universal law of the idiom that, paradoxically,

can be formulated only idiomatically. Briefly, it would fall to a given idiom to prescribe a generalized idiomaticity, even as said idiom prescribes an idiomaticity proper only to itself. Chapter three argues that, for Derrida, the idiom’s (un)translatability entails its originary, but non-dialectizable, spatialization. The idiom is not a means by which the whole of the world may come to light, but rather disrupts the world’s appearance as it resists being integrated therein. Where the idiom shows up in the world to be read is consequently perpetually in question.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Evan Foster received a BA in French (2007) and an MA in French Literature (2009) from the University of Kansas. He subsequently studied French literature at the University of California at Irvine, where he received an MA in 2011. During the summer of 2011, Evan was a participant at the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. He enrolled at Cornell University in the fall of 2011, where he continued to broaden his study of French literature and philosophy, and where he received his Ph.D. in 2018. Since 2015, Evan has taught French language and culture courses at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in Monterey, California.

For Claire

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Innumerable people deserve thanks for making this dissertation possible. While I can only single out a few of them here, I hope that those who go unmentioned know, somehow, that I owe them my deepest gratitude.

I would first like to thank my dissertation committee for their comments, their encouragement, and, maybe most of all, for their patience. Though I only realized it much later, it was in Jonathan Culler’s course on the theory of the lyric that I first started to think seriously about the idiomatic as a crucial stake of reading literary works. Without the intellectual stimulation he provided in that course, as well as on other, subsequent occasions, this dissertation would have surely turned out very different. Anne Berger’s work on Derrida proved to be a valuable resource at a crucial moment in the evolution of my thinking. Her generous comments were an especial boon to me as I worked to finish the body of the dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my advisor Laurent Dubreuil for his intellectual example, and for his pointed criticisms of my work throughout my time in Cornell’s Romance Studies Department. His scholarship is a perpetual reminder of the need to be vigilant in pushing against critical orthodoxy. I hope my own work shares, at least a little, that same vigilance.

Among all the teachers I have had during my graduate studies, Van Kelly of the

University of Kansas deserves special mention. He was the first to open my eyes to the enormous complexity of the problem of reading, and I owe him greatly for it.

I would also like to acknowledge Maj-Britt and Jim Eagle, whose great generosity over the last several years has been absolutely vital, and not just to the writing of this dissertation. But in particular, I thank them for their manifest interest in my intellectual pursuits, which has been a happy source of encouragement, especially during moments when the writing process proved to be deeply frustrating.

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I know no one who is more thoughtful, big-hearted, or good-humored than my mother,

Dayna Foster. I cannot express how thankful I am for the endless support she has offered me during my graduate studies. I have appreciated enormously the interest my father, Michael

Foster, has shown in the progress of this dissertation, and I especially cherish the little moments when I have gotten to share my intellectual interests with him. His, and my stepmother Doris

Degner-Foster’s, moral and material support has meant so much to me.

I would like explicitly not to thank my dear friend Brett Gerstenberger who, if anything, actively hindered the completion of this dissertation.

Lastly, and most importantly, I want to thank Claire Eagle. I cannot imagine a more supportive, loyal, and loving partner. She has remained by my side through everything, and there is no way this dissertation would exist without her. From Ithaca to Monterey and everywhere in between, Claire’s singular kindness, hilarity, and love have sustained me. This dissertation could only be for her.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH v

DEDICATION vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS ix

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE. Weaving the World: Metaphor, Translation, World Literature 19

I. Meaning as Medium, Through Metaphor 29

II. From Metaphor to Translation to the Endless Revival of Languages 42

III. Literature In the World, Literature As the World 54

CHAPTER TWO. The Invention of the Idiom – at the Limit: Genius in Derrida 82

I. The Power of Truth as Unveiling, In and Through Metaphor 85

II. Nature Reflects Nature: Genius and the Idea (of Metaphor) 97

III. The Gift of Metaphor’s Obliteration: Through the Example 110

IV. Between Metaphora and Translatio, the Limit of the Ultra-Idiomatic

Word 122

V. The Law – Par Exemple – of the Ultra-Idiomatic 144

VI. Language’s Inter-dict, de par en par 156

CHAPTER THREE. Passages Through the Idiom: Metaphorico-Translational

Crossings in Derrida 179

I. The Blank Space of Metaphor’s Turn to Translation in “La mythologie

blanche” 181

II. Passages of Fragments: de mots en tra en mots en par in “Le retrait de

la métaphore” 194

III. The Interest of the par, Between Text, Context, and World 224

CONCLUSION 254

BIBLIOGRAPHY 261

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS A “Avances” AF L’archéologie du frivole AV Apprendre à vivre enfin BS Séminaire : La bête et le souverain, Volume II (2002-2003) C “Circonfession” CP La Carte postale

D La dissémination DAP Du droit à la philosophie DG De la grammatologie DLM Donner la mort DP Déplier Ponge E “Economimesis” EC “Economies de la crise” ED L’écriture et la différence EP Eperons F “Fors : les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok” G Glas GGG Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie : Les secrets de l’archive

H Heidegger : la question de l’Etre et l’Histoire : Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1964- 1965 K Khôra LI Limited Inc. M Marges – de la philosophie MA Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine MPM Mémoires : pour Paul de Man

OG Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la géométrie : traduction et introduction P Points de suspension : Entretiens PA Politiques de l’amitié PAR Parages PDL “Préjugés : devant la loi” PIA Psyché : Inventions de l’autre POS Positions : Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis

Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta Q “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction « relevante » ?” R “Reste – le maître, ou le supplément d’infini” S Signéponge/Signsponge SN Sauf le nom TP Théorie et pratique : Cours de l’ENS-Ulm 1975-1976 TS A Taste for the Secret U L’Université sans condition V Voyous : Deux essais sur la raison VP La Voix et le phénomène : Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl

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Introduction

Where claims are made in defense of Derrida’s continued relevance for the Humanities, it is less than surprising to find warnings or admonitions or even apologies concerning the role that language plays in his overall project. It can seem as though Derridean deconstruction’s worthiness as a productive approach for thinking with other disciplines, fields, or sub-fields, has to be accompanied by some manner of reassurance, one that is at least tacit but often enough gets mentioned in passing, that Derrida was never really about an idealized linguisticism, or a bloodless and aestheticized textualism, or a postmodern discursive constructivism, or some other caricatural description, left over from the 1980’s, of the place of language in his œuvre. His would be a thought about more worldly issues, ways of living with other beings, of communing ethically, politically, religiously in the name of an infinite version of what of the Western tradition would be worth preserving: responsibility, justice, democracy, rights, etc., extended to every part of the globe and to every form of life.

While a ready-to-hand acknowledgment that Derrida is not really to do with some of the more risible aspects of post-structuralism has been, in one sense, a welcome development, in another sense, it is, I think, far too frequently symptomatic of a rush to reclaim his work for what are at bottom species of a moralistic teleologism. And teleologism always takes for granted, to echo a famous Derridean title, the question of method, which is always a question of language:1 how the scholar is supposed to have gained access to her object of study (for example, Derrida himself, and/or concepts as viewed through a singularly Derridean lens) and subsequently produced claims about it when said “object” is only ever available by way of a system of

1 For some recent examples of work that happily does not give short shrift to the problem of language in Derrida, see Elissa Marder’s “Snail Conversions: Derrida’s Turns with Ponge,” Chiara Alfano’s “Popentine,” Véronique M. Fóti’s “Speak, you also: On Derrida’s Readings of Paul Celan,” Kate Briggs’ “Translation and the Question of Poetry: Jacques Derrida’s Che cos’è la poesia?,” Clare Connors’ “Derrida and the Friendship of Rhyme.”

substitutional significations – which is to say, by way of some language – that overdetermines it, and in which, moreover, the scholar must situate herself as well. To echo some terms from the

“Question de méthode” section of De la grammatologie (DG 226-34), both the scholar and her object – that is, both the reader and the writer being read – must be understood to have been already “overtaken” (“surpris”) by the substitutional system – by the language – in which the relation between writing and reading is to be radically “opened” and must remain “open.”

Moralizing misreadings of Derrida take off from a failure to think through the implications of the necessity of the openness I have just indicated, and this for at least two basic reasons. For one, that the discourse being read and the scholar doing the reading open onto each other by way of signifying relations that “must” be kept radically open does not at all equate to an ethico-political prescription of openness. Martin Hägglund, in his Radical Atheism, correctly identifies this false equivalence when he states that “The ultratranscendental description of why we must be open to the other is conflated [in the kind of misreadings of Derrida I am talking about] with an ethical prescription that we ought to be open to the other” (31). There can be no question of knowing in advance how to act in regards to an openness that constitutes the very possibility of the ethico-political relation.

For this reason, openness “to the other” cannot be understood as a lawful injunction that one could simply double in the form of a reading practice that would subsequently ratify and enact it. This is made very clear by the aforementioned “Question de méthode,” where Derrida insists precisely on reading as a “task” (“une tâche de lecture”) that “produces” the opening to what it reads, but from within what it reads, thus without “redoubling” (in the form of, for example, commentary, regardless of whether that commentary seeks to be respectful or transgressive of what it comments on) what it reads (see in particular DG 227, 234). In my view, this problem, seemingly very unworldly because leaving no pre-determined exit out from under

“le surplomb de la langue” (DG 229), has received insufficient attention, and it is this that, I want to say, counts as the second basic reason for teleologizing and moralizing misreadings of

Derrida. If a certain recovery of deconstruction for the Humanities has been more or less successful over the last twenty years or so, this has come about largely at the expense of thinking about the opening to the other as a lingual opening that is not simply given to be read (as, say, an ethico-political injunction, demand, etc.), but that reading, in the highly unique sense Derrida gives this word, must “produce” in exorbitant fashion.

Now what counts as an exorbitant reading? Very schematically: if the text that is read is indeed to effect a rupture with respect to “la totalité de l’époque logocentrique” (as is the case, per Derrida, with Rousseau) (DG 231), then its exorbitance vis-à-vis logocentrism must entail its exorbitance vis-à-vis any totalizing identity, including itself. Reading, then, has to read what it reads in its a priori exorbitant non-self-identity, in other words, in its radical non-presence. This means having recourse to no pre-established methodology or logic that would make of the text its symmetrical mirror image. Reading has no direct access or path to what it reads, and so cannot be said to ever truly get started and subsequently be guided through to the text’s meaning in any straightforward sense. On this account, reading, understood in terms of an exit (“sortie”) from the totality of the whole of metaphysical knowledge, is nothing but a certain sustained thought on a non-actualizable “possibilité de l’itinéraire et de la méthode” (DG 232). Reading, in other words, can only “read” its own inability ever to start reading, or can only ever get going by way of a “false start” which, to quote Geoffrey Bennington, a commentator who, more than most, has been attentive to just this problem, “is what I must always begin by reading” (Not Half

No End 121). Needless to say, the question of method that is a question of reading as Derrida formulates it here – as an open question, or the opening of the question, “L’ouverture de la question” (DG 232) – is not reducible to the question of what one is reading. To echo the Derrida

of “Préjugés : devant la loi,” the prerogative of the what is only possible precisely because, as pre-rogative, it already composes with other, pre-judicial or pre-judicative modes of questioning.

For example, the methodological question how which, thanks to a certain “force réservée” (PDL

94), is able to question the question what in its very legitimacy, that is, in its very lawful authority or insofar as it is an instance of lawful authority, be it theoretical or practical (see in particular PDL 93-5).

I want to say that, for Derrida, before there is any legitimating principle giving order to the relations between text and reader, indeed, before there is anything like a text-reader relation tout court, there is the exorbitant pre-rogative of a language – what, late in “Préjugés,” Derrida calls a “structure essentielle de la référentialité” that is not to be confused with “le système

« normal » de la référence” (PDL 131) – in which nothing is related. Allowing nothing significant to be relayed or carried over between text and reader, such an insignificant language would have to be considered akin to what is called “le langage sans langage, le langage au-delà du langage” (PDL 134). In other words, such a language is utterly divorced from a totality of language that would be capable of producing and sustaining a continuous correspondence between fully present entities. Characterized by a persistent discontinuity of signifying relations, the language situating text and reader is, rather, irreducibly idiomatic. It is without appeal to a generality of language conceived as a metalingual whole. But neither is it to be counted as one language within a multiplicity of languages, for multiplicity is too easily figured as a symmetrical array situated against an implicit horizon of the whole of language as such. Neither generality nor multiplicity, and preceding the law thought in terms of a “dispositif théorico- ontologique” (PDL 93) capable of rendering judgments of a universal, thus metalingual, order, the idiom, says Derrida, is the law: “La loi n’est ni la multiplicité ni, comme on croit, la généralité universelle. C’est toujours un idiome” (PDL 128).

How, then, to read the judgments such an idiom makes possible? How, that is, to judge the idiomaticity of a radically idiomatic judgment belonging neither to language per se, nor to one or another distinct, particular language, nor even to the relations between some discrete set of languages? Reading, in this situation, would have to proceed starting from the risk that it leave the idiom essentially unread, or that it be blind to it. Consequently, reading’s first task is to avow this risk, or to produce itself as such an avowal, what Derrida, to return to the “Question of method,” calls an “aveu d’empirisme” (DG 232). But contrary to a confession made in view of a clear-eyed and non-aberrant reading, one that would seek eventually to reproduce the truth of what it reads as its mirror image, the empiricist avowal affirms risk and blindness. Its task, or what it is tasked with producing, is a blind spot (“tache aveugle” (DG 234)), the point at which the idiom is withheld from a universalizing vision of language, and its limits – both internal

(broadly speaking, the relationships between its signifiers, and between its signifiers and its signifieds) and external (broadly speaking, the relationships between itself and other idioms) – are rendered properly invisible. Reading must stake itself – risk, but also support or secure or bind, itself – on this invisibility. Which is also to say that it does not simply describe or document the idiom, but that it partakes – which partaking is not to be considered a species of performative, nor of any other act, be it or not a speech act – in its withdrawal from the visible horizon of language as such. Reading gets mixed up in the idiom it reads, and it is at the point of this mixing – where reading produces, from within the text, its unseen and idiomatic aspect (“la production, si elle tente de donner à voir le non-vu, ne sort pas ici du texte” (DG 234)) – that its task may come into view. There, the task (la tâche), as what binds reading to what it reads

(l’attache), is not other than the idiomatic blind spot (la tache aveugle) it must make visible.

There, reading’s avowal (l’aveu), as avowal of an empiricism untethered from all theoretical and metalingual certainty, is not other than the blindness (l’aveuglement) constitutively and

exorbitantly affecting the idiom’s own self-evidence or -identity. There, the “possibilité de l’itinéraire et de la méthode,” having to be thought according to an idiomatic referentiality without metalingual reference, or to a network of traces whose signifying links (attaches) have nothing natural about them (cf. DG 68: the trace “n’a aucune « attache naturelle » avec le signifié dans la réalité. La rupture de cette « attache naturelle » remet pour nous en question l’idée de naturalité plutôt que celle d’attache”), the possibility of a reading itinerary and method is not other than the text’s own idiomatic trajectory, the story of its own illegibility in which is recounted “pas d’itinéraire, pas de méthode, pas de chemin pour accéder à la loi, à ce qui en elle aurait lieu, au topos de son événement” (PDL 114).

Where in Derrida such an idiomatic pas leads – or does not lead – is, in a certain way, the subject of this dissertation. In a sense that I hope will become clear over the course of the chapters that follow, its trajectory cuts a path through the idiom, more particularly through the

French language and some of the highly determined uses (and abuses) of it that may be found in the Derridean corpus. I begin from the premise that French is constituted of, and thus holds within itself, lingual resources that are radically non-representational, and so that are exorbitant vis-à-vis any simple demonstration that would pretend to reproduce them, whether this be in the form of a theoretical description or of a performative positing of a language signifying in excess of itself. Let me pause to point out that “exorbitant,” as Derrida uses it in the passages I have quoted above, does not only refer to excess, to what exceeds or goes beyond a given set of limits.

More generally speaking, deconstruction should not be thought as a philosophy of excess or transgression. If, as Derrida states in Positions, deconstruction’s “gesture” consists, at least in part, of a reversal (“renversement”) of a hierarchically ordered binary distinction, this is not done in order to redress a wrong done to the systematically repressed or marginalized term such that it may subsequently exceed or transgress its repression and/or marginalization (POS 21-2). “Au

terme d’un certain travail [a certain deconstructive work], le concept même d’excès ou de transgression pourra devenir suspect” (POS 21). Rather, the “reversal” is one prong of a double- pronged movement that at the same time inserts or marks a certain gap (“écart”) between hierarchical distinctions, displacing the boundary between them to the point that they become utterly disjoined from each other. And because of this disjunction, it becomes impossible to conceive the terms of the distinction as occupying a common theoretical territory. They are, in other words, absolutely foreign to each other, their “relationship” marking a persistent lack, thus the absence of all relation (see, for example, POS 54-64). If a given term (such as

“dissemination”) has, due to its exorbitance, any transgressive “force,” that force needs to be located in the manner in which it “cracks open” the very horizon of meaning to which the term would otherwise belong. Far from producing an excess of meaning (say, polysemic, as opposed to monosemic, meaning), this force yields the utter meaninglessness of the term in question.

Dissémination ne veut rien dire en dernière instance et ne peut se rassembler dans

une définition…. Si on ne peut résumer la dissémination, la différance séminale,

dans sa teneur conceptuelle, c’est que la force et la forme de sa disruption crèvent

l’horizon sémantique. L’attention portée à la polysémie ou au polythématisme

constitue sans doute un progrès par rapport à la linéarité d’une écriture ou d’une

lecture monosémique…. Néanmoins, la polysémie, en tant que telle, s’organise

dans l’horizon implicite d’une résumption unitaire du sens, voire d’une

dialectique … d’une dialectique téléologique et totalisante qui doit permettre à un

moment donné, si éloigné soit-il, de rassembler la totalité d’un texte dans la vérité

de son sens…. (POS 61-2)

The exorbitant is, therefore, additionally what cannot be approached, what is so eccentric, so anomalous that it is not to be found within the circumference sketched by the power of

metaphysical vision in its idealizing movement. And yet the exorbitant, exterior to the visual field, nonetheless gives itself to be glimpsed, as though in the blink of an eye, through the production of the idiomatic blind spot such as I described it above. That is, because the idiom admits of no symmetrical relationship with any medium of meaningful signification (neither with any given language (natural or otherwise), nor with language as logos), its internal and external limits must be thought as asymmetricalizing. Rather than opening, in the sense of relating, the idiom to the other as symmetrical other-of-the-self, the limit installs the other in the idiom

“itself,” in its very self-sameness. Or, better, it installs the other in the idiom’s place. It thus makes of the idiom a topos that, providing the other a place, simultaneously displaces the distinction between self and other. This displacement, coinciding with the idiom’s taking place

(its manifestation as a self-same body of language), produces its simultaneous replacement, or produces it as originally replaced, thus non-present or invisible, utterly absent from the scene of representation, its limits exorbitantly displaced by the other come to represent it in its place.

This results in a situation that I will be calling, at various moments in the chapters that follow, ultra-idiomatic. On the one hand: because (Derrida’s) French is constitutively unable to close on itself as a self-same totality, it must inscribe itself in a substitutional movement that puts the identity of its signifying forms, or what in them is most properly French, into question. The referentiality without reference that I cited above is, on this thinking, a translationality, and the idiom is ultra-idiomatic in the sense that it gets carried away beyond itself, and that its signifying limits come to overlap with those of an idiom external to itself. But on the other hand: because it is the aforementioned non-representational resources idiomatic to French that originally put the language into its translational movement, those resources cannot prescribe said movement a destination, in the form of one or another target language, that would, precisely, represent them.

Taking place through French, through an idiomaticity absolutely unique to it – and not through

some mediating metalingual totality that would assure a symmetrical and successful relating between source and target languages – translation’s event cannot be said to take place. Replacing the translational event is a kind of original return or referral of French to itself, to a French that thereby remains the same while nonetheless resisting all manner of representation, including, of course, self-representation. If, therefore, it is through the ultra-idiomatic resources most “proper” to French that the idiom’s referentiality turns to a translationality, it is also through – through another through – those same resources that French remains French, turning inward at the same moment it turns outward, thus turning in place. Here again I argue that French must be considered ultra-idiomatic, but now in the sense that it is idiomatic in the extreme, bearing no resemblance to any other language. Ultra-idiomatic in this second sense, French is untranslatable. And yet it still finds itself in a situation analogous to that of its translationality: constitutively referential but without a destination, without any place in which reference might be said to take place, and, what is more, without a fully present point of departure from which to get going.2

I believe that this ultra-idiomatic problematics is what Derrida has in mind when, to take one example, in Le monolinguisme de l’autre he speaks of French as a unique “monolangue”

(“celle qu’on a sans l’avoir” (MA 124)) in which there is a place (“lieu”) that “inscribes” a certain “phénomène singulier de traduction” (MA 123). This translation is to be thought in terms of “la traduction absolue” into which the monolingual speaker is “jeté,” and in which there are only target languages, “langues d’arrivée” that are never arrived at because never constituting stable, self-present wholes: “des langues qui, singulière aventure, n’arrivent pas à s’arriver” (MA

ó Naoki Sakai has argued in a similar fashion that translation is a “nonrelational relation” (he borrows this turn of phrase from Jean-Luc Nancy) “that probably becomes most intelligible at the demise of all the ‘communication theories.’” This requires thinking translation as a repetition preceding what gets translated: “What is translated and transferred can be recognized as such only after translation. The translatable and the untranslatable are both posterior to translation as repetition. Untranslatability does not exist before translation: translation is the a priori of the untranslatable” (5).

117). However, an absolute translation that results in no actual translation simultaneously announces a return to a single, singular language, an “avant-première langue” (MA 118) or

“langue pré-originaire” (MA 122), whose traces, having been left in French, inaugurate an

“internal” translation between French and itself, “traduction interne (franco-française).” The monolingual individual that Derrida confesses to being thus finds himself at once outside and inside the French language, in the aforementioned “lieu « à l’intérieur » du français” that marks,

“dans le rapport à soi de la langue, dans son auto-affection, si on peut dire, un dehors absolu.”

Needless to say, this lieu or topos is not one determinate place or commonplace among others, nor is it a generality of place, the most common of commonplaces. It marks instead a point at which French’s internal limits do not add up to a language, or to the truth of a language as a self- present whole. As Derrida avers, “Une langue n’existe pas. Présentement. Ni la langue. Ni l’idiome ni le dialecte. C’est d’ailleurs pourquoi on ne saurait jamais compter ces choses et pourquoi, si … on n’a jamais qu’une langue, ce monolinguisme ne fait pas un avec lui-même”

(MA 123). And to avow one’s monolingualism would be, in a quasi-Augustinian manner, to produce the “truth” of this non-unity (MA 117), to produce, inside of French, an opening outside of French, at a highly determinate point at which there can be no accounting for, nor counting of, the distinctions between the idiom’s disparate signifying elements. The avowal is the avowal of – and as – an indistinction, the production of a “place” in which the linkages, for example, lexical and/or syntactic, that would otherwise bind French to itself because giving order to what it is and how it makes sense, are nowhere to be seen because absolutely dispersed. In this place, it is as if

French had never actually taken place: “Comme s’il s’agissait de produire, en l’avouant, la vérité de ce qui n’avait jamais eu lieu” (MA 118). As if the avowal were tasked with producing, in

French, an utterly non-real, fabulous, or literary place that, exceeding the signifying possibilities proper to French, at the same time promised no way out of French. The crossing movement that

trans-lation announces would, according to the ultra-idiomatic avowal, prescribe a turn back to

French, back through French so as to cross through and eliminate the limits attaching signifiers to signifiers and signifiers to signifieds. Left in the wake of such a crossing through would be a monolingual speaker with not only no language to avow, but no language in which an avowal could be made. In the idiom that it will have crossed through, the avowal, as an event, does not take place. Rather, it cedes its place and opens a way to a reinvention of the language, to unforeseen and fabulous genealogies – to what we might call, to echo again Geoffrey

Bennington echoing Derrida, so many false starts – of French in which the task (la tâche) of avowal (l’aveu) as the production of truth, as vision of the power of sight itself (la vue), gets remarked as the blind spot (la tache aveugle) that serves as the link (l’attache) to other possibilities of signification.3 The exorbitant limits of those possibilities French makes visible by turning a blind eye to them, by figuring their genealogy as “Une aveugle pulsion généalogique” whose

“force” (MA 22) should be located in the ultra-idiomatic law that Derrida gives in two parts as follows: “On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue – ou plutôt un seul idiome,” and “On ne parle jamais une seule langue – ou plutôt il n’y a pas d’idiome pur” (MA 23).

Where, or in what context, to find such reinvented, ultra-idiomatic genealogies, and according to whose power of invention they should be reinvented, are questions I will explore in this dissertation. As I have already indicated, the answers to these questions are not to be sought in any particular place or set of places. I will rather be following the ultra-idiomatic question where it crosses through Derrida’s œuvre, most saliently through his use of the French

3 The lingual genealogy I am describing here is, I think, close to what Serge Margel calls “la genèse abyssale d’un mot” (103) in his “Le spectre du nom. Notes sur la question lexicale d’une langue philosophique.” He speaks there of a Derrida that would countersign the constitution of “un nouveau lexique,” one that would be “ouvert” (101) and consist of a ceratin “pouvoir des mots.” This power would operate “entre les catégories de la réalité” (the human and the divine, the human and the animal, man and woman, literature and philosophy, etc.) (102), and present (“met en scène”) “la genèse abyssale d’un mot, qui dit l’homme, qui dit la femme, le divin ou l’animal,” and this “sous la forme lexicale des usages des mots, des mésusages et des abus” (103). In this way, the open lexicon “peut aller d’un mot à une phrase, … d’une argumentation … à tout un texte entier” (101-2).

preposition par. A particularly idiomatic use of this word (which, as I will argue, and to imitate

Derrida, is plus d’un mot en un) shows up as early as the 1971 essay “La mythologie blanche,” a work principally on metaphor and its abyssal determinations in the Aristotelian tradition. In chapter two I examine this essay in terms of Derrida’s critique of classical accounts of metaphorical substitution privileging the noun, name, or substantive that, entering into combination with other essentially nominalizable parts of speech, becomes productive or revelatory of new knowledge. And it is the human being, exemplarily the genius, who would not only represent that knowledge to herself, reproducing it in a theoretical description, but also present it to herself, generating it in an immanently practical, but still metaphorical, gesture.

Within this movement of (re)presentation, metaphor is conceived as a mode of mimesis, and so as a key value in the great Aristotelian chain of being whose telos is the genius generation and revelation of the entirety of being as a self-identical interiority, an interiority in which said generation and revelation are, additionally, to take place. In a circular manner – but this circle should not be confused with a petitio principii since it is, save perhaps some rare exceptions, the very shape of all of Western thinking – the genius, maker of metaphors, sets forth the whole within which she will simultaneously have always and everywhere been at home.

However, Derrida will seek to challenge this self-reappropriating circle by, among other things, displacing in Aristotle’s discourse the distinction between categoremata (all words that, essentially nominalizable, “prétend[ent] … à une signification complète et indépendante, ce qui est intelligible par soi-même, hors de toute relation syntaxique” (M 278)) and syncategoremata

(“les articles, les conjonctions, les prépositions, et en général tous les éléments du langage qui, selon Aristote, n’ont pas de sens par eux-mêmes” (M 277)). By virtue of this displacement, a primary metaphoricity of language comes into view, one forming what Derrida calls a “stratum” of “tropes « instituteurs ».” These metaphors, taking the place of the “« premiers »

philosophèmes” (M 261) that, as primary substantives, would form the very substance, the very meaning and ground, of philosophy, sunder language itself and, or so I argue, open the problem of an ultra-idiomatic body of language founded not on substantives, but on a constitutively incomplete dispersal of “syntactic” particles whose “metaphorics” “ne réduit pas la syntaxe, y agence au contraire ses écarts” (M 320). As I hope to show, the par happens to describe this dispersal, but by partaking in it. And it is at the point of this partage that the par gives rise to an ultra-idiomatic opening between metaphora and translatio, where a discourse on metaphor and its genius partakes of what it describes and so finds itself in plus d’une langue: between, for example, Derrida’s French and Aristotle’s Greek.

This “between” is not one between. As will be seen, the par also crosses through

Derrida’s interrogations of Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, and their respective uses of German; and of Condillac, Francis Ponge, Hélène Cixous, and their respective uses of French. But beyond some discrete number of writers and/or idioms, what counts is the constitutive openness of the par’s signifying limits, or that they form a place necessarily “giving place” (to translate literally the French expression donner lieu) to a principally limitless number of ultra-idiomatic substitutions (metaphors and/or translations). In this the par is not unlike the entre that is one key motif in Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé in “La double séance.” Though Derrida is there, as elsewhere, concerned to attack the traditional opposition of syntax and semantics in which the latter is consistently privileged over the former, it needs to be understood that the entre does not typify the relationality of “un élément purement syntaxique.” Rather, it is “beyond” the intermediary function of syntax, beyond syntax as medium of discourse’s continuous unfolding

(“Outre sa fonction syntaxique”), that the entre may begin to signify (“il se met à signifier”) (D

274). And in this beginning, or in the first place, is a plurality of “betweens” between which the entre would be situated. It would serve as a place for the gathering of so many places, so many

articulated openings, between syntax and semantics. Derrida thus states that the entre “signifie la relation d’espacement, l’articulation, l’intervalle, etc.,” which comes down to the entre

“signifying” its own original, internal division: “Nous avons dit les « entre(s) » et ce pluriel est en quelque sorte « premier »” (D 274 n. 29).

I believe that Derrida reinscribes this primary plurality of spacing through the par. In chapter three I thus aim to demonstrate in what ways the par, as a non-representational or

“metaphorical” commonplace, problematizes the very place of the idiom’s taking place, what could also be described as the spatial limits of the ultra-idiomatic word as it is both written and given to be read. I argue that where the par shows up is a function of a referential trajectory that, from the first, puts the word into movement. This consequently announces the need for a reading practice for which the sense of the word, or its meaning as a well-circumscribed unit of language, is of necessity overdetermined by the sense of the word, or the directionality of its signifying, the configuration of the word as originally and irreducibly spatial. What matters for Derrida as concerns this original spatiality – or what, in “Force et signification,” he also enigmatically refers to as “la non-spatialité,” which he ties to a “sens métaphorique” that, thought as such, would logically precede “le sens” as conceived according to “son modèle géométrique ou morphologique” (ED 29) – what matters is not, for example, the arrangement of the word as it

“actually” manifests itself: for example, inasmuch as it is written on the page, consists in a discrete series of letters, possesses a determinate morphology, relates to other words according to well-established rules of syntactic order, etc. More important is that the word-as-text should be situated in “un ensemble non clos de différences en différance,” or that the text in question should not be restricted to one or another context determining the manner in which it is read (TP

26).4 Under this optic, the text would be capable of radically overflowing and thereby

4 The particular context for Derrida’s comments here is Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.”

transforming the context – in brief, the conventions ordering the text’s referentiality, but by way of its spatial presentation, that is, where and how it shows up in space – to which it would otherwise belong, becoming in effect the context of its own context. I hasten to add, however, that the being-with of a text that is structurally open to a multiplicity of con-texts should be understood as analogous to the “être-avec-soi” that, per the Derrida of Donner la mort, predisposes the self to a relation (“rapport”) of radical secrecy with itself (DLM 147). By dint of this predisposition to secrecy, the text would contextualize itself in order that its sense remain radically secret or indeterminate, in other words, without any ultimate context. Therefore, to posit the text as exceeding and so recontextualizing its own signifying context is to posit the text en abyme: as a commonplace that, transgressing the limits of its place, gives itself over, in a prior manner, to a re-placement that leaves it exorbitantly placeless.

At the limit, “placeless” would mean “worldless.” Thought in terms of the referential trajectory that puts it into an original process of transformation, but undirected by any species of teleologism, the par is that through which text and context, word and world, open to and through each other. In question, that is, is not the referentiality of the ultra-idiomatic word, but the ways in which word and world do and do not determine, do and do not refer to, each other. Or, to borrow from Kantian parlance, the ways in which the idiom is and is not “interested” in the world as a single, unified, and unconditioned thesis. We will see that, for Derrida and Derrida’s

Kant, the par articulates a fundamental disunity of reason that, or so I will argue, announces the disunity of the world thought, as it is in Kant, as an unconditioned totality. Reason’s interest, in

Kant’s sense, is an unavoidably ultra-idiomatic interest that, articulating itself through the idiom, gives way to a state of disinterest in which no single world presents itself. Rather, through a strange metaphorico-translational turning, the par oscillates between a plurality of possible worlds that its ultra-idiomatic referentiality posits. But it does so having no interest in a Kantian

ideal of pure reason, the thesis, for example, of one world that would contain and organize in itself all possible worlds. The referential trajectory of the ultra-idiomatic par is instead so uninteresting, if I may put it like that, that it escapes all possible contextual or worldly determination. It gives itself to be read as utterly illegible, unlocatable in any space on the globe, as though it had never existed, and will never exist, anywhere at all, without one world in or to which to refer.

An idiomatic difference of this sort is, in my opinion, at odds with much of the work in literary studies in which the global stakes of literary reference are of primary importance. I am thinking first of all, of course, of work done on world literature, where, or so I will argue in chapter one, the prevailing tendency is to conceive literary works as essentially in circulation.

This conception of the literary yokes its force – to echo Derrida once again, its force réservée – to the production of a circular and circularizing interiority, what, I argue, at bottom amounts to the world as such, and which would be analogous to the great Aristotelian chain of being that

Derrida’s analysis in “La mythologie blanche” is seeking to dismantle. I find that even a commentator such as Emily Apter, who evidently wants to be very sympathetic to deconstruction, nonetheless wields a vision of “untranslatability” that she conceives, perhaps unwittingly, as force in posse, a force essentially harnessed to an unceasing “Philosophical world-making” of which literature would merely be a version: “Philosophical world-making, another way of defining what world literatures do” (Against World Literature 189-90). This emphasis on making and doing should,5 I think, be seen as just one more strain of the vitalism that is ubiquitous in contemporary literary studies. I believe that this vitalism, like all the others, bases itself on the presupposition, untenable in my view, that language is at bottom a transitive force – and thus very unlike a Derridean force réservée – thanks to which systems of meaningful

relations are forever being made and unmade in a seamless and ever-unfolding movement of regenerative becoming. On this view, the untranslatability that Apter touts would simply be the negative image of translatability, a non-posited surplus of meaning held in reserve that the critic would always essentially be able to withdraw and set forth so as to actualize what she calls, commenting on Derrida’s “Who or What is Compared?” “translational sur-vie.” The stakes of a life that continues to live via translation are, unsurprisingly, ethico-political, what she calls at one point a “a new order of translational justice” (Ibid. 234) that leverages the untranslatable as “an incorruptible or intransigent nub of meaning that triggers endless translating in response to its resistant singularity” (Ibid. 235). Justice through translation would be a force by which the transformed world of the future would, it seems, eventually, if incrementally, arrive: “Translation as a kind of leveraging of language, causes … the entire world, to pivot, eventually if incrementally, on its axis [just prior to this Apter speaks of an “incremental transition” that is an organic process by which “transitioning organic bodies” would be “capable of accessing a new terrestrial and cosmological prospect ‘for our globe and its inhabitants’ [Apter appears to be quoting Peter Fenves quoting Kant] through mental acts of leveraging” (Ibid. 245)]” (Ibid. 246).

This sort of lingual vitalism is not new, however. It communicates, I believe, in profound ways with a tradition that has never shunned the concepts of difference or relationality. To the contrary, it has been paramount to Western thinking to conceive unity in difference, to allow differences to emerge as a living weave or system of corresponding meanings, thus as a continuous and ever-evolving mediation of differences conveying the very relationality of a multiplicity of relations. In chapter one, I offer a very brief and schematic overview of this line of thinking, drawing on a handful of thinkers who have had some notable influence on literary studies over recent decades. But I do so with the aim of preparing the way toward another

5 To cite just one more recent example of criticism that thinks of itself as acting in concert with the literary works it

thought of lingual difference, an ultra-idiomatic difference that, though it would exist nowhere in the world, and would make no forceful appeal to a more just and inclusive relation to the other, would nevertheless announce another world, another place for the possible taking place of a heretofore unheard of idiom.

reads so as to fully actualize a world-making power, Ranjan Ghosh speaks of “Working out a reading of literature [that] is also about mapping one’s worldview, abilities toward world-making” (Ghosh and Miller 6).

Chapter One

Weaving the World: Metaphor, Translation, World Literature

This chapter wants to claim that language, broadly conceived as a transitive force that unweaves and weaves boundary lines within and across traditions and paradigms of meaning is, and indeed has been for a long time, a crucial stake of literary studies. This conception of language as a dynamic and ever-unfolding system of meaning-in-transformation has perhaps become most visible in work done on world literature, where the prevailing tendency is to assert that literary corpora do not belong: neither to this or that narrowly defined tradition or paradigm

(cultural, national, imperial, economic, techno-scientific, whatever), nor to a single, homogeneous genre. Whatever legitimate force this assertion might have – and I myself believe that it is indeed proper to literary works not to belong – is typically not, however, disentangled from certain presuppositions bearing on the basic way in which the language of literature functions. It is these presuppositions that do the heavy lifting in the adjudication of what literary works can and cannot, must and must not, do. I contend that the judiciary credentials of theoretical discourses in world literature studies tend to reflect a fundamental, specular unity between metaphor and translation. To put it very succinctly, the irreducibly transgressive and transformational power of literary language would be rooted in the axiom that metaphor (which I follow Derrida in taking as the trope to which, traditionally, all other tropes are reducible, and which would therefore best distinguish literature’s language from other, non-literary forms of discourse) that metaphor is, to quote (and possibly abuse Benjamin) “unconditionally translatable” (“The Translator’s Task” 165). To cite one example of this line of thinking, Emily

Apter, in her Against World Literature, appeals to Benjamin, among others (including Derrida), to speak of metaphor as “in a state of perpetual transit, retreat, and referential infinitude” (240),

and so already lending itself to translation. Translation thus substitutes for metaphor, becoming a metaphor for metaphor, which metaphor, being “in a state of perpetual transit,” occasions further translation. We are thus dealing with a metaphorico-translational “homelessness,” as she calls it

(241), that is ultimately redeemed because it allows us “to renegotiate the boundaries between self and institution, life and death, language and world” (243).

I will undertake a more sustained critique of Apter’s, and a few other scholars’, work on world literature in this chapter’s final section. I quote her now in order to bring out in concrete fashion the implicit stakes of a theorization of literature that uncritically affirms the work of literary works as constitutive of a network. For metaphor to be “in a state of perpetual transit” in such a way as to make the repeated negotiation of “the boundaries between … language and world” possible, there has to be presupposed a deeper ground according to which the in and the trans would be continuously mediated. The mediated reflection of metaphor into translation, and of translation into metaphor, produces an evermore inclusive network of literary exchange that, though it might be irreducible to the discursive prescriptions of given milieus, nevertheless would ground itself in a single, primary source of lingual activity. It is this originary grounding that, I think, puts world literature studies on common footing with other privileged theoretical categories such as the material, the multiple, the affective, the posthuman, the global, the ethico- political, the living. In other words, what is common to all of these, as manifestations of what

Jessica Berman has called a “‘trans’ orientation” (106), as theoretical approaches with the power to orient both themselves and their objects of study, is the origin putting the work of orientation into movement. A key value pervasively at work between all these orientations is, precisely, work, the creative productivity of a lingual force acting to clear a ground in which a multiplicity of entities may come to be and act upon each other. Claire Colebrook is one of relatively few scholars who have been sensitive to this privileging of the value of activity, arguing that “One

could create an exhaustive and exhausting list of all the ways in which theory has been re- territorialized back onto the lived, all the ways in which a radical consideration of force without center, without life, without intention or sense is continually relocated in practical life, in doing”

(Death of the PostHuman 36-7).

And complementary to the value of work is a second key value, one I have mentioned now more than once, that of ground. The cumulative effect of the unceasingly transformational interactivity of literary exchange is, at one and the same time, the positing of a single milieu, of the kind described by Husserl when he speaks of the “horizon-certainty” of a transcendental world (The Crisis of European Sciences 374). I quickly recall that the “self-evidence” of this world (Ibid. 373), though it itself has no content and is for that reason invisible to us, makes available to our vision determinate objects. In the very possibility of its appearing, an object in general is determinable against the background of infinite determinability, and in this way it serves to index the synthetic totality of interrelated things. Husserl remarks that “Anything that is

… is an index of a subjective system of correlations” (Ibid. 165), that is, of a transcendental ego that labors to reveal the world as such. In an analogous way, the properly active nature that theoretical currents in literary studies tend to ascribe to their objects of study goes hand in hand with the elaboration of a world, the one whose boundaries can and must be, in Apter’s and others’ parlance, renegotiated.

And here the role of the scholar needs to be broached. If the transgressive and transformative interactivity I have just sketched out presupposes a totalizing ground on which it is able to have standing and to take on meaning, how should one account for the relationship between the scholar who describes said interactivity and its ground of possibility? One would, traditionally, have recourse to a reciprocal and symmetrical relationship of giving and taking. It is as though the ground of the exchange between active entities, as a question – which is also to

say, as language – had already been posed or given to the scholar, who, at the same time and in her turn, had already and satisfactorily taken possession of or responded to it.6 This comes down to the inheritance, one I think is, generally speaking, insufficiently reflected on, of a single, common and unified world that, though it is bequeathed to the scholar as the very ground of her theorizing activity, is simultaneously the ideal object of that activity, the one indexed by the crossing movements that decompose and recompose networks of signification, but always from within a single, totalized, and totalizing milieu. And this implies an additional inheritance, that of language, of a single mother tongue that not only the theorist, but all entities (understood, to repeat, to be indexes of the world as a whole, but also of the transcendental subjectivity laboring to reveal it) are presupposed to speak fluently, just because they are supposed to have inherited it.

Since I have evoked Husserl, it is germane to recall Derrida’s argument, in the introduction to The Origin of Geometry, that the Husserlian project must pose, as fundamentally interrelated conditions of possibility of science’s objects, “le langage, l’intersubjectivité, le monde, comme unité d’un sol et d’un horizon” (OG 3). Language is always the medium of an intersubjective dialogue between subjects whose consciousness of “leur appartenance commune

à une seule et même humanité,” and that they together inhabit “un seul et même monde,” is axiomatic (OG 76). It is always one language, universally mediating the production of knowledge within one community, situated within one world:

le langage et la conscience de co-humanité sont des possibilités solidaires et déjà

données au moment où s'instaure la possibilité de la science. L’horizon de co-

humanité suppose l’horizon du monde, il se détache et articule son unité sur

l’unité du monde…. La conscience de l’être-en-communauté dans un seul et

6 I will analyze more thoroughly this giving-taking schematic in chapter two through Derrida’s treatment of

même monde fonde la possibilité d’un langage universel. L’humanité prend

d’abord conscience d’elle-même « comme communauté de langage immédiate ou

médiate »…. (OG 73-4)

This is why translation poses no real problem in Husserlian phenomenology: “si hétérogènes que soient les structures essentielles de plusieurs langues ou de plusieurs cultures constituées, la traduction est au principe une tâche toujours possible” (OG 75). And it is why Husserl can circumvent the problem of how to read literature. What Derrida terms language’s “equivocity” is, for phenomenology, a function of a more primary univocity, “l’acte de langage lui-même,” for which any object is always meaningful because itself possessing an essential identity of meaning that subsequently permits its indefinite reproducibility, its theoretical and practical reuse, its reactivation. But all of this, for Derrida, elides the question of a more radical equivocity for which identity of meaning “s’inscrit toujours à l’intérieur d’un système mobile de relations et prend sa source dans un projet d’acquisition ouvert à l’infini” (OG 106). Lingual mediation here becomes an “irréductible médiateté”; its ideality is not a theme, but the ideality of “un indexe thématique” (OG 106 n. 1). From this it follows that nothing lingual can be an object: “Si l’équivocité est en fait toujours irréductible, c’est que les mots et le langage en général ne sont et ne peuvent jamais être des objets absolus. Ils n’ont pas d’identité résistante et permanente qui leur soit absolument propre” (OG 106-7). Within this radical equivocity, translation does not lead to, because arising from, univocity. Language’s unity is instead a “structural unity” that itself gets situated “dans l’équivoque généralisée d’une écriture.” And in a general equivocity, there can be no stable relationship between languages. But this instability is not the characteristic of an activity. If language’s (or language-as-writing’s) generalized equivocity “does” anything, it

“retrouve la valeur poétique de la passivité” (OG 104).

metaphor in Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition.

But much of the work making up theoretical currents in literary studies is, in my view, deaf to a passivity of this singular sort. Rather, language for it is always an object whose movements and reactivations it is always possible to account for. Which means that, at bottom, language reflects its own infinite determinability insofar as this takes place at the hands of the theorist. It thus reflects the process by which theory is practiced and so situates itself in, while giving rise to, the world. Poetry, or metaphor, and translation are merely versions of a more original lingual movement whose activity should be understood as a positing. Which is also to say that metaphor and translation need to be thought as versions or reflections of each other, actively mirroring each other to bring forth an ideal, and thus transcultural, literary object with the ability to circulate between subjects, no matter their cultural or historical provenance. The literary object is, in other words, a self-identical object, one that allows itself to be thought in other contexts across time and space and languages. It is therefore just like any other object, which locates itself, from the beginning, within the dialectical unfolding of a universal subjectivity that, in the course of positing objects, comes always and everywhere to posit itself.7

Yet Heidegger tirelessly shows that the positing subject is the subjectivity of the most traditional and pervasive thinking known to the Western world. Positing is the mode by which the subject as will to power wills itself to appearance. The subject, in thinking all things as values that it posits, gradually comes to posit an entire system, the aim of which is to maintain and amplify the subject as pure force or act of will. This entails a certain view of language, one that is propositional, and that establishes and brings forth the first principles “concerning the

7 Derrida argues that Husserlian phenomenology is indeed dialectical: the activity of consciousness goes hand in hand with the temporalization that is “maintained” by the living present. Toward the end of his introduction, Derrida summarizes by saying, “Nous avons vu combien cette « activité » de la conscience était à la fois antérieure et postérieure à une passivité [the passivity of sedimented meaning that the human subject, in its freedom, reactivates (cf. Derrida’s account at OG 99-101)] ; que le mouvement de la temporalisation primordiale, ultime fondement de toute constitution, était dialectique de part en part ; et que, comme le veut toute dialecticité authentique, il n’était que la dialectique de la dialectique – l’implication indéfinie, mutuelle et irréductible des protentions et des rétentions – avec la non-dialectique – l’identité absolue et concrète du Présent Vivant, forme universelle de la conscience” (OG 157-8).

whole of what is, what is in being and what being means, from where and how the thingness of things is determined.” The proposition does not in essence have to do with “simply present things,” but with “a principle of all positing, i.e., a proposition in which that about which it says something, the subjectum (ὑποκείμενον), is not just taken from somewhere else. That underlying subject must as such first emerge for itself in this original proposition and be established. Only in this way is the subjectum a fundamentum absolutum, purely posited from the proposition as such” (What is a Thing? 103). The proposition in this sense encompasses all things, but in first directing itself toward itself. “The positing, the proposition, only has itself as that which can be posited…. Insofar as thinking and positing directs itself toward itself, it finds the following: whatever and in whatever sense anything may be asserted, this asserting and thinking is always an ‘I think.’… In ‘I posit’ the ‘I’ as the positer is co- and pre-posited as that which is already present, as what is” (Ibid. 104). Heidegger makes clear that the positing “I” is not some individual person or consciousness: it is, “in its meaning, nothing ‘subjective’ at all, in the sense of an incidental quality of just this particular human being. This ‘subject’ designated in the ‘I think,’ this I, is subjectivistic only when its essence is no longer understood, i.e., is not unfolded from its origin considered in terms of its mode of being” (Ibid. 105). Elsewhere, Heidegger brings out the specifically relational character of positing, in which the object, in being presented to the subject, takes part in a process of objectifying that comes to reveal the subject as the active and underlying ground of all presentation and representation.

All that is, is now either what is real [das Wirkliche] as the object or what works

the real [das Wirkende], as the objectifying within which the objectivity of the

object takes shape. Objectifying, in representing, in setting before, delivers up the

object to the ego cogito. In that delivering up, the ego proves to be that which

underlies its own activity (the delivering up that sets before), i.e., proves to be the

subiectum. The subject is subject for itself. The essence of consciousness is self-

consciousness. Everything that is, is therefore either the object of the subject or

the subject of the subject. (The Question Concerning Technology 100)

Therefore, the subject “knows itself as that which is essentially value-positing” (Ibid. 91). And, crucially for my purposes, Heidegger finds that art is not other to this situation. He argues that, in

Nietzsche for example, art enters into a “value relation” with truth, and there “The one, ever in a fresh way, calls forth the other.” In this ceaseless back-and-forth, art and truth “determine in their value-relation the unitive essence of the intrinsically value-positing will to power. The will to power is the reality of the real or … the Being of that which is” (Ibid. 86).

Finally, it needs to be mentioned that this conception of language as power of subjectivity entails a concomitant concept of world. In laboring to posit itself, the subject posits the whole of the world and everything in it as belonging to that whole. This happens via the human being, and so implicates humanism at the very heart of metaphysical positing. Heidegger, in On the Way to

Language, singles out Wilhelm von Humboldt as one example of this thinking. Humboldt, says

Heidegger, “defines the nature of language as energeia … as the activity of the subject” (119), and this leads him to identify language with the self-expression of the subject that puts between itself and its objects an entire world. Let me also point out that, under this lens, the production of the world occurs in view of more production, where it is the whole of humanity’s historical unfolding that is aimed at, and, by implication, the unfolding of language as always more language. Heidegger here quotes Humboldt: “language is … a true world which the intellect must set between itself and objects by the inner labor of its power”; thus, “the soul is on the true way toward discovering constantly more in language, and putting constantly more into it.”

Heidegger comments: Humboldt’s “way to language is defined … in terms of an endeavor to offer a historical presentation of man’s whole historico-spiritual development in its totality.” Key

to this development is the “view of objects as a whole,” in which the subject-object relationship is characterized by “the synthesis between the subject and its objects” (118), that is, by the subject and the object’s mimetic reflection into one another. In this way, everything is at the service of the ultimate self-expression of a single, singular force. Everything, in other words, is from the start locatable within, indeed, rooted to, a single place – the milieu of reflection, the world as such – from which it must never stray. And everything is made to speak in a single language, an implicit medium that acts to become explicit, positing itself through the performative circulation of things across individuals, communities, cultures, languages, history.

It should be obvious by now that “language” here does not refer to a utilitarian vehicle for the description of empirical objects, or for the intentions of an individual, empirical agency.

Instead, “language” should be understood as medium. And as it is the synthetic whole of the world that is at issue, that is, language as a force of creation that, in its self-directed activity, produces, as it simultaneously is, the ground on which a multiplicity of actors may come to be,

“language” should also be understood as milieu. In short, language as force is a positional power assimilating all things into its representational medium and milieu. Needless to say, I do not believe that the difference literary language makes should be assimilated to this way of thinking.

I will not be exploring this difference in the present chapter; chapters two and three of this dissertation will be the places in which I will attempt think this difference, which I will do by way of the thought of Jacques Derrida. In this chapter I intend to develop a little more fully the implications of a presupposed privileging of language as medium and as milieu. But in anticipation of my investigations in the following chapters, I will pose some preliminary questions, ones that, I hope, will in turn help to illuminate the stakes of the present chapter. For example: how might it be possible for a thing to speak without having been first assimilated into the movement of a monolingual positing? Without being a priori locatable within the space of its

all-inclusive, interiorizing milieu? How to think a language that does not from the first belong to the circuit coursing between the subject and the world it works to produce and unveil? A language that does not get integrated into the process of giving and taking I described above, that does not obey an imperative to fold itself into the essentially productive activity of signification?

Assuming one were able to think a language that resisted this imperative, would it not be necessary to consider the possibility of an essentially idiomatic tongue, one utterly inassimilable to the law directing the monolingual unfolding of the medium and milieu of language as I have been describing it? How would its resistance take place? Would the idiom bar itself from all entry into the specular circuit of giving and taking? Or would it permit itself to be taken in by the monolingual force, but only to move through it, and in such a way as not to aid in, even, indeed, in such a way as to destroy, or to let be destroyed, its self-positing? In what way would these two modes of resistance – the idiom’s non-entry into, and its passive transpiercing of, the monolingual medium and milieu – be related? Would they be related at all? Who or what might be said to speak this idiom? Would the idiom still be involved in an elaboration of something like a world? Would it be necessary, rather, to consider the ways in which the idiom does not speak, or does not let itself be spoken? In which it does not lend itself to an elaborative activity?

Would such negativity, putting the idiom outside and/or beyond the specular medium and milieu, not require that we speak, instead of an idiom, of the ultra-idiomatic, an idiom without a world and without language?

For the moment, I will only say that these questions are both raised, and in a certain way answered, by an interrogation of metaphor and translation that does not simply capitulate to the metaphysical law of monolingual positing I have adumbrated. That is, metaphor and translation offer resources for another thought of language that is a thought of the idiom, even as they make themselves available to the specular activity that, in my view, predominates in literary studies. I

will now look to consider a bit more completely the functioning and consequences of that specular activity, doing so via reference to a handful of mostly twentieth- and twenty-first- century thinkers. This will give at least a hint of the genealogy out of which a thought of the specular activity of language emerges. For it is only after considering such a genealogy that one might be able to prepare the way toward another kind of questioning bearing on metaphor, translation, and the idiomatic, one that is not already programmed by the twin imperatives of monolingualism and the all-encompassing world it sets up.

I. Meaning as Medium, Through Metaphor

Conceived as medium, language makes knowledge possible via relation or articulation, and therefore affirms the necessity of a relationship with the whole of what is. As unconditioned ground of knowledge, it is not, or not simply, itself an object of knowledge. Instead, it gives rise to it, manifesting itself in knowledge, without for all that being reducible to it. This is as much to say that the whole of what is, is not simply something to be known, but makes knowledge possible to begin with, while at the same time actively expressing itself in human modes of knowing the world. Reality in its totality comes to actualize itself in human knowledge’s possibility. In other words, we are here speaking of language as logos, language itself, which is not to be confused with any so-called natural language, even though it of necessity appears in the ways in which natural languages function.

I have already indicated, in Husserl, one major forebear within the lineage of this thinking of language. Hermeneutic philosophy, as inheritor of the phenomenological tradition, is also an obvious touchstone; one thinks immediately of Gadamer’s comment that “in language the world itself presents itself” (Truth and Method 466). But one could go back further and also

single out Hegel, which is just what Jean Hyppolite did once upon a time. For Hyppolite, the specular self-reflection of the Absolute that plays itself out in the phenomenal world, appearing through experience (“transparaît déjà dans l’expérience”) even as it has already prepared the

“itinerary” of phenomenal consciousness (77), must be comprehended as taking place first and foremost in language.

L’objet propre de la philosophie, dit Hegel, c’est la réalité effective

(Wirklichkeit)…. Que cette réalité se comprenne elle-même et s’exprime comme

langage humain, c’est ce que Hegel nomme le concept ou le sens, déjà immanent

à l’être du savoir absolu, dont il dit qu’il « est la réflexion, qui, elle-même simple,

est pour soi l’immédiateté comme telle, l’être qui est la réflexion en soi-même ».

Le langage humain, le Logos, est cette réflexion de l’être en soi-même qui

reconduit toujours à l’être, qui se referme toujours sur soi indéfiniment. (4)

By way of the articulatory power that human language demonstrates, being joins itself to itself by reflecting itself into itself, thus speaking itself to itself. In the process, it folds the human capacity for thought into itself just as it appears through that same capacity: “L’Absolu ne se pense pas ailleurs que dans ce monde phénoménal, c’est dans notre pensée que la pensée absolue se pense, que l’être se manifeste comme pensée et comme sens” (71); “c’est l’être qui se connaît par l’homme, et non l’homme qui réfléchit sur l’être” (106); “ce discours que le philosophe fait sur l’être est aussi bien le discours même de l’être à travers le philosophe” (5). Let me also quickly add that the centrality of language to thought is not unique to the continental tradition.

The early Wittgenstein, for example, draws tight together language and “the truth itself in its entirety”: “all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfectly logical order. – That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety” (5.5563). This appears to imply that language is the

domain not just of human beings, but of an extra-human necessity: “some things are arbitrary in the symbols that we use and … some things are not. In logic it is only the latter that express: but that means that logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself” (6.124).

Language, then, as the totality of what is in its original unity, and as what in the final instance gives unity to the world by grounding it in itself, is what originally gives existence to the world. Language per se is at bottom – or as bottom, as fundament or ground – active and productive. Let me clarify the nature of this activity and this productivity. Language is not productive just of everything in the world. Its production is more general than that, is indeed of the most general kind. As the very condition of possibility of knowledge, language-as-logos’ production is itself unconditioned. This is as much to say, once again following Heidegger, that its production is a positing, one that is, because unconditioned, purely active. Before, in other words, any particular thing should be produced by language, there is production in language, which is to say, production in itself, in the most general sense. From the point of view of the subject, language does indeed, as I have noted, designate the possibility of our saying something about the world. But as that possibility’s very ground, it announces itself, as it were, before our own referring to the world, and before even our own decision to make a referral at all, should take place. Rather than being merely that through which information is relayed (or, before being that through which referral takes place), language more essentially just is the objective possibility of such relaying (or referral). It announces itself, not by our saying something, but in our saying something. I bring up this distinction in order to provide another genealogical reference point for my discussion. Though associated with the speech act theory of J.L. Austin, it is not, as Rodolphe Gasché shows, confinable to the limits of analytic philosophy, nor to the specific uses that literary studies has made of it over the decades. Its heritage extends at least as

far back as German Idealism, and so “is tributary to the metaphysics of subjectivity” (The Wild

Card of Reading 40). All of this is to say that lingual interiority, the “in” of “in saying something,” is therefore not fundamentally to do with human agency. A more original, purer event takes place from within language per se, prior to any worldly, human mode of referral.

Before it is the means of expression of an individual, empirical agency, language refers to its own activity, in other words, to itself.

This essential self-referentiality does not mean that language speaks of itself as something. Language refers to itself as the act of referring that it just is. We are speaking here of an act folded back on itself, and that in its very spontaneity constitutes itself at the same time that it refers to itself. The work of language is its own self-positing, and it is through such work or activity, and through such positing or production, that a ground for a knowable world may be laid. But this ground is not itself yet another place that would, in its distinction from the first, explain it. This is perhaps most forcefully expressed in Hegel. In the words of Hyppolite,

“l’essence n’est pas érigée en un second monde, expliquant et fondant le premier. C’est l’immédiat lui-même qui se réfléchit, et cette identité de la réflexion et de l’immédiat est la connaissance philosophique elle-même” (106). Knowledge here is not at all a question of explanation, if by that word we mean a relationship between an explanans and an explanandum.

Such an opposition is at bottom precisely what language, conceived as pure medium, refutes in its unifying power. As ground properly speaking, which in truth constitutes a third term between explanation and that which is to be explained, language is a pure force of mediation that acts to unite determinate categories. It is able to root them in itself because, first of all, it has set itself forth as ground, and as nothing but ground, purely and simply. This tripartite structure of mediation is, as in Hegel once again, the minimal structure of the positing I am discussing: “Le minimum rationale c’est la triade : thèse, antithèse, synthèse” (Ibid. 74). In the pure, minimal,

and prior act of mediation, language presents itself as a place that is unlike any other. It is characterized, as indicated by my description of language’s self-referential act of positing, by an absolute self-proximity. In its absolute nearness to itself, or just as this nearness, language provides in itself an original, common element in which the human subject may take root. It is therefore the very condition of possibility of the relationship between the human being who knows and the object of her knowing, as well as of the particular place in which that relationship may unfold. Logos’ mediation provides a third, which is in truth a first, place that is, it follows, without exteriority. Its specular unfolding, through the human being’s philosophical activity, is an interiorization, “réflexion interne et non plus externe, … médiation ou réflexion absolue”

(Ibid. 78). It is nothing less than the World as such, that which provides a place for so many worlds as it assures their identity.

Now I would like to note that the possibility of the existence of determinate oppositions such as those already mentioned is doubled by the pure doing synonymous with the condition or ground of said possibility. In other words, possibility figures as a secondary mode of a primary act, in such a way that the possible being of those oppositions overlaps with, or mirrors, their being-products of language. Their existence is possible insofar as they are products of a primary act. For this reason, the primary and creative activity of language bestows upon its possible creations something akin to its own positive being. Determinate particulars are able to appear because they are products of, and so reflect, a prior doing, are individual instantiations of a singular, self-constituting power. While these particulars are not of the order of unconditioned necessity, their possible existence nevertheless is imbued with something of the positive force of that which created them, what is akin to “the residue of the creative word of God” spoken of by

Walter Benjamin in “On Language as Such, and On the Language of Man.”8

8 I devote some comments to this essay in connection to “The Translator’s Task” below.

Now to raise the question of the relationship between the pure interiority of a self- mirroring and self-constituting logos, and the secondary determinations that reflect it, is to broach the problem of mimesis and, by extension, metaphor. In having taken a look at Derrida’s commentary on Husserl concerning poetic language, I have already gestured toward some of the ways in which metaphysics attempts to subsume metaphor’s operations and therefore render metaphor an imitation of itself. And I have also, to a lesser degree, alluded to the ways in which metaphor resists or does not make itself available to metaphysics’ positing activity. I will look, in the next two chapters, to expand on this resistance, but for now I want to underline that metaphor has, traditionally, not at all been foreign to the claims of speculative discourse. The word

“speculative” evokes first of all the so-called continental tradition, but, to repeat, this does not mean there are not notable threads in the analytic tradition for which metaphor is central to the claims of philosophy, and this according to the imperatives, explicitly formulated or not, of speculation.

One well-known recent example representing the importance of metaphor for the latter tradition is the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. For them, metaphor is the lingual reflection of the mind’s fundamental openness to its environment, but as mediated by the body.

As they say in their Philosophy in the Flesh, concepts are derived because “evolved from our sensorimotor systems” (43), and it is in this way that human beings are assured of their place in the world. The mind as the central hub for the power of thought is, they state, “inherently embodied” (3), and the organic connection between thought and body results in “a philosophy of embodied realism.” This realism appears to be centrally a question of articulation, where the human being, via the interface of embodiment, is essentially “in touch with” its world: “Our concepts cannot be a direct reflection of external, objective, mind-free reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the

involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world” (44). Metaphor would be the name for the ways in which the relation between human and world is maintained through the body, that is, through embodiment as metaphorical substitution for “external, objective, mind-free reality.” Appealing to advances in cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson speak for the activity of what they call

“primary metaphor” as “the activation of those neural connections [between “subjective experiences and judgments” and “sensorimotor experiences”], allowing sensorimotor inference to structure the conceptualization of subjective experience and judgments” (555). The consequences of primary metaphor’s activity are, according to them, indeed far-reaching:

“Conceptual metaphors permit the use of sensorimotor inference for abstract conceptualization and reason. This is the mechanism by which abstract reason is embodied”; “conceptual metaphor makes possible science, philosophy, and all other forms of abstract theoretical reasoning” (556).

But beyond abstract reasoning, and the aberrant mind-body dualism it can connote for

Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor’s articulatory power is decisive for understanding how the self and its others are together enmeshed in a single, natural, worldly whole. Near the end of

Philosophy in the Flesh, they write of “empathic projection,” a “bodily mechanism” through which we not only “come to know our environment,” but come to take active part in it: “This is the bodily mechanism by which we can participate in nature, not just as hikers or climbers or swimmers, but as part of nature itself, part of a larger, all-encompassing whole” (566). And underlying this mechanism is the deeper “mechanism” of metaphor, itself a function of the body, the true “locus” of all “spiritual” experience. It should be noted that “spiritual” seems in this context to come down to a “sense of being part of a larger all-encompassing whole” (565) that is not reducible to the limited point of view of human beings: “Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than

human” (566). I also point out that, for Lakoff and Johnson, our understanding of our active belonging to a supra-human whole goes hand in hand “with awe and respect,” as well as a

“moral engagement” (565). Far from being the province of sophists or mere rhetoricians, metaphor makes, in an essential way, a meaningful difference. Operating in the name of

“embodied realism,” it allows the human being to step back from the pure relativity of immediate experience in order to gain an “account of how real, stable knowledge, both in science and the everyday world, is possible.” Metaphor installs a different kind of relativity: while it does not guarantee absolute knowledge (it “denies … that there exists one and only one correct description of the world” and so “does treat knowledge as relative”) (96), it still conditions the possibility of a “mediated” knowledge: “truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination…. [O]ur common embodiment allows for common, stable truths,” and this “creates a largely centered self” (6). Metaphor creates a break between the human and the world, but precisely in order to let everything in the world, including the human, be seen as inherently meaningful, based in “the meaningfulness of ordinary experience” (568).

Needless to say, all these values – of cognition and its rootedness in an articulatory and meaningful difference made by mimetic language, of the moral engagement with the whole of the world which reveals itself to be larger than the immediacy of anthropocentric experience, of the place of “awe” and “respect” in cognition, of appeals to the real – are thoroughly traditional, and should make any reader extremely wary of claims of challenging the Western philosophical tradition. This is, ironically enough, exactly what Lakoff and Johnson do. I note that part one of

Philosophy in the Flesh is in fact titled “How the Embodied Mind Challenges the Western

Philosophical Tradition,” and that this same pretention animates their first book on metaphor,

Metaphors We Live By. In the preface to the original edition of that book, they say that “Within a week” (!) of the start of their collaboration, they had “discovered that certain assumptions of

contemporary philosophy and linguistics … taken for granted within the Western tradition since the Greeks” needed to be overhauled to make way for their own account of metaphor (ix).

There is also, within Lakoff and Johnson’s theoretical elaborations, a certain equivocalness of metaphor that does not receive explicit comment from the authors, and that could be seen, precisely because going unreflected upon, as in line with certain classical gestures of philosophical thinking. Derrida, in La dissémination, and following Freud, describes such gestures as “le raisonnement du chaudron,” and sums them up thus: “Voulant mettre toutes les chances de son côté, le plaideur accumule les arguments contradictoires” (D 137). While

(almost) everything can be explained for Lakoff and Johnson in terms of metaphor, this does not mean that all metaphors are equal, or equally good. For example, a version of the mind-body dualism they seek to challenge with their work is termed “the Subject-Self split,”9 and, according to them, it privileges the subject “as an independent entity in no way dependent for its existence on the body.” Interestingly, this understanding of the mind’s and body’s respective relationships to the world, though aberrant, is still metaphorical: both Subject and Self, as well as the split between them, are considered metaphors (Philosophy in the Flesh 563-4). It would go without saying that such metaphors are evidently bad ones, especially when compared to metaphors closely connected to what they call “embodied spirituality.” And then there are the non- metaphorical grounds of human cognition’s metaphorical “mechanism.” Unlike, e.g., the

“poststructuralist person … for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent” (Ibid. 5), Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied person’s “conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages [one wonders what logical and/or rhetorical work is being done by “either … or” here]. Our conceptual systems are not totally relative and not merely a matter of historical contingency, even though a degree of conceptual relativity does

exist and even though historical contingency does matter a great deal” (Ibid. 6).

I raise these points not necessarily in order to criticize Lakoff and Johnson (though certainly a robust critique is needed; why, for example, is it possible for some metaphors to be bad and others good? If metaphor is inherent and natural to cognition, what explains the possibility of an aberrant metaphor to begin with? If the “locus of our existence and our identity” is the “environment” that is part and parcel of our embodiment (Ibid. 567), how to distinguish the bodily “mechanism,” also called the “neural mechanism,” that puts us into primary relation with the world (as what “recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision”(Ibid.

568)), from the mechanism of metaphor? When and where does one start and stop in relation to the other?), but to situate them within a larger intellectual context that, though it may not have, until relatively recently, thought much of metaphor, is nonetheless able to accommodate more or less easily interventions that would stake a claim for metaphor’s supposedly heretofore unheralded primacy. Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy offers another case in point. Though

Ricœur ostensibly affords metaphor a privilege that a thinker like, say, Husserl evidently does not, this does not guarantee that what he does with metaphor, as a theoretical object, is fundamentally different from the speculative positing of language that I have been outlining. If there are indeed important differences to be drawn out between, say, Ricœur, Lakoff and

Johnson, and other thinkers or currents I cite or allude to here, they cannot be sought in the age- old moves of dialectical mediation and its totalizing imperative, even, or especially, if it is the thinker himself who, in his own name, wants to sanction those moves.

According to La Métaphore vive, poetic discourse has “une explicitation ontologique”

(384), and this it is given by the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality. In this way, poetry is equivalent to “signifier les choses en acte” (the quotation is from Aristotle’s

9 “The Subject is that aspect of a person that is the experiencing consciousness and the locus of reason, will, and

Rhetoric), or seeing things insofar as they are “non empêchées d’advenir” (391) because charged with a certain power. Ricœur suggests that the poet would be “celui qui aperçoit la puissance comme acte et l’acte comme puissance…. Celui qui voit comme achevé et complet ce qui s’ébauche et se fait” (392). More precisely, the charge of power that metaphor bears, Ricœur names “l’effet gravitationnel”: a metaphorical utterance exerts force on a given “champ de référence” by virtue of the “signification dédoublée” of the utterance’s copula. This signification makes of metaphor an expressly specular statement: in its copula is produced a dialectical play thanks to which metaphor “préserve le ‘n’est pas’ dans le ‘est’” (313). And this inaugurates a process by which meaning metaphorically departs from its particular field of reference. At the origin of this process is, says Ricœur, “la véhémence ontologique” (379). Metaphor, in other words, carries in itself or is a vehicle for, albeit implicitly, a trace of the whole of what is (the etymology of “véhémence” confirms this). This is undoubtedly why Ricœur states at the outset of his study that “le ‘lieu’ de la métaphore, son lieu le plus intime et le plus ultime, n’est ni le nom, ni la phrase, ni même le discours, mais la copule du verbe être” (11). Philosophy, or speculative discourse, must consequently be called upon in order to elucidate poetry’s

“ontological vehemence.” In bringing philosophy and poetry together, Ricœur hopes to spur speculative discourse to search for their mutual place of origin. In his words, “C’est alors la tâche du discours spéculatif de se mettre en quête du lieu où apparaître signifie ‘génération de ce qui croît’” i.e., the place of the ultimate metaphor, the metaphor of metaphor: there where “les

‘fleurs’ de nos mots … disent l’existence dans son éclosion” (392).

The point to take away from all this is that metaphor for Ricœur is “living language,” a force acting, through the human intermediary, on behalf of a central, unified power, creating new meaning without limit:

judgment, which, by its nature, exists only in the present…. The Self is that part of a person that is not picked out by the Subject. This includes the body, social roles, past states, and actions in the world” (Philosophy in the Flesh 269).

c’est un trait significatif du langage vivant de pouvoir reporter toujours plus loin

la frontière du non-sens ; il n’est peut-être pas de mots si incompatibles que

quelque poète ne puisse jeter un pont entre eux ; le pouvoir de créer des

significations contextuelles nouvelles paraît bien être illimité ; telles attributions

apparemment « insensées » (non-sensical) peuvent faire sens dans quelque

contexte inattendu ; l’homme qui parle n’a jamais fini d’épuiser la ressource

connotative de ses mots. (123)

The human being, as intermediary, both experiences passively, and actively participates in, this creative power. Appealing to Kant’s third Critique, Ricœur speaks of the “task” given to the imagination by the Idea, which task is nothing other than to present the Idea, and in the process produce an additional quantum of conceptual thought. Here, the axiomatic loop formed between giving and taking I briefly described above is at issue: the Idea gives itself to the human being, so that the human being can give the Idea back to itself, and in the process produce more life:

“l’imagination a encore le pouvoir de « présenter » (Darstellung) l’Idée. C’est cette

« présentation » de l’Idée par l’imagination qui contraint la pensée conceptuelle à penser plus.

L’imagination créatrice n’est pas autre chose que cette demande adressée à la pensée conceptuelle” (383-4); “La métaphore est vive en ce qu’elle inscrit l’élan de l’imagination dans un « penser plus » au niveau du concept. C’est cette lutte pour le « penser plus », sous la conduite du « principe vivifiant » qui est l’ « âme » de l’interprétation” (384).

As for the surplus of meaning that the human being creates in giving back what it is given, its reference is dédoublée: split between “la référence ordinaire” (301) and “un mode plus fondamental de référence,” “la référence sur le mode virtuel” that, in poetry, functions to

“susciter un autre monde – un monde autre qui corresponde à des possibilités autres d’exister, à des possibilités qui soient nos possibilités les plus propres” (288). Reference is, in other words,

basically a species of power, “la puissance référentielle” (301), whose gravity is borne by an utterance, and that therefore endows that utterance with the ability to enter into and reproduce a general dynamism of signification. Such a dynamism corresponds directly to metaphor’s ontology: “le dynamisme de la signification donn[e] accès à la vision dynamique de la réalité qui est l’ontologie implicite de l’énonciation métaphorique” (376); “l’énonciation métaphorique ne fait que porter à son comble ce dynamisme sémantique” (378). Here again the values of interactivity, intersection, and position come essentially into play: “Pour ma part, j’incline à voir l’univers du discours comme un univers dynamisé par un jeu d’attractions et de répulsions qui ne cessent de mettre en position d’interaction et d’intersection des mouvances dont les foyers organisateurs sont décentrés les uns par rapport aux autres” (382).

Decentering taking place in a single universe, it would seem that, for Ricœur, the life of language is a monolingual life, one perfectly capable of holding in itself a plurality of languages whose interrelations would repeat the one language’s relation to itself. Now if, following Ricœur, the dynamic interactivity of metaphor is fundamentally creative, essentially able to open new contexts of meaning in an unlimited fashion, then it would seem to follow that the power exercised by metaphor in a given language could not, in principle, be confined by the limits of that language. If there is indeed no distance between words that cannot be bridged (“il n’est peut-

être pas de mots si incompatibles que quelque poète ne puisse jeter un pont entre eux”), then the metaphorical power to create new contexts of meaning should not be a priori hemmed in by the context of some natural language. Let me note in passing that, though Ricœur devotes hardly any space to the question of translation in La Métaphore vive, the little writing he would do on translation late in his career at least suggests the germ of a thematization of a relationship between metaphor and translation. This germ would be reflective. In Sur la traduction, he writes, for example, of “la capacité réflexive du langage, cette possibilité toujours disponible de parler

sur le langage, de le mettre à distance, et ainsi de traiter notre propre langue comme une langue parmi les autres” (25). He goes on to say that well-known theoretical problems to do with translation “trouvent leur origine dans la réflexion de la langue sur elle-même” (49-50). It is this capacity for self-reflection, shared among all languages, that opens the possibility of translation, both intra- and inter-lingual (cf. 43-52), and that constitutes what is referred to as a “dialectique pratique” of translation (27). In a very similar, and very traditional, way, he states in La

Métaphore vive that “le discours spéculatif est possible, parce que le langage a la capacité réflexive de se mettre à distance et de se considérer, en tant que tel et dans son ensemble, comme rapport à l’ensemble de ce qui est. Le langage se désigne lui-même et son autre.” Reflexivity, as a lingual “function,” cannot be opposed to any other, e.g., that of reference, “puisqu’elle est le savoir qui accompagne la fonction référentielle elle-même, le savoir de son être-rapporté à l’être” (385). It is against this background of language’s self-mirroring power that Ricœur wants to “tenter une explicitation ontologique des postulats … de la référence dédoublée, selon la visée sémantique du discours poétique” (386).

In any case, since language for Ricœur is totalized, living, and active, it stands to reason that no single natural language could be said to give sufficient expression to the dynamic movements of discourse as playing out through metaphor’s operations. Natural languages would have to be implicated in the opening and constitution of signifying contexts. In other words, the metaphorical power of meaning creation should also be considered a translational power.

II. From Metaphor to Translation to the Endless Revival of Languages

One obvious point of reference for a theoretical development of a dynamism that would be common to both metaphor and translation is the early work of Walter Benjamin. For one, he

too makes much of language’s self-reflexivity, as Rodolphe Gasché expertly shows in his

“Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference,” which I draw on here. Gasché recalls that, for the Benjamin of “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” “all language communicates itself” (64), and that language, “as communication … communicates a mental entity – something communicable per se” (66). In the same essay, Benjamin will link “mental being” to “linguistic being” – indeed, he will say that they are “identical,” but “only insofar as it

[mental being] is capable of communication. What is communicable in a mental entity is its linguistic entity.” Put otherwise, what a thing communicates is not itself as thing, but the thing

“in communication, … in expression,” or the immediate possibility of its communication of itself

(63). This direct possibility of lingual communication is doubled in the human being, specifically in the power of naming. As with communicability, it is the pure possibility of naming that is

Benjamin’s focus, not “the words by which he [man] denotes a thing.” Whereas “the means of communication is the word, its object factual, and its addressee a human being” (this comprises

“the bourgeois conception of language”), naming as possibility of naming “knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in the name, the mental being of man communicates itself to God.” In the name, language communicates itself “in its absolute wholeness,” which is also to say, through man as namer: “Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks” (64). We can see here that between the human who names and the things that give themselves to be named, a reflective circuit is established and maintained, through which is expressed “the identity of the creative word and the cognizing name in God.” This amounts to an additive process of perfection: the “nameless language of things” is converted into the human being’s “name-language,” and this process Benjamin describes as “the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one” which “cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge.” Naming thus becomes a “task” for the human being,

and by wielding the power to name, he “performs” it (70). The reflective circuit between nature and the human can thus gradually, or in an “uninterrupted flow,” come to totalization:

The language of an entity is the medium in which its mental being is

communicated. The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs through the

whole of nature, from the lowest forms of existence to man and from man to God.

Man communicates himself to God through name, which he gives to nature and

(in proper names) to his own kind; and to nature he gives names according to the

communication that he receives from her, for the whole of nature, too, is imbued

with a nameless, unspoken language, the residue of the creative word of God,

which is preserved in man as the cognizing name and above man as the judgment

suspended over him…. All higher language is a translation of lower ones, until in

ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement

made up of language. (74)

The reference, in that last sentence, to translation is not accidental. The “uninterrupted flow” of language’s perfection does indeed include in itself translation between natural languages. Benjamin asserts, “Since the unspoken word in the existence of things falls infinitely short of the naming word in the knowledge of man, and since the latter in turn must fall short of the creative word of God, there is a reason for the multiplicity of human languages. The language of things can pass into the language of knowledge and name only through translation” (70-1). It would seem that the multiplicity of languages, and the necessity of translation, would signify that no one language in itself could be adequate in seeking to communicate language itself in its absolute wholeness. And, indeed, this is confirmed in “The Translator’s Task,” which harbors a number of resonances with “On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man.” In the former essay, “translation” has as its “purpose … the expression of the most intimate relationships

among languages” (154), what Benjamin calls a bit further on a certain “kinship” that is their shared object of intention. Translation’s intended object is only properly “attained” through “the totality” of the “mutually complementary intentions” of all languages: “In the individual, uncomplemented languages, the intended object is never encountered in relative independence”

(157); “All suprahistorical kinship of languages consists rather in the fact that in each of them as a whole, one and the same thing is intended; this cannot be attained by any one of them alone, however, but only by the totality of their mutually complementary intentions: pure language.”

“Pure language,” as what all particular, natural languages intend because it is that which binds them together in a “kinship,” is intended, or referred to, primarily and necessarily. This is why

Benjamin writes that it is a “law,” “one of the most fundamental laws of the philosophy of language,” necessitating that “languages complement each other in their intentions,” in “the totality of their mutually complementary intentions” (156).

Throughout the essay, Benjamin repeatedly distinguishes between the intended object of translation and what he calls simply “meaning,” which is most likely what we saw above to be

“the bourgeois conception of language.” It is not the translator’s task to translate meaning understood thus (to transmit a “message” is “the hallmark of bad translations” (“Translator’s

Task” 152)), but to give a window onto what underlies all individual languages, and therefore to obey the law that issues from pure language. This is why Benjamin begins the essay by affirming that “knowledge of a work of art or an art form” – and it is indeed a matter of art here, and more precisely of poetry – is not to do with human modes of knowing: “When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account…. [T]he very concept of an ‘ideal’ receiver is spurious in any discussion concerning the theory of art, since such discussions are required to presuppose only the existence and essence of human beings”

(151). The work does not primarily make itself known to human beings, and does not, for that

reason, make itself known in the first instance in a human mode of communication. The law determining its understanding stems instead from its “translatability,” which Benjamin conceives as a “relational concept”: “certain relational concepts gain their proper, indeed their best sense, when they are not from the outset connected exclusively with human beings” (152). What pure language communicates, via the translatability of certain artworks, is the original confluence of human languages: what makes them possible, and what they must in the first instance intend because making itself known in them.

Benjamin makes particularly clear that pure language is an original and creative power when he says that it “no longer signifies or expresses anything,” which is to say, anything human, and is to be understood “as the expressionless and creative word that is the intended object of every language” (163). In giving voice to pure language, which is “the ultimate being”

(162), translation turns away from human communication, and renders instead a power analogous to the Word of God. Speaking of the work of art, or “the original,” as that through which the “demand” for translation makes itself known, and which therefore inaugurates translation’s turn away from human modes of speaking and toward a more fundamental and original Word, he writes: “translation must in large measure turn its attention away from trying to communicate something, away from meaning; the original is essential to translation only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his work of the burden and organization of what is communicated. En arche hen ho logos, in the beginning was the word: this is also valid in the realm of translation” (161).

However, according to Benjamin, the translational act of pure language can only be represented at a distance, so to speak. The “great motive of integrating the plurality of languages into a single true language,” this latter being also called “a language of truth, in which the ultimate secrets toward which all thinking strives are stored up” (159), can only be reflected on

within “intrinsic limits,” in Gasché’s words (“Saturnine Vision” 81). Translation, in “The

Translator’s Task,” is in the end not an act of speculative mediation. It is instead “merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other,” which is also to say, of coming to terms with the singular force of unity that, were it truly translatable, would transcend all positional, finite signification by making fully present the underlying kinship of human modes of communication. Benjamin will say that translation, as a “dissolution of [the] foreignness [of languages] … remains out of human reach” (157). The dissolution of the difference between languages, being figured as a certain beyond of human speech and thought, is precisely not a mediation, because a beyond. Though pure language may in effect call for translation, and establishes the very translatability of works of art just as that call,10 a translation is unable to surmount the differences among languages and actualize the original unity that binds them. Translation remains limited to the merely possible, to translat-ability. It can only announce itself within a work because it remains non-posited. And as what is non-posited and therefore unthought by the human translator, animated as the latter might be by the spirit of “philosophical genius” (160), pure language is unable to bridge the gap between languages.

That said, the precise nature of this gap, as well as that of the beyond of pure language, are enigmatic to say the least. This is evidenced by Benjamin’s comments on the “fracture” separating both the original’s language from pure language, as well as translation from its full actualization (158); and also by his comparison of translation’s relation to the original with the singular touching of a circle by a tangent, which occurs “at only a single point … only at the

10 Benjamin distinguishes translation’s intention from the poetic work’s in that “the latter’s intention never is directed toward language as such, in its totality.” Because a translation wants only to refer to pure language, Benjamin says that it “calls to the original within, at that one point where the echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the foreign language’s work” (159). Benjamin also speaks of the call of translation at the essay’s beginning; there, the call for translation is located in the original’s “translatability,” this latter coinciding with “translation’s law.” More precisely, Benjamin writes that “translation’s law [is] decreed as the original’s translatability” (152). Let me recall that this law is the same as that which necessitates that all languages mutually complement each other in together intending their object, i.e., pure language.

infinitely small point of meaning” (163). One should not be quick to explain away these elliptical remarks.11 Certainly it would be tempting to see Benjamin here as an inheritor of a certain

Romanticism notable for associating the work of art with a restless striving toward a beyond that, while it may be approximated, nevertheless lies forever out of reach.12 Benjamin’s own comparison of his thinking of translation, as tied specifically to what he calls the “afterlife” of the work, to Romantic criticism could be cited as proof of such an inheritance (158).13 But despite his complicated relationship with Romanticism,14 let me nonetheless draw out some of the implications of a Romanticized (which would also be, given the essays I am drawing on, the early) Benjamin as concerns the problems of translation and of the “out of reach” beyond that is translation’s ultimate destination; they will have some heuristic value going forward.

For one, it would appear that, because pure language’s call for unity through translation goes unrealized, it itself remains theorizable only as an opposition vis-à-vis natural languages.

On this interpretation of Benjamin’s text, pure language, as a force of unity that pretends to

11 For a subtle interpretation of these and other remarks in “The Translator’s Task,” see Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel” in Psyché : Inventions de l’autre. I will devote some comments to this essay in chapter two of this dissertation. 12 I have already gestured toward Emily Apter’s use of Benjamin in her framing of metaphor and translation as “referential infinitude” and “homelessness.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri give another example of a pseudo- Romantic wandering without borders. Benjamin is for them one more exemplary figure of a self-producing, multiple “humanity squared” (72). Such a humanity is in principle nomadic, and, in essence a multiplicity of “new barbarians” (214-18). Hardt and Negri cite Benjamin in celebrating the work of the “new barbarian” who “sees nothing permanent” and for that reason “sees ways everywhere” (215). That is, the border separating the native from the barbarian invader is in principle traversable. And the traversal of borders is implicated in the production of a new world, “a new global vision” (214) bringing with it “a new task: constructing … a new place” (217). This traversal is linked, briefly though emphatically, to figuration: that is, it is linked to the power of “the poor,” which is “the figure of a transversal, omnipresent, different, mobile subject” (156) and “the very possibility of the world,” to give “a creative meaning to language.” The poor’s power to imbue language with creativity is the legacy, according to Hardt and Negri, of Rabelais’s “poetics” (157). See also Ning, for whom Benjamin’s notion of translation “embodies the process through which a literary work becomes international or cosmopolitan” (6). The context of his comments on Benjamin is an essay on world literature that gives considerable weight to the concept of circulation, which I discuss below. 13 One might also cite the relationship between the incomplete intention of the translator and the totality of pure language that is translation’s intended object, which is compared to the relationship between the fragments of a broken vessel, and the vessel as a whole (161). An affinity might be possible here with certain of Schlegel’s fragments in which it is the relationship between the fragment and the whole that is at stake. Cf. fragment 48 in Ideas: “Every thinking part of an organization should not feel its limits without at the same time feeling its unity in relation to the whole” (98). 14 For generally interesting treatments of this problem, see the essays collected in Hanssen and Benjamin.

surmount the differences between languages, as well as the difference between languages and itself, finds itself cut off from what it should be the unity of. Both pure language and its translational act would, for this reason, be all too passive. Further, it cannot be said that pure language is characterized by the kind of nearness-to-self that is central to language as medium.

Its location is one of relative positionality, determined in its relation to human languages.

Whence the aforementioned gap distancing natural languages from pure language, which gap results in an insuperable limitation of the latter’s power to ground the former in itself. One could interpret Benjamin’s remarks on the “fracture” separating the original’s language from “a higher language,” and that also separates translation from its full actualization, as a reference to such a gap. And just because of this gap, one cannot speak here of the kind of ground I have called milieu or the World as such. Nor can one speak of an essential monolingualism.

But the metaphor of distance, that pure language is “out of reach,” nonetheless indicates

Benjamin’s presupposition of a monolingual World, the “domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled” (158), and which is “predetermined” (157). And as so predetermined, it forms translation’s horizon: “translation … does not renounce its striving toward a final, ultimate and decisive stage of all linguistic development. In translation the original … at least points … toward the predetermined, inaccessible domain where languages are reconciled and fulfilled”

(157-58). It seems that, in translation, there is a bare and fundamental index (this is why

Benjamin states that “In translation the original … at least points”), and for this reason a basic orientation, that localizes translation, imperfect though it might be. But what is the nature of this pointing? Let me note that the original poetic work’s “intention never is directed toward language as such, in its totality…. [T]he poet’s intention is spontaneous, primary, concrete.” That is, the original is powerless by itself to carve a path out of “the high forest of the language itself,” i.e., the natural language in which it was written. It requires the target language as a counterpart,

which, says Benjamin, “from outside it [the original’s language], facing it, and without entering it, … calls to the original within, at that one point where the echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the foreign language’s work” (159). In this the translation does not

“resemble the meaning of the original” as a mere copy of it. It “must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original’s mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language” (161).

The translation, in other words, aids the original in its intention, but does not for all that bring that intention to its perfection. Even in complementing the original, the translation, like its other, remains a fragment. It has failed in its aim to make pure language emerge, and yet a change has come about: in translation pure language is nevertheless “announced” (160). This is essentially to do, I recall, with the fact that a translation, for Benjamin, does not simply reproduce the original, and that what the original communicates is nothing human. “What,” Benjamin asks at the essay’s outset, “does a poem ‘say,’ then? What does it communicate? Very little, to a person who understands it. Neither message nor statement is essential to it” (151).

In complementary fashion, both original and translation establish an irreducible difference vis-à-vis the “bourgeois conception of language.” More precisely, each turns the other’s language away from meaning or message or statement, so as to point toward an unreachable realm. The failure that results from this yields a translation and a transformation. On the side of the translation, Benjamin says (approvingly quoting the German philosopher and poet

Rudolf Pannwitz), “[T]he fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the state in which his own language happens to be rather than allowing it to be put powerfully into movement by the foreign language … he must broaden and deepen his own language through the foreign one” (163-4). A translation imports something of the original’s language into its own, producing “a reverberation of the foreign language’s work.” And on the side of the original, the

translation is instrumental in the original’s “continuing life,” taking part in its “renewal” or

“transformation.” By dint of this transformation, the original’s language is changed as well:

“Established words also have their after-ripening.” The translation’s language, having taken on an alien character through contact with the original, revisits the altering power on the original’s language, which brings out of the original “immanent tendencies”: “What might have been the tendency of an author’s poetic language in his own time may later be exhausted, and immanent tendencies can arise anew out of the formed work” (155). Benjamin then refers to this mutual alteration as

one of the most powerful and fruitful historical processes…. For just as the tone

and significance of great literary works are completely transformed over the

centuries, the translator’s native tongue is also transformed…. Far from being a

sterile similarity between two languages that have died out, translation is, of all

modes, precisely the one called upon to mark the after-ripening of the alien word,

and the birth pangs of its own. (156)

Between two failures – the original’s powerlessness to tear itself away from its own language, the translation’s inability to “reveal or produce this hidden relationship [“the most intimate relationships among languages”]” (154) – translation remains essentially possible for

Benjamin, as the “the endless revival of languages” (157). In this revival, the original attains its

“‘afterlife’” (153) through the “after-ripening” of its language. But what is seminal in the original does not belong to it; it is also found in the translation. In addition to the already mentioned “birth pangs” that mark the “growth” and “renewal” of the translation’s language

(156), we should consider that “translation, with its seeds of such a language [i.e., pure language], stands half-way between poetry and doctrine” (160). The translation completes the original, lets it be itself in renewal, but by carrying in its stead what is seminal in it. It substitutes

for it, acts on its behalf to extend its life and, indeed, “bears the highest witness” to its life (158), but by seemingly standing between that life, the original as a “living being,” and the life it expresses (153), as though the translation were in truth closer to the original’s vital condition of possibility – the “doctrine” that appears to be a synonym for pure language’s “creative word”

(163) – than the original itself. This is not to say that the translation brings to fruition what the original cannot. Translation is impotent too: it “cannot possibly reveal or produce” the convergence of all languages in language as such. But it can “represent” it “insofar as it realizes it seminally or intensively,” or “by means of an incomplete form or seed of its production” (154).

Seed does not beget life itself; seed begets more seed in the “endless revival of languages,” also termed “the sacred growth of languages” (156). Translation does not render language as language; translation, in its failure to translate, yields language irreducible to human constraints of meaning, and so yields the possibility of a poem that would itself be in need of translation.

Translation yields the germ of more translation by way of a poetic deforming of natural language

– by way of metaphor – that will itself inevitably require a translational complement. Though

Benjamin states that “The notion of the life and continuing life of works of art should be considered with complete unmetaphorical objectivity,” this should not be of any concern in my privileging of metaphor here, especially given the importance he grants to poetic form and its relationship to translation. For form in Benjamin interacts with translation in such a way that their mutual impotence is demonstrated, but also reflects a sustaining desire, “the great longing for the completion of language” (161-2). This desire is not, once again, anything human; translation of poetry does not “serve the reader” (152). If I authorize myself to use “metaphor” in place of “form” or “literalness,” it is to bring out a little more concretely this non-human desire that is negated but preserved in the interactive weaving of languages, where trans-latio and

meta-phora implicate each other from within a wider movement of lingual growth.15

For a Romanticized Benjamin, this lingual growth bears in itself – while being governed, as though from outside, by – a theological limit, “the messianic end of their [languages’] history.” And in this way, in the continuous regeneration of translation’s and metaphor’s possibility, the “distance” from “revelation,” that of language as logos, can be assessed.

Translation is thus “ignited … in order to constantly test this sacred growth of languages, to determine how distant what is hidden within them is from revelation, how close it might become with knowledge of this distance” (157). And here is implicated a further crossing movement, yet another translation or metaphor, one that is spatial, the “distance” between languages’ growth and their ground of possibility. Let me recall that in “On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin makes translation integral to the task by which knowledge is cumulatively developed in the perfecting of language whose end is the moment when “the word of God unfolds.” In the same essay, it should not be surprising to find that the entirety of the world itself is also at stake. In this world is found a “community,” one constituted in the reflective circuit that holds the human being in communication with the world of things, and that is subtended by

God’s creative word. Commenting on the poet Friedrich Müller’s “Adam’s First Awakening and

First Blissful Nights,” Benjamin says that “God gives each beast in turn a sign, whereupon they step before man to be named. In an almost sublime way, the linguistic community of mute creation with God is thus conveyed in the image of the sign” (70). The communal nature of the circuit of communicability therefore portends the world: “the communication of things is certainly communal in a way that grasps the world as such as an undivided whole” (73). Though there is no mention of such a world in “The Translator’s Task,” the overlapping concerns of

15 Benjamin also superficially associates metaphor with the anthropocentric or bourgeois use of language in “On Language as Such,” where he declares that when he speaks of “language,” his “use of the word … is in no way metaphorical” (62). A statement like this should obviously be weighed against, for example, his conception of

these two essays would suggest that the aforementioned “distance” between natural languages and language itself is determinable on condition that there be a totalizing milieu on the basis of which a relative distance, between two determinate things, can stand out.

But on this same basis would also be possible distance’s being a priori pulled into the warp and weft of metaphor and translation’s reciprocal crossings. Distance, because essentially lingual like anything else, is drawn into the metaphorico-translational weave, and therefore signifies, in a fundamental manner, both something immediate that is carried on the inside of, and thus very close to, languages and their growth; and the infinite remove of an unreachable beyond. Benjamin thus speaks of “something ultimate and decisive [that] remain[s] beyond any message, very near it and yet infinitely distant” (162). These comments echo those on the translation that touches the original like a tangent touches a circle, at an “infinitely small,” and so infinitely intimate, “point of meaning,” from which it “pursues its path into the infinite” of an unreflected distance (163).

III. Literature In the World, Literature As the World

The metaphorico-translational couple of distance and proximity is arguably at the heart of the early Benjamin’s theorizations of language, since all the key values I have touched on appear to be held together by their belonging to the same “undivided whole” that, in principle, would have no outside. This essential interiority is glimpsed when, in “On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin insists that it is in language, and not through it, that a mental entity is able to communicate itself: “It is fundamental that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language” (63).

artworks’ language in their connection to language conceived as medium, as in the following: “the language of poetry is partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man” (73).

[A]ll language communicates itself in itself; it is in the purest sense the ‘medium’

of the communication…. For precisely because nothing is communicated through

language, what is communicated in language cannot be externally limited or

measured, and therefore all language contains its own incommensurable, uniquely

constituted infinity. Its linguistic being, not its verbal contents, defines its frontier.

(64)

It could be posed that the distinction between the “in” and the “through” of language’s activity is not unique to Benjamin. It evokes, for example, that proposed by J.L. Austin, in How to do Things With Words, between “in saying” and “by saying.” Since Austin’s speech act theory has had an undeniable influence on literary studies, I would like to devote a couple pages to examining in what ways its theorization of the illocutionary act, which Austin associates with “in saying,” gestures as well toward a self-interiorizing subjectivity. Though speech act theory’s influence was ostensibly more present in literary studies throughout the ‘80s and into the early

‘00s,16 I believe its legacy for more recent theoretical developments can at least begin to be located by singling out the asymmetrical character of the total speech act, and the interiorizing movement it implies. I draw on Rodolphe Gasché’s analysis of Austin in “‘Setzung’ and

‘Übersetzung’” from his The Wild Card of Reading, where he points up the essentially active character of the performative. Among the three acts that are recognized in How to do Things with

Words (the locutionary, the illocutionary, the perlocutionary), it is the illocutionary that is most closely associated with the speech act as total speech act. This is due to the fact that it is characterized by its force (as opposed to the meaning of the locutionary, and the perlocutionary’s

“producing of effects” (117)) and its primacy, which together indicate the presence, “implicit” within the “speech-situation” (61), i.e., within “the total situation in which the utterance is issued

– the total speech-act” (52), of a subject (the “I”) who is active and whose activity is primary. It is primary because it is distinguished from, and privileged in relation to, the utterance of which it is the “utterance-origin” (60). Contrasting his so-called explicit performatives with the “‘first person,’ who must come in,” that is, that must be implicitly included in every speech act, Austin writes that “The ‘I’ who is doing the action thus does come essentially into the picture. An advantage of the original first person singular present indicative active form [of Austin’s explicit performatives] … is that this implicit feature of the speech-situation is made explicit” (61).

Austin will shortly remark that this implicit utterance-origin is, in its “asymmetry” (in the privileged status accorded to the first person singular present indicative active, in contrast to other grammatical persons, tenses, modes and voices), “precisely the mark of the performative verb” (63).

In lectures eight through twelve, Austin shifts his attention to the illocutionary act and aligns it with the implicit utterance-origin described in prior lectures. And here an essential inside of the total speech act can start to be seen. For one, and as I have already pointed out, the act one performs happens “in saying something” (99), and so is distinct from both locutionary meaning and the production of perlocutionary “consequences.” This privilege of the illocutionary is further consolidated by what Austin calls the “natural break” between illocutions and perlocutions (112), these terms being expressly chosen to reflect the difference between “in saying” and “by saying”: “it was because of the availability of these formulas [in and by saying]

… that we chose in fact the names illocutionary and perlocutionary” (121). There is therefore “a break at a certain regular point between the act (our saying something) and its consequences

(which are usually not the saying of anything)” (111). And then there is, to repeat, the “I” that proves to be the im-plicit origin of the total speech situation and that, in its becoming ex-plicit,

16 For an overview of the relationship between Austin and literary studies up through the early twenty-first century,

still maintains its privilege of asymmetry. This is to say that the force of the speaking subject is not to be located among the discrete and relative, thus symmetrical, terms of discourse. The place of said terms’ taking place has to lie beyond them, while nonetheless enveloping them as their prior condition.

Now it should be remembered that, as Austin famously avers more than once in How to do Things with Words, the sheer doing and the singular interiority of the total speech act exclude in principle all so-called “parasitic” uses of “normal” language, among which are literary uses

(22, 104). In other words, the performative is to be understood as existing prior to the conveyance of meaning and the consequent effects it may entail through or around itself, in a per-locutionary manner. Normativity, as Gasché recalls, is evidently crucial for speech act theory

(The Wild Card of Reading 11-3), insofar as it seeks to account for the total speech act, for the act as the systematization of its various secondary instantiations. But in spite of the claim to normativity, and Austin’s concomitant rejection of the applicability of his theory to weakened or etiolated uses of language (to recall his famous description of speech used “in acting, fiction and poetry, quotation and recitation” (92 n.1; cf. also 22)), speech act theory’s appropriation by literary studies in service of the study of non-normal lingual objects was, of course, codified long ago. And undoubtedly a key reason why this was possible, was that texts and/or the culturally marginal objects they represented were seen as, precisely, not etiolated, but as permeated with a transitive force that, in overwhelming the supposedly fixed, binary meanings of homo- hegemonic cultural and political configurations, swept clear sites in which other articulations of sense might emerge.

Here it is perhaps helpful to mark briefly the influence of Foucault, whose early work on discursive formations, in, e.g., L’Archéologie du savoir, emphasized utterance as an event,

see “The Performative” in Jonathan Culler’s The Literary in Theory.

“l’énoncé-événement,” which gained its intelligibility from within “le système de son

énonçabilité” (170). Systematized, discourse can be winnowed down to moments (“chaque moment du discours” (37)) and rendered as positive units of analysis liable to transformations of a wide sort: discourse’s “forme de positivité,” an “a priori historique” for Foucault, determines

“les conditions d’émergence des énoncés … les principes selon lesquels ils subsistent, se transforment et disparaissent” (167). It is thus that novel discursive formations, “d’autres formes de régularité, d’autres types de rapports” (41), may come into view, and this within the parameters of the “archive,” which represents “le système de son fonctionnement [that of

“l’énoncé-chose”],” “le système général de la formation et de la transformation des énoncés.”

Central to all this is a “practice,” that of bringing forth statements, and that is mirrored by a second in which statements are worked on and so transformed: “une pratique qui fait surgir une multiplicité d’énoncés comme autant d’événements réguliers, comme autant de choses offertes au traitement et à la manipulation” (171). Later on, Foucault’s emphasis on discourse as seen through the lens of this doubled practice will cede territory to a vocabulary of battle, strategy, power, and act. But this, I think, only highlights to a greater degree the centrality to his project of the doubled up practice and its transformational productivity. The late essay “Le Sujet et le pouvoir” is illustrative in this respect. There, power’s exercise is described as

un ensemble d’actions sur des actions possibles : il opère sur le champ de

possibilité où vient s’inscrire le comportement de sujets agissants : il incite, il

induit, il détourne, il facilite ou rend plus difficile, il élargit ou il limite, il rend

plus ou moins probable ; à la limite, il contraint ou empêche absolument ; mais il

est bien toujours une manière d’agir sur un ou sur des sujets agissants, et ce tant

qu’ils agissent ou qu’ils sont susceptibles d’agir. Une action sur des actions. (Dits

et écrits 237)

It is easy to see how Foucault thus points the way forward for theoretically-inclined literary studies, away from the discursively and performatively oriented subject and toward something like a democratization of the act, an absolute inter-activity rooted in a quasi- speculative intra-action,17 “Une action sur des actions.” Further evidence for the ways in which discursive-performative accounts of identity have adapted so as to form a bridge to questions dealing with supposedly non-verbal, but still agential, phenomena could be found in the intellectual trajectories of certain theorists who first rose to prominence in the ‘80s and ‘90s. One immediately thinks, for example, of Judith Butler’s early theorizations of the discursively formed subject for whom identity is inseparable from the performative possibilities engendered by a

Nietzschean deed without doer. As she writes in Gender Trouble, “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything” (33). The Nietzschean resonance persists throughout her ‘90s work: e.g., in Bodies

That Matter, where “There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” (xviii). One also thinks of Excitable Speech, where the legal interpellation of the subject is the effect of a more general “juridicalization” whose authority is itself derivative, the equivalent of the “moral resolution of a continuous ‘doing’ into a periodic

‘deed’” (45). This continuous doing is “temporally expansive” (46), but temporality appears to be a modification of a simple, self-enclosed present, “the continuous present of ‘a doing’” (45).

The privilege of the pure and present act has allowed Butler to transition, in later work, to the problem of, for example, democratic assembly, where the body is less one particular body, and its participation in an assembly less to do with any one given political cause, than with the

17 This is not primarily a reference to the work of Karen Barad, for whom the coinage “intra-action” is a determining concept in what she calls “agential realism,” one of the more prominent recent realisms and materialisms. Identity for her is not to be understood in terms of “individual independently existing entities” (“Intra-actions” 77). Rather, it is the product of a prior and prioritized act. Barad states, for example, that “matter” (which for her is an ur-category that subsumes individual identity) is “not a thing [i.e., a discretely defined entity], but a doing” (Ibid. 80). See also her Meeting the Universe Halfway.

forceful “assertion of plural existence” (Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 16).

In this living plurality, it is an excess of signification that Butler wants to underline, where

“embodied forms of action and mobility … signify in excess of whatever is said.” Excess matters here insofar as it gives a glimpse of an original force of meaning that is “already” occurring:

“forms of assembly already signify prior to, and apart from, any particular demands they make”

(Ibid. 8). And between the prior signifying act and the excess it produces is signification as

“relation” giving rise to the event of a fruitful “equivocation” between the individual and the collective that, far from confusing the question of agency, allows it to emerge and be sustained in all its generative clarity. The individual’s act of protest “is neither my act nor yours, but something that happens by virtue of the relation between us, arising from that relation, equivocating between the I and the we, seeking at once to preserve and disseminate the generative value of that equivocation, an active and deliberately sustained relation, a collaboration distinct from hallucinatory merging or confusion” (Ibid. 9).

Another representative name one could cite is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Her early insistence on figural “chains of vicariation” that repeatedly actualize, specifically between male homo- and hetero-sexual identity, the “continuing possibility for symbolizing slippages between identification and desire” (Epistemology of the Closet 159), leads to a general hypostatization of the term “queer” whose “force as a speech act” is found in “the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself” (Tendencies 8). Performativity understood as a power, not belonging essentially to any one individual, but conceived as a general power of positing (“Discussions of linguistic performativity have become a place to reflect on ways in which language really can be said to produce effects: effects of identity…. [L]anguage positions” (Ibid. 10)), allows Sedgwick, like Butler, to pivot away from an explicitly discursive-performative thinking on subjectivity, and toward ostensibly less lingually centered concepts such as affect, bodies, animals, the ethico-

political. In, for example, the influential essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or,

You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” performative positing gets reinstantiated in the “reparative position” or “reparatively positioned reader” whose fundamentally affective relationship to her environs is determined by a “flexible to-and-fro movement” through which ceaselessly emerge “changing and heterogeneous relational stances”

(Touching Feeling 128). This “to-and-fro movement” and the relations it epiphanically reveals

(as in Proust (Ibid. 147-8)) appear to be grounded in a single, all-encompassing place, what

Sedgwick terms “the ecology of knowing” (Ibid. 145).18

But it is possible that it is in studies on world literature that the link between language, act, and place has most visibly survived, in particular through the concept of circulation. This concept has been especially important in mediating between the field’s structuring conceptual poles, the local and the global. The critical tendency has been to circumvent the problem of logical priority here – the problem of which, the local or the global, comes first19 – by affirming what, in my estimation, comes down to a pseudo-dialectical process through which different sites of literary production act upon and resist one another so as to form an ever-evolving, evermore inclusive network of literary exchange. This would be because, strictly speaking, literary corpora belong neither to this or that narrowly defined tradition or paradigm (cultural, national, imperial, economic, techno-scientific, institutional, whatever), nor to a single, homogeneous genre, but to a dynamic and ever-unfolding system of meaning-in-transformation. From this results a dynamic field in which literary corpora are to be reimagined as both determinate in their meanings and

18 Since I evoke two key figures within debates around gender and queer theory, let me point to a study sensitive to the act and its complicated place in the historical elaboration of those debates, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger’s The Queer Turn in Feminism. 19 A description of this problem can be found in Arif Dirlik’s “Place-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place.” This essay is not specifically to do with world literature. However, its broadly political concerns to counter the deleterious effects of globalization in the name of “the creation and construction of new contexts for thinking about politics and the production of knowledge” (16), and this as contextualized within the “intractability of the problem” (23) of the relationship between the local and the global, are easily applicable, I think, to work on world literature.

checkpoints through which meaning gets negated, transformed, emerges, flows. Though the labor performed by negation in the name of the productive transformation of meaning may be considered here more or less agonistic, there more or less benign,20 that there is such a labor taking place – and that there is a place for this taking place – can appear very often to go without saying. Tom Eyers is right to note that “To foreground circulation per se risks positing movement as its own justification against any more critical questioning of the arena within which such movements are tacitly assumed to take place, or the model of totality that this valorization of motion otherwise presupposes” (191). This “arena” is literature as world, and however literary circulation might be described, it is properly a global literary circulation that demonstrates the a priori mediation actively taking place between literary works, as well as the particular places they come out of. This mediation can equally be called, in Pascale Casanova’s words, “the ongoing unification of literary space” (“Literature as a World” 74).

Whatever the disagreements among scholars working on world literature, they would seem, for the most part, to be variations on a theme, the thesis of a world coming to light through the transgressive and transformative circulation of literature. In other words, because of the ongoing mediation happening axiomatically between works, what emerges as world literature’s ultimate horizon or ground is the unity of a single thing (Literature) and a single place (the

World). I use the term “horizon” in order to indicate that world literature, as I am describing it, is understood by world literature studies, tacitly or not, as the regulative possibility of the

20 A particularly agonistic account of the evolution of world literary space can be found in Pascale Casanova’s influential La République mondiale des Lettres. The following quotation is exemplary of her book’s argument: “les fonds littéraires nationaux, loin de se constituer dans la clôture et l’irréductibilité « naturelle » du « génie » de la nation, ont été l’arme et l’enjeu permettant aux nouveaux prétendants d’entrer dans la concurrence littéraire internationale. Pour mieux lutter les unes contre les autres, les nations centrales ont ainsi travaillé à promouvoir des définitions et des spécificités littéraires qui sont elles aussi, pour une grande part, des traits constitués par opposition ou différenciation structurelles. Leurs traits dominants ne peuvent se comprendre, bien souvent … que par une opposition explicite aux traits reconnus de la culture nationale prédominante. Les littératures ne sont donc pas l’émanation d’une identité nationale, elles se construisent dans la rivalité (toujours déniée) et la lutte littéraires, toujours internationales” (64). A rather more benign version of this story, in which a Goethean paradigm of

appearance and activity of local literary bodies, the background against which discrete branches of the ever-growing literary network show up, but which is not itself susceptible of theorization.

Yet it makes theorization possible. Pascale Casanova thus speaks, in “Literature as a World,” of

“the ‘world literary space,’” a synonym for her World Republic of Letters, as a “mediating area”

(72) that is a “totality” or “whole,” a “global structure” whose “coherence” (73) is illuminated by the texts that appear and relate to each other within it: “structural inequalities within the literary world give rise to specific series of struggles, rivalries and contests over literature itself. Indeed, it is through these collisions that the ongoing unification of literary space becomes visible” (74).

In this way, the “abstract model of all possibilities” (72) is gradually actualized through “a historical process” (73) made up of “struggles” among literary actors that, belonging both to respective national scenes and to “the world space,” work to unveil the entirety of the globe as a single interiority of which they are “inhabitants”: “the definitions of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ – that is, the boundaries of the space – are themselves the focus of struggles. It is these struggles that constitute the space, that unify and drive its expansion” (81). This pure interiority, which is nothing other than “literature itself” as world (71), would appear to be ultimately out of reach as an object of theory: Casanova seems to suggest as much when she speaks of a “unification …

[that] is far from complete” (74), as well as “the long and merciless war of literature” (90). Yet through the repeated event of unification and expansion, through the infinite diversity of strategies by which the world literary space emerges, the totality can be known in its formal structure, as a “general sketch,” if not in its content:

Le dessin général des grandes « familles » de cas [“family” being Casanova’s

term for the literary “strategies” binding a group of writers together across literary

time and space] …, ensemble de stratégies infiniment diversifiés des écrivains

Weltliteratur “points to the positive side of non-nationhood, to an anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism” (34), can be found in John Pizer’s The Idea of World Literature.

excentriques dans l’espace littéraire mondial, ne prétend pas épuiser toute la

complexité du réel. Il s’agit simplement … de montrer l’ensemble de la structure

mondiale de dépendance. (La République mondiale des Lettres 423)

Much the same can be said for ostensibly more positivistic approaches. In Franco

Moretti’s work, world literature is not itself an object of study, but a totality within whose confines the continuous weaving of literary power relations (“the struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world” (Distant Reading 56)) should be tracked. There is “one literature,”

Moretti claims, “one world literary system (of inter-related literatures).” As such a system,

“world literature is not an object” (Ibid. 46), but “a condition of knowledge,” a ground in relation to which the critic is necessarily distant. For Moretti believes we should no longer trouble ourselves with the question of reading: “we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them” (Ibid. 48). Reading is, for him, just interpretation, i.e., the elucidation of the symbolic relationship between a work’s form and its meaning. And because the question of literary form

(which is another way of saying, the internal coherence of literary works as self-same entities) was, apparently, settled long ago, it is presently necessary to move beyond literature toward the world, toward the synthesis of literature and world. In Moretti’s terms, this means “explaining”

(and explanation is just a higher order meta-interpretation (Ibid. 152-5)) literature as a product of social forces: “Deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work: this is the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be” (Graphs, Maps, Trees 57).

Moretti’s critic would, therefore, situate himself at the point where, and when, synthesis takes place, i.e., at the middle-point at which literary form (“devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems”) translates social force. This latter, as a unified totality, makes itself known as an abstraction, “the abstract of social relations,” what Moretti also describes as an impoverished formal knowledge: “If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing

something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know” (Distant Reading 49).21 At a distance from both the manifold of individual works and the unified totality of social forces known concretely (rather than merely abstractly),

Moretti’s critic observes the world system develop in an oscillation between local and global, difference and unity, “divergence” and “convergence” (Grqphs, Maps, Trees 67-80), death and life. In other words, the system is known through the differential unfolding of power relations, through the many variations of the one system : “world literature was indeed a system – but a system of variations. The system was one, not uniform…. (See here, by the way, how the study of world literature is – inevitably – a study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world)” (Distant Reading 56). What Moretti calls the “hidden pendulum of literary history”

(Graphs, Maps, Trees 18), or “the cycle as the hidden thread of literary history” (Ibid. 26), may ultimately, in its very principle, remain obscure. Yet, remaining perpetually hidden, it provides the endless fund on which both literature and critic draw as their common source of life. For the cycle Moretti speaks of is the life cycle of literature in which “literary survival” gets played out

(Ibid. 72), in which the great number of literary deaths, all the works “so quickly forgotten,” and

21 One wonders whether Moretti is aware that this monetary metaphor, positioning the critic in relation to the system as debtor to creditor, mirrors the “economic metaphors” that, he believes, “have been subterraneously at work in literary history,” those in which the movement of literary influence reflects the movement of capital, “whereby a … source literature may become a source of direct or indirect loans … for … a target literature” (Distant Reading 47). Many questions pose themselves here. Would the cycle of debt and credit characterizing the circulation of influence happening between literatures, and which would reflect the actual movements of capital in commodity form within print markets, accrue as a kind of interest to be collected by the critic? Would this accrual subsequently allow him to pay down his own epistemological debts in return for at least a little knowledge? What of the connections here between these species of circulation (influence, capital, knowledge)? What of the role of the non-academic reader, who is, on Moretti’s account, nothing more than a vehicle for social forces? What of the relationship between circulation and biologism, that is, Moretti’s theorization of “the logic behind literary survival and oblivion” via his appropriation of evolutionary biology (Ibid. 145)? What of the reduction of reading to two, crude paradigms, “close” and “distant” (which, again, are both nothing more than modes of interpretation)? What of translation, not only intra- and interlingual, but intersemiotic, all the modes of the circulation of meaning connecting the world, the text, the critic, capital, force? Moretti has been justly criticized for his assumption that the movement of literary influence simply reflects that of print commodities (on this see Prendergast). Pheng Cheah, within the context of his commentary on Moretti, is right to note that “Perhaps all sociological accounts of world literature necessarily

that count for “the lost 99 percent of the archive,” get reintegrated “into the fabric of literary history.” One of Moretti’s privileged figures of the literary life of this living archive, the evolutionary tree, thus “allow[s] us to finally ‘see’” (Ibid. 77) dead, lost and forgotten works, but as constitutive of life, as pre-forms of a higher sphere that binds them all together. All of world literature’s forms in all its languages would thus add up to the negative image of the “collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole” (Ibid. 4).

Even would-be polemics “against” world literature end up reproducing this schema by which form translates force, and metaphors pass between languages so as to trace a single, worldly home for literature. In her Against World Literature, a book that extends the project established in The Translation Zone, Emily Apter wants to appeal to Derrida, among others, to lay the groundwork for a practice of comparative literature that would respond “to the geopolitics of literary worlds [also termed “cartographies of emergent world-systems” (39) and “self- updating world-systems” (40)] as they occur in real time” (39). This theoretico-literary practice would seem to be warranted because the literary world-as-self (the one that is “self-updating”) is inherently transnational and plurilingual, and so resists and transgresses what Apter calls

“nation-based epistemes” (31) and “national language ontologies” (36). For Apter and her

Derrida, this means that literature (but also the criticism that performatively mirrors its object) is always in translation. Literary language (let us call it “metaphor”) and translation mirror and mediate each other; metaphor would be, as I stated above, “unconditionally translatable.”

Metaphor’s transgressive and transformative power is apparently demonstrated by a brief quotation from de Man (himself commenting on Benjamin) in which the German übsertzen is highlighted as translating the Ancient Greek metaphorein, rendered by (Apter’s) de Man as “to translate.” Because a literary work’s metaphors are “in a state of perpetual transit, retreat, and

attenuate the worldly force of literature by reducing its worldliness to social forces as exemplified by market processes” (What Is a World? 36).

referential infinitude,” they already lend themselves to translation. But translation thus becomes a metaphor (a metaphor “for the disarticulation of ‘the original,’” writes Apter, echoing

Benjamin) (240), which, in turn, occasions further translation. We are, as I brought up at this chapter’s beginning, dealing with a metaphorico-translational “homelessness” (241) that is ultimately redeemed because it allows us “to renegotiate the boundaries between self and institution, life and death, language and world” (243). New borders may (and should) get drawn, new cartographies may (and should) get instituted, and the world may (and should) continually update itself, but, once again, that there is a world (a world-self no less) in which we are able to negotiate our place through literature’s metaphorico-translational activity is apparently without question.

And since the “cartographies of emergent world-systems” are understood as a general

“linguistic cartography” (39), we should say the same thing about language: that, just like the world, it seems to operate in Apter’s work as an indisputable principle conditioning the

“negotiations” taking place between borders. Here specifically we could put in question her recourse to “negotiation” as a mode of the “critical praxis” that would make comparative literature a worthy, real-time respondent to “the exigencies of a contemporary language politics”

(43), because both the critic and the emergent language-worlds he would respond to are bound by “the minimalist presupposition of some common language.” Apter thus speaks of the emergence of

a translation zone constructed off the power grid of dominant world languages

and potentially mobilized around what Jacques Rancière characterizes as la

mésentente, an extended notion of diplomatic disagreement, or what Christopher

Prendergast describes as a “negotiation”: “the minimalist presupposition of some

common language in and over which to negotiate, although without in any way

papering over the many cognitive misfits and value clashes that might and do

arise in the conduct of negotiations.” (38)

For all Apter’s talk of reestablishing comparative literature as “a translational process … [that] breaks the isomorphic fit between the name of a nation and the name of a language” (The

Translation Zone 243), and that would therefore destabilize totalizing descriptions and performances of literary and lingual relations across the globe, she seems nevertheless to hold fast to a conception of translation as itself a “common language” or “medium,” that is, a unified continuum granting the human subject new life because repositioning him, always anew, in the world.22

There is indeed at work here a determination of language as lifeform, vouched for by the life-affirming critic, that needs to be criticized.23 One could begin to do so by noting the affective

22 There is a striking rhetoric of vitalism that runs through many of the essays of The Translation Zone, according to which the “language wars” that “shape the politics of translation” (4) are affirmed only insofar as they ultimately occur in the service of actualizing the survival of the human. This is partly borne out of a concern for “the continuing vitality of the humanities” (viii). But beyond the contingent existence of a particular branch of the American Academy, Apter appears committed to a latter-day humanism whose sheer inclusiveness would be founded upon the unceasing activity of a vitalist principle of nomination. See, for example, the essays gathered in Part One of the book (“Translating Humanism”), in which, wanting to offer an alternative to the subject as a master concept in the American humanities, Apter stakes a claim to “the human,” which, in the wake of the subject, “is ushered in as an emergency measure, promising, however utopistically, to put nothing less than life itself back on the table” (26). She goes on to read, among others, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach and Edward Said as exemplars of this vitalist humanism. Or see the essays in Part Three (“Language Wars”), in which “language politics” is valorized via a number of life metaphors. For one, language is like biological warfare: there is an inherent “seeding of conflict” in “self-appellation,” this seeding dispersing itself as, in one example, “germ warfare” (132). For another, “minority speech” (140) is a parasite feasting on hegemonic English, producing “stigmas” that reveal the bare life of language and “form the bedrock of critical paradigms of minority literatures” (141). Bare life as the bedrock of “non-Western expression in a global context” (140): this is what Apter’s project wants to live up to. The same goes for her essays on “Technologies of Translation”: technology just augments life. Translation is compared, for example, to “a cloning mechanism of textual transference or reproducibility” that puts in doubt the traditional hierarchy relating the original to its secondary translation: “Under these circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between original and cloned embryonic forms.” Apter seems to suggest that it is the metaphorical or analogical quality of this textual reproduction that leads to the positing of translation as “a ‘code of codes’”: “The idea of textual cloning, emphasizing, in a metaphorical way, literary analogues to genic coding, copying, and blueprinting, problematizes ‘the work of art in the age of genetic reproduction’…. As a ‘code of codes’ (a kind of HTML or master code used in machine translation), translation becomes definable as a cloning mechanism of textual transference or reproducibility rather than as a discrete form of secondary textuality” (213). Through metaphor, textual life is emphasized in its indefinite and ideal reproduction, whose master code is translation. Metaphora translates translatio, in the name of life. 23 Among recent works aiming at a critique of vitalism, see Lezra; Noys; Martin Hägglund’s “The Trace of Time: A Critique of Vitalism”; both volumes of Claire Colebrook’s Essays on Extinction; and two books by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller: Theory and the Disappearing Future and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols.

relationality constitutive of the subject’s place in the world, in translation (or “in-translation,” as

Apter writes it): “Cast as an act of love, and as an act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history…. Translation is a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Ibid. 6). Apter goes on, in The Translation Zone, to speak of a “militant love” (249) in which the traumatic incompleteness of individual languages, and the un-rootedness that follows from it, is prelude to a revitalizing plenitude and the ever open possibility of “political utopia” (79). Thus, “the traumatic proximity of violence and love, manifest as exploded holes in language or translation gaps” gives way to a “process of depredication” (247), whereby the link between nation and language, and subject and world, is repeatedly broken, and we are placed in a perpetual state of “in-translation” (6, 7, 243). In

Edward Said and Leo Spitzer she finds early advocates of a translational and transnational comparative literature that would describe and perform this process. They have a “common regard for word spacing,” the va-et-vient between lack and fullness by which “humanism” produces ever more meaning and ever more subject positions. Humanism thus is always on the move, oscillating (here in Said’s words as quoted by Apter)

between the space of words and their various origins and deployments in physical

and social place, from text to actualized site of either appropriation or resistance,

to transmission, to reading and interpretation, from private to public, from silence

to explication and utterance, and back again, as we encounter our own silence and

mortality – all of it occurring in the world, on the ground of daily life and history

and hopes, and the search for knowledge and justice, and then perhaps also for

liberation. (249)

Swinging from lack to fullness and death to life – but always grounded “in the world, on the ground of daily life and history and hopes” – the activity of an updated philological

humanism would attempt “to bring-to-intelligibility that which lies beyond language” (243).

Apter’s Said here finds a means “to re-articulate the sacred otherwise” (249), to give expression to a quasi-divine power that would be located “‘beyond identity.’” This “beyond” is “an ontological something else” in whose name the secular, translational humanist would un-name and rename, and so translate, linguistico-national identities (Ibid. 71). The name beyond name that comparative literature wishes to name “comes through in the desire to ‘re-speak or repunctuate’ a language that comes from the outside, bearing ‘the marks of its strange desires and cruel imperatives’” (Ibid. 250; here she is quoting Kenneth Reinhard on Lacan). This para- lingual power that puts language, nations, and peoples into “a translational process” (243) that is also a “process of nomination” (244) is, per Apter, “the idea of ‘life’ as an untranslatable singularity” that, through its repeated incarnations, grounds comparative literature in its perennial striving toward a revolutionary, quasi-divine justice:

The need to disrupt the deep structural laws by which languages are named after

nations, peoples, and God-terms complemented Said’s concern to posit a

philological humanism no longer hobbled by neo-imperialist jingoism, no longer

shy of facing off against the autocracy of theocratic speech-acts, and yet, also no

longer able to deny the idea of “life” as an untranslatable singularity, a “cognition

of paradise” that assumes tangible guise in Babel or the “afterlife” of translation.

She ropes Derrida into this para-lingual vitalism, stating that he, Spitzer and Said “together push the limits of how language thinks itself, thereby regrounding the prospects for a new comparative literature in the problem of translation” (251).24

24 In a more recent book, Michael Allan is equally impressed with the humanism of the old-guard of comparative literature. He speaks approvingly of reading as an ongoing, “transhistorical” relating with texts that produces new ways of being in the world. In this readers are situated as permanent exiles (untethered from socio-politically determining modes of reading) who are perpetually able to call into question exclusionary (and often nationalistic) discourses around literature. This entails a practice of reading that liberates a text from its historical and local contexts, giving way to the event of the text (its “taking place”), and that allows it to put in question the historically

It is easy enough, then, to agree with Rebecca Walkowitz when she correctly points out that “Apter is not really against world literature, or even World Literature. She is interested in

‘when and where translation happens,’ expanding the corpus of literary works geographically and linguistically, and rethinking foundational concepts from the perspective of literary histories beyond Europe” (29). But whatever polemics might have arisen over Apter’s nominal contravention of world literature’s “foundational concepts,” they have not troubled the more basic foundation of the objective givenness of the world, of a milieu and a medium permitting the too easy conflation of literature, translation, expansion, and event (that translation supposedly “happens” or takes place). There is, for this reason, quite a bit of irony in David

Damrosch’s criticisms of Against World Literature. For he too privileges the ongoing mediation of literary language as interiorized within a single, all-encompassing space, one whose sheer expansiveness would not nullify the differences between works, but preserve the “variability” of both literature and the criticism that would read it:

properly understood, world literature is not at all fated to disintegrate into the

conflicting multiplicity of separate national traditions; nor, on the other hand,

need it be swallowed up in the white noise that Janet Abu-Lughod has called

“global babble.” My claim is that world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable

canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as

and locally determined values according to which one otherwise reads. Reading ceases to reflect particular cultural, social and political practices, and instead reflects a properly international practice, an engagement with, and a self- situating in, the “entire” world. Allan is specifically impressed with Erich Auerbach, for whom reading is “The interplay of translation, citation, and explication [that] allows for the text to take place, and this taking place is not so much a matter of finding home as one of appreciating the entire world as a place of exile…. For Auerbach, it seems that world literature becomes itself a manner of earning proper love for the world, allowing him to escape his national condition through a longing for a literary internationalism across place and time…. If we take Auerbach’s exile seriously, then we might necessarily question the place from which we read, respond, and critique – that is, the values that supposedly inform and inflect a manner of being in the world…. More than a fight over belonging and unbelonging, consider what it might mean to engage with traditions not to find a home, but to appreciate the entire world as a place of exile with ‘intimacy and distance.’ Might this be the place from which to question the borders of world literature? In the end, might this be the place not only from which to read, relate, and think differently, but also from which to imagine the world anew?” (140).

applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for reading

established classics and new discoveries alike…. [J]ust as there never has been a

single set canon of world literature, so too no single way of reading can be

appropriate to all texts, or even to any one text at all times. The variability of a

work of world literature is one of its constitutive features – one of its greatest

strengths when the work is well presented and read well, and its greatest

vulnerability when it is mishandled or misappropriated by its newfound foreign

friends. (What Is World Literature? 5)25

In his review of Apter’s book, Damrosch appears to criticize her for preaching better than she practices, the result being that her own contribution to the field does not hold enough of the world in itself as it should. He chastises her for being too Euro- or Western-centric (the theorists she discusses are scarcely “based outside Paris or the United States” (508)), and for being “Little engaged with current scholarship in world literature” (506). But what he really means is that

Apter’s bibliography is not as long as he would like: he laments that Apter does not specifically cite much of the contemporary work on world literature, nor prominent scholars working in translation studies, nor strains of “Theory” that are not nominally Derridean. Damrosch ends his review thus:

The world is a large and various place. Those wishing to chart new planetary

cartographies are finding many languages to study beyond the French-German-

English triad that long dominated Western comparative studies, and they are

25 See also Damrosch’s “World literature as figure and as ground,” in which a rhetoric of consumption serves as a vehicle for the mediation of at least a few important oppositions (between the local and the global, between individual literary works or authors, between modes of criticism): “Taken together, the multiplying reversals between consumer and consumed … play out the shifting figure/ground reversals of the world and the nation that we can explore through the study of world literature in its local metamorphoses. Far from having to choose between the nation and the world, or between close and distant reading, comparatists have the opportunity today to look freshly at the intimate interanimation of these seemingly opposed terms. The world in a grain of sand; or in an aquarium, in the Jardin des Plantes, in the spring of 1951” (139). This last sentence, in which the relationship between part and

developing new methods appropriate to the expanded scope of our field. The

tough linguistic and political analyses that Emily Apter rightly wishes

comparatists to pursue will best be carried forward by widening our cultural and

linguistic horizons, and by employing the full variety of critical and theoretical

approaches that can be included in our cartographic toolboxes today. (508)

I will first state the obvious, that neither the success of an argument “against” world literature, nor the proof of “engagement” with the scholarly work done in a particular academic subfield related to the problem of world literature, is directly dependent on whether or not a scholar cites this or that work said to deal with some aspect of world literature. But more importantly, while it is all good and well to proclaim the necessity of variety, widened horizons, and novelty in the study of world literature, it is a very different, and much more difficult, thing to think about the difference made by literature, or by way of literature, and to think the relation of literature to the world through this by or by way of. I am not speaking of interiorities: the world in literature, or literature in the world, or literature as the world. I am speaking of a literature unbounded by a world horizon, located perpetually parallel to the world because beside and between itself and the language it would belong to.

Let me demonstrate my own engagement with this problem of literature’s relation to the world, which is that of metaphor, translation, and a certain (non)spatiality, by citing a rather uncontemporary source, albeit one the commentators on world literature would do well to revisit.

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha writes forcefully on the facileness of “cultural diversity” that yields to a

strategy of containment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of

difference, never the active agent of articulation. The Other is cited, quoted,

whole is not one of mutual determination but of interpenetration or “interanimation,” is, of course, equally indicative of the problem under discussion.

framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial

enlightenment. Narrative and the cultural politics of difference become the closed

circle of interpretation…. However impeccably the content of an “other” culture

may be known, however anti-ethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as

the closure of grand theories, the demand that, in analytic terms, it be always the

good object of knowledge, the docile body of difference, that reproduces a

relation of domination and is the most serious indictment of the institutional

powers of critical theory. (46)

In difference to the happy simplicity of a spatial unity undergirding “liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity” (50), Bhabha has in mind a parallelism, a “side-by-side nature” (42) that intervenes between identity and produces a “Third

Space” whose structure or form is not an outer bound because it does not pre-exist difference as its condition of readability. Instead, it intervenes without mediating: “The intervention of the

Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code” (54). The experience of enunciation is a limit- experience, but the limit that crosses is itself crossed, and so produces “the place of utterance”

(52), a “split-space of enunciation [that] may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (56).

At certain points of Bhabha’s argument, crucially, there is a crossing, of metaphor and translation. Most notably, perhaps, in “DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation,” where “that moment of the scattering of the people … becomes a time of gathering” (199). In this scattering-gathering is the inscription of a void, “the metaphoricity of

the peoples of imagined communities” whose “metaphoric movement requires a kind of

‘doubleness’ in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centred causal logic” (202). In the book’s introduction (but elsewhere too), this metaphoricity of the nation, “the grounds of cultural comparativism,” gets explicitly figured, as it were, as translation, as “a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities” (7). This global movement between metaphor and translation would not be, then, the expression of an easy circularity, what in the preface to the

2004 edition of the book Bhabha calls “a kind of global cosmopolitanism … that configures the planet as a concentric world of national societies extending to global villages” (xiv).

This is not to say, of course, that there is no bone of contention to be found in Bhabha’s work. For all that is compelling in The Location of Culture, one can nevertheless ask if his demonstration indeed rises to the level of his claims. Despite his assertions that the

“contradictions” he finds in enunciations of identity are non-dialectical,26 and so destructive of self-reflection,27 it can seem as though Bhabha’s argument often proceeds according to a subtle but continuous vacillation between contraries conditioned by a hypostatized performativity.

Again in “DissemiNation,” he is centrally concerned to describe such a vacillation, in this case between “the pedagogical” (the process by which the nation refers to “the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object” and so narrates itself) and the performative (“the

26 For example: “My purpose here is to define the space of the inscription or writing of identity…. This is not a form of dialectical contradiction, the antagonistic consciousness of master and slave, that can be sublated and transcended” (70); “These moments of undecidability [in the “cultural authority” of the British Empire in nineteenth-century India (184)] must not be seen merely as contradictions in the idea or ideology of empire. They do not effect a symptomatic repression of domination or desire that will eventually either be sublated or will endlessly circulate in the dereliction of an identificatory narrative” (186). 27 For example: “The demand of identification – that is, to be for an Other – entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness. Identification … is always the return of an image of identity that bears the mark of splitting in the Other place from which it comes” (64). “Portraits” of postcolonial identity “seize on the vanishing point of two familiar traditions in the discourse of identity: the philosophical tradition of identity as the process of self-reflection in the mirror of (human) nature; and the anthropological view of the difference of human identity as located in the division of Nature/Culture. In the postcolonial text the problem of identity returns as a

people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign” (211)). Though we are told that it is the “split” between such contraries that needs to be “confronted” (“We are confronted with the nation split within itself” (212)), it is, within the moment of the split, the performative pole that appears to be privileged. Here, performance mirrors performance, address reflects address: the nation unknowingly interpellates “the people constructed in the performance of narrative” (“the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects” (209));

“marginal voices or minority discourse” thus gain “a theoretical position and a narrative authority…. They no longer need to address their strategies of opposition to a horizon of

‘hegemony’ that is envisaged as horizontal and homogeneous” (216). And so they address themselves to Bhabha, who, in facing up to the nation’s liminal space, situates himself there, thus speaking “both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent” (214). Bhabha translates “the foreignness of languages” (this is Benjamin’s phrase), or “the inescapable cultural condition for the enunciation of the mother-tongue.” This condition is also a space, “a margin of the uncertainty of cultural meaning that may become the space for an agonistic minority position.” But the potentiality expressed by this “may” is just before this a more tendentious

“will” actualizing a creative power: “dissemiNation" is the translational process by which “the radical alterity of the national culture will create new forms of living and writing” (239).

If Bhabha’s claims regarding lingual difference end up, through the process of argumentation, establishing a circuit of address in which the act of enunciation comes to dominate the self-other relation, then we must question spatiality in Bhabha’s text. The “side-by- side nature” of heterogeneous elements does not easily break from established discursive practices when its parallelism forms an unbroken line of exchanges culminating in the

persistent questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image – missing person, invisible eye, Oriental stereotype – is confronted with its difference, its Other” (66).

emergence of “the people in a fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to” (220;

Bhabha is here paraphrasing Fanon), in the “practice” of “a performative time” that is the

“present of the people’s history.” The emphasis here on the precise moment of the present of enunciation, registered in the adverbial “just” that modifies the people’s creative act,28 would seem to be ratified by a spatial symmetry between the postcolonial scholar and “the forms of life struggling to be represented in that unruly ‘time’ of national culture” (211). Between, but also superseding, all these lives would be one life in its living act, “the incommensurable act of living” (219) that is very nearly synonymous with the one borderline that effects the articulation of Western frontiers. Valorizing the Other postcolonial space, Bhabha still gives it a quite traditional air: it is the single, self-differentiating boundary, the third space in which the many boundaries of the West get redrawn. It “stands in a subaltern, adjunct relation that doesn’t aggrandize the presence of the West but redraws its frontiers in [my italics] the menacing, agonistic boundary of cultural difference that never quite adds up, always less than one nation and double” (241). In L’Empire du langage, Laurent Dubreuil has argued that “La recherche de

Bhabha diverge entre son dit et son dire” (231), and this makes the hybrid a function of a pre- existing between. The hybrid as third “vaut donc pour synthèse, pour le dépassement hégélien”

(226). In Bhabha’s hands, it is ultimately not the product of a unique implosion of the thought of identity, but a still too conventional “logique à même de dire le troisième autre genre” (227-8).

The location of The Location of Culture thus risks being the library’s Neoplatonist section (228).

He may, that is, think too little – or too much – of the space of language.

28 As I have pointed out, Bhabha’s source here is Fanon. But it should be noted that his emphasis of the “performative time” of the present depends on a mistranslation and some misleading italics. He states that “he [Fanon] tries to locate the people in a performative time: ‘the fluctuating movement that the people are just giving shape to’” (218). This quotation comes from the 1963 English translation of Les damnés de la terre, but there the “just” is not italicized (227); Bhabha fails to indicate that he has added emphasis in his quotation. Further, the text he cites is a mistranslation. Fanon’s French is as follows: “Il ne suffit pas de rejoindre le peuple dans ce passé où il n’est plus mais dans ce mouvement basculé qu’il vient d’ébaucher et à partir duquel subitement tout va être mis en question” (215). Whatever the temporality of the people’s movement in its being preliminarily sketched out (the act

But what of a hybrid that, in Dubreuil’s words, “est du côté du tiers terme – tel que l’évoque Platon dans le Timée. Triton allo genos : troisième autre genre” (226)? What of a co- implication of language and space that would not represent just another “approach” or

“framework” of interpretation to be tossed onto the ever growing pile of literary studies? “Un pluriel de connaissances ne suffira pas” (216). What of language as “la marque d’une négativité

épistémique” (233) that would threaten the entirety of the architecture of thought as institutionalized in the Western university, that “miroir de l’univers” (220, my italics)? Dubreuil recalls in passing that, in the Timaeus, at stake is indeed the construction of the universe, which necessitates, through the very activity of reason, a splitting or an interval within the theory itself of imitation, this producing a “tiers non synthétique” (227). Where would this third, the production of an addition that is also a breaking apart, be located? In what way, through what means, would it get designated? And by whom, by what? Here we could point out that Dubreuil himself appears to be concerned to realize a thought of spatiality in relation to a certain possibility of language, a possibility not so easily assimilable to the actuality of a self-present moment of enunciation.29 In L’Empire du langage, he elaborates a critique of hybridity or

“métissage” that, in its dominant theoretical guises, too easily becomes an unwitting vehicle for an “universalisme foncier” privileging global totality, “la dimension pancosmique du concept”

(95). Under the reign of the universal that takes shape in the one world, hybridity instantiates a monolingual self-relation (“dans les sciences humaines, le métissage ne renvoie le plus souvent qu’à soi-même, et s’affirme instance d’éloge” (97)) that the juxtaposition or mixing of natural languages does little to disturb (96). More recent work has argued for a thought of language that, in its irremediable defectiveness and unflagging virtuality, points to, while being displaced by, an

described by the verb ébaucher), it is not a present. The periphrastic conjugation Fanon uses here (“vient d’ébaucher”) is a passé récent.

outside.30 We come to have standing through this displacement, in a “transiently appearing space” (The Intellective Space 22) that is precisely not the common ground of intersubjectivity.

Instead of the Husserlian “horizon-certainty” of the transcendental world as such (The Crisis of

European Sciences 374), the “validity-ground … of a strictly unassailable … self-evidence”

(Ibid. 373), Dubreuil’s space is “shared” (The Intellective Space 24), “virtually accessible as soon as cognition is performed and shared” (Ibid. 22). Through language’s sharing (literary language seemingly a privileged instance of this), an opening toward the outside is produced,31 while said outside passes through us. “The whole circuit of cogitation is looped in a complicated way, with no systematically identical predetermined paths” (Ibid. 11). The outside (named early on in The Intellective Space “the cogitandum,” which is “the index of something external to thinking” (9)) thus becomes “a mixed notion, posited as a point of entry and a possible arrival”

(10-11). This mix, or hybrid, of the movement of passage, but also of who or what enters and arrives, and of where all this happens – this is not of the order of the universal. Again nodding to the Timaeus, Dubreuil writes that “The demiurge ultimately gives meaning to everything” (33).

But against this universal temptation, what is needed is a thought of the breaking of the promise of meaning, in which a certain maintenance of thought in defection situates the participants of the shared space in the wild part of language’s exterior. The cogitandum, as the indexed outside of thought, is “the part of reality on the verge of becoming our object” (10). On the verge, “its name and meaning are coming through (and not to) us” (33).

29 For a study bearing more directly on the moment, or “weird temporality,” of literary works (44), according to which “Literature does not exist before but rather after itself,” and in which “This now is said the moment after” (45), see Dubreuil’s “What Is Literature’s Now?” 30 “An object of language is a virtual deixis, which is momentarily actualized through cogitation. Language is opaque because the virtual is untouched by the actual: the designation is not exhausted by its operation” (The Intellective Space 39). Further on: “Language is open. If it were the closed circle so many represent, it would never mean anything. Language is open to the real, to non-verbal cognition, to the intellective. Moreover, it is no more sealed than any of our subsystems of thought; it is incapable of staying within itself…. As long as I express my thoughts through language, they will inexorably bypass the orb of their verbal inscription, but they will never completely stay out of word materiality and what this entices” (40).

Amid the defection of a certain number of idiomatic motifs (among them: sharing, participation, part, through), I believe there appears in Dubreuil’s text the chance of another opening, one for thinking the co-implication of literature’s transversal movement, through metaphor and translation.32 I will, in the chapters that follow, be taking up the invitation of this chancy opening, to read and write literature’s graceless voyage, from the place it goes, without knowing it. Where? Nowhere, I do not know. But by lingering awhile by literature’s borderlands

– not in literature, as though both feet could be planted firmly in its territory, but literary adjacent, on adjoining shores, reading and writing around Derrida – I hope to join this nowhere, in spite of everything. Next, or running parallel, to everything else, a literary topo-logy, idiomatic in extremis, lays down an injunction: to say literature and nothing else. To invite others to join in, to co-sign the sharing of this non-place, over and above all the rest of the world.

31 “The literary is an exploration of language failures. Opacity is maximally deployed, undoing the ligatures of discursive conventions, thus opening its verbal density to the space beyond” (The Intellective Space 45). 32 I am running the risk of locating in Dubreuil a certain idiomatic signature. But then it can only be a question of doubling down on this chance by which language, differentially enforcing its law, singularly opens the place of a name. The collection of motifs I have singled out (sharing, participation, part, through) indicate a silent voie de communication running between English and French. As proof, I would wager on Dubreuil’s insistent use, in The Intellective Space, of the English lexeme “share,” whose French homologue “partage” figures saliently in his Le refus de la politique. In both books, the shared is delimited from the common. In the former (here Dubreuil is describing an experiment in which participants were made to listen to a story, and who consequently display “idiosyncratic performances of cognition” (23)): “The participants have shared something that is not limited to – but is bounded by – their commonalities” (24) (on the preceding two pages, the word “common,” or some variation thereof, is written six times). In the latter book: “Dans la dilacération du moi consistant que peut être l’émission d’un je, dans la fabrication momentanée d’une expérience partagée (et non commune), dans la création d’une fissure où passer, nous sommes loin de l’individualisme et proches du refus déictique” (88-9). Further, a passage appearing in the English translation of the book, but not in the French original, states: “What is at stake for us is not rediscovering the communal (biological or cultural), nor forging a communality by way of the symbolic, nor building a community or communities. Rather, we’re striving to open up and explore a space that could be shared by us” (97). Since I have just evoked the conjunction of signature and wager, let me refer the reader to Peggy Kamuf’s treatment of these problematics in and through Derrida, in her “I See Your Meaning and Raise the Stakes by a Signature.”

Chapter Two

The Invention of the Idiom – at the Limit: Genius in Derrida

At the outset of “Economimesis,” Derrida is speaking of “philosophemes” – the terms with which a philosophical discourse elaborates itself, whose differential inscription through language is understood to be a derivative function of that discourse’s self-unfolding, and that serve as the means by which it joins itself to itself – and inquires into a certain “pointed specificity.” How, he asks, to make visible the specific point at which discursive chains and their philosophemes intersect or get interwoven with one another (he is in particular interested in the relationship between politics, political economy, and discourses on art and the beautiful, specifically in Kant)? As might be expected, such a point for Derrida is not a fixed node around which discursive sequences would be held in place, and thanks to which they could be sorted out and evaluated according to their “lengths” (“lengths” referring, for example, to sequences stretching within and across thinkers and currents belonging to various historical periods,

“reconduisant à Platon ou à Aristote,” for instance). This much is made clear when he states that

“il ne suffit pas de faire le tri ou de mesurer des longueurs.” Rather, the “most pointed specificity” of the difference between discursive networks is to be discerned through the differential and unstable functioning of philosophemes that are, in a certain sense, independent of the networks to which they supposedly belong. “Une fois introduit dans un autre réseau, le

« même » philosophème n’est plus le même, et il n’a d’ailleurs jamais eu d’identité hors de son fonctionnement” (EM 57). The strange temporality described in this sentence should be paused over. Philosophemes, once they get transferred into a new discursive network (when, e.g., they are taken up by a different thinker or group of thinkers, at another time, in another place or context), are no longer the same. And yet a philosopheme is never identical to itself outside its

differential functioning, which is to say, it has never been and never will be self-identical at all.

At least one consequence of this functioning via constitutive non-self-identity is that the terms that might be thought to belong to, and so make up, larger networks of meaning, because their signifying operations are irreducible to this or that circumscribed field, are responsible for bringing different networks into contact with each other. But precisely because they are not self- identical, and precisely because the differential possibility of their signifying cannot be confined to any determinable context, the “point” of the contact between networks is itself radically indeterminate or “open.” What this means, is that the “most pointed specificity” of the articulation or “implication” of disparate discourses is not located between units of discourse themselves (letters, words, syntagma, locutions, sentences, entire corpora, etc.), but coincides with them. Philosophemes are not merely the links in the chain, the threads interwoven to form coherent and self-enclosed textual systems. They are also the instrument of weaving, the pointed end of an operation that overpowers and transforms “les grandes séquences” from within, opening, displacing, and folding them, but in an original manner, into another, “new system”:

“Pliées à un nouveau système, les grandes séquences se déplacent, changent de sens et de fonction” (EM 57). Needless to say, it results from all this that what counts as a unit of discourse, and how it relates to the contexts in which it gets inscribed, are radically in question.

Here I point out that the examination of Kant in “Economimesis” is in important respects a continuation of other work done from roughly the same period: “La mythologie blanche” and its examination of Aristotle’s theorizations on mimesis and metaphor, and L’archéologie du frivole, specifically as regards the place of genius in Condillac. As we will see, important to all three essays (though less so in the case of L’archéologie du frivole) is the problem of the specular relationship between nature (or physis) and the human being, exemplarily the genius.

We will have occasion to explore these essays to greater or lesser degree. Right now, I want to

claim that at stake in the convergence of these essays is not only a “pointed” difference between philosophical discourses, but also between idioms: for example, German, Ancient Greek, French.

I want to say that folded into the thematic concerns of these essays is additionally a concern for the idiomatic. A bit more precisely: I aim to show in this chapter that Derrida’s reflections on these and other thinkers and writers (including Benjamin, Francis Ponge, Hélène Cixous) give him each time a chance to open his own idiom, and the philosophemes constituting it, to something foreign or improper to it. Through this most pointed, foreign difference, there is articulated something like a demand or dictate or law, according to which the idiom ((Derrida’s)

French) is made to turn back on itself in a reflexive manner, but in order to produce (though it would perhaps be better to say “to invent”) something like what Derrida, speaking of Francis

Ponge’s poem “Fable,” calls a “false speculation” (TP 48). The self-reflexive turning of the idiom would be “false” because, quite simply, it would say nothing true: it would breach the idiom at highly determinate points so as to put in question the basic unity of its words and syntax, and thereby destroy the possibility of its meaningful, which is to say, metalingual totalization.

I will sum this up by saying that Derrida’s meditations on other thinkers and writers

(even, or perhaps especially, those who also ostensibly wrote in French) provide him with a chance to open his own language – or to discover where in his language there already existed prior openings – to a foreign disturbance that inaugurates a transformation of French. Such a transformation would mark, on one hand, the event of French’s exceeding itself, as though the language, or its genius, were operating according to the rules of an exterior, foreign authority.

But this same transformation would simultaneously mark a withdrawal, as though French’s exposure to foreign disturbance put in question whether its own unique genius had ever indeed been truly its own, and truly distinct from the genius of other languages. To quote again from

“Economimesis”: “Nous ne sommes pas près de disposer de critères rigoureux pour décider d’une spécificité philosophique, des limites encadrant un corpus ou le propre d’un système” (EM

57).

It can be inferred from this that the destruction of French’s metalingual totalization cannot happen (just) once. And it is precisely because of the essential possibility of the repetition of idiomatic breaching that the idiom, far from being annihilated in its difference from other idioms, has the chance to be itself and to let come to light philosophemes that are new or, as per

“Economimesis,” “inédits” (EM 57). Some pointed examples of these in Derrida that I will bring up are: par, pas, sans, sens, ver. Through the turns of these and other very idiomatic words,

French would possibly open itself to reinvention, one that would take place, as Derrida might say, as though for the first time. Such an invention I call, here and there, the ultra-idiomatic, and

I claim that it is proper to genius to (re)invent it.

I. The Power of Truth as Unveiling, In and Through Metaphor

In order to get a grasp on the ultra-idiomatic turnings taking place in Derrida’s French, I turn first to his most sustained examination of the trope of metaphor, “La mythologie blanche :

La métaphore dans le texte philosophique.” In that essay, he reminds his readers that, classically, metaphor works according to resemblance, meaning that it is possible to call one thing by the name of another because the two resemble each other, or stand in a relationship of analogy each with the other. But relationships of analogy are themselves possible because, first of all, it is always possible to refer to a thing by its name in its absence. Or, better: it is always essentially possible that an interval come between a thing and its name. A name being detachable from what it signifies, it may come to stand in place of another name, and enter into the composition of a

metaphor which, assuming it is a good metaphor, may in turn produce knowledge and thus participate, in however slight a way, in the self-revelation of physis. Yet in bringing to light a given relationship of resemblance and thereby saying something true (and, further, allowing truth itself to reveal itself in such and such a way), metaphor does not simply close down the interval that conditioned its possibility. Metaphor’s operation, its act or energy, Derrida asserts, “suppose néanmoins que la ressemblance ne soit pas une identité” (M 285). In other words, it supposes that the interval remain open in principle if not in fact. And in remaining open, the metaphorical interval would constitute a certain question put to thought in general, a certain risk that thought must run vis-à-vis meaning and truth.

Indeed, it is part of Derrida’s objective in “La mythologie blanche” to show that metaphor is a problem worthy of serious philosophical treatment insofar as it must, according to its classical conception, be situated in, and thereby aid in the constitution of, the Aristotelian chain of being, whose various chief values (Derrida mentions discourse, voice, name, signification, sense, imitative representation and resemblance (M 282)) are all governed and united by truth’s positing power. This latter, as the gradual appearing of the whole, shows itself at work through the relationship between resemblance and imitation: the human being notices resemblances in the world and imitates, or represents, them in meaningful language. This is as much to say that not only do there exist resemblances between things in the world that the human being represents in language, but that a fundamental resemblance obtains between the world itself and the human as a speaking being. This latter resemblance constitutes the very meaningfulness, or truth, of discourse, the naturalness of the unfolding through the human being of the whole itself. It is that which teleologically determines the human being as the recipient or addressee, as it were, of physis’ a priori act of revealing itself, and which therefore allows her to partake, mimetically, in said act. Mimesis (and, by extension, metaphor, since metaphor is an

effect of mimesis) is a manifestation of Aristotelian analogy (see in particular M 282-5). In or through mimesis, nature appears to itself, gives itself to itself, but not before appearing, and giving itself, to the human being. Not before, in other words, she takes possession of nature, her nature, as that which is her own natural gift or power to reproduce nature in metaphors: “Comme la mimesis, la métaphore revient à la physis, à sa vérité et à sa présence. La nature y retrouve toujours sa propre analogie, sa propre ressemblance à soi, et ne s’y accroît que d’elle-même. Elle s’y donne. C’est pourquoi, d’autre part, le pouvoir métaphorique est un don naturel” (M 291).

The naturalness of this relationship, in which the human being and nature itself are seen to be fundamentally alike, and which is constituted through a dynamic process in which nature gives and the human being takes possession, will be at the heart of my interrogation of metaphor throughout this chapter’s first few sections. It will suffice to say for the moment that it is the naturalness of the human-nature nexus – what comes down to an axiomatics of the self- presentation of nature as natural source, as presence, from which the human being as speaking and representing being unquestionably springs – that will prove to open itself to questioning through metaphor. On the one hand, mimesis (and thus metaphor) should serve to bind the human being and physis in such a way that the former’s ability to make mimetic representations in language (in metaphors, then) ought to go without saying, and such that it is in mimetic (but also metaphorical) language (the repeated “y” in the passage quoted above – “there,” in mimesis

– but where?) that the aforementioned dynamic naturally takes place. But on the other hand, the energy source fueling nature’s (re)presentation does not give itself (make itself present) to the human being as her resource without, from the first, being doubled in or through (but what is the difference between these two prepositions?) mimesis (and metaphor). In or through: it is there that we will be, eventually, questioning metaphor.

But we should not get ahead of ourselves. To return to the Aristotelian theory of

metaphor, the one sanctioned by the tradition: mimesis belongs from its inception to the whole of what is. Derrida writes that, in Aristotle, mimesis is “posée en quelque sorte comme une possibilité propre à la physis…. Elle appartient à la physis” (M 283). In terms emphasizing its spatial stakes (which I will interrogate more fully in the next chapter): mimesis is already situated in the whole. The mimetic act that is physis’ representative double does not import from an outside the individual moments, or developments, of the whole’s unfolding. Rather, it is by way of a continuous interiorization that mimesis operates. The gradual unfolding of mimesis in discourse leads to an ultimate point of reference that is nothing other than the very power-of- truth-as-unveiling that both is proper to the human, and that governs the entire chain of metaphysics for which the Aristotelian theory of resemblance is, per Derrida, crucial: “Le pouvoir de vérité, comme dévoilement de la nature (physis) par la mimesis, appartient congénitalement à la physique de l’homme, à l’anthropophysique” (M 283); “La mimesis ne va pas sans la perception théorique de la ressemblance ou de la similitude…. L’homoiosis n’est pas seulement constitutive de la valeur de vérité (aletheia) qui commande toute la chaîne [of metaphysics], elle est ce sans quoi l’opération métaphorique est impossible…. La condition de la métaphore (de la bonne et vraie métaphore) est la condition de la vérité” (M 282). Because this properly powerful reference point is the very ground in which mimesis has standing, it follows that both the back-and-forth between imitation and resemblance, and the gradual unfolding of discourse it occasions, always essentially happen within, and thanks to, a single, singular place.

Derrida succinctly, though somewhat enigmatically, describes the unfolding process in which mimesis takes part, while subtly gesturing toward the stakes of a certain spatiality belonging to that process, in the following passage:

Au début de la Poétique, la mimesis est posée en quelque sorte comme une

possibilité propre à la physis. Celle-ci se révèle dans la mimesis, ou dans la poésie

qui en est une espèce, en raison de cette structure peu apparente qui fait que la

mimesis n’apporte pas de l’extérieur le pli de son redoublement. Elle appartient à

la physis, ou, si l’on préfère, celle-ci comprend son extériorité elle-même et son

double. La mimesis est donc, en ce sens, un mouvement « naturel ». Cette

naturalité est réduite et confiée par Aristote à la parole de l’homme. (M 283)

A mimetic act (or an instance of metaphor), in enacting the unfolding of physis, does not bring or import (“n’apporte pas”) from outside the latter its development. Mimesis and metaphor – but this goes generally for “la parole de l’homme,” and here again we are confronted with a monolingual imperative, the reduction of all natural tongues to one human language – are already proper to, or belong to (appartenir), the possibility of this unfolding, and so draw the energy for their acts from physis’ own self-contained force. There is, properly speaking – that is, according to the properness that is set forth by truth’s essential power – no outside, no other place, to be distinguished from the milieu out of which nature unfolds itself. The fold that mimesis performs – the act that brings together, e.g., two terms or names into an analogical relationship, thus assuring the articulation or connection between them – is a function of a single, ultimately simple, and self-contained place. This place gathers in itself (“comprend”) the taking place of the mimetic act.

Yet where there is a fold in Derrida, we may suspect that things are not so simple, something the adjectival phrase “peu apparente” at least hints at. Without broaching in detail the problem of the Derridean fold,33 we should nevertheless continue to keep in mind that while metaphor, as the hinge or fold – the engine, as it were, of relation – connecting terms in a given relationship of analogy, is supposed to bridge oppositions and thus set the stage for the continued

33 A discussion of the motif of the fold (pli) in Derrida would probably need to start with “La Double séance” in La Dissémination. Rodolphe Gasché’s brief comments, in the essay “Structural Infinity,” on the fold as supplementary fold or re-mark, represent a good point of departure for such a discussion. See in particular p. 141-45 in Inventions of Difference.

and active appearing of truth, it must also keep within itself an interval that in principle (if not in fact) prevents such relationships from achieving totalization. What is at stake here, among other things, is precisely the status of metaphor as an act: its ability to perform the exchange of names

(and therefore meanings) between things, and thereby to join them in a relationship of analogy.

This status of metaphor is, for Derrida, the one supported by the tradition, and that Aristotle’s text endorses on its face. More precisely, the theory of metaphor belongs to the theory of lexis, which Derrida glosses as “l’acte de langage lui-même (énonciation, diction, élocution, lexis),” and which exists to make manifest the thought or meaning or sense (dianoia) belonging to a given individual (for example, a character in a work of tragedy): “La différence entre la dianoia et la lexis tient à ce que la première n’est pas manifeste par elle-même. Or cette manifestation, l’acte de parole, constitue l’essence et l’opération même de la tragédie.” He continues in the following paragraph:

Il y a lexis et en elle métaphore dans la mesure où la pensée n’est pas manifeste

par elle-même, dans la mesure où le sens de ce qui est dit ou pensé n’est pas

phénomène de lui-même…. Il n’y a de métaphore que dans la mesure où

quelqu’un est supposé manifester par une énonciation telle pensée qui en elle-

même reste inapparente [this “inapparent” quality of thought or meaning evokes

the quality of being “peu apparente” belonging to the “structure” of which the

fold is an integral component], cachée ou latente. La pensée tombe sur la

métaphore, ou la métaphore échoit à la pensée au moment où le sens tente de

sortir de soi pour se dire, s’énoncer, se porter au jour de la langue. (M 277)

Now what these passages begin to show is that bound up with the problem of language, and specifically metaphor, as act (as what makes possible the appearance or manifestation of thought or meaning (sens)) is the additional problem of a certain relationality, that between

meaning or thought and language. Let us now try to analyze with Derrida the connection between the act and this relationality by focusing on the name, i.e., the noun within the

Aristotelian theory of lexis. Indeed, the problem, in Aristotle, of the relationship between meaning and its expression in or as language is tightly linked to the problem of the noun or substantive: Derrida holds that this latter is privileged in Aristotle because it (but also verbs, which share a “profound identity” with nouns and are thus essentially “nominalisable,” or given to use as substantives) is of itself meaningful: nouns (and verbs) “ont ceci en commun d’être intelligibles par eux-mêmes, d’avoir immédiatement rapport à un objet ou plutôt à une unité de sens” (M 277). Because the meaning of nouns, as well as all parts of speech that are basically reducible to substantives, is self-evident, they belong properly to the order of meaning. But in therefore belonging to meaning, nouns must at the same time actively constitute it. And this would seem to be so, though Derrida does not explicitly say as much, because of the triple character of the reference proper to the noun. On the one hand, a noun is proper when it signifies

“immédiatement” one thing, one “objet” or “unité de sens”: a noun refers (faire référence) “à une unité indépendante, unité d’une substance ou d’un étant, à travers l’unité d’un catégorème” (M

287); “Un nom est propre quand il n’a qu’un seul sens. Mieux, c’est seulement dans ce cas qu’il est proprement un nom” (M 295); “Le propre des noms, c’est de signifier quelque chose …, un

étant indépendant, identique à soi, et visé comme tel.” Even if a given noun has multiple meanings, those meanings remain in principle distinct from one another, and therefore could by right and reason, if not in fact, each have their own proper noun. Derrida quotes Aristotle: “Il est d’ailleurs indifférent qu’on attribue plusieurs sens au même mot, si seulement ils sont en nombre limité, car à chaque définition pourrait être assigné un mot différent” (M 282). But on the other hand, and as we have already seen, a noun is essentially detachable from what it signifies, and it is on this condition that it may enter into a metaphorical composition, and that a metaphor may

perform a transport, or transfer, of nouns that, in the best case, brings knowledge to light and produces truth. The immediate signification proper to the noun may always in principle, if not in fact, become mediate. And this can only be possible if a noun, in addition to taking part in (a) a reference to a single thing or referent, and (b) a transference between multiple things or referents, may give itself to (c) a certain inference, if I may be allowed a rather forced use of this word. That is, the noun must also be able to give itself to an importation of new meaning that comes from outside itself. In addition to the transport of signification characteristic of metaphor, a simultaneous apport of additional meaning, taking place through the detachability that is also proper to the noun, must also be able to take place for a metaphor to be what it is. In this way, not only may a noun enter into the composition of a given metaphor, but into the unfolding of discourse and, ultimately, the total system of the metaphysical chain. It can thereby participate in the movement of mimesis, whose chief characteristic is to give rise to new knowledge and, ultimately, to facilitate the manifestation of the whole by “saying what is.” Derrida thus quotes

Aristotle (here speaking specifically of the pleasure associated with mimesis): “les mots

(onomata) ont une signification (semainei ti) ; par conséquent ce sont les mots qui nous apportent quelque connaissance qui sont les plus agréables” (284, my italics). The apport of

“quelque connaissance” prefigures the interiorizing apport of physis’ unfolding (i.e., mimesis

“n’apporte pas de l’extérieur le pli de son redoublement …”).

But if it is proper to a noun to signify both immediately and mediately, to refer and transfer but also to infer, so to speak, that is, to import or apporte, then a certain relationality must also be proper to it. But this consequence was, in truth, visible from the beginning of

Derrida’s comments on the relationship between dianoia and lexis. Though language

(represented exemplarily by nouns, and more broadly by all words subject to substantivization) belongs from the start to the order of meaning (“ils [nouns and verbs, but by extension all words

that are nominalisable] constituent l’ordre de la phonè sémantikè” (M 277)), there nevertheless exists in Aristotle an a priori difference between language and meaning, and this is due to the latter’s inability to manifest itself by or through itself. I recall that “Il y a lexis et en elle métaphore dans la mesure où la pensée n’est pas manifeste par elle-même, dans la mesure où le sens de ce qui est dit ou pensé n’est pas phénomène de lui-même.” In itself (“en elle-même”), thought “reste inapparente, cachée ou latente.” What needs to be understood here is that, on this reading of Aristotle and the tradition that flows from him, the difference between meaning and its phenomenalization (first and foremost in language), and the act connecting the two are equiprimordial. From this it follows that among the configuration of terms involving, for example, meaning, language, act, and relationality, not one of them may be said logically to precede the others. There is meaning insofar as meaning is able to make itself manifest (in language); but the self-manifestation of meaning, i.e., the act by which meaning appears, is unthinkable without a concomitant division separating meaning from its manifestation. Here we find what is in fact a prefiguring of Derrida’s comment, some twenty-five pages later in “La mythologie blanche,” on a certain “history” of subjectivity-as-presence’s transformation into self-presence, which is also the “history” of truth’s transformation into “proximité” and

“propriété” (properness, but also propriety, property, among other possible meanings) “de la subjectivité à elle-même” (M 303). Without taking up the question of history and its relationship to subjectivity as self-presence, we can say that the point, at this stage of Derrida’s reading of

Aristotle, is that the thought of a particular meaning’s unity (but the unity of a given meaning,

Derrida recalls elsewhere in this essay, is always and everywhere tied to meaning-as-unity, or meaning itself, as the essence, the very principle, of language and of philosophy: “L’univocité est l’essence, ou mieux, le telos du langage. Cet idéal aristotélicien, aucune philosophie, en tant que

telle, n’y a jamais renoncé. Il est la philosophie” (M 295)34), the thought of a particular meaning’s unity necessitates a primary displacement that is, in truth, constitutive of that unity, that makes possible such a unity only insofar as it is a self-unity. The theory of meaning Derrida locates in Aristotle is not possible without the thought of a certain relationality folded into meaning as such, and that complicates from the start any particular meaning’s supposed simplicity. To be what it is, a meaning must have already left itself, so to speak (“sortir de soi,” as Derrida says). This is as much to say that meaning is from the start in language, that the “act” of its “manifestation,” of a certain fold, has already begun. It is the very status of a meaning as a self, then, as necessarily “in relation to” itself – meaning as already displaced from itself – that is being thought here, and it is just this thought of self that puts in question any meaning’s simple unity. In other words, meaning is only itself because it is meaning-in-relation-to-itself; and yet it is this very relationality that originally complicates, or “adds” a fold to, the “itself” of meaning.

From the beginning, then, the division between meaning and the act of its manifestation in language is, in a certain way, blurred. Therefore, the privilege that meaning enjoys in Aristotle and the tradition he informs cannot but be imperiled if “the act of language itself” is, from the start, complicating it. But while the difference between meaning or thought and language is at issue here, this certainly does not mean that there is simply no difference between them. And neither does it mean that lexis, as Derrida is thinking it here (and by extension metaphor), would somehow supersede the substantive unity of dianoia, that language’s positional act of manifestation or presentation would somehow supersede, in the order of concepts, meaning’s self-presence. Indeed, it is just as much the lingual act, as well as the self-contained force or presence that such an act would have to draw upon in order to act, as it is meaning’s supposed

34 Derrida continues: “Aristote reconnaît qu’un mot peut avoir plusieurs sens. C’est un fait. Mais ce fait n’a droit de langage que dans la mesure où la polysémie est finie, où les différentes significations sont en nombre limité et surtout assez distinctes, chacune restant une et identifiable. Le langage n’est ce qu’il est, langage, que pour autant

unity, that Derrida is at least beginning to interrogate with his comments here. Let me now try to separate out specifically the question of the forceful act that is proper to lexis from my comments up to this point. If a meaning is originally displaced from itself, and if it is precisely on this condition that it should have the chance to express itself – that is, to act – as the meaning that it is

(i.e., as a self), then the joining of meaning to itself by way of language must at the same time be a disjoining. The relation originally “added” to a meaning, and that complicates its supposed unity, must simultaneously be a lack. In other words, the relation is here precisely not something that is added to a meaning. It is not that first there is meaning, to which subsequently is added a relating or corresponding noun that bears the burden of, that performs the work of, reference.

Nothing – precisely, nothing – is “added” to dianoia, and this is because there is not only no act of adding, but no act of the expression of meaning, to be found in it. The act, performed by language, exemplarily by the noun, joining meaning to itself, paradoxically undoes that joining, which is to say, undoes meaning from the beginning. The “undoing” we are zeroing in on is precisely not an act; it is a kind of absolute passivity at the heart of the force that would, nevertheless and paradoxically, allow for the act of meaning’s manifestation in language.

Dividing a meaning from itself, interposing an original difference into a given meaning, is a certain indifference, or lack of differentiation, concerning the language-meaning distinction.

From the beginning, language’s act is in meaning, but this act acts in order to deactivate the very principle of its own activity, i.e., the essential and self-contained force that should properly belong to meaning and allow for its manifestation.

And yet, to repeat, this does not mean that there is simply no difference between language and meaning. Indeed, the problem we are gradually coming around to is the problem of a “between” – what, as we have seen, Derrida calls an interval, what he will go on to call a

qu’il peut alors maîtriser et analyser la polysémie. Sans reste. Une dissémination non maîtrisable n’est même pas une polysémie, elle appartient au dehors du langage” (M 295).

“partage” – located in the language-meaning relationship. The original complication we have just located “between” lexis and dianoia is, as it happens, the first indication that the essential interiority proper to physis is itself originally complicated because in a constitutive relationship to a non-oppositional “outside.” And this will be so because, pace the Aristotle of the tradition, metaphor is not, or not simply, that in which physis binds itself to the human being and consequently makes its appearance. The tripartite structure of reference we honed in on above

(that bringing together reference, transference, and in-ference35) does not purely serve the purposes of knowledge and the self-presentation of presence by way of dialectical synthesis.

Between physis and its self-presentation, both in and through metaphor (but, I repeat, what is the difference between – what is the “between” between, the partage between – these prepositions?) a relational fold does not, strictly speaking, take place. “Taking place,” rather, is a certain displacement not unlike the one we have just seen, having followed a specific thread in Derrida connecting metaphor, and more broadly mimesis, as manifestation of analogy to the Artistotelian theory of “l’acte de langage lui-même.” This primary displacement, what we could equally call an essential incompleteness, characterizes any given meaning, and is due to a fundamental relationality inhering in that meaning. In other words, the relationality traditionally reserved for language, and that determines language as secondary in relation, precisely, to the unity of its referent or signified, determines the referent or signified as well. Derrida will claim that this relationality points toward the delimitation of truth itself: language (language-as-metaphor) intervenes in truth’s manifestation because it belongs to a fold thanks to which meaning or sense

35 This assemblage of terms evokes the “mouvement de férence (transférence, référence, différence)” that, per Sauf le nom, carries words beyond themselves toward God (SN 61), who is perhaps the same as the Word (cf. Derrida’s comment that some translate “Wort” in Angelus Silesius’ Cherubinic Wanderer “par Dieu, tout simplement” (SN 58)). We will eventually see that this concern with the Word is not at all foreign to metaphor’s functioning in Derrida. Cf. also “Circonfession” and the “impossible port” that is related to the bearing of a secret name, a “port” whose “portée partout s’écrit pour qui sait lire et s’intéresse au comportement d’une férence, à ce qui précède et circonvient en préférence, référence, transférence, différance, ainsi me porté-je vers le nom caché sans qu’il soit jamais écrit à l’état civil” (C 93).

(“le sens”) may appear as the possibility of non-truth and non-sense. In and through this fold, language has not yet been “born,” is not yet itself. Or, as Derrida seems to state, in not being itself, language comes paradoxically to be itself:

Dans le non-sens, le langage n’est pas encore né…. La lexis n’est elle-même, si

l’on peut dire, que dans l’instance où le sens est apparu mais où la vérité peut

encore être manquée, quand la chose ne s’y manifeste pas encore en acte. Moment

du sens possible comme possibilité de non-vérité. Moment du détour où la vérité

peut toujours se perdre, la métaphore appartient bien à la mimesis, à ce pli de la

physis, à ce moment où la nature, se voilant d’elle-même, ne s’est pas encore

retrouvée dans sa propre nudité, dans l’acte de sa propriété. (M 288)

II. Nature Reflects Nature: Genius and the Idea (of Metaphor)

Yet at the same time this is what, according to the tradition, makes mimesis, and a fortiori metaphor, possible: what necessitates the combination of particular meanings into a composition, which composition is always a mimetic composition that the human being, as the being to whom imitation is most proper, effects in the name of the manifestation of the whole, of meaningfulness generally, rather than any one particular meaning or any given assemblage of particular meanings. Indeed, Derrida is, to a significant extent in “La mythologie blanche,” interested to show that, classically speaking, metaphor and metaphysics are not at all foreign to each other. Despite the seemingly mutually exclusive positions of (a) thinkers who contend that metaphysics is derivative of a primary metaphoricity, and (b) those who claim that metaphysics ultimately subordinates its metaphors to a perfect univocity of meaning, said positions are

founded on shared presuppositions.36 It is therefore, at least at this stage of my analysis of

Derrida, not yet clear that the relationality dividing a particular meaning from itself must be thought in conjunction with what at one point in “La mythologie blanche” Derrida refers to as

“Un autre partage” (M 286) separating the human being, properly understood as capable of representation and thus a maker of metaphors, from himself and thus from his privileged place in the Aristotelian chain of being. Though a given word, or assemblage of words making up a given metaphorical composition, may be incomplete in itself, the given is always, Derrida tells us, traditionally doubled by a paradigm of metaphorization, i.e., by a non-metaphorical idea of metaphor. Even though such a paradigm is itself only definable according to a metaphor, this latter is not just any metaphor, but a metaphor of metaphor, the most excellent metaphor, that which, though not identical to its ultimate ideal, stands in a relationship of analogy with it.

Between human language and logos, between the sensible world and physis as the generative source of all mimetic representation, stands metaphor as that which perpetually and continuously joins these oppositions, and which gives the human being a temporary residence, so to speak, in which to dwell before finally passing over to his proper place of origin. Metaphor, like mimesis, is a waystation or port of call, and the human being is always in the process of coming back to the “structure peu apparente” that is his house. Being in metaphor, he may not yet have arrived at his final destination, but he nonetheless knows where he is, and is turned in the right direction, oriented by the shining, sun-like Idea (of metaphor). “Comme la mimesis, la métaphore revient à la physis, à sa vérité et à sa présence”; “Tout l’onomatisme qui commande la théorie de la métaphore, toute la doctrine aristotélicienne des noms simples … est faite pour assurer des havres de la vérité et de propriété” (M 291). Commenting on Du Marsais’s Traité des Tropes,

36 Rodolphe Gasché’s “The Eve of Philosophy: On ‘Tropic’ Movements and Syntactic Resistance in Derrida’s White Mythology” provides a good overview of Derrida’s interest in the “relations, exchange, commerce, or complicity” between the positions, paradigmatic for the tradition, privileging either metaphor or philosophy, and shows how this gives way, in “La mythologie blanche,” to more “‘properly’ Derridean statements on metaphor” (3).

Derrida writes that the particular metaphor of the temporary residence or dwelling is privileged in that it both describes and realizes the human being’s place in the world, i.e., his place in analogical relation to the world as a whole. The metaphor of the “demeure empruntée” itself effectively serves as a “demeure empruntée” for him,

est là pour signifier la métaphore ; c’est une métaphore de la métaphore ;

expropriation, être-hors-de-chez-soi, mais encore dans une demeure, hors de chez

soi mais dans un chez-soi où l’on se retrouve, se reconnaît, se rassemble ou se

ressemble, hors de soi en soi. C’est la métaphore philosophique comme détour

dans (ou en vue de) la réappropriation, la parousie, la présence à soi de l’idée dans

sa lumière.37 (M 302)

If in residing in metaphor, the human being cannot accede, properly, to knowledge (either of a thing, implying the necessity of a definition of said thing;38 or of the whole of what is generally), he is nevertheless able to position himself in relation to it thanks to his intermediary status, standing as he does between, e.g., the sensible and the intelligible, language and meaning, etc.

“Ce recours à une métaphore pour donner l’ « idée » de la métaphore, voilà qui interdit la définition mais qui pourtant assigne métaphoriquement un arrêt, une limite, un lieu fixe : la métaphore/demeure…. [C]haque métaphore [peut] toujours se déchiffrer à la fois comme figure

37 At one point in his discussion of “le propre du soleil,” which is setting up the comments on the idea of metaphor as primary tropic movement through which moves “la vérité de l’être en présence,” Derrida refers parenthetically to the sun, which he has just identified as the very paradigm of the sensible, as “Idée” (M 299). The capitalizing of “Idea” would seem to be a reference, among other things, to the regulative use of reason in Kant: reason regulates the understanding in prescribing it an asymptotic approach toward a horizon line that, while unreachable, is always in view and thus serves to orient the understanding. A final destination for the understanding would boil down to a single principle of unity. Being unreachable, it would nevertheless “exist” as an ideal regulating the judgments produced by the understanding in order to grant them the unity of a system. The “idea in the Kantian sense” is of course a persistent issue in early as in late Derrida (more particularly by way of Husserl in the early work); Geoffrey Bennington sketches out a problematics of analogy in Derrida that connects metaphor to the Kantian Idea in “Metaphor and Analogy in Derrida.” I discuss Derrida’s engagement with Kant, in particular through the motif of interest and its connection to architectonics, in the next chapter. 38 “Or si la métaphore (ou la mimesis en général) vise à un effet de connaissance, on ne pourra pas en traiter sans la mettre en rapport avec un savoir portant sur la définition : sur ce qu’est proprement, essentiellement ou accidentellement, la chose dont on parle…. [L]’idéal de tout langage, et en particulier de la métaphore, étant de

particulière et comme paradigme du processus même de la métaphorisation : idéalisation et réappropriation” (M 302-3). The proportions of this process eventually swell to encompass the very movement of history: Derrida sums up a host of philosophers’ positions on metaphor by stating that, understood in terms of its “generalization,” metaphor is determined as a provisional turning away from meaning that may be “unavoidable” but that, for that very reason, makes of it a history, specifically “histoire en vue et dans l’horizon de la réappropriation circulaire du sens propre” (M 323). Early in the essay, criticisms directed at the position, represented by Polyphile in Anatole France’s Le Jardin d’Epicure, that philosophy and its language are dependent on a primary metaphoricity, are at least in part aimed at the subjugation of metaphor’s turnings to historicism and its semanticist prerogative, and this at the expense of “syntax”:

Dans cette critique du langage philosophique, s’intéresser à la métaphore … c’est

donc un parti pris symboliste. C’est s’intéresser surtout au pôle non syntaxique,

non systématique, à la « profondeur » sémantique, à l’aimantation du similaire

plutôt qu’à la combinaison positionnelle, disons, « métonymique », au sens défini

par Jakobson qui souligne justement l’affinité entre la prédominance du

métaphorique, le symbolisme … et le romantisme (plus historien, voire

historiciste, et plus herméneute). (M 255-56)

It is not difficult to see, then, how the poet, as well as poetry overall (M 283-4), come historically to occupy an intermediary status, standing between the philosopher who “n’a jamais qu’une chose à dire” (M 296), i.e., “la vérité du sens,” and the sophist who wallows in “la contingence des signifiants.” The poet, by contrast, “joue de la multiplicité des signifiés, mais pour rejoindre l’identité du sens” (M 296 n. 35).

Given thus the ways in which metaphor is reappropriated by the tradition, or the ways in

donner à connaître la chose même, le tour sera meilleur s’il nous approche davantage de sa vérité essentielle ou propre” (M 294-95).

which metaphor reappropriates the tradition in the latter’s name – and this is one reason why

Derrida states that “La détermination de la vérité de l’être en présence passe par le détour de cette tropique,” i.e., the metaphorical detour that should inevitably turn back to its generative source; and why, moments later, he writes that “La philosophie, comme théorie de la métaphore, aura d’abord été une métaphore de la théorie” (M 303) – given, then, the reappropriation of and by metaphor that is centrally at stake, it is not yet clear that metaphor impedes or undoes, instead of enacting, the mimetic linking of particular meanings to the whole of meaning generally.

Metaphor as act, and the energy or force on which it draws, are not yet in question.

It is through the interval or partage between meaning and itself that Derrida will come to interrogate metaphor’s status. Now if language’s telos is unequivocal meaning in its full presentation, and if that presentation accomplishes itself through the continuous unfolding of truth in relationships of resemblance which it is naturally proper to the human being to perceive and to represent or imitate, it nevertheless remains that, to repeat, resemblance is not identity.

For there to be knowledge, not only of this or that object, but generally speaking, a difference must be supposed to divide, to give but one pertinent case, subject and object. Indeed, it is this a priori division that ought to give rise to the work that language performs as representational or mimetic language, and to metaphor as a syllogistic operation (M 285, M 285-86 n. 29). If, for example, the object to be known does not give itself to man in the very fullness of its actuality, its presence may nonetheless be deduced via a logical process, which process reproduces in nuce the larger movement constituting the Aristotelian chain of being:

Une prime de plaisir [i.e., the pleasure of acquiring knowledge thanks to the

human being’s ability to recognize and imitate resemblances] récompense donc le

développement économique du syllogisme caché dans la métaphore, la perception

théorique de la ressemblance. Mais l’énergie de cette opération [this “energy” is a

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reference to actuality which, Derrida reminds us, plays a “rôle décisif” in

Aristotle’s philosophy] suppose néanmoins que la ressemblance ne soit pas une

identité. La mimesis ne procure le plaisir qu’à la condition de donner à voir en

acte ce qui néanmoins ne se donne pas en acte, seulement dans son double très

ressemblant, son mimème. (M 285)

Paradigmatic in this situation is the sun. Derrida notes that, per Aristotle, the sun cannot be properly known because, every evening, it disappears over the horizon. The human being cannot, for this reason, keep it under her watchful gaze. The most proper attribute of that which illuminates all things is to disappear from sight. From this fact concerning the perception of the sun, Derrida then moves to an idea of the sun, which idea, he claims, holds for the perception of objects in general. Via an argument that will end up becoming something of a signature move throughout his work, he states that the being of any sensible entity must be determined by its necessarily possible non-presence.39 As the sun is itself never fully present to the human observer, is defined by its absenting itself, it becomes the very model of the sensible, i.e., the very idea governing sensible perception. “Le sensible en général ne limite pas la connaissance pour des raisons intrinsèques à la forme de présence de la chose sensible ; mais d’abord parce que l’aistheton peut toujours ne pas se présenter, peut se cacher, s’absenter. Il ne se donne pas sur commande et sa présence ne se maîtrise pas. Or le soleil, de ce point de vue, est l’objet sensible par excellence” (M 299). It is, furthermore, just this necessary possibility of non- presence, the necessity that the thing not be fully present to the subject, that conditions the distinction between an entity’s essence and its secondary attributes and that, in turn, opens the possibility of both its self-presentation as self-expression (its status as a self, in other words), and

39 In the short text “Hap,” Geoffrey Bennington helpfully condenses this argumentative move of Derrida’s by citing the well-known analysis of the postcard (“Because a letter always might not arrive at its destination”), and emphasizing its generality: “‘Necessary possibility’ arguments (Derrida’s contribution to logic) seem (necessarily?) to take the form of a ‘necessarily-possibly-not’” (170).

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its mimetic representation (exemplarily in language) by the human being. Whence its inclusion in a metaphor:

Bien qu’il en soit inséparable, le propre ne se confond pas avec l’essence. Cet

écart permet sans doute le jeu de la métaphore. Celle-ci peut manifester des

propriétés, rapporter les unes aux autres des propriétés prélevées sur l’essence de

choses différentes, les donner à connaître à partir de leur ressemblance, sans

toutefois énoncer directement, pleinement, proprement l’essence, sans donner à

voir elle-même la vérité de la chose même.

Les significations transportées sont celles des propriétés attribuées, non

celles de la chose même, sujet ou substance. (M 296-97)

And a little earlier: “l’idéal de tout langage, et en particulier de la métaphore, étant de donner à connaître la chose même, le tour sera meilleur s’il nous approche davantage de sa vérité essentielle ou propre. L’espace du langage, le champ de ses écarts est précisément ouvert par la différence entre l’essence, le propre et l’accident” (M 295).

Yet what is crucial to understand here is that the consequence of the a priori non- presence of the object is that same object’s a priori entry into the relationality of the mimetic system. As was the case in the lexis-dianoia opposition that we examined earlier, a certain relationality is equiprimordial: here, it is a question of the thing and its “double très ressemblant, son mimème.” Co-present, as it were, with the very existence of any object whatsoever is (a) said object’s non-presence and (b) its simultaneous repetition in its mimetic double. Put differently, representation of the object, its mimetic doubling, is already taking place, at the same time as the object’s presenting itself, which act of presenting never therefore simply happens. The object absents itself in presenting itself, and this is because its being is coterminous with its substitution by its mimème: that which it is not, yet which, at the same time, is not other to it: “Le mimème

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n’est ni la chose même ni tout à fait autre chose” (M 286 n. 29). In terms of language, we can say that the thing is already lingual: in a manner similar to what we saw in the lexis-dianoia relationship, language (here, it is a question specifically of the name of a thing, the noun that best represents it) adds itself, originally, to the object. But as this addition of a name must also be thought in conjunction with the disappearance of the referent, it must be said that the referent is never properly named, and that the name never properly names. Originally disappearing, the referent is neither properly known, nor properly named. Speaking thus of “l’objet sensible par excellence,” Derrida writes: “le soleil sensible est toujours im-proprement connu et donc im- proprement nommé” (M 299).

But the original addition of the name that coincides with the original absence of the referent is itself beholden to the logic of supplementarity I have begun to sketch out. If the name, i.e., the noun that should properly represent an object for cognition, is part and parcel of what an object is in principle, its “addition” cannot, for all that, count as meaningful. By this I mean that

Derrida is not here simply hypostatizing language over meaning or reference, and neither is he reducing the status of things and meanings to words. The noun or the name, more generally the linguistic, is not for Derrida a model by which to understand the problems he is devoting his attention to in “La mythologie blanche.” But if the noun is not in and of itself meaningful, this is not because, in representing its object, it would end up misrepresenting it or serve as an untrustworthy means of access to it. Misrepresentation, in this case, would still provide meaning, would still in the final instance be representation, just in a negative mode. Rather, it is a question of the referent presenting itself as mis-(re)presented, originally so. And originally here means irreducibly: the “addition” of the name to its thing has never happened simply once. The work of representation the name should perform does not take place, and this not-taking-place is irreducible, as well as, in a certain sense, multiple. This is precisely why Derrida avers, a little

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earlier in the text, that the sun’s name – in addition, then, to the sensible object itself – is itself constituted by a relational system. Speaking of the sun in its essential act, i.e., in its properness or according to that by which it properly expresses itself, he writes that “Si le soleil peut « semer »

[“sowing” being the word chosen, in Aristotle’s example to which I referred above, to represent the sun as it “sows” its light, an action for which there is apparently no proper term in Ancient

Greek], c’est que son nom est inscrit dans un système de relations qui le constitue” (M 291). The sun’s lack of name being irreducible, it must, so to speak, go by more than one name. The sun’s anonymity has to be thought in conjunction with a polyonymy.

Now before we tackle further the consequences of this constitutive relationality as concerns the multiplicity of metaphor, and how that multiplicity (which is linked to the irreducible not-taking-place of representation by way of mimesis) is implicated in a certain metaphorical supplementarity, let me take just a moment to bring out the specifically active character of metaphor that the foregoing pages have been pointing toward. We have just seen that a fundamental relationality divides the thing from itself, implicating its disappearance or absence in its very presence, and that it is just this division that both makes possible and necessitates the work of the thing’s self-presentation. We have further seen that this same division opens, as Derrida says, “the space of language.” Inaugurated in the division of the thing from itself is the activity of self-expression belonging to the thing, its presenting itself to the human being in language, i.e., in the form of its “double très ressemblant, son mimème.” And we have equally seen that mirroring this presentation is the work of representation that the human being, as the being for whom it is natural to know and to represent the resemblances that appear naturally in the world, most properly performs. Nature reflects nature, then, as things reveal themselves to the human being by way of their mimèmes, and the human being imitates, in the form of mimèmes, said things. Between one nature and another (that of things to make

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themselves known via resemblances, and that of the human being to notice and imitate or reproduce said resemblances in knowledge) lies an axiomatic and natural correspondence (an analogy), a single and unified condition for their a priori relating: the naturalness (“la naturalité”) of mimesis’ movement as “the power of truth as unveiling.” And between one act and another (that of things, presenting themselves to the human being, and that of the human being, representing those things) lies a certain energy and a certain productivity. The indicator of these latter two is the mimème, whose bifurcation between object and subject, the thing known and the human being who knows, is rooted not just in nature itself, but in that proxy for nature, he to whom the naturalness of mimesis has been gifted by nature itself, the human being who, as maker of metaphors, is properly called a genius. Like physis – for which it is proper to appear

(first of all to itself), to make resemblances (but first of all its own resemblance to itself), and whose appearance is the expression of a power or energy that exists to give expression (above all to itself) – the genius concentrates in herself both sides, objective and subjective, of the activity of mimesis. In the provocative and elliptical final pages of the chapter entitled “L’ellipse du soleil : l’énigme, l’incompréhensible, l’imprenable,” Derrida, developing Aristotle’s comments on the natural gift, or genius, of making metaphors in the Poetics and the Rhetoric, indicates that this genius does not merely consist of perceiving and subsequently representing resemblances that unfold systematically out of nature. It is not, that is, as if the human being, in a state of relative passivity, perceives the activity by which phenomena relate to one another via their resemblances, which relating, in its taking place over time, would constitute a teleological gathering together synonymous with the systematicity of physis in its totality. Rather, in exercising her metaphorical powers, the genius herself participates in nature’s unveiling. She does not merely bear witness to it, but, in the mimetic act itself, demonstrates it and knowingly performs it. This is why Derrida can say that the naturalness of nature is given (“confiée”) to the

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human being as speaking being, and that this naturalness, in being given, is gathered up (or gathers itself: “se rassemble”), reflected (or reflects itself: “se mire”), and is known (or knows itself: “se connaît”) in or through human nature.

La mimesis est donc, en ce sens, un mouvement « naturel ». Cette naturalité est

réduite et confiée par Aristote à la parole de l’homme. Plutôt qu’une réduction, ce

geste constitutif de la métaphysique et de l’humanisme est une détermination

téléologique : la naturalité en général se dit, se rassemble, se connaît, s’apparaît,

se mire et se « mime » par excellence et en vérité dans la nature humaine. (M

283)

Derrida’s use of pronominal verbs is significant here: they mark a simultaneously active and passive status belonging to the genius – but also to nature – who both serves as a means for the teleological gathering and unveiling of nature, and herself performs that gathering and that unveiling. The double character of the genius, both representing and presenting the naturalness of nature, is therefore the double character of mimesis, which takes place properly through the simultaneous passive reception, and active gathering up, of nature by the human being. Her privilege, or her genius, is maintained in this reflective simultaneity: she alone takes part in this way in physis’ unveiling. To human nature alone (“à la physique de l’homme, à l’anthropophysique” as Derrida puts it) belongs truth’s power of revelation: “Le pouvoir de vérité, comme dévoilement de la nature (physis) par la mimesis, appartient congénitalement à la physique de l’homme, à l’anthropophysique” (Ibid.). Unlike for the animal, imitation in man is not an unthinking gesturing, deprived of truth and of the logos. Animals, for this reason, do not make metaphors, cannot be geniuses:

La condition de la métaphore (de la bonne et vraie métaphore) est la condition de

la vérité. Il est donc normal que l’animal, privé de logos, de phonè semantikè, de

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stoikheion, etc., soit aussi incapable de mimesis. La mimesis ainsi déterminée

appartient au logos, ce n’est pas la singerie animale, la mimique gestuelle ; elle est

liée à la possibilité du sens et de la vérité dans le discours. (M 282-83)

The genius of metaphor, or the unique human ability to make metaphors, is more properly therefore a genuine doing or power, “le pouvoir métaphorique” (M 291), in that it mirrors, as it dovetails with, “le pouvoir de vérité, comme dévoilement de la nature.” The genius of metaphor is a power of metaphor that signals the human being’s active participation in physis’ unveiling.

She herself, in other words, powerfully unveils nature. Or, what from an Aristotelian point of view should come down to the same thing: those human beings who best embody the genius of metaphor, those geniuses who most fully possess the natural genius proper to humanity in general, unveil nature: “certains ont le génie de la métaphore, savent mieux que d’autres apercevoir les ressemblances et dévoiler la vérité de la nature” (M 292).

To sum up: the unquestionable or axiomatic reflection of mimèmes subjective and objective implies a central mimetic practice whose exemplar is the genius. Being privileged over all other beings, the genius is granted the power to make relations of resemblance appear.

Crucially, this privilege is natural: “le pouvoir métaphorique est un don naturel” (M 291);

“l’invention des métaphores est un don inné, naturel, congénital.” And being natural, it cannot be put in question: it is simply unquestionable, it is axiomatic, that nature should give to the human being the gift of metaphorical exchange. And it is, in turn, simply unquestionable, axiomatic, that he should own innately his gift, that nothing should intervene to take this power of invention away from him. This is at least one reason why Derrida refers to the gift of the metaphorical power that is inborn in man as a “Ressource imprenable” (M 292). It is also why the human being, who learns through imitation, is that special animal who has learned to imitate: “Seul il prend plaisir à imiter, seul il apprend à imiter, seul il apprend par l’imitation” (M 283). Thanks to

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mimesis, he may learn about the world around him, and may learn to do many things. But what is apparently beyond question is his learning to imitate: that is, his initial learning to learn, and this through (“par”) mimesis. It is just natural, self-evident, that a baseline imitating or representing is already taking place (“il apprend à imiter,” but also “il apprend par l’imitation”; which of these comes first?), and that the human being alone, in his genius, is the agent who performs it, who makes it happen. This learning (apprendre) is both inalienable and unlearn-able

(imprenable).40 From one axiom to another, then – from the natural giving of natural gifts to humanity by nature, to the natural taking and possession of said gifts by humanity – a simple and continuous line runs connecting the human being in its nature to all of nature, making it a principal, privileged actor – a genius, precisely – in the gradual and total emergence of physis.

Human power is therefore indissociable from truth’s power. It is bound to the very possibility of meaning and of truth: “[mimesis] est liée à la possibilité du sens et de la vérité dans le discours.”

More precisely, human power is itself made possible by its connection to meaning and truth. It is, in other terms, a potentiated form of truth’s pure power or energy, and is possible only as such. Its possibility just is its power, and the specular nature of the relationship between possibility and power, together forming a single resource, points toward a place of pure, untouched energy as their first and final source.

40 In support of the claim that, in Aristotle, the genius of metaphor is a “ressource imprenable,” Derrida cites the Budé edition’s French translation of the Poetics: “« Exceller dans les métaphores », « c’est la seule chose qu’on ne peut pas prendre à autrui et c’est un indice de dons naturels »” (M 292). The standard English translation of the Poetics gives the following rendering of that passage: “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius” (1459a). Despite the difference, in French, between prendre (broadly, “to take”) and apprendre (“to learn”), a difference a comparison of the French and English translations of Aristotle registers (where the former has “la seule chose qu’on ne peut pas prendre à autrui,” the latter gives “the one thing that cannot be learnt”), the central point I want to bring out here is the naturalness and the self-evidence of man’s power to represent the natural world, in, e.g., his making of metaphors. If this power is simply natural (and thus proper) to man, it neither is something that he needs to learn, nor is something that can be taken away from him. The difference between prendre and apprendre is here ultimately superficial. It is superseded by the problematic of possession, which is to do with what is properly owned or properly one’s own, and with just how such a proper property might be possible at all – thanks to the presentation of presence in the present.

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III. The Gift of Metaphor’s Obliteration: Through the Example

Now it is evidently this energy source that Derrida is aiming to attack in “La mythologie blanche.” The following remarks on metaphor’s usure (a motif I will examine in the following chapter) make this clear: “On s’intéressera d’abord à une certaine usure de la force métaphorique dans l’échange philosophique. L’usure ne surviendrait pas à une énergie tropique destinée à rester, autrement, intacte ; elle constituerait au contraire l’histoire même et la structure de la métaphore philosophique” (M 249). And given the central importance of the sun in the classical theorization of metaphor, we should say that the energy this source provides is a solar energy.

Because metaphor requires an idea of metaphor to make it intelligible, said idea must be synonymous with a primary tropic movement (“tropic” in a sense analogous to that attributed to the sun in its circular movement through the celestial sphere) circumscribing the indefinite production and functioning of all metaphors within a single, unified horizon of metaphorization.

This horizon would guarantee the illustrative purpose of any particular metaphor which, imperfect though it might be, should still indicate a baseline analogy connecting the perception of sensible objects (via the physical eye), and the natural and self-evident activity of representation axiomatically performed by the mind’s eye (the nous or theoretical organ). It is just this natural activity of representing, this natural resource, that, in its turn, calls for a corresponding and symmetrical presence, a natural source making it possible while supplying it with power. The eye’s ability to see requires a sun to shed – to sow – light, that is, to make things visible, to give them to the eye as visible. This is why Derrida can say that “le tour du soleil aura toujours été la trajectoire de la métaphore”; and that “L’opposition même du paraître et du disparaître, tout le lexique du phainesthai, de l’aletheia, etc., du jour et de la nuit, du visible et de

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l’invisible, du présent et de l’absent, tout cela n’est possible que sous le soleil.”41 And it is the naturalness of the sun’s trajectory that naturalizes the genius and her language, bringing into harmony the technical or artificial interventions of philosophical and metaphorical discourse with the functioning of natural languages. The sun, “en tant qu’il structure l’espace métaphorique de la philosophie, représente le naturel de la langue philosophique…. « [N]aturel » devrait toujours nous reconduire à la physis en tant que système solaire, ou, plus précisément, à une certaine histoire du rapport terre/soleil dans le système de la perception” (M 299).42

There is therefore “une certaine indissociabilité de système” (M 282) holding together metaphor with the rest of the links in the metaphysical chain. Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to say that “le logos, la mimesis, l’aletheia sont ici une seule et même possibilité” (M 283). But the congruence of these terms, or that at the level of the system they are not dissociable, is also, to echo Derrida, the mark of a difficulty for the idealizing and reappropriating tropic movement of

41 In Luce Irigaray, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger finds at work a very similar system of analogy. Though Irigaray “wants to free signification and metaphoric play from the ghostly grip of the phallus” (73) in the name of materialism, she does so by having recourse to the “metatrope” of the veil, which “commands a huge analogical network” in her œuvre. But Berger also picks out in Irigaray’s deployment of the veil certain “double dealings with metaphors in general and the metaphor of the veil in particular” (72). This would point toward “another possibility” of metaphor, one with Derridean resonances, and entail another sort of relationship between the sensible and the intelligible. See her “Textiles that Matter.” 42 Any ecocriticism or ecological mode of criticism worth its salt would need to take into account, rather than simply take for granted, just this problem of the naturalness of the solar system that connects the act of perceiving (perceiving, for example, that the environment must be saved, that life on Earth must be vouched for, that life in general (i.e., not just human life) needs to be responsibly appealed to) with what makes it possible as an act, i.e., solar energy. Claire Colebrook’s recent volumes of “essays on extinction” provide one good entry point for thinking about this problem. See, for example, her comments on the possibility of “inhuman perception” and “a world without organic perception” (23) in the opening essay of Death of the PostHuman: “we abstract from the human eye … to imagine what would be readable, after humans, in a mode analogous to the human eye…. Perhaps … the premature hailing of the world as already posthuman, needs to be tempered by the thought of the seeing brain that looks beyond itself.” And in the following paragraph: “This allows for a new thought of the brain’s self- extinguishing tendency” (24). See also Colebrook’s work with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, e.g., Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols, where they argue that human vision’s power to take stock of the Anthropocene has to begin with rooting vision in its constitutive blind spots. Without doing so, the problem of the very legibility of the damage done to the earth by human beings is uncritically avoided. It would be believed, e.g., that the marks left in the rock strata are “to scale,” i.e., that they are legible by “us.” But just who this “us” or “we” is, to whom belongs the power to look at the world and declare when, where, and to whom damage has been done, and who is responsible for it – in short, the human power of narrating the Anthropocence – should not be taken lightly. The “play of lights within the global narrative – of who, and when, and how – obscures the light of narrative as such: both the Anthropocene and its competitors [the authors speak of other “narratives” of climate change centering on capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc.] assume that the globe as a living system can be marked at certain points, and that these points are to

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Aristotelian metaphor. For if mimesis in its double character – subjective and objective mimesis

– is the means by which presence’s unquestionable source (re)presents itself to itself in a productive and re-appropriative act,43 this presentation of presence (as self-presence, then) is also, for all that, a gift. Indeed, the entire axiomatics of metaphorical genius we just explored above broaches an analogous problematics of the gift, a dynamic relationship of giving-and- taking that would seem to underlie the shared possibility of mimesis, meaning, and truth. Let me recall that it is in mimesis (thus in metaphor) that physis (re)discovers its presence to itself, i.e., that it gives itself to itself: “La nature y [in metaphor] retrouve toujours sa propre analogie, sa propre ressemblance à soi, et ne s’y accroît que d’elle-même. Elle s’y donne” (my italics).

Nature’s gift to itself is therefore, at the same time, its gift to the human being. Better, its gift to humanity is also its gift of humanity: nature’s gift is the metaphorical power that constitutes the human being as what he is, that is, as a genius, capable of making metaphors, and thus as a proxy for nature itself. And as such a proxy, the human being, in exercising his genius, pays nature back. He not only brings light to the world, but, more fundamentally, actively aids in the very constitution of the world as luminous. He does not simply relate to it as an object to be known, but, through metaphor, takes part in its engendering, engendering it as something knowable. In the context of the problematics of Aristotelian metaphor, this comes down to granting it a name.

scale. To question scale as such … is … to acknowledge that the forces from which various scales and narratives are proposed are multiple and irreducible to any register. To illuminate is to (at least in part) occlude” (8). 43 Derrida’s treatment, in La Voix et le phénomène, of the question of ideality in its authenticity in Husserl addresses just this problematic of presence. Ideality in its authentic mode underlies and unites its own indefinite repetition via its own presence to itself, its self-presence. Repetition, as a teleological process, then, signifies a productive act (“un acte producteur”), one that, as the ultimate source or “form” of meaning and life, gives rise to or produces particular, worldly significations or “contents.” In the absolute certainty of universal meaning, and through repetition, an “infinite diversity” may occur (may be produced, se produire) as meaningful. Cf. the following passage, where “le mode authentique de l’idéalité” is the ideality “qui est, qui peut être répétée indéfiniment dans l’identité de sa présence.” A little further on: “l’origine en sera [i.e., the origin of ideality will be] toujours la possibilité de la répétition d’un acte producteur. Pour que la possibilité de cette répétition puisse s’ouvrir idealiter à l’infini, il faut qu’une forme idéale assure cette unité de l’indéfiniment et de l’idealiter : c’est le présent ou plutôt la présence du présent vivant. La forme ultime de l’idéalité, celle dans laquelle en dernière instance on peut anticiper ou rappeler toute répétition, l’idéalité de l’idéalité est le présent vivant, la présence à soi de la vie transcendantale. La présence a toujours été et sera toujours, à l’infini, la forme dans laquelle, on peut le dire apodictiquement, se produira la diversité infinie des contenus” (VP 4-5).

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Here is yet another reason why Derrida puts so much emphasis on the sun’s anonymity in “La mythologie blanche”: it provides the paradigm for metaphorical production generally in that the human genius for making metaphors most clearly shows itself when, in a metaphorical composition in which one of the terms is lacking, that term must be invented: “Or il y a des cas, remarque Aristote, où l’un des termes manque. Il faut alors l’inventer” (M 289). The necessary absence of the referent “opens the space of language,” and therefore a certain capacity for invention on the part of the genius, who, in exercising his natural metaphorical gift, performs the work of nature itself: “Puisque l’invention des métaphores est un don inné, naturel, congénital, ce sera aussi un trait de génie” (M 292). Speaking in Aristotle’s name, Derrida can thus describe the turn of phrase (“le tour”) that the metaphorical power of invention produces as “plus généreux, générateur, génial,” not to mention that such a turn is also stronger, truer and more poetic: the invention of the genius turn of phrase would additionally count as the most excellent poetic gesture. The genius, having enjoyed the generosity of nature, here effectively pays down his debt. He has taken possession of his natural gift, that which generates him as a natural being, as his “ressource imprenable”; and in a perfectly symmetrical gesture, he generates, generously and in his turn, by a genius turn of phrase, the original present, the source of his gift. Metaphor thus put to use is, properly speaking, illuminating: not only because it provides an example of a good metaphor, but because it brings to light that which is, as illuminable. The paradigmatic example of this, in which the genius gives a name to the anonymous sun, is therefore properly illustrative: the example itself is “le plus illustre, l’illustrant par excellence, le lustre le plus naturel qui soit” (M 289). Because it is demonstrative of truth’s power and, by the same stroke, nature’s axiomatic generosity, the human being’s very use of metaphorical power – the very giving of the example, which therefore is no longer merely an example but exemplary, the most

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excellent gift of giving – is self-illuminating.44 Within this structure of the gift, in which every generous turn by which the gift circulates reflects and illuminates every other, it is just as accurate to say that nature gives an essential gift to man, as it is to say that man gives it to himself. Every use or example of metaphorical power is self-affirming because self-illuminating.

If human genius is generative of nature, it must follow that, being natural – for what could be more obvious, more natural, than for the human being to act according to, or to act out, his own nature? – it is self-generative.

It is also worth briefly noting that this essentially illustrative property of metaphor is in turn what redeems the recourse to metaphor in order to define metaphor. To define metaphor by way of metaphor is not, per the tradition, to fall into logical inconsistency, but to demonstrate, via metaphorical practice, the very idea of metaphor, the philosophical metaphor or metaphor of metaphor, i.e., the “détour dans (ou en vue de) la réappropriation, la parousie, la présence à soi de l’idée dans sa lumière” (my italics). Metaphors that show the idea of metaphor in actu are therefore “tropes définissants autant que définis” (M 301).

But there is more – and less – to the gift of metaphor than meets the ((re)presenting) eye here. The giving of the gift is, despite the axiomatically self-reflective structure I adumbrated above, not simple: it is not, that is, simply doubled by a symmetrical and specular pair, a taking,

44 Dana Hollander has examined exemplarity in relation to the singularity and translatability of “particular” languages in Derrida. Her book proceeds in a see-saw-like manner, describing instances of “duality” or “tension” she claims to find in Derrida, notably between (a) the resistance of particular languages to universalization, which threatens to close them off to otherness; and (b) the openness of particular languages to their others, which conversely raises the threat of a violent imposition of linguistic and cultural values by one particular on another, and thus the threat of a loss of particularity or “singularity.” This tension is framed by a background of universality common to all particular idioms, toward which they all strive, but which they also all resist. The effect of all this is the setting up of a coordinated multiplicity, of idioms joined together in symmetrical relations, in a symmetry maintained by “tension.” By contrast, I am hoping to show that the idiom is characterized by its asymmetry, both with respect to other idioms and to itself. Sarah Hammerschlag has also spoken of exemplarity in Derrida, but she too emphasizes a “tension between the universal and the particular,” specifically concerning the figure of the Jew or Jewishness. She writes that “the Jew represents an intensification of a universal structure. Not only is Jewishness a product of the self-estrangement that is constitutive of any claim to exemplarity, but the Jew is also already the bearer of a history that marks him as the figure of estrangement” (240). See especially 228-60 in The Figural Jew. Geoffrey Bennington provides a few remarks on the relationship between the example and the exemplary as tied to

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that would complete the event of appropriation in a circular movement of giving and receiving a proper gift, the proper gift, the most proper, appropriate, paradigmatic gift of (re)appropriation.

The gift of the present, in every instance – from presence to genius, from genius to presence, from genius to itself, from presence to itself – takes place, in mimesis, as a giving through, a giving by way of. Nature, in every instance, unveils itself, and truth exercises its power in nature’s unveiling, not in a direct manner, but only through or by way of (par) mimesis-as- metaphor. Between nature and the human being as genius, between the two kinds of mimesis that should axiomatically bind themselves to each other, the most natural event of presence’s self- presentation takes place through metaphor. What do I mean by this?

On the one hand, as concerns presence itself: in order to make itself present (and thus give itself as (a) present), presence has to make a detour through what should be a secondary resource, i.e., through mimesis and (but this is not exactly the same thing) metaphor, and this so as to show itself in its (supposedly) own, natural light: “détour dans (ou en vue de) la réappropriation, la parousie, la présence à soi de l’idée dans sa lumière”; “La détermination de la vérité de l’être en présence passe par [my italics] le détour de cette tropique [i.e., the tropic movement of metaphor connecting the sensible and intelligible planes, or connecting all metaphors to their singular idea]” (M 303); “Le pouvoir de vérité, comme dévoilement de la nature (physis) par [my italics] la mimesis, appartient congénitalement à la physique de l’homme, à l’anthropophysique”; “la physis … se présente, dans la vérité, par [my italics] la mimesis, le logos et la voix de l’homme” (M 296); “[la] délimitation philosophique de la métaphore se laisse déjà construire et travailler par [my italics] des « métaphores »” (M 301).

Presence, the proper source of genius’ gift, gives itself to itself by way of its very recipient, as though the gift of metaphor had been taken before it could be properly given. The act of giving

some of Derrida’s thoughts on metalanguage and metaphor in Glas in his “Notes towards a Discussion of Method and Metaphor in Glas.”

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by which presence should give or present itself to itself here becomes indissociable from its non- presentation because the reflexive movement that would turn it back toward itself is simultaneously a turning away, a detour. Presence’s gift to itself, its act of self-giving is at the same time a non-giving. Implied in this non-giving is the possibility of a non-representational metaphor, a metaphor without an idea of metaphor guiding its movement; or a genius who does not represent because deprived of his representing eye, or who is perhaps the inhabitant of a foreign planet without a solar system, of a rogue planet not bound to a star. The paradigm of metaphor as self-illuminating self-presence, present to itself because immanently self-contained, containing itself in itself, must, to be itself, originally leave itself and pass through the non-self of a non-mimetic metaphor.

Yet on the other hand, concerning human nature: the ability to make a metaphor, as natural resource, has also to make a detour, as though to draw its energy from a source other than itself. We have seen that this other source is traditionally the idea, the solar center around which the human being as terrestrial metaphor maker revolves. But “La mythologie blanche” wants to show that metaphorical power simultaneously involves another turning or revolution through which the production of metaphors must pass. In other words, the giving of an example of the idea of metaphor, the very operation of metaphorical substitution, cannot occur without being rerouted toward, and thus without first being substituted by, a second sun whose example illustrates the utter lack of (natural) genius at work in the making of metaphors. As opposed to the metaphysical sun whose trajectory is determined as a specular movement, a rising and falling that counts as an idealizing and interiorizing “retour à soi” (M 320) that powers metaphor’s reflective turns, metaphor’s second sun does not provide a natural model to imitate, a living example to mirror. It is a non-natural, “artificial” “construction”: “Si le soleil est métaphorique déjà, toujours, il n’est plus tout à fait naturel. Il est déjà, toujours, un lustre, on dirait une

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construction artificielle si l’on pouvait encore accréditer cette signification quand la nature a disparu.” If “Le plus naturel de la nature comporte en lui-même de quoi sortir de soi,” and thus

“composes” with “la lumière « artificielle », s’éclipse, s’ellipse, a toujours été autre, lui-même”

(M 300), then the sun cannot, sensu stricto, be the source of anything. The human being’s axiomatic gift comes through a non-giving that obliterates her self-illuminating power, crossing through it, turning it away from its organizing, genius principle. We might say this obliterating light, in its shining example, shines through the genius as a kind of question, rendering the affirmative performance of her inventiveness as an originally constituting question (one posed to the genius as it constitutes her, putting her in question, that is, substituting her with a question), at the same time that it engenders her as she who must invent a response to it. Such a question, to go by Derrida’s example, must be without determinate form, soliciting a response while extinguishing its possibility. Speaking of the immanent repeatability, and thus substitutability, of any particular genius (and not just of her metaphors), Derrida writes: “Suis-je dès lors assuré qu’on peut tout me prendre sauf le pouvoir de remplacer ? Par exemple, ce qu’on me prend par autre chose ?” (M 292, my italics).

The strange lucidity of this question will be guiding this dissertation’s investigations from this point forward; it is therefore necessary that we take a moment to examine its functioning.

Derrida is taking advantage of the syntactic resources unique to French (specifically as found in the verb-preposition combination remplacer par and the locution par exemple) to construct an interrogative simultaneously tautological (“Am I thus assured that anything can be taken from me except the power to replace? For example, to replace what is taken from me with something else?”) and without (i.e., irreducibly without) the possibility of a response because irreducibly different from itself. Rewritten slightly, while maintaining the essential syntax in question, we read: “Suis-je dès lors assuré qu’on peut tout me prendre sauf le pouvoir de remplacer par

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exemple, ce qu’on me prend par autre chose ?” Am I assured of my power to replace (my power to give an illustrative example of metaphor and thus to invent, replacing an absence with a presence, what is not known with knowledge, what is obscure with what is clear and luminous because bathed in the light of being-as-presence, thereby demonstrating my genius as a natural proxy or replacement for nature’s pure presence), am I assured of my power to replace through an example? That is, am I assured of my power to give an example when that very giving, the power to give, gives itself, already, through an example? And when that giving, as giving through, is itself already given, (already, as though my power to give had been taken from me in advance), from the beginning, through something else, “autre chose”? Am I assured that that through which (the through through which) I give expression to my metaphorical power, does not already give itself through another through?45 Through another through that is not merely the same through yet again, and not merely, not even, a word, but something else, another thing entirely, “autre chose”? The human being’s power to (re)present the world, as example of being’s positing power, has here become a question, or a putting into question whereby he is called to answer for metaphor’s place in the (re)presentational circuit. This circuit gets enacted,

45 Here, Derrida’s speaking of assurances (“Suis-je dès lors assuré …”) at the same time that he is putting into question, or transforming into a question, the relationship between semantics and syntax (by exploiting the simultaneously over- and under-determined grammatical function of the French preposition par) recalls his comments, in the posthumously published Heidegger : la question de l’Etre et l’Histoire, on the “assurances” from which Heidegger departs in his attempt to “ouvrir le chemin propre à la question de l’être elle-même” (H 77). Derrida explains that the question of being, in its radical historicity, is founded on a certain a priori that shows up in the form of the “always already.” Derrida wants to claim that the “always already” (in French, “toujours déjà”), as a translation of Heidegger’s “immer schon,” is radically foreign to “la syntaxe philosophique française” and “le logos très français,” and that this problem of syntax is one important way in which Heidegger gains access to a beginning of philosophy that is stripped of any metaphysical presuppositions, but that, even so, only makes itself accessible through repetition, having always already begun and so never actually begun. Repetition thus leaves the beginning of philosophy always already (repeatedly) suspended, and thus, in a certain sense, possible. The motif of “assurance,” intersecting as it does with a number of Derridean and Heideggerian problematics, could perhaps provide an opening onto the vexed question of Derrida’s relationship to Heidegger. In the posthumous Heidegger, see especially the second, third and fourth séances for the discussion of the Heideggerian “assurances.” But Derrida speaks as well of assurances elsewhere. To cite one example: in the second volume of the seminar La bête et le souverain, “assurance” is spoken of briefly in terms of contractual relationships bearing on life or social insurance (Derrida brings up, in the span of a couple of pages, “une mutuelle d’assurances sur la vie,” “l’assurance sociale,” “un système d’assurances sur la vie,” “la police d’assurance,” “contrat d’assurance et de mutuelle probabilitaire” (BS 367-9). It would be the analogical, Kantian as if that provides the structure for any conception of the world as a

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or takes place, through metaphorical substitution, i.e., through a metaphor that is given through something else, ad infinitum. Are we not then confronted with the shining (but non-natural) necessity of a par (qui se donne) par (un autre) par? Or even more succinctly (and in imitation of Derridean syntax), of a par par par?46 Of a solar power, a burning example, something (but what thing would this be?) emitting an absolutely blinding and destructive light? Around which nothing – no genius, no language, no metaphor – revolves, because it presents itself as a generalized self-destruction that consequently crosses through the border protecting and separating “philosophemes” such as “metaphor,” “proper,” “meaning,” “syntax,” “self,” “other,”

“border,” etc.?

Cette auto-destruction aurait encore la forme d’une généralisation mais cette fois,

il ne s’agirait plus d’étendre et de confirmer un philosophème [i.e., the

philosopheme “metaphor,” metaphor as in essence a philosopheme] ; plutôt, en le

déployant sans limite, de lui arracher ses bordures de propriété. Et par conséquent

de faire sauter l’opposition rassurante du métaphorique et du propre dans laquelle

l’un et l’autre ne faisaient jamais que se réfléchir et se renvoyer leur rayonnement.

(M 323)

In the case, then, of genius’ metaphorical resource, as well as in that of the source proper to truth itself, the appropriative deploying of natural power or energy for the sake of

(re)presentation requires a simultaneous turning away from the proper. This turning that is common to both the genius’ metaphorical power and the power of truth as unveiling, this rerouting or detour that they both share as what binds them according to the systematicity of metaphorical production that we have been gradually uncovering in our reading here of “La

single, self-same world common to all living beings. Such a structure is, per Derrida, contractual, and any contract it makes possible is “toujours labile, arbitraire, conventionnel, et artificiel, historique, non naturel” (BS 368).

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mythologie blanche,” is concentrated, for Derrida, in the term “heliotrope.” Metaphor, considered in its internal, systematic, and conceptual articulation (to echo Derrida’s comments at

M 302), signifies “héliotrope, à la fois mouvement tourné vers le soleil et mouvement tournant du soleil” (M 299). The simultaneity of this turning that should bind metaphorical production and the event of truth’s self-(re)appropriation to each other, indicates that between them intervenes a wholly different ap-par-tenance as concerns the power of metaphor, that what they share is un autre par-tage (M 286). In either case, a more original and supplementary “turning” or “passing through” has already to be taking place, before the turning of metaphor can be properly considered mimetic, or more broadly speaking, (re)presentational. Each tropic movement, both that belonging to the idea of metaphor and that belonging to the genius’ illustrative and affirmative use of metaphor, seems, necessarily, to turn toward the other, as though each were having recourse to the other as what should complete it. Each seems to depend on the gift of the other, requiring that the other’s gift be used on its behalf. Yet each of these turning movements, in addition to turning toward each other, must be thought in conjunction with another, a turning away. In such a situation – in which each turning, to be the turning or

(re)appropriating movement that it is, first or already turns simultaneously toward and away from the other, and this without the possibility of a re-turn to self – the turn of the gift, the act by which the gift is both generated and, in turn, generously circulated, is in a relationship of supplementarity to itself. Here there can be no original, purely natural source from which would be derived the circular, circulating movement of self-(re)presentation. In other words, there can be no original creditor to whom a return on investment would obviously be due, and to whom a debtor (be it the human being or nature itself) would be principally engaged, i.e., bound by a contract or formal promise. An important consequence of such an original absence is that both

46 One possible model for this imitation would be the syntagma “sans sans sans,” which shows up in, for example,

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humanity and nature are in the same situation: each has standing through something else, through a self-destructive and artificial metaphor whose turns prevent the full (re)presentation of presence, presence always being given through another through, through a generalized syntactic obliteration. Because each is bound to the same situation (or, as it is this situation to which both belong, à laquelle ils ap-par-tiennent tous les deux), I will, starting now, refer primarily to the genius as the paradigm for discussing this lingual turning. For presence, in its naturalness as a self-unveiling power, can no longer rightly be spoken of here. Its self-presence, like the genius’, originally passes through something else. The genius is the self who is bound to the obliterating turning of metaphor – but a metaphor that is now no longer recognizably itself – which I have provisionally named with the syncategorem par, which is bound to its own repetition, or syntactic obliteration,47 as par par par.48

IV. Between Metaphora and Translatio, the Limit of the Ultra-Idiomatic Word

But what exactly of this bond between, on one hand, the self-destructive metaphor and, on the other, the genius that, as I asserted above, is constituted by it, draws its power from it, and, for that very reason, should exemplify it? Since the genius is unbound from the dictates of a

Parages. It is there a question of syntactic relations whose “engine” (“ressort”) would be the “sans” that divides a word or thing from its reference and identity, while leaving a trace of the “tout autre” in it. See especially p. 90-3. 47 On the question of syntax in Derrida, see especially Hobson. See also Rodolphe Gasché’s remarks in “The General System” from his The Tain of the Mirror. Andrzej Warminski provides a discussion of syntax in “La mythologie blanche” that is thematically close to my own. I have, however, chosen to extend this “theme” differently than he does. See especially p. liv-lxi of “Prefatory Postscript: Interpretation and Reading” in Readings in Interpretation. 48 This exploitation of the semantic and syntactic idiomaticity of the preposition par could represent a possible entry point into the relationship between Derrida and Lacan. The latter introduces the term “par-être” in the seminar Encore through a discussion that veers, among other topics, from the elliptical turning of the sun, to “la fonction du signifiant” as a sort of “départ” for thinking the non-persistence of the world-as-totality, to writing (“l’écrit”) as an effect of language that provides a vista onto the “articulation” that occurs in “ce qui résulte du langage” (see in particular 54-8). One seeming consequence of this articulation is that, for Lacan, being only ever “presents itself” as to the side, “l’être para, l’être à côté” (58). Being “appears” as decentered from itself: it cannot be spoken of in terms of “paraître,” only “par-être”: “l’être se présente, se présente toujours, de par-être” (59). Being thus cannot serve as the eternal “correlate” of the sublunary world (57). See especially “L’amour et le signifiant” (51-65).

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universal idea of metaphor, which is also to say, from the dictates posited by a universal language that would manifest itself through metaphor, it should follow that, whatever metaphorical power is left to the genius in this situation, it should be a non-universal, or idiomatic, power. My preliminary hypothesis going forward will be that metaphor is, in Derrida, a question of the idiomatic, or that metaphor is idiomatic, and that this idiomaticity of metaphor is tied to the self-destruction of metaphor. Moreover, I will wager that it falls to the genius to bring about or to let happen, in a word, to invent, metaphor’s idiomatic self-destruction.

Let me recall that metaphor becomes a problem for Derrida precisely where the univocity of meaning as presence, in order to (re)appropriate itself as self-presence, must leave itself in order to say itself, which is to say, must supplement itself through language. Language thus understood as a non-(re)presentational or metaphorical language, there can be no question of language in general, i.e., of a metalingual medium by which presence would unveil itself in all its universal splendor. The genius’ inventiveness does not reside in helping the sun to sow its seed, in serving as the specular double of physis’ shining presence – the double that, being engendered by the sun, reflects it, and so allows the sun to show itself and to be engendered through its double. When the genius stands in for the sun and scatters its light, she is necessarily doing so, from the beginning, in a language, or in some language. Her metaphor making is conditioned, not by a seemingly universal power source, but through the particular idiom in which she happens to speak, the idiom that has already intervened in the circular journey that presence undertakes, leaving itself in order to come back to itself.

It is because of this original intervention that the problem of metaphor in philosophy is not only that of the difference that rhetoric makes, but that natural languages make as well. And, in fact, Derrida announces the co-implication of metaphor and natural language at the very outset of “La mythologie blanche.” He asserts there that philosophy is obliged to determine how

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exactly metaphor gets used in discourse, so as to integrate it into its own properly philosophical, or universal, language, but for the reason that metaphor comes between philosophical and natural language. In other words, Derrida appears to state that metaphor is what requires philosophy to account for its relationship to natural languages (to account for the “use” of natural language within philosophy’s purview), and, at the same time, is what requires philosophy to present itself in or as natural language: “la métaphore semble engager en sa totalité l’usage de la langue philosophique, rien de moins que l’usage de la langue dite naturelle dans le discours philosophique, voire de la langue naturelle comme langue philosophique” (M 249). These comments are echoed by others in the later text “Des tours de Babel” in which Derrida claims that metaphor (specifically the name Babel, which is yet another example in Derrida of “la métaphore de la métaphore,” but is additionally in this text “la traduction de la traduction”) shows (or tells of, “dit,” writes Derrida) “au moins l’inadéquation d’une langue à l’autre, d’un lieu de l’encyclopédie à l’autre, du langage à lui-même et au sens,” as well as “la nécessité de la figuration, du mythe, des tropes, des tours, de la traduction inadéquate” (PIA 203).

These remarks indicate that the problem of metaphor in Derrida cannot be thought without also broaching the problem of translation, and that the theoretical elaboration of genius as inventor of self-destructive metaphors is to be located in a metaphorico-translational nexus.

Let us stay for a bit with “Des tours de Babel” since Derrida is there interested in examining this nexus. In the passage I have just quoted, we can begin to see that he describes metaphor as simultaneously intervening between languages, and so preventing the work of translation – and, a fortiori, any metalingual theorizing that would have recourse to even the barest notion of a universal language – from accomplishing itself, at the same time that it compels translation, but one that is from the start “inadequate.” There is therefore, for Derrida, an essential non- adequation or heterogeneity between languages that implies a second heterogeneity, one inborn

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in a given language that renders it foreign to itself. This is why, relatively early in the essay, he takes a moment to offer a general criticism of translation theories that fail to account for what one might call the congenital heterogeneity of languages:

notons une des limites des théories de la traduction : elles traitent trop souvent des

passages d’une langue à l’autre et ne considèrent pas assez la possibilité pour des

langues d’être impliquées à plus de deux dans un texte. Comment traduire un

texte écrit en plusieurs langues à la fois ? Comment « rendre » l’effet de

pluralité ? Et si l’on traduit par plusieurs langues à la fois, appellera-t-on cela

traduire ? (PIA 207-8).

The inborn non-adequation of a given language to itself is, further, why any theory of translation, or any attempt to bridge a multiplicity of idioms by appealing, explicitly or not, to an underlying universal metalanguage, must paradoxically formulate itself in a single idiom: “On ne devrait jamais passer sous silence la question de la langue dans laquelle se pose la question de la langue et se traduit un discours sur la traduction” (PIA 204).

In no way does this mean that Derrida finds the translator’s task to be futile. It means, rather, that, the incessant turnings of metaphor making meta- and thus mono-lingual homogeneity impossible, a work written in a given idiom is originally incomplete in itself and so constitutively requests or demands to be translated. Yet the request or demand being constitutive of the work itself, it must remain essentially non-actualizable, and it is in this way that the work supplements itself, i.e., that it lives on. All this comes down to a co-indebtedness between original and translator. On one hand, “Le traducteur est endetté, il s’apparaît comme traducteur dans la situation de la dette ; et sa tâche c’est de rendre, de rendre ce qui doit avoir été donné”

(PIA 211). The translator (who is not, for Derrida, this or that empirical individual, or even an extra-empirical subject), that is, is not unlike the genius: he is brought into being “en situation de

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traduire, sommé de traduire” (PIA 212), summoned to restore or give back (restituer) to the original what it demands because originally lacking it, i.e., what is enigmatically referred to as its

“sens,” which is not reducible to “la structure communicante du langage” and “l’acte linguistique de la communication” (PIA 215; Derrida is here echoing Benjamin in “The Translator’s Task”).

Yet on the other hand, the original is equally indebted to the translator: being in a state of essential incompletion, it is dependent on the translator for its very being: “si la structure de l’original est marquée par l’exigence d’être traduit, c’est qu’en faisant la loi [what is earlier called the original’s “loi intérieure” (PIA 216) that articulates its demand for translation] l’original commence par s’endetter aussi à l’égard du traducteur. L’original est le premier débiteur, le premier demandeur, il commence par manquer” (PIA 218). Strictly speaking, the life of the “original” does not precede its translation, but must be thought as itself dependent on, and so already a translation of, the “version” said to be its “translation.”

We can condense this situation as follows: the inborn heterogeneity of a given idiom, instituted by metaphor, presents the necessity of a passage outside the idiom that would otherwise be assumed to contain its own metaphors. Metaphor therefore announces a demand or request for translation that already puts the original language into, exposes it to, translation: metaphor’s movement must be understood to exceed the limits of the idiom, to transform it from within, and put it in relation to an outside, to an idiom other than itself. But precisely for the reason that this externalization occurs because of metaphor’s congenital heterogeneity, the precise place and moment of translation’s taking place, the event of the passage through which one language would pass over into another, cannot, in principle, be located. That is, it cannot be said that translation does indeed take place, that metaphor’s movement of substitution in one idiom lets itself be substituted by an analogous movement in another idiom. In brief, it cannot be said that translation is a substitution, or metaphor, for metaphor. In this situation, the “original”

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idiom must, to repeat, be understood to be incomplete in itself and to remain so. It is subjected to catastrophe by metaphor, ruined and translated from within, and yet its “translation” results in its remaining the same. In this situation, we are dealing with a congenitally heterogeneous metaphor that is constitutively without meaningful, metalingual totality, that is therefore “indebted” to, because not preceding, in principle, its translation. It is, in this case, the “original,” in its metaphorical structure, that should come after and translate the “translation.” Yet lacking any meaning in itself, this metaphor is constitutively precluded from providing restitution of “sense” to its translation. In other words, it cannot be said that metaphor substitutes for, or translates, translation.

Here I think we can take a further step in understanding what Derrida is doing in “La mythologie blanche” when he has recourse to the idiomatic resources of a syntax that is uniquely

French (par par par) as a means of bringing out in Aristotle’s Greek an ellipse or éclipse (M

300) that is co-originary with the sun’s shining self-manifestation. It is because, I recall, there is no word in Ancient Greek for the sun as an active sun that spreads its light over, at the same time that it engenders and withdraws from the visibility of, all that is, that metaphorical substitution becomes possible. But this is the case not only in Aristotle’s Greek. The analogy between the proper power to name and some name that would name it, or between the engendering but non- generic source of beings and a being that would conceptualize or conceive and so (re)present it, is inexpressible or invisible in any language. Having just quoted Aristotle on the sun’s

“anonymity” and its supplementing through metaphor (“le rapport de cette action [of sowing grain] à la lumière du soleil est le même (homoiôs) que celui de « semer » à la graine”), Derrida says half-incredulously, “Où a-t-on jamais vu qu’il y a le même rapport entre le soleil et ses rayons qu’entre l’ensemencement et la semence ?” Yet the lack of absolute justification for this analogy does not preclude its imposition. To the contrary, metaphorical substitution does

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nonetheless get going, but its beginning and destination are difficult to see, its process long and secret:

Si cette analogie [between sowing grain and sowing light] s’impose – et elle le

fait – c’est que, dans le langage, elle passe par une chaîne longue et peu visible

dont il est bien difficile, et non seulement à Aristote, d’exhiber le premier bout.

Plutôt que d’une métaphore, ne s’agit-il pas ici d’une « énigme », d’un récit

secret, composé de plusieurs métaphores, d’une puissante asyndète ou

conjonction dérobée dont l’essentiel est « de joindre ensemble, tout en disant ce

qui est, des termes inconciliables »….

Such a metaphorical process figures, further, a “lexis qui serait de part en part métaphorique.

Aucun nom propre n’y est du moins présent, apparent comme tel” (M 290).

With no proper name as such being (re)presentable, the anonymity of the power to name cannot stay confined to Greek. It gets reinscribed in, or imposed on, other languages at other historical moments (and undoubtedly this reinscription is what opens the difference between historical moments to begin with),49 becomes, as I said above, polyonymous, but without this polyonymy ever congealing into a stable, mimetic relationship between languages. Derrida transposes into French the non-presence of the name in Greek, but not in order to (re)present that non-presence. The relationship between the two idioms is non-(re)presentational, or metaphorical through and through, “de part en part,” de par en par (en par). The anonymity of the sun in

Greek remains anonymous – French has no power to translate it. And yet it lets itself be translated (or metaphorized) by French, by way of a syntactic construction idiomatic to French –

49 Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús shows that Derrida, or at least the early Derrida, thinks “the movement of history as a finite, textual, and yet endless movement of metaphors” (66), this resulting in the removal of history’s “essence from any horizon of actualizability, from any concept of virtuality that has already introduced ‘the real’ into the structure of the possible, and even from any understanding of the possible as already stabilized in its possibility” (59). Mendoza-de Jesús’ understanding of metaphor’s movement appears close to my own when he states that “history

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par par par – but of which French cannot in principle make visible the origin or end. Let us look a little closer at the long, invisible movement of this syntagma. Which par should we consider the first in the series? Which the last? Which the middle? If every par is given always through another, is the series not limitless? In that case, from where in the series, and in what direction, does it get extended? From left to right? From right to left? Between the “first” and the “second,” or the “second” and the “third”? How to number the par in such an a priori limitless list? But is not, in truth, such a limitless list very strictly limited? If, that is, the number of par between any given pair of par is indeterminable, must we not consider each par in its absolute isolation from every other, strictly limited to itself because an uncountable number of par away from its nearest neighbor? But if it is through the par that nearness and distance – the limit – between par are measured, if each par appears only in order to disappear and so give rise to a substitutional series, is not the difference (the limit) between (a) the word, and (b) the limit (the difference) between words, destroyed? And is the limit that gets destroyed that between words of the same idiom? Or is it the limit between words belonging to different idioms that disappears? In this delimiting of the limitless series of words, is not the very identity of the word – because it is the word-as-metaphorico-translational-limit-of-the-word – therefore in question? And since there is no a priori difference between the word and the limit between words – but this lack of difference is still not the pure and simple coincidence of an identity – is not the principle of articulation, the syntax, the metaphoricity, the translationality, whatever, between words also at issue? In any case, it is clear that, for Derrida, the idiomatic word – which, embodying as it does the metaphorico-translational limit, might better be called ultra-idiomatic – is neither to be described, nor performed. Within a given lingual series, the ultra-idiomatic word-as-limit is that series’ missing term (word, origin, end, limit), the one that appears so as to self-destruct. As

understands that it is most historical when it has understood itself as the very movement through which a metaphor is exposed as a metaphor by another metaphor” (61-2).

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such, it is to be invented, exemplarily by the genius. This, at least, as re-marked in Greek, under the name, and naming power, of Aristotle: “Or, il y a des cas, remarque Aristote, où l’un des termes manque. Il faut alors l’inventer.”

I will return to invention and its relationship to the idiom and genius in this chapter’s following sections (not least because Derrida appears to have prescribed such a return: echoing the passage I just quoted from “La mythologie blanche,” he writes in “Psyché : Invention de l’autre” of a “Retour étrange d’un désir d’invention. « Il faut inventer »” (PIA 34)). For now, I want to underscore the claim that, for Derrida, metaphor and translation take place through the ultra-idiomatic word that delimits the lack of determinable limits between words. And without distinctly delimited words to metaphorize and/or translate, there must be something a- metaphorical and a-translational – something unrealizable or self-destructive – about metaphor and translation. Here we rejoin the preliminary hypothesis I put forward at the beginning of this section, in which metaphor’s “auto-destruction” and the idiom were said to be co-implicated. Let me revise that hypothesis now. Where metaphor and translation give way to each other, they share in a mirrored self-destruction. The ultra-idiomatic word is the limit – non-reflective, invisible, like the tinfoil of a mirror50 – of this repetitive destruction. Disappearing through its appearance, it delimits the idiom as limitless, opens it, and keeps it open, to an inescapably incomplete movement of lingual transfer, in which every metaphor presented is a-metaphorical, and every translation offered is a-translational.

Derrida will thus go on to speak in “Des tours de Babel” not just of la métaphore, but of l’ammétaphore, and not just of what is to be translated, l’à traduire, but of a resistance to, or lack of, translating, l’à-traduire. Let me begin with the former, in which, following Benjamin,

Derrida compares the kinship (“parenté”) between languages to the gathering together of the

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shards of a broken amphora. The shards, analogues of languages, relate to each other and so fit together according to the smallest details without, for all that, being identical, and so without forming an identity, a single thing one could call “language.” This is evident from the following remark, in which the cracks between shards not only work as points of contiguity that make possible the reconstruction of the amphora, but also open the vessel to an outside that renders its totalized integrity a priori impossible. The reconstituted vessel “n’est peut-être pas un tout, mais c’est un ensemble dont l’ouverture ne doit pas contredire l’unité…. [L]’amphore est une avec elle-même tout en s’ouvrant au-dehors – et cette ouverture ouvre l’unité, elle la rend possible et lui interdit la totalité” (PIA 223).

This “opening” to an “outside” marks not just a conceptual incompleteness that the metaphor of the amphora is supposed to explain. It is just as much the amphora metaphor itself that is incomplete (one could speak of l’ammétaphoricité de la métaphore de l’ammétaphore), and that occasions an additional analogy by which to understand the relationship between idioms. For the fragments of the ammétaphore do not enter into relation just as inert pieces of non-living matter that together make up an artificial construction. Their relation is additionally a

“mouvement d’amour” (PIA 223) that operates according to a “logique « séminale »” (PIA 222).

One language and another, or original and translation (and the difference between these pairs indexes the additional problem of the relationship between a natural language and an artificial and arbitrary language), enter into a nuptial union or contract whereby their respective aims or intentions (visées) would be able to complement each other and thus contribute to the production of a larger, organic whole. In this way, each language would assure the continuation of its own genealogy, while, by joining itself with its other, auguring the formation of a new and greater one. As Derrida says, “C’est ce que j’ai appelé le contrat de traduction : hymen ou contrat de

50 I will return to the motif of the tinfoil, and discuss its link to invention and genius, in my discussion of Derrida’s

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mariage avec promesse d’inventer un enfant dont la semence donnera lieu à histoire et croissance” (PIA 224).

But this product of the marriage of languages, which is described late in the essay as a messianic invention that would help to bring to term the “holy growth” of “pure language” (these are, of course, Benjamin’s terms from “The Translator’s Task”), is nonetheless a promise, and a promise, we know from “Avances,” must be essentially breakable or unkeepable: “pour être promesse, il faut qu’elle reste tenable sans assurance d’être tenue, elle doit pouvoir rester intenable, possiblement intenable pour demeurer ce qu’elle aura été, à savoir une promesse” (A

33). But this does not mean that nothing comes of the promised union of languages; “une promesse n’est pas rien,” after all (PIA 224). What it does mean, however, is that translation’s

“mouvement d’amour” is not, at bottom, representational: “S’il y a bien entre texte traduit et texte traduisant un rapport d’« original » à version, il ne saurait être représentatif ou reproductif.

La traduction n’est ni une image ni une copie” (PIA 215). Translation, for Derrida, does not represent the fulfillment of the contract between languages. It promises, rather, the possibility of the contract, which possibility must remain possible, essentially possible or non-actualizable.

Whence Derrida’s formulation of the “loi de la traduction,” the law that would therefore legitimate the contract between languages, as “l’à-traduire,” “l’à-traduire comme loi,” as he puts it at the essay’s end (PIA 234). This singular law results in a singular, self-legitimating contract in which the original, constitutively incomplete, simultaneously calls for, gives itself to, and resists, translation. In other words, what the promise of translation renders, in highly elliptical fashion, is the promise itself, i.e., the promise of the promise that is also the promise to translate the promise: “Il y a de l’à-traduire…. [I]l n’engage essentiellement ni à communiquer ni à représenter, ni à tenir un engagement déjà signé, plutôt à établir le contrat et à donner naissance

“Psyché : Invention de l’autre” below.

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au pacte” (PIA 221).

This yields at least two situations, each a link in the same lingual web or system, and entails yet another metaphor, that of survival. 1. The substitution of the original by the translation has already occurred. Here, the former is survived by the latter, has already departed from the latter, and has bequeathed its remains to it. The signing of the contract, then, automatically, in a machine-like and arbitrary manner, produces the translation, or replaces the original with the translation, as though, by signing the marriage license, the translator were also signing the original author’s death warrant.51 This is undoubtedly why Derrida states that the movement or

“transfer” happening between original and translation is not simply one of love: the transfer is both “amour et haine” (PIA 212). Returning the original’s love and co-signing the shared nuptial agreement, the translation’s promise has a threatening air.52 The translation is thus left to live with the original’s remains, charged with carrying to term what was seminal in the original, i.e., its very possibility, which is the essential possibility or promise that it be translated. The translator is “déjà en situation d’héritier, inscrit comme survivant dans une généalogie, comme survivant ou agent de survie” (PIA 214). The translation lives on, but only by carrying in itself, as its condition, this essential but non-presentable germ that remains of the original. 2. The substitution of the original by its translation has not occurred, and will never occur. Here, because of the “double endettement” (PIA 219) I pointed out above, the translation must be said to condition the original’s survival: the latter will have replaced, and thus paradoxically will have survived or come after, its translation. And yet it bears in itself the perpetually unrealizable promise of its own completion-via-translation. That is, the original presents itself as incomplete,

51 This is analogous to some of Derrida’s meditations on friendship in Politiques de l’amitié. Cf. the following: “Je ne pourrais pas aimer d’amitié sans m’engager, sans me sentir d’avance engagé à aimer l’autre par-delà la mort. Donc par-delà la vie. Je me sens, et d’avance, avant tout contrat, porté à aimer l’autre mort. Je me sens ainsi (porté à) aimer, c’est ainsi que je me sens (aimer)” (PA 29).

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and its promise as part of its incompletion, as what in-completes it. The original makes its formal demand to be translated in a language it cannot, and indeed must not, read. Not knowing what it promises, it thus turns away from the contract it puts forth: it violates the terms of its own agreement at the very moment it proposes it. And so it returns to itself, to itself as unrealized promise that it will have, in the same movement, and once again, not known how to make sense of.

Perhaps all of this can be made a bit more concrete by taking a look at Derrida’s remarks on form and literality. This will bring us back to the specific problem of the word and its location in the mirrored movement between metaphor and translation, or to what Derrida refers to as the economic problem of translation. The law of the text as à-traduire, as essentially heterogeneous to itself and so from the start in a process of translation that in principle cannot be achieved, is to do with a fundamental “indistinction du sens et de la littéralité” in the text’s language (PIA 234).

The movement of sense-making, as comprised of many fine distinctions gradually made in the process of elaborating meaning, distinctions based on traditional conceptual pairs such as form and content, signifier and signified, sensible and intelligible, letter and spirit, etc., does not apply wherever the problem of the ammétaphore and the à-traduire arises. The movement of reference is not governed by the imperative of the presentation or revelation of meaning as self-presence.

As Derrida asserts, quoting Benjamin, “le sens a cessé d’être la ligne de partage pour le flot du langage et pour le flot de la révélation.” This is because meaning is in the end unable to shed its

“external” form or literality, and indeed is a priori unthinkable without it: “pas de sens qui soit lui-même, sens, hors d’une « littéralité »” (PIA 235). No meaningful, dialectical resolution of the differential relationality of reference without some body, some externality, remaining in the heart of presence, originally intervening between presence and itself as self-presence, between

52 Cf. “Avances”: “Peut-on menacer d’une promesse ? Promettre un don menaçant ? Peut-être. Peut-être est-ce la

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presence and its self-legitimating law.

And no law or economy that is able rigorously to account for the relationship of the word and the movement from language to language. I speak of the word because, as for Aristotle and the tradition that inherits from him, for Benjamin in “The Translator’s Task,” “le langage y est déterminé à partir du mot et du privilège de la nomination…. « [L]’élément originaire du traducteur » est le mot” (PIA 221). And everything we have seen concerning the heterogeneity of languages goes equally for the word. Because the meaning of the word does not precede its differential movement between one language and another, but also between one language and itself – and this is the “meaning” of what Derrida calls “la catastrophe métaphorique” (PIA 213)

– because the word is already metaphorical, thus already ammétaphore and à-traduire, because the word is therefore a hetero-genizing force externalizing language from within it, one cannot in principle take for granted the indivisibility or essential integrity of the word, whether it be found in the original or the translation. Indeed, it is the very difference between original and translation, as well as between language and language, that is at issue. For one cannot in principle determine a word as a word, as just one word. One cannot in principle dismiss the possibility that a word is more than a word in a word, implicating languages “à plus de deux dans un texte” and raising the possibility of translating “par plusieurs langues à la fois” (PIA 208).

Whence, as I said, an interest in economy: the privilege of the word “ouvre sur le problème économique de la traduction, qu’il s’agisse de l’économie comme loi du propre ou de l’économie comme rapport quantitatif (est-ce traduire que transposer un nom propre en plusieurs mots, en une phrase ou en une description, etc. ?)” (PIA 221). Derrida does not follow up on this problem of economy in any explicit way in “Des tours de Babel,” but he does devote some important comments to it in the late text “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction « relevante » ?” Without

question la plus profondément inquiétante. Car si cette perversion était exclue dès le départ, si son exclusion était assurée, il n’y aurait plus de promesse qui tienne. Ni de menace” (A 38).

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tarrying too long in this essay, I only want to point out that there the problem of translation is raised in very similar terms (“« Economie », ici, signifierait deux choses, propriété et quantité”

(Q 563)) in order to put in question the very unity of the word. In translation, “L’unité de mesure est l’unité du mot…. Au commencement de la traduction, il y a le mot. Rien n’est moins innocent, pléonastique et naturel, rien n’est plus historique que cette proposition, même si elle paraît trop évidente” (Q 564); “Nous oublions souvent … combien l’unité ou l’identité, l’indépendance du mot reste une chose mystérieuse, précaire, peu naturelle, c’est-à-dire historique, institutionnelle et conventionnelle.” As self-legitimating movement of the à-traduire that renders every metaphorical word an ammétaphore, translation is underway from the very beginning, and the body of the word, or the word as body, is already taking part in the catastrophic turning that puts in question its identity. The word – which is to say, the word as master word, as basic unit and exemplary embodiment of the unity of meaning itself, as proper name sovereignly governing the limits between words – “si c’en est un et qui soit un, unique, seul” (here Derrida’s exemplary example is “relevant”), “porte en son corps une opération de traduction en cours” (Q 562).

The most obvious or relevant example of this operation in “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction

« relevante » ?” is “relevant,” whose function in the essay derives from the fact that it does not belong to a single language or code. It “représenterait l’un des exemples de mots dont l’usage flotte entre plusieurs langues” (Derrida singles out English, French, and German). This floating usage has to do with its form, or its form as effect. Resembling words belonging both to French and English, “relevant” presents Derrida’s readers with “plusieurs mots en un ou dans la même forme sonore ou graphique.” It thus gives an “effet d’homophonie ou d’homonymie,” and this poses “une limite insurmontable” to translation, a limit that is “le commencement de sa fin, la figure de sa ruine” (Q 565). Derrida is emphasizing form as effect because the problem of

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translation as he is elaborating it is not equivalent to plays on words.53 Homophony or homonymy is indicative of a movement of reference whose operation presents the word as fundamentally without a metalingual ground that would put an end to its catastrophic metaphorico-translational turnings. Such an operation thus brings out what remains to be translated in the word, what, by remaining, will never permit of translation. It presents the word, not as a word as commonly understood, but as a limit or boundary that brings forms or bodies into relation, but a relation so intimate that the distinction between them – but this is just to say, the distinction as limit or boundary – fades. By dint of the elliptical translating operation, then, the word-as-limit gets erased, and it leaves in its wake (in the wake that it just is) bodies that are monstrous. Monstrous because they lack the limit that would provide them with bodily integrity, because their very existence puts in question – renders indemonstrable – the limit that made them possible in the first place. What is left of the original word – of the meaning that gets manifested as the ideally repeatable unit that is the word – is thus a monstrous word body whose integrity, whose belonging to this or that side of the lingual boundary, is a priori indemonstrable. It is simultaneously more than one in one – a monstrous combination whose components are unidentifiable – and less than one in one – a monstrous incompletion for which no combinational complement is identifiable, “complete” in its persistent incompletion: “plus d’un mot en un” (Q

562, 566).

This leads me to the “passion” of the word in this essay. When Derrida speaks of passion, he is making use of the Christian character of dialectics in order to argue that the dialectizability of the word as pre-form of the Word, as precursor to the pure, spiritual interiority of meaning, is disseminated, in a prior manner, in the form of word bodies that are in essence idiomatic or ultra- idiomatic. Here I mean “ultra-idiomatic” in the sense that we are dealing with words that, rather

53 One thinks of the following from “Survivre”: “Ce ne sont pas, surtout pas, des jeux de mots” (PAR 121).

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than serving to convey universal meaning because constituting the concept of language in its full generality, foreground their own utter lack of universal grounding, or that they do not belong to a generality of meaning in any sense. In difference to the dialectizing and Christianizing movement in relation to which passion announces the inevitable fulfillment of the promise, in relation to which the fleshly word is negated, condemned and ruined and buried, but in view of its eventual resurrection and transformation in the fullness of the bodiless Word, the passion of the ultra-idiomatic preserves or saves the ruined body. And if the ruined and condemned body

(“corps perdu”) happens to go missing, gets up and walks away and gets lost (“corps perdu” (Q

575)), this is in accord with its “pas de sens” (PIA 235), which names the movement of reference that distances translation from its “limite” or “modèle” or “terme messianique,” and permits a certain lingual “growth.” Yet in announcing this limit or “ideal” (PIA 233), translation does not situate itself opposite a horizon toward which it would be able to strive, and in relation to which it would be able to determine itself as mere copy or representation of its ideal. Translation is given its ideal, and thus situates itself, at the limit (“à la limite”: let us take note of Derrida’s italics (PIA 234)), and when it “announces” it, it produces or lets happen the distancing of the limit, it “relates” us to it as to something that does not present itself, that therefore does not brook relation. Alternately quoting Benjamin, Derrida states that “La traduction, comme sainte croissance des langues, annonce le terme messianique, certes, mais le signe de ce terme et de cette croissance n’y est « présent » (gegenwärtig) que dans le « savoir de cette distance », dans l’Entfernung, l’éloignement qui nous y rapporte” (PIA 233). Translation, in other words, just is this distancing, which is the distancing of the word from its ideal, from the realization of the promise that it be completed and contribute to the formation of a greater whole. The word, as pas de sens, signifies its own incompletion, demonstrates the indemonstrability of its own limit, that it is a body without limit, “plus d’un mot en un.”

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The syntagma pas de sens is very demonstrative in this respect. Both pas and sens are certainly highly equivocal and highly idiomatic (pas meaning “step,” but also referring to, e.g., someone’s movements in a given place, choreographed movements (as of a dance), the particular manner in which someone or something walks or moves, a moment or stage in a progression, the trace or tracks left by a human or other animal, an obstacle (as when one “franchit le pas” (cf.

PAR 40) or “se sort d’un mauvais pas”); and also serving as an adverb of negation; and sens referring to, e.g., any number of human faculties natural (related to intelligence, understanding, judgment, perception, sensibility, intuition, etc.) or occult (as in “un sixième sens”), a manner of understanding or judging particular to a given individual or group, the sources of feelings of pleasure, meaning or signification or value or reason, direction or orientation, order (of a series of elements)). But beyond simple polysemy, i.e., a static and determinate set of particular meanings, we are dealing with a movement of reference, and it is this promised movement or movement as promise, in principle incomplete, that needs to be accounted for. So let us count, and account for, the incomplete movements of the word, the steps that it takes: the pas projects a step out and away from itself, a step complementary to itself that signifies an arrival, a limit, of which the pas would give the possibility or promise, as well as the desire. But possibility or promise turning just as quickly to impossibility or threat, and desire to hatred, the pas turns away from and negates its step and its outer limit. This negation leads nowhere, precisely: rather than sketching the formal outline of a referential end-point that would, in classical terms, assure its own identity, the pas, as hetero-genizing and catastrophic force, embodies the limit it would otherwise refer to. That is, its meaning or sense, the externality of its ideal limit, is indistinct from the contours of its own body, from the limit of its “literality.” So the word internalizes its externalizing movement of sense, it opens itself to the extension or growth of its body, which opening should be understood as promissory or preparatory because its limits, its starting- and

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end-point, are indemonstrable. In other words, the pas negates itself in view of a preparatory step, of another pas, a pas de pas, that should have been taken into account before it could have had the chance to present itself as a single, self-identical word. Needless to say, such a promised, preparatory step remaining promised, it can only promise further preparation, prolonging this preparatory step – pas de pas de pas – and thus cutting off its promise. In this ammétaphore, the word’s growth is prepared by a cut, a preparatory incision made in anticipation of a metaphorico- translational graft. The natural passion of the Word made flesh gets supplemented by technical, poetic means, whose intervention constitutes an event: “Ce qui se passe dans un texte sacré, c’est l’événement d’un pas de sens. Cet événement est aussi celui à partir duquel on peut penser le texte poétique ou littéraire qui tend à racheter le sacré perdu et s’y traduit comme dans son modèle” (PIA 235). In the negation of the cut (both the act of cutting, and the notch made in the word’s body), there is growth, but growth as repetition of growth, growth prepared by death:

“Cette perpetuelle reviviscence, cette régénérescence constante (Fort- et Aufleben) par la traduction” (PIA 233). This is growth as overgrowth, as a prolonged step, that prepares itself by getting penetrated, accepting another’s seed, and carrying the promise of more (than) life, carrying more than its own body, “Post-maturation (Nachreife) d’un organisme vivant ou d’une semence” (PIA 217).

What, then, does the pas de sens, as preparatory step toward supplementary growth, look like or resemble? What would constitute the appropriate a-metaphorical, a-translational analogy of this pas, the one that would render it as it is, as (in)complete, as enduring its (in)completion, as more-and-less-than a body? For example, as pas de pas de sens, pas de pas de pas de sens, pas de sens sans sens, passion de sens, pas de passion de sens, passion de sang sans sens or de sens sans sang.

But also, for example, as carrier of the promise or seed (“semence”) of its own

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overgrowth. This is precisely Derrida’s characterization of the sun in “La mythologie blanche.”

The sun there is “source de vie et de visibilité, de semence et de lumière” (M 289), and, as source, is already a metaphorico-translational scattering of itself as seed, as figure of

“l’ensemencement solaire” that gets “emportée dans l’aventure d’une longue phrase implicite, d’un récit secret dont rien ne nous assure qu’il nous reconduira au nom propre.” This long and implicit dissemination of word bodies is opened through a cut that is suffered without promise of communion with the holy Word of ontotheology, i.e., through a “coupe sans vin” (M 290) that opens its own implicit supplementary analogizing, as coupe sans fin (I will provide further evidence of the legitimacy this analogy in the following section). If, as we saw above, the sun as physis, as the truth of being as presence, presents itself only through the heliotrope, i.e., through the turnings of a genius metaphor that take place always through (another) through, then its power to carry its own potential or seed to actuality or maturation is a priori in question. Having just raised the problem of the genius as the example that disseminates the solar power of metaphor making, Derrida asks: on what conditions “le soleil pourrait-il toujours semer ? et la physis s’ensemencer” (M 292)? On what grounds would the pas de sens let come about the germination or “holy growth” of language that announces the non-present messianic limit, that gives a sacred promise a threatening air? On the grounds that the pas de sens be, to reiterate, endlessly implicitly analogized: for example, as pas de semence, pas de sens sans semence, pas de sens sans semencer, pas de sens sans s’ensemencer.

And what of the preposition de in this syntagma? The syntactic relationship between pas and sens is evidently not strictly a genitive: it is not strictly a question of describing the characteristics properly possessed by a substance or substantive, and of positing such a description within a larger movement in which relationships of analogy between things portend the production of further analogies, all within a single organic process by which nature would

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reveal itself. If, in brief, it is not just a matter of a genitive and of an entire genealogical scene, of the assertion and generation of meaning in an unbroken lineage, one in which what is passed down is essentially the power to generate meaning, i.e., the power to keep passing down, then the pas de sens leaves other syntactic possibilities to be inherited by its translators and/or metaphorists. Its genealogy presents itself through other steps, its lineage is not linear, its pas, as pas de pas, is equally a pas sans pas (cf. PAR 46, 58, 90) that implies a pas de sans, thus a pas sans sans and a sans sans pas. A pas that goes nowhere, pas sans passage, yet that still remains mobile, as in Derrida’s description of the syntax of the sans in Blanchot: “Il reste un reste sans reste de ce passage” (PAR 91). What remains is the preparatory step, which does not simply precede the pas but intervenes in or moves through it. The pas takes place, takes its step, by giving rise to a throughgoing, transgressive movement, pas par pas, where the limit between letters (two contiguous letters, to go by the conventional order of the alphabet) gets crossed through, pas/r or par/s. What, then, is the difference between these letters? What intermediary step relates the p to r but not to s, to s but not to r, pas de p à r pas de p à s? What step to take that crosses through the word to arrive at the word, that crosses through s to get to s crossing through r?

My point here is not, of course, to provide a complete inventory or combinatorics of the particular movement of reference named by the pas de sens. The point is that the inborn or congenital heterogeneity of language in a general sense, the heterogeneity that thus destroys the generality of language and yields an original situation of particular languages or idioms (or as

Derrida writes, “Non pas l’origine du langage mais des langues – avant le langage, les langues”

(PIA 219)), is redoubled in those same idioms, and that this destruction of the idiom is, paradoxically, the mark of its singular idiomaticity. That is, if the limits of an idiom’s ideal form are properly or principally indemonstrable, it is nevertheless through this indemonstrability that

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the idiom asks or demands, properly or principally, to be demonstrated. It does this by laying out the process of its demonstration as some number of preparatory steps to be taken, as steps prepared by bodies embodying both the demand and the process. The idiom, that is, just is this processive relation of bodies. Bodies that, in following the process, repeat and preserve the demand, which, by turns, repeats and preserves the process. But this process is neither circular nor linear. It is, one might say, biased: knowledge of it is gained only by having already entered into and taken part in it. But the entry point is oblique, and if, in following the process’ biased steps one ends up inventing the body to be known, one has not simply committed a circular error of reason or methodology. Nor is one committed to a hermeneutic circle. This is because knowledge of the body runs through the body: the steps leading to a theory of the word lead through its object, and to follow the winding path of knowledge is to wind up back at a pre- theoretical starting point. Or, per Benjamin, it is to be at an oblique crossroads between theory and literary creation, where the philosopher is moved by the promise of translation. Indeed, this is philosophy’s genius: “Car il existe un génie philosophique, dont le caractère le plus propre est la nostalgie de ce langage qui s’annonce dans la traduction…. [L]a traduction, avec les germes

(Keimen) qu’elle porte en elle d’un tel langage, se situe à mi-chemin de la création littéraire et de la théorie” (PIA 212-3). One winds up, then, at the same – but not identical – starting point, a pre-theoretical or obliquely theoretical starting point where the word, now cut open through its being-traversed (but when, “now”?), now a word no longer because incorporated into the very methodology of its own theorization, poses a different question, makes a different demand, and opens the possibility of a different path and a different theoretician – or poet, or translator. A general description of this problematics of the biased or oblique method and what it produces or invents can be found in “Tympan”:

La philosophie a toujours tenu à cela : penser son autre. Son autre : ce qui la

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limite et dont elle relève dans son essence, sa définition, sa production. Penser son

autre : cela revient-il seulement à relever (aufheben) ce dont elle relève, à n’ouvrir

la marche de sa méthode qu’à passer la limite ? Ou bien la limite, obliquement,

par surprise, réserve-t-elle toujours un coup de plus au savoir philosophique ?

Limite/passage. (M i)

To put it succinctly, knowledge of an idiom is itself idiomatic. This means that knowledge is never just of the idiom-as-object, is never the name of an axiomatic relationship between rigidly distinct terms such as subject and object. Knowledge must also be a systematized, thus differential, process or method that leads to, as it is led by, the idiom that will have been therefore invented. But, as I have just been demonstrating, this invention, which is necessarily the invention of the process of invention, leads to no stable grounds of invention.

Idiomatic invention always returns to the beginnings of its process, to the reinvention of the idiom and all the steps of its corresponding system. The embodiment or exemplification of knowledge is, then, the embodiment or exemplification of this limit between the idiom invented and reinvented.

V. The Law – Par Exemple – of the Ultra-Idiomatic

This is, in Derrida, additionally the exemplification of genius. I will return explicitly to the problem of invention in the final section of this chapter. For now, I want to argue that the genius is the name of the idiomatic lingual body that invents itself, that delimits the very limits of its own capacity for invention, and this because it has received a dictate to do so. Consequently, the genius’ exemplification of its own inventiveness must also be its complying with the law, its own law, dictating that it show – that it give an example of – its idiomatic inventiveness. I

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emphasize that the dictate or law is the genius’ own because what is at stake is, precisely, non- universality, that what is prescribed to the genius is the display of its idiom as utterly particular, limited, arbitrary. The genius’ idiom is an example of no antecedent law of language; it is its own example, exemplifies nothing but this example as example of itself. Thus exemplifying the dictate to exemplify only itself, the idiom demonstrates its limits in limitless, or tautological, fashion. This will entail that the idiom, as medium between law and the exemplification of law, reflects, in the form of a judgment, the undecidable, or unreflective, limit between them. To reflect what remains unreflected – through the idiom – this is the idiom’s genius, the idiom as ultra-idiomatic.

At least one essay from roughly the same period as “La mythologie blanche” attests to this. “Economimesis” is especially pertinent to my purposes because it reiterates a number of problematics that surface in the former essay, not to mention that it also evokes the Aristotelian theory of mimesis, albeit in passing, at at least four distinct moments (EM 57, 60, 68, 70).

Among the reiterated problematics from the earlier “La mythologie blanche” are the specular relationship of giving-and-taking between nature and genius; mimesis as at bottom the imitation of a power of productivity (and not just of this or that product of productivity); and the genius both as exemplary of the natural power to produce, and as an example produced by it. I will in particular be focusing on the third of these. For it is in the double duty pulled by the example, as both product and producer of nature, that a break in the auto-affective circle of speculation may be detected, and that an ultra-idiomatic example of the idiom might be given.

But let me start with the problematics of giving-and-taking, and of power or productivity, which Derrida finds to be central to the theory of mimesis, this time in Kant. Within the theory of art and the beautiful, mimesis is principally the imitation, by the genius, of nature insofar as the latter is a force of pure productivity. It is, i.e., this productivity, and not any particular product

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thereof, that the genius imitates:

La mimesis n’est pas ici la représentation d’une chose par une autre, le rapport de

ressemblance ou d’identification entre deux étants, la reproduction d’un produit

de la nature par un produit de l’art. Elle n’est pas le rapport de deux produits mais

de deux productions. Et de deux libertés. L’artiste n’imite pas les choses dans la

nature, ou si l’on veut dans la natura naturata, mais les actes de la natura

naturans, les opérations de la physis. (EM 67)

In this specular production of production, the genius exists to reflect nature back at itself, and thus to give it to itself, at the same time that she takes her own gift of existence from it.

“L’ingenium est naturel, c’est un talent naturel, un don de la nature (Naturgabe). Instance productrice et donatrice, le génie est lui-même produit et donné par la nature. Sans ce don de la nature, sans ce présent d’une liberté productrice, il n’y aurait pas de bel art. La nature produit ce qui produit, elle se produit la liberté et se la donne” (EM 69-70). Once again, this should make of the genius not merely an example or copy, i.e., a product, of nature, but exemplary of its very productivity (“should” indexing, at least in part, the moral stakes, and therefore the non- conceptual basis, of the genius’ activity, which is essentially free): “En donnant des règles non conceptuelles à l’art (règles « abstraites de l’acte, c’est-à-dire du produit »), en produisant des

« exemplaires », le génie ne fait que réfléchir la nature, la représenter : à la fois comme son legs ou son délégué et comme son image fidèle” (EM 70). The genius’ productivity is, moreover, super-productive, always (re)producing more nature, exemplifying more (re)productive power than would be possible in a mere mechanical imitation of nature. The poet’s genius is to give more than she promises, and to keep giving more in an infinite cycle of surplus value (plus- value):

Un cercle infini se joue et se sert du jeu humain pour se réapproprier le don. Le

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poète génial reçoit de la nature ce qu’il donne, certes, mais il reçoit d’abord de la

nature (de Dieu), outre le donné, le donner, le pouvoir produire et donner plus

qu’il ne promet aux hommes. Le don poétique, contenu et pouvoir, richesse et

acte, c’est un en-plus donné comme un donner par Dieu au poète qui le transmet

pour permettre à cette plus-value supplémentaire de faire retour vers la source

infinie : celle-ci ne peut pas se perdre. Par définition, si on peut le dire de l’infini.

(EM 71)

Here is to be found the paradigmatic relationship between genius and nature, in which the latter issues its sovereign dictate (what at one moment is referred to as the “diktat” of auto- affection (EM 80)), and the former complies through his freely operating faculty of mimetic invention: “Or la mimesis intervient … dans la productivité libre et pure de l’imagination. Celle- ci ne déploie la puissance sauvage de son invention qu’à écouter la nature, sa dictée, son dict”

(EM 62). The genius, exemplarily the poet, works as nature’s mouthpiece, speaking the latter’s truth and responding faithfully to the dictate that it do so: “Ce qui parle par la bouche du poète comme par la bouche de la nature, ce qui, dicté par leur voix, s’écrit de leur main, doit être authentique et véridique.” Between the authentic and veridical mouth of nature, its ergon, and the mouth, the exemplary organ, of the poet, is the “s’entendre-parler” of auto-affection:

Par exemple quand la voix du poète célèbre et glorifie le chant du rossignol, dans

le buisson solitaire, par une soirée d’été silencieuse, à la douce lumière de la lune,

le bouche à bouche ou le bec à bec des deux chants doit être authentique….

[C]’est d’une certaine exemploralité qu’il est ici traité…. Dans la première

exemploralité, dans l’oralité exemplaire [that of the “authentic” reproduction of

nature by the poet], il s’agit de chanter et d’ouïr, de voix sans consommation ou

de consommation idéale, d’une sensibilité élevée ou intériorisée. (EM 79)

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In another work from roughly the same period, Derrida notes that, for Condillac, genius is also paradigmatically guided by nature’s dictate, and in this it is inventive. Genius’ “qualité essentielle,” imagination, “n’invente que ce qu’il faut pour suivre la dictée de la nature.” Derrida quotes Condillac: “Qu’est-ce donc que le génie ? Un esprit simple qui trouve ce que personne n’a su trouver avant lui. La nature qui nous met tous dans le chemin des découvertes, semble veiller sur lui pour qu’il ne s’en écarte jamais…. Et quand je dis les hommes de génie, je n’exclus pas la nature dont ils sont les disciples favoris” (AF 53).

Yet, as in Derrida’s interrogation of Aristotle, this specular and natural circuit of interiorizing (re)presentation is more elliptical than it might seem at first glance. The genius is as though pulled in two different directions at once, both product or example and exemplary

(re)producer of nature’s pure productivity. On one hand, she is that through which physis comes to be itself, the “place” of nature’s dictate: “Le génie est le lieu d’une telle dictée : ce par quoi l’art reçoit de la nature ses règles… [La nature], assignant ses règles au génie, se plie, revient à elle-même, se réfléchit à travers l’art” (EM 59, my italics); “« Le génie est la disposition innée de l’esprit (ingenium), par laquelle la nature donne des règles à l’art »” (EM 70, italics in original). But on the other hand, genius is that through which the poet seems to receive and obey her own dictate: by which she gains her freedom, becomes god-like (messianic even54), and

(re)produces nature: “Au moment où elle donne librement des ordres à l’homme, par la voix du génie, la nature est déjà, elle-même, un produit, la production du génie divin” (EM 75, my italics).

This throughgoing movement is, then, a movement of articulation, a passage from nature to nature, or mouth to mouth, that interposes a break or interruption within the auto-affective

54 Earlier in the essay, Derrida speaks of “l’identification de l’acte humain à l’acte divin” that makes of the “sujet auteur” a “dieu auteur” (EM 67); and of the concept of art in Kant whose purpose is to elevate the human being above the world of mechanical nature and toward the realization of freedom. Thus the concept of art “est là pour ériger l’homme, c’est-à-dire, toujours, l’homme-dieu” (60).

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s’entendre-parler. Thus interrupted, nature’s “flexion spéculaire” is barred from bending back toward itself and completing its “rapport à soi” (EM 80). Its interiorization requires an exteriorization (in the form of a second mouth, that of the genius poet), but also an exclusion, that of the self, from the articulated system it would have generated and commanded. Yet the break interposed is not clean, and exclusion does not happen only once. Whence the following questions on the auto-affective limit and what exactly it excludes:

Si le s’entendre-parler, en tant qu’il passe aussi par une certaine bouche,

transforme tout en auto-affection, s’assimile tout en l’idéalisant dans l’intériorité,

… si cette bouche-là commande un espace d’analogie dans lequel elle ne se laisse

pas inclure … quel est le bord ou le débord absolu de cette problématique ? Quel

est le bord (interne et externe) qui dessine sa limite et la [sic] cadre de son

parergon ? Autrement dit : qu’est-ce qui n’entre pas dans cette théorie ainsi

cadrée, hiérarchisée, ordonnée ? Qu’est-ce qui en est exclu et qui, depuis cette

exclusion, lui donne forme, limite et contour ? Et quoi de ce débord quant à ce

qu’on appelle la bouche ? Puisque la bouche ordonne un plaisir tenant à

l’assimilation, à l’auto-affection idéale, qu’est-ce qui ne se laisse pas transformer

en auto-affection orale, tenant l’os pour telos ? Qu’est-ce qui ne se laisse pas

ordonner par l’exemploralité ?

Answer: “Il n’y a pas de réponse à une telle question.” That is, there is no example that could adequately mirror what exceeds, by being excluded from, auto-affective exemplarity: Derrida speaks of the “impossibilité de trouver des exemples dans ce cas,” as well as of “une sorte de loi sans exemple.” But if there are no examples that would be adequately reflective of this singular law of exclusion, Derrida finds in Kant still other examples, non-reflective ones, whose only source of lawful illumination is themselves. These are “exemples précédant la loi de manière

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réfléchissante,” and to the unanswerable questions cited above, they do in fact provide a certain response, one whose form is “tautologique” (EM 87). Of what could an unreflective example be the example? The example of the example: the one that, like the genius, produces a break in nature’s onto-theological, auto-affective circle. Such a genius example, offering no communion with a divine telos, can have no determinable end: it is at once sans vin and “sans-fin.” Its law, or the truth of its law, the verdict of its dictate, is that there be no end to the giving of examples, that the example therefore exceed and exclude the singular dictate that made it possible. Put otherwise, the law of analogy that reigns here is the analogy of examples: of examples of examples in examples through examples. “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire ? Ça veut dire que ça veut dire et que ça dit que ça veut dire que ça veut et que ça veut ce que ça veut par exemple.” The example exemplifies itself: for example, and by example. “Par exemple. C’est par exemple que

ça veut dire que ça veut dire et que ça dit que ça veut dire que ça veut et que ça veut ce que ça veut par exemple” (EM 75).55

The tautology demonstrated here does not equate to the speculative movement of

“comprehending (begreifendes) thought” that, as Gadamer notes, produces “a philosophical statement [that] is always something like a tautology: the philosophical statement expresses an identity” (Hegel’s Dialectic 18). Tautology is here the economy or law of the analogical example that incorporates in itself an endless series of examples. That is, the example exemplifies a crisis of interiority that does not permit of a practice of reflection that would be a “reflection into self”

(Ibid. 19). The two passages I have just quoted, each of which make up distinct paragraphs, the former immediately preceding the latter, each count as a single example that, however, is

55 Andrzej Warminski finds a similarly tautological (though he does not use this word) “example of example” that “‘asymmetricalizes’ the dialogue of speculative question and answer” in Hegel. In this asymmetry, “An example can never represent or exemplify itself enough as example to recover its own excess, the excess of example ‘itself,’ for there will always be one more (or less) as yet unreflected and forever unreflectable and unmediatable example left over or missing” (178). See “Reading for Example: ‘Sense-certainty’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” in Readings in Interpretation.

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constituted of, and so contains, examples. Rather than unfolding within, thus constituting, the exemplary paragraph that would subsequently contain them, the contained examples must be read as overflowing and containing their container, but “containing” it by erasing its limits, and so reconstituting, or reinventing, another exemplary – i.e., overflowed and erased – paragraph.

This is precisely why Derrida gives two paragraphs, two nearly- but non-identical examples of tautology, examples that are examples of each other. As such, they do not exemplify a temporally or spatially linear or circular movement of reading; that one follows another in a sequence of paragraphs is purely arbitrary. There is no reason why we should not, e.g., read the second before we read the first, or read the second as though it were in the first, or the first in the second. There is no reason why, then, the words that just happen to make up each paragraph as

Derrida arbitrarily wrote them should not make possible, promise or announce, further words, further examples of the baselessness of these paragraphs. Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire ? What is the starting point for an example that is exemplary of its own being-rewritten, or that prepares the steps, the pas de sens, toward its own reproduction or reinvention, that exists between its given state (the state, say, in which Derrida “actually” gives the example on this particular page in “Economimesis”) and a state that is not manifestly given? How to say what a given example gives as non-given, non-present? What is the truth, the veridicity, the verdict, that the example that gives itself, by or for itself, by or for example, gives or says or dictates? Innumerable examples offer themselves here. Let me offer some number of them: ça dit que ça dicte sa véridicité par exemple, exemple par exemple que ça dicte, dict par dict que ça dicte, dict par dictée par diktat par exemple. And since what is dictated by nature’s mouthpiece must be veridical, and since verse is the apogee of the free play of veridical productivity (“La poésie, sommet du bel art comme espèce de l’art, pousse à son extrême, en haut de la hiérarchie, la liberté de jeu qui s’annonce dans l’imagination productive” (EM 62)), the veridicity of the

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veridical example, the veridicity that operates by example and through the example, is always folding itself toward or vis-à-vis its example: ça dicte par vers véridique, par vers ça dicte, ça dicte en vers envers sa véridicité, vers ça par exemple ça dicte, ça dit vers, ça dit vers vers, ça dit vers en vers, vers par vers envers vers en vers par vers. But could we not also say that the veridicity of the example given through verse is a per-vers-ion, especially where the ver-dict, dictating the truth, promises it in more than one language? Here let me quickly recall Derrida’s examination of Paul de Man’s relationship to Heidegger, in which it is argued that language (in

(Heidegger’s) German, die Sprache) is originally and essentially modalized as promise, through a “modalisation apparemment post-originaire et performative” that would require, instead of saying, in Heideggerian fashion, Die Sprache spricht, that, as per de Man, “Die Sprache verspricht (sich).” Derrida then comments on the particle ver-, arguing that “Paul de Man … insinue qu’à s’affecter d’un « ver- » le Sprechen de la parole ne devient pas seulement prometteur, il se détraque, se perturbe, se corrompt, se pervertit, s’affecte d’une sorte de dérive fatale. Vous savez que le préfixe « ver- » a très souvent cette signification en allemand” (MPM

102).

In this analogy of examples of examples, everything comes back to language. “Tout remonte au langage, l’analogie est produite par le langage qui, donc, met tout en rapport avec lui- même, à la fois raison du rapport et terme du rapport” (EM 81). But because of the overlap of reason or container and the terms or examples it should contain, language must be understood as parergonal. Exemplifying itself through the example, language traces a frame for itself, cuts out its own limits. But this delimiting of limits does not just happen around language: around, say, its organs (e.g., its grammatical forms, its lexical units, its figures of speech, who or what is authorized to possess the ability to give voice to it in exemplary fashion), as what would provide an external border for its organs, as well as for language as a whole. It also happens through

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language, via a penetrating forcing of language’s boundaries that therefore suspends the possibility of determining what does and does not count as an example of it.

This, then, is the general or universal dictate of language: that there be no universal, metalingual ground on the basis of which a judgment regarding language’s totality may be rendered. Such a dictate contravenes the “classical prerogative” of judgment. As Rodolphe

Gasché recalls (Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence 89-107), for the Derrida of “Préjugés : devant la loi,” judgment’s “classical prerogative” is its “ontological prerogative”: it effectively pre-judges an essence, or takes whatever is to be judged as already, in its very being, given over to itself. Therefore, in its “prérogative ontologique,” which is also “pré-judicative,” “l’essence du jugement” is “dire l’essence (S est P).” And this in turn takes judgment itself as already given over, in its essence, to the whole of philosophy: “cette prérogative préjuge, prédetermine ou prédestine l’essence même du jugement, et, pourrait-on même dire, l’essence de l’essence, en la soumettant à la question qu’est-ce que?” But Derrida will seek in judgment’s pre-judging resources that will also allow for a questioning of “tout le dispositif théorico-ontologique qui préjuge qu’on doit pouvoir juger ce qu’est le jugement avant de juger de la façon dont il faut juger” (PDL 93). In a similar way, I have been, in the present section of this chapter, looking into the problematic of the exemplary example for idiomatic resources that would permit the rendering of an ultra-idiomatic judgment, a judgment not beholden to a universalizing pre- judgment or prejudice dictating how to judge an idiom.

For, instead of such a universalizing pre-judgment, there is the parergon, the delimiting of examples of language that, through being given, exemplify their own radical exclusion from any totalizing system, from any mouth or source that would claim authority to dictate, and to render a verdict on, what language is and how it should work. It follows that every example given is excluded from every other – excluded, even as it is given, through the other. The

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through, the par of the parergon, is the law of the idiom, i.e., of that which exemplifies the impossibility of a single, all-encompassing metalanguage. In other words, the law itself – its origination, proclamation, application, the very dictating of its dictate and rendering of its judgment – cannot not itself be non-universal. Therefore, it cannot be distinguishable from the ultra-idiomatic example and its “débordement parergonal” (EM 87). Every example is exemplary of the rule of analogy that rules by example: “L’analogie est la règle…. Par exemple, l’analogie est la règle” (EM 75). Every example has, per the dictates of its own idiom, the right to invent its own law, to exemplify only itself, and thus to let itself be overrun by, and excluded from, a process of parergonal delimiting which it will never have had the ability to exemplify.

If there is no difference between the law and its example, between the law as example and the example as law, if their relationship is completely arbitrary, it is by way of this arbitrariness, by way of the utter lack of a universal ground of language that would unite law and example in an identity, that the idiom, never appearing as such, never giving an example of itself, never definitively issuing its dictate, might remain itself, or might remain open to its own

(re)invention. Indeed, is this not what Derrida – for example – is dictating in the repetition of the exemplary, tautological paragraphs I quoted – and imitated – above? Is he not judging the sheer unfoundedness of his own examples? And is he not doing so through a delimitation of language’s limits? Through some idiom – but which one: French? German? Derrida’s French?

Derrida’s German as exemplified through French? Kant’s German as exemplified through

Derrida’s German as exemplified through French? French as exemplified through Derrida’s

German as exemplified through Kant’s German by way of a Latinization of a Greek parergon? – through some idiom in which a partial cut or break gets made, so as to prepare the possibility – as though for the first time – of an idiomatic invention? But is Derrida not, in merely preparing the possibility of that first time, simultaneously destroying it? Is not the possibility of the idiom

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that is only prepared but never realized, whose decisive cut is only partial, therefore its impossibility? But then what kind of judgment does an impossible idiom, or an idiom whose possibility dictates its simultaneous impossibility, render?

Answer (judgment rendered): a non-reflective judgment, one whose medium, because it is utterly arbitrary, is powerless to reflect on the non-difference between law and example. Now as we saw from Derrida’s “Préjugés,” judgment is classically the synthesizing expression of a power to adjudicate differences and so say what is. As such, it is properly reflective, or speculative, and its aims are universalizing and totalizing. By contrast, the non-reflective, or ultra-idiomatic, judgment does not give expression to a presupposed power. By passing judgment on itself, on its own power to judge, it passes through itself, and says nothing but this passing that, without precedent or prior example, draws its medium’s – the idiom’s – limits. Its law or judicative ground is a “loi sans exemple.” And without precedent, precisely, without the example exemplary of a permanent authority with the power to decide the drawing of its limits, the idiom is, through the passing of its judgment, simultaneously what that passing already leaves behind: some number of lingual examples reflecting no unified and preceding judicative ground.

Preceding the law that should precede them, they are “exemples précédant la loi de manière réfléchissante.” The genius of this ultra-idiomatic medium of judgment, then, is found in the non-reflective opening it traces in itself, through which it leaves – but with no power to reflect this leaving – examples of language whose differences – not only those between the examples, but also those between the examples and the exemplary medium passing judgment without precedent – remain undecidable. If it can be said that this ultra-idiomatic judgment reflects anything, it is its own inability to reflect the difference between the idiom as it passes judgment, above all on itself, and the examples that will have, paradoxically, preceded the very movement of judgment by which the idiom traces its own limits.

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Derridean tautology is the “repetition” of this non-reflection, and it is genius, through its ultra-idiomaticity, that reflects it. Reflecting that there is no difference between the medium possessing the power to reflect, and the limit between that power and what it should make possible, the genius invents a singular opening, invents itself as that opening, through which the

(re)invention of the idiom, as though for the first time, remains (im)possible. Through which, then, genius itself remains, to quote again from “La mythologie blanche,” “imprenable”: unlearnable, inalienable, inimitable, certainly. But also un-takable, as a gift whose elliptical circulation will have dispossessed genius of what is most proper to it, and thus made it indistinguishable from what it is not: a mere imitation, a fake or counterfeit genius. Genius’ power of substitution – its ability, within the dialectical development of nature’s unveiling through mimesis, to replace what is not known with knowledge, an absence with a presence, what is obscure with what is clear and luminous because bathed in the natural light of being-as- presence – this power of substitution is most ingenious when it lets itself be substituted. When tautology (substitution substituting substitution) says what is exemplary of no precedent. Here I quote again from the end of the chapter of “La mythologie blanche” entitled “L’ellipse du soleil : l’énigme, l’incompréhensible, l’imprenable”:

L’imprenable, c’est certes le génie de percevoir une ressemblance cachée mais

aussi, par conséquent, de pouvoir substituer un terme à un autre. Le génie de la

mimesis peut donc donner lieu à une langue, à un code de substitutions réglées, au

talent et aux procédés de la rhétorique, à l’imitation du génie, à la maîtrise de

l’imprenable. Suis-je dès lors assuré qu’on peut tout me prendre sauf le pouvoir

de remplacer ? Par exemple, ce qu’on me prend par autre chose ? A quelles

conditions aurait-on toujours un tour de plus – dans son sac ? une graine de plus ?

et le soleil pourrait-il toujours semer ? et la physis s’ensemencer ? (M 292)

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VI. Language’s Inter-dict, de par en par

Now as I have just stated, and indeed as has been implied throughout this chapter, the privilege in Derrida of the ultra-idiomatic over a general, metalingual totality of language, nonetheless necessitates the formulation of a universal law. To repeat, the universal law of language would be that there be no such law. A given idiom, through the idiomatic law it dictates to itself, would nonetheless be able to render a judgment that goes for all idioms. I will spend the rest of this chapter thinking through this strange possibility. This will necessitate passing, once again, through genius, but also through the not unrelated thought of invention, whose analysis

Derrida undertakes in the mid-period essay “Psyché : Invention de l’autre.”56 It will be seen that, for Derrida, invention (which has historically been associated with genius: “l’invention suppose

… originalité, génération, engendrement, généalogie, valeurs qu’on associe souvent à la génialité” (PIA 15); this association is similarly recalled at PIA 43) invention is the invention of language itself (“le langage même”), whose truth intervenes (invention as “in(ter)vention,” then) as the possibility of the word. Which is to say, not simply in the word, in the self-enclosed unity of the word as basic unit of language, but through the word, as intervention of the word (“une invention et une intervention du mot”), “dans et par le mot.” This par – which is also the par

56 In his account of genius in Derrida, “Genius Is What Happens,” Michael Haworth focuses in large part on invention, in particular as it is discussed in “Psyché : Invention de l’autre.” He insists that genius for Derrida is basically concerned with the invention or creation of newness and originality. He seems, then, to ignore the crucial role of repetition in invention, and in particular how the link between singularity and repetition troubles the very concept of the event of invention. For example, Derrida writes that “pour que l’invention soit une invention, c’est-à- dire unique, même si cette unicité doit donner lieu à répétition, il faut que cette première fois soit aussi une dernière fois” (PIA 16). In other words, the coming about of an invention, its “first time,” has to be thought in conjunction with its simultaneous disappearance, or “last time,” through repetition, which puts in question the very event of invention. Later on, he writes that “l’invention ne serait conforme à son concept, au trait dominant de son concept et de son mot que dans la mesure où, paradoxalement, l’invention n’invente rien, lorsqu’en elle l’autre ne vient pas, et quand rien ne vient à l’autre et de l’autre” (PIA 59). It is through the putting in question of the event of invention, where one is made to question whether an “invention” in fact brought about anything at all, that its singularity has a chance to be thought. I explore this below. Ann Jefferson provides some largely inconsequential remarks on

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through which the first line of Francis Ponge’s “Fable,” analyzed in this essay by Derrida, gets going: “Par let mot par” – marks a quasi-reflective opening or wound, a “blessure narcissique.”

And as it grows infinitely large (“s’accroît à l’infini” (PIA 21), the motif of growth announcing, by the way, a kinship between “Psyché : Invention de l’autre” and the “growth” of languages in

“Des tours de Babel”), it refuses to cut itself off from the intervention of any language whatsoever. “Fable,” that is, exemplifies what, in Signéponge, Derrida terms “une fable”: it is an

“histoire de la langue et de l’écriture” that insists “infiniment à la mesure de son impossibilité inénarrable.” It therefore opens what is most proper to itself to the essential, but unactualizable, possibility of substitution by every idiom, what Derrida describes as “échange sans échange du nom [e.g., the name of an idiom] avec toute langue … je dis bien toute langue” (S 103).57

But I will first take a further look at the problem of the indistinction between the authentic genius and its fake imitation that appears in “La mythologie blanche” and that, as I have indicated, appears connected to the problem of the law-example relationship in

“Economimesis.” I will be looking in particular to develop Derrida’s remark that genius, as genius of mimesis, can give rise both to its own imitation, as well as “une langue.” It is between the genius of the individual and the genius of a language that the intervention of “le langage même” may be said to take place.

The problem of genius and its counterfeiting is developed at greater length in the late work Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie. What Derrida there calls “quelque chose comme une thèse” on genius (GGG 14) might be summed up by saying that “le type idéal du génie” is, like the character Gregor in Hélène Cixous’s Manhattan, “contrefait ou contrefacteur” (GGG

Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie in the final chapter of her book Genius in France, “Derrida, Cixous, and the Impostor.” 57 Derrida calls the abyssal opening of a fable its “allure,” which he describes as “la démarche de ce qui vient sans venir.” He then states that in the fable of this “allure” of fable (“Fable d’une allure”), “rien ne va autrement que dans ce petit texte … intitulé Fable et qui commence par « Par le mot par commence donc ce texte/Dont la première ligne dit la vérité »” (S 103).

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81). Genius’ productive or, as per “Economimesis,” (re)productive act, is its counterfeiting. And what does genius counterfeit? Genius. But, crucially, genius, by counterfeiting itself, does not seek to hide itself, does not want to give a false impression of itself. Gregor, for example, “aurait aimé être aimé en contrefacteur de génie” (GGG 82). There is no secret being kept, no evil trick being played, the genius wishes to be recognized for what he really is: a genius of faking genius who, through his fraudulence, shows there is no distinction between a counterfeit genius and a genius counterfeiter. Derrida goes on to say that it is “Comme s’il revenait à la fausse monnaie du génie de donner à lire, pile ou face, l’authenticité, l’or du génie, comme un hommage du vice

à la vertu qui laisserait à jamais indécidé, du point de vue du savoir et de l’énoncé théorique, l’essence authentique du génie” (GGG 91).

In an important respect, the problem of genius as Derrida meditates on it here is the problem of the proper name, which, like meaning (sens) as it is conceived in “Des tours de

Babel,” is unthinkable without an external form or “literality.” In the case of Cixous, Derrida remarks on the importance of the letter g in her work (“tout semble revenir à la littéralité d’une lettre. Tout semble tenir à la lettre g”), which is marshalled so as to leave an inimitable mark in the archive that would hold her collected writings. It is, indeed, the most proper of proper names that Cixous would sign, the name of language itself: “La lettre g inscrit, tel un logos qui serait, proverbalement, au commencement de tout, l’initiale absolue d’un prénom propre” (GGG 17).

Here, of course, we encounter a double bind. If it is through French that the genius has a chance to make her mark and sign a proper name, not only her own, but that of the whole of language, it is also in French that the she is immediately dispossessed of the power to do so: the proper name cannot but be located in a differential system in which it is made to function, through repetition, like a generic, common noun. To recall the well-known argument from De la grammatologie, the condition of possibility of the proper name is that it be already inscribed in a system of

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classification: “le nom propre n’a jamais été possible que par son fonctionnement dans une classification et donc dans un système de différences” (DG 159). Within the context of the late book on genius, it is more specifically an inescapable relation to the archive that is at stake.

According to Derrida, Cixous is a genius who writes first of all with an eye to her own classification in a language such as French, and in an archive such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This is the case of Manhattan, “un livre sur l’archive et, d’avance, tout expressément destiné, à la vérité, à la BNF [la Bibliothèque nationale de France], à la vérité de la BNF ; je veux dire un livre fait pour parler, entre autres choses, de la BNF à la BNF, pour lui dire son fait et son œuvre, à un moment où l’auteur savait déjà l’alliance destinale qui s’était déjà engagée entre la BNF et elle” (GGG 92-3).

This does not mean, of course, that there is simply no genius to speak of chez Cixous, as though it had been absorbed into and erased by the archive and its archiving language. Derrida incessantly argues that the archive’s capacity to hold, or to reflect, what it is given (that being here Cixous’s collected writings) is fundamentally in question. He writes that “la BNF … avec toutes les compétences distinguées, avec les savoirs incomparables du lectorat qu’elle représente pour des siècles, demeurera toujours par essence incapable de déterminer, et a fortiori de s’approprier ce qu’elle accueille, héberge, protège, ce à quoi elle a l’insigne vertu d’offrir hospitalité.” For her part, though Cixous “knows” already that her writings are destined for the

BNF and the genius of the French language it represents and puts to work in its name, this does not mean that she has the power to reflect in a theoretical or speculative mode on that fact.58 Just

58 Here an in-depth analysis would be needed on Derrida’s reflections on knowledge, the theoretical, the speculative, etc., as well as on all the ways in which he deploys the idiomatic French word savoir (in relation to, e.g., s’avoir, avoir, voir, SA, ça, etc.), and this in distinction to the problem of faith or belief and their related idioms. In this vein, on a faith in Derrida that is “constitutive of every relation to the other, since one cannot know what the other will do or see what the other has in mind” (126), see Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism, especially “Autoimmunity of Life: Derrida’s Radical Atheism.” But see also Sarah Hammerschlag’s Broken Tablets, in which she rightly, I think, maintains that while too much has been made of a turn to religion and, by association, ethics in Derrida, one cannot simply oppose Derrida, as a “radical atheist,” to religion, whose “literary stakes” go too often unconsidered (xiv).

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like the archive to which her works are given, Cixous is, in a most basic sense, ignorant, specifically of what, or even that, she gives: “la donatrice est incapable de savoir et de mesurer ce qu’elle donne, voire même qu’elle donne – ou confie” (GGG 88).

The verb confier is key here, as Derrida makes clear with his trait. It signals that he wants to think the structure of the gift, in its passage between Cixous and the BNF/French, in its secrecy. For it is thanks to the secrecy of the gift-structure of the gift, or of the gift in its being- given, that the limit between the proper name of genius and its inscription in a system of classification will be able to be thought as a non-reflective limit, one permitting an escape from the specular totalization of metalingual meaning. For example, though Cixous, through her writing practice, “imposes” an “implacable law” on the archive and French as language of the archive, and this so as to exceed their signifying possibilies and leave an idiomatic signature (“la signature de l’idiome Cixous”) within them, she does this by exploiting what was, as it turns out, already present in them. She thus “gives,” as it were, what had already been “secretly” taken.

Genius, in this sense, does not so much impose itself implacably as it exposes the classificatory language to a radically self-reflexive moment that opens it to the sort of lawless exemplification we have witnessed in what is by now a number of places in Derrida. In this moment of self- reflection, the language bears up and gives to be seen the genius of its “resources” – Derrida writes of a “vision de la langue française comme d’un génie – on dit souvent le génie de la langue pour désigner son trésor grammatical, lexical ou sémantique” – as a virtuality of resources, “la virtualité infinie de ses ressources propres.” That is, the genius of a language is to be sought in a set of “resources” that seems to give rise to more possibilities of signification

(“infinite” ones) than should be allowable by the parameters of the set. At the moment a genius such as Cixous gives her excessive gift (“don à la fois béni et dangereux de son archive”), the language, container of infinite resources of signification, is made to look away from the genius

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and upon itself, but via a hyperbolic turning movement. It turns at once toward itself, lovingly, to embrace or enclose itself and the superabundance of its lingual wealth; away from itself and its treasure, in a gesture of betrayal, so as to embrace a set of lingual possibilities external to itself; and through itself, rending itself and leaving itself as a blind limit, a place for the gathering of secret, ultra-idiomatic lingual particles that constitute a purely, limitlessly virtual resource.

Genius would be just this hyperbolic turning movement that “lui ouvre doucement, violemment, tendrement les yeux [the eyes of the French language] sur ce qui se trouvait en elle, je veux dire la langue française, comme en sommeil ou somnambulant dans le rêve infini de son inconscient, s’y trouvant et s’y retrouvant sans s’y être jamais encore trouvé” (GGG 32).

This same schema, formed of a hyperbolic turning at once toward, away, and through, structures Derrida’s remarks on genius in L’archéologie du frivole, as well as his argument regarding the Francis Ponge poem “Fable” in both Théorie et pratique and “Psyché : Invention de l’autre.” As important parts of the latter two works center around the strangely reflective oscillation of the preposition par within the opening line of the Ponge poem (“Par le mot par”), I will devote the final pages of this chapter in large part to them. But I would still like to draw attention to L’archéologie du frivole, where, as in the book on Cixous, a decisive if virtual difference, a kind of difference within non-difference, structures the relationship between genius and language, or genius and the genius of a language.

Derrida writes that, for Condillac, “le génie est porté par la langue” and so reflects the historical progress of the language, of its genius and that of the nation it belongs to. Condillac asserts that “Les circonstances favorables au développement des génies se rencontrent chez une nation, dans le temps où sa langue commence à avoir des principes fixes et un caractère décidé”

(AF 56). Once set in place, those principles offer up the conditions for individual genius’ interventions into, and consequent contributitions to, the genius of the language: “La langue lui

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[to genius] fournit des conditions élémentaires qu’il n’a plus qu’à reconnaître pour en jouer” (AF

58).

But by the insertion of a certain, indeterminately small gap, the genius can himself bear along language. In the process, he does not just take what he is given, does not just draw and inherit his power from a pre-existing stock so as to reciprocally enrich it. He “garde en propre quelque pouvoir qu’à son tour il prête à la langue” (AF 58). Genius gives, but in order to keep, and this by turns: that is, according to a secret ruse or sleight of hand, “à son tour.” By way of this very nearly insignificant expression, one that, to echo “Reste – le maître,” was no doubt

“discrètement abandonée … à sa chance idiomatique” (R 28) by Derrida, I want to claim that a turn of phrase reflects an essential possibility: that the condition on which a genius might, “à son tour,” give a gift and demonstrate his power to give, is that genius might always have one more gift to give, a “tour de plus,” as Derrida says in closing his brief remarks on genius in “La mythologie blanche.” This would be so because, in its being-given, it is as though the gift were not a true manifestation of the genius’ power to give, and so reflected no difference between giver and receiver, individual genius and the genius of a language. As though the gift given were itself nothing but a trick or ruse, “un tour de plus – dans son sac” (M 292), a false presentation of the event of the exchange, that is, of the circulation or “turning” of the gift, from one genius (the individual) to another (the language and its various socio-political institutionalizations). The ruse of this turning would, in turn, be the turning or circulation of the ruse: the trick would present the exchange as false, while leaving undecidable the true source of the power of genius, the power that should make possible, through the imagination, “de nouveaux tours dans les règles de l’analogie” (AF 58). Reflecting that it reflects no true reflection between one genius and another, the tour works as supplement of itself, a “tour de plus” turning between multiple (Derrida would certainly want to say “infinite”) possibilities, none of which are in truth actualizable. This is

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surely why Derrida, in “La mythologie blanche,” speaks of the genius’ “tour de plus” as, additionally, a “graine de plus” (M 292): the supplementary turn of language is a seed that, absolutely scattered, will have never come to realization, and so borne no fruit. In L’archéologie du frivole, the tour thus turns between: (a) a genius that keeps what it gives, and that therefore puts in doubt the very event of giving; (b) a language whose historical and logical development, as analogical unfolding of meaning, coincides with a deviation from the rules of analogy and therefore its own decline. On this, Derrida quotes Condillac speaking of “great men” of genius who “sont obligés d’imaginer de nouveaux tours dans les règles d’analogie, ou du moins en s’en

écartant aussi peu qu’il est possible,” and who “Par là … se conforment au génie de leur langue, et lui prêtent en même temps le leur” (AF 58). The source of historical progress leads to the source of an anachronistic downfall: “Après avoir montré les causes des derniers progrès du langage, il est à propos de rechercher celles de sa décadence : elles sont les mêmes.” Where the genius looks to hone an original style, “il ne lui reste qu’à s’écarter de l’analogie. Ainsi, pour être original, il est obligé de préparer la ruine d’une langue dont un siècle plus tôt il eût hâté les progrès.” And in that slightest of gaps or écarts separating the turns of the individual genius from those of his language, as well as the turns of a teleological progression from those of ruination, there is the possibility of (c) counterfeiting genius. With no possibility of decision as to the source of genius, there is left a place in which genius’ tour may be replaced (or re-placed) by copies of genius, copies that have arisen from no discernible source of genius. The gap or écart opened by genius is, in this instance, a genius gap, a place for the profusion of false geniuses and all their ruses. The moment when genius, à son tour, demonstrates its original power and turns loose its gift, “C’est alors qu’on voit naître le règne des pensées subtiles et détournées, des antithèses précieuses, des paradoxes brillants, des tours frivoles, des expressions recherchées, des mots faits sans nécessité, et, pour tout dire, du jargon des beaux esprits gâtés par une mauvaise

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métaphysique.” This profusion would be a virtual one through and through, a multiplicity of works of counterfeit genius, each emerging and falling away in an instant: “les ouvrages frivoles, ridicules, qui ne naissent que pour un instant, se multiplient.” Archaeology as archaeology of the frivolous, as a search for first principles and a first language or logos that already finds itself in the irreducible turns of an idiom, and that gives rise to undecidable differences between one genius’ idiomatic turns of phrase (say, Derrida’s, “à son tour”) and another’s (say, Condillac’s),

“c’est cet écart du génie” (AF 58-9 n. 4).

The écart of genius reappears subtly but, I think, importantly several years after

L’archéologie du frivole in “Psyché : Invention de l’autre.” In a passage figuring a bit past the half-way point of the essay, Derrida brings together quite economically the problematics of the non-reflective turn of genius that I have just been describing. Here, an écart stands in the midst of a language, a genius,59 and the event of an invention:

la Fable de Ponge ne crée rien, au sens théologique du terme (du moins en

apparence), elle n’invente qu’en recourant à un lexique et à des règles

syntaxiques, à un code en vigueur, à des conventions auxquelles elle se soumet

d’une certaine manière. Mais elle donne lieu à un événement, raconte une histoire

fictive et produit une machine en introduisant un écart dans l’usage habituel du

discours, en déroutant dans une certaine mesure l’habitus d’attente et de réception

dont elle a pourtant besoin…. (PIA 36)

Notably, the relationship described here between Ponge’s poem and the French language (which is not named as such in this text, but which I think we can safely assume to be implicitly referred

59 Though Derrida speaks of genius at a few different points in “Psyché : Invention de l’autre,” and though one could easily infer that he considers Ponge a genius, he never explicitly refers to him as such in this essay. He does, however, speak of “le génie singulier de Ponge” (DP 41) in an interview with Gérard Farasse that was published as the standalone volume Déplier Ponge.

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to if we recall the important ways in which Ponge is connected to it in Derrida’s Signéponge60) is, elsewhere in the essay, resonant with the ways in which Derrida tackles the problem of genius and the gift structure linking it to French in the book on Cixous. For example, he makes mention of language as a rich stock the genius must draw from, “un fonds linguistique préexistant (règles syntaxiques et trésor fabuleux de la langue).” And the singularity of a genius invention such as

Ponge’s is similarly originally open to reinvention as imitation, and, one supposes, counterfeiting. Thus, “Par le mot par,” the beginning of “Fable,” is “capable d’engendrer d’autres énoncés poétiques de même type…. On peut dire ainsi : « Avec le mot avec s’inaugure cette fable », ou d’autres variantes réglées” (PIA 32). And here we find Derrida echoing the terms he would use some twenty years later in Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie to describe the relationship between singularity and generality, the proper name and the common or generic noun: the invention as event “semble se produire en parlant de lui-même, par le fait d’en parler, dès lors qu’il invente au sujet de l’invention, frayant sa voie, inaugurant ou signant sa singularité, l’effectuant en quelque sorte au moment même où il nomme et décrit la généralité de son genre et la généalogie de son topos” (PIA 16-7).

Now, though “écart” is ostensibly not a regularly recurring word in “Psyché : Invention de l’autre,” the problem it announces or brings together in the passage I have just quoted, which is that of an undecidable opening between an individual genius, the genius’ invention, that invention’s repetition, and language, structures the general concern of the essay. This can be summarized as the invention or reinvention of invention, and Derrida, in a footnote, ties it directly to language as the invention of language. “L’invention du langage et de l’écriture – de la marque,” he writes, “est toujours, pour des raisons essentielles, le paradigme même de l’invention, comme si on assistait là à l’invention de l’invention” (PIA 47 n. 1). A formula such

60 In brief, Derrida argues that Ponge appropriates the whole of the language for himself in order to “Francis-fy” it,

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as “invention of invention” implies, of course, a certain reflective turning between one instance of genius or language and another, and so it is not surprising to find Derrida speaking of Ponge’s

“Fable” as “un faux speculum, une fausse spéculation” (TP 48). These comments, from the recently published Théorie et pratique, whose writings made up a seminar given during the mid-

1970’s (and so during roughly the same period in which nearly all the texts I have treated here were being written and/or published), will bring us closer to the assertion with which I began this section, i.e., that the necessity of a single idiom’s non-universality and, concomitantly, the dictate of its own radically idiomatic law, should somehow make possible a further law regarding idioms generally speaking. Derrida’s descriptions of the essentially imitable genius and its relationship to a given language by way of a non-totalizing and originary reflexivity have already moved us some way toward thinking through this, in particular on the basis of the

“infinite virtuality” of signifying resources that an idiom such as French makes available to deviative and deviant uses (those, e.g., of the individual genius), even as they are said to be

“proper” to French’s own lingual stock.

Derrida’s commentary on Ponge’s “Fable” will deepen these reflections. In the same session from the seminar that I have just quoted, he describes the reflective movement of reference happening between the two par of the poem’s beginning (“Par le mot par”) as, on one hand, utterly foreign to any metalingual totalization and so, one presumes, radically unique, proper to the genius of Francis Ponge and/or French. Derrida thus mentions “l’impossibilité de produire un métalangage au sujet de « par ».” On the other hand, the par’s falsely specular referral results in a shattering of the locution’s mirror structure (“son interruption brisante”) that marks the event of a repetition that is also a translation of a preceding event, “événement qui répète et traduit l’événement initial (« par le mot par »).” Here it needs to be mentioned that

“la re-franciser”; and that he purifies it, renders it, via his poetic practice, all the more French, “la-refranciser” (S 45).

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these comments on “Fable” follow on and further a discussion of the “canon of pure reason” in

Kant’s first Critique and Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason, in which is foregrounded both thinkers’ use of the German weil as representative of reason itself: in Kant, reason as manifested through an interest in reason in its very unity; and, in Heidegger, reason as abyss of reason that grounds itself on a persistent withdrawal of ground. Par, claims Derrida, translates weil (which itself translates reason) at key moments in both Kant’s and Heidegger’s respective works, the translation resulting therefrom being, importantly, “imperfect”: par “ne traduit qu’imparfaitement le « weil » (en perdant peut-être un peu de sa référence lointaine à la durée)”

(TP 48).

It would appear that this imperfection arises from a problematizing of priority vis-à-vis the German and French sources Derrida is drawing on. Via an elliptically looped phrasing,

Derrida notes that weil is “ce qu’on traduit par « par » (« par-ce-que »)” (TP 45, my italics), and that, in the French translation of Kant that Derrida is working from, “« weil » y est traduit une fois par « puisque », l’autre fois par « parce que »” (TP 47, my italics). These remarks dovetail with the subsequent claims that not only can no metalanguage account for the mirrored turning between par and par, but that any metalanguage that attempts to do so finds itself, from the first, pulled into the very same false speculum: “aucun métalangage théorique ne peut surprendre qu’à se laisser d’avance occuper, préoccuper par lui, par « par ». Pas de métalangage théorique, mais pas de métapratique non plus” (TP 48). Derida’s elliptically looped phrasing seems to suggest, then, that, like any metalanguage “preoccupied” by the par, both Kant’s and Heidegger’s

German are, in an original manner, moving with or through the par, pre-occupied or contained by it. Before any self-conscious decision might be made on the part of any particulat translator, the respective uses of weil by the two German thinkers would from the start be on their way to being translated and transformed through, because contained by, another language, here French,

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or French by way of the genius of Ponge and/or Derrida. And given the stakes of the weil in both

Kant and Heidegger – Derrida claims that it, like the par, functions as a strangely looped translation of reason itself (regarding Kant in particular, he states that the weil is invested “d’un office et d’une signification très étranges” (TP 44); see also TP 44-51) – nothing less than the language of reason, language of language, would be implicated in the par’s idiosyncratic, radically transformational turns.

Yet I recall that as such a radically transformational medium, the specular turning typifying the par is a “false” one, and that the event of its mirroring is, for Derrida, a simultaneous shattering of the mirror. Indeed, he appears to tie, via “un rapport essentiel,” the translational movement by which any metalanguage gets swept into this mirror structure to “le bris du miroir, à la fois … l’effet de miroir, l’effet spéculaire ou spéculatif … et son interruption brisante” (TP 48). Needless to say, then, though the par appears to dominate and contain in advance any language that would otherwise position itself as the primary text, so to speak, of which the par would merely serve as the secondary translation, the domus it forms through that domination cannot itself be a metalanguage or an all-containing set of languages.

And yet this false speculum as instantiated by Ponge’s “Fable” counts, for Derrida, as an invention (he puts the word in quotation marks when designating “Fable” as such, “Cette

« invention » (PIA 18)), whose paradigm, the invention of invention is, I recall, the invention of language, “[le] langage.” How, then, does this paradigm give itself to be invented through the par of “Fable”? As we will see, the par for Derrida forms a place, a medium of sorts in and through which language as a gathering or collection of idioms might have a chance to be invented, as though for the first time. Let me first point out, though, that one way in which

Derrida approaches this place is through the metaphor of a wound, a “blessure narcissique” (that

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is, another sort of écart or, as it were, escarre61). The par’s specular structure, the movement by which it both constitutes and breaks itself and, in addition, invents itself – or (re)invents itself, invents itself as reinvented – appears as an internal fragmentation. This leaves the par at one and the same time untouched and shattered, alone without the other and pierced from within by the other, the other that has therefore taken up residence inside it, having effectively replaced it while leaving it in place. “Fable,” for Derrida,

dit l’allégorie, le mouvement d’une parole pour passer à l’autre, de l’autre côté du

miroir. Effort désespéré d’une parole malheureuse pour franchir le spéculaire

qu’elle constitue elle-même…. [I]l y va justement de la mort, de ce moment du

deuil où le bris du miroir est à la fois le plus nécessaire et le plus difficile. Le plus

difficile parce que tout ce que nous disons, faisons, pleurons, si tendus que nous

soyons vers l’autre, reste en nous. Une partie de nous est blessée et c’est de nous

que nous nous entretenons encore dans le travail du deuil…. A l’instant de la

mort, la limite de la réappropriation narcissique devient terriblement coupante,

elle accroît et neutralise la souffrance…. La blessure narcissique s’accroît à

l’infini de ne plus pouvoir être narcissique. (PIA 20-1)

It is by virtue of such growth without end that the par in “Fable” would be able to leave a place, through itself, for another word. Not simply its other, the other par, for example, of

“Fable”’s strangely reflective syntax. Derrida insists throughout roughly the first half of

“Psyché : Invention de l’autre” that the two par are at bottom indistinguishable in terms of any

61 The motif of the wound as escarre runs throughout “Circonfession,” and appears to be linked to the “engendering” of a great number of undecidable, ultra-idiomatic words. For example, he writes of a “multiplication des escarres sur le corps … des mots.” The scars/wounds on the body of words are analogized with the sores and wounds on his mother’s body: “ces croûtes noirâtres et purulentes qui se forment autour des plaies sur le corps de ma mère … grouillantes d’homonymies, toutes ces escarres … l’escharose du mot lui-même engendrant une énorme famille de bâtards étymologiques, de progénitures qui changent de nom et dont l’escarre homonyme, l’équerre du blason quarré, donne lieu aux généalogies en abîme dont je n’abuserai pas mais je ne m’arrête pas ici sans noter le lien avec la cicatrice anglaise, scar, ou avec la coupure du haut-allemand, scar” (C 90-1).

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number of metalingual conceptual pairs (notably including constative-performative and use- mention). Rather, through the par, a place would be made or left for another word as inaugural word, another first word or beginning, an “incipit absolu” (PIA 23) or “première venue” (PIA

22) without precedent, and that would invent the fable of “Fable.” That is, Derrida wants to show that any reading of “Fable” has to contend with a prior signifying process that shows the poem’s language to be radically non-representational or “fabulous.” The par would be bereft, or in mourning, of any power to represent or present anything at all, up to and including itself. And yet it is, for Derrida, thanks to this utter absence of power that the par, unable to reflect itself or anything else, may invent or may make possible an invention, but a non-(re)presentable invention: a fabrication or fiction or fable, an invention referring to nothing real, nothing preceding or following it, because constitutively open to imitation, counterfeiting, replacement, reinvention. And in this way, the invention of the “first word” would be, in an essentially virtual way (to echo Derrida’s analysis of genius in Cixous), the invention of every word, of every word as first word of language, the proper name, as it were, of language.

What Derrida therefore calls “invention” cannot be in a symmetrical relationship to the other that would be an other, absolute beginning, or the invention of invention. This is without doubt why, toward the end of his remarks on “Fable,” he speaks not just of invention, but of

“intervention” (or of “Fable” as “une histoire … qui n’est autre qu’elle-même en sa propre in(ter)vention”), and of “intercession” (PIA 31). Of what would the invention of “Fable” be the intervention or intercession? Derrida provides at least one answer when he claims that, in presenting itself “comme un commencement,” and this “Dès le commencement,” “Fable” ironically quotes the beginning of the Gospel of John, “Au commencement fut le logos” (PIA 22)

(and here I recall that Cixous’s literary ambition is, per Derrida, to leave a mark that, “tel un logos … serait, proverbalement, au commencement de tout, l’initiale absolue d’un prénom

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propre”). By virtue of the unique way in which its “réflexivité originaire” (PIA 23) brings together the constative and performative functions of speech act theory, the poem would resemble the divine Word in its speaking itself into being. “Fable” thus “décrit et effectue, sur la même ligne, son propre engendrement,” but not without also situating itself as a quotation, and, what is more, an ironic quotation, one whose first quoted word should itself be determined as a modification of a “citationnalité générale” (to echo Derrida’s argument from “Signature

Événement Contexte” (M 387)). This latter quotation (of quotation) would be what Derrida refers to as “l’étrange structure de l’envoi ou du message évangélique, en tout cas de son incipit qui dit qu’à l’incipit il y a le logos,” and which “Fable,” per Derrida, both “révèle et pervertit”

(PIA 22).

By quoting the Word, “Fable” would thus invent the Word, all while perverting it so as to leave open the possibility that another Word should intervene or intercede in its place. Derrida follows up on the remarks on the Ponge poem’s ironic inscription in the “tradition évangélique”

(PIA 22) several pages later by claiming that “Fable” is in fact “une invention et une intervention du mot, et même ici du mot « mot ».” Now the word “word” is evidently not functioning for

Derrida here as a metalingual, proper name, i.e., an ideality that, via an evangelical intervention or intercession, would assure the unified belonging of every common noun to a unified monolanguage. The individual words making up the opening locution of “Fable” should not, for example, be read as though silently communicating their a priori status as lexemes of French or, for that matter, any other language: le mot “par” le mot “mot” le mot “par.” Nor should one be tempted, in light of Derrida’s comment, to read them as though yielding to the reductio ad absurdum of an endless linear and/or circular series of designations: le mot le mot le mot, or par le mot par le mot par, etc. To repeat, the truth of “Fable” is its truth as fable, as inscribed in a differential system (e.g., a system of classification, an archive, French) and therefore

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constitutively non-representational, a speculation whose mirroring operation is a structural repetition of its own shattering, or that it reflects its own ultra-idiomatic inability to reflect, remaining in mourning for an absolute beginning that should remain essentially non-actualized because radically fictional. Therefore, the intervention or intercession, by the word “word,” into the false speculum of Ponge’s poem – whose necessity Derrida describes when he states that “le miroir n’advient à lui-même que par l’intercession du mot” (PIA 31) – far from mediating between it and a metalingual totality, should rather repeat, and in an original manner, its non- reflective structure. That is, the word “word” intervenes or intercedes in the par’s turning in order (a) to repeat it, but in the mode of intercession or witnessing, thus to bear witness to it as a non-(re)presentational, and so ultra-idiomatic, word; (b) to repeat it, but in the mode of reinvention, thus to reinvent or replace the ultra-idiomatic word; and (c) to repeat it, again in the mode of intercession or witnessing, but so as to bear witness to it as a reinvention, as essentially imitable, counterfeitable, and replaceable by another invention.

When Derrida thus speaks of the invention of “Fable” and the false speculum of its par as being at the same time the invention of “le mot « mot »” as well as the intervention or intercession of the “le mot « mot »,” he is: (a) referring to “Fable,” and more specifically its first word (its “incipit absolu”) as, from the start, more than one invention in one invention, more than one (first) word in one (first) word; and (b) highlighting that the means by which to differentiate

“Fable” and the par that is its first word from their possible generic imitations or counterfeitings serves to annul the difference between them. The word that would intervene or intercede so as to bear witness to the ultra-idiomaticity of the par, by intervening – but then, for Derrida, the intervention is already in the invention, forming an “in(ter)vention” – inaugurates an original repetition that opens the par to its reinvention, and that renders – or keeps – its ultra-idiomatic difference obscure, hidden from coming into and reflecting the light of (re)presentational truth.

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In this sense, as interceding word, “le mot « mot »” would bear witness to something radically false or fabulous, to a non-difference, or an event, the event of the par and its ultra-idiomatic turning, that makes no difference because it would be originally replaced by the event of a second invention.

Thus, “Fable” would, on one hand, appear to be the story (or “récit” cf. PIA 23) of an utterly unique event involving the “originary reflexivity” of a self as instantiated in language, in particular in French and by way of the par: “voilà un événement singulier” (PIA 32). Yet on the other hand, that story, or the singular event as story, cannot get started or come about, cannot be invented, before appealing to another invention that would intervene in it. The result is not simply one singularity, or a singularity as a single event, but a “singular duplication” that cuts the par off from itself and annuls the event it would constitute. And yet, because the intervention of the second invention is at the same time an intercession or act of witnessing, the par’s invention is vouched for and preserved in a certain way. The par is duplicated, counterfeited and substituted for by another invention, but such that it is referred to, or addressed, without recourse being had to a metalanguage. This would be the case because the invention, that of “le mot

« mot »,” that comes to intervene in the par, rather than opposing itself to it (as imitation or copy to original, or as witness to event to be witnessed), mixes itself up with it, such that no metalingual third term might arrive to delimit the par’s signifying boundaries according to its own totalizing prerogative. Because remaining obscure, the limits between the par and the in(ter)vention that would at once vouch for it, replace it as another invention or reinvention, and vouch for it as originally replaced, do not fall under the prescriptions of an element of mediation.

The par is doubled, in an original relation of sorts to another, but this doubling does not open onto a medium, a logocentric third that would be a first. This is why, for instance, Derrida describes the “singular duplication” as taking place “de « par » en « par »” (PIA 27). The par is

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disrupted “through and through,” and yet this disruption results in a repetition: in the same par that is nevertheless another. An examination of the functioning of the prepositions “de” and “en” in this ultra-idiomatic turn of phrase confirms this. There is a doubling of the par in the par, yielding more than a word in a word; of the par as the par, yielding an original substitution, and therefore an original annihilation, of the par; and from the par to the par, yielding a gap joining the par to itself, but in and/or as itself, and so, at a stroke, disjoining it from itself. This gap is the gap of in(ter)vention, a blessure or écart or escarre that is located in the word, but that, growing ever larger, exceeds the word, replaces the word and therefore transforms the word as the place of its own replacement. Standing between in(ter)ventions, the gap is, then, a third, but a third that leaves the limits between in(ter)ventions absolutely opaque. Allowing the repetition, or reflection, of in(ter)ventions to take place far from the light of logos, it is a third with no first, the event of an in(ter)vention without precedent. It is the par referred to in its original, ultra- idiomatic dispersal, a par as écart that is épars, the par as “medium” of its own écartement,

épart of épars or écart. It breaks the horizon of language and disappears just as quickly, like a bolt of lightning or épars, the blinding sign of a law interdicting all transparency from word to word, de mot en mot.

This law of a third that is not a first, Derrida calls the “tain” or tinfoil of “Fable”’s false speculation, and it is therefore first of all to do with the unity of a word as word: “il tient d’abord aux mots, et au mot « mot ».” Its dictate would be an inter-diction, that of a generalized intervention or intercession, such that no element of reflection, no word, would be able to enter

“Fable”’s specular economy without the prior mediation of another, without therefore taking part in a generalized economy of intervention or intercession: “le miroir n’advient à lui-même que par l’intercession du mot. C’est une invention et une intervention du mot, et même ici le mot

« mot ». Le mot lui-même se réfléchit dans le mot « mot » et dans le nom de nom. Le tain …

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interdit la transparence et autorise l’invention du miroir.” The tinfoil “names” the place of in(ter)vention’s taking place. It is an asymmetrical and asymmetricalizing name of name that gives place to nothing less than language itself as general economy of in(ter)vention. In the following passage, Derrida takes dictation, so to speak, from the interdict, and names or renames the place of language’s generalized intervention, which is located “between” the par and its dispersals. He reinvents Ponge’s poem, rewriting it so as to put in doubt the very identity of the words as they were “originally” written. For what matters is not what Ponge “actually” wrote in his “own” name, but the movement of reference his poem inaugurates, the gap it leaves in and as itself, de par en par, that leaves undecidable the difference between invention, reinvention, and intervention, or between one name and another: say, Ponge, whose name would designate the inventor of the invention “Fable,” and Derrida, whose name would designate an intercessor intervening in the name in order to rename the name. In whose name did Ponge write “Par le mot par”? What did he really mean when he wrote it? What is really being said through the par’s elliptical turns? What word, what name is already there, implicitly intervening so as to refer to the par in its ultra-idiomatic referral, that is, in and as the gap of its own singular dispersal? Is the par a par-tage? A sé-par-ation? One end or another, one part or another, of the signifying gap the par interposes in and as itself, “de part et d’autre de lui-même”? Is the par, in its ultra- idiomatic and opaque appearing, nothing but a ghost or ap-par-ition? I quote Derrida: “Entre les deux « par », le tain qui se dépose … c’est le langage même ; il tient d’abord aux mots, et au mot

« mot » ; c’est le « mot » qui partage, sépare, de part et d’autre de lui-même, les deux apparitions de « par » : « Par le mot par… »” (PIA 31, my italics).62

62 For the sake of economy, I have elided a small part of the passage I am quoting. It makes reference to the relationship between the first two lines of “Fable.” Here it is complete: “Entre les deux « par », le tain qui se dépose sous les deux lignes, entre l’une et l’autre, c’est le langage même.” Derrida here is concerned to remark that the invisible limit, or tinfoil, that is internal to the poem is not, in its location, fixed to a single place (as indeed I have been demonstrating). Not only does it produce a certain infinite reflection between par and par – or between “the word” and “the word” – but it also does so between the poem’s first two lines (“Par le mot par commence donc ce

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Being in principle endless, the dictation of the general law of language’s in(ter)vention should be open to every idiom, to every genius of every language. And with every in(ter)vention, the law should be redictated and the name renamed so that the essential openness of language be maintained. Both in and as this openness, the par gets situated between all possible dictates. It gives rise to them as that on behalf of which they will have all interceded, providing them a place in which they will have all intervened. But as every intercession should maintain the par’s radically undifferentiated difference, adding itself to the par so as to obscure its limits, it follows that every intercession leaves the par essentially unspoken for.63 Already to be found in the par, the intervention hollows out and disperses it, as though it were simultaneously too close to the par to reflect its limits without shattering and transforming them, yet too distant from it to be able to say anything about it at all. As though the par were just some trace of a long dead other whose name, in order that it be kept alive in memory, could only be imitated, counterfeited, spoken of in a fictional or fabulous mode, in short, (re)invented. In the dispersal of its limits, the par would no longer provide – if in fact it ever truly had provided – a general economy for the intervention of other idioms. Its opacity, for that reason, could not be associated with “le langage même.” And so, having stated that “Fable”’s tinfoil interdicts the transparent limits of its first word while simultaneously authorizing the invention of the mirror, Derrida writes that the tinfoil is “une trace de langue” (PIA 31).

texte/Dont la première ligne dit la vérité”). Both lines, as it turns out, “say the truth,” but not before situating themselves, like the par, in a movement of originary reflexivity. For example, the second line, referring to the first in order to assert that it “says the truth,” also refers to itself, in a performative gesture by which it effectively promises that it is telling the truth about the first line telling the truth. This play of mirrors, the doubling of a constative by a performative that itself gets doubled by a constative, etc., would in principle know no end. 63 Like myself, Jan Mieszkowski demonstrates a concern for ways in which Derrida wants his readers to “question the status of the word as the core unit of language” (210), and this, for example, by attending to “the disjunction between the syntactic and the semantic” (211). The interest in this disjunction motivates a remarkable reading of Paul Celan’s “Sprich auch du” in which Mieszkowski locates in the poem a discourse that is not “a language of propositions (Sprüche) or articulation (eine Aussprache), but eine Auchsprache,” that is, a language that “is always on the verge of confirming its own inability to be anything more than an also-ran, a mere ‘something else’ that just happens to be on offer.” From this it follows not only that the poem disarticulates its own ability to speak for itself.

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The invention of the par cannot, therefore, but proceed each time anew, with the “time” of “each time,” each “beginning” of invention, invariably being hollowed out and dispersed. The par, having never been invented, remaining to be invented, would thus leave untold beginnings to be invented, untold traces, not of language itself, but of “une langue,” of some idiom. In its ultra-idiomaticity, it would leave untold first words to be written. Bringing his discussion of

“Fable” to a preliminary close, Derrida speaks of a “process” of the poem’s invention as reinvention, one whose beginning reflects no symmetrical end, and that therefore can only start again and again, as though for the first time, at the edge of a first word, what is here called the exergue: “Il faut toujours recommencer pour arriver à commencer enfin, et réinventer l’invention. Au bord de l’exergue, essayons de commencer” (PIA 32).

It is also the case that “it is no longer clear that the text can give the other a voice, if only as a proxy, or even confirm that the other’s capacity as a speaker is one of its salient traits” (220).

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Chapter Three

Passages Through the Idiom: Metaphorico-Translational Crossings in Derrida

At the end of part three of the interview “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” Derrida insists on the importance of a secret that, in something like a paradox, would be shared: not, that is, between some determinate number of individuals, nor between some individual and herself. The secret would, like good sense itself (as per the Cartesian formula), be “the best-shared thing in the world” (TS 58). I take Derrida to be referring here, among other things, to the differential distribution of good sense or reason, the partage by which the event of reason’s self- manifestation would be founded in a constitutive exclusion preventing it from closing on itself in a founding act of totalization. As Derrida seems to suggest, this partage of reason would entail a problem of space or place. Put succinctly: the place of reason’s taking place would not be founded in and as a purely public place common to all; the event of its self-manifestation would not establish a unified medium and milieu to which everything would simply and properly belong. Couching this problem of reason’s partage in expressly political terms, he says, “I have a taste for the secret, it clearly has to do with not-belonging; I have an impulse of fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is the glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy.” He closes his remarks as follows: “Belonging – the fact of avowing one’s belonging, of putting in common – be it family, nation, tongue – spells the loss of the secret” (TS 59).

What follows in the present chapter can be seen as an attempt to work out, at least in a preliminary fashion, and without touching on the political stakes of the preceding quotations, the connection Derrida draws in these comments between “tongue,” space, and reason’s secret

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partage, which I understand to be synonymous with the differential possibility of language as such. I aim, for one, to reconfirm (following my argument in the previous chapter) that, as differential possibility, language is for Derrida already not unifiable in itself, and therefore idiomatic. In a word, there is no language per se, only idioms (or, to echo yet again “Des tours de

Babel,” “avant le langage, les langues”). And as idiomatic, a given tongue’s signifying operations would take place in service of, precisely, its own idiomaticity, as a ceaseless turning away from metalingual totalization, or, one might say, as the affirmation of its secrecy vis-à-vis the metalingual. This, as will be seen, entails a certain spatialization. In delimiting itself from its others, the idiom would simultaneously interpose between itself and itself a gap or opening through which a supplementary idiom might pass. And it is in the repetition of this gap’s interposing, in the remaining open of the opening between and across idioms, that the problematic relationship between text and context will be broached. To be brief: the interposition of a supplementary idiom puts in question not only the self-same identity of the idiom (as

French, German, English, whatever), but also where, or even that, it supposedly shows up to be read in some determinate context or set of contexts, which is to say, in some part of the world.

The examination of the remaining open of the opening will ultimately lead to some reflections, in this chapter’s third and final section, on the possibility of an idiom’s belonging to the ultimate context, the context of context that is the world as such. There I hope to provide at least an initial clarification of why, for Derrida, there can be no world as such, or, put somewhat differently, why language’s essential idiomaticity implies something like an essential non-belonging to the world. Once again, I will be approaching this a-ppartenance, this impartageable partage, in large part by way of the idiom par as it does (and does not) show up in a number of Derrida’s works.

But before arriving there where there is no world, I turn back to “La mythologie blanche”

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in order to establish some of the ways in which, per Derrida, metaphor in particular inaugurates, within the discourse of philosophy, a certain ignorantly peripatetic wandering.

I. The Blank Space of Metaphor’s Turn to Translation in “La mythologie blanche”

As we saw in the previous chapter, metaphor, as subsumed by the Aristotelian tradition under the aegis of mimesis, is centrally important for the human-nature nexus, through which the whole of what is comes to show itself through language, and through which the human being becomes able to “say what is.” This nexus originates out of the generative but non-generic source of all that is, the sun, first and final energy source of the human being’s metaphor making power.

We saw that the term “heliotrope” concentrated the turning movements by which metaphorical power and the power of truth as unveiling were reflected into each other and themselves, and so formed a closed circuit in which the unimpeded flow of being’s energy or actualization guaranteed its, as well as the human being’s, imminent self-presence. I say “imminent” in order to gesture toward both the temporal and spatial stakes of the heliotrope. Where metaphor is subordinated to metaphysics in the name of presence’s luminous, sun-like self-presentation, it is also subject to the dialectical movement of history that brings to light the whole of the world itself. Out of the ever turning circle of the human-nature relation gradually appears everything under the sun. Or suns: “Le discours philosophique – en tant que tel – décrit une métaphore qui se déplace et se résorbe entre deux soleils” (M 321), the sensible and the ideal: the former rises in the East, at the dawn of History, and, by virtue of its course through the heavens, sheds light over the entire globe as it becomes an ideal, Western sun, setting and completing its trajectory.

Following this essentially onto-theological movement (M 318), metaphor does its part to elaborate a veritable solar system (“la physis en tant que système solaire, ou, plus précisément,

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… une certaine histoire du rapport terre/soleil dans le système de la perception” (M 299)), which means that the thought of metaphor-as-heliotrope must be complemented by a thought of metaphor-as-geotrope. Metaphor’s turns belong, then, to philosophical language, or to philosophy’s desire to speak itself in the world that, in the end, it will have shown itself to have always been:

Désir philosophique – irrépressible – de résumer-relever-intérioriser-dialectiser-

maîtriser l’écart métaphorique entre l’origine et elle-même, la différence

orientale. Dans le monde de ce désir, la métaphore naît à l’Orient dès lors que

celui-ci, se mettant à parler, à travailler, à écrire, suspend sa jouissance, se sépare

de lui-même et nomme l’absence : soit ce qui est. Telle est du moins la

proposition philosophique dans ses énoncés géotropiques et historico-rhétoriques.

(M 321-22)

Just before this passage comes, in a footnote, a long quotation of Hegel’s Reason In History through which the link between “La généralisation de la métaphore” (M 320) and the unity of a world-historical space is solidified, again via the human being’s essential spiritual activity. It is, importantly, a matter of building: the “aperçu géographique” in which is indicated “le chemin que suit l’histoire universelle” prompts “la création d’une œuvre tirée de ses [i.e., from the human being’s] propres ressources.” By nightfall, at the end of history, the human being’s laboring will have resulted in an education that is also a work of architecture, an edification:

il aura bâti un édifice achevé, il aura un soleil intérieur, le soleil de sa propre

conscience, un soleil créé par son propre travail, qu’il estimera plus haut que le

soleil extérieur [that is, the sensible, Eastern sun]. Et dans son édifice il se

trouvera face à l’Esprit dans le même rapport dans lequel il s’est trouvé au début

face au soleil extérieur, mais ce rapport sera libre, car ce deuxième objet est son

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propre Esprit. Cette image contient le cours entier de l’histoire, la grande journée

de l’Esprit, le travail qu’il accomplit dans l’histoire du monde. (M 321 n. 56)

Finally, let us refer to Derrida’s comments, earlier in the essay, in which, speaking of “concepts

« fondateurs »,” i.e., concepts that are determined as tropes, but that simultaneously “found” the very possibility of a properly philosophical rhetoric, the Earth gets mentioned as yet another shining example of “tropes définissants autant que définis,” an essential metaphor of metaphor:

“Le fondamental répond au désir du sol ferme et ultime, du terrain de construction, de la terre comme soutien d’une structure artificielle” (M 266).

Apart from these altogether traditional accounts of the movement of logos that corresponds to a production and an extension of knowledge over the entirety of the world’s surface, there is a certain number of gestures in “La mythologie blanche” that Derrida makes toward another, still other, spatiality, one for which the relationship to metaphor is not edifying, but catastrophic. The passage from, e.g., the sensible plane to the intelligible (“passage du sens propre sensible au sens propre spirituel à travers le détour des figures” (M 269)) takes a turn, as we say. This would have to do with a certain dissimulation, or “sedimentation,” carried out by philosophy itself, of the illegitimate aesthetic grounds of metaphor as a philosophical, i.e., dialectical, concept. Where Hegel, for example, finds in the union of opposite and contradictory terms (e.g., “sense” as in meaning, and “sense” as in the non-intellectual faculty by which external stimuli are perceived) the generous “root” (“souche”) of “la relève secrète,” Derrida asserts that “on doit, avant d’utiliser un concept dialectique de la métaphore, s’interroger sur le double tour qui a ouvert la métaphore et la dialectique, permettant d’appeler sens ce qui devrait

être étranger aux sens” (M 272). Derrida wants to argue that the supplementary or double turning that originally divides the meaning of meaning is precisely non-dialectizable, and so non- aestheticizable. In its naïveté, philosophy speaks of the spatio-temporalization of the atemporal

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and non-spatial logos, and has recourse to metaphor in order to help itself make sense of this, without for all that knowing just what space and time mean (M 271). Derrida’s point is, of course, not to chastise his philosophical forebears for having failed to do what philosophers are supposed to do. The point is, precisely, not to seek to resolve the problem of the supplementary turning of metaphor, and so to stay within its transversal and inexorably, innumerably meaningless movements. To think metaphor neither from outside nor from inside philosophy, as neither proper nor improper to philosophy, but “depuis l’au-delà de la différence entre le propre et le non-propre.” Where is this “beyond” of a metaphor (or “un certain nombre de métaphores”) that, no longer bearing the name of “metaphor,” does not, nevertheless, make up a “langage

« propre »”? Between metaphor’s concept and its “field” (“champ”), where “la loi de supplémentarité” (M 273), i.e., the law of “la supplémentarité tropique,” gets enforced. There,

“le tour de plus devenant le tour de moins, la taxinomie ou l’histoire des métaphores philosophiques n’y retrouverait jamais son compte.” Any attempt to account exhaustively for all philosophical possibilities of metaphor, whether or not this be done under the aegis of

“philosophy,” results in a certain, constitutive failure, and an opening onto a certain outside that is in “solidarity” with the integrity of the metaphorical “network” or “field”: “Si l’on voulait concevoir et classer toutes les possibilités métaphoriques de la philosophie, une métaphore, au moins, resterait toujours exclue, hors du système : celle, au moins, sans laquelle ne se serait pas construit le concept de métaphore ou, pour syncoper toute une chaîne, la métaphore de métaphore.” For this reason, metaphor, however conceived, is simultaneously too philosophical, and not nearly philosophical enough. “Elle [metaphor] est issue d’un réseau de philosophèmes qui correspondent eux-mêmes à des tropes ou à des figures et qui en sont contemporains ou systématiquement solidaires.” And these latter tropes or figures – “systematically co-dependent” with, yet also “outside,” the “network” or “field” of metaphors-as-philosophemes – form a self-

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destructive “stratum” or “layer”:

Cette strate de tropes « instituteurs », cette couche de « premiers » philosophèmes

(à supposer que les guillemets soient ici une précaution suffisante) ne se domine

pas. Elle ne se laisse pas dominer par elle-même, par ce qu’elle a elle-même

engendré, fait pousser sur son sol, soutenu de son socle. Elle s’emporte donc

chaque fois qu’un de ses produits – ici, le concept de métaphore – tente en vain de

comprendre sous sa loi la totalité du champ auquel il appartient. (M 261)

Here, then, Derrida is introducing a thought of spatiality that is not only independent of an a priori concept of spatiality (and so of any transcendental aesthetic), but that comes about precisely from the impossibility of such an a priori. This impossibility is bound to another, that of speaking: of establishing, that is, a hierarchy between a universal philosophical discourse or metalanguage, and the numerous ontic regions of discourse (belonging, e.g., to individual academic disciplines, or to particular natural languages) the former would distinguish and govern, and from which it would draw its metaphors. It is not just that philosophy does not know what space and time mean; philosophy does not even know what meaning (logos, vouloir-dire) means, since the latter cannot not engender within itself an originary movement of spatio- temporalization: “Comment savoir ce que veut dire temporalisation et spatialisation d’un sens, d’un objet idéal, d’une teneur intelligible si l’on n’a pas élucidé ce que « espace » et « temps » veulent dire ? Mais comment le faire avant de savoir ce que c’est qu’un logos ou un vouloir-dire qui spatio-temporalise, de lui-même, tout ce qu’il énonce ? ce que c’est que le logos comme métaphore ?” (M 271). For Derrida, metaphor is not just a question of language or meaning. It signals as well a primordial spatiality that opens language outside itself: makes it possible as it destroys it. But what can appear to be a “regression,” a reductio ad absurdum in which language and space antinomically vie for primacy, is not, in truth, an obstacle to starting to think about

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metaphor. As in Derrida’s comments, in “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,” on the circle – “une sorte de cercle” – in which “discours destructeurs”

(such as those belonging to Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger) are already “pris” (ED 412), it is not a matter of doing without the “regression.” Rather, we have to ask how we get caught up in the elliptical circle (ED 413), how to “work” (“opérer”) the “regression” (M 271). To quote again from “La structure, le signe, et le jeu,” “le passage au-delà de la philosophie ne consiste pas à tourner la page de la philosophie, (ce qui revient le plus souvent à mal philosopher) mais à continuer à lire d’une certaine manière les philosophes” (ED 421-2).

What sort of reading does Derrida have in mind? One that wants to make sense of an invisibility added to the circular, per-fect deployment of meaning. Here, from “Ellipse,”

le retour au livre est d’essence elliptique. Quelque chose d’invisible manque dans

la grammaire de cette répétition. Comme ce manque est invisible et

indéterminable, comme il redouble et consacre parfaitement le livre, repasse par

tous les points de son circuit, rien n’a bougé. Et pourtant tout le sens est altéré par

ce manque…. Quelque chose manque pour que le cercle soit parfait. (ED 431)

Attending to this invisibility that doubles or supplements the book, means breaching the book’s structural horizon. How? A furtive, elliptical escape through the book:

Dès lors que le cercle tourne, que le volume s’enroule sur lui-même, que le livre

se répète, son identité à soi accueille une imperceptible différence qui nous

permet de sortir efficacement, rigoureusement, c’est-à-dire discrètement, de la

clôture. En redoublant la clôture du livre, on la dédouble. On lui échappe alors

furtivement, entre deux passages par le même livre, par la même ligne, selon la

même boucle. (ED 430)

One does not read or speak of this discrete breach, but about or around it. One thus traces the

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contours of language through metaphor. The latter delimits language, spatializes it and so erases it from sight. Look: “elle [philosophy] est impuissante à dominer sa tropologie et sa métaphorique générales. Elle ne la percevrait qu’autour d’une tache aveugle ou d’un foyer de surdité. Le concept de métaphore décrirait ce contour mais il n’est même pas sûr qu’il circonscrive ainsi un centre organisateur” (M 272). One could also cite in this vein “Force et signification,” where an essential absence intimately tied to the metaphorical structure of literary writing is described as the very “situation of literature.” This situation is criticism’s “object,” around which it speaks: “Cette vacance comme situation de la littérature, c’est ce que la critique doit reconnaître comme la spécificité de son objet, autour de laquelle on parle toujours. Son objet propre, puisque le rien n’est pas objet, c’est plutôt la façon dont ce rien lui-même se détermine en se perdant” (ED 17). It is the return of a furtive – or ultra-idiomatic – erasure or absence or breach that, I believe, Derrida insists on everywhere in his work, and that he asserts as the principle “interest” of his investigation into metaphor.

Whence his use, at the outset of “La mythologie blanche,” of the metaphor of usure, at once hyperbolic usury and hyperbolic deterioriation: “On s’intéressera d’abord à une certaine usure de la force métaphorique dans l’échange philosophique. L’usure ne surviendrait pas à une

énergie tropique destinée à rester, autrement, intacte.” Reading metaphor’s usure, we must pass through metaphor, “Cette métaphore de l’usure (de la métaphore), l’abîmé de cette figure.” Not to arrive at the meaning of usure. To move through metaphor to get to usure, as another metaphor, through which to pass, and so go nowhere, as Derrida’s quite interesting syntax here demonstrates: “Comment le rendre sensible, sinon par métaphore ? ici le mot usure” (M 249).

One thus never gets a sense of the sense of metaphor, because of the sense, the directionality, of its spatialization, that by which it keeps not presenting itself in a final place to be sensed (seen, heard, intuited, understood, known, theorized, read, etc.). We are asked to read or remark an

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erasure of language, and the production of a space. Such a space is not a ground for inscription; it is inscription’s abyss and annihilation (“l’abîmé de cette figure”), that by which language is, and we are, put into motion, set off on an “adventure” (M 287, 290), in order to arrive nowhere, in a non-place, in radical isolation from everything, non-present.

And yet this isolation rests, is borne, on a solicitation. For example: Derrida wrote in

French, addressed his work to readers of French, destined his signature to endless re-reading in a given natural language. Yet he did so by leaving traces in French,64 which traces would permit an invention, “une invention qui viendrait … donner lieu à l’autre, laisser venir l’autre.” Giving rise to the other means breaching, via a passive decisiveness, the circular closure of one’s own discourse, and so leaving a place, a passage, to the other: “Je dis bien laisser venir car si l’autre, c’est justement ce qui ne s’invente pas, l’initiative ou l’inventitivé déconstructive ne peuvent consister qu’à ouvrir, déclôturer, déstabiliser des structures de forclusion pour laisser le passage

à l’autre” (PIA 60). Derrida writes and signs his works from this other place, from the impossibility of authenticating oneself in a system of differential signifying relations, i.e., in writing.65 This makes reading him a task, singular in its difficulty, of bringing out what is illegible in his signature: namely, Derrida himself. He himself, already gone, returning as such, bearing up the blank space of (another) inscription.

This is the value of the word “exergue” in “La mythologie blanche”: in addition to

64 See the final interview, published posthumously as Apprendre à vivre enfin: “Laisser des traces dans l’histoire de la langue française, voilà ce qui m’intéresse. Je vis de cette passion, sinon pour la France, du moins pour quelque chose que la langue française a incorporé depuis des siècles” (AV 38). 65 On this, see, for example, the comments, in the interview “Entre crochets,” on the structure of metaphysical closure that it is a matter of (il s’agit de) undoing or deforming. Derrida calls this a “pratique de la contrebande” that “ne se signe pas, ni dans son initiative ni dans sa fin” (P 26). Co-signing the dis-closure, deforming the code of what “ne se signe pas,” means signing, in a language, one’s own a priori death and disappearance: the “I” affirms its non- presence in writing, such that “je suis” always implies “je suis déjà mort.” Being attuned to the generality of this “signature effect,” one can find in Derrida’s work, besides his own, legible proper name, “une organisation phantasmatique particulière, sinon absolument singulière.” On this signature organization of his own work, Derrida cannot, and must not, have much to say, for his signature hides in itself something unreadable that one would be able to access only from “the place of the other”: “Même si j’avais beaucoup à dire sur le mode idiomatique du « je suis

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serving as the title of the essay’s first chapter, it functions as a monumental epigraph positioned at the essay’s outset, whose explicatory power (and epigraphs, if they do anything, are supposed to explain, at the very least to point to the leading idea proper to the text that follows it) lies in its self-citationality: the essay’s exergue is, literally, “EXERGUE” (M 249). Quoting nothing but itself, and in this way quoting the general form of a convention of writing (of every other exergue – but in just a single language, French), this exergue is in a position of immanent replace-ability: it functions as a metaphor because turning between itself and its others, without ever coming to rest. The inscription of the exergue (and exergue means, in both French and

English, inscription, that on the reverse of a medal or coin, of a medium of fiduciary circulation) asks to be read in this adventurous movement, and so asks to be un-read. The value of the verb

“to ask” is important: even if, de facto, “exergue” is perfectly legible on the page of the copy of

Marges – de la philosophie I happen to have in front of me as I write this, this does not eliminate the necessity of a practice of reading, one the written work already makes room for, by way of a singular address to some reader. Being written, the work is constitutively in relation to its being read, outside itself, ex-ergon, while remaining inside, or on this side of, itself, in-complete. And here I can point out that “exergue” is also functioning, in “La mythologie blanche,” as a loan from Anatole France’s dialogue Le Jardin d’Épicure. There, it serves to exemplify, on one hand, the “présupposition continuiste” typical of nearly all theorizations of metaphor, be they expressly metaphysical or expressly anti-metaphysical, that conceives metaphor both in and as the history

“d’une érosion progressive, d’une perte sémantique régulière, d’un épuisement ininterrompu du sens primitif.” This historicist conception is an abstractionist and aestheticist conception: it tracks metaphor’s path from the sensible plane to the intelligible plane and back, and never thinks to interrogate the very foundation of this “continuist” movement. One therefore remains at

mort » qui me manœuvre, ou avec lequel je ruse, quelque chose m’en reste absolumenet dérobé, illisible … accessible seulement depuis la place de l’autre” (P 29).

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home, on the surface of the earth: “Abstraction empirique sans extraction hors du sol natal” (M

256).

But on the other hand, France’s dialogue also provides resources for thinking the exergue as it turns between its writing and its reading, in brief, as it asks to be re-marked. Metaphor’s usure becomes here the singular marking of an erasure: of this metaphor, “exergue,” that leaves open a place for another’s “use” of it (and this too is the meaning of exergue: the small place on the reverse of a coin available for a, usually minor, inscription). Reading and re-writing the metaphorical exergue in France, Derrida makes supplementary room in his own essay, giving to

France a place in which to have a chance to speak again of metaphor. But because this place is simultaneously inside and outside Derrida, while being inside and outside France, neither of these figures has room to speak. The exergue, the place of metaphor, disappears, is destroyed, en abyme, via an “active” (rather than “progressive”) erosion: “A l’exergue de ce chapitre

[presumably the opening chapter of “La mythologie blanche”], remarquons-le, la métaphore empruntée à Anatole France – l’usure philosophique de cette figure – décrit aussi, par chance, l’érosion active d’un exergue” (M 249-50).

This disappearance can be grasped in the blankness of the essay’s title. If Derrida speaks of a mythology that is white, it is certainly because he wants, albeit subtly, to criticize the specifically Eurocentric claims of the Western, white philosopher who would mistake his own regional mythology (the classical theory of metaphor) “pour la forme universelle de ce qu’il doit vouloir encore appeler la Raison” (M 254) (we will come back to this later).66 But Derrida wants also to criticize the naïve opposition to this thesis (represented by, among others, Nietzsche and

Ernest Renan), which would claim to have access to a pre-philosophical and variegated multiplicity of affectively and materially rich figures. Rodolphe Gasché is therefore very correct

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to state that “Both metaphorical meanings of whiteness concern philosophy, and both are operative within a dialogue about the nature of philosophy that is itself entirely philosophical”

(“The Eve of Philosophy” 3). But if it is true that these oppositions “will eventually become effaced by the issues that will occupy Derrida” in the chapters following “the exergual space”

(Ibid. 2), it has to be added that a general erasure is operative throughout Derrida’s text. “Once the exergue has become effaced” (Ibid. 3), Derrida is giving himself over to disappearance or blankness as well. If a space consequently opens up, it is absolutely blank, belonging neither to the Western white man, nor to his non-Western other, nor even to Derrida. From within the

“longue séquence métaphysique” of metaphor’s endless and adventurous erasures (M 256), a space opens, but it is for no one. Non-human, non-theological, desert-like, it is a space of wandering. Where, we do not know – it is not a space. We never speak in a topos. We are, then, like (Derrida’s) (Anatole France’s) Polyphile, who, from within his (that is, the whole of the

Western tradition’s) incessant mythologizing, lets escape, in near silence, a miniscule metaphorical form. Speaking of and for a non-Western, and therefore non-universal, metaphor, we translate, and we do it par-odically, without recognizing ourselves in what we say:

Une formule [i.e., “de la mythologie blanche”] – brève, condensée, économe,

presque muette – a été déployée en un discours interminablement explicatif, se

mettant en avant comme un pédagogue, avec l’effet de dérision que produit

toujours la traduction bavarde et gesticulante d’un idéogramme oriental. Parodie

du traducteur, naïveté du métaphysicien, du piètre péripatéticien qui ne reconnaît

pas sa figure et ne sait pas où elle l’a fait marcher. (M 253)

Given the previous chapter’s examination of the metaphorico-translational nexus in

Derrida, the mention of translation here should not be surprising. I recall that since monolingual

66 On this see also Rodolphe Gasché’s commentary on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Euryopa : le regard au loin” in his

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meaning does not precede the operation of metaphor’s turning (and this, I think, would correspond to what Derrida, in “Des tours de Babel,” calls “metaphorical catastrophe” (PIA

213)67), the latter announces the necessity of a passage outside the idiom that would otherwise be thought to contain its own tropes. That idiom, in Derrida, is French, which, let it be said, is already substituting for (metaphorizing? translating?) the logos of reason itself. (And I will also point out that, early in “La mythologie blanche,” the solicitation of reading is taking place between two metaphorical uses of French, one of them manifesting under the name “France,” which name produces a metaphorical ex-ergue (an inscription and a space) whose effect is derisive. That is, one signature effect of Derrida’s reading of France’s French is derision, a metaphorical derision of an ignorant translation of an Eastern form of writing, undertaken through the French of France.68) Metaphor institutes a demand or request for translation that already puts the original language into, exposes it to, translation. So because French cannot dominate metaphor’s movement, that movement must be understood to exceed the limits of

French, to transform it from within, and put it in relation to an outside, to another idiom that it would get translated into. But precisely because this externalization of the idiom happens through the abyssal movement of metaphor (“La métaphorisation de la métaphore, sa surdéterminabilité sans fond, semble inscrite dans la structure de la métaphore” (M 291)), the precise place of translation’s taking place, the event of the passage through which one language would pass over into another, cannot, in principle, be located. In other words, it cannot be said that translation does indeed take place, that metaphor’s movement of substitution in French lets itself be substituted by the same movement in another language. In brief, it cannot be said that

“Alongside the Horizon.” 67 On metaphorical catastrophe, see also, e.g., comments in “Le retrait de la métaphore” (PIA 82) and La Carte postale (CP 52, 72). 68 Derrida gestures strongly, though very briefly, in the seminar Théorie et pratique toward “dérision” as a paronomastic signature practice that would make legible the limits of the unity of reason as they are elaborated in Kant, among others. See, e.g., TP 58-60.

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translation is a substitution, or metaphor, for metaphor. In this situation, French must be understood to be incomplete in itself, and to remain so. It is subjected to catastrophe by metaphor, ruined and translated from within, and yet its “translation” results in its remaining the same. Translation turns back toward metaphor, but to metaphor as “ammétaphore,” to a spatializing destruction of metaphor. Neither can it be said, then, that metaphor is a substitution, or translation, for translation.

Turning back to “La mythologie blanche”: a concise turn of phrase (“de la mythologie blanche”), located somewhere between Derrida’s and France’s discourse on metaphor, has compelled a translation, but one that situates the speaker (Derrida? France?) next to himself and to his language: parodically,69 peripatetically, naïvely pedagogical, derisively pedestrian. It is not just that a text wishing to speak about metaphor (whether metaphysically or metaphorologically) cannot domesticate its own metaphors, and so speaks metaphorically in spite of itself. It is also that, always already speaking in metaphors, one has left the confines of the metalanguage – here,

French, metaphorico-translational substitution for the logos itself – to which one’s metaphors would belong. This is where we are, then: between metaphora and translatio, perpetually next to our language, both beyond and on this side of it. If, per Polyphile’s critique of philosophy,

Western metaphysics forgets its metaphorical origins, it is, nevertheless, not enough simply to remember them and so to return to a proto- or non-Western scene. The scene is itself metaphorical or “fabulous,” it only is through an a-metaphorical erasure that leaves French dislocated and relocated, in parallel with itself, non-present. Absent, but still loquacious, inscribed invisibly, this is the place of writing, like a palimpsest: “Mythologie blanche – la métaphysique a effacé en elle-même la scène fabuleuse qui l’a produite et qui reste néanmoins active, remuante, inscrite à l’encre blanche, dessin invisible et recouvert dans le palimpseste” (M

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254). The “dissymmetrical dialogue” to which Derrida subsequently refers is not between the fictional characters of France’s Le Jardin d’Épicure, but between the West and itself, between the West and itself-as-other, thus between two spatializations of language that the universalism of the Western logos cannot dominate. Two figures address each other about metaphor, unable to do so except through metaphor. And so one (which one? but is it here a question of choosing?) goes wandering, passing through not even God knows where. For there is no one medium or milieu of reflection by which to recognize either oneself or the other. Without metaphor, without translation, parallel but not belonging to the circulation of the one universal Wor(l)d.

II. Passages of Fragments: de mots en tra en mots en par in “Le retrait de la métaphore”

Now the co-implication of language, (non)spatialization, and idiomatic erasure that I have been elaborating can be found in a number of different places in Derrida’s work. One thinks, for example, of “Force et signification,” where the attempt is made to uncover the “sens métaphorique de la notion de structure” as such, and so to “awaken” “la non-spatialité ou la spatialité originale en lui désignée” (ED 29). Literary works made of metaphors have as their

“orientation” an obscure, blind origin, what is also called “ce rien essentiel à partir duquel tout peut apparaître et se produire dans le langage.” Literature’s “situation” is not just its own absence, but “l’absence de tout.” “[I]l s’agit ici d’une sortie hors du monde” (ED 17), of a

“passage” that is a “navigation première et sans grâce,” inaugural.70 Without precedent and so

69 For a discussion linking parody in Derrida to other, better-known Derridean problematics (most saliently iterability and the yes, but also responsibility, hospitality, institutionality, the machine, among others), see Weber. 70 Rodolphe Gasché correctly points out that Derrida speaks of the literary work’s language as “inaugural” in order to bring out the essential relationship between writing and reading within it. The text is inaugural “in the sense not only of making a new beginning but also of its Latin meaning as making a beginning under good omens or reading the omens while beginning something new”; “writing is inaugural not only in that it is a first sailing, but also in that it inscribes within itself a secondariness owed to the fact that written meaning is, from the start, in a relation to an other…. The written meaning that the writer produces in a first sailing is a meaning that is always already read” (Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence 111 n. 5).

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without ground, writing “ne sait pas où elle va, aucune sagesse ne la garde de cette précipitation essentielle vers le sens qu’elle constitue et qui est d’abord son avenir” (ED 22). There is also, in

“Violence et métaphysique,” Derrida’s engagement with Levinas and the thought of the other as irreducible exteriority. This exteriority must, per Derrida, “s’installer dans la conceptualité traditionnelle pour la détruire”: rather than abandoning metaphysics’ interior-exterior structure, one must conserve it and, at the same time, leave open the possibility of its self-differentiation in repetition. This means conserving an essentially metaphorical sense of (non)exteriority: “qu’il faille penser la vraie extériorité comme non-extériorité, c’est-à-dire encore à travers la structure

Dedans-Dehors et la métaphore spatiale, qu’il faille encore habiter la métaphore en ruine … cela signifie peut-être qu’il n’y a pas de logos philosophique qui ne doive d’abord se laisser expatrier dans la structure Dedans-Dehors.” The metaphor of this expatriation would be “congénitale” to the logos (ED 165-6).71 Or Khôra, the quasi-maternal “place” that “figure le lieu d’inscription de tout ce qui au monde se marque” (K 52), as what should provide, or should have already provided, the grounds for a cosmo-onto-encyclopedic program, as well as its very subject matter:

71 In an analysis of “Violence et métaphysique,” “La mythologie blanche,” and a few other of Derrida’s texts, Mauro Senatore claims that Derrida conceives metaphor “as the originary spatialization and inscription of language” (163- 4). That is, he appears to believe that Derrida hypostasizes space, and that metaphor is therefore just a mode of space, the spatialization of space: “metaphor is originarily spatial and, therefore, … language is originarily inscribed into space or inscribed tout court” (164-5). Even where language-as-inscription exceeds space, being the obliteration or negation of space, obliteration and negation still “require space, take place in the latter and, thus, leave the possibility of more writing open” (165). Writing always promises more space and more writing: “Derrida recalls the irreducibility of the spatial inscription of language. There can only be an obliteration of that inscription, namely, one more inscription, a trace” (166). All of this appears to imply a thought of the world as the ultimate space, thus the ultimate ground, of writing-as-spatial-inscription: it would be impossible to think “any linguistic sign outside the world qua space of inscription” (165). In all this, Senatore seems not to have taken into account the ways in which Derrida, throughout his work, complicates all of the key concepts of his essay. For example, in “Force et signification,” Derrida warns, precisely, against confusing the meaning (“sens”) of metaphor “comme tel” “avec son modèle géométrique ou morphologique [one page earlier referred to as “l’espace, espace morphologique ou géométrique, ordre des formes et des lieux”],” and this so that “la non-spatialité ou la spatialité originaire” designated in or as metaphor (“en lui désignée”) may be “awakened” (ED 29). The non-spatiality of metaphor is crucial to understanding the relationship, which I analyzed above, between the “network” or “field” of metaphors and its “beyond.” I recall that it is this relationship that permits the thinking of the law of tropic supplementarity according to which “more” metaphor is never simply “more,” “le tour de plus devenant le tour de moins” (M 261). As we will see, these complications of metaphor, spatiality, and quantity will lead to a problematization in Derrida of the concept of the world as such. All of this is pointed to by the very idiomatic formulation from “Violence et métaphysique” I quoted above, which states that it is “à travers” the inside-outside distinction and spatial metaphor that an original expatriation may be thought. I will return to travers and other mots en tra below.

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that on which we speak (K 44-6). But in its generality, as what gives rise to everything that is, without, however, engendering it, it limits itself, is its own limit (K 53), and so makes us like poets, imitators, sophists, wanderers without a fixed residence (K 54-9). We speak of ourselves, of our world, and to each other, from this metaphorical wandering. The commonality that is our language, the commonplaces of our speech, lie in a certain abandonment of language: from within Platonism, speech is a relating – a discourse about, an address to, a spacing out, not to mention the familial value of relation – that relates (through and to) its extreme apartness, “de relation en relation” (K 90, my italics; cf. also 53-60, 85-97). Khôra forms an un-formed cosmos, and “C’est dans ce cosmos qu’on puisera néanmoins les figures propres – mais nécessairement inadéquates – à décrire khôra” (K 95).72

But another text principally on metaphor, “Le retrait de la métaphore” would be, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a particular solidarity with the issues I have been raising. Here we need to be particularly attuned to the ultra-idiomatic deployment of the twisted passages (in every sense of the word) of metaphor. For example: “il n’est rien qui ne se passe avec la métaphore et par métaphore.” Everything happens “non sans métaphore.” And yet it is also the case that “la métaphore se passe de tout autre, ici de moi, au moment même où elle paraît passer par moi.”

Doing without everything while everything is unable to live without it, metaphor may, in an altogether unheard of manner, just go on without itself, in its own radical absence: “Mais si elle se passe de tout ce qui ne se passe pas sans elle, peut-être qu’en un sens insolite elle se passe d’elle-même, elle n’a plus de nom, de sens propre ou littéral.” All these modalities of passage (se passer, se passer avec, se passer par, se passer de, se passer sans, passer par, including the passing appearing of passage, paraître passer par) bespeak the erasure and the spacing out of events through a language: everything in the world (and the world is indeed at stake here)

72 For a discussion of khôra focusing on the production of the universe, “how it was generated or else is

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happens, and is relatable in language, by passing through a (French) metaphor. This metaphor – of French – is, however, without the world. Not only, that is, without universal form or content, and so deprived of anything to speak of or anyone to speak of it to; but also without, as in, outside of, next to, “with,” the world. Outside of the world that it would have made possible as its internal condition of possibility, metaphor externalizes the world: moves through it, invasively disjoining it from itself, upturning it and leaving in its wake a collection of lingual forms that do not fit or correspond together, a-metaphorically, so many parts, or metaphors, of some ammétaphore. These metaphorical forms take shape by virtue of a spacing out of language

– of metaphor – that renders them absolutely incomprehensible to each other and to themselves: radically illegible, as though written in invisible ink, à l’encre blanche. Because invisible, because they, in their ultra-idiomatic morphology, do not correspond, the shapes form something like a palimpsest, each providing a space for all the others. But this radical provision of space – radical because every metaphorical form gives space without making itself present therein, because receding from the light of presence and remaining in presence’s hollowed out and blackened recesses – annuls space. The fate of the ultra-idiomatic metaphor is thus to be deprived of the space in which its form would appear. The spatialization of metaphor turns toward non-spatialization – non-worldliness – as its internal divisions (the sum of its internal differences that would, per a classical logic, cohere in a single form) are supplementarily divided. In the wake – no, through the wake – of this division of division, a singular blankness, a non-spatial nothing, is left, and it is this invisibility, this blind spot whose con-tour gets traced over and over, that, between metaphor and translation, gets traced, retraced, withdrawn, as so many worldly blindspots. So many spaces without a world in which to be found.

en son retrait, il faudrait dire en ses retraits, la métaphore peut-être se retire, se

ungenerated” (47), and on the production of the discourses treating this production, see “Production of the Cosmos” in Sallis.

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retire de la scène mondiale, et s’en retire au moment de sa plus envahissante

extension, à l’instant où elle déborde toute limite. Son retrait alors aurait la forme

paradoxale d’une insistance indiscrète et débordante, d’une rémanence

surabondante, d’une répétition intrusive, marquant toujours d’un trait

supplémentaire, d’un tour de plus, d’un re-tour et d’un re-trait le trait qu’elle aura

laissé à même le texte. (PIA 65)

As it violates every border, metaphor moves us along without our knowledge – without knowledge tout court – and so establishes a crossing for languages. In this crossing is a problematics of occupation: metaphor “se laisse habiter,” gives itself to us as a dwelling place, but through a giving that gives itself by crossing through itself and us: it “occupies” our world, the West, both as what we direct our thought and speech toward (whether we know it or not), and what appropriates us, para-sitically inhabits us. But not permanently: it parasites us only to move through us, and so to get us moving, transporting us between languages. Metaphor is thus a

“subject” that

occupe l’Occident, il habite ou se laisse habiter : s’y représentant comme une

énorme bibliothèque dans laquelle nous nous déplacerions sans en percevoir les

limites, procédant de stations en stations, y cheminant à pied, pas à pas, ou en

autobus (nous circulons déjà, avec l’« autobus » que je viens de nommer, dans la

traduction et, selon l’élément de la traduction, entre Übertragung et Übersetzung,

metaphorikos désignant encore aujourd’hui, en grec, comme on dit, moderne, ce

qui concerne les moyens de transport). Metaphora circule dans la cité, elle nous y

véhicule comme ses habitants, selon toute sorte de trajets, avec carrefours, feux

rouges, sens interdits, intersections ou croisements, limitations et prescriptions de

vitesse. De ce véhicule nous sommes d’une certaine façon – métaphorique, bien

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sûr, et sur le mode de l’habitation – le contenu et la teneur : passagers, compris et

déplacés par métaphore. (PIA 63)

It is not Derrida who transforms the world into a library.73 It is a metaphorico-translational spacing out that puts language into movement, as a motif (not a theme) that solicits reading.74 But solicitation, in marking out a place for reading (in a library, archive, city, wherever), thus ruins that which is to be read.75 The library’s walls are no safeguard against the perpetual threat of the total destruction of the archive’s holdings. Indeed, it is these very walls that occasion language’s ruination: that which is to be read delimits itself in its spatialization, and so limits its own reading. Or, better, it becomes the very limit that limits itself, par-titioning itself and so walling itself up within itself. There is some hermetic library to which access is never granted. And yet every metaphorical form situating and being situated by every other, every one occupying every

73 Cf. Derrida’s complaint, from “Survivre,” regarding those latter-day critics who accused him of wilful obscurantism, and who did so “sans reconnaîre qu’il ne s’agissait pas d’étendre la notion rassurante du texte à tout un hors-texte et de transformer le monde en bibliothèque en effaçant toutes les limites … mais au contraire de réélaborer de fond en comble ledit « système-théorique-et-pratique » de ces marges [i.e., those margins or limits that do not simply delineate the outer boundary of a corpus]” (PAR 127). Though they are somewhat dated in their references to those same latter-day critics of the 1970’s, Rodolphe Gasché’s essays “Deconstruction as Criticism” (in Inventions of Difference) and “Unscrambling Positions” are still valuable for thinking the singular difference of Derrida’s work in its resistance to simple classification or archivization. But for a critique of Gasché, see Geoffrey Bennington’s “Genuine Gasché (Perhaps)” from his Interrupting Derrida, in which he identifies in Gasché a tendency to ascribe to Derrida a privileging of philosophy over the literary that limits what is “ultra-philosophical” in Derrida (156). See also Jonathan Culler’s comments, in “Deconstructive Criticism” from his On Deconstruction, on the temptation “to separate orthodox deconstructive criticism from its distortions or illicit imitations and derivations” (227). 74 Cf. the following from the introduction to Parages, where Derrida asks about the legitimacy of naming genres in Blanchot: “Comment légitimer ces noms ?” Then: “La question ressurgira sans cesse, sous une forme ou sous une autre, je l’abandonne ici. Elle demeure inséparable des autres motifs de ce livre. Motifs plutôt que thèmes, motifs pour faire signe en particulier vers ce qui met en mouvement, et d’abord vers la citation, que j’entends parfois dans ce sens venu du latin. Incitation ou sollicitation, elle appelle ou donne le mouvement” (PAR 10). 75 On the possibility of a radical disappearance, without remainder, of “constitutive and seemingly irreducible differences (or différances),” this disappearance forming an unthinkable condition of possibility in Derrida (40), see Donahue. I would argue that the thought of radical disappearance or destruction is far more prevalent in Derrida than Donahue allows. To cite one example: in Heidegger : la question de l’Être et l’Histoire, Derrida at one moment very briefly speaks of a means of “shaking up” Heidegger’s thought by evoking a “brutality” that is not the same as “violence,” and that would, in its stunning ignorance, bring about the total destruction of the archive: “la brutalité, le mutisme et la surdité d’un incendiaire de bibliothèque ou d’un étrangleur de la pensée qui pousserait sa colère de brute jusqu’à ne pas savoir ce que c’est qu’une bibliothèque et que c’est une bibliothèque qu’il brûle, la confondant avec une pâtisserie ou avec quelque tour Eiffel. Et après tout l’explicitation de la question de l’être [in Heidegger] serait sans ressources devant un phénomène aussi naturel que cette brutalité, brutalité que j’ai évoquée en ne faisant que le gros et de façon caricaturale mais dont on pourrait trouver la monnaie dans des événements qui ont la forme extérieure de la parole ou de l’écriture” (H 87-8).

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other, the “itself” of the par-tition, as it erects itself and takes its place, falls and opens onto a passage, the opening of space, through language(s).76 The great book of the world, as onto- encyclopedic horizon, opens its covers to a certain volume77 of passages whose “element,” along with our means of navigating it, keep changing. As I speak about metaphor, and even as I attempt to speak more metaphorico, “Je viens de changer d’élément et de moyen de transport.

Nous ne sommes pas dans la métaphore comme un pilote en son navire. Avec cette proposition, je dérive” (PIA 64). Absolute movement cuts a path to absolute immobility: failing (échouer) to put an end to metaphorical slippage, my ship runs aground (échouer): “Si donc je voulais interrompre le dérapage, j’échouerais” (PIA 65).

Now I have, of course, been gesturing toward the sheer idiomaticity of Derrida’s metaphor in nearly every passage I have commented on thus far. But let us now train our focus, more par-ticularly, on a par-ticular genius of metaphor – that of the par I devoted, in part, the previous chapter to – and its disseminative par-titioning in “Le retrait de la métaphore.” Let us do this through the third and final “trait” of Derrida’s treatment of metaphor chez Heidegger. I recall that Derrida’s three “traits” follow immediately upon a discussion of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a metalinguistics – and thus as a cosmological or “interplanetary” instrument of information that would be the paternal project of philosophy (PIA 77) – in which the “dialect” or “idiom” is said to be, properly, “la mère de la langue.” This inversion of the classical

76 Cf. Derrida’s “Fors,” where the arrangement of “places” (rhetorical and spatial) forms the story or history (“l’histoire”) “d’un lieu compris dans un autre mais rigoureusement séparé de lui, isolé de l’espace général par cloisons, clôture, enclave.” In this “système de parois … l’enclave cryptique produit un clivage de l’espace général, dans le système rassemblé de ses lieux, dans l’architectonique de sa place ouverte en son dedans et elle-même limitée par une clôture générale, dans son forum” (F 12). 77 On the metaphor of the book, cf. Derrida’s comments, in “Force et signification,” describing, contra the flatness and simultaneity of the structuralist book, the “volume” and its “implication,” “tout ce qui de la signification ne peut être étalé dans la simultanéité d’une forme” (ED 42). In “Le retrait de la métaphore,” he speaks of philosophy’s “logique onto-encyclopédique” in which its self-representation takes shape: “La représentation d’une clôture linéaire et circulaire d’un espace homogène” (PIA 72). There are also the comments, in “La mythologie blanche,” on the “anthology” (or “lithography”) that metaphor constitutes and whose structure “aucun langage ne peut réduire en soi”: “Ce supplément de code qui traverse son champ, en déplace sans cesse la clôture, brouille la ligne, ouvre le cercle, aucune ontologie n’aura pu le réduire” (M 324).

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hierarchy (subordinating a given, mother tongue to language in its generality, as fatherly metalanguage) gives us yet another metaphorical catastrophe that disjoins the idiom from any metalingual “sense” of language. In this metaphor (that substitutes the idiom for language as such), there is no metaphor, but a “turning” that orients us, as speakers of idioms, in proximity of a certain maternal place belonging to the mother tongue (PIA 76-7).

Now, in the essay’s third and final “trait,” Derrida seeks to locate in Heidegger’s German a “quasi-archi-lexique” that would “name” “le trait ou la traction différentielle comme possibilité du langage, du logos, de la langue et de la lexis en général, de l’inscription parlée autant qu’écrite.” This lexicon, more and less than itself, is found in the relation between two “word families” (families we would need to understand to be matriarchal), the family of Ziehen and the family of Reissen (PIA 86). Between them, the trait they name works to mark a general catastrophe of metaphor that opens the proximal relationship, or the nearness, between Dichten and Denken (PIA 82-93). In other words, the idiomatic resources of a particular language

(German) permit a relaunching of the question of the correspondence between the general possibility of language and thought, and this is done by concomitantly reopening the question, or catastrophe, of metaphor. But as we have already seen, the catastrophe of metaphor is additionally the catastrophe of translation. The movement of the trait, as sheer possibility of language, pulls together and puts in parallel two “word families” or “« logies »” that are heterological. German, then, is already not one language: in its self-differentiating movement, the tractation of the trait is already surreptitiously at work, producing a gap in German, through which German itself violently passes into, or is captured by, itself-as-other. And on top of all this, Derrida inscribes a supplementary duty: to capture, in French, this violent capture, in

German.

Nous devons encore, ici même, performer, entamer, tracer, tracter, traquer non

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pas ceci ou cela mais la capture même de ce croisement d’une langue dans une

autre, la capture (à la fois violente et fidèle, passive pourtant et laissant sauf) de ce

croisement alliant Reissen et Ziehen, les traduisant déjà dans la langue dite

allemande. Cette capture affecterait le capteur lui-même, le traduisant dans

l’autre…. Pour entamer cette captation compréhensive et cette tractation ou cette

transaction avec la langue de l’autre, je soulignerai encore ceci : que la tractation

fait œuvre, elle est à l’œuvre déjà dans la langue de l’autre, je dirai dans les

langues de l’autre. Car il y a toujours plus d’une langue dans la langue. (PIA 90-

How does Derrida effect this capture, at once violent, faithful, and passive? Most obviously, by translating with the French retrait, which, he tells us, “imposed itself” on him

“pour des raisons économiques” (PIA 77). Without venturing too far into the question of economy, let me point out that Derrida stresses in the essay’s opening pages that he will take on an enormous question (one of whose forms is, “si on parlait toujours métaphoriquement ou métonymiquement de la métaphore, comment déterminer le moment où on en ferait son thème propre, sous son nom propre ?” (PIA 67-8)), and this within the strictest of limits: his essay will be merely, he says, “une note brève, et même pour resserrer encore mon propos, une note sur une note” (PIA 68). It is, in other words, as though Derrida wishes to say as little as possible, to say nothing or almost nothing, and to inscribe in this tiniest of textual spaces the largest context possible. And though this miniscule space is being opened between a number of conceptual pairs, one particular pair worth particularly mentioning is that of Derrida and himself: the mere

“note” that is “Le retrait de la métaphore” is on the subject of another mere note, a footnote found in “La mythologie blanche” that quotes the very little – indeed, the almost nothing – that

Heidegger has to say on metaphor. Of what use will the trait or the re-trait be, then, in tracing

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out this smallest of textual economies, whose parallel con-text will be as large as possible? It will be useful through its per-formance. Heidegger’s work, in saying so little about metaphor so elliptically, nonetheless would have “quelque chose de si nécessaire à performer quant au métaphorique.” That is, Derrida is less interested in “les propositions énoncées, les thèmes et les thèses au sujet de la métaphore comme telle,” than in Heidegger’s “traitement de la langue,” or,

“more rigorously,” in “son traitement du trait, du trait en tous sens … comme mot de sa langue, et … comme entame traçante de la langue” (PIA 67). This performance, Derrida asserts, is to be remarked in a “very open sense,” and in this very open opening, it gets repeated, singularly by

Derrida’s French: “Remarquons … la performance, ou en un sens très ouvert de ce mot, le performatif d’écriture par lequel Heidegger nomme, appelle Aufriss (entame) ce qu’il décide, décrète ou laisse se decider d’appeler Aufriss, ce qui s’appelle selon lui Aufriss et dont j’esquisse la traduction, selon la traction d’un geste également performatif, par entame” (PIA 89). Through metaphor’s per-formance, language cuts (out) and gets cut (out) (“entame traçante de la langue”).

German opens (itself) and lets come or pass, through an open performativity, a French word.

But how can this be? How, objectively speaking, can Derrida say that Heidegger treats the French word trait as a “mot de sa langue,” when trait does not, objectively speaking, belong to German, and when it surely does not feature anywhere in the Heideggerean corpus? How can the subject of metaphor – so old and so worn out at the time of Derrida’s writing of “Le retrait de la métaphore,” as if, objectively speaking, there were practically nothing left to say about it, as if, objectively speaking, there were practically none of it in the world (PIA 65-7) – how can this subject, as little of it as there is in Heidegger, be said to be located in a French word, and, what is more, to be located there in what is, objectively, not a language Heidegger had much truck with?

But why speak of subjects and objects, why speak of speaking “ob-jectively” of a particular “sub-ject” at all? For one, Heidegger’s German, casting itself forward in its thinking

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on language’s possibility, would run up against a limit. In colliding with its limit, it exposes itself to an absolute intimacy, the sheer closeness of the limit, and this closeness overwhelms it, casts it underneath itself, submerging it. As is well-known, the value of nearness or neighbor- ness and the dwelling it implies, are decisive for Heidegger. The decisive place of this fundamental proximity or relation is in the differential possibility of language, and, per Derrida, it is this place that he wants to mark out and speak for, to sign for or countersign, to underline under his name: “il y a le trait, un tracé ou un tracement du trait opérant discrètement, souligné par Heidegger mais chaque fois en un lieu décisif, et assez incisif pour nous donner à penser qu’il nomme justement la signature la plus grave, gravée, gravante, de la décision” (PIA 86).

Aufriss as trait is “ce qui se signe et s’entame sous la signature de Heidegger” (PIA 89). But being able to mark out this essential, general, objective possibility of language only in German, in his German under his own name, Heidegger must formulate the relation to language idiomatically. He decides to do this by deploying a “mot décisif,” Aufriss, which, “dans ce contexte,” is a “mot de la décision, … de la décision non « volontaire »” (PIA 88). How such a decision, which is a non-decision or passive decision, might come about is one of the most important questions in all of Derrida’s work. Here, it passes through the idiom as follows:78

Heidegger decides to name the differential possibility of language. But this possibility has no name: “l’unité de la Sprache est encore restée innommée (unbennant). Les noms de la tradition en ont toujours arrêté l’essence à tel ou tel aspect ou prédicat” (PIA 89). Nor does it even exist: its essence is to have none, it “is” nothing. The “trait de l’entame”

n’est pas une instance autonome, originaire, elle-même propre par rapport aux

deux [Dichten and Denken] qu’il entame et allie. N’étant rien, il n’apparaît pas

lui-même, il n’a aucune phénoménalité propre et indépendante, et ne se montrant

78 For a discussion of the decision as violent founding act and its relationship to “the inevitably idiomatic nature of

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pas, il se retire, il est structurellement en retrait, comme écart, ouverture,

différentialité, trace, bordure, traction, effraction, etc. Dès lors qu’il se retire en se

tirant, le trait est a priori retrait, inapparence, effacement de la marque dans son

entame. (PIA 88)

And so Heidegger per-forms this differential relationality of language, and through this performance, there is (“il y a,” “es gibt”) something like a decision. “Like” a decision, because, again, it is not here a matter of a will or power that would autonomously make something happen. The event is here that the nothing that conditions Heidegger’s use of German, that originally deprives it of a metalingual ground, gives it existence, or lets it be itself, as an idiom.

Affirming the nothing that is the differential possibility of language, Heidegger therefore affirms the objective idiomaticity of German.79 This objectivity straddles the idiom and the nothing the idiom stands out against, the nothing that gives it standing and that it must therefore stand for (as figure to ground), all while standing for only itself, subjectively. In this “while” is to be found

(Heidegger’s) German’s ultra-idiomaticity: while standing forth as itself, offering proof of its uniqueness, the Heideggerian idiom is situated on a proving ground: it is tried, made trial of, tested, experimented. And by the end, it will have been found wanting. It can offer nothing that demonstrates or performs its idiomaticity, and thus it pares itself back, limiting itself to nothing save an ultra-idiomatic non-totality. That is, it limits itself to what it is, in its utter, objective- subjective ultra-idiomaticness. Heidegger’s German speaks, or lets speak, the annihilating limit, the one it leaves in the wake – in the wake that it just is – of its self-paring. Thus: “La décision tranchante d’appeler Aufriss ce qui d’une certaine manière était encore innommé ou ignoré sous son nom, c’est déjà en soi-même une entame ; elle ne peut que se nommer, s’auto-nommer et

language” (28), see “The Possibility of Deconstruction” in Rodolphe Gasché’s Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence. 79 For a discussion of affirmation in Heidegger as self-affirmation that founds itself in an Ab-grund, and that consequently entails the possibility of decision that opens a world, see “Difference and Self-Affirmation” in Fynsk.

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s’entamer dans sa propre écriture” (PIA 89). When he names language’s possibility entame,

“Heidegger ne dit pas : je décide arbitrairement de la baptiser « entame » mais « qu’elle s’appelle », dans la langue qui décide, entame” (PIA 90).

The limit left behind gets transformed, in its turn, into a space for the chance intervention of another idiom. French, as it happens, has the chance to drop its anchor in German’s wake. The former thus undergoes its own idiomatic trial, situating itself in its own proving ground. Should we say, at this juncture, that French and German are rooted in the same ground? That they fall under the same jurisdiction, are subjects submitted to the same, objective order or regime of lingual possibility? Do they exist in the same world? No. Of greater interest than a ground that is the same, is one that is shared, or that there is a sharing, the sharing of a place between idioms, between each of them. The trait and all its values – figured as so many mots en tra (traction, attraction, attrait, contracter, contraction, tractation, traitement, tracer, tracement, tracé, trace, traduction, transporter, traquer, transaction, etc.) – are supplemented by some partage, or by the partage of some number or portion of, some part de mots en par.80 Let me enumerate some part of them now. Between thought and the differential possibility of language it would name starting from the idiom, the trait shares out and itself gets shared out. It is “le trait propre qui rapporte (bezieht) l’une à l’autre Dichten … et pensée (Denken) en leur proximité avoisinante, qui les partage et que les deux partagent” (PIA 87). The retrait is not a unity of oppositions.

Rather, it sets up pairs as parallels (“Dichten et Denken sont parallèles (para allelôn), l’un à côté

80 Anne-Emmanuelle Berger has subtly indicated the importance of a number of mots en par for Derrida’s thinking on sexual difference. She argues that he prefers to “keep alive the memory of the idiom of ‘sexual difference’” as opposed to “the dominant idiom of today, that of ‘gender construction,’” in order to show how sexual difference is interwoven into, as well as cut across by, “historical and historicizing processes” that are inevitably “histories of language.” The problem of sexual difference would thus have a “cutting edge” that would leave it open to reinscription in multiple idioms, without originating out of any particular one (59). Among those idioms would evidently be Derida’s, particularly his idiomatic deployment of the par. “The question, then, is not simply one of precedence or origin. It is also a question of ‘part(s),’ of the interruptions and fragmentations evolving from ‘à partir de’ [Berger has just quoted Derrida asking if différance should be thought “‘avant’ la différence sexuelle, ou ‘à partir’ d’elle” (52)]…. A logic of endless and impossible partition is set in motion” (53, my italics). See her “Sexing Differances.”

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ou le long de l’autre mais non séparés” (PIA 88)), whose “unity” appears (apparaître) in having already de-parted from itself: “Si « la » métaphysique avait une unité, ce serait le régime de ces oppositions qui n’apparaît et ne se détermine qu’à partir du retrait du trait, du retrait du retrait, etc. Le « à partir de » s’y abîme lui-même” (PIA 89). Being from the start retrait, the trait is thus also “inapparence” (PIA 88). Per Derrida, when Heidegger names the “unity” of this non- appearing, he writes his own text as though he were taking dictation, non-voluntarily. And what is being dictated is, precisely, the opening of a line or contour, the delimitation or fracturing apart of his writing, through a para-graph: “Heidegger va à la ligne et ouvre ainsi un nouveau paragraphe” (PIA 89). The idiom thus enters into relation, relates to itself and to every relation, and takes part in the general possibility of language as it gets articulated through and through:

“L’entame (Aufriss), c’est la totalité des traits (das Ganze der Züge), le Gefüge de cette

Zeichnung (inscription, gravure, signature) qui ajointe (articule, écarte et tient ensemble) de part en part l’ouverture de la Sprache.” Only when the relational opening is remarked in a singularly idiomatic way do we get a sense of what happens through language (le parlé) and of the possibility or power of language that is also a par-ticular way of speaking (le parler): “cette entame reste voilée (verhüllt) tant qu’on ne remarque pas proprement (eigens) en quel sens il est parlé du parlé et du parler.” We are, in the end, dealing with an ultra-idiomaticness through which every idiom sets itself up in parallel to every other. Each carves out a place for itself, therefore for every other. In this impossible situation, no idiom has its place, and every parallel can be itself only by carving into and through the other. Every one gets erased, disappears into every other disappeared parallel as a mere particle of itself, fallen off from itself, a recoupe or entame. And it is “in” such a par-ticle that the reciprocal opening of parallels might be said to happen: “Dans la recoupe, le trait se remarque lui-même en se retirant, il arrive à s’effacer dans un autre, à s’y réinscrire parallèlement, donc hétérologiquement, et allégoriquement”; “La

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recoupe croise et allie entre elles, après les avoir attirées dans la langue, les deux généalogies hétérogènes du trait” (PIA 90). A little earlier, the parallels of thought and language’s possibility are said not only to cut into each other, but to get cut out of each other (entamer meaning, e.g., to cut into, but also to remove a part of, some body), in a strangely reciprocal cutting out that leaves each a mere part of itself but also of the other, and that lets each come to be near the other, but in the entame, in the cut and the part cut out: “Elles [the parallèles, and it should be noted that

Derrida here opts for the feminine form of the substantive over the masculine81] s’entament seulement et sont coupées (geschnitten) dans l’entame (Aufriss) de leur avoisinement, de leur essence avoisinante (nachbarlichen Wesens)” (PIA 88).

Needless to say, with this strange part of mots en par, I am attempting, through Derrida

(through Heidegger), to put into question the very identity of any single concept, any single master word or meaning, that would gather under itself every species of par word, as so many metaphors and/or translations of itself, and that would consequently delineate itself, in its singularity, from every other word genus in Derrida’s essay, most saliently the trait and all its related mots en tra. When I write, echoing Derrida in the introduction to Parages, of mots en par

(PAR 17),82 what exactly is going on between the “word” and the “par” that should be some metaphorico-translational version of, or stand-in for, it? Am I, for example, speaking of a word as the par? As substituted by the par? The word situated in some relation to the par (located in it, on it, borne up by it, coming to expression by way of or through it)? The word taking on the form

81 According to the Littré, the feminine substantive can refer to “une ligne parallèle à une autre,” as well as to a trench that, in a siege, is dug (“tracée”) parallel to the place that is under siege. It thus serves to “resserrer graduellement les assiégés, et [to] faire communiquer les attaques de la gauche et de la droite.” 82 In the introduction to Parages, Derrida speaks of the book as a “glossary” made up of “collusions” among “les noms en pa, par, para, ra, rage, age. Avec leur valeur de signifiants, comme on disait naguère. Dans les collusions d’un glossaire qui ne reste jamais aléatoire, syllabes ou mots entiers, ils inquiètent l’inconscient peut-être, et le corps propre d’un titre. La liste et la généalogie de ces autres mots ne doivent pas ici s’établir – ni table ni tableau. La déduction serait longue et ne saurait se clore. Apparemment fortuite, l’occurrence de chaque vocable viendrait croiser, dans ces parages, et le hasard et la nécessité : lueur brève, abréviation d’une signature à peine esquissée, aussitôt effacée, un nom dont on ne sait plus à qui il revient, à quel auteur ou à quelle langue, à l’une ou à l ‘autre” (PAR 17).

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of the par? The word as constituted of the par? How, in other words, to understand (translate? metaphorize?) the passage from mot (as master or key word, metalingual meaning or concept) to par, which the preposition en is problematizing in the expression mots en par?

The least we can say is that these questions upon questions index the non-identity of the word, of the par as a word or as a metaphor or translation of some master word (for example, metaphor or translation). They thus inaugurate the chance for an ab-usive idiomatism that seeks to render an account of the word as it cuts, and gets cut, (out). To take only one example: when

Derrida writes that “ce trait (Riss) est une coupe que se font, quelque part à l’infini, les deux voisins, Denken und Dichten” (PIA 87), the otherwise inconspicuous “quelque part” can, and must, be read in relation to the fragmenting partage of par words I have just adumbrated.

“Quelque part” does not here simply mean “somewhere,” because, and as we have seen repeatedly, where the parallel fragmentation (here, the “coupe,” which one could, in addition, read in conjunction with the “coupe sans fin” and the coupe sans vin I commented on in the previous chapter) of language is taking place, is what is precisely not known. Derrida’s use of the word has instead to be read as an ab-use, a violent twisting of the word that disorients all the other mots en par to which it relates. And since, as I have tried to show above, those par words are threaded throughout the essay’s open per-formance of the metaphorico-translational trait and all its related mots en tra, that per-formance cannot but be disoriented as well. Metaphorically substituting for “somewhere,” or for the place, however indeterminately conceptualized, in which the larger context of “Le retrait de la métaphore” might anchor itself, is a very “literal” and “reactivated” translation of the “usual” sense of “quelque part”: “some part.” I borrow the predicates “literal” and “reactivated” from Derrida (and his Heidegger). Late in “Le retrait de la métaphore,” he speaks of the trait that pulls together or attracts adversaries (“les adverses”) into an “appartenance réciproque” that is also a “combat.” The trait thus serves to pull them toward

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“la provenance de leur unité à partir d’un fond uni.” The trait becomes “Grundriss : plan fondamental, projet, dessein, esquisse, précis” that pulls into itself “locutions” whose “literal” or

“usual” meanings, by dint of the trait’s force, get “reactivated” and “reinscribed”: “S’impriment alors une série de locutions dont le sens courant, usuel, « littéral » dirait-on, se trouve réactivé en même temps que discrètement réinscrit, déplacé, remis en jeu dans ce qui fait œuvre en ce contexte” (PIA 91). To return to the part, some part, of “quelque part”: there is no place, no

“somewhere,” for the retrait’s metaphorico-translational partage to take place. Instead, there is a fragmentation of some word that produces some part, some portion of some word, and this fragment asks to be read in its irreducible idiomaticness: as, precisely, a fragment, whose lack of metalingual ground extends infinitely (“à l’infini”). One that therefore stands in for

(metaphorizing/translating) the absence of ground, and that lets the dérapage of metaphor’s movements or passages between languages and locations get under way.

Besides all the tracings, retracings, withdrawals and openings that the trait and its accompanying mots en tra give to think, there is, then, a throughgoing movement, whereby the parallels of an idiomatic configuration (the mots en par) fragment (transitively and intransitively) and open, not a pseudo-Heideggerian clearing, but a passage. The parallels attract or pull each other to and through themselves, so gaining traction starting out from (à partir de) the openings they produce in each other and themselves. Each opens out into the other, cutting into it as it cuts itself off, thus leaving the other behind and carrying it away.83 Every parallel shares, then, all these values of fragmentation: that which fragments, that which gets fragmented, and the

83 Derrida employs the verb s’enlever in “Le retrait de la métaphore” to describe the movement through which metaphor stands out, but also gets transported, taken or torn away, disappeared (PIA 89). In this respect, the use of s’enlever is not different from his use of the verb s’emporter in other texts dealing with metaphor and figuration. See, e.g., a few points in “La mythologie blanche” (M 251, 261, 320); a description of the motif of the pas that “s’emporte lui-même” in “Pas” (PAR 31); the description of the opening of the abyss of the proper in Nietzsche, in which the proper “s’enlève et s’emporte – de lui-même,” and which is irreducible to the Heideggerian reading (EP 114-6).

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movement between.84 We must, of course, be wary of confusing this movement with the

“présupposition continuiste” that Derrida warns his readers of in “La mythologie blanche.” The passage under examination is not, ironically enough, a dérive. Though, as I have already shown,

Derrida affirms in “Le retrait de la métaphore” that in metaphor “je dérive,” in La Carte postale

“dérive” would designate “un mouvement trop continu : plutôt indifférencié, trop homogène,

[that] paraît éloigner sans saccade d’une origine supposée, d’une rive encore, et d’un bord au trait indivisible. Or la rive se partage en son trait même” (CP 279). The passage of the idiom, of the ultra-idiomatic par, se partage: it cuts itself off as it blocks its own movement; it projects itself outward as it breaks from itself; it moves through itself. It is ultra-idiomatic precisely because of this sharing of fragmentation, and it takes its place, its passage passes, by per-forming it. In other words, the par’s idiom ex-per-iences itself, as idiomatic, through the self- fragmentation that dis-perses it – through Derrida’s text – as so many unformalizable quasi- forms (par, part, partage, parallèle, parler, parlé, apparaître, inapparence, etc.). Unable to add up to a single, metalingual meaning or medium, these forms co-implicate and give place to each other, thus making each other possible, by delimiting each other, by each transforming the other into its “own” limit and ex-per-iencing itself through that limit. Each word solicits its own delimiting, i.e., asks the others to stand in for, to bear witness to, it as what they will never have been able to speak of or for, so ultra-idiomatic is its movement of reference. Each word, then, is the nothing through which every other comes to have standing: each word delimits every other and per-formatively affirms its annihilation. The witness turns toward the annihilated word, par-

84 Elissa Marder is, I think, similarly interested in ways in which certain words in Derrida, but also in Hélène Cixous, both transitively and intransitively fragment. Her focus, in the essay “Bit” (from her The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), is a configuration of mots en mors in which, chez Derrida, “the word mors returns again and again throughout many (if not most) of his major early writings on the work of mourning and the question of the remainder.” And in Cixous, morsure is connected “to a primal scene (that is to say an event that has happened to me but to which I can never be present).” This primal scene would contain more than one (word) in one (word): the bite “bites back, through remords (remorse) returning again and again as a trace in me of the one who bit me and hence a trace of that bit of me that will never be part of me but that never lets go of me either…. This means that my conscience does not belong to me; it is that living bit of you that lives in me and bites back through me” (230).

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taking in its annihilation (turning on it, we might way in English), thus turning away from it in order to make legible that this word never actually was and never actually will be.

This is the cost of a non-universal ultra-idiomaticity: that there is some language that some great number of lingual beings in the world will never have spoken or spoken of, because it at no time or place will have become universally present or actualized. I do not simply mean that a discrete number of beings capable of reading, hearing, speaking, or whatever, will not have had the chance to come across Derrida, or (Derrida’s) French, or (Derrida’s) (Heidegger’s) German, or any of the secondary literature thereon, because, empirically speaking, they will not have had

French or German or whatever, or will not have lived in a place where they might have read, heard, or spoken to or about Derrida or Heidegger or whomever. Though I will add that these empirical possibilities are accounted for by, as their condition of possibility, the ultra- idiomaticity here under discussion, and it is easy enough to imagine Derrida pointing to such non-necessary or “eventual” non-encounters (between two given individuals, or between an individual and a language, or between two languages) as marks of a more essential possibility:85 that, already from within the idiom, there are parts unknowable, unspeakable, and that the idiom is able to function “like that.” Derrida describes this strange possibility in Limited Inc. as follows: “Once it is possible for X to function under certain conditions (for instance, a mark in the absence or partial absence of intention), the possibility of a certain non-presence or of a

85 Cf. Derrida’s discussion of misunderstanding and related mots en mis in Limited Inc. For example, the following, on misunderstanding and its implication for the event or “confrontation” that may not, indeed, may never have taken place: “if a misunderstanding (for example, of Austin’s theses) is possible, if a mis- in general (‘mistake,’ ‘misunderstanding,’ ‘misinterpretation,’ ‘misstatement,’ to mention only those included in Sarl’s list of accusations, from the first paragraph on) is possible, what does that imply concerning the structure of speech acts in general? And in particular, what does this possibility imply for Austin’s, Sarl’s or for ‘my own’ speech acts, since, for an instant at least, in a passing phrase, this latter case is apparently not excluded entirely (‘it is possible that I may have misinterpreted him as profoundly as I believe he has misinterpreted Austin’)? And if the supposed misunderstanding were of such a nature (if not of such a design [destination]) so as to leave the auto-authorized heirs of Austin no choice but to involve themselves – passionately, precipitately – in a ‘confrontation’ that they claim ‘never quite takes place,’ what would all that imply? What is taking place at this very moment, right here? ‘Where? There.’ Let us not exclude the possibility that the ‘confrontation’ that so fascinates Sarl may indeed not have taken place and that it may be destined never to take place: but what, then, of this destiny and of this destination? And what is going

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certain non-actuality pertains to the structure of the functioning under consideration, and pertains to it necessarily.” Eventual possibility (the possibility that “a mark functions without the sender’s intention being actualized, fulfilled, and present,” even if this non-actualized functioning should happen only “once, and never again”), and necessary possibility get drawn together, and this entails a double consequence for the mark’s event. That is, the eventual possibility of the one, non-necessary time,

“to one degree or another … always happens, necessarily, like that”: by virtue of

the iterability which, in every case, forms the structure of the mark, which always

divides or removes intention, preventing it from being fully present to itself in the

actuality of its aim, or of its meaning (i.e. what it means to say [vouloir-dire]).

What makes the (eventual) possibility possible is what makes it happen even

before it happens as an actual event (in the standard sense) or what prevents such

an event from ever entirely, fully taking place (in the standard sense). (LI 57)

Bringing this thought of the event to bear on the idiomatic configuration we are considering here, let us say that the annihilated word takes place, as annihilated, through an original non-appearance that already removes it from the scene of any and all meaningful intentionality. To every other par word, it is, was, and will be nothing at all. To every other, and so through every other as a witnessing word that turns to form the annihilated word’s limit, that through which it takes place idiomatically, and so has no place whatsoever. The witnesses turning, they transform into the medium of a passage through which nothing happens: through which the word never comes to actualized presence in order to make itself seen, read, heard (or whatever metaphor of sense one might prefer to use), through which it is never here, ever nowhere, and remains so, à l’infini. As passage, the rest of the mots en par thus assure that this

on ‘here and now’?” (LI 37). See also replies to Gerald Graff in the “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion” (e.g., LI 120, 146-7).

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spatial annihilation stays annihilated, that its non-event keeps (not) happening, and that it remains (by) not remaining. The event of the word’s non-appearance has already, and has never, happened. The mots en par assure this by transforming into more and less than words: they become an illegible or mute surface or medium of language, par-ietal walls or par-titions whose sharp angles at once cut the annihilated word off (as though depriving meaning’s inscription of enough space on which to be written, and so depriving it of a proper end), and allow the word to veer into an infinite expansion (as though the angle were a corner around which inscription could keep going on, but therefore, and again, depriving it of a proper end). One could here evoke

Derrida’s “Fors,” where he describes Abraham and Torok’s Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups at one point as “un dictionnaire en plusieurs langues manipulé avec une agilité d’autant plus stupéfiante, aux limites du croyable, que chaque langue y fait angle avec elle-même autant qu’avec les deux autres [the three languages being French, Russian, and German], toute correspondance linéaire brisée” (F 32).

So between the two in-completions or fragmentations I have just evoked (original cutting off, original infinite expansion), i.e., between nothing and its incompatible but para-sitic repetition, the mots en par form the limits, always par-ticular, i.e., ever irreducible to universality, of some part of an idiom. Speaking (of) that part does not happen somewhere: for example, on the edge of an abyss. Speaking (of) the part is the edge, the lip that no word passes, but that therefore may open, may part. Here, the limit itself gets delimited: because unsaid and remaining so, the annihilated word turns back to the limit that let it be and, by turns, cuts into it, as though it were so close to its limit as not merely to be staying in contact with it, but to form the very possibility of contact with it, as though it were maintaining contact, staying in contact with, or contacting, contact itself, that of the limit that thereby touches nothing: intact, sauf. Like a body of water whose current laps at a shoreline, the annihilated word remains and comes back

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– remains to come back – to submerge the mots en par, overflowing everything legible about them as it erodes them and carries them out to sea. It is not, then, strictly speaking a question of

“reading” these par words, but of letting the incompleteness of their ultra-idiomaticity come through to the point where one sees, in the blink of an (unseeing) eye, that there is nowhere for reading ever to begin or end, that reading keeps not happening. What there is instead, is words that turn into – both veering and transforming into – that nowhere, taking (a) part in it. Turning their angled edge to the reader, so that her reading touches the part of them that delimits contact, they “present” their unaccountability, the sheer non-givenness of their lexicon. Reading’s non- event turns on this: that the set of meaningful units (i.e., the lexicon) comprising the idiom is not complete, and that therefore what exactly counts as a word therein is never given as such, never obvious.

Derrida consistently questions the “nature” of the word throughout his work. For example, in “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction « relevante » ?”: “Nous oublions souvent … combien l’unité ou l’identité, l’indépendance du mot reste une chose mystérieuse, précaire, peu naturelle, c’est-à-dire historique institutionnelle et conventionnelle. Il n’y a pas de mot dans la nature” (Q

562). This is part of what Derrida is getting at when, as we saw in “La mythologie blanche,” he speaks of the “field” or “system” and metaphor’s “compte” therein. It is a matter not only of the impossibility of rendering a final account of metaphor, but a final count as well. How to determine the number of metaphors in a corpus when what counts as a word is unsettled?: “la taxinomie ou l’histoire des métaphores [but we must here add “traductions” to Derrida’s sentence] philosophiques n’y retrouverait jamais son compte” (M 261). Derrida’s meditations, in

De la grammatologie, on the unity of the word are also extremely pertinent. The word, being

“pré-compris dans tout langage en tant que tel,” permits the opening of the question of the meaning of being in general, but this question both opens (“entame”) philosophy and “se laisse

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recouvrir par elle.” Which is to say that the “meaning” (“sens”) of being is not linked to this or that word or system of words, but “à la possibilité du mot en général” (DG 34, my emphasis).

From this it follows that the “méditation incessante” of the question of being “contribute … à disloquer l’unité du sens de l’être, c’est-à-dire, en dernière instance, l’unité du mot” (DG 35-6).

Nowhere, nulle part parmi les mots en par, do I simply know what a word is. Wherever I happen to encounter the idiom, it is at the point or edge of some break in the ammétaphore, where I am solicited to countersign (as though I were, like (Derrida’s) Heidegger, merely following along and taking dictation) an abuse or fragmentation of sense, where articulations between words, those, for example, of syntax and meaning, become miniscule cracks (the tiniest of spaces or economies) through which supplementary sense may endlessly burble up. The writing that should (re)present some animating intention (proper to what Derrida and/or

Heidegger really meant, to the expressive possibilities proper to French and/or German, to the meaning of the concept of metaphor and/or translation, etc.), whose words would be self- evidently impressed in ink (encre) on the pages of “Le retrait de la métaphore” and so serve as said intention’s anchor (ancre), this writing transforms into the palimpsestic passage (the surface, the place, the passageway, the element or medium, the limit or edge) for the passing inscription of virtual marks. As though the blankness of the page were overflowing the print with another script – another, much larger con-text – written in white ink (“à l’encre blanche” (M

254)). As though, in this way, a prophecy or prevision were coming to pass, one that the tiny crevices or articulatory passages of the mots en par were recalling (rappeler). As though, through this recalling, the text had been put into an unexpected movement, a dérapage that had reinvented the rules of reading and writing, instituted some unforeseen relation (rapport) of reference. The text recalls what it would have already known, that it will have always found itself in that movement, and originally spoken from the place of the palimpsestic passage Where?

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Quelque part, somewhere, in the language of “parages,” where the I (je) of the text is unmoored, overwhelmed, cut into, through the play (“jeu”) of idiomatic inscription (“ancre,” encre). Here, some par-entheses: “(j’avais rappelé quelque part que le mot « dérapage », avant sont plus grand dérapage métaphorique, avait rapport avec un certain jeu de l’ancre dans le langage de la marine, je dirai plutôt de la flotte et des parages)” (PIA 64-5).

I have quoted this last passage from “Le retrait de la métaphore” for at least a few reasons. 1. To solidify my hypothesis that this essay is an important place in which to read the co-implication of metaphor and translation in Derrida, particularly through the syncategorem par and its dissemination by way of a certain number of mots en par (of which parages is yet one more example).

2. Not to claim so much as to wager, that the ultra-idiomatic topology the mots en par situate overwhelms their reading to the point (or through the point, i.e., the miniscule place of articulation that would otherwise relate them together within a totalized lexical set), that the unity of a par word comes to be in question. The grounding principles of word formation being necessarily non-present, and Derrida’s par-ticular idiom recalling its idiomaticity from that non- presence, starting from the point of its own virtual re-inscription or reinvention, the possibility arises of a quasi- or partial anagrammatism. Derrida briefly but decisively raises the relation of metaphor to anagram in “La mythologie blanche”; I cannot explicate it here,86 except to say that

Derrida touches on it after declaring that “Le système sémantique (l’ordre de la phonè semantikè avec tous ses concepts connexes) n’est pas séparé de son autre par une ligne simple et continue…. Un autre partage traverse [my italics] le tout du langage « humain ». Celui-ci n’est

86 See especially 281-7 in Marges. Michael Naas aligns anagram, or “the anagrammatical,” in Derrida with “writing and difference” (49), describing it as basically one more name in Derrida for what makes simultaneously possible and impossible the metaphysics of presence, which he associates specifically with analogy in “Analogy and Anagram” from his Derrida From Now On. He draws a link between anagram and space, particularly by way of Khôra. He does not, however, pursue the problem of anagram in relation to anything like a determined “practice” of anagram in Derrida, as I am, at least in part, doing here.

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pas homogène, il n’est pas humain de part en part [my italics] et au même degré. Le critère du nom reste encore déterminant” (M 286-7). In the end, the noun, as the determining factor of meaning, cannot but fold into itself asemantic “elements” (e.g., letters). Metaphor lets itself be traversed by the foreign, and this appears to inaugurate a mutilating partage that transforms words into “mots morcelés,” thus opening the possibility of anagrammatism (M 287). When, therefore, in “Le retrait de la métaphore,” Derrida uses the metaphor of dérapage to recall

(rappeler) a pre-metaphorical dérapage and its relation (rapport) to an overdetermined “jeu de l’ancre,” but in so doing also recalls a non-determined place (“quelque part”) in his work where he had already recalled (“j’avais rappelé”) this same, originary dérapage, thus setting off an abyssal movement of memory (Derrida recalling, here, that he had recalled, elsewhere, that reading metaphor starts out from a pre-metaphorical topos that, already annihilated, never stops needing to be recalled, somewhere) – when Derrida says and does all this, is he not gesturing toward another law or economy of reading that would put the “actual” words printed on the pages of the “actual” book I have in my hands in a secondary position as concerns “what” it is exactly I am supposed to read? Is not there being raised – solicited – the necessity of a reading or countersigning that is not derivative of intention, that is already happening with the book’s writing,87 and that institutes a reversibility or partial reversibility according to which, for example, the relationship between letters and the word they constitute would be overturned, and this irreversibly? I speak of an irreversible reversibility in order to refer to certain places in La

Carte postale where Derrida describes the co-originariness of reading and writing I am getting

87 Literary writing is, for Derrida, unflaggingly secondary, and this establishes an irreducibly heterological economy whereby writing and reading pass between one another. The tertium quid of this “between” is, additionally, a witness: “l’expérience de secondarité ne tient-elle pas à ce redoublement étrange par lequel le sens constitué – écrit – se donne comme lu, préalablement ou simultanément, où l’autre est là qui veille et rend irréductible l’aller et retour, le travail entre l’écriture et la lecture ? Le sens n’est ni avant ni après l’acte. Ce qu’on appelle Dieu, qui affecte de secondarité toute navigation humaine, n’est-ce pas ce passage : la réciprocité différée entre la lecture et l’écriture ? Témoin absolu, tiers comme diaphanéité du sens dans le dialogue où ce qu’on commence à écrire est déjà lu, ce qu’on commence à dire est déjà réponse” (ED 22-3).

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at. For example, having just spoken of his writings as nothing but postcards, Derrida says that what he “prefers” about the postcard is a certain “réversibilité” that disorients the conventions of reading (for example, between “image” and “text”): “on ne sait pas ce qui est devant ou ce qui est derrière, ici ou là, près ou loin … recto ou verso. Ni ce qui importe le plus, l’image ou le texte, et dans le texte, le message ou la légende, ou l’adresse” (CP 17). He then writes to his addressee: “D’avance tu détournes tout ce que je dis, tu n’y comprends rien, mais alors rien, rien du tout, ou bien tout, que tu annules aussitôt, et je ne peux plus m’arrêter de parler” (CP 18).

Elsewhere, this reversibility is linked to catastrophe: “ma carte postale naïvement renverse tout.

Elle allégorise, en tout cas, l’insu catastrophique de l’ordre. On commence enfin à ne plus comprendre ce que veut dire venir, venir avant, venir après, prévenir, revenir – et la différence des générations, puis hériter, écrire son testament, dicter, parler, écrire sous la dictée, etc.”

Writing on or as postcards means fitting a large amount into a small space (or economy). This produces something like an anagrammatical effect: “J’ai tant à te dire et tout aura dû tenir sur des clichés de carte postale – et s’y diviser aussitôt. Des lettres en petits morceaux, déchirées d’avance, découpées, recoupées. Tant à te dire, mais tout et rien, plus que tout, moins que rien”

(CP 26). Further on, the “Postal Principle” that makes every inscription essentially unreadable

(because, e.g., “intercepted” before its arrival at its destination) is described as “irreversible”:

“j’aurai … « intercepté » ma propre lettre. Mais je te confirme que cela sera irréversible. C’est d’ailleurs la loi, et aucune lettre jamais n’y échappe” (CP 130).

Irreversible reversible, the par has already passed through and back through the word as lexical unit or seme, like a wave or current doubly eroding the ground on which the word would stand, cutting into it while pulling it out to sea, but cutting into it so as to add to it, and in the opposite direction: writing over from right to left what had been carried away from left to right, so to speak. And here I point out that the words dérapage, rappeler, and rapport are all

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themselves mots en par that have partially reoriented the sense, the directionality, of Derrida’s language. As though these par words, in order to defend themselves from the universalist pretensions of conventional reading and writing, had preserved their idiomaticness by turning away reading (that, at least, of some number of words) in the usual sense. But turning reading away, these tropes risk catastrophe: that they not be read at all, that the apotropaic conjuration they have invoked dooms them to eternal nothingness. Indeed, does it not follow from what we have seen that the idiom’s apotropaism, or the idiom as apotropaic, can be only partial, can only work in part? That the rapport the idiom posits with itself (the inverted rapport of the trope par) as apotrope (and this word is itself a partial anagram of rapport) can only work badly (which is also to say that it can only work too well)? That the conjuration of the idiom must write over the idiom, turning away from and leaving exposed and unspoken what should be spoken for and therefore protected?88 How to read the abyssal rappel that the dérapage has already started – the

“that” in my sentence acting as both conjunction and relative pronoun, the verb “started” both transitive and intransitive? Does this not ruin any chance for the reader to locate Derrida’s rappel, to situate herself in parallel to it? Would not a “faithful” parallelism always overwrite and anagrammatize the rappel, leaving in its wake nothing but a partial parallel? Can not the same be said for the relationship between the topos parages and the movement of dérapage that would arrive there? Can one ever say where “le langage … des parages” is, if one’s trajectory is made through incessant detours, as though the trip were only possible through a supplementary throw of the die signifying a wager on De-rrida’s anagrammatic signature, as a dé-rapage?

This brings me to a third point: 3. that more important than any reading of a particular passage I might offer here (e.g., the identification of the mots en par in “Le retrait de la

88 On the apotropaic, see, e.g., Glas, where it is first invoked in parallel with a number of par figures and a movement of passage: “le parapluie, comme toutes les figures de para (paratonnerre, parachute, paravent) est un apotrope absolument menaçant. La protection et l’agression passent l’une dans l’autre, se renversent sans cesse dans leur rapport voilé à la vérité. Fonction toujours réversible du supplément” (G 33).

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métaphore,” the “literal” reading of “quelque part,” the anagrammatical or apotropaic reading of

“dérapage,” “rappeler,” “rapport,” etc.) is that the par, because of its ultra-idiomaticity, ruin reading altogether. It is unverifiable, thus unknowable. But “unknowable” does not bespeak, among other things, a “correlationist” epistemological limit.89 If Derrida shows, again and again, that the “pure possibility” of making “essential distinctions” is “différée à l’infini,” as he writes in La voix et le phénomène, this is in order to locate knowledge in an “aporia” where the infinite and the finite, the ideal and the real, the “in principle” and the “in fact,” objective and subjective expression, fragment (VP 113). Without a regulative idea, there is only – idealiter – the idiomatic. I say “the idiomatic,” and not “the idiom” or “idioms” to emphasize that at stake is a systematicity or enchaining of predicates unsupported by the unity or totality of an ultimate ground. The infinite distance (to echo Husserl) between such a ground and the idiomatic can be

“measured” through the “sharing” of the idiom’s fragmenting as I have been treating it. This happens “where” the relationship between reading and writing is itself substituted – metaphorized/translated – by a passage between modes of annihilation. “There,” the idiom’s

89 A careful consideration of the stakes of the idiomatic in Derrida would be sufficient to dispel the charge that his work is a variant of “correlationism.” If this latter term names a way of doing philosophy believing in “la primauté de la relation sur les termes reliés” as well as “la puissance constitutive de la relation mutuelle” (Meillassoux 19) and that thus can claim to have access to that relation, then Derrida’s thought cannot rightly be called “correlationist.” His is a thought of a “between” space, a “relation,” that does not join terms in a mutual belonging, but that severs them from each other, constituting them as heterogeneous to each other because they are simultaneously, and from the first, heterogeneous to themselves. The event of this severing heterogeneity is precisely not a “co-belonging” (“co-appartenance”) in the way Quentin Meillassoux describes it in his extremely brief synopsis of Heidegger in Après la finitude (22-3). While I will point out in passing that a more patient weighing of the problem of translation (e.g., of the German Ereignis, a term which Meillassoux mentions for a mere moment) would have led Meillassoux to different conclusions concerning certain “variants” of post-Kantian thought, it is more to the point at this moment to say that translation, and the metaphor it implicates, in Derrida requires a thinking of “relation” as the “event” of the repeated and indeterminate obliteration of the border between a given term and its “others.” In other words, “relation” has to be thought starting from the “always already” of an obliterating movement whose result is that the location of the border between terms is perpetually at issue. In consequence, the very identity of the terms (therefore their “co-belonging”) becomes a question, or a certain kind of question: to give but one example, a topological one, asking that we attest to the necessarily possible disappearance of a term, which disappearance leaves a “place” for the intervention of others. It is therefore not first of all a question of “relation” in Derrida since his thought is devoted to questioning the very value of relationality and the conceptual order it prescribes. When a relation is thought in conjunction with an obliterating movement whose result is the non-presence of said relation’s terms, the concept of “relation” itself cannot but tremble. For a critique of Meillassoux that departs from a similar concern with the event of an original non-presence or “alterity” inhabiting presence, see Martin Hägglund’s “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux.”

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words become its limits, and they par-take of the idiom as of nothing: nothing that they will have already, and that they will have never, spoken (of). Derrida in fact bookends “Le retrait de la métaphore” with two analogous formulations of such a speaking (of) metaphor that both already and never happens. In the beginning: metaphor does without me, but in order to “me faire parler, me ventriloquer, me métaphoriser. Comment ne pas parler ?” (PIA 65). In the end: metaphor’s trait is nothing, and its entame is irreversibly divided: “Comment en parler ?” (PIA 92). The beginning and the end of speaking here cross each other; the idiom’s limit-as-passage itself fragments. In the “beginning,” the idiom’s passage has already begun, and there is no hope of catching up to it. Speaking thus finds itself at a loss: it has come to its “end” or limit, which prevents it from ever reaching the end – that of its own originary passage. It already passes to the end that has nonetheless passed beyond it. In other words, there is nothing that is left to say; there is the end or limit of the idiomatic word itself that remains (to be) spoken. Where (not) to speak this? With nothing to say, wanting nothing to say, the word remains short of its limit. Coming up short, it gets negated, yet this negation produces a supplementary fragment of speech. Where to locate it? Where to start speaking, after the end? Where to end speaking, before the beginning?

And not just speaking about the fragmenting limit, but speaking it itself, as fragment – where to speak this part or partitive of speech? Once again, I authorize myself to abuse (Derrida’s)

French: the pronoun en in “Comment en parler?” does not name the object of a discourse about metaphor, and does not, at bottom, signify the relationship connecting a subject to his object of knowledge, the one he would represent in a logical, grammatical language. En designates a hyperbolic par-titive, some part of metaphor, metaphor as some part of an idiom whose edge, touching its beyond, at the end of its word, is negated and folded back through itself. Turning back in itself, as though it had never left itself, the partitive idiom touches this side of itself, where no word has yet been located and spoken. The en and the ne anagrammatize each other: en

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parler, c’est ne pas parler, there being added between them a pas, an additional and asymmetrical “negative” element that unceasingly opens space and movement. Between the idiom’s edges, between the production and negation of its partitive, there arises an endless vociferation, the repetition of a meaningless syllable that prevents locating either a first or a final word: en parler is not only ne pas parler; to this we must add (again abusively) ne pas pas parler, ne pas pas pas parler, ne pas pas pas pas parler, etc.90 Where to speak? Where not to speak? Where not not to speak? These interrogative adverbs, i.e., the question of space and movement, open – are made possible without possibility of actualization – in the passage of the passage between the imploding edges of the idiomatic word. “Between” is not, of course, simply between: the relation here, like that between intention and intuition in Husserl, is “pro-visoire”

(VP 109) in that its provision destroys, and keeps destroying (sauf le détruire), the pure form or ideality of the word. There remains, then, a different ideality or systematicity (to be) spoken, “Il reste alors à parler” (VP 117). To speak what will have remained, without dérive. Derrida’s comments here, on ideality that is wanting regulation of difference, go as well for the regulation of idiomatic, or ultra-idiomatic, speech: “Que Husserl ait toujours pensé l’infinité comme Idée au sens kantien, comme l’indéfinité d’un « à l’infini », cela donne à croire qu’il n’a jamais dérivé la différence de la plénitude d’une parousie, de la présence pleine d’un infini positif ; qu’il n’a jamais cru à l’accomplissement d’un « savoir absolu » comme présence auprès de soi, dans le

Logos, d’un concept infini” (VP 114).

90 Cf. certain descriptions of the pas in “Pas”: “Le pas n’est donc pas même un pas, pas même” (PAR 38). There is also “la venue de l’événement” that, because “il n’arrive pas simplement,” Derrida describes as “son pas, son allure, ce dont il va dans le venir d’un événement, l’unique comme rapport à l’autre, le pas qui n’accompagne pas” (PAR 64). This yields a double law of the event, or a law with a “double pas”: “Ne serait-il [the event] pas frappé d’interdiction (ne pas !) par son arrivée même, selon le double pas de la loi, son double lien, son double nœud circulaire mais sans cercle qui ne soit d’abord franchi ?” (PAR 66). The pas is irreducible to dialectics and to grammar: “Le ne-pas ne fait pas porter la négation sur une position ou sur une négation mais sur l’indécidabilité singulière de l’abord de l’autre : ne pouvoir aller ni plus loin ni plus près. Voilà qui suffirait à désemparer tout schéma dialectique traditionnel, même si le ne-pas était conforme à ce que nous entendons de sa grammaticalité, si c’était une négation. Le pas vers l’autre (pas d’é-loignement) n’y trouve pas sa place ou plutôt ne supporte pas d’y

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III. The Interest of the par, Between Text, Context, and World

I evoke Derrida’s analysis of Husserl, and through Husserl, Kant, as a kind of foreword to some more definitive proof of the connection between the par and a certain repetition – a remaining – of space in his work. But let me ask the reader to hear, again, in “proof” the echo of a constitutive failure, the remains of a proving ground through which no context, no reason, is given for the existence of a par-ticular word. One important text I am going to cite, the recently published seminar Théorie et pratique from the mid-70’s, does indeed show the importance of the par for Derrida’s thinking on, among other questions, the architectonic nature, the very systematicity, of human reason, which for both Husserl and Kant is tied to the idealization of space that projects the world as absolute totality of appearances.91 The world as such is for both

Husserl and Kant the ultimate context, what the former, in “The Origin of Geometry,” calls the

“horizon-certainty” (The Crisis of European Sciences 374), what Derrida dubs, in his introduction to that work, “la Terre transcendantale” (OG 79); and what for the latter is a regulative idea of the unconditioned totality of all phenomena. Though in what follows I will be quoting texts by Derrida in which the par is present, and in which Derrida gestures toward

Husserl and Kant and their thinking on the concept of world, I hope my argument has shown, and will continue to show, that however I might contextualize Derrida’s use of the par, it is

trouver sa place. Cela, pourvu qu’on lise le nœud de ce pas qui se recoupe lui-même dans le récit tel que Blanchot” (PAR 97). 91 Sean Gaston helpfully situates Derrida’s meditations on the concept of world in relation to, among others, both Kant and Husserl. Regarding the latter, for example, he states that “Derrida attempts to register the contingency of the ‘world’ [in the introduction to “The Origin of Geometry”] without subscribing to what Husserl called ‘the essential detachableness of the whole natural world from the domains of consciousness.’” This “detachableness” would involve the “profound exclusion of the spatiotemporal in the name of the disappearance of the world,” a disappearance that “registers for Husserl a pure consciousness ‘to which nothing is spatiotemporally external and which cannot be within any spatiotemporal complex’ [Gaston is here quoting the Husserl of the Ideas].” Gaston suggests that, through a quasi-concept like differance, Derrida wants to insist that “we are always confronted by the

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precisely the context of the word that is at issue. Wherever in the Derridean corpus I might find this word, wherever Derrida wrote or spoke or put or found or quoted it, is in a “context” that is not rigorously separable from the “text,” the word, it would ground. Context, as what goes along with text, is another name for the shared out parallelism that inexorably transforms what a word is. By extension, my ability to read, and Derrida’s ability to write, a word, and where a word might be said to be found between reading and writing: these are transformed as well. This, I think, is Derrida’s point in comments such as the following, from “Survivre”:

Je pars de là [my italics] : aucun sens ne se détermine hors contexte mais aucun

contexte ne donne lieu à saturation. Je n’en fais pas une question de richesse

substantielle, de ressource sémantique, mais de structure, la structure du reste ou

de l’itération. Mais je lui ai donné beaucoup d’autres noms et, précisément, tout

tient ici à l’aspect secondaire de la nomination. La nomination importe, pour être

sans cesse entraînée dans un procès qu’elle ne domine pas. (PAR 125)

Elsewhere, the non-saturability or non-determinability of context and the secondariness of nomination that results from it, are tied to erasure, but an erasure that preserves singularity. In

Limited Inc., for example, Derrida says that “as soon as it accommodates reference as difference and inscribes différance in presence, this concept of text or of context [which is that of a certain limitlessness of context (cf. LI 136)] no longer opposes writing to erasure” (LI 137). And in the interview “I Have a Taste for the Secret,” he says that, where “context is not absolutely determinable,” this implies that “there are none but singular contexts” (TS 13).92

As I was saying, Théorie et pratique provides another context of sorts for the par’s fragmentation, one that gets shared, in fact, between a number of contexts. One of those is the

entangled and impure difference of spacing and temporalization” (101). See in particular “Derrida and the End of the World” in The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida.

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Kant of the first Critique, specifically where he is concerned to treat an “interest” in the systematic unity of reason.93 The par’s passage through Kant, among other places, will indicate that its spatial and contextual stakes extend in and through the ultimate context, the context of context that is the world itself. Indeed, I believe it is such an extension into and through the world that will motivate Derrida, decades later, in his final seminar to say, for example, that “il n’y a pas le monde,” that “il n’y a sans doute jamais eu de monde comme totalité de quoi que ce soit” (BS 366); but also that “Il y a peut-être trop de monde dans le monde” (BS 367). The

“absence de monde commun,” also called “la dissémination radicale” and “une dissémination sans horizon sémantique commun” (BS 366), he goes on to call “la monstruosité … de l’impartageable absolu …, de l’impartageable abyssal” (BS 367). This is what I will be trying to think through in the final stages of this chapter: the par as absolutely uncontextualizable, without a world in or through which to appear, as though the demonstration of its idiomatic functioning required a reckoning with its monstrous indemonstrability, and, in turn, with the indemonstrability of the world itself.94

At the outset of the second session of Théorie et pratique, Derrida states, “Je crois de plus en plus que la question (théorique et pratique) du contexte, et non seulement le concept du contexte, nous contraindra à nous occuper d’elle au cours de ce séminaire.”95 Context and its constraints are indeed those of the word, which is not a determinate “object” of speculative

92 In Limited Inc., see especially LI 131-7. In A Taste for the Secret, see part one and the very beginning of part two of the interview “I Have a Taste for the Secret” (especially TS 12-20). Jonathan Culler provides helpful comments on context in Derrida in “Meaning and Iterability” in On Deconstruction (see especially 120-34). 93 I will be looking, in what follows, to draw a link between interest and the concept of world in Derrida’s treatment of Kant. Sean Gaston, for his part, has linked the concept of disinterest in Kant, via Derrida, to an “internationalization,” that is, to a certain “public use of reason” that would not be a priori confinable to the borders of the nation state (56). See “The Interests of Reason” in his Derrida and Disinterest. 94 Among the spate of works devoted to Derrida and the concept of world and/or globalization to have come out in recent years, see: Claire Colebrook’s “The Play of the World,” “There Is No World Without End (Salut)” in O’Connor, Pheng Cheah’s “The Untimely Secret of Democracy,” “Animal and Plant, Life and World in Derrida” in Nealon, Michael Naas’ The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments, Kas Saghafi’s “The World after the End of the World.” 95 Important comments on context can also be found in the first session, especially TP 13-4, 26-7.

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reason, but what Derrida calls a “problem” that becomes visible only in a highly restricted, or we might say idiomatic, context. More precisely, language as “problem” is an “in-détermination”

(TP 35) in that it is only ever available in highly idiomatic formulations (e.g., “faut le faire,” “ça me regarde,” “cou,” “par,” etc.) whose meanings take shape within “une combinatoire sémantique très complexe.” Crucially, reason itself, about which Derrida will speak in his treatment of interest in Kant, and which treatment I will turn to shortly, must operate from within the same differential element: “nous n’avons aucun recul absolu devant cet élément sémantico- linguistique” (TP 16). The “question” is, then, not how to determine the word for the theoretical faculties, but how to “determine” it in its very indeterminacy, as that which remains indeterminate.

This requires a certain reading practice, one that transgresses or overflows meaningful context, and so transforms the word that would situate itself in such a context. Heidegger is once again for Derrida something of a privileged example of this.96 But Kant provides as well a case in point for the problem of making theoretical sense of what passes without sense and without context. Of particular interest is Derrida’s examination of “The canon of pure reason” from the first Critique. Kant posits that the conflicts that speculative reason experiences with itself

(among which the antinomies, which concern, among other things, the regulative idea of the world as unconditioned totality) may be resolved by appealing, via the regulative use of reason, to reason in its original, extra-experiential unity. The human being’s rational “interest” in fundamental principles leads her to privilege, within the antinomies, the moment of thesis over antithesis, and this is legitimized through the exercise of practical reason, as a supplement to speculation. In other words, Kant finds in practical reason an appropriate stand-in, or analogy, for reason itself as thought in its final aim, which is to actualize itself as an ultimate totality that

96 See especially sessions five (TP 101-19) and six (TP 121-37).

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is self-contained, i.e., that bears its own end within itself, independent of anything else. Reason, as a unity, is teleological. The faculty of human reason, as distinct from the understanding, thus projects the thought (but a thought distinct from knowledge) of a future world lying beyond the present world of which we have knowledge in experience. It then becomes necessary to establish how these two worlds, and the human faculties corresponding to them, should be brought into harmony with each other. It is at this moment that practical reason’s “interests” take precedence over theoretical reason, whereby we infer that there must be an extra- and trans-empirical ground of reason. But this “must” represents a rational necessity that is purely formal, and so conceivable only by analogy. For example, prior to “The canon of pure reason,” Kant, in “On the final aim of the natural dialectic of human reason,” states that empirical investigations take place

“as if” based in non-empirical, systematic unity.97 Reason, as regulative (and not constitutive), relates to transcendent objects by way of objects of experience. The former are conceived therefore as “analogues of real things [i.e., of appearances given in representation], but not as things in themselves” (607). The inference of the purely formal, analogical unity of reason will ultimately inaugurate the possibility of acting in the world under the dictates of a non-empirical, or moral, law. Practical reason would thus have a hand in bringing about, or making come, as an event, the world of the future, the one announced as regulative idea, by actively transforming the empirical world as it is known in the present. On the whole, it could be said that the burden of

Kant’s thought is to show the possibility of passing between two worlds, thus two orders of reason prescribing, respectively, two events. This means, in the “canon of pure reason,” articulating by analogy two different rational relations (embodied in two different instances of

97 Derrida explicitly treats the Kantian “as if” in L’Université sans condition, where, he argues, it introduces an irreducible “ferment déconstructif” into the purposiveness without purpose central to aesthetic and teleological judgments that “exceeds,” and thus undoes, the desired connection between knowledge of natural phenomena and morality (U 28); and in Voyous, in connection with the use of the regulative ideas, the interests of reason, transcendental illusion, and the architectonic nature of reason (Derrida deploys the locution “comme si” throughout Voyous but makes explicit mention of the Kantian als ob at V 124-5, 168, 171, 187).

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the word “because,” weil in German), each connecting things, by inference, to their condition of possibility. In the world of nature, the relation is put as follows: “that something is … because something does happen”; in the world of moral ends: “that something is … because something ought to happen” (677).

Reading the “canon of pure reason,” Derrida locates in reason’s self-articulation (between theory and practice, via the question, “What may I hope?” or “If I do what I should, what may I then hope?” (Critique of pure reason 677)) a “place” (“lieu”) where reason’s event gets doubled and divided, where it gets “distributed” (“se distribue”) between theory and practice (and, we can infer, between the future world and its present analogue), without being anchored in a totalized unity, thus “de façon toujours dissymétrique” (TP 41). That place is a single word, weil

(“because”). Not hesitating to translate it into French by “« par » (« par-ce-que »)” (TP 45),

Derrida describes the word as “le lieu immobile, ou, plutôt qu’un lieu immobile, un dispositif immobile pour un trajet qui se divise, … un aiguillage, un syntagme fixé mais articulé qui tantôt rapporte à l’avenir de l’événement, tantôt au présent de l’événement, et qui donc est la raison”

(TP 46-7). Reason’s trajectory, or “trajet,” would get divided, in other words, because having to articulate itself through language, more precisely, through idioms, and more precisely still, through particular words of those idioms, weil and par. Passing through to itself in order to produce itself, reason would have to make a detour through speculation, but a “false speculation,” a self-mirroring syntagma producing the breaking of the self-as-mirror. As evidence of this, Derrida cites Francis Ponge’s “Fable,” whose opening (“par le mot par”) constitutes “une fausse spéculation qui n’arrive pas à s’emparer de son objet, et qui forme par là même l’événement d’un texte, texte événement qu’aucun métalangage théorique ne peut surprendre qu’à se laisser d’avance occuper, préoccuper par lui, par « par ». Pas de métalangage théorique, mais pas de métapratique non plus” (TP 48). The weil and the par, then, would both

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seem to serve as containers for the whole of reason itself, idioms through which the latter would be required to pass in order to arrive back at itself. Reason’s essential self-containment, or that it bear its own end within itself, would, in this way, have to supplement itself by way of an externalization and division between idioms.

Yet Derrida certainly does not want to suggest that, containing reason, either German or

French, or any given word belonging to either of these languages, are themselves self-contained.

Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, the status of a word such as the par depends on its prior inscription in an in principle limitless series of metaphorico-translational substitutions, and thus partakes in what I spoke of as a generalized economy of intervention that originally puts in question the self-contained unity of the word. And yet I also argued that the par itself provides a certain place for that economy, or that it gives itself just as that economy, the oikos, as it were, in which a dispersal of lingual particles may obscurely show up. In this way, the par would contain more than one idiom in one idiom. And this is doubtless why Derrida so rapidly translates Kant’s

(but it is also Heidegger’s and Angelus Silesius’ (TP 44-5)) weil. Like any metalanguage that would be “pre-occupied” by the par, that would be unable to “parler de « par » sans déjà passer par lui” (TP 48), Kant’s (and Heidegger’s and Silesius’) German, or at the very least the weil, must itself, per Derrida, pass through the par in an original manner. Derrida appears to suggest as much when, echoing in advance his own statements on the pre-occupation of metalanguage by the par, he writes that the weil is “ce qu’on traduit par « par » (« par-ce-que »)” (TP 45, my italics), and that in the French edition he is working from in this session of his seminar, “« weil » y est traduit une fois par « puisque », l’autre fois par « parce que »” (TP 47, my italics).

Understood as pre-occupying the weil, the par, as translation, would not find itself in a position of secondariness vis-à-vis what it translates. Translating the weil, the par would put it into movement, into a trajet that divides it from itself and disperses it, just as it would do to the whole

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of reason. Such a translational trajectory would imply that the site of the writing and the reading of the weil, or the context of this text, is radically disseminated. In this case, it would be as though Kant, that famously immobile philosopher, had, in writing the first Critique, become suddenly peripatetic, crossing over not just the outer limits of Königsberg, but the western frontier of the Kingdom of Prussia to arrive in France, and not even eighteenth-century France, but the twentieth-century France of Francis Ponge. Like Polyphile in Anatole France’s Le Jardin d’Epicure, Kant, by writing of reason through the metaphor of interest and the weil (and we will see in a bit that, for Derrida, Kant’s argument concerning interest and the weil takes the form of a

“metaphorics”), is simultaneously involved in a process of translation, but a radical one in which his figure, weil, has become unrecognizable and led him far from home. Translator in spite of himself, translating (turning from one language to another) and translating (conveying his text from one place to another), he would have erased the very interest of his writing and put it into an elliptical movement of transmission, as though it were a counterfeit coin circulating from the start in someone else’s name, an exergue that is already elsewhere. Kant, in other words, would have himself been rendered blank and set wandering, “piètre péripatéticien qui ne reconnaît pas sa figure et ne sait pas où elle l’a fait marcher” (M 253).

And yet, states Derrida, the translation of weil by par is, for all that, an imperfect one.

Though it is “un lieu de grande circulation” for the interest of reason that the weil metaphorizes and/or translates, it “loses” something of that interest in the process. Now Derrida surely means by this that the par has not simply supplanted the weil, or German, or the whole of reason so as to become a metalanguage itself, the very reason of reason. This is an easy enough conclusion to draw. Derrida would certainly not countenance the thesis of the par as a master word to which the weil, or any other representative of the positing power of reason itself, would refer. The par is not being posited, or does not posit itself, as a single, metalingual term positing and holding in

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itself any other term or array of terms. Indeed, the par is not, for Derrida, a positing or position, but a com-position or dis-positif. The par does hold the weil, holds all of reason itself, but it holds them as divided, as already in circulation beyond themselves and so disarticulated from themselves. For this reason, the par forms itself and persists as itself through that disarticulated and disarticulating circulation. It too is a Derridean exergue, more than one denomination in one.

It is of very great value, as it holds a number of lingual values in itself. And at the same time, it is of no value because it is constituted of some quantity of values that, like the weil, have no determinate origin or context, and that exist only through the trajectory of their self-division. It is in this way that we should understand Derrida’s use of the term aiguillage, which names a technical apparatus or dis-positif that works by turning in place, thus persistently remaining in a single location, but in order to open itself and form a passage to any number of locations. Thus, while it translates, transmits, and transforms the weil, the par gives itself over to the same process, but by remaining immobile, stuck to one place. It is in the par, “dans le « par », je dirais sur l’aiguillage du « par », à travers le fonctionnement d’aiguillage du « par » de « parce que » ou du « weil » que ça se divise.” Among many other things, ça would refer here to reason itself, but reason in its disarticulating trajectory between present and future, between one context and another, through the par’s aiguillage. Or, to evoke Kant’s terms, the par would be located between theoretical knowledge of the present empirical world, and hope directed toward the coming of a future world, the one in which practical reason has an active “interest.” Derrida thus continues: “que ça se divise, je veux dire qu’on va pouvoir discerner entre le rapport de l’espoir à l’événement et le rapport du savoir à l’événement” (TP 46).

In reason’s disarticulation from itself, there would be no grounds for discerning the difference between a future world and a present one, and it is presumably this that would allow

Derrida to suggest, albeit implicitly, that Kant’s eighteenth-century Prussian weil is originally

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translated by a twentieth-century French par. But it would, in addition, be the here and now of the speculative or theoretical present that would be undergoing the trajectory of self-division, and this within itself, as though by turning around on and opening itself to division and movement to future times and places, the par, this par as theoretical object to be read in the present, simultaneously were going nowhere, remaining “immobile” while getting separated out from itself. Here I note again that the par is not, strictly speaking for Derrida, an object of speculation

(its “object” cannot be grasped, s’emparer – the par would here already be traversing its own conceptual grasping, s’em-par-er), and, indeed, that the “speculation” it makes up is a “false speculation” whose mirroring event cannot be thought without a supplementary event, that of the mirror’s breaking. The translating operation by which the par pulls any metalanguage into its turnings implies “un rapport essentiel … avec le bris du miroir, à la fois avec l’effet du miroir, l’effet spéculaire ou spéculatif (théorique, si vous voulez), et son interruption brisante qui ne peut se faire que d’un coup, en un événement, événement qui répète et traduit l’événement initial

(« par le mot par ») qui constitue un faux speculum” (TP 48). Let me pause for a moment over

Derrida’s use of the word “traduit” here. As we saw in the last chapter’s analysis of “Des tours de Babel,” though metaphor’s turnings open a given, natural language to an originary movement of translation (and I again note that Kantian interest is a metaphor for Derrida), this does not guarantee that said language will be replaced by another, that the term being translated will in fact find itself successfully carried over into another language and, by extension, another context.

Rather, the event of translation as such cannot be said to take place, and so metaphor’s

“translation” results in a return, or return as originary re-turn, to the same language, the same- language-as-other-language. When Derrida states that the par’s shattering constitutes an event that translates a prior event (this shattering-as-translation being apparently presented in the parenthetical quotation of the Ponge poem’s opening phrase), I think we should understand him

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to be speaking of an intralingual translation that produces a division within the present of the par’s event, i.e., the present of its event as an object that, in Kantian parlance, is, because it happens. The presence of the par as an object for consciousness, as a word to be read here and now, depends on its prior passage through itself, through the par that is already another par, the same par as other. And this must entail that the boundary between, for example, the word as self- same word that gets read, and the word as other word – which is to say, the context that would anchor the text of the par’s reading, that would assure that it is this word and not some other, or this par and not some other unrelated instance of it – is originally unmoored.

This unmooring of context produces the kind of lingual movement we saw in the case of

Kant, through which his text is put into translation – carried across languages as well as across the space of the globe, not to mention across history – such that there is more than one text in his text, and such that his text is located in more than one context in one context. But I want to say as well that this unmooring of context additionally produces a radical immobility of language through which the par, in its passage through to itself, goes nowhere, indeed, is nowhere, belongs to no context and so cannot be found anywhere in the world. Again, it is, at least in part, a question here of the constitutive limit of the par’s event, its status as an object that is given to be read, or that arrives where it is to be read: it is, because it happens or comes or gets where it is going (Derrida’s French says “parce que quelque chose arrive” (TP 44)). In difference to the

Kantian weil that, in getting put into circulation, ends up originally intercepted and sent to where it does not belong (I say “intercepted” to recall the argument from La Carte postale that I cited above; here is another relevant passage describing the prior interception of the postcard: “Bien sûr, je sentais, à la seconde à laquelle j’écrivais, que cette lettre, comme toutes les autres, était interceptée avant même toute autre mainmise, toute interception accidentelle” (CP 57-8)), in difference to the original interception of the Kantian text, the par does not arrive. It is not

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originally intercepted, but originally lost, bearing neither a recipient address nor a return address.

The text’s prior belonging to a multiplicity of contexts has to be thought, in other words, at the same time as implicating a prior non-belonging in which the text, being more than one text in one, gets divided from itself and reveals the lack of a single medium and milieu in which it would otherwise have standing. The following, further passages from La Carte postale crystallize this co-implication of more-than-one-context or destination in which a text is to be read, and no-context, no place for a letter to make sense: “à l’intérieur de chaque signe déjà, de chaque marque ou de chaque trait, il y a l’éloignement, la poste, ce qu’il faut pour que ce soit lisible par un autre, une autre que toi ou moi, et tout est foutu d’avance, cartes sur table. La condition pour que ça arrive, c’est que ça finisse et même que ça commence par ne pas arriver”

(CP 34); “Même en arrivant (toujours à du « sujet »), la lettre se soustrait à l’arrivée. Elle arrive ailleurs, toujours plusieurs fois. Tu ne peux plus la prendre. C’est la structure de la lettre (comme carte postale, autrement dit la fatale partition qu’elle doit supporter) qui veut ça” (CP 135). The system of lingual movement that makes up the post, the postal service as what posits or positions itself as what organizes or contextualizes the referrals or sendings of “letters” (letter being a metaphor, or ammétaphore, for every element of discourse) must, in principle, always lose what it conveys, must constitute itself by an original exclusion, which exclusion is a self-exclusion.

The post leaves something out, which is to say, it leaves itself out, and it remains in its being left out, a “place” or “lieu immobile” not in which but through which text gets absolutely dispersed, without remainder, as dead letters. There can be no reason, either practical or theoretical, nor any analogue of reason in the form, say, of a postmaster or master thinker, who might contextualize this dispersal. Rather, Derrida wants to claim that it is the master who “knows” how not to yield to the command that his text show up in a determinate location or context. Passing through not one language, his “strength” as a thinker (that he is strong, “fort”) is what puts him at a distance

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from himself (far, “fort” in German, from himself) and leaves the self-enclosed identity of his text a priori indemonstrable:

Les maîtres-penseurs sont aussi des maîtres de poste. Savoir bien jouer avec la

poste restante. Savoir ne pas être là et être fort de ne pas être là tout de suite. Ne

pas livrer sur commande, savoir attendre et faire attendre, aussi longtemps que

l’exige ce qu’il y a en soi de plus fort – et jusqu’à mourir sans rien maîtriser de la

destination finale. La poste est toujours en reste, et toujours restante. Ça attend le

destinataire qui peut toujours, d’aventure, ne pas arriver. (CP 206)

I want to say now that from all this we can deduce that context and text are constitutively open to each other: that context being made up of text, or a single positing or position being already a dis-positif or a com-position, there are simultaneously (a) multiple contexts that are non-totalizable (both in respect to their relations to each other and to themselves – “singular” contexts, to echo Derrida’s comment from “I Have a Taste for the Secret” that I quoted above), and (b) multiple, non-totalizable texts without context (texts that, being contextually limitless, are erased from any context whatsoever, to recall Derrida’s comment from Limited Inc. I quoted above). In this simultaneity, between context and text, is “where” we would find the par: radically replacing, transforming, and transmitting disparate idioms (such as the weil), providing them with contexts – times, places, worlds – of a sort through which to move; while itself being unable ever to arrive at itself, turning forever in place, forever at a remove from any context, any world in which to be situated. Whence, as I was saying earlier, its imperfect translation, not only of the weil, but of itself-as-other, as, for example, other French mots en par:

ce « par » … ne traduit qu’imparfaitement le « weil » (en perdant peut-être un peu

de sa référence lointaine à la durée), il en garde bien en tout cas la signification de

ce qui perdure ou permane à travers un changement ou une altération ou un

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mouvement, il en garde en effet le « per ». Garder le « per », ici, c’est garder la

signification de « traverse », « traversée », de ce qui s’accomplit par, c’est-à-dire

à « travers ». La valeur de « trans », « tra » compose intimement avec celle de

« per ». (TP 48)

Derrida goes on in the following pages to sketch out a number of “semantic motifs” that owe their interest to “les valeurs de « par », « per », « trans », « tra »,” (he adds “« pra »” to this list at

TP 58)), in particular, motifs tied to “la « trans-formation » ou, à travers des relais lexicologiques compliqués, au « travail » (tripalium, torture : passivité, souffrance), où chaque fois l’on peut distinguer l’idée de « passage par » et donc aussi de « passage au-delà », le « trans » impliquant la « traversée », le « travel » laborieux, pénible, douloureux” (TP 48-9).

It is such a complicated field of “values” that incites Derrida, throughout the seminar, to raise the possibility of a “practice” that would be revolutionary in extremis because unbeholden to any “thesis,” that is, any practical positing of a single, meaningful context. Commenting on the context of Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (of which one particularly transformative translation offered by Derrida is “Les philosophes n’ont pas même réussi à interpréter diversement le monde, ce qu’il faudrait … faire, c’est, même pour l’interpréter, le changer” (TP 28)), he speaks of a “pratique-révolutionnaire” whose thesis would constitute an utterly unique “locution,” one without universal meaning:

une locution elle-même révolutionnaire, en ce sens qu’il ne s’y agirait pas d’une

pratique dont tout le monde comprendrait déjà ce qu’elle veut dire et qui se

préciserait ensuite en « révolutionnaire »…. Seule la pratique-révolutionnaire peut

donner accès à la pratique, non pas tellement à l’essence de la pratique, à la

signification de la pratique, ni même à l’être-pratique de la pratique, mais à la

pratique-pratique, à une pratique qui ne peut venir à elle-même qu’à partir d’elle-

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même. (TP 25-6)

À partir d’elle-même: practice has no one, nothing, to authorize it, no determinate context in which to take on and constitute meaning. As evidence of a “practical” locution, Derrida points up the “Theses on Feuerbach,” noting that they have effectively outlived both Marx and Engels, and have therefore overrun what might be considered their authoritative context. For example, Marx, recalls Derrida, had never meant the “Theses” to be published, Engels took it upon himself to make alterations to Marx’s text after his death, and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of Moscow had the “Theses” published, but only after both Marx and Engels had died, in 1932. These

“eventual” possibilities are, to repeat, marks of an essential possibility: that a “thesis,” an idiomatic locution positing itself practically, is limitable by no definitive context, by no place and/or medium in any sense in which it might be read, countersigned, responded to, “practiced,” etc. “Quand je parle ici de contexte, il s’agit alors d’un contexte ou d’un texte qui ne se ferme pas sur le contexte immédiat des « Thèses sur Feuerbach », ni même d’un texte écrit sur du papier, mais d’un ensemble non clos de différences en différance, en cours de transformation, si vous voulez” (TP 26). From this follows the transformation and traversal of text and context, each opening to and through the other: “le texte ou le contexte non clos ici ne se limite pas à ce que l’on entend par texte au sens courant, à ce que Marx, par exemple, a écrit, à ses notes ou ses brouillons ou ses œuvres complètes”; the “valeur énigmatique de « pratique » … met en mouvement un langage qui n’a plus simplement à être compris, entendu, conçu sur le mode de la lecture théorique ; … on ne sait pas ce qu’elle dit, ce qu’elle veut dire avant de le faire, et … même on ne sait pas ce qu’il faut faire, selon une antériorité rigoureuse, avant de le faire” (TP

27).

The concern, via the problem of context, with a certain limitless “movement” of language whose meaning is neither theoretical nor practical nor a synthesis of the two, brings a thought of

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spatiality that is at least double, which Derrida elaborates via sustained commentary on the

“bord,” the articulatory edge that should join philosophy to itself while distinguishing it from what it is not. “Naturally,” he tells his seminar participants, the bord does not provide clean demarcations between inside and outside, this side and beyond. “Au contraire, cette problématique vise le bord, vise à problématiser la sécurité que procure un bord, le trait d’un bord” (TP 103). Thus understood, the bord as débordement (that is, Derrida adds, “le trait du discours en général” (TP 104)) is located within the space of an analogy that draws together what overflows and what is overflowed. The former remains related to, the neighbor of, the latter.

They are as two corresponding spaces, the former resting so close (“affine” “confiné”) to the latter as to be confined (“confiné”) within it: “chaque fois que ça déborde, ça ressemble à ce qui est débordé ; le débordant reste affine au débordé, affine et je dirai même confiné au débordé”

(TP 125).

Inferred in the spatial analogy is a second analogy, one between theory and practice, and it yields the thought of a certain passivity, a negativity within practice that dislocates from any determinate starting or end point the traversal between the two spaces of débordement. The

“traversée de la langue,” which moves via a “pas de sens” (TP 124), leads nowhere: to the bord that, giving place to its own overflowing and thus to “more” space, recedes before itself and takes away the place of the overflow, as though the productive traversal toward “more” space had never actually taken place, where the “more” appears as “less” than space. Where the overflow pulls back to the bord, the same bord that thereby has gone nowhere, has remained or been left. Derrida puts it as follows, via Heidegger, whom he is translating on Besinnung

(rendered as “méditation” in French, “reflection” in English):

Par la méditation … nous arrivons proprement (eigens) là où sans en avoir déjà

l’expérience [erfahren – rapport aussi au voyage, à l’épreuve traversante] et sans

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le voir de part en part (durchschauen), nous séjournons [nous nous tenons] depuis

longtemps. Dans la méditation, nous allons vers un lieu [Ort – Erörterung …] à

partir duquel seulement s’ouvre l’espace (Raum) que chaque fois parcourent

[durchmißt – encore le motif de la traversée pratique] notre faire et laisser [Tun

und Lassen …] (TP 127).

Derrida then claims that this problematics of more (than) and less (than), proceeding through a complex configuration of mots en par, en per, en pra, and en tra, not to mention some

German mots en durch and en er, is the essential situation of Western reason, an

“incontournable” toward which “la méditation (Besinnung) est en tra-jet de pensée” (TP 129).

And this takes us back to Kant and the “ouverture sur « weil » et « par »” that, per Derrida, is also “incontournable” (TP 51). Now, let me recall that the stakes of the Kantian incontournable are, per Derrida, to be found in the question, “What may I hope?” which “is simultaneously practical and theoretical” (Critique of pure reason 677), and which therefore announces the possibility of the analogical connection between the world of appearances and a future, intelligible or moral world. In this connection is the foundation of reason’s entire systematic edifice, its architectonic nature, which Derrida touches on shortly after speaking of the par as incontournable. To repeat, it is reason’s architectonic interest that leads it, within the antinomies, to side with the theses over the antitheses, the latter of which are said to make reason’s systematicity impossible. Yet, and as Derrida points out, practical reason cannot simply renounce the antinomies since it cannot do without speculation. Indeed, reason’s regulative use, which is ultimately the proposed solution to the antinomies and the other forms of transcendental illusion, and whose exposition is supposed to prepare the ground for reason’s constitutive use, as pure practical reason, becomes possible through transcendental illusion, of which the antinomies are a major form: “of course it is from this [the regulative use of the transcendental ideas] that there

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arises the deception”; “this illusion (which can be prevented from deceiving) is nevertheless indispensably necessary if besides the objects of our eyes we want to see those that lie far in the background” (Critique of pure reason 591, my emphasis).

Having claimed that “le « par » du « parce que » … signifie l’intérêt de la raison, un intérêt qui procède toujours « par »” (TP 48), Derrida turns to the third section of “The antinomy of pure reason,” entitled “On the interest of reason in these conflicts,” where he interrogates interest “et du point de vue du concept, du discours conceptuel, et du point de vue de la rhétorique, voire de la métaphorique” (TP 52). He then, following Kant, raises the possibility of

“une raison sans intérêt. Une raison qui s’affranchirait de tout intérêt,” and adds, “C’est avec cette hypothèse que nous pourrons imaginer ce qu’est l’intérêt – donc, depuis sa vacance, penser son relief ; et surtout, c’est à partir de là que nous allons voir ce qui lie de façon privilégiée la notion ou la valeur d’intérêt-de-la-raison (pure, en général) à la raison pratique plutôt que spéculative” (TP 53). It is the metaphorics of interest, interest as inescapably metaphorical, that posits the emptiness, a certain availability, of interest, and, what is more, a turning, what Kant calls “a state of ceaseless vacillation” (Critique of pure reason 503) or, in Derrida’s translation,

“un état d’oscillation interminable,” which he translates at least a few times more, as “le double lien, la double obligation” and “Double-bind de la raison pure.” The metaphorics of this turning or “oscillation” should, of course, bring once again to mind Francis Ponge’s “Fable” and the

“false speculation” taking place between the par and itself in the syntagma “Par le mot par.” In

“Psyché : Invention de l’autre,” Derrida describes the mirroring of the par as “Une circulation infiniment rapide” (PIA 24), “L’oscillation infiniment rapide” (PIA 25), and, recalling the comments on a “locution révolutionnaire” touched on via the reading of Marx’s eleventh thesis, a “révolution fabuleuse” (PIA 28). Yet Derrida also states that the par is characterized by an extreme immobility: its “spécularisation paraît d’abord saisir ou glacer le texte. Elle le paralyse

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ou le fait tourner sur place à une vitesse nulle ou infinie” (PIA 27).

Continuing to explore the disinterest that has resulted from interest’s metaphorical oscillation, or that it is “sans intérêt,” Derrida argues that interest no longer has any regard for

“les conséquences des thèses ou des antithèses.” And it being no longer a question of consequences, neither can it be a matter of a cause-effect relationship, of a relation through which practice brings about an effect from a cause (this is further borne out of Derrida’s examination of Heideggerian Besinnung and the incontournable of all Western theoria that conceives activity in general as causa efficiens; see especially TP 129-37). Independent of such a relationality, human reason cannot be determined as that which practically unfolds an intelligible world of the future from out of the sensible world of the here and now. It is not interested in this between place, i.e., in inter-est, in the reason that seeks to recoup, with interest, the value it puts into play via speculation. The power of reason to produce a future revenue through speculation is only possible because it has already been pulled into the game, into what Kant refers to, at different points of the first Critique, as the “regress” of the empirical use of reason whose conditions proceed indefinitely “to higher ones, which are likewise always empirical.” For Kant, this indefinite regress is not opposed to “the intelligible cause” that would be “the ground … of the possibility of the sensible series in general” (Critique of pure reason 549). Indeed, the regress

“demands” such a ground (Ibid. 550), and this will move Kant to posit “teleological laws” governing “the speculative interest of reason.” The “purposive unity of things” is a “principle” that “opens up for our reason, as applied to the field of experience, entirely new prospects for connecting up things in the world,” and that gives the idea of a “world-whole.” “As long as we keep to this presupposition [of teleological unity] as a regulative principle, then even error cannot do us any harm” (Ibid. 614). In moving ever higher, from one empirical condition to another, “we only miss one more unity, but we do not ruin the unity of reason in its empirical

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use. But even this setback cannot at all affect the law itself, in its universal and teleological aim.”

Once again, it is the analogical mode of the “as if” that directs this indefinite but idealizing progression of regression (Ibid. 615).

But to recall one of the statements from “La mythologie blanche” with which I began my examination of Derrida in this chapter, it is not a matter of resolving or giving into the regress, but of working it, of traversing and transforming it, crossing through it. What Kant frames as a temporal process, and what he finally tries to bring under the aegis of rational teleology, is, says

Derrida, “une tentation synchrone ou simultanée.” Reason’s oscillation or metaphorical turning is such that “c’est simultanément qu’un tel homme [a man whose interest oscillates between thesis and antithesis], une telle raison désintéressée, serait tendue jusqu’à craquer entre deux exigences et des conséquences principielles” (TP 53). In other words, reason is stretched and broken between the two fragmented and fragmenting par that articulate its unity in the question of hope by turning between infinite possible theses. Or, in what is not quite the same situation, it is a single unique par that, through what Derrida names its “unité aiguillante” (TP 47), puts reason and the human being into the regress of conditions, but all while keeping them fixed to a single spot, to the par as “lieu” or “dispositif immobile” that, in its “fonctionnement d’aiguillage” (TP 46), turns around on itself and opens itself, without regard for architectonic unity, to a multiplicity of tracks to follow – even as it never goes anywhere. “Kant demande donc : que ferait un homme s’il pouvait s’affranchir de tout intérêt, et être indifférent à l’égard de toutes les conséquences des thèses ou des antithèses, si donc en lui l’intérêt de la raison était suspendu, et jusqu’à l’intérêt architectonique, l’intérêt pour le système ?” Where, in other words, would such a man go? “Un tel homme ne suivrait que les principes de la raison, où qu’ils conduisent, et en ne tenant compte que de leur valeur intrinsèque, de leur valeur de principe rationnel…. [U]n tel homme devrait alternativement suivre la thèse et l’antithèse. Il serait pris

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dans le double-bind d’une raison sans intérêt. Il serait, dit Kant, « dans un état d’oscillation interminable »” (TP 53).

In this particular context, following reason wherever it leads is to follow the par wherever it turns up, wherever, that is, it turns so as to open a track and breach, or overflow, its contextual constraints, transforming them and, in turn, itself in revolutionary fashion. The par carries no interest for theoretical reason, but neither for practical reason: it bears no prior meaning, and is not directed toward any totalized organization of meaning into which it would neatly fit, and which it would therefore help to posit as, e.g., a thesis. It is, to recall Derrida’s comments on Marx’s eleventh thesis, a non-closed locution whose meaning does not precede the moment of its appearance or self-positing, which self-positing must, however, maintain the par’s radical indeterminacy. That is, it shows up, not to show itself as itself, as a self-identical and meaningful unity, but as in transformation, already different from itself, already interested in its own originary transformation, indeed, in every possible thesis of transformation.

I bring together the values of transformation and interest in order to point out that the par’s radical practice or act of self-transformation cannot be thought in terms of that transformation’s actualization. For the actualization of the act of self-transformation would arrest and neutralize it. In order to “perdure” or “permane” (to echo Derrida’s comments from TP 48) as in a state of permanent transformation or traversal across so many mots en par, per, pra, tra, and beyond (as in the case of German words such as weil), the par must remain interested in, or open to, all its possible transformations without, however, actually following where any of them lead, so to speak. It must remain interested in every possible interest, in every possible thesis or context of meaning, such that it show no actual interest in any one of them. And this would be because the par relates to its possible theses as the bord or limit through which said theses would become possible in the first place. And, in fact, not in the first place, but through the first place:

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the par is inter-ested precisely because it stands between itself and its signifying possibilities, and because it does so repeatedly, by virtue of a reflective turning that is “infinitely rapid.” I briefly quote an excerpt from the interview “Ja, ou le faux bond” in support of a thought of interest in Derrida that leaves indeterminate what it would be interested in, because it serves as a

“place” in the middle of which the interested person would oscillate between interest and disinterest, movement and immobility: “Quand j’écris « ce qui m’intéresse », je ne désigne pas seulement un objet d’intérêt mais le lieu au milieu de quoi je suis, et précisément ce lieu que je ne peux pas déborder ou qui me paraît fournir jusqu’au mouvement pour aller plus loin que lui ou hors de lui” (P 72). At infinite speed, then, the par turns away from its own place and toward that of another possibility, placing itself between itself and its thesis, traversing the boundary that had separated them. But just as quickly, it gets lost in the passage from place to place, lieu to lieu, topos to topos, text to context, lost in the partage of its crossing. In this way, it leaves open every thesis and antithesis, permits the possibility of some great number of non-totalizable contexts – or, and what is the same (a same that is not identical) situation, some great number of non-totalizable texts – that, as partage, the par will never have known how to bring together into a single unity of text and context, or, put succinctly, into a single word and world.

It is for Derrida, I think, this non-knowledge that the par would give to be “known,” or that would be “necessary” to be known, and whose necessity Derrida might be seen to announce here: “il sera en tout cas nécessaire de savoir ce qui passe ou ne passe pas par « par », ce qui se passe ou ne se passe pas dans le partage de ces « par » (TP 47). The knowledge imparted by the par would be neither of the world nor of the word. Through its non-reflective turns, the par would make possible, because putting into movement and com-posing, some configuration of contexts and texts, some part or partage of a world that, remaining possible or interesting, interesting as possible, the par will not have had a part in. The par would, in this situation,

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remain immobile, on this side of the partage, grounding itself and proving itself through itself, situating itself in a proving ground (to return to the same figure I evoked above in my discussion of “Le retrait de la métaphore”) where, speaking for itself, it would simultaneously speak through itself, letting another speak. It would remain itself, unique, the place of its taking place, ever to be proved, ever to be spoken again.

To conclude, I would like, in preliminary fashion, to point toward further places in

Derrida’s corpus where one might continue to pursue the problematics of the ultra-idiomatic par and the relation it does or does not form with the world. I think, for example, of the second volume of La bête et le souverain. There, Heidegger’s question “Was ist Welt?” is of major interest. Derrida interrogates Heidegger’s thought on the world, including the proposition that

“der Mensch ist weltbildend,” through at least one specific mot en tra, Austrag. Derrida does this in the final two sessions in particular, where he says that the Austrag “porte tout le poids d’une pensée de la portée” (BS 354), in that it constitutes a certain place, an interiority, in which

“l’excès de souveraineté” that Heideggerian Walten signifies (BS 383) would take place:

“Austrag … sera défini comme ce dans quoi ça waltet, ce « dans quoi » le Walten waltet” (BS

353).98 It further functions as an articulatory third in which difference, or the conflict between

“differents,” is carried to a certain end or term (“la portée terminante ou déterminante du différend entre les différents, entre l’être et l’étant, la survenue et l’arrivée” (BS 386)). In this way, it links itself to a problematics of sharing, more precisely of sharing the world. To put it

98 David Farrell Krell believes that Derrida to some degree mistranslates walten in his treatment of Heidegger, that “he is too quick to hear in” it “the danger of ‘preponderant violence’” that he links to Gewalt and all its variants, as well as to the Austrag (52). Perhaps greater consideration of the problem of the relationship between idioms, between, say, all of Derrida’s mots en par, tra, etc. and German tra words, might lead one to different conclusions regarding the legitimacy of what Derrida is doing in the late readings of Heidegger, but also of other thinkers and writers. Another obvious example of a German tra word that is, for Derrida, motivated in highly interesting ways is tragen as it appears in Celan and his poem “Grosse, Glühende Wölbung,” particularly the line “Die Welt is fort, ich muß dich tragen.”

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much too succinctly: the power of relation making up the as-structure that Heidegger wants to accord to the human alone, and thus to the exclusion of the animal and to the non-living generally, is itself conditioned by the non-human, excessive force of Walten. This excessive force or violence is not something that the human being (as Dasein) has, that characterizes his actions; it characterizes instead “son existence, son Da-sein, le là de son être-là.” And this leaves the human essentially “exposé à la violence du Walten” (BS 392), in such a way that he is surrounded and cut through (durchwalten, transir) by a non-human excess of force. This force or violence is additionally what the human must take upon himself. But he inevitably forgets to do this since he mistakes himself for the master of the Walten: “La violence qui transit l’homme, c’est bien celle du en tant que tel de l’étant que le Dasein est et qu’il prend sur lui, dans son

Walten, comme tel…. Parce qu’il croit être l’auteur, le maître et possesseur, et l’inventeur de ces pouvoirs, il ignore qu’il en est d’abord transi, saisi, qu’il a à les assumer” (BS 394). The very power that would give the human access to beings as such, which is also the power of language, and that would distinguish him from the non-human, is also what irrupts into him while forcing him outside himself. Through the violence that cuts through, the human finds herself in the midst of beings (“la mer, la terre, l’animal”) whose violence dominates her through and through: “C’est

à travers cette violence qui défriche, fraye, capture, dompte [it would be necessary to add

“transir” here, though Derrida does not], que l’étant se découvre ou se révèle ou se dévoile, apparaît comme mer, comme terre, comme animal” (BS 394-5). “Tout cela ne tient pas à un

Vermögen, à un pouvoir, à une faculté dont l’homme dispose, mais consiste à dompter et à ajointer (Bändigen und Fügen) les forces ou les violences (Gewalten) qui viennent transir l’homme et grâce auxquelles l’étant se découvre comme tel.” Man finds himself “là où la Gewalt de ce Walten fait irruption pour faire apparaître l’étant comme tel au milieu duquel l’homme est transi de violence” (BS 395).

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What this means is that the human being as sovereign shares the world with the beast:

“ils coexistent, ils compatissent, ils convivent, ils co-habitent un monde qui est le même … la question est bien celle d’une communauté du monde qu’ils partagent et co-habitent” (BS 364-5).

The world that is shared is also that in which animal and human are borne; in this it resembles the Austrag: “Le mot « monde » a au moins pour sens minimal de désigner ce dans quoi tous ces vivants sont portés (dans un ventre ou dans un œuf) … (et « dans » n’a pas ici le sens d’un contenant, si bien que toute notre méditation devrait se concentrer dans le dedans de ce que dans veut dire …)” (BS 365). At the end of the previous session, Derrida writes of the Austrag, “Eh bien, c’est dans l’Austrag que ça waltet. Que veut dire « dans », et Austrag et waltet, voilà nos questions” (BS 354). Derrida poses these questions of sense and language because, in a world that is shared through an excess of force that leaves its inhabitants without a world and so without force, sense and language are always essentially in question. Having proposed that sovereignty “se signifie d’abord comme l’excès même,” Derrida asks, “Y a-t-il un excès possible de la souveraineté ou bien cette hypothèse est-elle absurde ? Absurde comme la souveraineté même qui excède toute responsabilité du sens ou devant le sens, devant la loi du langage et du sens ? Le sens et la loi comparaissent devant le souverain plutôt que l’inverse. C’est en tout cas cette hypothèse qui oriente la lecture” of the problematics of the Walten and the Austrag.

The second work I am thinking of that also would prove fruitful, I believe, for an investigation into the relationship between world and the par is Voyous. There Derrida is also thinking about sovereignty, in relation, for example, to the problem of reason’s architectonic unity, and he does this, especially in the book’s final two chapters, by way of meditations on

Kant and Husserl. In order that reason might overcome the auto-immune sickness that has made it forgetful of its infinite ideal, the latter appeals to “un « idéal pratique » lui-même inconditionnel” (V 177) that sets itself up as the regulative idea of an infinite task. In this,

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Husserl takes after Kant: “la raison théorique est d’abord et finalement, pour lui [Husserl] comme pour Kant, de part en part, en tant que tâche prescriptive et normative, une raison pratique” (V 184).99 For both thinkers, the practical would be privileged over the speculative

(and here, as point of comparison, Derrida again cites the concept of interest in conjunction with the architectonic nature of reason in Kant (V 169-70, 185, 187-8)), and in this hierarchy would be found the unity of reason itself as unconditioned unity. And yet for both, reason’s unconditionality can only be thought starting from a certain circularity and a certain power that threatens it in a constitutive fashion. Derrida has recourse to a particular mot en per to talk about reason’s auto-immunity: “le monde serait en passe de perdre la raison, voire de se perdre comme monde … la raison elle-même, la raison comme telle serait en passe de devenir menaçante ; elle serait un pouvoir, elle aurait le pouvoir de se menacer elle-même, de perdre le sens et l’humanité du monde. De se perdre elle-même, de sombrer d’elle-même, je préférerais dire de s’auto- immuniser” (V 173). Two pages earlier, Derrida speaks of reason’s power to protect itself as self-enclosed and self-same, in its “indemnité ou son immunité.” But such self-sameness also implies an “announcement,” “l’annonce d’une perdition.” Through its perdition, there might be heard, in a single idiom, a chance at saving the world: “là où la raison risque de perdre ou de se perdre…. Là où la raison se perd, là où elle est perdue ou perdante, dirions-nous, alors sauvons l’honneur” (V 171).

But Derrida implies that to retain the injunction to save reason and by extension the world, is simultaneously to commit it to silence, as though the words of the order belonged, from the start, to no context, and were in fact destined to be nothing more than an unprovable hypothesis. For this reason, as hypothesis, they would be put into the abyssal movement of a pas

99 It is perhaps of interest to point out that Derrida would appear to have changed his mind about Husserl in this respect. In Théorie et pratique, he in fact distinguishes Husserl from Kant by stating that, while both appeal to an anterior unity of reason, reason “se laisse mieux représenter par le théorique que par le pratique [in Husserl], et c’est peut-être en cela que Husserl est plus théoriciste que Kant” (TP 56-7).

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de sens: “Se glissant sous chaque mot [each word of “Sauver l’honneur de la raison”] l’hypothèse ouvrit aussi un abîme sous chacun de mes pas” (V 168). The order or obligation – save reason – should, in being left to or retained by memory, remain non-actualized and unspoken: “Ils m’ont obligé, ces mots, à les retenir” (V 167).

In “Plus d’États voyous,” reason is again committed to silence. Sovereignty is there said to “se poser et s’imposer en silence, dans le non-dit” (V 143). That is, to give sovereignty, thought in its very ipseity, meaning (“sens”), is to divide and distribute it (“en faire la part”), to submit it “à la partition, à la participation, au partage,” to perpetuate its silent idiomaticity such that “si la force souveraine est silencieuse, ce n’est pas faute de parler – elle peut être intarissable

–, c’est faute de sens” (V 144). And in “Maîtrise et métrique,” Derrida locates a moment of autoimmunity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking on ipseity, in which there is recognized “la part d’un partage essentiel, à la fois comme partition et participation, ce qui n’est possible que selon un irréductible espacement.” He then quotes Nancy’s L’Expérience de la liberté: “l’ipséité est elle- même constituée par le partage et comme partage” (V 71).100

As a final example, I will gesture toward the late essay “Reste – le maître.”101 Derrida opens this text by restating the Cartesian dictum (that good sense is “la chose du monde la mieux partagée”) as a “figure” that, as economy or law (Derrida calls it a “figure économique du

100 A comparative study of Derrida with Nancy could be written based on the par. The word partage is of course of major importance for a number of Nancy’s works. In addition to L’Expérience de la liberté, one might examine, e.g., Le partage des voix (where at certain moments the partage appears to hook up with the words participation (cf. 82) and partition (cf. 88)). There is also Être singulier pluriel, where meaning (sens) as “partage de l’être” gets disjoined from itself in something like an as-structure, the “as” (en tant que) supposing “écartement, espacement et partition de la présence. Le seul concept de « présence » contient la nécessité de cette partition” (20). And there appears to be a certain play of par words at work in Corpus: cf. his description of l’aséité as “l’à-soi, le par soi du Sujet” that “n’existe que comme l’écart et le départ de cet a – (de cet à part soi) qui est le lieu, l’instance propre de sa présence, de son authenticité, de son sens. L’à part soi en tant que départ, voilà ce qui est exposé” (32). Cf. also the description of the body as “partes extra partes” throughout the book. 101 For a general overview of the problematics of this essay, see Kas Saghafi’s “The Master Trembles,” Michael Naas’ “Oddments,” and Dearmitt. None of these essays concern themselves directly with the par or any other idiomatic aspects of Derrida’s language in “Reste – le maître,” though Naas does briefly gesture toward the problem of translation (saying that “Derrida’s discourse on remains becom[es] more and more untranslatable” where it intersects with what exceeds “ontology and the language of ontology”), as well as that of a generalized substitution (“the reste is unthinkable as such, it can only appear in or through a series of substitutes” (117)).

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partage”), would point toward both its own possible substitution – “Doit-on la tenir pour contingente et remplaçable ?” (R 25) – as well as something akin to a primal scene of partage that, like the weight of the world, one could not afford to take lightly: as though, from within the partage, one were weighed down by a certain, very serious duty or debt tied to the origin of the world itself: “doit-on – et alors pourquoi ce « devoir », sinon cette « dette » ? – prendre au sérieux une scène de partage, une loi ou un droit du partage (nomos, nemein, nemesis) ? Faut-il faire sa part, entre « partager » et « départager », à une juste distribution des tributs et des parts, de la partie, du départ, du partiel, de la partition, de la participation, de la répartition ?” (R 26).

This quasi-figural distribution of mots en par occasions, as in so many other places in Derrida, the thought of a limitless series or an infinitely large set, each of whose terms would simultaneously (a) found and order the series or set as a whole, (b) merely form a part of it, and

(c) embody the limit between whole and part. And as this limit must remain open, even as embodied, such that the series or set is ruined in the moment of its constitution, such that every moment, every part counts as that through which every other remains to be accounted for, the

“economic figure” of the partage motivates the addition of another figure, that of the reste. From one end of the partage to the other, through and through, there is the rest, what is left after every partage of the par has been counted and/or accounted for. Every part remains to be thought, as though no single, singular part had ever in truth been accounted for at all. “Il y a le reste et il n’y a que du reste, de part et d’autre du partage” (R 38); “il n’y a que du reste, un reste qui déstabilise jusqu’à l’opposition … entre le tout et la partie, c’est-à-dire toute logique calculable du « partage », de la « partition » ou de la « participation ». Le reste … prend parti ou il prend à partie tout ce qui vient à être ou à se déterminer” (R 37). Not one par comes before the others.

Nothing pre-exists the rest: “Dans cette série, il n’y a que des restes potentiels. Les restes ne

« sont » pas les restes de quelque chose qui serait autre chose qu’un reste. Rien n’aura été, dans

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cette série, avant, hors ou par-delà le reste. On est dans l’ordre du reste, qui est déjà au-delà de ce qui est, de l’étant-présent, de l’être de l’étant-présent” (R 55).

This order, this economy or law, would be in endless need of new orders, new languages

– “Il faudrait donc … changer de langage, de lexique et de grammaire” (R 45) – by which to be shared and shared out, as a collection of unshareable texts and contexts, as idioms unmoored from any single medium or milieu or any single thing they should have in common. Derrida at a few different points refers to reason’s thing, the Cartesian thing that would be widely shared, the chose or cause of reason, as a chaos, figure of the abyssal relationality through which a partage of voices, voix, would be originarily en voie, “envoyé, pour un autre partage, vers un fond sans fond, sans fond logique ou ontologique, c’est-à-dire vers un chaos. Le chaos du bon sens, le chaos de la chose du monde le mieux partagée, ce serait ici ce fond sans fond.” It is to the face or figure of the abyss, “une figure de la figure” (R 26), that the organ of speech and reason would be destined, as that before which “Nous restons bouche-bée” (R 27), and toward which we would ever be moving, as toward some silent shore, to what, in the essay’s exergue, is announced as

“plages de silence.” I end this chapter here, at the edge of an exergue, on the way toward the rest of some silent word and world. “Aux plages de silence, à l’insertion de silence dans le cours de la parole est assignée la fonction d’évoquer ce reste infini qui entoure la parole configurée” (R

25).

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Conclusion

The preceding chapters have sought to put in question the very unity of Derrida’s idiom, how and where, for example, it might be said to take place. And through Derrida, or through the singular manner in which the question of the idiom arises in his corpus, I have also wanted, if only in a preliminary way, to attempt a more general interrogation: where and how, for example, an idiom, any idiom – if indeed there is any idiom, some part of an idiom that could be spoken of, spoken for, or just spoken tout court – might be said to show up.

To question the general, according to Derrida’s sense of questioning, is not, of course, to do so in order to appeal to a more general general, a hyper-general that would refute the general while moving past it.102 And as Derrida would undoubtedly avow, this is familiar. Indeed, he might say that it is too familiar. As he writes in “Économies de la crise,” “Nos éloquences sont inépuisables sur la fin de la philosophie, sur l’incapacité des sciences humaines [Derrida mentions in the preceding sentence “tous les ‘domaines’ … : philosophie, histoire des civilisations et des religions, économie politique, géo-stratégie militaire, médecine, techno- sciences en général, etc.”] … à se fonder dans leurs théories et dans leurs institutions.” And yet the tireless profusion of eloquent speech on an all too familiar subject, that of a certain crisis or

“paroxysme” to do with the grounds of theoretical inquiry and its discursive medium, must imply a concomitant speechlessness. At the most pointed (“aigu”), paroxysmal instant of a crisis affecting all of human questioning and the knowledge it would seek, there is nothing to say:

“Nous sommes sans voix à ce point, à cet instant, le plus aigu du paroxysme.” Consequently:

“pas de discours unique ou dominant, pas de système, pas d’instance arbitrale pour décider de l’unité ou de l’unicité de ladite crise.” In other words, where a unified meaning and experience of

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crisis might be anticipated, there is no language as such through which to adjudicate the paroxysm: “L’anticipation de cette unité [that of an “horizon commun [qui] permette de délimiter une expérience déterminable”], sa langue même nous paraît refusée.” In the place of a common horizon – which, for Derrida, signifies a common world of and in which to speak: “il n’y aurait donc plus de « monde », encore moins de « monde actuel » dont l’horizon commun permette de délimiter une expérience déterminable” – in the place of a common horizon and a common language are “analogies,” of which there are too many (“nous en avons trop”). Too many analogies of language – too many languages, then – in which there are too many

“interpretations,” too many theories, too many ways of making sense of a world in crisis: “elles ne se laissent pas ajointer : pas de discours unique ou dominant.” Too many ways, in other words, in which the very meaning of crisis, the very unity of the word, puts itself in question: the crisis “in its turn” is itself in crisis (EC 4); “Crise de la crise,” Derrida says several years earlier in “La crise de l’enseignement philosophique” (DAP 159).

What decision or judgment does such a crisis of meaning – such a crisis of crisis – call for, according to Derrida? Evidently, one that would avoid appealing to the monolingualism of philosophico-politico-cultural mastery. As we have seen, philosophy begins for Derrida where its presupposed unity comes into question or crisis through language, more precisely through differences both inter- and intra-lingual that are utterly irreducible, and that cannot therefore be resolved by appealing, for example, to distinctions of nationality: “Les différences nationales … ne recoupent pas rigoureusement les différences linguistiques” (DAP 161). Such lingual differences are as it happens so irreducible, so “graves” that “les conditions minimales d’une communication et d’une coopération viennent à manquer. Le contrat minimal d’un code commun n’est plus assuré.” Even “A l’intérieur d’une même aire linguistique … le même brouillage ou la

102 This schema, as I am describing it, mirrors the “first stage” of Derrida’s response, in “Comment ne pas parler :

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même opacité peuvent interdire la communication philosophique et faire même douter de l’unité du philosophique, du concept ou du projet supposé derrière le mot « philosophique » qui risque alors de n’être chaque fois qu’un leurre homonymique” (DAP 162); I note that, before this passage, Derrida says of philosophy’s abyssal “Crise de la crise” that “les deux occurrences [of the word “crise”] ne sont ici que des homonymes : « crise » n’a pas deux fois le même sens”

(DAP 159). Whence a thought of a “trait permanent et structurel de la philosophie, de la crise de la philosophie et de la philosophie comme crise” (DAP 161). And whence the necessity of tirelessly attacking – putting into crisis – lingual unity and the philosophico-politico-cultural mastery that is coterminous with it – “Tout monolinguisme et tout monologisme restaure la maîtrise et la magistralité” (DAP 163) – even where the political stakes, which Derrida ties closely to the colonial stakes, of lingual unity are not readily apparent.

Cette domination n’a pas nécessairement la forme facilement identifiable de

l’hégémonie politico-économique, qu’elle soit coloniale ou néo-coloniale. Il reste

que, on le sait bien, la maîtrise peut encore s’exercer à travers la (une) langue

philosophique, au sens le plus large de ce mot, quand les autres formes de

domination, les plus spectaculaires et les plus codées, battent en retraite. (DAP

162-3)

Yet such domination or mastery is, per Le monolinguisme de l’autre, at the same time an original possibility proper to all cultures and their respective languages. It “begins” by appropriating to itself, in an essentially politicizing and colonializing gesture, the power to posit meaning or “to name”: “Toute culture est originairement coloniale…. Toute culture s’institue par l’imposition unilatérale de quelque « politique » de la langue. La maîtrise, on le sait, commence par le pouvoir de nommer, d’imposer et de légitimer les appellations” (MA 68). There can be no

Dénégations,” to claims that deconstruction is a version of negative theology (PIA 537-42).

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question for Derrida, then, of simply privileging one particular national or cultural idiom or group of idioms over against a totalizing monolingualism, or over against another particular idiom or group of idioms. For it is the very power to name, to “impose and legitimate appellations” and thereby found a culture and a politics via any language that Derrida wants to question. Before there is any power to name and bring forth the entities that would make up a culture or a politics – and this is a version of what, in chapter two, we saw, in Derrida’s reading of Aristotle and others, to be the mimetic power to partake in the positing of the whole of the world itself – there is an ultra-idiomatic trait, that through which a language’s naming power is already in crisis. Thus, “C’est en traitant autrement chaque langue, en greffant les langues les unes sur les autres, en jouant de la multiplicité des codes à l’intérieur de chaque corpus linguistique qu’on peut lutter à la fois contre la colonisation en général, contre le principe colonisateur en général … contre la domination de la langue ou par la langue” (DAP 163).

Can one then speak here of an originary translingualism and/or transnationalism and/or transculturalism in Derrida? No, if by those terms one refers to the synthetic creation of “a hybrid ‘in-between’ language” (Keown 253), a “dynamic model of the productive zone situated in between languages” (Nordin et al. xxiii) that would make possible the exploration of “new identities” (Wilson 237), and that would conceive “the nature of language as the hybrid medium that brings the world into being” (Lionnet 204). And Derrida’s French should not be considered

“a language detached from its close ties to a single nation” if this means that it ends up lumped in with “a body of texts whose transnational dimensions are fully apparent” (Forsdick 219). There is nothing “fully apparent” about the translational trait (or any other of the mots en tra, par, per, etc. I have discussed in this dissertation) by which the French idiom gets treated “otherwise,” as per “La crise de l’enseignement philosophique.” There is, in Derrida, no deciding on the ultra- idiomatic in these terms. This is because decision is blind to the appearance of the ultra-

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idiomatic. It repeats the crisis of monolingualism by making “visible” that there is no horizon of meaning against which the idiom – say, (Derrida’s) French – could be said to present itself. It is not a critique of the crisis.103 It passes judgment on the idiom that, at the same time, it happens to pass through, the idiom that, before it refers to anything else, translates the crisis of a lack of a horizon or world – the lack of a language – in which to appear to the theoretical, judgmental, decisive eye.

French, in Derrida’s hands, therefore translates its own non-appearance. Which is also to say that it is constitutively open to translation, or that through French – through the opening that

French just is – may be glimpsed, in the blink of an eye, a radically new lingual horizon that would replace French so as to make every other idiom possible. Every other idiom would thus be

“saved,” but as ultra-idiomatic: without a world in which to appear, dispossessed of a home, as though originarily colonized. Through its own a priori dispossession – through the paroxysm or convulsion of a translational trait substituting it and putting it in crisis – French gives rise to so many dispossessed idioms. Through its crisis – the crisis that is translated by a paroxysmal

“crise” – it becomes a “milieu absolu” (MA 13), the “milieu dont il sera toujours difficile de dire s’il était colonisant ou colonisé” (DP 160), the singular home of a generalized homelessness and of “l’ex-appropriation de la langue” (MA 46) that Derrida ties to a “colonialité essentielle” (MA

47).

A son tour en crise, le concept de crise signerait un dernier symptôme, l’effort

convulsif pour sauver un « monde » que nous n’habitons plus : plus d’oikos,

d’économie, d’écologie, de site habitable « chez nous ». Encore un effort, nous dit

le mot de crise, qui est bien de chez nous, encore un effort pour sauver le discours

103 For an argument dealing with Derrida’s specific relationship to critique understood in both Kantian and Husserlian terms, and that poses that “Critique is not just one thing among many that deconstruction is not, but something that deconstruction especially is not,” see Geoffrey Bennington’s “Almost the End” in Interrupting Derrida.

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d’un « monde » que nous ne parlons plus, ou que nous parlons encore, parfois de

façon d’autant plus volubile, comme dans une colonie d’émigrés. (EC 4)

On a critical scene that can often seem glutted with panegyrics to all things “trans” – to what Jessica Berman calls “Trans approaches” that hypostatize transgressive but always productive traversals “between and across disciplinary or conceptual categories” (106) –

Derrida’s translational idiom remains unique. Far from situating itself as a “between” place – between, say, languages, as a single place in which they are able to hybridize in perpetuity, and in which ever new meanings, ever new references to ever new worlds, may be posited – the

Derridean tra achieves its crossing movement through a paroxysmal par. That is, French’s translational opening to other idioms can be said to take place only in the place of French, where a non-representational substitution – metaphor of translation, translation of metaphor – produces the ultra-idiomatic event, but at the same time that it replaces it, writing over and erasing the event in whose name it would have interceded (to recall one of the terms of my examination of

“Psyché : Invention de l’autre” in chapter two). To decide on French’s ultra-idiomatic event is to intervene in it, to cut through (de-cide) it such that it is destroyed and saved at a stroke. As though the very existence of French, the life of this supposedly living language, had to be put in question or crisis in order that it have a chance to be critiqued (judged or decided on). As though it existed only in written fragments, with no living speaker who might bear witness to its lexicon and its grammar, to all the ways in which it might have exercised its power to name a world or worlds. As though French were, as Derrida says in “Envoi,” “une langue morte” (PIA 108), living on only through the par-oxysm of a lingual rigor mortis, through the convulsive appearance of life. As though, in sum, it were necessary first of all to reinvent the idiom, before speaking, writing, reading, or situating it in a world.

In difference to all the transgressive and productive vitalisms to which contemporary

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criticism subjects the idiom, Derrida makes a practically unheard of demand: that the critic make of her reading a risk, one by which to avow, not the synthetically transnational, transcultural, or translingual status of what she reads, but its ultra-idiomatic uniqueness. For a risky criticism – a critical criticism – dares to put the life of what it reads in crisis. It is on that condition – the condition that reading misread, that it bypass the event of the idiom’s coming to pass, cross through and obliterate what it should leave intact, even as it leaves it untouched in all its ultra- idiomatic singularity – that a place for the invention of some radically unique idiom might, for the first time, be given place.

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