1 What remains? What remains of the "between" and of the space that divides, the seam that touches both borders? Between literature and philosophy? Between texts and readers? Between Glas and CA?1 "What remains of the 'remain(s)' when it is pulled to pieces, torn into morsels? Where does the rule of its being torn into morsels come from? Must one still try to determine a regularity when tearing to pieces what remains of the remain(s)? A strictly angular question. The remain(s) here suspends itself. Let us give ourselves the time of this suspense. For the moment time will be nothing but the suspense between the regularity and the irregularity of the morsels of what remains."(Glas, 226a) There are too many questions remaining. But how, precisely, is that possible? How do they "remain?" What "past" do they mark as "remains?" How does one deal with remains? What is the work of mourning and interrment, the glas-work, the work announced even as it is made impossible by Glas? Can this be the mark of a reading? A Writing? A "critical discourse?" What is it, finally, "to remain?" This is the fundamental (post)-ontological question that Glas ceaselessly recites even as it tears the fabric of such a question, the texts that appear to posit it (the texts of Sa, the Phenomenology of Spirit), and those that disseminate it through a celebration of the partial and the signature (the texts of the thief, the prisoner, the homosexual) into pieces. In approaching these questions of what can (possibly) remain, Glas continually reminds me that the number most often written into Sa, the Hegelian number parexcellence , is three. The stages of development: of the family to the State, of religion to the Absolute, of ethics to Sittlichkeit, of art to Spirit, and, of 2 course, of the dialectical procedure(s) to(wards) Aufhebung, all proceed according to this same numerical -- later it will be "biblical" -- law. And so this graft, this morsel of glas- writing, in working with the remains, begins with three citations. Already, these are three citations of citations, "translator's notes," from three different texts, all surrounding the problem of the remains: From "Cartouches": "1. 'Cartouches,' like Glas, plays persistently with the word and notion reste(s): the rest, the remainder, remains; and the verb rester: to stay, remain. Expressions involving the sequence du reste, as here (literally 'of the rest/remainder'), also introduce the idiomatic expression du reste: 'besides' or 'moreover.' We have tended to use 'remainder' for the singular reste and 'remains' for the plural restes, and to translate du reste literally or idiomatically according to immediate context.-- TRANS." (Truth in Painting, 185) From Mark Taylor's Altarity: "1. The notion of le reste plays a very important role in Derrida's rereading of Hegel. It functions as either a noun or a verb, and the multiple nuances upon which Derrida plays cannot easily be captured in translation. Reste can designate rest, remainder, residue, trace, vestige, and leavings. Rester means to remain, stop, dwell, continue. In most cases, I will follow John Leavey's imaginative rendering of reste as 'remain(s).'(Altarity, 255) From John Leavey's Glassary: "Remain(s): reste: this term plays with its noun and verb forms. Reste is the noun (remainder, remnant), the third person singular (remains), and the imperative (remain). The translation, rather than deciding this play, as a rule uses remain(s) to render this word wherever it occurs. In addition, the adverbial phrase du reste, translated here as 'after all,' often complicates the translation, since du reste can also signify 'of the remain(s).' The translation attempts to respect this play." (Glassary, 135) "After all," isn't this precisely the problem? What "remnants" can there be "after all?" How can "translation," "capture" the remain(s), "as a rule?" This is still the problem, the never-captured, the remain(s) of (a) critical reading/writing. What are the rules? What are the materials of the critical business (the list is easy to start: concept, metaphor, analysis, explication, order, category, genre, discipline, history, meaning, translation...once started, though, it can never quite be stopped) and can they "capture" the "nuances" of their critical object? That is, can they, in any way, in even a heterogeneous way, fulfill the singular desire of Sa? Without excess? Without overrunning the borders and boundaries of their own systems of translation? Without disrupting the field with a 3 generalized, non-singular fetish? Without leaving an incalcuable remain(s)? If not, (and Glas demonstrates precisely this "not") then how does criticism write it-self aware of the remain(s)? How does it write itself in the "here" and "now" of reading-between? After all? "Remain(s) to (be) divide(d), detail(ed), retail(ed) one more time."(Glas, 102bi) Glas -- prior to its announcing as it reads Hegel that "what always remains irresoluble, impracticable, nonnormal, or nonnormalizable is what interests and constrains us here" -- offers two options "almost": "Of the remain(s), after all, there are, always, overlapping each other, two functions. The first assures, guards, assimilates, interiorizes, idealizes, relieves the fall into the monument. There the fall maintains, embalms, and mummifies itself, monumemorizes and names itself -- falls (to the tomb(stone)). Therefore, but as a fall, it erects itself there. The other -- lets the remain(s) fall. Running the risk of coming down to the same. Falls (to the tomb(stone)) -- two times the columns, the waterspouts -- remain(s)."(Glas, 1-2b) "Running the risk of coming down to the same" or what? What is the third possibility? It is not, I can see on the left, exactly speculative dialectics; for whom any third is always magical. It is -- I will set out to perform -- the graft. The cut. The morsel. The workings of Glas' organs and sewing machines. All the attempts called for in the pastiche-citation of à propos gather around a new task for the reader/writer -- one that respects and yet suffers under the unceasing teasing of what remains.2 Glas cites Genet citing Roger reminding me, "its reading that counts."(Glas, 3bi) And so, learning from Glas, without actually re-reading it here and now, I set out to read, seeking "verily a critical displacement (supposing that is rigorously possible)"(Glas, 5a), and keeping in mind the tripartite Hegelian syllogism with which Glas (almost) begins: "Its first term is the family. The second, civil or bourgeois society. The third, the State or the constitution of the State."(Glas, 4A) And the question that continues to haunt it through to (almost) the end: "Of a remain(s)? Of a remain(s) that would no longer be -- neither relic nor remainder -- of any operation."(Glas, 257bi) I would read the chronicle, the "legend" of a family, its development and its relationship to 4 the very business of translation in which I would always already be ((n)ever) engaged, and the inevitable, impossible ruins that remain.3 There will be, to start, three questions. What remains of a text that begins with the question of what could possibly remain of philosophy after Hegel and ends with the question of how one maintains incalcuable remains after Genet? What remains of a novel that begins where everything remains, including the business of Genesis, the biblical business of naming (of writing the Book) and ends with the Book's own destruction, the death knell (glas) of the desire for translation? What remains between these two texts that announce their own annihilation within prophetic Annunciations of singularly spiritual and "proper" types; and yet, after (such) Revelations, leave remains? These questions, the residue that they leave, and the tracings that they call for are inevitably engaged within the act of reading Glas into and through CA; of attempting to recreate a reading, here and now, following in order, in order to reproduce the illusion of a singular act of translation. "I have often posed the question: what does here [ici] mean (to say) for a text and in a language in general? What is the here and now of a glas?"(Glas, 257) What remains still is to re-read and re-cite a certain bringing to consciousness, a never- quite-immaculate conception, of a subject (position) into the context of (a) reading/writing.4 "Let us give ourselves the time of this suspense." 5 CA begins in and with the future. "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía..." CA also begins in and with the past. "...was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."(CA, 1) CA also begins with the beginning of the past and the future. "The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."(CA, 1) When the all of the past and so much of the future share the same space on the page, what, precisely, is the possibility of any "discovery?" What can that word come to mean (to say)? As in, "It was a matter of what lets itself be discovered."(Glas, 45b) or "I have discovered a lot of new words, and yet I always return to the same ones for want of others."?(Glas, 216b) What is the difference between discovering and, say, inventing? Can one only discover something that was in a certain sense, "already there" to begin with? On the other hand, can one only invent something that "never existed" prior to its invention? Already where? Never existed where? When? These questions, which begin to inscribe the possibility for debates about beginnings, about exploration and imagination, about the limits of available knowledge and the bestowing of proper names, are already sounding as a young boy, in memory, "discovers" ice.