A MAN OF LITTLE FAITH SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought —————— David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, editors A MAN OF LITTLE FAITH Memory Theaters in Contemporary Barcelona MICHEL DEGUY With Two Essays by JEAN-LUC NANCY Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by CHRISTOPHER ELSON State University of New York Press Frontispiece, illustration by Alain Lestié untitled acrostic for Michel Deguy’s 80th birthday, by Jean-Luc Nancy Un homme de peu de foi © Editions Bayard, 2003 Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2014 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Eileen Nizer Marketing, Kate Seburyamo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deguy, Michel. [Un homme de peu de foi. English] A man of little faith / Michel Deguy ; translated, edited, and with an introduction by Christopher Elson. pages cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary French thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5359-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5360-6 (ebook) 1. Faith—Philosophy. 2. Belief and doubt—Philosophy. 3. Religion— Philosophy. I. Title. BD215.D4413 2014 210—dc23 2013048559 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Meteor tracing furious ellipses Impalpable bump of worlds in rebound Cast pebbles, coaldust, silex, micas and gypsums Humouristic reports, sobs and zounds Entrained by the pure avidity of saying Luxuriant all and one like the other Drawing on his lyre ingenious before us Enharmonic with cadences of reason Grave and gay in turn in the well-milled throat Ulcerous from the saps that its conjugation Yearning like a gluttonous muse there pours out —Jean-Luc Nancy, from Deguy le Grand 8 CONTENTS Translator’s Notes xi Introduction To Conserve While Leaving Behind: Michel Deguy’s Palinody xv A MAN OF LITTLE FAITH This text is of little faith . 3 I. Palinody I will not tell of how “I lost faith” . 11 There is no transcendent . 12 If I were a visual artist . 13 I will reverse a saying of Auguste Comte . 14 Confiteor 17 Love Story 19 Negligence 21 The fantasy of forgetting 22 Cuttings 23 Paul Valéry’s “to be awake . .” 24 Gift without Exchange 25 Case of Equality 28 Love has no why . 29 Of the Author 30 Escence 31 “Super Flumina” 32 Attached 34 Poetry is triple . 36 Man is the being who tramps his own transcendence . 37 “My fellow, my sister . .” [Mon semblable, ma soeur] 39 Natives of Eden . 40 “Everything is full of soul(s) . .” . 41 “Keine Rache mehr” . 42 “Ecce Homo” 43 I pause for a moment . 46 We are in the Fiji Islands . 47 We are in the Fiji Islands . 48 Of the Mortal Possessing Speech 50 II. Notebooks of Disbelief In Doubt 57 “Non credo in” 62 To Mothers 63 In the imagination . 64 “The patient breath of the bull” . 66 Who is God? . 67 Christ 68 The Incarnate 69 Why continue . 70 Nothing will be destroyed . 71 Since the body . 72 The Future of the Illusion 73 Relics 75 Of the Holy Family 76 My Guardian Angel 77 There are certainly other just men in the city . 78 The Infernal Machine 79 Metaphysical Meditation 81 Descartes and Socrates 82 Enough with the science! . 83 Literature And The Good 85 The Common Nothing 87 The Reproach Made to Kant 90 “Minima Moralia” 92 Logic of Double Negation or of Non-Mathematical, Paradoxical Apodicticity 93 III. Simone Weil From Memory Life and Death 99 Of Purity 101 Attention 103 Of Contrariety 104 And Today 106 viii Notes On Paradox 109 Of the Double-Bind 111 Digression on Analogy 114 Transcendence 116 An Aside 117 Revelation, continued . 118 Of Religion 119 Of the End 121 IV. Jewish Humanity Peace-With 125 “All Men Will Be Jewish” 128 Appendix A: Dublin Interview 147 Appendix B: Two Essays on Michel Deguy by Jean-Luc Nancy Deguy The New Year! 169 To Accompany Michel Deguy 189 Notes 201 Index 211 ix TRANSLATOR’S NOTES It is a privilege and an adventure to translate Michel Deguy, to attempt to bring his vigorous inventivity and erudition in the original French to life in an idiomatic, comparably layered, and still comprehensible English. This often seems like an impossible exercise, balancing inspiration and peril, one where difficult choices are necessary on every page. Deguy’s inventivity is that of the extreme contemporary, an already “future rigor” where the writer of vigilance works ceaselessly to safeguard the linguistic relics of our cultural past at the same time as he seeks to enliven today’s words, which are always at risk of falling behind today’s things and phenomena, keeping both sides open in a continuous retranslation for future uses and astonishments. 1. Neologisms. I have an absolute respect for Deguyan neology and a commitment to rendering it each and every time, even at the cost of occa- sional awkwardness. “Things change more quickly than words” and culture has been “vampirized” (CPAC, 195 and back cover). Neologisms are sharp wooden stakes in the toolbox of Michel Deguy, Vampire Hunter. 2. Something that may not be immediately apparent to the reader of only the English text is the degree to which I have respected but not absolutely the expansive, exigent syntax of Deguy’s phraseology. Sometimes the precise preciousness of his sentences has been attenuated here, sinuos- ity abandoned in favor of a straightened-out stretch, his prosody’s rhythmic elongation across the bar lines given more limited measures. 3. The quantity and cumulative, signifying density of allusions in this as in any other of Deguy’s works adds a further dimension to its translation, as well as posing basic editorial challenges. How not to overload the text with parenthetical references or footnotes? I have attempted to find the right balance between useful information and excessive disruption of the text’s flow and appearance. On the same heading, the French poetic tradition is massively present here as elsewhere in Deguy’s corpus and I have aimed for a balance between compactly indicating author names or/and the titles of works cited by Deguy and the inclusion of a few recapitulative notes gathering together a brief account of the place of Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and others in A Man of Little Faith and Deguy’s other works. xi 4. A Man of Little Faith is a multilingual book before any translat- ing takes place. There are many citations and expressions in Latin and in Greek, along with a few quotations left in their original English, German, or other languages. Like his late friend, Jacques Derrida, Deguy proceeds from the conviction that any language is always already more than one, always relating to itself diachronically and relating to its others geopoetically in full consciousness of the necessity of translation and a lucid reflection on its conditions of possibility. His 1978 text “The Compass Rose of Languages” (JMUSA, 88–98) is a fine illustration, in a kind of textualist mode, of the poet-thinker’s acute awareness of the necessity of relating one European language to its others. 5. Wherever Deguy has played with a biblical or philosophical cita- tion in Greek or Latin, I immediately give a rendering in square brackets to help the reader avoid mistaking a more or less significant alteration for a familiar reference. Explanation or translation of unaltered quotations in the original languages is treated less systematically, sometimes given paren- thetically, sometimes incorporated into endnotes found on the same page, sometimes not provided, if the context is sufficiently rich. 6. The comme of comparison. One of the most important challenges for a translator of Deguy is to find ways to convey the density of his thought of comparison, a reflection that is both poetic and ontological in its implica- tions. The French comme condenses the senses of English “like” and “as” or German wie and als. Deguy has worked on and with its ambivalent two- sidedness virtually since the beginning of his career. The cumulative richness of these years of poetic and philosophical reflection on comme is present in the translator’s mind at each occasion of choice. In the subsection “Escence” (infra 30–31), Deguy makes it clear that he privileges the like over the as but cannot escape from the undividedness of the comparative and the definitive, the proximity in comme of the open multivalence of like and the identitary risks of as. “The work of reason, which always still awaits, is to scrutinize the obscurity of a difference which is reducible to that of ‘as’ and ‘like,’ [en tant que/ pareil à] which in French comes down to the homogeneity of the comme where this difference cannot be heard” (infra 118). A crucial decision must be made with respect to Deguy’s tendency to substantify the adverb or conjunction “comme” in order to treat comparison theoretically: Le comme, when it is used analytically as a conceptual operator, will be treated in English translation as a compound common noun, “the like-or-as,” despite the possible awkwardness of that expansive choice—I think the reader needs this occasional reminder; this will not be the case in expressions like l’ontologie du comme, which is translated as “the ontol- ogy of like,” suppressing the implicit definite article and condensing the two-sidedness of like-or-as for the sake of elegance.