Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 6-11-2018 3:00 PM Double/Cross: Erasure in Theory and Poetry John Nyman The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Plug, Jan The University of Western Ontario Pero, Allan The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © John Nyman 2018 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Philosophy of Language Commons, Poetry Commons, and the Reading and Language Commons Recommended Citation Nyman, John, "Double/Cross: Erasure in Theory and Poetry" (2018). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 5529. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5529 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically mobilized aspects of the text: textual thickness and responsibility. On one hand, erasure ensures that texts are doubled both within themselves and throughout their various contexts; thus, textual meaning is dispersed, branched, or thickened across multiple dimensions as texts are constituted in space and time. On the other hand, this sprawling, decentralized thickness is persistently juxtaposed with the fact of particular individuals’ responsibility for the concrete texts they write. In the course of developing my argument, I analyze Martin Heidegger’s striking out of “Being” in The Question of Being, Derrida’s use of strikethroughs in his early philosophical works, John Cage and Jackson Mac Low’s incorporation of erasure into their poetry of “chance operations,” Jean-Luc Marion’s negative theology, William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method, Tom Phillips’s erasure-based artist’s book A Humument, and contemporary erasures including Ronald Johnson’s Radi ii os, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps. I conclude by discussing some of my own creative explorations using the erasure technique. Keywords erasure, deconstruction, Derrida, experimental literature, appropriation, authorship iii Acknowledgments Thanks, first, to Jan Plug, my champion at the Theory Centre, for his boundless insight and generosity. Thanks to Melanie Caldwell, everyone’s champion at the Theory Centre, for her tireless attention and support. Thanks to the students of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, my professors, my friends, and all others with whom I have shaped and shared the ideas behind this dissertation. Special thanks to Peter Schwenger for his enthusiasm and encouragement. Thanks to Adrian Mioc, my secret hero, for providing me with room to live and think. Thanks to the poetry communities of London, Guelph, and Toronto, for reminding me why I write. Finally, thanks to the staff of McDonald’s (Stone Road West and Gordon Street locations, Guelph) and the Toronto Public Library (Downsview branch) for maintaining the facilities in which the bulk of this dissertation was drafted. iv Table of Contents Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………iv Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………………v List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………vii List of Appendices ……………………………………………………………………viii Note on the Text …………………………………………………………………………ix Introduction: (At Least) Two Erasures ……………………………………………………1 Chapter 1 Double/Crossing Differential Ontology: Heidegger and Deleuze on the Question of “Being” ………………………………………………………23 Chapter 2 Derrida’s “tour d’écriture”: Erasure, Paleonymy, and Responsibility …………54 Chapter 3 Responsible for “Nothing”: Cage’s and Mac Low’s Proto-erasures as Negative Theology …………………………………………………………112 Chapter 4 Asymmetrical Collaboration: From the Cut-up to Erasure ……………………155 Chapter 5 Crossings: Contemporary Erasure Poetries ……………………………………241 Conclusion: (At Least) Two Erasures …………………………………………………307 v Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………330 Appendix A: Permissions ………………………………………………………………352 Curriculum Vitae ………………………………………………………………………353 vi List of Figures Fig. 1: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 105 (second version 1994) …………………187 Fig. 2: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 133 (first version 1973) ……………………190 Fig. 3: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 46 (second version 1988) …………………193 Fig. 4: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 133 (second version 2004) …………………202 Fig. 5: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 44 (second version 1986) …………………221 Fig. 6: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 6 (first version 1973) ………………………229 Fig. 7: Phillips, Tom. A Humument Page 6 (second version 2008) ……………………230 Fig. 8: Nyman, John. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: A Selection, interior ……………………………………………………………311 Fig. 9: Nyman, John. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: A Selection, title page …………………………………………………………314 Fig. 10: Nyman, John. Your Very Own, from “Delia and I” (1) ………………………321 Fig. 11: Nyman, John. Your Very Own, from “you” ……………………………………322 Fig. 12: Nyman, John. Your Very Own, from “Delia and I” (2) ………………………324 vii List of Appendices Appendix A: Permissions ………………………………………………………………352 viii Note on the Text Throughout this dissertation, I use a single strikethrough (like this) to quote words rendered under erasure by their original authors. In several notable cases, however— including Martin Heidegger’s “Being” in The Question of Being and Jacques Derrida’s “is” and “thing” in Of Grammatalogy (19)—erasure is indicated in the original publication not by a single strikethrough, but by an X printed over the word in question. This discrepancy is not an oversight on my part; rather, it is a consequence of one of my study’s central claims regarding the relationship between erasure and textuality. A textual erasure is a sign, not a picture, and its representation should be amenable to various typical forms for the same reason that one hardly ever quotes using the same font in which the quoted text was originally printed. While I take seriously Jerome McGann’s call for scholars to “attend […] to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such’” (13), I am also committed to Jacques Derrida’s conclusion that a sign’s iterability “supposes a minimal remainder (as well as a minimum of idealization) in order that the identity of the selfsame be repeatable and identifiable in, through, and even in view of its alteration” (Limited 53). On a larger scale, striking this balance between the concrete materiality of writing and the enduring possibility of transcendental expression remains a persistent challenge across multiple dimensions of my research. ix 1 Introduction: (At Least) Two Erasures Either there are two erasures, or there is no erasure at all. In the first place, to erase means to “scrape out,”1 not merely to partition or to cover up, and so an erasure indicates something that is no longer intact, complete, or available as such. In other words, an erasure proposes a pure omission; its goal or telos is the blankness or “null [nul]” substitute (de Biasi 23) in whose place something would no longer be anything. And while it is true that what has been ostensibly erased can often be recovered, the possibility of this recovery is not endemic to the erasure itself. Rather, to recover what has been erased only exposes the erasure’s partiality; something may not have been “scraped out” everywhere or entirely, but the nature of its expulsion ensures that it cannot be “scraped in” or “unscraped.” Otherwise, there has never been an erasure in its most basic sense. Yet if there ever has been an erasure, there were always two, since something does take place precisely where something else is “scraped out.” An erasure’s “having taken place [l’avoir-eu-lieu]” (Rougé, “Rature” 14)2 refers to its taking the place of what it erases only insofar as it also institutes the “definition of a place” (Rougé, “Ponctuation” 148) as something more than the merely formal corollary of plenitude or presence. 1 From Latin ērādĕre, composed of ē (“out”) and rādĕre (“to scrape,” “to scratch” [“erase,” OED]). 2 Bertrand Rougé adapts this phrase from Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien, in which Jankélévitch uses it to define le repentir (“repentance,” but also the corrections applied to a visual