Between Philosophy

and Poetry:
Writing, Rhythm, History

MASSIMO VERDICCHIO
ROBERT BURCH,
Editors

Continuum

B E T W E E N P H I L O S O P H Y A N D P O E T RY

T E X T U R E S P H I L O S O P H Y / L I T E R AT U R E / C U LT U R E
SERIES

Series editor: Hugh J. Silverman, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New
York, USA
An interdisciplinary series, Textures addresses questions of cultural meaning,
difference, and experience.
Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death
Edited by James E. Swearingen and Joanne Cutting-Gray
Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality,
Transnationalism
Edited by John Burt Foster Jr. and Wayne J. Froman
Panorama: Philosophies of the Visible
Edited by Wilhelm S. Wurzer
Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History
Edited by Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch

BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY
AND POETRY

W R I T I N G , R H Y T H M , H I S T O RY

EDITED BY

MASSIMO VERDICCHIO AND

ROBERT BURCH

Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 100176503
First published 2002
Massimo Verdicchio, Robert Burch and the contributors 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0826460054 (hardback)
0826460062 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Between philosophy and poetry: writing, rhythm, and history / edited by Massimo
Verdicchio and Robert Burch.
p. cm (Textures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0826460054 ISBN 0826460062 (pbk.)
1. Philosophy. 2. Poetry. I. Verdicchio, Massimo, 1945. II. Burch, Robert, 1949.
III. Textures (New York, N.Y.)
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2002074053
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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CONTENTS

General Introduction: Thinking Between Philosophy and Poetry

Robert Burch
Part One: Ethics of Writing
Introduction

11

1 Gesture and Word: The Practice of Philosophy and the Practice

of Poetry
Carlo Sini

15

2 The Rise and Fall of Reality: Socrates, Virtual Reality, and the
Birth of Philosophy from the Spirit of Writing
Alessandro Carrera

27

3 Analogical Thinking as a Friend of Interpretive Truth:

Reections Based on Carlo Sinis Images of Truth
Forrest Williams

41

Part Two: Truth, Texts, and the Narrative Self

Introduction

59

4 When Truth Becomes Woman: Male Traces and Female Signs

Eve Tavor Bannet

63

5 Orality and Writing: Platos Phaedrus and the Pharmakon Revisited

P. Christopher Smith

73

6 Ethics of the Narrative Self

Richard Kearney

91

Part Three: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Spirit of History

Introduction
7 Woburn on My Mind and in My (Minds) Eye: Becketts Poiesis
Stephen Barker

101
105

vi

CONTENTS

8 The Naming of the Hymn: Heidegger and Hlderlin

Karen Feldman

117

9 On Transvaluing History: Rilke and Nietzsche

Richard Detsch

125

Part Four: The Force of Rhythm in Life, Philosophy, and Poetry

Introduction

139

10 Reections on Speed
David Halliburton

143

11 The Meaning of Rhythm

Amittai Aviram

161

12 Mousike Techne: The Philosophical Practice of Music in Plato,

Nietzsche, and Heidegger
Babette E. Babich

171

Abbreviations

181

Notes

185

Bibliography

207

Index

215

Acknowledgments

219

Contributors

221

Editors

223

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

THINKING BETWEEN
P H I L O S O P H Y A N D P O E T RY

Robert Burch

Ever since Plato banished poetry from the just regime ironically, in a dialogue that has itself an essential narrative structure, an eikon at its logical
center, and a myth at its conclusion philosophy has looked askance at the
poetic. Metaphors, gures of speech, dramatic ourishes may be thought to
favor or hinder the exposition and promulgation of philosophical truths, but as
a rule they are judged accidental to the truth attained. In the extreme version
of this story, the accidental is cast as decidedly villainous. Not merely is
gurative language so much frippery ornament to the essential tasks of
philosophy, as for example Jeremy Bentham warns, but in its ambiguity and
pretence to real reference, it is virtually unclean, befuddling and upstaging
the majestic simplicity of good sound sense.1 Thus portrayed, the true danger
of gurative language does not lie in its being literally false but in its being a
sham, a mere semblance of thinking, a Scheingedanke in Freges words, that
comes on the scene unabashedly as if it possessed a genuine truth-value.2
Nowadays, however, this story is often told with a quite different plot,
moral, and characterization. In place of the primacy of nominal reference, we
are now advised la Saussure that signs, taken singly, do not signify anything,
that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence
of meaning between itself and other signs. Accordingly, the ability of language to signify a thought or a thing directly is only a secondary power derived
from the inner life of language itself.3 It follows then that metaphors and the
like cannot be straightway condemned as obvious deviations from an original
literal purity, and thereby as departures from serious speech and truth, since
on this account literal references themselves come into play only through a
prior interaction of signs. This tale, too, has its extreme version. Linguistic
meaning is not only said to originate from the interactions of signs, but this
interaction is also held to be both omni- and innite, constituting a differential network in which nothing, neither among the elements nor within the
system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There is only everywhere

BETWEEN

PHILOSOPHY

AND

POETRY

differences and traces of traces.4 In this version of the story, the traditional role
of philosophy to make the absent, occluded true in itself totally present by
means of the literal word is played out as merely one more substitution
within an open-ended interweaving of text. Traditional philosophy is thus
deprivileged, not on skeptical grounds that its word falls short of what lies
outside it, but because this story admits of no outside to the open play of
signications, no positive entities, and no center to arrest and ground the play
of substitutions.
However familiar this juxtaposition of extremes may now be, if it is taken at
face value and used to characterize what is at issue for thinking between philosophy and poetry, it proves altogether misleading. For it takes for granted that
what is at issue in such thinking is a relation in which two discrete terms,
philosophy and poetry, are to be brought together, compared, and ordered. Yet
this is already to proceed in the traditional manner of philosophy. For it is to
assume in principle that the disciplinary, textual identities of philosophy and
poetry are determined in and through a relational opposition in which one or
other of the terms must inevitably be privileged as the positive term from
which the relation is rst posited. The privileged term will then serve to dene
the ground of the relation as such. Of course, traditionally, philosophy has
claimed this privilege for itself in the name of Truth. Yet even were one to
reverse this traditional order of privilege, so as to valorize poetry over
philosophy in the name of a superuity of meaning, the same traditional
assumptions and implications about the issue itself would remain in place.
Consequently, in the rst instance, we would be left with a philosophical
reduction of meaning to truth in which the poetic dimensions of thinking were
deliberately occluded and excised. In the second, we would be left with a
poetic reduction of truth to meaning, which brings with it all of the traditional relativist complications, along with the problematics of deriving reference from sense. In either case, a genuine space for thinking between philosophy
and poetry would effectively vanish.
It might well be argued, however, that this way of setting up the issue in the
rst place misrepresents at least one of the alternatives. To subvert philosophys
traditional role as truth-teller in the name of innite semiosis and the superuity
of meaning is not simply to put poetry by default in the traditional place of
privilege. It is instead to render the interplay of poetic and philosophical discourses ultimately undecidable, in such a way as to make untenable the assumption that their relational juxtaposition is absolute and original. Thinking between
philosophy and poetry would occupy the space of this ultimate undecidability.
The essays collected in this volume are intended as characteristic examples of
such thinking. As such, they serve by example to dene the interplay of philosophy and poetry as what (in Heideggerian terms) might be called die Sache des
Denkens, the matter of thinking. They represent a wide variety of perspectives
and concerns both within and upon the topic. Their collective purpose, however, is not to summarize the various possible positions that might be taken on
the philosophy/poetry relation, or to indicate which, if any, of these positions is
according to current fashion academically reputable. Even less is their purpose
to advance (either directly through a sustained argument or indirectly through

GENERAL

INTRODUCTION

the juxtaposition of the essays themselves) any one particular position as being
the last word. As it is construed here, thinking between philosophy and poetry
does not so much represent a position as a dis-position to sustain the
philosophy/poetry interplay. By means of a variety of concrete examples, we
have sought in this volume to hold open the space for such thinking as the topic
of our shared interest. The attempt, however, calls for a few words of introduction, if only to help clarify albeit supercially and even tendentiously the
initial terms around which this volume has been organized.
By the term poetry we understand here neither exclusively nor even principally what in the current lexical denition typically falls under the rubric of
poesy, that is, metrical and/or imaginative discourse designed above all to
evoke an aesthetic response, as opposed, for example, to discourse having as its
purpose apophantic truth-telling. Without pausing to discuss this disavowal in
detail, sufce it to remind ourselves that, since Nietzsche and Heidegger, no
one can simply take for granted the divisions and determinations of the
apophantic and aesthetic upon which this usual denition of the poetic turns,
nor the ready equation of poetry with meter and verse that it posits. Instead, to
begin with we understand the term poetic here in the broadest etymological
sense to encompass the whole domain of poiesis as that of the creative production
of meaning. Following etymology, we likewise construe the term philosophy
in a similarly broad way as philosophia, the love of wisdom, expressed in the
quest for truth. In the broadest terms, then, as a tentative, working characterization we mean by thinking between philosophy and poetry, a discourse bounded
by the interplay of meaning and truth.
Admittedly, there is a sense in which this initial characterization might
seem to offer little or no advantage. If it served in effect merely to recast the
interplay of philosophy and poetry as a relation between truth and meaning,
then it would only serve to reintroduce under different names the very closures
and oppositional relations from which we seek expressly to abstain. How we
might avoid this lapse thus needs at least some explanation.
The case of poetry ought to be a familiar one. According to tradition, the
race of poets is divine, and as such does at least occasionally hit upon truth, if
only by the unmethodical means of grace and inspiration.5 In this regard, even
the prosaic Aristotle concedes that poetry is more philosophical and serious
than history, insofar as it tells a general truth [ta katholou].6 Traditionally,
then, the issue has not been whether poetic meaning is related to truth but how
it is related and how its claim upon truth is warranted.
The case of philosophy is less familiar, precisely because it is one that the
philosophers themselves have tended to suppress. According to tradition,
Pythagoras coins the term philosophos to denote one who seeks for truth
[theratai . . . tes aletheias].7 In offering this characterization, however, he uses a
metaphor, that of the festival, ta Olumpia, with philosophers being cast as
theatai, the spectators, whose dening excellence is that they simply look at
the Games in order to get the sense of it all. In the metaphor, the philosophers
love of truth is at the same time a love of the nest sights (ton kalliston
theorian), from which they glean a comprehensive meaning. Thus, according
to this hagiograph, philosophy has situated itself from the beginning

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PHILOSOPHY

AND

POETRY

precisely in the ambiguous space between the quest for truth and the quest for
meaning.
The history of philosophy indicates various ways by which philosophers have
sought to come to terms with this between. Traditionally and in general, they
have sought to recongure this space less ambiguously so as to make their
meaning ultimate as truth. Arguably, this strategy nds its exhaustive and nal
expression in Hegels panoramic attempt to sublate all meaning into the comprehensive Truth of absolute self-knowing knowing. His goal is to realize a
singular, fully present Truth in itself in which the difference between meaning
and truth is rst presupposed in order then absolutely, essentially to be overcome. After Hegel, it might well be argued, all subsequent attempts to absolve
meaning into truth are epigonic.
Yet there are other strategies for dealing with this between that are not so
imperial, and in that respect are closer in spirit to the topic of this volume.
Before Hegel, for example, Kant insists on the impossibility of an absolute
resolution of meaning into truth, and does so in the name of an inescapably
nite philosophy whose virtue is that it limits knowledge in order to make
room for faith and the practical extension of pure reason.8 At the basis of this
limitation is Kants conviction that the quest for meaning and the quest for
truth are not identical. We are possessed, he says, of a pressing need that is yet
something more than [noch etwas mehr] the mere thirst for knowledge.9 Arguably, this something more is the poetic need to make sense of things as such
and as a whole. In the end, however, Kant remains under the sway of the
philosophers impulse to systematic completeness, and hence posits as an ideal
of reason a (divine) knowledge in which meaning and truth would be one. By
contrast, Kants contemporary heirs seem more resolute in their adherence to
the division, and hence less receptive of the systematic ideal. Hannah Arendt,
for one, claims that the interpretation of meaning on the model of truth is
not just a fallacy of metaphysical thinking but the basic fallacy, taking
precedence over all other metaphysical fallacies.10
Although by no means an Hegelian,11 Heidegger declares (in seeming opposition to the Kantian distinction) that the meaning of Being and truth of
Being say the Same [sagen das Selbe].12 Considered out of context, this might
seem to be just another instance of the fallacy that reduces meaning to truth
(which is just how Arendt, for example, reads it [T, 15]). Yet, in Heideggers
vocabulary the same (selbe) is not the identical ( gleich). In the context of a
discussion on the interplay of poetry and thinking, he remarks: The same never
coincides with the equal [ gleichen], not even in the empty indifferent oneness of
what is merely identical. The equal always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same,
by contrast, is the belonging-together of what differs, through a gathering by
way of the difference.13 It is in these terms that Heidegger seeks to preserve
the essential space that is the interplay of meaning and truth, not as an identity
that posits difference in order to negate it, but as an integral sameness-indifference that can never be aufgehoben and hence is always already in tension. In
this way, he celebrates the poetic in thinking, yet without seeking to absolve
the difference. Were it the case instead that Heideggers thinking did simply

GENERAL

INTRODUCTION

dissolve into the poetical without difference, including even the thinking that
afrms the thesis that all thinking is poetical, Heidegger could not avoid the
usual, fatal entanglements of a formal dialectical sort. But, then, if indeed all
thinking were poetical without difference, then in a sense none would be, since
there would be no other kind of discourse to mark the difference.14
Derrida, too preserves the difference of meaning and truth, yet in a more
subversive way than does Heidegger more subversive, that is to say, for the
traditional pretensions of philosophy as a quest for truth. He does question the
value of truth in the name of the superuity of meaning, but not in such a way
as to reinstate the sameness of truth and meaning for the sake of the thinking of
Being. In Derridas writing, truth is rendered as a particular mode of meaning.
Yet it is not just one mode among others. It is the fetishist mode of meaning, of
whose absolute appeal we have always to disabuse ourselves. We recognize in
truth, Derrida writes, the normal prototype of the fetish. How can we do
without it? (P, 80, n. 23).
Although hardly exhaustive, the preceding gloss does help to establish a
context for the present volume. Insofar as the essays in this volume share a
commitment to preserving the space of thinking between philosophy and
poetry, they eschew the philosophers imperial strategy to absolve truth of all
dependence on meanings it does not exhaustively comprehend. Among the
essays, however, there is no uniformity of voice with respect to the whither
and wherefore of the alternative. Moreover, although each of the essays moves
within that space and is an example of such thinking indeed this is their
shared topic they do not all directly thematize that space or that thinking.
The essays in this volume are arranged in four sections according to the
following themes: (1) Ethics of Writing; (2) Truth, Texts, and the Narrative
Self; (3) Poetry, Philosophy, and the Spirit of History; and (4) The Force of
Rhythm in Life, Philosophy, and Poetry. The essays in Part One are devoted to the
work of the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini, as exemplifying well the nature and
diversity of the interplay between philosophy and poetry. In his own contribution to this section, Sini argues that terms like poetry, philosophy, history, and prose are basically genres of the written word, mystied forms of
knowing introduced with alphabetic practice. He nonetheless views writing as
an exercise which affords the subject the possibility to view itself in its event of
meaning, so as to gain a new genealogical comprehension of itself. This new
comprehension is ultimately the product of the imminent and immanent end of
metaphysics. It yields what Sini calls the world-sheet ( foglio-mondo), a genealogical display of the practice of writing to itself in the reection of its peculiar
writing effects.
The two other essays in this section take as their starting point this postmetaphysical analysis of writing and orality, and proceed from that locus in two
directions. In one case, a trajectory is traced from Sinis account of the transition from orality to writing to show how in diverse ways this transition has
served to affect and effect the evolution of thinking, from the Galilean mathematization of reality and the Cartesian modelization of nature to the present
experience of digitalization. In a postmetaphysical context of innite semiosis,
a response to this transition can be found in the poetic invocation of the

BETWEEN

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AND

POETRY

Delphic injunction, yet understood now as a call to unending selfinterrogation. The other trajectory is to show in a concrete analysis of poetry
how Sinis postmetaphysical thought addresses directly the problematic of
thinking between philosophy and poetry as the locus of the event of meaning
and as the space wherein the subject gains a genealogical knowledge of itself.
The essays in Part Two are framed in terms of two interrelated issues. The
rst issue concerns how identity is to be conceived in relation to difference,
alterity, otherness, against the background of the metaphysical conception of
identity as negation of negation. In that conception, which receives its fullest
expression in Hegels philosophy, difference is contradiction, yet contradiction, as Derrida observes, constructed in such a way as to permit its resolution
within dialectical discourse, in the immanence of a concept capable of its own
exteriority (P, 74, n. 14). Difference thus turns out to be only a moment of selfidentity, destined to be superseded in an absolute conceptual self-possession.
Each essay in this section is concerned in one fashion or another with the
issue of identity and difference specically in its postmetaphysical, postHegelian formulations, that is, where the possibility of absolute self-possession
is radically in question. Moreover and this is the second issue that serves to
focus this section in its postmetaphysical, post-Hegelian formulations, the
question of identity is inseparable from the hermeneutic, poetic question of the
constitution and dissemination of textual meaning. Thus, each essay is concerned with identity the identity of self, of genders, of truth, of meaning as
inextricably a textual question which has, as we have come to learn, pas du
dehors.
The essays in Part Three are concerned with readings of a literary text or an
uvre in such a way as to problematize not only the act of reading itself but also
the performative potential of the text and its ability to posit itself with respect
to the referential claims it inevitably makes. In this regard, each reading serves
in its own way to raise and make problematic the whole issue of thinking
between philosophy and poetry as an undecidable space. Whereas philosophical
texts traditionally seek refuge in the scientic certainty of the supposed literal word, and achieve an apparent closure in an interplay of occlusions and
visibility, a more rhetorical reading dismantles this presumption to closure to
reveal an inevitable superuity of meaning to the text. Conversely, with respect
to texts traditionally characterized as literary, the readings problematize their
referential character, within the determining context of meaning. The texts in
question are drawn from Beckett, from Heidegger on Hlderlin, and from
Rilke and Nietzsche.
The essays in Part Four concern the issue of rhythm in various modes the
rhythms of modern life; the choral rhythms of poesy; the musical rhythms of
philosophy. According to the conception of rhythm that prevails in current
literary theory and criticism, rhythm is dened generally and abstractly as a
demarcation of a continuity. But this denition represents only a faint echo of
the original sense of rhythm. To be sure, in ancient thought rhythm did mean
the measured movement and tempo of prose and verse.15 But it also meant
proportion or symmetry of parts, and hence the form or shape of things. More
generally, rhythm meant to the ancients, arrangement and order, and hence the

GENERAL

INTRODUCTION

state or condition of a thing, particularly the temper and disposition of a

person. Thus, for example, Plato has all of these connotations in mind when he
declares that the whole of human life has need of rhythm.16
Something of this ancient sense of rhythm survived in the Romanticist
response to the rhythms of burgeoning industrial society (although in a way
unattuned or repelled by what might be awing or even exhilarating in those
rhythms). It survives as well, so Nietzsche tells us, in the contemporary habit
among some philosophers of invoking verse to lend ideas force and credibility.
It survives too in the deliberate rhythms and cadence of the work of certain
poets and thinkers. What the essays in this section have in common is the
conviction that rhythm is a central concern, having to do with the relation of
our language and body, the fundamental character of our thinking, and the very
tenor and tone of our lives.

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PA R T O N E

ETHICS OF WRITING

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INTRODUCTION

M a s s i m o Ve r d i c c h i o

This rst section is devoted to the philosophy of Carlo Sini. The rst essay by
this major Italian philosopher presents in general terms the latest direction
taken by his thinking toward a critique of metaphysics and of the fundamental
genre distinctions between poetry, philosophy, and history. These are basically
genres of the written word and as such are metaphysical and mystied forms of
knowing which have come into being with the introduction of alphabetic
practice. To be sure, Sini does not dismiss writing or the philosophical practice
it produces, but denes it as an exercise that affords the subject the possibility
of viewing itself in the event of meaning, of acquiring a new genealogical
comprehension of itself. This new comprehension, which entails the imminent
end of metaphysics, is what constitutes for him the ethical nature of
philosophy.
Poetry, on the other hand, differs from philosophy as it has always contested
writing by maintaining a constant relation to the archaic model of orality. As
poetry aims at translating the singing of the living voice, the poet refers to
lived experience directly and not instrumentally. But while poetry and philosophy are distinct they are not opposed and exist side by side. They share in
the ethical revolution that Sini summarizes in the expression world-sheet
(foglio-mondo) which entails the genealogical display of the practice of writing
that makes it possible for the metaphysical subject of writing to watch itself in
the reection of his peculiar writing effects. World-sheet is an ethical exercise, the experience of an impossible transcription that releases the subject from
his subordination to logical superstition with the purpose of educating it to
live where it is according to the time and destiny of the world and its nihilistic
consequences. The subject is no longer the reection of practices pursued and of
objects produced but the subject of practices committed to the meaning and
destiny of its own existence.
The essays by Carrera and Williams illustrate different aspects of Sinis
postmetaphysical analysis. Carrera expands on Sinis critique of metaphysics
which originates in alphabetic writing and arises out of an investigation of
alphabetic writing practice of the type never pursued by Derrida. Philosophical
concepts have meaning only within the writing practice that produces them,
where by practice is not meant a transcription of the world but writing itself.
Sinis critique of Western metaphysics, including Heideggers and even
Derridas, questions the binary logic which informs philosophical practice. In

12

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AND

POETRY

Heidegger, for example, the question of truth is decided in the opposition

between truth of logic and truth of Being as aletheia. Unconcealedness for Sini,
however, does not arise against the background of concealedness of Beings but
by getting rid of mimesis, the analogic impurity that taints the origins of
writing.
Sini is also critical of Derridas grammatology since the notion of archwriting, which is supposed to be an instance of nonmetaphysical thinking, does
not escape similar pitfalls. Arch-writing presupposes the afrmation of traces as
something which is not an object and cannot be brought into presence. This
strategy resembles that of any negative theology where the signied (God)
remains irreducible to any signier striving towards it. The issue is not the
content of the logical form but how it appears in writing, how writing gives
shape to what we later call logical and meaningful. What Sini calls ethics of
writing is the acknowledgment of the niteness of every practice as a nite and
limited enactment of the sign.
Ethics, furthermore, must be understood in the Peircean sense of habit and
dwelling, as the practice of inhabiting the space of writing. As an ethics of
transcription, it is the enactment of a sign-relation, a transcription of the world.
In these terms architecture is a writing, just as Platonic angling is writing. But
the ethos of writing is neither a description nor a deconstruction of writing,
rather, it posits the question of the content of the event, of its threshold, of its
ground. For Carrera, Sinis ethics of writing is best exemplied by Socrates
message and by his questioning of the Delphic Oracle, an interrogating habit
that has to come to terms with its own endless self-interrogation.
The third essay by Forrest Williams presents another aspect of Sinis philosophical practice by showing how we can understand his conceptual language
analogically. Williams deals with Sinis reading of Piagets child-moon episode
that recounts the experience of a child who, as he moves, feels he is carrying the
moon along with him, and when he looks at the moon the moon looks back at
him. For Sini the experience of the child exemplies the Peircean sign-relation
event that is neither private nor public and cannot be understood in terms of a
duality, but by means of a bipolar process. The child expresses the reciprocity of
primordial experience constitutive of our commonsensical conception expressed
in the polarity me-here, world-there. Here a key element is mood which has a
central and epistemic function as it founds and constructs the objective world
of knowledge and opens up the world.
Another aspect Williams deals with is the relation of part and whole which
Sini nds inadequate in understanding the child-moon experience. While for
Sini we cannot speak of whole, it does not mean that there is no whole at all,
that is, that there is nothing. The wholeness of experience gures instead as
null (nulla) of the evident part-iality of that (particular) moon or child. The
null whole determines the very identity of the part making it a perfect-ed
part, a de-nite, determinate part. For Sini a sign-relation is a sign of this or
that particular object (for example, moon) and in the last instance a sign of
null, a null whole which enables the given part to be just the determinate part
that it is. That is why, too, the child-moon experience is not in any way
imperfect as compared to a perfect whole. Rather, the experience is perfect

INTRODUCTION:

PA R T

ONE

13

because it is partial. Sinis notion of perfection refers to wholes that are always
and everywhere partial by virtue of their negative, null-wholeness.
For Williams the root analogies to understand the type of experience Sini
alludes to here can be found in literary criticism, in a language capable of
thinking and talking about art. As examples, he chooses Dylan Thomass Do
not go gentle into that good night and William Ernest Henleys Invictus to
show that a reading of Thomass poem raises the same issues and can be understood in ways similar to Sinis child-moon episode. Both the content of Thomass poem and the feeling it raises, or the commentary one can provide, cannot
really add up to a distinctive wholeness of the particularized experience of the
poem. The poem perpetually eludes us and is present so-to-speak only in its
absence. It is an entirely de-nite part and a non-positive or null whole. The
experience of reading the poem is similar to that of the child-moon relation
since the poem like the moon is just as much in our responses as it is out there.
In this experience self and object, reader and poem, are reciprocal moments or
polarities. As in the child-moon episode, the poem is near in its farness and far
in its nearness. Furthermore, the affects generated are but pale analogies when
expressed in the emotions of the everyday world. At best, they are a source of
raw material. The world that the mood opens up and reveals is entirely unique.
One cannot name it except as that null and perfect-ed whole which is the poem
itself.
On the other hand, Henleys Invictus, an inferior poem, is for Williams an
example of how a poem can be depressive rather than expressive, lacking completely the denite character that would make it perfect. And as one would
expect, Henleys poem has no afnities whatever with the child-moon episode.
The analogical concepts of literary criticism help us understand Sinis conceptual language perhaps because in Art too, as Sini contends, one nds an
essential place of experience similar to what we attain in experience and where
what is attained is the null in its most pregnant deniteness.
Carrera and Williams help us understand and situate Sinis philosophy at the
crossroads of the problematic between philosophy and poetry, writing and art.
They show that philosophy viewed as writing practice and poetry as constitutive of an oral and archaic form of expression share a common ground of
experience where the distinction between philosophy and poetry, as well as the
genres themselves, are no longer operative forms. Their displacement allows for
the possibility of an ethics of writing whose sole domain is the world-sheet.

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GESTURE AND WORD

THE PRACTICE OF PHILOSOPHY

A N D T H E P R A C T I C E O F P O E T RY

Carlo Sini

Heidegger has often pointed out the nonoriginal character of aesthetics. Aesthetics is a philosophical discipline, just like logic and ethics. Metaphysics is
divided into the doctrines of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and aesthetics is the science of the beautiful. These divisions, born out of the Platonic
school, became canonized starting with Aristotle and have ever since then
inuenced our conception of poetry and, to a large extent, that of the poets by
shaping their views on poetic practice. Against this tradition, Heidegger
argued that the poetic experience of the word is far more ancient, greater, and
more original than aesthetics generally makes it out to be. Poets like Hlderlin,
Rilke, and Trakl are more or less conscious examples of this. This is the result of
the nonoriginal character of metaphysics. The experience of the thinking word is,
in its turn, far more ancient, greater, and original than metaphysics ever thought.
According to Heidegger, it is a question of rediscovering the unifying stock
that, starting from the original experience of the word, joins thinking and
poetizing together, while keeping them distinct. Generally speaking, this unifying stock is constituted by the evocative nature of the word which is at the
same time re-memoration, commemoration and revelation of Being. The poetic
word celebrates the giving of Being to beings and at the same time its withdrawing from any communicative bind. The poet speaks of the divine as
absence which in giving itself to the presence of the poetic word remains
absent. The poetic word approaches what is far by leaving it essentially distant,
a source of light whose origin remains hidden in the phusis that in giving itself
withdraws into darkness. On the other hand, the thinking word focuses on this
blind spot of vision that makes possible and gives the very same vision of
beings. Having renounced the claim to capturing beings and their truth in
denitions and logical-scientic information, thinking tries rather to correspond to the constitutive withdrawing of Being, to the lethe which is the hidden
core of its aletheia.
How this is possible remains problematic. Except for comprehending the

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evocative nature of the poetic word of which it speaks, thinking is not able to
show that constitutive difference which, neither rationally nor irrationally,
makes it nonetheless thinking and not poetry. Thus, as Heidegger says, the
essential poverty and present marginality of thinking, and its merely preparatory character is preparatory to the event of the thinking word, that is no more
than a possible future destiny, and very uncertain as to the how and the
when. In case of its advent, it would entail a radical transformation of the
relationship between man and Being, and thus between man and worldly
beings, and would entail also a radical transformation of mans very being,
marking his way out of the metaphysical, humanistic, and technical age.
I have alluded in synthesis to the above thesis, as I am persuaded that its
potential is beyond doubt. It helps us overcome the prejudices of metaphysics
and aesthetics. Despite this, my belief is that in this thesis there is a considerable margin of prejudice, which does not allow us to see deeply into the matter
and arrive at a positive solution. This is not the ideal moment to discuss and
criticize Heideggers position, which I consider inadequate. I will try to
confront the problem and formulate it from a different point of view, which
implicitly entails the criticism that has been here omitted.
To begin with, I would like to mention an event that is well known to
everybody. In the fth century b.c., under Pisistratus, the two epic poems
ascribed to Homer by our tradition were written down in alphabetic notation
for the rst time. Athenian society was witnessing the spread of alphabetic
practice in reading and writing that deeply marked the cultural revolution
characterizing what was to become the age of the Sophists. As skillfully illustrated by Eric A. Havelock, the practice of alphabetic writing in general, and
specically this transcription of Homers poems, exercised a decisive inuence
on the history of Western culture. This is not to be understood as merely a
technical device, since it determined a complete change in poetic habit and
practice. First of all, what was uid, ever changing, dependent on inspiration,
subject to place and time contingencies, as well as on the highly innovative and
creative transience of oral memory, was xed in a stationary mould, which has
been kept comparatively constant ever since. The whole continent of poetic oral
practice gradually sank into the abyss of the past, a dimension that was no
longer to be recovered. The ancient poet became an obsolete gure, overcome
by the deep changes affecting political, social, and economic life and was eventually replaced by the gures of the poet and the writer, as we understand
them today. Owing to their transcription, the two poems by Homer may be
considered the rst event and literary document of our history.
In their original living form they were not. They were rather a form of
knowing through which the Greeks handed down from generation to generation the memory of their origins and identities, of their founding tales and
legends, of their gods and heroes, along with a series of mainly cognitive and
practical notions, rules directing their costume and their education ( paideia),
and last but not least the art of the word. A whole system of feelings and values,
a comprehensive vision of the world had been committed to a poetic memory
that did not play a secondary role in aesthetic terms (which was absolutely
inconceivable at the time), but a primary formative role. The oral poet (as the

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priest) was an educator and a prophet of his people, a wise man (sophos) in touch
with the primordial divine and natural forces. To think that his poetic word
and mnemonic and commemorative poetic practice is something having to do
with the aesthetically beautiful is pure nonsense.
It is only starting from the written document that notions of author, text,
genre, and style appear for the rst time. The musically tuned recitative, reecting the pathos shared by the participants, eventually comes to be replaced by
private reading, by solitary subjective enjoyment of the written text, by a
technically detached formal imitation and specialized literary practice. Poetry
becomes a particular genre of the written word, like rhetoric, science, history,
philosophy, and prose in general. The poet turns into a man of culture, a man of
letters, in the literal sense of the word. The notion of culture itself, which is
typically Sophistic, is a further product of alphabetic writing, in addition to the
notions of school and school learning. There are no men of culture prior to the
revolution started in Greece by writing. The archaic age did not have any
knowledge of the difference between the cultured and the uncultured, the
literate and the illiterate. Such a distinction, based on the Latin word litterae,
denitely asserted itself in Rome rather than in Greece. That is why, to speak of a
culture of the archaic age is a blunder in our view and the result of a prejudice
unable to transcend its own mental framework. The same could be said of what
we call archaic literature and poetry. These ways of thinking and speaking
simply depend on the aesthetic transformation introduced by metaphysical
thinking which, in turn, is the typical product of alphabetic practice.
With regard to this topic, I will concentrate on a few essential points. One
can nd a deeper and more detailed analysis in my recent work Etica della
scrittura (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1992). My inquiry focuses on the birth of rational
thought or, more specically, on the birth of logic. Oral practice as well as the
formation and conveyance of what we call mythical thought already included
some aspects that at present may be dened as rational. Aristotle points out
that in myth is already present the kind of astonishment that is at the very
origin of philosophy, an implicit questioning of the nature of Being and the
causes of beings as given in common experience. Yet, such an attitude became
systematic in Greece only with pre-Socratic thinkers, who emphasized the
rational aspects of the logos, paving the way for both Sophistic antilogy and
Platonic dialectics. This deep change in the practice of speech and truth connected with the use of the word would be totally inconceivable without any
reference to the practice of alphabetic writing. In this regard I will point out a
few remarkable aspects.
First of all, writing isolates meaning from its original context of life, from
the gesture of the living word experienced in concrete situations. In a purely
oral practice speech is a habit that joins other active and expressive or meaningful habits. The word had to turn into a product, into something written, an
object denitely separate from the lived and direct habits of verbal meaning, in
order to draw our attention to what is, in the way that it is, and to the specic
content of its meaning. It gradually acquired consistency and autonomy and
started to be considered analytically, as it is today in our dictionaries. This
operation tends inevitably towards the logical content of the word, towards its

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pure signication, abstracted from its living context. Such an operation is both
at the basis of the distinction between literal and gurative or metaphorical
senses, and at the basis of the possibility of raising questions on the objective
content conveyed by words. What I mean is that reading and writing incline
towards a homogeneous denition of meanings. It is no more possible to neglect the difference between good when referred to a good citizen and good
when referred to his peaceful or merciful nature. By playing on the technique of
denition, that is, on the distinction of language expressions according to the
meanings actually put into practice (same meaning and time, as logic says),
philosophical dialectics defeated Sophistic rhetoric. Moreover, once the notion
of good in its specic meanings has been isolated, we naturally come to ask
questions about what is good in itself, what is the nature of being good, and
which common features are shared by the different ways of being good
expressed and witnessed by language. This was the core of Socrates questioning
and inquiry, which inspired Plato to create what we properly call philosophy,
that is, dialectics and logic. This was nally perfected by Aristotle in his
Organon. As we shall see, logical homogeneity in meanings implied the idea of
homogeneity or self-consistency in things.
Secondly, only the practice of writing made it possible to improve the techniques of arguing, refuting, and demonstrating, techniques subject to objective
and intersubjective control. The overwhelming power of speech, the emphasis
expressed by the human voice, the pathetic nature of images, all this produced
effects of persuasion that would soon be defeated by the written text and by the
cold and analytic detachment of the subject, who came to play the role of the
reader. This possibility of keeping under control, comparing, reckoning, and
concentrating on synthetic relations has always been viewed as the origin of
scientic thought. History, geometry, cosmology, all these would never have
been possible without the fundamental change introduced by the practice of
writing into the mental habits of alphabetized subjects, not to mention the
notion of subject itself.
Thirdly, alphabetic practice, by generating the autonomous nature of logical
truth, that is, the exact and homogeneous sense of speech, produces the very idea
of reality. Here, the habit of telling the truth is not opposed to that of lying,
but it turns into the ability of reproducing the same thing in a correct form.
Plato wrote about an orthotes corresponding to to pragma auto. But Heraclitus
had already appealed to a universal logos, a truth common to all mankind,
namely to all men enlightened by reason and able to use their own minds,
capable, as Parmenides added, of not contradicting themselves. Logic and
ontology are therefore congruent and derive from the use of the rational mind, a
usage that arose with writing, and could not have been possible among people
who were still rooted in what Walter Ong describes as primary orality.1 For
them there was no universal truth, not even an objective reality, a physical
world in itself, a universe made of facts totally detached from their own
humanly or sacredly prominent sense and governed by the logic of pure
meaning (or physical causality, as Aristotle conceived of it).
It eventually becomes natural, even necessary to a logical mentality, namely
to a philosophical and scientic mind, to divide the different meanings

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attributed to Being into distinct areas. Being is said in different ways, wrote
Aristotle.2 On the one hand we have the truth of the thing as it is in itself and its
correspondent expression in speech, at which logical knowledge strictly aims.
On the other hand we have the usefulness of things according to human purpose, their being good or bad, morally meaningful or not. Or their ability to
stir emotions, feelings, pleasant or unpleasant images, and so on. Thus, ontological and scientic knowledge becomes divorced from both moral practices
and artistic techniques, in compliance with that division of the truth, the good,
and the beautiful we mentioned earlier. This implies the birth of an aesthetic
dimension and the reduction of art to a self-governing, separate, and subordinate sphere of knowledge, a reduction to which we have become accustomed for
more than two thousand years.
If we keep in mind all that has been said so far, we can easily understand how
questions concerning thought, poetry, and philosophy are mere nonsense.
What kind of objects are these? What do they mean? Just in asking these
questions, we are falling into a long series of prejudices. We think of thought
and poetry as something real, that has always existed, even though it is
philosophy that rst mentioned and dened them. We could put this another
way. People have always been thinking and poetizing without really knowing
it; philosophy just revealed this universal truth. But this is not the way things
are. Rather, it is philosophy that appropriates Homer and assigns him to what
it thinks poetry is. Homer, in his concrete linguistic and singing practice, could
not even have thought of it, nor did he have any reason to. It is once again
philosophy that daringly works out the abstract notion of thought with
remarkable originality, changing the meaning of words and exercising an
extraordinary reective and argumentative power of denition. As a matter of
fact, Parmenides is responsible for distorting the archaic meaning of the word
noein (whose semantic root has never been fully explained by any philologists
and which probably meant to smell or to move in something liquid or
probably something else). In Parmenides noein takes the meaning of perceiving,
of taking something true with the mind, knowing by intuition, and so on.
Afterwards, Plato worked out Parmenides lexicon, which even to him must
have seemed obscure, and came up with the exact meaning of dianoia or, as it
has been called since, thinking as distinguished from both sensation and
imagination. This complex creative operation is objectively taken as given by
Aristotle and his noetic and dianoetic logic, which presumes to identify formal
rules in human thought in general.
Homer, however, did not know anything about sensation, imagination, and
thought, according to the meaning they have received since the philosophical
revolution. This does not mean that Homer was incapable of intelligent habits,
speech, or intelligent behaviour. The fact is that he lived within a range of
practices that are different from and to a large extent incommensurable with
our own practices of life and language. And above all he totally ignored the
practices of logical denition resulting from the use of writing that allow one to
determine the semantic thickness of words and to take them in a universal
ontological sense. All this produced our current use of words that makes it
possible to speak of thought, poetry, man, nature, and language. It is

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most signicant that the Greeks did not have a corresponding expression for
language.
When we say thought or poetry we accept logics dening practice,
namely the metaphysical habit. Expressions like die Sache des Denkens or
thoughts destiny, often used by Heidegger with the purpose of pointing out
problems and thresholds beyond metaphysics, still belong to the metaphysical way of thinking. Metaphysics is not characterized by an appeal to an
objectifying thought, a thought that enties Being by structurally missing
its truth that it believes true, that is, worldly beings in their manifestation,
while forgetting the event of their manifestation, its primary origin, irreducible
to worldly beings because hidden source of the same. This way of approaching
metaphysics does not go below its surface. In its deep nature metaphysics is the
constitutive act by which an ultrasensible subject, namely the Socratic-Platonic
mind, and a universalizing panoramic view, denitely disembodied, are established. Such a view is bound together with a logical mind that views things as a
whole, as universally valid for everybody, and complying with a public intersubjective agreement of all minds. This attitude has been ideologically mistaken for the equivalent or the reection of true Being in itself, of things, and
the world. This is simply a consequence of the introduction of alphabetic
writing, which deprives words of their contexts and reproduces them in merely
conventional signs, the content of which turns out to be purely mental and
abstract.
The subject who writes the word virtue alphabetically releases its meaning
from concrete action, experience, or virtuous practice. Alphabetic signs allude
to virtue in its most general sense, separate and aloof from all practice, and
create the idea that such a thing indeed does exist somewhere or that it is
somehow the model or essence (the eidos, as Plato used to call it) of every
virtuous act and event. This ultrasensible objectivity, alluded to by the sensible
written signs which conventionally bear pure meanings, belongs to a similarly
shaped subject, the silent subject who reads and writes and that in doing so,
and only by doing so, can properly think or literally thinks, which is synonymous with thinking the universal, the object in itself, virtue as it is universally in itself, in its conceptual truth valid for all or more precisely, valid
for those who can read and write and whose minds have gradually complied
with these habits, which have since become so obvious as to be neither seen nor
questioned.
Now we can easily see that what we call objectication is not a limitation of
the human mind, is not the cage inside which language fails in its attempt to
tell both Being and its truth, in which case man could only keep silent or
deconstruct the claims of metaphysical speech. That is not the point, at least
because Being and truth are still integral parts of that cage and not something outside it which unfortunately remains inaccessible to human thought
and language. This is the big misunderstanding, a quid pro quo resulting from
the fact that the practice of writing has actually translated the word, putting it
into practice directly and without reection into its reection, the written
word. This is the rst objectication which gives rise to all others. Writing
turns the word into an object, a material thing opposed to its reader, who is

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separate and free from it. What the reader cannot think is not something like
Being or truth or thought, which are not mysterious realities in themselves, supposedly inaccessible, but only written things. What the reader
cannot do is write his own act of writing, that provides him with universal
objects like Being, thought, truth, poetry, philosophy, and so on. The act or
habit of writing is something particular and has a specic context, like the
habits of all other practices. But it has also a peculiar nature, that of universalizing and conceptualizing all that it produces, its object. The universal, the
ultrasensible is its peculiarity, its speciality and, why not, its superstition.
That is why it can write the act of writing, but not the act itself. It can
write the universality of writing, but not this particular writing. And even
this particular writing that we are writing here and that we generally write
(or, say, as logically thinking minds educated by writing) is immediately universal (every this is a this, according to Hegel, and therefore says this in
general). However, this immediate universalization is not produced by language or by the word, as Hegel believed, but by the written word, the word
translated into something written and consequently conceived as the word,
something that was neither conceivable, nor visible nor existent in the practice
of pure pre-alphabetic orality. We say this writing and miraculously understand each other beyond writing. We think of it somehow. But we cannot rationally say it, that is conceptually express it without contradiction, or write it,
after all.
Furthermore, if we can understand each other, it is only because, when we say
this (this act of writing), we implicitly refer to a gesture, an ostensive act of
showing. It is as if we could see a nger pointing to and limiting an area on this
page and what is written in it as a result of a concrete and concretely denoted
act of writing. And the difference lies between the performance of the act of
speaking or writing and the object of this gesture taken separately from its own
acting. The acts of speaking and writing will never be able to utter this difference, they will just allude to it. This allusion is the difference itself, performed
in every practice as its limit and horizon; it is something acted and shown by
every practice starting from its own limit and that for this same reason cannot
be shown within its own limit.
These necessarily brief and all too general remarks on these practices allow
us, at least, to draw some interesting conclusions that might be expressed as
follows. The fact that philosophical practice, as rational thought in action
allowed by alphabetic writing, cannot say itself in its typically universal conceptuality, simply denotes the ethical nature of its theoretical action. The true
problem of philosophizing does not lie in its inability to say or to found the
rational meaning of its thinking speech. The point is that we should take
charge of the rational subject produced by philosophical practice. Instead of
implicitly taking it as a given, philosophical practice should exhibit it in its
constitutive limits and show it as a product of the particular nature of its
universalizing alphabetic gesture. The ethical nature of this act lies in the fact
that now philosophy, without dismissing the habit of writing, that is the habit
of thinking conceptually (in absence of which there would be no philosophy,
but maybe another practice), determines to inhabit its own acting otherwise,

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that is, to dwell in the writing practice in a different way. Writing should not
be employed to accomplish presumed theoretical truths conceived as universally valid; on the contrary, it should be seized as an opportunity and practiced as an exercise by which the subject is educated to watch himself not in his
products (in his rational meanings, among which the word subject is highly
signicant), but in his event of meaning. The very meaning of the subject is to
be subject to and not the subject of writing. His task is not to ground
himself, but to turn to a new genealogical comprehension of himself starting
from the enlightenment of the practice and from his own practice. This new
comprehension represents the ethical nature of philosophizing as a result and
consequence of the end of metaphysics, which is well on its way.
The second conclusion nally concerns poetry. We could say that, even if it
has turned into literature, poetry has contested writing since the beginning.
Hence its difference from philosophy. Plato used to fear poets and rightfully
so. As shown by Havelock, he fought against the paideia of the oral tradition in
order to assert the new humanity expressed by philosophical theory. He also
fought against the literate poet and against the orator, whose allusively sensual
word, stirring the souls patheis, hindered the formation of the ultrasensible
subject and his merely conceptual vision and obscured the philosophical sense
of truth. Aristotle improved this movement of thought by denitely relegating
art to the realm of the verisimilar, as a surrogate of that truth which falls
within the province of science only. Rather than an adversary, the poet
becomes an ally and a collaborator of the philosopher, when he repeats the
same human truth asserted by philosophy on the imperfect level of
sensibility.
How is the practice of writing disputed by poetic practice? First of all, by
means of a constant relation to the archaic model of orality. The poetic practice
pretends to repeat the original act of transcribing the Homeric tradition, previously mentioned. A poet is a rened literate writer, but his pamphlets pretend to translate the free singing of the living voice. Rhythm and rhyme are
employed for this purpose.
Secondly, even though the poet makes use of conceptual words, (insofar as
they are written) he also inserts them into a highly evocative and narrative
context (as generally done by prose writers, novelists, and historians, whose
work Aristotle did not assign to the sphere of the true, but to the sphere of the
verisimilar; and that was not by chance). The comparison that can be drawn
with the frequent reference to exemplication, which characterizes philosophical writing, clearly illustrates this point. A philosopher, for instance, in
trying to dene conceptually the passions of the human soul can very well
describe the passionate love overcoming the adulterous couple well beyond
their will and good intentions, by describing some common features and feelings. His description, however, aims solely to color and enliven his concepts,
to provide him with a sense reference, well known to common experience. This
description is in no way self-contained, has no value in and of itself, and for this
reason is limited to a few schematic features, to a quick and general synthesis,
that the reader will complete by recollecting events from his everyday experience. What is reported by the philosopher is just an exemplum, one sensible copy

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of the concept, amongst many. The poet, on the contrary, is not interested in
conceptual examples. His purpose is not to illustrate adulterous love. Even if it
were, because of a consciously pursued moral project, the practice would follow
in rather different ways. In the Paolo and Francesca episode, Dante is not
interested in portraying passion or lust, but Paolo and Francesca themselves,
their passion and their tragic destiny, totally individualized and unrepeatable.
The poet reproduces concrete details, the fatal contingency of their emotions,
perfectly contextualized in the individual and accidental nature of the event
and not in the general rule disclosed in it. A poet examines the exemplum
under a microscope, a philosopher through a telescope. And for a poet there is
no such a thing as an exemplum, but only symbols, something whose meaning
cannot be translated into a concept and has to maintain its connection with
the sensible expression. In doing so, the poet refers to lived experience directly and not instrumentally. In concrete experience a lover does not recognize the embodiment of love, sexuality, or womanliness in his beloved, he
cannot detach those universal characters from her features and body, because
they are exactly what he loves. It is the woman that inspires his love and not
a chapter of physiology or psychology that the woman might perfectly
illustrate.
The poet walks the way from living experience to the word, recollecting the
original emotional contexts. His act is a constant recollection of what words
used to express when they were not yet conventional means of intersubjective
communication. That is why his words often echo the magic of childhood and
myth. The fact that his tale becomes emblematic and Paolo and Francesca
become universal symbols of forbidden passions has nothing to do with the
universal nature of conceptual knowledge. Rather, it has to do with the universal nature of literary conscience made possible, especially in modern times,
by the spread of both writing and reading, encouraged and transformed by
printing, in ways impossible to investigate here.
What has been said applies to poetry in general, but it is also true that
contemporary poetry has renounced traditional rhyme and rhythm. Nowadays,
poetry appears to be a conscious written exercise, a well-reckoned disposition
of words on a page, relying on the free choice of lines, often interrupted by
puzzling spaces, apparently bizarre, and on designs of unpronounceable
shapes. It appeals to purely mental sounds and nonsemantic formulas, features
existing only in writing and reading, which have no equivalent in words and
voice. Contemporary poetry does not seem to allude to any singing, whether
true or false. It is a highly graphic product, that is to be read rather than
recited.
In my opinion, such a widely spread event should be acknowledged as poetic
practices deepest objection to writing. An objection exercised on writing itself
by breaking its logico-chronological linear structure and its by-product, the
metaphysical subject (a constituted temporal subject according to Plato,
Augustine, Kant, Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger), who is subject to fracture
and refraction in the event of his emotions and language visions. The breaking
up of the regular syntactic order is a further objection to the metaphysical
subject and his logical writing.

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Paul Celan writes:

The reversedly-pronounced
names, all
the utmost,
neighed to the king
in front of mirrors of frost,
besieged, surrounded
by the plurigeminous births,
the crenellated crevice across it,
alluding to you
isolated.
Or:
Slowly clown-faced
nothing-mirrored,
the make-up truth blue-frozen
in the angle-shaped mouth
frost-pollen powder over the glossy overskull,
around the thin questioning lock black,
the eyebrows, eyebrows: growing
two, giant antenna-combs, two
you so-combed
so-perceived harsh night everever,
already tossed out of the ake-world,
not here, not there.3
Here writing becomes a way of contesting and denying the metaphysical
subject, the Western historical subject, who reects his own disruption and
surrenders to a different universe of experience, beyond the opposition between
orality and writing and the imperialistic subordination of the former to the
latter. A similar example, at a philosophical level, is to be found in a sentence
written by Wittgenstein in the notebooks preceding his Tractatus, where he
deals with his renowned theory of representation. He wonders whether language
is only one language and why there cannot be a form of expression whereby one
can talk over language, so that the latter could appear in coordination with
something else. He supposes that music is that form of expression, but it is also
peculiar to science that no musical themes may ever occur. He writes: I am
writing here only propositions. And why? How is language unique? He wonders:
What is the ground of our surely well-grounded reliance on the conviction
that we can express all meaning by our two-dimensional writing? He admits
that what was difcult about his theory of logical representation was nding a
connection between the signs on the paper and a state of things outside in the
world, and adds: It is clear neither a pencil line, nor a steamboat are simple: is
there a real logical equivalence between the two?4

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What emerges here is the knot binding logic to alphabetic writing, of which
nonetheless Wittgenstein was only marginally and occasionally aware. Even C.
S. Peirce showed the same ambiguous awareness in his existential graphs that
object to writing inside writing and point out the nite margins of logical
inference. This is how the ethical revolution of philosophy is announced,
a revolution that I like to summarize in the expression foglio-mondo
(world-sheet). I cannot dwell upon this subject now, but essential to it is its
presentation, the genealogical display of the practice of writing that allows the
metaphysical subject of writing to watch herself in the reection of her peculiar
writing effects and chase herself within the nite and particular boundaries of
her acting the same acting that produces the objective and universal truth of
Western knowledge. The world-sheet is therefore an ethical exercise, the
experience of an impossible transcription releasing the subject from her subordination to her logical superstition. Its purpose is not to commit her to
nonlogical practices (which would be superstitious in their claim to a more
satisfying truth), but to educate her to live where she is, in Heideggers terminology, according to the time and destiny of the world of technique and its
nihilistic consequences.
In this work on and in writing, which is at the same time against writing, or
at least against its nihilistic consequences, I personally believe that poetry and
philosophy are today side by side. Their practices remain distinct and that is
good. The confusion between poetizing thought and thinking poetry, so common nowadays as a consequence of Heideggerianism, has misunderstood the
core and the root of the problem. In its confusion it falls prey to that relativistic, weak, and pseudomystic nihilism it wishes to overcome. In the reconrmed distinction between the practices of poetry and philosophy lies the
possibility of a deep and parallel transformation of the subject of writing and of
writing itself that fatally implies that our knowledge will be completely overturned, and the boundaries marked by metaphysics between science and art,
aesthetics and philosophy, will be overthrown and eventually overcome. This
does not go in the direction of any collusion between poetic fantasy and logical
equations or any entry of cybernetics into artistic composition, as someone may
be tempted to believe. Such childish and muddled avant-gardism has always
proved empty. The true direction is the one that draws the foglio-mondo
(world-sheet) by employing a new subject: a subject that will not be thoroughly
and superstitiously subject to the practices pursued and the objects produced
by them, but oriented towards the formation and conformation of his possible
being subject, being the subject of the practices committed to the meaning and
destiny of his own existence.
Translated from the Italian by Massimo Verdicchio

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T H E R I S E A N D FA L L O F R E A L I T Y

S O C R AT E S , V I R T U A L R E A L I T Y,
AND THE BIRTH OF PHILOSOPHY
FROM THE SPIRIT OF WRITING

Alessandro Carrera

DIONYSUS IN THE NET

Now that chatting on the Internet is the talk of the day, its easy to forget that
just a few years ago the enthusiasts of virtual reality vociferously claimed that
in their nonlinear and nonverbal environment one could nally get rid of the
obsolete linear code of alphabetic writing. The viability of those claims doesnt
need to be debated anymore; we know now that they were not justied. However, it is worthwhile asking why such claims were made in the rst place, and
why so many people who placed themselves in the forefront of technology were
so eager to throw away the linear codes of communication altogether. We may
come to the conclusion that the desire to distance oneself from the so-called
limitations of the alphabetic language had little to do with technological hipness. A very archaic dream was at play; the same dream that thousands of years
ago gave life to the shamanistic rituals which implied the total identication
with the totemic gods.
As a mere substitute of reality, a mask of the truth that hides behind its
signs, virtual reality is not different from any other semiotic code: a mixture of
conventional and iconic (mimetic) signs, both being signiers of reality, the
reality being the signied. And yet virtual reality claims to be much more than
mimesis and representation. Virtual reality is a simulation of reality that
demands to be experienced as a total replacement of reality itself. Whoever
approaches virtual realitys environment as a totalizing experience is hanging
on the balance of such duplicity. On the one hand, one knows perfectly well
that what he or she is experiencing is not real. On the other hand, the temptation to call it another reality (if not a self-sufcient reality) is very strong.
Virtual reality is not just an experience that creates a new fragment of reality:
the degree of participation involved is so high that it displaces nonvirtual
reality.

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Virtual reality lies at the crossroads of four discourses. By the use of the term
discourse, we refer here to the joining of forces of one semiotic code and the range
of beliefs that such code is capable of sustaining. For reasons that will be
explained later on, we might as well call this discourse writing. Iconic code is
the rst discourse at play; the codes of representation, as they operate in our
culture, are the second; the third discourse is the creative power of the code of
representation itself, that is, the cybernetic, self-correcting feature of the virtual
reality environment; the fourth discourse speaks with the authority of scientic
procedure. Virtual reality displays at its fullest the essential feature of modern
technology, a feature that harks back to the Cartesian notion of automaton,
ultimately aiming at replacing reality as it is perceived by the senses.1
A few years ago, the widespread and even morbid curiosity that surrounded
the rst experiments of virtual reality revealed a hidden urge far more ancient
than the fads of contemporary technology. The archaic foundations of such a
dream of total illusion and total participation cannot be overlooked. Shamanism or totemic religions have always provided, in a high degree, the illusion of
living in a separate reality, shared by anyone who participates in the ritual and
by no one else. The essence of ritual, as Nietzsche puts it in The Birth of Tragedy,
is the dissolving of the individual conscience the principium individuationis
based on social and cultural differences linked together by the communality of
logos. When the virtual reality enthusiasts claim that their environment goes
beyond language or creates a new, nonverbal language, they actually resort to
the most archaic forms of iconism.
In his La sapienza greca, while discussing what he called the Dionysian
celebration of knowledge, Giorgio Colli pointed out that when knowledge
turns into delirium, delirium reveals itself as knowledge. When in their collective parousia the followers of Dionysus rushed to see the God, they did not see
themselves as men or women anymore but as sacred goats, half-humans, halfanimals. Similarly, when technology replaces Dionysus, the participant in the
virtual reality rite considers himself as half-man and half-machine as an
android or a disembodied cyberspace traveler whose mind is no longer discernible from the computers software. This virtual satyr is the modern or
postmodern re-enactment of the shamanistic and mystic experiences whose
common feature was the lowering of the principium individuationis. Since our life
is shaped by technology as much as the life of the ancient Greeks was shaped by
the gods, it is no wonder that the Dionysus in us makes use of technology to set
himself free.
It would be misleading to say that in the Dionysian ritual the illusion
replaces reality. What actually happens is that truth is encountered in ritual.
Truth is to see God. Confronted with the splendor of that vision, ordinary
reality turns into an illusion, a replica, a mask, a prop. Perhaps that explains
why the virtual shamans despise nonwired reality. In cyberspace, they see the
god of technology summoning them, just like Dionysus would summon his
Bacchants. No wonder then that some cyberspace addicts, hardly at ease in the
ofine world of daily routine, are verging on sociopathic behavior. Online
reality is more real to them because it shows the hidden technological net that
holds ordinary reality together. For similar reasons, the revelation that ordinary

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reality is nothing more than the dream of a god makes Dionysian mysteries
absolutely real to the initiated.
Dionysus is the god of truth without mediation. His mysteries simulate the
state when the infant is coextensive with the mothers body. Before the principium individuationis is established, before the alienating codes of language, culture, and society get in the way, in the absence of mediation promised by the
mysteries (albeit articially recreated by means of trance and drugs) all visions,
sensations, and feelings appear to be authentic. However, with the passing of
time, the primordial Dionysian ritual gave way to its aesthetic formalization,
the Greek drama. The shaman became Gods narrator, adding words to the
original music, dance, and scream, while Dionysus, the god of the truth that
does not have to be interpreted, came closer and closer to Apollo, the god of
signs and forebodings that needs Sybils and seers as interpreters. When the
choir was added to the scene, the ritual turned into representation. The choir
was not made by real, possessed satyrs, but by men portraying satyrs.
Immediateness had become mediated, and the direct vision of the god gave way
to the speech that narrated the story of the god itself. Nonalphabetic, iconic,
musical, immediately shared experience became subjected to logos and interpretation. More and more, the original oneness of the mysteries turned into the
secularized imitation of itself. Actors came forward, faking the gods, while the
choir restricted itself to the moralistic commentary on the actions carried out
by individual characters. In the modern era, when the curtain fell to separate
the scene from the audience, the reversal became complete. Now the audience is
real, and the scene is an illusion. The nonlinear, nonalphabetic realm of the
shared Dionysian experience has been stretched into a linear, written treatment.
What used to be a discourse (a writing) of bodily gestures is now theater as a
literary genre.
In the second half of the twentieth century, avant-garde theater has repeatedly attempted to re-create the avor of the lost Dionysian experience (the
Living Theater or Jerzy Grotowsky are the rst names that come to mind).
Following the ancient mystery path, the new Thespians wanted their theater to
be more true than life, and their illusion more real than reality. Too bad they
didnt have the goggles and the gloves.
II

THE VIRTUAL GOLEM

When Galileo began transcribing the world into mathematical terms, he did
not merely translate it; he re-created it. In Galileos scientic revolution, mathematics is supposed to replace the impressions of the senses by revealing realitys inner structure. It was Galileos epistemic revolution that made Descartes
mental experiment possible as the rst modern attempt to discard ordinary
reality in favor of its purely differential and discontinuous transcription
(remember that differential and discontinuous read today as digital ). The
human being, Descartes argues, will never bypass the limitations of its senses.
Neither can they improve the features of the hand and of the eyes, who are not
sophisticated enough to penetrate the natural processes. And yet, since it is
possible to create machinery that imitates nature, it is also possible to put aside

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nature and deal directly with machines. The core of Descartes mental experiment is the idea of an automaton, or robot, that reproduces perfectly the human
body. The automaton does not need to be created. It is not a real Golem. It is a
virtual object, a virtual Golem, a reference model that serves the purposes of a
scientic investigation. Being a mimesis of nature, the automaton will help us
understand the ways of nature. Descartes modelization of nature has been so
effective that what was meant to be a mere speculative device quickly ended up
as a true replica of nature. The language the scientist used to describe the
feature of the automaton was then applied to nature. It did not take very long
before the whole paradigm turned upside down, and nature was understood
only by means of the vicarious language that had been shaped to describe the
automaton. Hence, the great fascination of the eighteenth century with mechanical creatures, a fascination that lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth
century (think of E. T. A. Hoffmanns and Mary Shelleys parables) to resurface
as science ction in the twentieth century. The new reality shaped by the
cybernetic revolution has not severed its ties with the Cartesian paradigm.
Contemporary scientic discourse is just bringing this paradigm to the point
when the automaton will be truly ruling all over the world. The rst step is to
say that cybernetic is a good way to describe the mental process; soon it will be
taken for granted that the mental process reproduces the language that has been
adopted to verbalize it. The nal step comes when everybody understands and
agrees with sentences like intelligence is feedback or the brain is like a
computer, only more powerful.
Like a Dionysian ritual, Cartesian automaton is the transition from the
delirium of knowledge to knowledge as delirium. With a huge difference.
Whereas the shamanistic ritual (rites of virtual reality included) aims at
deleting the linear, alphabetic features of the communication codes, in the
Galilean-Cartesian discontinuous (digital) paradigm, truth is reached through
systematic suppression of the nonlinear and nonnumeric (nondigital) traits of
experience. As Galileo was wont to say, to approach science correctly we must
remove the animal rst.
What animal is Galileo talking about? Galileo does not say, but we may
argue that he is referring, albeit unconsciously, to the archaic and animistic
universe. Plato, after all, in his Timaeus had described the cosmos as a great
animal. Platos animal is the beast that Giordano Bruno in his Spaccio della
bestia triofante saw as put down by the dry science of the Aristotelians of his
time. Galileo had a long history of ridiculing the Aristotelians, and yet he
sensed that the removal of the animal was essential to his reduction of the
universe in mathematical terms. Through the shamanism of his science, much
more powerful and effective than any other ritual, the mathematic hallucination took over the ordinary reality. By believing that truth is in numbers (in
digits), Galileo started a planetary dream in which the scientists see the mathematical order of the universe as the ancient satyrs saw Dionysus (remember
Leibnizs motto calculemus!). We are still dreaming Galileos dream. It doesnt
take any arcane ritual to convince us that we are little more than machines, and
that our experience can be reduced to a numeric pattern of stimulus and
response. Entering a hospital will sufce.

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How much, and how little, has changed, from the beginning of our civilization! The archaic men saw God as the only reality worth its name. Dionysus
was real, and the world was no more than an image in the mirror donated by the
Titans. The cybernetic man sees the mathematization of reality as the only
truth worth considering, while looking at the world through the mirror-screen
of his computer, donated to him by the titanic forces of technology. And if the
virtual prophets have not been able to get rid of the linear codes of communication, it is because their holistic, ideographic vision is reached through digitalization only. They have just fullled the Galilean project aimed at the rewriting
of the world in mathematical terms.
And yet, the circle is not complete. Nonlinear, ideographic communication
and linear, alphabetic, and digital writing are closer than ever. As A. J. Kallir
argued in his genealogical research on the origins of the Western alphabets, the
letters of the known alphabets are not mere conventions.2 They are based on
ancient and prelogical practices that went almost entirely lost when alphabetic
writing became widespread. As Vico was the rst to understand, the oral signier did not precede writing. At least in the Western hemisphere, orality and
literacy were born together. Before literacy there was no orality, there was an
entirely different perception of the world, where there are no signiers and no
signieds, but only magical-operational symbols. Kallir maintains that the
original alphabetic letters were bispheric signs. They formed an operative unity
of sound and image in which it is not possible to separate what is written and
what is spoken. The Latin word for house, says Kallir, was obtained by
modifying the ideogram of a dome. By putting it straight we have the capital
D and the rst letter of Domus. And by accumulating many of these examples,
Kallir claims that our alphabet is made by forgotten icons, or engrams, that
still play a large role in the shaping of our subconscious imagery.
On a conscious level, we perceive the alphabet as conventional, and it would
be impossible, and useless, to trace back any single word to its original iconic
meaning. Alphabetic writing has indeed removed the animal from the world.
It has detached language from its body (from the operative unit of gesture,
vocal utterance, and iconic sign) and, in so doing, it has made possible the birth
of logic and science. Long before the Cartesian automaton or the triumph of
modern cybernetics, the alphabetic writing has articially transcribed and
digitalized the iconic and mimetic richness of ideographic language. Alphabetic writing has provided us with a vicarious reality with which we deal as if it
were reality in itself. Actually, only by means of alphabetic writing can we
speak of a reality in itself, detached from any contingency, as if it were possible
to deal with anything in itself outside the given situation in which we
partake of its event. This literal reality, which exists only in alphabetic
practice, has replaced that world where Dionysus summoned his mustes and
where Timaeus great animal was still breathing. The mathematical transcription of the world in which words are replaced by truly conventional symbols is
just one step further. Virtual reality is no exception to the rule. But it helps us
to ponder whether every simple act regarding writing and reading belongs to a
certain degree of virtual reality. In the experience of children before they learn
how to write, or in the world of someone who comes from a nonalphabetic

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culture, there is a stage when letters of the alphabet possess a shamanic aura
whose promise is the replacement of known reality.
Our will to power and the desire to subjugate the animal in us are still at the
top of every technological agenda. And if we assume that the vision of God in
the shamanistic ritual was an illusion, no less of an illusion (albeit powerful and
effective) is our faith in the mathematical order of the universe and in its digital
reduction. We are not accusing any linguistic or scientic practice of hiding the
truth of nature, because the idea of nature is itself a human construct. What we
call reality is indeed linked to a specic and contingent opening of the world
that may take different names in time. To an extent, every formalization of
reality makes reality virtual, no matter whether the formalization is accomplished by means of alphabetic writing, algebraic symbols, or computer bytes.
And yet, we cannot help looking back in awe to the time when the world of
experience changed once and for all, that relatively short span of time when
theater replaced the Dionysian experience, alphabetic writing took over the
resounding world of myths and symbolic speech, and, not many years later,
Platos dialogues mysteriously captured Socrates oral teaching.
III

IS LOGIC FOR REAL?

At the heart of Derridas theoretic enterprise lies the unearthing of the paradoxical nature of philosophic writing. Philosophy is a writing practice claiming
to be the transcription of a voice that, by its essence, cannot be transcribed.
However, thirty years after the publication of his early, daring works, we may
say that Derrida did not want to draw the most radical conclusions from his
own premises. By accepting the status of the voice (phone) as it is presented in
Plato (where it is already implanted in the rhetoric of logos), Derrida did not
want to turn his stern upstream, from the effects of Platonic writing back to the
very practice of writing in its material and operational dimensions. Before
Plato, when the empire of the logos had yet to be and phone was still close to the
primordial utterance of the myths of creation, a more ancient and foundational
terrain awaits us all. While this is a road that Derrida has not taken, Italian
philosopher Carlo Sini, in his recent works, has turned his attention precisely to
the practice of alphabetic writing. Attempting to go further than Derrida,
Sini stresses that strong philosophical words like logos, Being, truth, and
judgment do not have any meaning outside the writing practice that gave birth
to them.3
Carlo Sinis Etica della scrittura (Ethics of Writing) is based on the assumption
that every practice ( pratica), from the most materialistic activity to the most
intellectual enterprise, is better understood within the category of writing. It is
not enough to say that by rendering what is close at hand and reproducible of
the world with which it deals, every practice is a transcription of the world
(every practice fashioning its own writing). More than this, every practice is
writing. Philosophy as mainly a written practice began as a transcription of
Socrates voice. But every transcription of a world-event (Socrates being one of
them) opens up new room for a new practice. And if any practice is a transcription of the world, any practice is writing.

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Furthermore, if practice is writing, any genealogical inquiry regarding its

lexicon, its unfolding of concepts and categories, its codes or its efcacy,
will only end up mapping out the writing effects that its appearance has made
possible. As tragedy was born from the spirit of music (from the non-linear
Dionysian experience), so philosophy was born from the spirit of alphabetic
writing, from Platos desire to write down the unwritten appearance of Socrates.
No single thinker is accountable for the formalization of logos that occurred
from Parmenides to Aristotle, when thinking changed from poetic and narrative hodos (way) to the extremely systematic Aristotelian methodos (method). Yet
Plato provided the alphabetic practice with a theoretic frame capable of containing both philosophic and scientic writings. The formalization of the linguistic logos, as undertaken by Plato, takes three steps: 1. the letters of the
alphabet share the same conceptualization of the eide (Ideas); 2. the very notion
of idealness, according to which the letters of the alphabet are purely ideal,
discrete, and differential beings (like ideas are supposed to be), originates with
the practice of alphabetic writing; 3. writing equals a conventional transcription (one could also say somatization) of idealness (EDS, 100).4
Sini argues that these principles, pillars of every philosophy of language,
have been established by means of excluding any linguistic approach inuenced
by naturalistic hypotheses. In a naturalistic philosophy of language, the relationship between things and words is not just conventional. As A. J. Kallir and
others tried to demonstrate, conventional signs are nourished by deep symbolic
and analogical ties.5
Platos Cratylus, for instance, starts with a frankly naturalistic approach to
language, based on mimetic and, as of yet, not so fanciful etymologies. Nonetheless, Plato soon abandons his mimetic approach, replacing it with the pure
theory of Theaetetus and Sophist, where language ceases to imitate the practices
from which it was born in order to turn into a true, logical, and scientic
relationship (no longer analogic) between words and things. Platos change of
perspective on language, Sini claims, was the pivotal point of Western thought,
the very moment when Being and truth were invested for the rst time with a
pure and detached power of signicance that otherwise they might not have
acquired. For similar reasons, when Heidegger defends the truth of Being,
against the tyranny of logic, he still remains, according to Sini, within the
borders of the Platonic circle.6 The question of truth is not decided, as
Heidegger would wish, in the conict between the truth of logic (where the
Platonic logos is already at work) and the truth of Being (i.e. the concealedness
of Beings essence, the lethe of Sein). Platos aletheia (the purity of truth as
unconcealedness) does not rise, as Heidegger claims, against the background
of lethe. It becomes visible by getting rid of mimesis and of any analogical
impurity tainting the origin of writing (EDS, 1718).7
Heidegger, Sini admits, is right when he says that whenever a problem is
spotted (like the problem of logic), it is because there is a question that nobody
knows how to ask anymore. Yet the question regarding the content of the
logical form, the question that logic cant answer anymore because it is too busy
tracking down its problems, cannot be answered, as Heidegger did, by
merely correcting the meaning of aletheia, because such a solution does not free

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itself from the Platonic horizon. Only an inquiry on the writing practice that
Plato developed to build up aletheias fortress (the only place where the problems of logic make sense) would take us further. Heideggers criticism of Plato
falls short of demonstrating that only linear and alphabetic writing makes up
the schema, or the hidden schematism of logic (EDS, 23).8
There was no such a thing as the idea of truth or the idea of Being before
linear and alphabetic writing took place. Nonalphabetic cultures do not think
according to ideas. They think, as E. A. Havelock has pointed out, in practical
units. They do not possess a logical scaffolding from which they check out
abstract concepts. Nonalphabetic man knows what the good thing is; he
doesnt know what the Good is. On the other hand, Sini admits, Havelocks
account of writing is achieved through an historian-like apprehension, as if
Platos treatment of language were the result of a fully conscious move toward
abstraction. Platos experience was probably very different altogether, still bordering on the enchanted edge of the new practice that has just been disclosed.
Only after Platos time the new alphabetic universe is ready to be charted and
diversied according to the various genres of prose writing: philosophy, grammar, science, or history. Henceforth the question on the content of the logical
form (of discourse in general) in Aristotle turns into an issue of orthotes, or
formal adjustment.9
The question of the content of logical form is locked into a prison whose key
has been lost. Heidegger does not hold it, for the reasons that we have just
explained. Neither does Havelock, regardless of the merits of his discoveries,
nor does semiotics. Havelocks history of writing, as well as semiotics, are
universalistic theories, still claiming that their Western and anthropological
point of view is the balcony from which truth can speak. They see man on one
side and writing, on the other side, as if it were possible to encounter man and
writing in themselves instead as localized and contingent events and practices.
Being, Truth, Man (Western Man) of whom we speak and decree birth and
death, are permitted to exist only insofar as the practice of alphabetic writing,
of which we are subjects, allows it. When semiotics claims to be a science (here
Sini echoes Derridas criticism of semiotics), it separates the signifying (what is
actually written) and the signied (the ideal and immaterial meaning of what
has been written) in a way that repeats the metaphysical distinction between the
body and the psyche, the sensible and the intelligible. This criticism does not
apply only to semiotics. Even the so-called hard sciences are intrinsically ontological and theological insofar as they assume a notion of the signied that is true
in itself and to which all signiers refer. This true signied is not very different
from the Cartesian God, watching over the correctness of logical propositions.10
Yet not even Derridas grammatology is safe from the Western and Platonic
strategy of the psyche, as Sini calls the anthropological and theological schematism, which is based on the assumption that truth is exiled from the world and
that there will always be an unbridgeable gap between appearance and reality,
between phenomenon and Being. Derridas arch-writing that he introduces as
an attempt at nonmetaphysical thinking, based on the trace of writing, and not
on logos or idea, does not escape such strategy. Arch-writing can be dened only
by afrming that the trace is not an object and that it cannot be brought to

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presence. In resembling the typical conclusion of every negative theology,

where the signied (God) remains irreducible to every signier struggling to
reach it, Derridas denition of trace reproduces the same metaphysical move he
was trying to avoid. Vicos Scienza nuova, argues Sini, would have served Derrida
better than Rousseaus Essai sur lorigine des langues. Behind linguistic signiers
there is neither arch-writing nor arch-trace, but as Vico saw only: An
unmeasurable prehistory of practices; a wide, genealogical, phenomenological,
and phenomenographical adventure (EDS, 88).11 Yet not even the Vician
genealogical approach comes close to the question on the content of the logical
form (the content of formalization of discourse, of logos). To say that the content
(the meaning) of logic is the alphabet, or that logic is the signier and alphabetic writing is the signied, does not solve the problem. The question of the
content of logical form is not a question of the content of what comes into
existence in the form itself: language, writing, or difference. Language, writing,
or difference are already signieds, objects of a reection already framed by
metaphysics, captured in the very binary logic that opposes form and meaning.
The real question is about the content of logical form as it appears in writing.
How does writing give shape to what we later dene as logical and meaningful? If we need genealogical research, it is the genealogy of the logical mind
through language, symbol, and sign, as it was unveiled by Vico and carried on
by Friedrich Creuzer.12 But such a genealogical inquiry cannot redress any
origin or any original truth. Origin and truth are simply nowhere to be found,
not because they are lost in some irretrievable past, but because they are nothing,
they are just the edge and the null of the inquiry itself. They are edge of the
trace, Derrida might say; or the line where the trace ceases to be a trace and
becomes the null of itself. Nothing changes if we substitute trace with practice,
since any practice, just like the trace, is limited by its own borders, its own
specic nothing.
Sini calls ethics of writing the acknowledgment of the niteness of every
practice as a nite and limited enactment of the sign. In his terms, ethics must
be understood as ethos, meaning habit (as Peirce would say) as well as dwelling:
ethos of writing as the practice of inhabiting the space of writing. It is all ethics of
transcription too, since every enactment of a sign-relation is, in its own way, a
writing, a de-sign of the world, a transcription of the world. Architecture
is writing, physics is writing, angling, to quote the classic Sophists example, is
writing, another way of clipping out a detail of the world. The ethics of writing
neither describes any of these writings nor does it attempt to deconstruct them.
It posits the question of what is the meaning (the content) of their event, where
is their threshold and what is their ground.
Nonetheless, between genealogical inquiry and its ethical resolution,
between the origin of writing and the ethics of writing, an intricate no-mans
land lies before our eyes. As we have already pointed out, the genealogy of
logical forms is not fully entitled to answer the question regarding the content
of logos. Whoever relies heavily on the results of genealogical inquiries maintains a strong faith (maybe too strong), in a navely assumed phenomenological
tenet, as if the sheer decision of going back to the thing itself (that is, writing
and its beginnings) would give us its essence, its meaning, its true sense.

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Genealogical researches are easily trapped in a vicious circle. Regardless of

how rened their procedures are, their point of view is always panoramic, ideal,
historical, which is exactly the point of view that alphabetic writing made
possible. Genealogy takes for granted that the object which it investigates is,
after all, objectiable. Its target cant be missed. In other words, isnt the
genealogical investigation of the content of logical form just another offspring of the well-known, archetypally metaphysical, will to truth? Only will
to truth can posit the problem of writing as the transcendental horizon of logos.
On the other hand, logos, transcendence, and truth become true objects of
thought only within the frame provided by alphabetic writing. It is the wellknown conundrum of the social sciences. Only the will to truth which is
internal to the anthropological project brings the anthropologist to question
his own position as a researcher. For similar reasons, the ideal Interpretant of the
origin of truth rises only within a will to truth so radical that it comes to
question its own foundations.13
We cannot dismiss any genealogical project, though, without standing up
to its claims (like Vico and Creuzer boldly did). That would be just the
prelude to a much bigger defeat, sentencing philosophy to silence, aporia, and
undecidability. He who has not the strength to challenge science on its
battleeld deserves its contempt. There are questions worth asking of science:
How did writing change from graphics to linear strings? How did the evocative, poetic voice surrender to alphabetic verse? How did the epic, symbolic
word, that fashioned its own temporality through rhythm, evolve into the
linear temporality intrinsic to the written text? As a result of this string-like
alignment, writing became invisible. We dont look at writing anymore, we
read it to know what it says (what its voice says). We follow a string of
points of which we cant say anything except that they have no sense in
themselves (they are conventional) and whose role is purely differential. The
same negative theology is shared by other metaphysical beliefs: time, Being,
and motion, all of them both thinkable, or unthinkable, within the frame of
linear writing.14
Still, genealogy cant really disclose what is essential to the way alphabetic
writing created the world that we still inhabit. We do not know how writing
disentangled itself from the sea of the other unrealized, latent chances that old
Parmenides, in the eponymous dialogue (137 a), called the sea of discourse
(pelagos logon). Genealogical inquiries are concerned with what does exist, not
with unrealized chances. What we need is an hypergenealogical project where
those chances are taken seriously as the null of every enterprise, the border and
the nothing which pertain to the unfolding of any event.
After Plato we cannot think as one could have thought before Plato. Anything we might think of doing wouldnt be thinking at all, it would be something else. And yet Plato is an answer to Socrates, to that truly demonic and
extraordinary man (Symposium, 219 c) who quietly unraveled the civilization in
which he was born, at the same time allowing for the foundation of another one.
To ask what is the content of logical form, what is the sense of philosophic
writing, and its difference from the primordial world of the gods, means to
wonder, once again, what is Socrates message. How can a Socrates appear?

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What is the meaning of his coming into the world? Why was it so necessary to
track down his words?
IV

THE TRUE DANCER

Regardless of the many authoritative answers the question has received, we

humbly have to ask it again. It is as much a fundamental question as the one on
the essence or the concealment of Being. The primary problem of philosophy is:
Who is Socrates? Very much like Plato, Socrates is an answer too. He answers
to Delphis oracle, which singled him out as the wisest of all men. Why
Socrates? No one knows. Socrates didnt know either. On the other hand (and
this is our point): Why not Socrates? Why not just someone? Why not just anyone?
If Socrates doesnt know why the oracle called upon him, that means that
Socrates is just like anybody else. Socrates is the rst Everyman of the great
profane tragedy of Western culture. In questioning Delphis oracle, he isnt just
kicking against the pricks like Moses did with the burning bush when he
complained of being unworthy of the divine call. Socrates why me? is much
more reasonable and therefore more awesome. With Socrates questioning his
call, the individual is born, the man in the street, the man who is like every other,
undistinguishable from his neighbor in the gods gaze, and who can be indifferently summoned or not summoned. There had to be an unpredictable latency in
the appearance of Socrates, some concealedness of its own, a difference which
was also an indifference (that is, absolute freedom of his call) concealed in his
coming about. The event of Socrates had been provoked by the oracle, but no
oracle would have foreseen how Socrates responded. What makes Socrates so
devastating is that his persona does not rise from the predictable result of any
process, not even by the standards of the most shrewd hermeneutics or historiography. His coming about showed a degree of phenomenical freedom that
bears almost no equivalent in the history of mankind. In other similar occurrences, like Jesus or Buddha, the same epiphanic liberty gave birth to religion,
not to philosophy. Socrates inexplicable indifference cannot be justied by any
genealogy. Reconstructing the world that preceded him is hopeless. On the
other hand, when Socrates epiphanic indifference clashes with philosophical
writing as it was passed down to us, it draws the real border (the edge of the
trace) of any genealogical inquiry on the meaning of writing itself. Philosophy
is the name of the writing that Socrates, albeit uninterested in writing, helped
give birth to by surreptitiously forcing Plato to write about him. And we cant
help but pause on the threshold of that event, since only on that very ne line
can we hear the echo of Socrates indifference (to the gods and to writing) as
well as have a glimpse of the universe that he left behind.
Without Plato there is no thinking. But without Socrates there is no Plato.
Was Plato ever free to think apart from the sheer power of Socrates presence?
Could we still call it thinking? This is a genealogical question we dont know
how to answer. We dont even know how to justify our obsessive desire for
unveiling the Platonic strategy, a desire that is still related to the Neoclassic
and Romantic turning point in European culture, when it was decreed that the
modern Europeans were the true descendants of Greek civilization. The legacy

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is still haunting. Regardless of Hegels gigantic enterprise (his dialectic being

the most straightforward attempt at rationalizing Trinitys dogma), in the
common sense of the last philosophers, and with few exceptions, Christianity is
little more than an accident that happened on the way to (or from) Plato, while
the contribution of Judaism to the roots of Western culture is still a matter of
controversy.
It has been remarked that Sinis Etica della scrittura seems to assume that our
era is nothing but the unfolding of the basic alienation of thought for which
Platonic metaphysics should be blamed. The remark deserves serious attention.
It addresses various positions that, mired in antimetaphysicial zealotry, seem
eager to get rid of the very tradition that gives them the linguistic tools they
couldnt do without. But thats not Sinis case. On his part, he has answered
that he does not believe that there are such things as metaphysics or thought
outside the alphabetic practice that actually created metaphysics, thought, and
their reality. His ethics of writing does not concern any alienation or distortion suffered by thinking because there is not such a thing as a true practice
being alienated by less true practices. Whoever thinks so still assigns values on
a metaphysical basis (that is, if values are not absolute they are not values at all).
As in C. S. Peirces pragmatic principle (where the object coincides with the
range of its effects), in Sini, every object of thought (every thing) is understood as the unfolding of a practice. Borrowing a line from a faithful Neoplatonist like W. B. Yeats, we might say that the thing is where you cant tell
the dancer from the dance.
Nonetheless, there is a true n de sicle obsession concerning the prenatal
condition of philosophy, from which Parmenides, Heraclitus, Democritus shine
their light like mysterious ghosts of whom we, who were born in Platos light,
know nothing of what we would like to know. We would like to experience
some sort of regression to that prenatal condition in order to know what would
have become of us if Socrates had been contented to follow Parmenides footprints, or if Plato wouldnt have burned his youthful attempts at tragedy when
he converted himself to dialectic. Thus, we inict the most sophisticated hermeneutic tortures on our bundle of surviving Greek texts, hoping that sooner
or later, under the pressure of our Inquisition machines, they will disclose their
secret. We know all too well that without Socrates, the midwife, and without
Plato, the doctor on duty, we wouldnt be here, because we would think
differently and wouldnt ask ourselves the same questions. Yet the abyss of the
private language which was spoken there, while remaining always obscure, will
never cease to beckon us.15 An alien wisdom is calling from that abyss, a
nonlinear, nonalphabetic, nonphilosophic knowledge that we try to recall every
time we immerse ourselves in the Dionysian world of musical harmony, or
when we dream shamanistic dreams ranging from the Living Theater to virtual
reality. On that knowledge, which is not nihilistic but simply tragic, philosophy has nothing to say. So, what is the realm of philosophy? What question
does philosophy claim as its own?
It is the question about questioning. Other gures of wisdom dont ask; they
already know it all. Two questions, actually: rst, why is there philosophy at all;
second, why do we keep on asking such a question. As it is easy to see, in putting

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together these two questions, we are still stuck with the penchant roles of the
genealogical approach (why philosophy?) and the theoretical one (why ask why
philosophy?). It is not a pointless activity, even though it appears addressed at
nothing else but itself. Other gures of wisdom may know their truth, and yet
they prevent themselves from asking questions on the nature of asking. Their
practice (their writing), which is kerygmatic and not dialogical, does not contemplate asking its own nature. Even the dialectical method that Parmenides
explained to the young Socrates (Parmenides 136 ac) did not originate from a
free inquiry upon truth, but from the assumption that the existence of the One
was the fundamentum preceding any questioning. And yet, even Parmenides
rigoristic approach was limited, anked as it was by the edge of its trace, its
own specic nothing. Question is the name of that nothing. Archaic wisdom
leaves no room for questioning within its borders. In so doing, it outlines the
external space where the interrogating habit exercises its domain. When Socrates answered Delphis oracle by questioning it, and by consulting other men in
order to decide, in the inner roots of his psuche, whether the oracle was or was
not correct, he claimed rule over that land that lay outside the unpatrolled
crack in the walls of traditional wisdom. From Plato on, the writing arm of
philosophy followed him. Perhaps, when Sini calls ethics of writing the habit of
dwelling on the threshold which lies between archaic knowledge and Socratic
knowledge (the knowledge to know nothing at all), he harks back to Heraclitus mysterious fragment 119 B: ethos anthropoidaimon. As ethos (habit, praxis,
character, the act of dwelling) is demon and guidance to man (what is divine in
man, who dwells near the divine), so ethics of writing, is the threshold, the
practice of self-containment, the praxis and the demon of an interrogating habit
that must constantly come to terms with its own endless self-interrogation.16
Translated from the Italian by Massimo Verdicchio

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3
ANALOGICAL THINKING
AS A FRIEND OF
INTERPRETIVE TRUTH

REFLECTIONS BASED ON
CARLO SINIS IMAGES OF TRUTH

Forrest Williams

Whoever possesses truths which in one way or another, knowingly or not, are not interpretations, i.e., signs and relations of
signs which innitely refer, let him come forward to cast the
rst stone. What the role of truth is in interpretation . . . is an
issue as inescapable as it is disquieting. . . . the philosopher is
rst of all the friend of truth.
Carlo Sini, Images of Truth: From Sign to Symbol

Carlo Sinis Images of Truth1 is a penetrating study and attempted resolution of

the apparent dilemma of squaring the interpretive character of all philosophic
discourse with the philosophic obligation to truth. Even if coherence certainly
is a necessary condition of truth where interpretation is at work, is it a sufcient
one? What assurance can there be that the outcome, however internally coherent, is in any credible sense a true one? With this dilemma in mind, we nd
Sini developing an original philosophic discourse, inspired by both Peirces
semiotic philosophy and Heideggers hermeneutic-phenomenological philosophy, that insists on being both interpretive and, as he phrases it, the friend
of truth. More exactly: regarding these two philosophies as theoretically
congruent and complementary, Sini locates his own thinking at what he and
others deem to be a philosophical convergence of Peirces innite semiosis
and Heideggers interpretation without end (IT, xxviii; IV, 8). These complementary approaches a philosophy of signs and a hermeneutic
philosophy both appear, unfortunately, to have radically nihilistic and relativistic implications. How, Sini rightly asks, can anyone [including, of
course, Peirce, Heidegger, and Sini himself ] speak of truth, authentically, if its

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form and image are constantly deferred in a movement which, from the point of
view of truth, is literally without either head or tail?
This concern, which in Anglo-American epistemological parlance would
generally be called radical skcepticism, has haunted modern philosophies at
least since Nietzsche and pragmatism, and perhaps even since Hegel. And Sini
insists that one cannot blithely turn a blind (that is to say, dogmatic) eye upon
this highly troubling implication; much less can one overtly concur with it,
since clearly one cannot pronounce the nihilistic or skeptical implication itself
to be true. Therefore, he locates his thought at this seeming dead end of
philosophical discourse as interpretive through and through, precisely in order,
instead, to confront it with the experience of truth (IT, xxix; IV, 10, Sinis
emphasis). In sum, his work is, in a broad sense of the term, phenomenological.
I shall not attempt here, of course, to represent this complex work one
which arouses in me, to borrow a phrase of his, consonances and elective
afnities (IT, xxvii; IV, 8). Rather, what I should like to investigate in this
limited space is another issue, concerning the very language for expressing the
basic concepts of philosophical inquiry. Though not Sinis issue in his book,
it seems to me germane to his (and others) concern with reconciling
interpretation and truth.
What sort of thinking or otherwise put, if you will, what sort of
language is needed for his philosophic project? The correct answer, I shall
propose, is that the fundamental concepts of any philosophical discourse and
ipso facto those of Sini must be analogical. I shall try to identify what I believe
to be his analogies.
Let me broach this matter by turning briey to a recent American philosopher, the late Stephen Pepper, who developed a somewhat similar view of
philosophical discourse by reference to metaphor rather than analogy.
In his once widely read book, World Hypotheses, Pepper had already expressed
views similar to those of Sini with specic regard to the untenability of radical
nihilism and relativism.2 There is, he wrote, the utter skeptic . . . whose only
safety (from self-contradiction) lies in silence, and there is the dogmatist, . . .
a more serious character than the utter skeptic . . . [who] will put you down by
main force . . . and he is no myth (WH, 7, 11).3
Pepper then proceeded to address the question of how an all-encompassing
philosophical system can generate its most fundamental cognitive concepts.
The issue is inherently puzzling, because such knowledge can be neither merely
logical in character, nor simply empirical, nor some random mix of these.
Peppers position, as some readers will recall, was that certain concepts are
removed from already established contexts of cognitive use and then employed
metaphorically. He termed such borrowed concepts, philosophical root metaphors, and claimed to have located four such root metaphors that have proved
themselves in the tradition adequate to the cognitive task of philosophy, naming them Form, Mechanism, Context, and Organism (WH, Chaps. 5
11 passim). Although I am in general agreement with Peppers view, I have
three specic difculties with it. The rst is that he attempted to bring all
major philosophies under one or another of four such metaphors, a claim that I
nd too reductive, considering the variety of major philosophic works. The

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second difculty is that he did not emphasise sufciently that any such root
metaphor, because no word exists in isolation, brings with it what
Wittegenstein would have termed a whole family of cognate terms and
concepts. I shall turn to the third matter in a moment.
First, rather than supposing only four such sources, it seems to me that we
should anticipate a far wider range of possibilities. For example, logic, mathematics, one or another of the natural sciences, various human studies, such as
history, social theories, those heterogeneous disciplines that bear the catch-all
title psychology, and even everyday common sense, appear to have been
deployed systematically in various philosophies.
Second, I suggest that a philosophical work is always, conceptually speaking,
indebted to some other, fairly coherent domain of knowledge and language for
its fundamental concepts. At the same time, it seems that philosophical discourse dare not navely embrace such borrowed concepts literally, on pain of
simply dissolving its own inquiry into a branch of logic, mathematics, one or
another school of psychology, or whatever.
The third difculty I nd with Peppers views is that metaphors are too
imaginatively explosive, as it were, and therefore too difcult to put to controlled theoretical use. Hence my proposal to look, instead, for what I shall call
root analogies, a far more orderly and reliably communicable use of language.
Philosophers of rhetoric and literary critics seem fairly well agreed that
analogies and metaphors lie in close proximity along a continuum of gurative
language and thought. Indeed, metaphors have often been called implicit analogies, and analogies, discursively elaborated metaphors.4 However, just
because the metaphor is the far more compressed, imaginatively rich, and
associatively powerful trope, it may be all the more valuable to the poet but all
the more risky for the philosopher. By comparison, an analogy (as the etymology of logos already suggests) is a more discursive, more logically regulated,
and more intellectually driven gure of speech. It requires that we thoughtfully
consider similarities and differences between states of affairs, and sieve these
according to their relevance to the analogical intent. Sensuously and imaginatively thinner than metaphor, and intellectually more provocative, analogies can
be more friendly, in Sinis sense, to the ultimate philosophic concern with truth.
Some philosophers would, of course, object to assigning a fundamental role
in philosophy to any gure of speech whatsoever (although, if I am right, they
themselves must be doing so, if only unwittingly). We need only recall the
general rule in the Age of Reason, with its strict condemnation of any use of
gurative language in philosophy; motivated by their understandable hostility
to prevailing theological obscurantism, tropes were viewed as mere ornaments,
forbidden to anyone seriously interested in truth. But by the nineteenth century, no less a thinker than Mill had already deemed analogizing a process
sufciently rational to be counted as a mode of logical inference (analogia, as the
Greek has it). Its value, he rightly noted, depends on the nature of the resemblances on which they are based and on that of differences which they disregard. (EB, 1910, vol. 1, 91213). In our own times, the modern literary
critic, Cleanth Brooks, drew the implied consequence straightforwardly: analogy, he stated, is a means of presenting a truth incommunicable by other

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means (EB, 1992). In sum, I suggest, analogical thinking can indeed be a

friend of truth, provided that differences and resemblances are thoughtfully
regarded. This thesis of analogical borrowing, I must emphasize, is by no
means intended as a psychological claim about any philosopher, including Sini.
The philosophical borrower certainly need not agree with either Peppers
overall view or mine on this matter. Possible analogies are simply there for the
taking, in the given language and culture.
I have already remarked on two preconditions: the pre-existing or prototypical discourse must itself be a cognitive one, some domain of knowledge, so
that the prototype concepts would already be fairly clear and understood, however implicitly, within their native setting; and, such analogical transfers, it
should be clear by now from the very meaning of the term analogue, will
never amount to a wholesale incorporation of the prototype concept. For a
familiar example, we might cite Kants fundamental (transcendental) principle of a priori synthetic judgment. The analogical transfer commanding the
rst two Critiques is plainly indebted to the cognitive domain of coherent
judicial discourse, as Kants term Urteil or judgment suggests. In a courtroom trial, as we well know, someone cognitively competent to do so brings
together the available evidence, and then judges a priori, which is to say,
according to pre-existing laws. By contrast, in the third Critique, shifting to the
fundamental notion of reective (rather than determinant) judgment, the
operative analogy is rather more to an appellate court nding, where preexisting legal determinations applied by lower courts are themselves surveyed
and as a result (in some cases) yield an essentially creative judgment with no
exact legal precedent. The eventual value of a given analogical use cannot, of
course, be demonstrated in advance: the proof will always be in the pudding.
It must be admitted, of course, that beyond the common comprehension to
which I am appealing, this vast topic of analogical thinking still remains one of
the least examined today.5 I shall assume that for present purposes enough has
been said about it to allow me to turn to my previously anticipated question:
within Sinis text, just which pre-existing domain of cognitive discourse provides him with the analogical concepts employed for interpreting our experience of truth? The answer to this question will, of course, illustrate the thesis
just advanced concerning the role of analogy in philosophy.
Let me begin by presenting (sketchily, of necessity) an example of one of
Sinis important inquiries in Images of Truth. I title it, for reasons that will be
apparent shortly, the child-moon episode. I shall then to anticipate try to
show that the philosophical concepts skillfully invoked by Sini demand to be
read as analogues of concepts familiar to us in a specic cognitive domain: that
of literary criticism.6
Finally, in support of this thesis, I shall offer a concrete (though highly
condensed) instance of the domain of literary criticism by criticizing briey
two well-known poems.

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THE CHILD-MOON EPISODE

The main philosophical concepts the root concepts that emerge in Sinis
meta-interpretation of the experience of truth by way of his example of the
child-moon episode are: whole and part, perfect and imperfect,
near and far, and affective tonality or mood (IT, 1007; IV, 13443).
Of necessity, I limit myself in this section to culling those few elements of
Sinis analyses that are most telling with regard to these concepts.
In the modern philosophical tradition, Sini points out, we have come to
think of ourselves as private psyches confronting a public world. But this
so-called private psyche, though real enough in its own way, is actually itself
a formation of a public world, which is itself already constituted by signrelational experiences, in Peirces sense (IT, 93; IV, 124). The latter experiences,
however, are themselves neither private nor public. Unfortunately, familiar
epistemological dichotomies private/public, inner/outer have falsied
from the start the structures of our concrete, lived experiencing or esperire. (The
Italian innitive employed by Sini, as Massimo Verdicchio helpfully advises us
in his translation, is more dynamic or processual in its connotations than our
common English locution, experience [IT, 158, n. 67].) Such typical oppositions then move to exclude as no friend of truth, one might say, because
merely private, a dimension of experience that is not really private, since the
private does not yet exist (IT, 934; IV, 124). Unfortunately, the effect is to
distort that dimension of experience by measuring it in terms already regulated
by constituted public language and public concepts (IT, 94; IV, xxx). (No doubt
Descartes would serve as a typical example, with his notion of secondary
qualities, that is, secondary to those primary qualities of objects that can be
measured according to publicly established standards.)
We deect these misleading distortions and partis pris, Sini maintains, when
we recognize that experiencing (esperire) is an interpretational sign-relation of
the complex structural sort schematized by Peirce as the triad, Interpretant
RepresentamenObject (IT, 102; IV, 1356). Clearly, Interpretant is not
to be taken here in the conventional sense of a private psyche, Subject, or inner
substance, much less as an inner object, since any of these would simply land
us back in the dichotomies already rejected. An Interpretant is, rather, a
responding-to . . . , Sini notes (IT, 11516; IV, 1524).
We must turn in reection, then, to esperire, and be careful to suspend the
dualistic conceptual habit of prematurely publicizing some dimensions of
experience and thereby prematurely privatizing others.
In the child-moon episode, borrowed by Sini from Piaget, a child is being
carried, and is looking at the moon, relative to which, of course, he is changing
position (as we would say in public discourse). Interestingly enough, the child
spontaneously reports both that he is moving the moon and that, just as he is
looking at the moon, so the moon is also looking back at him (IT, 101; IV,
134). One is of course inclined to smile indulgently at such childish delusions.
The childs utterances, when judged by common-sense discourse, scientic
discourse, or much of modern philosophy, are simply false; so, we take them to
refer to nothing more than a merely private, psychological experience, as
opposed to being publicly veriable statements. In sum, we immediately

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introduce an epistemological schism between, on the one hand, a true (that is,
objective) account and, on the other hand, a false (that is, subjective)
account which holds no interest for the philosopher as friend of truth. Now,
there is no doubt that these are indeed the nave utterances of a child. But for
Sinis philosophical purposes, so much the better: since the philosophical issue
at stake is not at all one for either common sense concepts or for those of
psychology or physics. The prior philosophical issue, rather, is just how a public
world and its private dimension are constituted to begin with, so that our
everyday (and sometimes scientically sophisticated) modes of cognition may
eventually come to nd their own suitable ranges of application.
Sini goes on to contend that, however strange it may seem to already constituted common sense, long habituated to thinking in terms of a constituted
external world, the looking relation here is somehow reciprocal. The child
feels at the same time [that he is looking at the moon] that he is being looked
at (and perhaps protected) by the moon (IT, 102; IV, 136; my emphases). Of
course, one is inclined to counter immediately, almost by conditioned philosophical reex, with the familiar strategy of modern epistemologies one
which has had a decisive inuence on most of our modern philosophies. Pouncing upon the telltale verb feels, one moves to declare summarily that the
(mere) feeling of reciprocity is, like all feelings, of no cognitive signicance.
Sini therefore attempts to activate a counter-vision that will improve our comprehension of how the child and the moon have already become for us distinct
entities occupying a public world (Cf., IT, 98; IV, 130). As Sini puts it:
To call this [feeling of reciprocal looking] a childs psychological fantasy
is once again to assume child as already constituted reality and,
naturally, moon too as an object in itself. This means being unable to
understand the primordial and constitutive character of the [sign-] relation
moon-child . . . Even the adult looks at the moon feeling somehow that
he is being looked at and perceives this look sometimes as benevolent
and sometimes as malevolent; among his most common expressions there
is, for example, to be moonstruck, and so on. Why? Nobody knows.
Common sense says that these are just fantasies, oddities. The psychoanalyst
says that these are just sub-conscious projections.
(IT, 102; IV, 136)
One may well be reminded here of Merleau-Pontys citation of Paul Klee, to the
effect that in a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked
at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking
to me.7 Interestingly enough, then, it is not only the nave child, but likewise
the mature artist, who may so describe certain experiences.
So here is a Peircean sign-relational event, Sini contends, that is neither
private nor public, neither inner nor outer. And, speaking in a complementary Heideggerean fashion, he writes that the moon-child experience is
an event in the constitution of the being-in-the-world-of-man (IT, 101; IV, 135;
my emphasis). The primordial structure of experience is not that of a duality,
but of a bipolar process. What the child navely and spontaneously expressed,
was the reciprocity of primordial experience; which is not at all equivalent to,

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but constitutive of, our derivative and (so to speak) commonsensical conception
of me-here/world-there.
This structural reciprocity of experience, moreover, challenges some of our
other commonsensical conceptions as well, according to Sini. Consider our
notions of the near and the far. Did not the child experience the moon as far
away, as over there? (IT, 103ff.; IV, 137ff.). Yes and no. Certainly, there is in
this experience an over-thereness, a far-ness, about the moon. Yet, that very
over-there-ness is simultaneously experienced as here, that is, as a far-ness
which for all that does not so separate the moon from the child that the moon is
not experienced at the same time as near. This is why the child can move
the moon as the child is carried along. Naturally, this world-constitutive
dimension cannot possibly refer to the measurable distance within the constituted public world, approximately 186,000 miles, that Neil Armstrong travelled in a space rocket. It would be absurd to propose to measure this
nearness-farness by publicly applicable standards. Nor is it to be preemptively classied as a merely private phenomenon. This dimension of
distance-in-proximity might be best designated, I suggest, by a gerund,
grammatically speaking: for example, as a spanning.
I am reminded here of the words by which the notion of far is expressed, I
have been told, in Zulu parlance, an African language that happened to
develop, as we know, in circumstances relatively free of the Western inuence of
the particular linguistic stratagems of scientic and industrial societies. Fully
translated into our language, the Zulu phrase apparently says nothing less than:
There-where-my-mother-cant-hear-me-any-more-when-I-am-crying. In the
phrase when-I-am-crying, we hear expressed the experiential feature of nearness; in the phrase, cant-hear-me, the feature of farness; and in the word
mother, the reciprocity of farness-in-nearness-and-nearness-in-farness.
This cross-linguistic comparison, with its references to maternal care and tears,
may serve here to introduce yet another salient feature of Sinis analysis of esperire.
The child-moon phenomenon is pervaded throughout, and subtended, by an
affective character that it would be somewhat misleading to dub an emotion,
as that term is commonly understood in everyday language and by many psychologists. This affect is a global feature of the child-moon episode, not a
component or epiphenomenal effect. What would therefore be better termed
an affective tonality is essential to the very possibility of the experience of
interpretive objects, because it rst supplies a world within which they are
able to appear. Whereas, to speak here of an emotion (even the term, feature, is misleading) would almost inevitably be to call to mind this or that
particular, isolable, private event caused by other events taking place within
an already given public world. Sini contends, correctly I think, that this
affective tonality would be conceived quite incorrectly as only a particular
psychological reaction to an already given object (though of course there is that
going on, too, psychologically provoked by the childs sensory perceptions,
movements, etc.).
Rather, categorically distinguishable from this or that particular emotional
reaction, can be discerned some sort of affectivity for which it is admittedly
difcult to nd a customary name among either everyday or purportedly more

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scientic languages of psychology; for these have been institutionally fashioned

for quite other purposes than the reective analysis of experience.
The requisite philosophical concept, according to Sini, is a pervasive and
globalizing affective tonality which Heidegger had already called attention to
by way of his concept of mood (Stimmung) (IT, 100; IV, 134). In Sinis view,
Heidegger thus introduced an extraordinarily valuable topic which he never
fully pursues (IT, 99; IV, 131). Pursuing it himself, Sini holds that mood in
Heideggers sense is vital to the very possibility of the Peircean sign-relation,
for example, the child-moon experience. It functions to open up a world-like
structure of experience in the rst place (IT, 99100; IV, 1324). In this particular instance, there is not, then, a mere feeling in the sense already noted, but an
affective mood of reciprocity that opens a world within which can be disclosed
such things as child, moon-against-sky, trees-in-park, and whatever other
meaningful entities may be contingently here or there in a world.
And yet, Sini reminds us, it is only too easy for both philosophers and
psychologists to overlook or even dismiss its crucial epistemic role because of the
reference to affectivity:
as soon as we say emotion or emotional, these words commonly stand
. . . for something referring or relative to a private or internal event
. . . [But] private facts are a formation and a consequence of the public
eye . . . , divisions which are neither original nor unproblematic. Therefore, let us take a point of view different from the obvious one provided by
common sense and its public truths.
(IT, 98; IV, 131)
Mood, then, has no less central an epistemic function than that of founding
and constructing what can be rendered as the objective world of knowledge (IT,
98; IV, 131). Hence, Sini warns, we may not reduce as the philosophical
tradition has inclined to do the dimension of Stimmung or mood, to
nothing more than
a feeling or a state of mind that is added psychologically, within the
mans head, to real bodies and to real public objects. Let us think of it
as that relation that literally opens up the world.. . . Nothing real
could be encountered without mood. . . . It is in mood, with
mood, for mood, that what we have here called constitutive relations or originary relations are continuously occurring.
(IT, 99100; IV, 1314)
Still cleaving to Sinis analysis of the child-moon episode, let me conclude my
highly schematic version of Sinis account with his discussion of the categories
of part and whole.
In the metaphysical tradition, true thought has been supposed to be capable
at some point of conceiving a positive whole. True cognition, Nous or Dianoia,
thus achieves an overview, a birds-eye view, a pan-oramic apprehension of
reality in all its perfection. Into this supposed positive whole, parts may be
tted, each such part being what is not itself the whole; what is therefore

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known to be imperfect, as over against the perfection of the positive whole

in its thoroughly done, per-fected (facere), and non-temporal nished-ness.
Certainly, this metaphysical notion of a perfect, positive whole, within which
everything else can be subordinated, and is merely temporal and partial, hence
imperfect, has been rejected by both Peircean semiosis and Heideggerean
hermeneutics.
At rst sight, as has often been objected, what seems to remain, therefore, to
these (and some other) modern philosophies, is simply one part after another,
with no beginning or end, and no admissible concept of wholeness whatsoever.
Thus, truth must amount for Peirce to the long run. But how long a
run, before one can say, Yes, this is indeed so? Unfortunately, there appears
to be only innite semiosis, or alternatively, interpretation after interpretation.
Thus, it is only in a Pickwickian sense that one can speak of truth, it would
seem. An ironic outcome for any philosophical, that is, cognitive endeavour.
Hence, the common charge of radical nihilism or skepticism noted earlier.
The traditional Parmenidean aspiration to apprehend a perfect whole
need not and should not be jettisoned, however. While it now becomes impossible to speak intelligibly, on the basis of Sinis analysis of the child-moon
phenomenon, of a positive or perfect whole, there is, according to Sini, something that nevertheless allows and even demands the root concepts (in my
terms) of whole and part. Again, no positive whole in the traditional metaphysical sense, is ever discoverable. But the alternative is not: no whole at all.
Rather, the experience does require the concept of a negative whole. It is
important, however, to see that this is not the nonsensical notion of a whole
which is somehow just nothing at all (IT, 105ff.; IV, 139ff.).
There are two possible senses of nothing or negation here. They happen
to be, in the contingency of common speech, more conveniently distinguishable in Italian than in English. To make the conceptual distinction, Sini avails
himself of two very different Italian words, niente and nulla (IT, 106; IV,
141). Since no phenomenon can conceivably provide panoramic grasp of anything as a positive whole (e.g., the whole moon, much less of the whole of
reality), one can say, not just adventitiously but in principle: there is no such
(positive) whole. But this does not mean that the whole-to-part and part-towhole structure therefore translates ( per impossibile) into a nothing-at-allwhole-(to)-a-part-of-nothing-at-all structure (or vice versa). That would
indeed be the absurd implication, if the whole were niente, that is, just nothing at all. However, the whole at issue here is not niente, is not just nothing
at all. Rather, wholeness gures in the phenomenon as il nulla, the null, of
the evident part-iality of that (particular) moon or child. This null whole,
which then is by no means some vacuous nothing at all, in fact determines
the very identity of the part, making of the part a perfect-ed part, that is, in the
root sense of a nished, de-nite, determinate part. In this sense, null wholeness is a constitutive and organizing ingredient in every primordial, triadic
sign-relation, and is an indispensable concept (IT, 105; IV, 141) Otherwise
put, in the experience in question, the signied moon must be understood as a
(null) whole that is present in that perfectly determinate part, but present
precisely as absent.

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Every sign-relation, then, Sini proposes, is not only sign of this or that particular object (for example, the moon), but is in the last instance, segno di nulla
[sign of nothing] understood as the sign of a null whole that, without being a
positive totality, yet enables the given part to be just the determinate part that
it is (IT, 106; IV, 141). An important consequence, Sini holds, is that we must
also revise the traditional metaphysical concepts of perfection and imperfection associated, respectively, with whole and part. By virtue of being evidently
partial, the child-moon experience is not in consequence somehow imperfect;
relative to, say, some (alas!) still unrealized perfect whole (IT, 107; IV, 142).
Rather, the experience is perfect while (indeed, because), by the same token, it is
partial. In sum, on Sinis semiotic-hermeneutic analysis of esperire, perfection, quite contrary to the metaphysical tradition, does not call for a single,
positive, and actual whole, however denominated, but only wholes which are
always and everywhere part-ial by virtue of their negative wholeness.8
Needless to say, this conceptualization of experience not only ies in the face
of the metaphysical tradition rejected by Sinis hermeneutic-Peircean philosophy, but departs equally from publicly-constituted common sense, daily
corroborated by common speech; and also, does not coincide with any objective
concepts of the sciences; and, does not fall gratefully on some philosophically
attuned ears. Hence, Sini insists, to really understand its meaning . . . , we
must rst destroy . . . the public logos in whose light we have been educated,
been brought up, and have learned to speak and think (IT, 98; IV, 130).
And here, I would say, arises the question concerning the source of such
fundamental concepts which is at the heart of this discussion: if the concepts
employed in the child-moon analysis are as they must be
metainterpretational concepts, where in the world (for there can be no other
origin) can we garner them in the rst place?
I have previously claimed that such specically philosophical concepts must
turn on an analogical use of concepts borrowed from some other, going sphere
of knowledge. In this instance, where might those prototypes be located? My
reply, as I have indicated, will be that literary criticism, the capacity to think
and talk about works of art (most conveniently here, poems), could best provide
us wittingly or not with the suitable analogues for the root-concepts
employed by Sini in Peircean-Heideggerean metainterpretation of the experience of truth. In support of this suggestion, I now turn to concrete, critical
analysis of two short pieces of writing in verse form that are frequently selected
for anthologies of poetry.9
TWO POEMS

The rst, Dylan Thomass Do not go gentle into that good night, is an
exemplary poetic achievement. The second, William Ernest Henleys Invictus, is a mediocre effort; properly speaking, it is a would-be poem that is little
more than a pseudo-example of poetry. In the spuriousness of the latter piece,
however, lies precisely its theoretical usefulness, as I will try to show. I have also
chosen these particular examples, partly because both are short, but more
important, because they share a certain supercial similarity in content. Both

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display prominently the familiar and generic emotional themes of deance and
anger. This particular resemblance will facilitate comparison. (I should
confess or better, warn! at once that what I shall have to say about the
Dylan Thomas poem, will not only, in the nature of the case, be egregiously
meager compared to the extraordinary richness of the poem itself, but will be
an instance of rankly amateur literary criticism undertaken solely to make a
philosophical point.)
1.

Dylan Thomass Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in ight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your erce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Some few comments relevant to my claim:

In line 1 of Dylan Thomass poem, the grammatically anticipated adverb,
gently, which the commonsensical reader (we, one) almost surely expects, is
displaced, as it were, by the adjective, gentle; a word that, by way of its accented
rst syllable and its wholly unexpected softening in the second syllable ( gentle as
contrasted to the expected gently) stands forth in the sound of the rst line, by
the same token introducing a momentary pause in its rhythm. Embedded in
the admonition, even imperative, of this rst line, the softness of sound and
meaning of gentle partially transforms the opening command into a quiet
enjoining, an asking. But this is soon followed by an assertive, almost indignant, almost angry exclamation in line 2. Then line 3 names, and expresses by
its rhythm as well (Rage, rage against . . . ), like an enraged cry now almost out
of control, an anger that now seems to have been already lurking in line 2. But
by the end of line 3 this anger is immediately gathered up and muted into the
sadness of the dying of the light caring, grieving words for someone near death.

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One cannot but notice, surely, how crude and strained is this description
that perforce relies on our standard vocabulary for our most conventional ideas
of human emotions; and how I have spoken of successive lines, where in fact
there is a cumulative interplay and a continual retotalizing. For example, line 1
recurs later, word for word (see line 6), as any computer could easily conrm in
its robotic way. But what the reader (in contrast to any computer) will understand is that the rst two stanzas are now being subtly tied together, in a unity
that nevertheless embodies a distinction: line 6, though indeed repeating line 1
word for word, has subtly shifted from the imperative to the indicative mood
(again, dont ask the computer), thanks to the new subject-term, they,
appearing at the end of line 5. Since they prove to be wise men, realizing the
failure of their words, who do not go gentle into that good night, and (now looking
ahead) are soon to be succeeded in the poem by good men, wild men, and grave men
as well, the scope of the poem expands, and its addressees increase in variety:
all these the wise, the good, the wild, and the grave are commanded/
enjoined/begged to rage, rage against the dying of the light. But these are soon to
converge again, as the speaker then addresses you, my father, there on the sad
height; evoking, of course, the personal image of a dying father, yet at the same
time the pervasive religious image of Golgotha. The invocation, curse, bless, me
now with your erce tears, recalls at once the wrath and mercy of the Old Testament father-God as well as that of the dying parent. Then, suddenly: I pray. We
feel the full stop, as if the poem were ending, as the two words infuse now a
reverent tone into the speakers voice, at the outset so dominating and assertive,
now so small and humbled before that towering Father/father. Then, the last
two lines surprisingly repeat the rst and third lines of the rst stanza, or
rather echo them in a different emotional register that yet complements and
completes the preceding lines. For of course although the tokens are identical,
they now register quietly, pleadingly, almost unbearably sadly, rather than
angrily; because the penultimate as well as the last of these two lines comes to
a complete stop at a period, the forward movement of the poem that had been
increasing in vigour now comes to an end with shocking rapidity. The last line
closes the poem with a feeling of ineluctable nality that gives to the poetic
whole a clear limit, that de-nes it, in the root sense of de-nes, circumscribes, completes, per-fects, thus making of the poetic experience a
determinate part that is at the same time a null whole. And so the poem
closes about itself, precisely by both re-invoking and yet revoking its opening
command.
I am embarrassed to have presented here so simplistic and clumsy a gloss on
but a fraction of what goes on linguistically, imaginally, rhythmically, sonorously, culturally, and always emotionally, in this remarkable poem. Owing to the
multiple meanings alone of so many of the words, one could of course gloss
more or less endlessly, with a variety of emphases and perspectives on this
poetic object that would further multiply the possible observations. Yet no
such extravaganza of commentary would really add up to the distinctive wholeness
of this particularized experience of the poem. For it is not a wholeness that can
ever be positively identied apart from or over and above the lines before us.
Rather, precisely because its wholeness, unlike that of (say) the Pythagorean

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theorem, cannot possibly be comprehended as a positive totality over and above

its elements, the poem as a positive entity perpetually eludes us, and seems to
be present only in its absence. The poem, consequently, is at one and the same
time an entirely de-nite part, and a non-positive or null whole. It is, therefore, not im-perfect, but perfect-ed. It is complete and entire, yet in a way
that does not for a moment exclude, as does Spinozas Substance, the happy
possibility of any number of equally perfect-ed poems (of whose existence, in
fact, we well know).
But I have been speaking of Dylan Thomass poem as if it were simply a
text out there, when clearly the poem is as much in our responses as in the
object. Indeed, the conventionally imagined separateness of subject and
object no longer obtains, properly speaking, and we nd instead an experience, where self and object, reader and poem, are its reciprocal moments, or
polarities. It is, to recall the child-moon episode, near in its farness and far in its
nearness.
Moreover, although I have noted that the poem expresses in word, sound,
and imagery a combining or transforming of various familiar emotions and
attitudes, e.g., of command, injunction, deance, declaration, pleading,
encouragement, sadness, anger, and prayerfulness, I have of course failed and
must have failed to convey its unique affective tonality, its globalizing mood,
that does not merely refer to and associate stock human emotions such as anger
or fear, but is a pervasive affective structure that constitutes or opens up a world
within which everything appears different from our everyday world. In the
constitution of this world, our institutionalized repertory of emotional reactions has served as at best a source of raw materials. The world-opening Stimmung of this particular poem is integrative, and its revealed world, is entirely
unique; if per impossibile its elements could be named, their names could only be
that null and perfect-ed whole which is the poem itself.
2.

William Ernest Henleys Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall nd me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

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Here, the critical task is no longer utterly daunting, but singularly unrewarding, due to the mediocrity of the piece. It is easy enough to note, to begin with,
that Henleys meter is monotonous, that his choice of words is hackneyed (this
place of wrath and tears, the horror of the shade, etc.), that he used a rhyme scheme
so implacably that it seems to control the words, rather than work with them;
and so on. The verse form of broken lines is an arbitrary imposition, justied
only by the rhyming. All that is offered could just as readily be offered and
would be more gratefully said as a simple series of four unbroken sentences
(albeit annoyingly pretentious ones). As a consequence, the sort of wholeness
possessed by these words can be located only extrapoetically, when they are
taken simply as someones prosaic declaration of intent, like an act of promising
to repay a loan or to abstain from smoking a performative utterance in
Austins sense. And precisely because Henley presents us (confusingly, in a
textual format that by the conventions of literature suspends practical accountability) with a performative or series of them, the emotional contents, which it
does little more than talk about, can easily be identied and catalogued by such
generic and abstract terms as deance, anger, etc. Thus, all sixteen lines (or
better, all four sentences) could simply be replaced, without loss as a signifying
event, by any commonplace declaration of resolve appropriately uttered under
trying circumstances; for example, Whatever happens, I just wont give up!
Such a vow does represent, of course, a very important sort of linguistic statement, since such utterances are established and understood through a set of
accepted social customs and contexts for present and future action. And, in a
sense, I want to suggest, so simple, prosaic, and conventional a paraphrase as I
have made would be far preferable to Invictus; would indeed be far less
imperfect, if you will, precisely because it would raise for the ideally responsive reader none of the linguistic confusions and frustrated expectations generated by Henleys deliberate and egregious choice of a rhyming verse format. As
it stands, then, by assuming this presumptively poetic format, Invictus seems
gratuitous. Indeed, it is hard not to wonder, with some irritation, about the
rationale for such a lengthy and ponderous linguistic apparatus introduced to
say something so commonplace; in sum, to think about the author, his motivations, his apparent self-delusion, and who knows what other matters in the
public world. What, one may legitimately be tempted to ask in exasperation,
can have been either the private or public occasion calling for this particular
sequence of words or sentences? But of course any appropriately motivating
context has been excluded in principle by the verse form and the actual context
of an anthology of poetry. It is somewhat as if, walking down the street with
Henley, one were to hear him suddenly declare, The sun is shining, or Im
not going to give my house to that stranger over there, with no further
explanation forthcoming for these gratuitous utterances. As Wittgenstein
might observe, one might well take such a speaker to be in a bizarre state of
mind, if not deranged.
To put it mildly then, this aggregate of components, does not have the
completed, de-ned character that would make it, like Do not go gentle into
that good night, perfect. Given our rightful expectations of something
clearly not asking to be read as a statement of public or private fact, but as

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something of poetic value, it turns out to be de-pressive rather than expressive.10 Perhaps one could even say that in a sense every bad (that is, failed) effort
at what presents itself as poetry, or speaking more generally, as a work of art, is
a singularly depressing image of that very spectre of intellectual nihilism, of that
niente, that has long been perceived to threaten Peirces innite semiosis,
Heideggers hermeneutics, and any metainterpretive philosophy. By contrast,
the real afnity is not between W. E. Henleys Invictus and Dylan Thomass
poem, despite certain generic emotional themes these may be seen to share in a
highly abstract sense, and in spite of the interesting fact that both are frequently anthologized; the greater afnity lies between the child-moon episode
and Dylan Thomass poem; for, admittedly different as they are, both answer to
the same conceptual analysis.
If we ask, then, whence we derive our capacity as ordinary-language, publicly constituted, and privatized adults, to understand the philosophical
concepts employed by Sini to (meta)-interpret the primordial esperire of the
child-moon episode, the answer may lie for myself, does lie in concepts
employed analogically, concepts whose prototypes may most readily be found
in the cognitive enterprise of literary criticism.11
This has been a speculative extrapolation of my own, of course, from a brief
but I think highly representative portion the child-moon episode of a
complex philosophical theory of knowledge and experience as through and
through interpretive; and, of course, is itself necessarily an interpretation one
that could well be quite off the mark.
But perhaps, I should like to think, it may in fact embody for Carlo Sini
some consonances and elective afnities. Possibly it even offers, in effect, a
kind of philosophical rationale for this comment made by the author himself in
Images of Truth: There are moments in experience in which nothing (nulla) in
its most pregnant deniteness, is attained. . . . Maybe the play of Art aims,
deep down, at this essential place of experience (IT, 107; IV, 143).

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INTRODUCTION

Robert Burch

The last seminar of Heideggers teaching career dealt with Hegels Science of
Logic. That Heidegger chose this particular text for the occasion was doubtless
more than a whim. It is in the Logic that Hegel argues in the element of pure
thought alone1 for the concept of identity as the negation of negation. And it
is this concept that both epitomizes and fullls (vollendet) the metaphysical
tradition inaugurated by Parmenides and Plato.
Hegels argument is familiar and in its formal terms can be quickly summarized. A pure, abstract, undifferentiated identity is unthinkable. In order to be
able to grasp identity as such (as expressed in the principle AA), the terms of
the tautology must rst be determined in thought as differentiated to be able
then to be equated in a relation of identity. This differentiation is negation,
since in the element of pure thought alone, negation is the minimum rationale
for the thought of difference. Accordingly, in principle of identity itself, the
term A is thinkable as such only in terms of the thought of not-A as its sheer
negation. In the thought of this principle, then, there is an essential mediation.
That is to say, in the positing of A, not-A as the determining negation that
differentiates A as such must also be posited, with the (self-) identity of A
being established in the thought of the negation of this negation. Stated more
simply: A is A by virtue of not being not-A.
This concept of identity has momentous implications. It establishes as the
rst law of thought that all rational thinking must proceed in terms of
negations and binary oppositions. Moreover, if identity is negation of negation,
and otherness is only the negative moment in a self-relation, then truth is
complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and hence consists in this
unity.2 In concrete terms, this thesis is played out famously, for example, in
Hegels phenomenological account of the essential origin of selfhood as one that
begins with a battle to the death for prestige and has its immediate resolution
in a master/slave relation. Such inequities persist, until in absolute knowledge,
which is the true form of selfhood, all difference as such has been sublated
(aufgehoben), and all otherness-to-self has been rendered inessential.
That Heidegger should be troubled by this concept of identity is scarcely
surprising. His express project is to reect (nachdenken) on the essence of
metaphysics in order to bring to light as such the hitherto unthought ontological difference of Being and beings. In this way, he seeks to overcome the leveling hegemony of metaphysics, and to preserve what he considers to be the

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multi-dimensionality peculiar to the domain of thinking.3 As the fulllment

of the metaphysical tradition, Hegels concept of identity could hardly be
further from Heideggers thinking. For in that conception, the ontological
difference proves to be absolutely, essentially no difference at all.
In that place of Hegels metaphysical concept of identity, Heidegger thinks of
identity in terms of a sameness (das Selbe), which he characterizes enigmatically
as a belonging-together of what is different through a gathering by way of
difference.4 The intent of this characterization is less puzzling, if one recalls by
way of contrast that in the Hegelian case, the moment of difference is posited as
negation, and although essential as a moment, in truth it resolves into the unity
(Einheit) of identity. In Heideggers understanding of sameness, the moment
of difference is thought of as a differentiation in the essence of the matter itself,
yet one in which the terms encounter each other in the same only when and as
long as they remain determinate in the differentiation of their essence (PLT,
218). Still, as Heidegger himself might concede, this understanding of identity
as sameness is the name for a matter of thinking (Sache des Denkens), not a
doctrine to be received. For it leaves open the question of what, if not negation,
differentiates in the essence of sameness, and hence what in each case holds the
same together as such in difference as the particular identity that it is.
As one might expect, Derrida responds to this Hegelian/Heideggerian problmatique in large measure by sidestepping it. Following Saussure, he represents
identity in terms of diacritical difference; that is to say, identities are constituted not as positive terms in themselves, but in and through a network of
differences that obtain between and among terms. In this understanding there
is no singular logic that connects the terms in one way only, and hence no
singular, centered determination of identity. Identity, then, is always deferred,
always yet to come. This is the case, then, for our self-identity too, which is
represented as always already in play and in question.
All of the essays collected in this section move in and around this issue of
identity and difference in its post-Hegelian formulation. Broadly speaking,
what they have in common is a critique of the speculative closure and indifference that is now typically regarded as fundamental to the edice of metaphysics, and a concern for reformulating how, beyond metaphysics, the issue of
identity, and of self-identity in particular, is to be addressed.
In the rst essay of this section, When Truth Becomes Woman: Males
Traces and Female Signs, Eve Tavor Bannet takes issue with Derrida, contesting the account of phallogocentrism provided in his classical study, perons/
Spurs. The structural basis of that account that the sign reveals and conceals a
trace of that which is Wholly Other is something which, as Eve Bannet avows
in the perfect tense with a pluperfect tone, we have always already said. The
specic terms of that structure, and the argument that Derrida builds upon it,
are also by now quite familiar. The history of Truth in the West, Derrida
contends, derives from a particular gendering of signs and traces, that is, where
the sign is male, and the trace is female. Accordingly, the question for Derrida
. . . is the extent to which truth becomes different [and] . . . differently, when
we change the genders around. This is the question for Bannet too. But,
against Derrida, it is her contention that when Truth Becomes Woman in

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Derridas fashion, that is, according to his styles, it does not become Woman
at all.
The focus of Bannets critique is the absurd reversal she nds in Derridas
regendering of signs and traces. In this reversal, Bannet contends, the sign, the
writing, and the philosopher Become Woman by abdicating self . . . in order to
be for another, and to become the passage through which the other can enter
language and thought. This may seem like a noble gesture, a recovery of the
effaced other within and beyond. But Bannet asks rhetorically: Are death and
castration really the entry into life? This question contains a number of critical
gestures. In Derridas reversal, the male sign denies itself in order to become
woman, yet to become woman in the most clich and phallocentric way. In
the event, far from abandoning his old tyrannical place, the philosopher reestablishes it with a vengeance. For with the reversal, Woman, Truth, Philosophy, will speak at his dictation, the philosopher/sign, abdicating self to
become woman in order to envelop and develop the seminal spur to writing,
now become male trace. Yet in this move, the goal remains the same, that is the
pure epiphany of what is concealed and inexpressible whether Phallus or
Hole. What is called for instead, Bannet avows, is a becoming of truth
through the alliance of male and female bodies, in a process which, in Irigarays words, is faithful to life . . . as it is: sexed. With this process comes a
revelation that is inni innite and unnished. Yet because the revelation
is unnished, always partial and incomplete, we cannot rest in the trace or
the sign.
The second essay in this section, P. Chrisopher Smiths Orality and Writing:
Platos Phaedrus and the Pharmakon Revisited, also deals with Derridean texts.
Smith re-examines the now familiar thesis of Derridas essay, Platos Pharmacy, to the effect that Plato displaces and marginalizes writing in favor of a
phonocentrism that in turn gives birth to the whole tradition of metaphysics as
a metaphysics of pure presence. Smith contests this thesis in four broad moves.
First, Smith presents the principal themes of Derridas deconstructive
exposition on its own terms. On Derridas reading, Plato mistakenly projects
into the experience of hearing oneself speak, a pure presence to self in which
nothing is absent or deferred. He then deludes us (and himself ) into thinking
that we can pass through this moment of the souls sentendre parler to a pure
intuition of unrepresented truth in itself. The truth in itself, presumed at rst
to be occluded and absent as such, is thus (wrongly) supposed to be made fully
present once and for all. Smith contends, however, that in claiming that Platos
text valorizes orality over writing, Derridas reading gets things backwards. I
would contend, Smith writes, that in the end Plato and metaphysics are not
attacking writing as secondary to speaking, but on the contrary, attacking
speaking and the oral tradition by turning to the paradigm of mathematics,
where the voiced sign was in fact always entirely secondary to the written sign.
Smiths third move is to highlight the essential temporality of hearing oneself
speak in contrast to the essential spatiality of writing. In terms of this contrast, it is speaking, and not writing, that best exhibits the differance that
Derrida himself celebrates. Fourth, Smith concludes his essay by reminding us
of the connection between Platos attack on sophistry and the attack on orality,

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as well as reminding us how it is that writing and not speaking allows for the
distance of a pure presence to self.
The third essay in this section, Richard Kearneys Ethics of the Narrative
Self, reprises a conception of the self and self-identity in terms of narrative
against the background of a perceived crisis of self thought to lie in the postmodern declarations of the death of man. Drawing principally upon the work
of Ricoeur, he makes the case that this narrative conception is the best alternative between the extravagance of a postmodern decentering of the self, and
the static, substantialist conceptions of selfhood provided by modern philosophy. Now, from German Idealism, we have already learned that the self is
essentially self-constituting, dening itself as such in the present moment by
projecting a future and appropriating a past. Kearney explicates this process of
self-constitution as a narrative structure, that is, a process wherein we establish
our (self-) identity by realizing the story of a life. In the wake of the existential
retreat from Idealism, we have also learned that our self-constitution is essentially situated, limited by an other that nevertheless enters into its selfconstitution. This limiting otherness sets the bounds of the stories we can
possibly tell.

4
WHEN TRUTH
BECOMES WOMAN

MALE TRACES AND

FEMALE SIGNS

E v e Ta v o r B a n n e t

The sign reveals and conceals a trace of that which is Wholly Other we have
always already said so, long before Levinas and Derrida. The trace is a trace of
the Spur to writing, whether we call it Truth, Innite, Inspiration, or
like Derrida in his new afrmative phase of deconstruction1 the other
without me, beyond me, in me.2 The trace is a trace of the Spur to writing, and
it is encrypted in the sign. The sign is a writing, a differential system,
material and visible, whether in the medium of natural phenomena, of metaphoric images, or of langue-parole. Its function, at least in principle, is to bear
witness to be what Levinas calls a sign of the gift of the sign3 and thus to
put us on the track of the trace, and on the spoor of the Spur. When Truth
Becomes, therefore, it becomes as a sign; it becomes as a sign which conceals
and reveals a trace of Innite Wisdom and Truth.
This immemorial preunderstanding of semiology inhabits the conjuncture
between poetry, prophecy, mysticism, and philosophy.4 So it is not surprising
that Derrida should have had to come to grips with it in the late 1970s and
1980s when he was trying to return philosophy to poetry and the Sacred. In
perons/Spurs, his classical study of phallogocentrism, everything turns for
Derrida on the genders we attribute to the trace and the sign. For Derrida is
arguing that the history of truth in the West, the history of this truth as error,
derives from a particular gendering of traces and signs. The question of truth for
him and for us, therefore, turns on the extent to which truth becomes different,
on the extent to which truth becomes differently, when we change the genders
around. In this essay, I am going to be arguing that When Truth Becomes
Woman in Derridas fashion, it does not become Woman at all; and I am going
to be looking at some other ways that, for women, Truth might Become.
It is characteristic of the phallogocentrism of the West that the trace has
always been of the female gender. She has always been his muse. And his Muse is
a desiccated woman. In Kierkegaards, Petrarchs, and Dantes poetic and

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philosophical texts, for instance, the real woman Regina Olsen, Laura, and
Beatrice has been transmuted into a Spur to his quest, into a spoor to be
followed in his sublime ascent, and into a marker for the epiphany which calls
to him from behind the veil. The real woman Regina, Laura, Beatrice has
been divested of the children hanging at her breast and of her inconvenient
husband, of her esh and her life, of her knowledge and her desire. She has been
encrypted in his writing as a Spur (in German, as Derrida reminds us, as trace,
track, index, mark of truths seduction, of its indecipherability, and of its innite distance from man (E/S, 38). Regina, Laura, and Beatrice are precisely that
which only is sous rature.
But then his desire has really never been for her. As the iconography indicates
and iterates from the rst, whatever male poets, philosophers, and divines have
lusted to know, even in the biblical sense, it has not been (a) woman.
A damsel came in with these squires, holding between her two hands a
grail. She was beautiful, gracious and splendidly garbed, and as she
entered with the grail in her hands, there was such a brilliant light that
the candles lost their brilliance, just as the stars do when the moon or the
sun rises. After her came a damsel holding a tailleor of silver. The grail
which preceded her was of rened gold; and it was set with precious stones
of many kinds, the richest and costliest that exist in the sea or in the earth.
Without question, those set in the grail surpassed all other jewels.5
Beautiful, gracious, and splendidly garbed as they may be, these eminently
interchangeable damsels in Chrtiens Conte del Graal are both upstaged by the
grail the jewelled dish containing the mass-wafer, the transubstantiated body
of Christ, which the damsels parade back and forth before a still puzzled and
quiescent knight. As Beatrices crown of glory only consists of reecting from
herself the eternal rays,6 so here the brilliant light, the matchless gems, the
richest values, and the costliest mystery attach to the Corpus Christi and its vessel,
eclipsing the damsels body and soul. It is not her person but His divine Corpus,
not her graciousness but Grace, which are constructed as objects of male desire.
Thus, if in some versions of the Grail story the knight has to be tricked into
sleeping with the grail-bearing maiden and in others her chastity and virginity
are emphasized, it is because the damsels function in his love-affair with the
male god is only to trip-start her errant knights desiring-machine to arouse
in him an impulse and an energy which he can reappropriate and displace from
her to Him. As Beatrice knows (no doubt with innite, weary patience), this
has always already been her function for Dante too:
I turned to Beatrice, but she had heard
Before I spoke and granted me a sign,
Making more great the wings of my desire.

(DC, Canto 11, 1921)

If in some versions of the Grail story, like Mallorys, the grail-bearing maiden is
invisible and in others, she simply at a certain moment disappears from view, it
is to underline the necessity of this displacement of aroused male love and

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desire. This is also what speaks in Kierkegaards aborted engagement to Regina:

I could be happier in my unhappiness without her than with her; she had
moved me, and I would have like, more than liked to have done everything.
But there was a divine protest, that is how I understood it. . . . The rst thing
to be decided was the seeking and nding of the Kingdom of Heaven.7 Consummation with her or such proximity as would lay bare the device by showing that she had been robbed of everything but her beckoning surface would
cause the mechanism to fail. As Nietzsche points out, to work her magic and
most powerful effect, the woman must act on him from a distance.8
The secret of the Kingdom of Heaven which the male poet-philosopher seeks
is also always already imbedded in the iconography of this displacement: in the
image of the virgin holding between her two hands a grail which dispenses to
every knight such meats and drinks as he best loved in the world (G, 174).
The point here is not only that the life-giving, sustenance-giving, selfsacricing and sweet self-giving qualities of the mother9 are bottled up in the
virgin, and then transferred to the sacred vessel so that Jesus can become our
mother.10 The point is that by holding out to man the Corpus Christi, what the
woman is offering him is the image of himself: the image of himself as human
and divine, as man and god. Her supreme gift is to satisfy what Dante calls his
longing . . . to see that Essence wherein we behold / How God and our own
nature were made one because, as Kierkegaard agrees, for the male poetphilosopher, it is this divine side of man, this internal action, which means
everything (DC, Canto 11, 401; KA, 5). What he has really desired what he
has longed to identify, unite with, and possess is this image of himself.
This is also why when she merges with the overowing vessel itself, the
source of more than human wisdom, life, and truth, and appears in the text as
Philosophia, Natura, Ecclesia, or Muse the woman still remains a cardboard
surface. Her function is still to give him back the image of himself to mirror
back to the male philosopher-poet his own male-stream philosophy, theology,
and truth11 and to allow him to gure not merely as a man, but also as a God.
For the traditional philosopher-poet, the proper function of woman as Spur
trace, track, index, mark of truths becoming is always already to give him
stature and identity, and to allow him to walk tall:
Whomsoever the Muses honour, they pour sweet dew upon his tongue,
and from his lips ow gracious words. All the people look to him as he
settles causes with true judgments; . . . and when he passes through a
gathering, they treat him as a God with gentle reverence, and he is conspicuous among the assemble: such is the holy gift of the Muses to men.12
For it is equally characteristic of the phallogocentrism of the West that the
sign has always already been of the male gender. Truth, and the Muse as its
trace, can only speak their being or nonbeing, their nature or supernature,
through him. The point here is not merely that the stylus, the style, and the
writing have always been in mens hands, or that the steles and monuments of
culture have always been erected by and to men. As Lacoue-Labarthe reminds
us through his mocking quasi-Heideggerian puns on the stele and the Ge-Stell,

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the Stand and the Gegen-Stand, the sign is only visibly a sign, only present as a
sign, if it will stand like man as opposed to animals, and like man as opposed
to woman.13 The sign is an erection, and as an erection, it is stele, monument,
rapier, stylus, imprint, and visible mark.
We should pause to recall here that male and female belong to the physical
world, where together they engender most living things; and that it is a fundamental principle of that semiology where Truth Becomes as a sign, that
whatever makes no sense in terms of the manifest order of the physical world,
makes no sense of the Innite or of spiritual experience, and has no truth. There
need be no identity, no transparency, no visibility of the trace of truth in the
material sign; but truth, physical phenomena, and the sign have to be allied
and aligned or there can be no tracking of traces in and through manifest signs.
The gendering of the trace as female and of the sign as male breaks this cardinal
rule. And the result is not merely an error, but an absurdity. For this makes her
the seminal element which he bears forth. And, in a remarkable feat of engineering, it inates what is generally not a particularly visible organ into a monumental sign, which usurps and supplies the place of the much more blatant and
enduring visibility of her swollen belly.
What Derrida takes issue with, therefore, when he rewrites this traditional
Western gendering of traces and signs in Jewgreek, is the aggressively virile
gendering of the sign. perons/Spurs is subtitled Nietzsches styles because, for
Derrida, it is a question of alternative styles which philosophers used to inscribe
truth in language and thought. The style of the stylus and of the stele is the
style of the dogmatic philosopher with his quest for clarity and self-evidence,
his clear-cut discourses in pro and contra, his determination to penetrate the
veils of ignorance and capture Truth in order to make his imprint and his mark
and to erect a monument to himself. But, as Derrida says, the woman (the
truth) will not allow herself to be taken (E/S, 54). At that juncture of poetry,
mysticism, and philosophy where she becomes his inspiration, she will inscribe
the truth. . . . She writes [herself]. . . . The style, [the stylus] are hers (E/S, 56).
In this other style of philosophy, therefore, it is she, the woman, the truth
who comes to man and speaks in him as the other without me, beyond me, in
me. The philosopher is possessed by her and writes at her dictation. His signs
become signs of her gift of the sign, the channel for her becoming. The sign, the
stylus, and the stele those monuments of mans own making collapse,
invert, and transmute into a birth canal. In this style of philosophy, therefore,
the sign, the writing, and the philosopher Become Woman: I have a chance of
being woman, of changing sex, says Derrida. I can give birth (PAR, 281).
In Derridas regendering of traces and signs, therefore, Truth Becomes
Woman twice: as trace and as sign. The sign is female because it is the receptive
moment, and the channel through which Truth Becomes becomes language,
history, part of what is spoken and done. And the trace is female, because the
woman who is divided and diverted from her knowledge and from her proper
truth like Regina, Laura, and Beatrice embodies the truth about truth,
which is its differance. Differance means that truth is always already cut off and
separated from any proper identity and from all possibility of identication,
that truth has always already been diverted and deferred. The truth of the trace

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therefore lies in acknowledging this fact: in indicating its difference from truth,
in indicating that truth cannot take place, and that the trace is not itself
truth. This is why, for Derrida, woman can represent the trace and why
woman is the name of this non-truth of truth because she knows that if
woman is truth, there is no truth, that the truth does not take place, and that
one doesnt have the truth (E/S, 50, 52).
Unlike the grail-bearing maiden, woman as the trace of the non-truth of
truth comes to the ear, rather than to the eye/I. She comes to the philosopherpoet as a voice sounding the Animadverso of language its anima-de-verso, or
animating, pneumatic other side. Her gift is a tracery, part chance and part
design, of all the other sounds, all the other signieds, and all the other tongues
always already encrypted in the sign. It is she who brings the detours to De[s]
Tours de Babel and the heard (oui) to the afrmation (oui) when it is cited for a
second time (oui, oui). It is she who indicates (montre) the monster (monstre,
Zeichen, sign) in Heideggers Hand when it grasps (Begriff ) the handiwork
(Handwerk) which is present-at-hand (Vorhandensein, Zuhandensein) or gets a
handle (behandeln) on Truth in its manu-scripts. It is the re-mark of her stylus
and her style which makes Heideggers hand fall away (tombe) by burying it
(tombe) under the weight of all its other possible donations, and by introducing
that divergence (cart), that distance and difference of the hand from itself,
which (de)monstrates that the hand shows nothing, and that the sign is only a
perfectly monstrous monster without meaning, all sound and fury, signifying
nothing (PSY, 4212). It is also by the re-mark (re-trait) of her stylus that the
textual tissue is torn (trait, Ri) and that an opening is cut onto the abyss: the
withdrawal at/of the origin, the immemorial retreat (retrait) of Truth.
This is why, as the womans voice says in Feu la cendre: The best paradigm of
the trace for him is not, as some people have thought and as he perhaps once
thought too, the hunters trail, the beaten track, the furrow in the sand, the
furrow in the sea, the love of the pas (step, not) for its imprint but cinders
(what remains without remaining of the holocaust, of the all-consuming ame,
the conagrations incense).14 For him, the paradigm for the trace is no longer
that of the hunt, the capture and the chase, as it was for Dante or for the grailknight because the woman no longer has to keep her distance to work her
magic and most powerful effect. On the contrary: it is by her very
proximity by coming to him as the other within the Same, and as the other
beyond me, in me that woman distances Truth from the philosopher-poet
and displaces the image of man. It is by her very closeness to him as the
underside of his own familiar tongue, as the contra-band sounding under the
band of his speech that she displaces Truth from the sign and shows men that
their desire for the Stele and the Stance, their desire for their own erections, has
always already been misplaced: Distancing (de-stancing) is here at the heart of
the thing (PAR, 28).
At the same time, although this evidently involves a negative, de(con)structive step ( pas--pas) not to mention a fundamental castration the
paradigm here is, at least in principle, not the nihilistic paradigm of a negation
enamored of itself and content to rest in the admiration of its own imprint and
its own mark. For that would only be to erect another Truth, and to put

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Woman in mans place. To differ from his by deferring Truth and afrming that
she does not have it, and to open onto a Wholly Other, she must consume
herself as well as him. She must lay waste them both, but in such a way as to
leave behind some ineffable and untranslatable remainder as an innite intimation and as an intimation of Innity. That is why cinders (cendres) are the best
paradigm of the trace for Derrida: because cinders are all that remain of her
body and of his after the holocaust, and because cinders (cendres) are where It
enters (sentre) transforming (andre, anders, androgenous) his phallus into an
opening by the sacrice of all he loves best, in a conagration which leaves in
his wake the bitter-sweet smell of burning the pyres incense as mans
offering and would-be connective to God.
Jean-Luc Nancy complains that readers-users of deconstruction treat the
undecidable as the truth instead of focusing on how the Other comes to
perforate the Same, in a specular abyss or epiphany.15 But it seems to me that
the real undecidability in this writing has to do with whether there is an
epiphany at all, and with whether the ineffable does indeed come through.
Can the dust praise Thee, can it declare Thy truth?16 Are death and castration
really the entry to life?
In Derridas regendering of traces and signs, the philosopher Becomes
Woman by accepting (engineering?) his own demise and by indicating that,
like woman, he now has the sexual organ that is counted as none.17 The
philosopher signs, signals, and signies this sacrice of his (historical/cultural/
personal) phallus performatively, each time as if for the rst time, but writ[ing] with a language which shows nothing . . . [and] says nothing that exists
beyond this event which she (the woman, the language) constitutes.18 The
sign, the writing, and the philosopher thus Become Woman by abdicating self
(writing with not with . . . not even [his] self ) in order to be for another, and
to become the passage through which the other can enter language and
thought. Deconstructive writing thus offers
an other in-vention (coming in) or rather an in-vention of/from the other
who traverses the economy of the same; that is, by miming or repeating
the same, it gives a venue to the other, lets the other come. I am careful to
say let the other come for, if the other is precisely that which does not get
invented, deconstructive initiative and inventiveness can only consist in
opening, in de-enclosing, in de-stabilizing structures of foreclosure to
leave a passage for the other.
(PSY, 60)
In this mythography, then, Woman becomes both a cypher for Derridas
philosophy of differance, and the sign of a deconstructive writing. And Truth
Becomes Woman only to write the philosophy of Derrida. In a curious reversal,
therefore, the woman who comes to inspire the philosopher, Derrida, turns out
to be inspired by him. As Luce Irigaray says, speaking for Woman: I was only
your cover ( gaine), your reverse side, your inversion, your Mime. . . . You lled
me with your voids. You heaped me with your lacks.19
Setting aside for the moment the question of what this does to women, I am
going to call this absurd reversal the revenge on Derrida of that semiological

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principle which requires truth, signs, and the physical world to be allied and
aligned. For when Truth Becomes in Derrida, it becomes through the hymen of
two women two women who are conceived in the most clichd and phallocentric way (as receptivity, passivity, and non-truth, and as lacking a body
part), and who therefore have nothing to say of and for themselves. The union of
two such women cannot possibly give birth to living signs. Their hymen puts
both under sentence of death: come, kill yourself (viens, tu toi) says the trace
coming: come, I in pieces, I die (viens, je mort/s) sighs the sign as she comes. In
the normal order of things, moreover, the complete repression and exclusion
from this delightful hymen of the male, will only ensure his violent return (as
Derrida unwittingly demonstrates).
Consider the inconvenience of a spur to writing which insists that truth does
not take place and that one doesnt have the truth. When she, the truth, the
trace comes to the philosopher and speaks in him she has absolutely nothing
to tell him. Imagine him now, in his posture of pure female receptivity, before
that blank page which is waiting to be lled with Signs and Sendings. The
hymen of these two women produces nothing. What is to be done? The
solution magically appears to Derrida at Oxbridge, when he buys that postcard
showing Plato dictating truth and philosophy to his master, Socrates. Eureka!
She, the truth, the trace, can be as silent as Socrates on this postcard. Like Plato,
he, the philosopher Derrida, will tell her what she said. Woman, Truth, Philosophy will all speak at his dictation. It is the Law of [the] Genre, the Law
of Gender ( genre), the law of engendering signs, says Derrida, that he
engenders her. The law in its feminine aspect is borne of him for whom she
becomes the law . . . it is the child of his afrmation (PAR, 284, 283). The
male philosopher has returned, quite brutally, to his old tyrannical place, and
whatever Truth has Become, it is not Woman.
For Truth, images, and the physical world to be allied and aligned, the
trace the seminal spur to writing must be male, and the writing, which
envelops and develops it, and which bears witness to its nature or supernature,
must be female. But a simple reversal of genders will not do. For, of course,
women have also always already been placed on the side of the esh as opposed
to the spirit, on the side of matter as opposed to mind, and on the side of things
as opposed to the truth of things; and, as feminists have shown, this identication with Nature has silenced women as effectively as becoming trace and
Muse.
I would argue, however, that what we reject when we reject this identication of women with nature is the imaginary of nature which men invented, in
the presence of a silenced Muse, to ensure and ll her silence. I would also argue
that what we reject when we reject the identication of women with matter as
opposed to mind, is the binary opposition itself. For we know that we will not
be able to live in nature until we can live it both as body and as mind. And it
becomes as the alliance of two different bodies and two different minds. For we,
also, say that we want to live in a mutually supportive space, where differences
ally and supply each others lacks, and where there are no exclusions even (and
sometimes especially) of him. Translated into the language of traces and signs,
this means that When Truth Becomes, it does not become Woman and it does

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not become Man. It Becomes through the alliance of embodied male traces and
of spiritualized female signs. Here is one way this might be experienced on the
scene of writing.
Whatever spurs us to writing might come out of nowhere, but it does not
come without a form. It has some body to it, however slight; there is a niggling
something there at the back of our minds; there is a nagging pointer, as if to
say look in this direction or try it like this; there is a prod to be checked out
or an indistinct sense of a shape there is a trace. This male trace is not
formless matter; but, it is matter which is not yet distinct, visible, or articulate,
the seed of our subsequent work. She, the Writing, takes this seed and makes it
into something else, by mixing it with what is her own. For the sign is not a
corpse, an empty shell, or even a megaphone; it has a life and a mind of its own.
It is this life of hers which she adds to the trace, as she, the Writing, takes this
seed and makes it into something else, by mixing it with what is her own. For
the sign is not a corpse, an empty shell, or even a megaphone; it has a life and a
mind of its own. It is this life of hers which she adds to the trace, as she, the
Writing, envelops it, develops it, lets it grow in directions of her choosing, and
supplies its lacks according to her lights. She, the Writing, is therefore quite
different from the trace, but they are each others condition of possibility. She,
the Writing, and he, the Trace, are allied by their difference are allied because
of their difference and she envelops him as he envelops her.
As Irigaray points out, when Truth Becomes through the alliance of male
and female bodies, in a process which is faithful to life . . . as it is: sexed,20 the
trace and the sign mime an incarnation of the Divinity and an annunciation of
the mystery, on earth as well as in heaven, which is quite different from the
abstract, unisex self-mirroring of male-stream Western philosopher-poets.21
For this coupling of male and female elements returns us to what Irigaray calls
the god-couple or coupled God [un dieu couple].22 It returns us to the God
who made (humans in) the Divine Image by making male and female, and for
whom, therefore, there has to be sexual difference for God to become incarnate
in the esh (CM, 99). And this coupling of male and female elements in
God, in turn, takes us back to the mysteries of those Oriental traditions which
speak to us of the energetic, aesthetic and religious fecundity of the sexual act
(ESD, 21).
In this older dispensation, the question of Truth still turns on the proximity
and distance of gendered traces and signs each to each. This is why, as Irigaray
reminds us, in those Oriental traditions which understand the two sexes as
giving each other the seeds of life and eternity (ESD, 21), the alliance of traces
and signs has always already been represented as a marriage. But the metaphor
invoked here is not at all that of our traditional Western notion of marriage as
a union where two become one corpus and one corpse by virtue of one covering the other, eclipsing the other, in that excess of proximity we call identity.
Nor does it resemble Western representations of courtship as the quest of a
solitary male hunter for his innitely distant spiritual mistress, a quest culminating and terminating in the capture of its object and/or in the consumption of
the epiphany.
In those other Oriental traditions of which Irigaray speaks, the alliance of

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traces and signs is gured as a sacred marriage between two different bodies,
who join and separate, separate and come together, in a courtship which has
always already been consummated, and which is always yet to be consummated
anew. Forever linked by the desire she always and again arouses for him and by
his innite yearning for her, male trace and female sign part and draw close in
an eternal return as various and recurrent as the waning and waxing of the
moon as she changes her position relative to the rays of the sun.
In this other metaphor of marriage, what matters is what passes between the
two: between male and female, trace and sign, human couples and the coupled
God. What stretches between them is not something to be penetrated, cut
through, burned away, vacated, or abolished. And what goes between them is
neither a means nor a path, neither an incision nor a hole. For as Hlne Cixous
and Catherine Clment say, We do not circle round the Supreme Hole we
have no reason as women to give our allegiance to the negative.23 If anything,
what comes between two is an interval which punctuates both the time of
union and of separation (ESD, 185) and which makes repetition of difference,
distance, and separation the precondition for the recurrence of desire, proximity, and union.
In her readings of Diotima and of the male and female cherubs in the Ark of
the Covenant, Irigaray insists on the necessity for such an interval. There is an
interval between those male and female cherubs on the ark who come to the
encounter from opposite directions, because this interval makes it possible for
them sometimes to turn towards each other and sometimes to turn away,
completing the cycle of their solitude to return to the other (CM, 56 ff.; ESD,
185) once more. It is also across the interval between them and indeed, in and
through that very between (entre) that living births from the body and from
the mind and the Divine Presence come (sentre). Diotima too knows all about
this entre. She knows that between ignorance and knowledge, poverty and
wealth, man and woman, mortals and God, what enters in is the distance and
the difference that permits growth and change and the constant becoming of
living things. She knows entre as the ow relating one being to another and
permitting the encounter, and transmutation or transvaluation between the
two (ESD, 28). And she knows entre as the place of generation and creativity,
the place where the living love and where eternity enters time.
On the scene of writing, this metaphorology of marriage transforms the
character and the roles of the feminine. For in her proximity and her distance
from the trace with which she is allied, she, the Writing, heralds what Derrida
calls the advent of the event as an act of pure relation. Distanced from her
others from the trace and from us or turned in upon herself in a gesture of
mere self-reexivity, the Writing darkens like the waning moon, which continues to preen even as it merges back into the inconsequence and oblivion of
vacant space. This is precisely what reawakens desire to turn back to the other.
For it is precisely as a relation to the other to the trace and to us and as the
enabling narration of that relation, that she, the Writing, becomes both the
Spoor and the Spur; both the Memorial and the Call; both the Speculum in
which we see as through a glass darkly, and the Seductress forever beckoning us
to cavort with her body glass, glas, cla, lac, egla and to lose ourselves in her

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tresses/traces until Glas(s) becomes Gilah revelation. The revelation is innite because it is unnished (inni). It is no longer a question here either of
having the Truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or of having no
truth but the non-Truth of truth either of having a Phallus or a Hole. We are
always between ignorance and knowledge, between the phallus and the hole,
and the revelation is unnished because it is always partial and incomplete.
This is important because, as Michle le Doeuff says, the way to dispense with
the logocentric phallocratic phantasmagoria and its sterile binary oppositions
is to cease wishing to mask the incomplete nature of all theorization, and to
accept that there is a portion of non-knowledge in every philosophical
enterprise.24
Because the revelation is unnished, always, partial and incomplete, we
cannot rest in the trace or in the sign. Because knowledge is always defective,
but necessary all the same (PI, 118), we cannot hold (on) to the signs, and we
cannot hold up without them. So we must love them and we must leave them,
let them stand and let them fall, learn what we can from them and let them go.
But this is not a gesture of cynicism or despair: it is only to recognize that
writing too obeys the rhythm of life. Like the hours and the days, the traces
come and the traces are forgotten. The metaphors return, but never quite the
same way. There is writing without end, but each time it is different, and the
revelation is unnished because it carries on.

5
ORALITY AND WRITING

P L AT O S P H A E D R U S A N D T H E
PHARMAKON REVISITED

P. C h r i s t o p h e r S m i t h

I want to make the case here that as arbitrary and far-fetched as it might be, and
consequently repellent to traditional classicists, Jacques Derridas Platos
Pharmacy is a crucial, indispensable, and uncircumventable contribution to
Plato interpretation.1 For this work, in a deconstructive variation, brings to
bear on Plato Heideggers radical Destruktion of Platos and metaphysics privileging of timeless, statically present being over the being that happens in time,
the privileging of ousia over genesis. It brings to bear on Plato, that is to say,
Heideggers revolutionary recovery of an earlier unity of being and time in an
inceptive thought closer to the origin.2 In Derridas hands this privileging
of static presence over temporal ux becomes the privileging of voiced speech
over writing. In what follows I will argue that, in fact, the privileging of static
presence implies just the opposite, namely a privileging of spatial, visual writing, of graphein and grammata, of the graphic and diagrammatical, over temporal, acoustical voice, a thesis for which I nd considerable support in Eric
Havelock.3 Still, it is Derrida who is the real provocateur here and the one who
confronts us squarely with the pivotal ontological and grammatological questions: namely, how do voiced speech and writing gure in Platos privileging of
static presence over concomitant presence and absence? Moreover, just what is
the relationship of voiced speech to writing in Plato in the rst place?
Or better, just what are the relationships of voiced speech to writing? For
following Derridas deconstructive strategies, I will try to show that Plato is
seminally self-contradictory in regard to the apparent priority he gives to
speaking over writing in the Phaedrus. Prodded, sometimes even by Derridas
most extravagant interpretations, among them his tracing of pharmakon or
drug, to pharmakos or prisoner-scapegoat, we will see in our investigation of the
Phaedrus that Plato wavers indecisively on the border between the older oral,
dramatic tradition and the newer literate, mathematical one, sometimes
pushing forward into the new and other times pulling back into the old.
Our approach will be as follows: rst, we will try to clarify carefully the

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interpretive principles of Derridas deconstruction of the Phaedrus and to illustrate how these principles are to be applied, with expositions of Derridas
readings of specic passages in the Platonic opus. Second, we will go back to the
source of these interpretive principles in Heideggers penetration behind the
metaphysical privileging of static presence and in his uncovering of the original
concomitance of any beings showing and withholding itself much as at sea,
still indeterminate shapes are ever emerging from the fog even as they are
lapsing back into it. And having asked in this section just what Heideggers
Destruktion of the metaphysical superstructure of static presence with no
absence might mean for the relationships to each other of hearing and seeing,
listening and reading, speaking and writing, we will turn, third, to the
Phaedrus again. But this time we will proceed more by Heideggers Destruktion
than by Derridas deconstruction, which is to say that instead of seeking out
those places in the interstices of Platos argument about speech and writing
where he contradicts himself, and instead of taking down the hierarchical
ordering that seems to give priority to one of these over the other, we will look
for persistent remnants of an earlier, experience of being, closer to the inception of thought, that still shimmer through the layers of later metaphysical
thought covering them. In this way we will be able to see, fourth, where
Derridas bold initiatives eventually went wrong.
For Derrida is right: Plato is thoroughly contradictory in his arguments
about writing and speech. But Derrida is wrong: Plato does not privilege
speech over writing. Indeed, the speeches written in a soul (Phaedrus 278 a),
of which Derrida rightly makes so much, are not the means of communication
for some vocal and acoustical experience underlying them. Rather, according to
Plato they are the primary semantical expression of the visual diagrammatical,
genos/eidos structure of timeless metaphysical being, a system of signs that, like
letters, are statically present and distributed within mental space. Logos or
speech has come to mean reasoning here, and is now precisely aneu phones,
without voice (see Sophist 263 e). The acoustical has been eliminated and we are
in the realm of what is seen and known according to the look of it (to eidos).
Hence it is most of all when Plato falls back on voiced speech, or logos in the
sense of talk, that he contradicts himself, and not when he recurs to writing.
I

Reserving criticism for later, let us rst restate the principal themes of Derridas
deconstructive exposition. Contrary to appearances, the text to be read, says
Derrida, in this case the Phaedrus, is not to be taken as a self-contained unity
entirely in view and completely penetrable for the interpreter. Rather, as a
crisscrossing of traces of what is precisely not in view and but absent, it withholds itself from us even as it shows itself to us. Thus the text inevitably leads
us, who would pick up and follow the track of these traces, in particular the
track of the word pharmakon, across the semantic eld of this words linguistic
associations to other uses of it and related words, not only within the text itself,
but in the Platonic opus as a whole, and then even to uses and words outside this
opus. In this way we are led beyond the horizons of the present text to what is

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absent and outside it, to be sure, but present and inside it, too, precisely by
being unwritten there. Thus pharmakon, a word that means an alien substance
both in the sense of a remedy and a toxin, and that Platos Theuth uses to
characterize writing in the Phaedrus (274 e), is to be traced as it defers to
pharmakeia or administration of a drug, to pharmakeus or the one administering
the drug, and then even outside Platos dialogues to pharmakos, the disruptive
alien from outside the city walls introduced inside and kept in prison there to
serve as a whipping boy in times of disaster. For, writes Derrida,
we do not believe that there exists, in all rigor, a Platonic text, closed upon
itself, complete with its inside and its outside. . . . Rather one should
simply be able to untangle the hidden forces of attraction linking a present word with and absent word in the text of Plato.
(PPh, 130)
Crucial here is that any word, of which we would pick up the trace, not be
taken as a univocal sign signifying some essential being ever identical with
itself and statically present. Unlike 2 which supposedly, at least, signies
univocally the self-identical mathematical eidos of duality, pharmakon is a sign
or indication that in its multivocality points us only to other signs which in
turn point us to still others ad innitum. Unlike 2, pharmakon, in its differing
with itself unstably, in its meaning, not one thing, but now remedy and now
the contrary toxin, thus continually propels us beyond itself and refers us to
equally ambivalent uses of other neighboring words. However, once the metaphysical superstructure of stabilized eidetic essences is deconstructed and taken
away, we are plunged into a radical instability and chaos of meaning. 2 is
taken to have its univocal meaning in signifying the metaphysical eidos of
duality, but with the hypothesis of an eidos suspended, as Derrida claims it
obviously must be in the case of pharmakon, meaning shifts and slips from one
contrary to the other. Indeed, we might add that it was precisely to put an end
to this slippage and its exploitation by sophistical word twisters that Platos
Socrates goes beyond the physical accounts of the rst philosophers and, in
eeing into the logoi, that is, arguments themselves, hypothesized the metaphysical eidos (Phaedo 99 d102 a). But following Heidegger in destroying all
such metaphysical postulations, Derrida moves in the opposite direction. By
subverting the superstructure of static ideas he would set free the aneidetic
play and oscillation of pharmakons multiple and self-contradictory senses.
Why? And why choose pharmakon for this deconstructive liberation? First,
because it is writing that is called a pharmakon in the Phaedrus (274 e), and
Derridas ultimate concern here is to subvert the dominance of voice over
writing that in his view characterizes metaphysics from Plato on. As voice has
been moved to the center, he maintains, writing has been driven out to the
margins and beyond. Like the pharmakos, the pharmakon of writing is treated as
a disruptive alien substance introduced to the inside from outside and best
expelled, were it not for the fact that the inside can dene itself only in relationship to this outsider that it would both ostracize and incorporate within
itself. It is in the Phaedrus treatment of writing as a pharmakon-pharmakos,
Derrida argues, that the issue of writing is most obviously joined and where

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metaphysics of presence and phonocentrism have best displayed their selfcontradictory origins. What better place than the Phaedrus could there be, then,
to apply a deconstruction and to dissolve in each other such supposedly
distinct contraries as inside/outside, and to show that the text ultimately says
the opposite of what it purports to say?
But pharmakon is also chosen for a different if related reason: Derridas deconstructive strategy is also to show that if we were to follow Plato in moving back
from what is assumed to be only a copy, a substitute and supplement, to what
the copy is supposedly a copy of, we would end not at all where Plato thinks we
will, namely at the unmediated comprehension of some sort of originary form,
statically present and ever identical with itself, and which itself is not a copy of,
a substitute for, and supplement to, anything else rather is what it is in reality
and in truth. If, for instance, we were to attempt to trace writing back to the
speech or logos of which it is said to be the copy, and then speech or logos back to
the pure audibility of ones own speech in full presence to oneself, we would
discover that we actually end not at such a pure audibility and full presence of
speech after all. Instead, we end only at more writing, save that this time the
writing is the writing in the soul, which is to say, the communicative system
of expression that differentiates and relates a multiplicity of signs to each
other a grammar, as it were. In other words, far from penetrating to some arche
or starting point for what our signication expresses and communicates, we
always still nd ourselves only at what we take to secondary expression and
communication, the origin of which continues to withhold itself from presence,
and which, like the idea of the good itself, auto to agathon, remains epekeina tes
ousias or beyond presence. As a matter of fact, in this pursuit we were in fact
always chasing after a metaphysical phantom that never existed except as a
hypothesis; save in our projections of it, there never was a superior static,
stabilized essence, an arche or origin above and behind the supposedly inferior
supplement or sign substituting for it. There were always only signs deferring
to other signs in the system. If we look beyond writing we see only more
writing.
There is, in other words, a hierarchy assumed in the Phaedrus that governs
the dialogues entire treatment of speech writing, logographein, from its initial
thematization at 257 d: at the beginning or origin arche there is posited a
pure presence of eidetic truth to the self of the speaker in what Husserl will
later call an Anschauung and Gegenwrtigung, namely the intuition and presentation to oneself of what is self-evident. In descending from this originary truth
there follows that interior logos or speech of the self to itself which Husserl will
call Vergegenwrtigung or representation, then speech as it is uttered to someone
else in communication, and then, last, furthest from the origin, and most
derivative, this uttered speech as it is written down and recorded (see PPh, 135,
n. 61 and 166, n. 82). According to this hierarchy the written speech is a
replacement for the spoken speech, which has its origin in the speech of the
speaker to himself or herself and, ultimately in his or her immediate intuition
or, better, audition of the truth, for in the end Derrida understands Husserls
Anschauung acoustically, as sentendre parler or hearing oneself speak.4 In
Derridas deconstructive exposition, however, this hierarchical structure rising

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vertically to the arche and origin collapses leaving the web of signs across which
we can move only laterally.
Or, to invert the metaphor, metaphysics and its logos are in fact exposed as
oating in an abyss: there is no getting down to some stable basis at the bottom
of their semantical activity, no ground, no foundation beneath it. At any apparent bottom to which one penetrates there is only the aneidetic and variable sign
always in contradiction with itself and never the self-identical static thing in
itself which the sign is supposed to signify. Ultimately metaphysics and its logos
rest unstably in the aneidetic oscillations of the universal pharmakeia, the
pharmacy and pharmaceutical brew of all binary distinctions ever dissolving
in each other.
Thus in Derrida to pharmakon is also a synechdoche, a gure of speech in
which a part comes to stand for the whole of something. Like the hands in
All hands on deck!, to pharmakon, in its oscillations between the opposite
senses of remedy and toxin, comes to stand for the whole non-ground of the
aneidetic and equivocal, down to which philosophy and logos are to be deconstructed; to pharmakon stands for the bottomless pharmakeia, the pharmacy at
the bottom of things:
If the pharmakon is ambivalent, it is because it constitutes the medium in
which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them
among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the
other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness,
speech/writing, etc.). . . . The pharmakon is the movement, the locus and
the play: (the production of ) difference.
(PPh, 127)
And, Derrida continues, It is also this store of deep background that we are
calling Platos pharmacy (PPh, 128), hence the title of his essay, Platos Pharmacy. The task for the deconstructive reader is thus to avoid any translation of
pharmakon, say as remedy (Robin: remde), that would eliminate its inherent
ambivalence and self-contradiction and shut down the unstable oscillation
between its contrary senses. For if the word appears in its positive sense, say, in
Theuths presentation of writing to Thamus the king (Phaedrus 274 c275 b), it
must nonetheless be read anagrammatically, that is, as a rewriting and reinscription of the word as it appears elsewhere in other senses. To keep the
oscillating play of contrary senses in play a deconstructive interpretation must
resist Platonism, must resist, that is to say, the will to master the play and
close it off by imposing one self-identical, noncontradictory sense on the word
(see PPh, 98).
The Timaeus, 89 ad, Derrida submits, provides the locus at which to observe
best this intrinsic oscillation in the sense of pharmakon, its tipping back and
forth from meaning something good to meaning something bad. For in arguing
against the administration of drugs and pharmaceutical therapies, against
pharmakeia, pharmacy, Plato contends there that remedies or medicines, once
introduced into the living organism from outside, only disrupt its native constitution and aggravate the illness (see PPh, 1001). Pharmaceutical treatment implies the aggression of an alien element to which the living being

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responds with metastatic allergic reactions; hence the perfection of a living

being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside (PPh,
101). And turning to the Phaedrus with this in mind, we can see that precisely
this same system of features operates in Thamus response to Theuths proposed pharmakon of writing:
. . . by trusting in writing they [the readers] will be reminded from outside by means of characters alien to themselves [dia pistin graphes exothen
hup allotrion tupon] and will not remember internally by themselves [ouk
endothen autous huphauton anamimneskomenous]. So you have found a
pharmakon not of memory but of reminding [oukoun mnemes, alla
hupomneseos, pharmakon heures].
(Phaedrus 275 a; cf. PPh, 102)
Mental degeneracy will, therefore, be the inevitable result of the introduction
of this pharmakon of writing:
Condent of the permanence and independence of its types (tupoi),
memory will fall asleep, will not keep itself up, will no longer keep to
keeping itself alert, present, as close as possible to the truth of what
is.
(PPh, 105)
Writing, that is to say, destroys the pure presence to self in the pure audibility
of the souls sentendre parler, its listening to its own logos or speech or so Plato
thinks.
For on Derridas reading Plato mistakenly projects a pure presence to self
here in which no reminder of anything absent is needed, no representation
(Husserl: Vergegenwrtigung), since everything is fully present ( gegenwrtig) and
nothing is absent or deferred. Moreover, this pure cognition would ultimately
no longer even be memory, which always presupposes the mediated recovery of
what is not yet there, but simply nous, direct immediate intuition (Husserl:
Anschauung) of the self-evident truth (see PPh, 109 for the reference to Republic
533 b on the unhypothetical intelligibility of the truth). What is more, for
Derrida it is the experience of our hearing our own logos that gives the appearance of coming closest to this immediacy, the moment of sentendre parler that
deludes us into thinking that we could even pass through this to intuition of
the unrepresented truth itself. And deluded in this way, we take writing to be
the pharmakon-supplement, the sign of a sign, the signier of a phonic signier
(PPh, 10910), a dangerous, penetrating supplement that breaks into the
very thing that would have liked to do without it yet lets itself at once be
breached, roughed up, fullled and replaced (PPh, 110).
Yet Plato cannot do without the pharmakon. Like the Sophists, his Socrates, a
stingray, a gady, a bee, is a pharmakeus too, but one whose pharmakon, in
casting its spell upon the audience, wards off (alexei) the bad pharmakon of
sophism (see PPh, 11921). The Socratic alexipharmakon or counter-drug thus
restores the purity of the inside by bringing charges against exteriority as
a supplement: It is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To
keep the outside out (PPh, 128). The dialectical cure by Socratic logos, by

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cross-examination or elenchos, will thus exorcize writing. In this way, however,

we are led outside the traces we have been tracking of pharmakeia, pharmakon,
pharmakeus, and so forth, within the Phaedrus and the Platonic opus as a whole:
we are led to pharmakos, the prisoner and whipping boy, a word which is present
precisely in being absent from the Platonic texts, inside, in being outside.
In the Thargelion, the rite of civic purication by beating pharmakoi to death
and driving the evil from their bodies,
The citys body proper thus reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself
within the connes of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory
the representative of an external threat or aggression. That representative
represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside
by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside is
nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community,
chosen, kept, fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside.
(PPh, 133)
And just so it is with the pharmakon of sophistical speech writing that Socrates
subjects to cross-examination in the Phaedrus. This exterior writing which
invades and disrupts the interior pure presence to self in ones sentendre parler,
in ones hearing and understanding ones own speech, is, even so, indispensable
for, and constitutive of, the interior it disrupts. As with the pharmakos, the extra
muros is intra muros and vice versa (see PPh, 133).
Thus with writing too we are involved in constant shuttling between the
contradictory poles of binary distinctions: on the one side we have knowledge
and memory (mneme, anamnesis) and, on the other, non-knowledge as rememoration (hupomnesis). On the one side we have a good repetition of truth that
presents and exposes the eidos and, on the other, a bad repetition that does not
present the eidos, but re-presents a presentation, repeats a repetition (PPh, 135).
Opposite the good writing within the soul we have the bad writing that
displaces its model, provides no image of it, violently wrests out of its element
the animate interiority of speech and that estranges itself immensely from the
truth of the thing itself, from the truth of speech (PPh, 137). Bad writing is
the fatherless illegitimate orphan, uprooted, anonymous, unattached to any
house or country (PPh, 144), a signier freed from logos (PPh, 145), a
moribund, ignorant, external, mute artice for the senses, whereas the good
writing, of noble lineage ( geneseos) and written in the soul of the learner, is
natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking (PPh, 149).
But the good writing is writing nonetheless. Writing in what sense? The
clue here is that the tupoi, the types or characters condemned as alien external
reminders in the Phaedrus, 275 a, are also the paradigm for the archetypes or
forms (eide ) (see Republic 402 d and PPh, 11213, 159): the grammatological
system of the letters relation to, and difference from, each other is the
metaphor for the collection of the eide into genera and division into species.
How this works is spelled out explicitly in the Philebus, where Theuth, the
god of writing, reappears, but this time as the one who sorts out and systematizes the unlimited number of voiced sounds ( phonai) by uncovering the

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limited number of kinds (eide ) of voiced sound, vowels, consonants, and mutes,
and by articulating the system of how these elements (stoicheia) of sound relate
to, and differ from each other, that is, the system of which elements can, and
which cannot, combine with each other, or what the Sophist dialogue will call
the weave of the forms (sumploke ton eidon) (259 e; PPh, 165). Importantly, in
the Philebus this knowledge is called the art of letters (techne grammatike ) and the
one who possesses it is called lettered ( grammatikos). Hence in acquiring it he
has moved behind the acoustical elements (stoicheia) to the graphic letters
( grammata) (see Philebus 18 bd and PPh, 1623).
As we will see in the third part of this essay, precisely this move from the
acoustical to the graphic, from the undifferentiated temporal ow of sensation
to the static diagrammatic genos/eidos structure behind it and prior to it, is in
Platos own view prerequisite for any science and art. Put another way, before
any voiced word can become signicant, this graphic structure of differences
and relations must be in place, and just this is what Derrida means when he says
that contrary to the logocentric prejudices of the metaphysical tradition,
graphe precedes logos, writing precedes speech. As a matter of fact, then, Plato is
a lot closer to Derridas position then Derrida recognizes.
II

To evaluate this extraordinary thrust of Derridas we need to go back to the

ontology behind his strategy of reading with an eye to what is present and
inside the text precisely by its being absent and outside. We need to go back,
that is, to Heideggers Destruktion of a metaphysical ontology that privileges
the timeless, tenseless being of what is present statically, stete Anwesenheit (ousia,
einai) over the being of what comes to pass in time, Geschehen ( genesis, gignesthai).
For Heideggers point is precisely that whatever comes to pass in time is
presenting itself all the while it is withholding and absenting itself. Hence, it is
not statically present at all, rather its prae(s)ens or being there before us entails
ab(s)ens or being away from us; in Heideggers later, admittedly forced
language, its Anwesen entails Abwesen, its fading in, we might say, its
simultaneous fading out.
Despite the difculty in nding words to say it, there is really nothing
mysterious about this, and Heidegger provides ample exemplication of what
he means. In Being and Time, for instance, he points out that human existence,
our nite being there in the world, is just such a being as this that cannot be
construed in terms of being that is statically ever present.5 Indeed, a faithful
phenomenological description of our own Ek-sistenz or being would display
that we experience ourselves as having come to be out of a past time outside (ek)
the horizons of our consciousness, a time when we did not exist, all the while
we are passing into a time outside the horizons of our consciousness, a time
when we will no longer exist. As human beings our being is thus not fully
present to us but always in part withheld from us and absent. But not only our
own existence but also the things of our world, shoes, pitchers, artworks,
dwellings, have this same temporal being of coming to pass. They are present
in our awareness only in having arisen from beyond it and in already having

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faded away out of it.6 They neither are statically ever present nor are fully
present. Indeed, in their withholding themselves from us there is always a
certain opacity about them and impenetrability: they are present in concomitantly being absent; they are there in simultaneously being no longer there and
not yet there. Their truth is thus not at all the steady presence of a look or
eidos of the thing itself given to the view (thea) of some onlooker and beholder
(theoretes), rather only a partial emergence from obscurity, an a-letheia or
disconcealment (Unverborgenheit) in which oblivion and concealment (lethe,
Verborgenheit) are never eliminated.
But as Heidegger displays, Platonic metaphysics sets out precisely to eliminate this opacity and impenetrability of things.7 This is why it must abstract
from the being of what comes to pass and posit a being which really is, to ontos
on and which, in standing and staying statically in view, is fully and ever
present to our awareness. In the place of the appearance-disappearance concomitance of what comes to pass metaphysics posits the look or eidos, the
static form of what always is. Hence Heideggers task becomes that of disclosing the original conjunction of being and time by razing the structure of
Platonic metaphysics which the tradition has superimposed upon it.
Now before returning to the Phaedrus to assess Derridas deconstructive
reading of it critically, two questions arising out of this Heideggerian Destruktion of Platonic metaphysics must be addressed: rst, how, exactly, do oral and
literary expression, respectively, gure in Platos metaphysical abstraction to
the eidos? And, second, is it by returning to writing from the priority given to
orality that one can take down the edice of metaphysical constructs and lay
bare, as Heidegger would say, the original being of coming to pass that these
metaphysical constructs have covered over? Or is it not rather by returning to
orality from the priority given to writing? For in opposition to Derrida, I would
contend that in the end Plato and metaphysics are not attacking writing as
secondary to speaking, but on the contrary, attacking speaking and the oral
tradition by turning to the paradigm of mathematics, where the voiced sign
was in fact always entirely secondary to the written sign, where two, for
instance, was always entirely secondary to 2.
To see why Platonic philosophy takes this turn we need to distinguish
between two experiences of the being of the word, the rst, oral-auditory and
the second, literate-visual. In oral-auditory experience of the word what is
expressed comes to pass; it is as genesis or gignesthai in time. For as we experience it, a voiced word arises out of a previous word or previous silence only then
to fade into a subsequent word or silence. Each voiced word displaces either a
previous word or, if it is the rst word, silence, all the while it momentarily
defers what is yet to come and defers to it, be this the next word or silence. A
voiced word is thus experienced as a self-contradictory conjunction of being and
not being: it is all the while it is re-ferring, carrying the listeners back, to what
is not any longer, and pro-(f )-ferring, carrying the listeners forward, to what is
not yet.
An accurate phenomenological description displays that our experience of
the being of written words is quite different. First, as marks on a surface, things
written, ta grammata, stand steadily at a place in space. Even if the letters and

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markings on this surface were put there at some time and will fade at some time
into illegibility, we do not experience this temporality as readers of them. And
even if as readers we must pass in time from one set of letters to the next, from
letters that are present to us now to letters that are not yet present, we
experience the letters themselves as spatial and not temporal being, for we know
we can always go to where they are at any time and they will always be there.
Thus even if letters we have present before us always defer to letters that are
absent, we experience letters as aei onta, as always-being, accessible above
and below where we are presently reading, or always-being, there somewhere else in some other text. Thus, unlike words that we hear, we do not
experience words that we read as coming into being at a time and, in time,
passing away.
We must ask, then, if the Phaedrus treatment of writing must be understood
quite differently from the way Derrida has understood it. For in the end is it
not writing that is statically? And is it not writing, therefore, that might best
express static metaphysical being? Precisely because it is, I suggest, the Phaedrus actually privileges writing over speaking; for only static writing could
articulate dia-gramma-tically the universal and timeless differences from each
other and relations to each other of the eide or static looks to things. Orality,
on the other hand, since it communicates in the concomitant fading in and
fading out of audible sound, keeps us at the level of what is in coming to pass.
Hence, it keeps us at the level of what, in Platos view, remains ultimately
indeterminate and unknowable.
III

But if I am correct, why is it not orality but writing that right at the beginning
of the Phaedrus account of it, is linked to the enemy, sophism (see 257 d)? For
after all, sophism builds its art of confutation on just that indeterminacy of
words which I am attributing primarily to orality. Must it not be the written
word, then, that is unstable, as Derrida maintains, and not the spoken word?
And do not oral words become unstable and subversive only once they are
written down, abandoned by their fathers, and cut off from their supposedly
stable origin in speech? (See PPh, 142 f., The Heritage of the Pharmakon:
Family Scene.)
To evaluate Derridas contention here, we might best ask, just what the
question is which this linking of writing to sophism in Plato is meant to
answer.8 And to nd this out we need to go back to the three speeches, one of
Lysiass and two of Socrates. For these three speeches are clearly intended as
samples of speech making in general, samples whose particular subject matter,
as the Symposium makes plain, provided a frequent and customary theme for
exercises in epideictic or show-off rhetoric: in praising love (eros) promising
rhetors could learn to show their stuff and, like Agathon in the Symposium,
best their competitors for the prize. With this in mind we can see that love was
never the actual focus of the Phaedrus dialogue, but rather speeches as such. And
what so impresses the all too impressionable Phaedrus about Lysiass speech is
that in reversing the standard topics of epideictic rhetoric, to kalon and to

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aischron, it is able to make even such a canonically kalos or fair and decent
thing as love seem aischros or ugly and despicable: . . . in just this consists its
ingeniousness, says Phaedrus (227c; see Aristotles Rhetoric 1358 a 36b 28
on epideictic rhetoric).
With that statement the issue for the entire dialogue is joined: How are we
best to defend against sophistical exploitation of any ordinary words inherent
potential to mean opposite things? How are we to defend against a sophistical
word twisting that makes a good thing seem bad or, what is worse, a bad thing
seem good? How can we best stabilize the meanings or words so that this does
not happen? (See, in particular, the Phaedrus 260 c on the danger whenever an
orator who is ignorant of good and bad undertakes to persuade a community
equally ignorant . . . praising . . . bad as good, and so forth.)
Plato has a double and inconsistent answer here. At rst glance it appears
that the defense against sophistical deception could only be live discussion; it
could only be in dialegesthai as talking (legesthai) things through (dia),
which is to say, in putting sophistical inversions of the truth to the test in
Socratic cross-examination and exposing them for what they are. And for this to
occur the written word must be converted back into the voiced word, of which
it is only the notation. The speech writer, however, evades the Socratic elenchos
by passing the written speech on to others, who, when they recite it, just read it
off, as Phaedrus just reads off Lysiass speech, and who are themselves unable to
invest it with new dialogical life. Indeed Phaedrus, charmed as he is by the
speechs rhetorical devices, its copiousness and well-turned phrases, is completely unable to enter into a discussion of the thesis it proposes. Hence there is
little point in putting any questions to him about its subject matter. With him
dialegesthai is impossible, and its author Lysias is, after all, not available for
questioning, so the speech stands unchallengeable. This, not their fatherlessness, is really the point of Socrates comparison of written words to paintings
at 2757d: . . . if one questions them, he says, they solemnly keep an utter
silence.
Thus Socrates does not even attempt to engage Phaedrus in discussion of the
speech he has read off. Instead he provides two speeches of his own, speeches
that the dialogue presents as extensions of an oral tradition I have heard of
some things (tinon akekoa) from the beautiful Sappho or the wise Anacreon or
some prose writings or other (235 c) but which, of course, Plato writes for us
to read. And with that a remarkable tension and contradiction is introduced in
Platos account of writing, which I, in contrast to Derrida, would argue goes
back to Platos striking ambivalence, not in regard to writing, but in regard to
the oral tradition.
For Plato views sophism as an outgrowth of that oral tradition, particularly in
its writings, which he considers merely a notation for orality. On the one hand,
to be sure, he would counter sophisms perversion of orality with Socratic oral
dialectic, and to this extent, then, Derrida would seem to be right: to prevent
seduction by the written word it must, in Platos view, be brought back to live
speaking. On the other hand, Plato is also a Pythagorean, and he sees in
Pythagorean mathematics, in its theories of harmony, numbers, and geometrical forms, another, perhaps even more effective counter to sophism. For

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the knowledge Pythagorean mathematicians have of their subject matter makes

them immune to sophistical confutation. For instance, seeing and knowing,
eidenai, what the area of a square is, its ti estin, and seeing and knowing what the
area of a circle is, makes mathematicians immune to attempts to make it seem
as if a square could be constructed equal to the area of a given circle. To one who
sees and knows a thing mathematically, that thing cannot be passed off for
what it is not.
Now, as opposed to Socrates language, the language with which these
Pythagoreans make their unconfutable demonstrations (apodeixeis) is not at all
the language of orality, and, as Derrida himself rightly points out on another
occasion, it is not even based in orality but rather in writing.9 For instance, the
voiced sound that one makes for 2 is entirely secondary to the written mark
2 and twice removed from the eidos or look of duality in the system of
numbers that one sees and reads in the writing in the soul. Here the mark, the
gramme, 2, is the sign most closely approximating the archetype, not the voiced two.
With that a problem is posed for Plato: How indeed might one best defeat
sophism and, in particular, sophism in its best defended form of oral speech
written down? With Socrates oral dialectic of question and answer? Or should
we, like Pythagorean mathematicians, be made immune to its distortions from
the start by clear insight into what it is that speech is about, by a clear vision,
this is to say, of the eidos or look of the thing and its place in the diagrammatic system of differences and relations establishing what it combines with
and what it does not? (For example, 2 combines with Even but not with
Odd, Soul with Life but not with Death [see Phaedo 104 a f.], and,
presumably, Love with to kalon but not with to aischron.) If seeing and
knowing the look of things is the best defense against sophism, then dialegesthai as Socratic talking things through in time, must be transformed into
the new dialegesthai of a spatialized and systematic sorting things out,
namely by the bringing together or sunagoge of what is related, and the
taking apart or diairesis of what is different. Dialectic as spoken dialogue
must become the diagramming that Plato refers to as the writing in the soul
(Phaedrus 276 a, 278 a). Indeed, the possibility that Plato holds out, is that like
duas or two the voiced phonemes, dikaion, kalon, agathon, which name the
three principal topics of rhetorical persuasion, are really acoustical signs of
mental insights into the look or eidos of each of these, a look that is primarily
signied not vocally at all but graphically, in writing, which is to say, in some
distribution of marks in space just as 2 has its place in the series of odd and even
numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so forth.
And just why would recourse to this good writing shield us from the
dangers of the bad writing that merely writes down oral speech? Because
recourse to the writing in the soul, to the diagrammatic system of the eide in
their differences and relations, would stabilize the meaning of words, which
now would no longer be equivocal onomata, mere names for things, but henceforth univocal signs for what a thing is seen to be clearly and distinctly. With
some one who has seen and knows (oide) the eidos or look of something that
2 signies, Sophists have no chance to make 2 mean something it does not.
The hope accordingly, is that the same univocity could be achieved for the

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rhetorical topics of to dikaion, to kalon, and to agathon and that the signs designating these could thereby made invulnerable to sophistic word twisting. The
fact of the matter is that in the Phaedrus Plato shifts, albeit incompletely, from
taking the Socratic oral response to sophism to taking the Pythagorean written
one, and from Socratic dialectic as talking things through in time, to a mathematical or instructional (mathematike ) dialectic that sorts things out spatially
and diagrammatically. Indeed, directly contrary to Derrida, I would argue that
it is not the attack on writing that characterizes this dialogue but the attack on
orality: the only writing it attacks is the one that represents oral speech and
thereby aggravates the weaknesses of the latter.
The issue, joined at 258 d, is, after all, in just what kalos graphein, as opposed
to aischros te kai kakos graphein, consists, that is, writing in a noble way like
Lycurgus or Solon (compare PPh, 1212 on the writing of law-givers), as
opposed to writing in a despicable and bad way. The answer is already given
away at 259 e: of both legein te kai graphein, speaking and writing, it is asked,
Must it not hold for things stated well and nobly that the thought of the one
saying them has seen and known the truth [dei tois eu ge kai kalos rhethesomenois
ten tou legontos dianoian eiduian talethes] of the things that he would speak
about? The key words here are dianoia, namely thought or discursive intellection, and eiduia, the participle of eidenai or to have seen and known. For
already here the translation of the auditory into the visual is obvious; dialegesthai or talking something through in Socratic question and answer and
listening to the voice of ones partner in the discussion has given way to dianoein, sorting things through intellectually once having seen the truth of them.
In other words, writing nobly presupposes founding mere appearances, as these
are named in voiced speech, in what is seen to be; the vocal sounds we make and
write down for others to reinvoke for listeners, must be founded in an envisioning of what is statically ever present to the intellection (nous) envisioning it.
Even someone who would deceive the audience would, if the deception is to be
done well, have to have seen and known the truth, for, the one who has not
seen and known the truth [ho ton aletheian me eidos], but instead chases after
beliefs in the apparent, will produce, so it seems, some sort of ridiculous art of
speaking that is no art at all (262 c).
To make his point Plato now develops the hypothetical case of one who
would persuade his audience artfully and well, if not nobly, of something
that is not so, and he proceeds to test Lysiass speech to see if it is an example of
just such an artful deception founded in a vision of the truth or if it is not rather
an instance of the mere knack of producing nice sounding words about appearances in complete ignorance of the truth. It emerges that Lysias has simply
written down what he has heard, namely an uncharted, undiagrammed acoustical ow of onomata or oral, audible word-names, in no logical sequence and
pieced together only loosely by and and furthermore or on the other
hand. There is and just this is the point no envisionable structure to his
speech at all, rather it is phrased, solely for the sake of its sound, with the
rhetorical schemata of parallelism and antithesis. In other words, it lacks the
sustasis or spatial composition of writing (see 268 d). Thus it fails utterly when
measured against the standard Plato applies to it: Every speech, he says,

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must be composed like a living being [hosper zoon sunestanai], having a kind of
body of its own so that it is neither without head nor foot, but has a middle and
extremities that are written [ gegrammena] so as to stand in proper relationship to
each other and the whole (264 c; my emphasis).
It follows that if a speech is to be written well and by a techne rather than by
a mere knack, it must be founded in a spatial diagrammatization. The spoken
words to be recited by the speaker and heard by an audience over a length of
time must be based in a static structure envisionable in space, a diagram, say, of
the species brought together in the genus madness and then taken apart
into a left and right love (see 266 ab). The spoken speech must be based,
that is, in the writing in the soul which, being precisely without voice [aneu
phones] was never heard but was always seen and read silently (Sophist 263 e).
Measured against this standard, Lysias, it emerges, merely perpetuates in what
he has written down the oral-auditory tradition of rhetoric, which, like him, is
concerned simply with the temporal duration (mekos), be it long or short (see
267 b), and the temporal sequence of what the audience will hear, that is, rst,
the introduction, second, the narration, third, the certain proofs, fourth, the
likelihoods (266 e), and last, a sort of da capo to remind the listeners [hupomnesai epi teleutes tous akouontas] of what they had heard before but might have
forgotten since (267 e). (We note that the hupomnesis or rememoration here is
purely oral-aural and has nothing to do with writing!) Lysias is not in the least
concerned with founding this acoustical temporal ow in a visual, spatial diagram. Hence, for him to claim that such a procedure as his is a techne or art
would be the equivalent of Sophocles or Euripides claiming that their tragic
techne consisted merely in knowing how to make very long speeches about a
small matter and very short speeches about a great one (see 268 cd). But, in
fact, their entire techne consists in the positioning together, the sustasis, of the
parts in a whole (268 d), and measured against this standard, Lysias and the
tradition of rhetoric can be seen to have no art at all. Like all the writers of
treatises on the so-called rhetorike techne or rhetorical art, Lysias remains caught
in the oral tradition and is incapable of the new visual dialegesthai, of bringing
together parts dispersed over a space and then taking them apart again
according to their natural divisions (see 266 a). He and they are incapable,
that is, of organizing a whole that can be taken in at a glance (see 269 ac).
Still, Plato, on the border, as he is, between the earlier oral tradition and the
new literacy, and drawn, as he is, in the opposite directions of the Socratic oral,
and the Pythagorean mathematical logos, is strikingly inconsistent about all
this, and beginning at 274 c we now read what Plato has written about what
Socrates has heard about writing. allha phes akekoenai, lege, demands Phaedrus: But tell what you say you have heard. And Platos literary character
Socrates then tells the tale heard, he akoe, of Theuth and Thamus.
In regard to this tale we must note, to begin with, that, as opposed to
Husserl, whom Derrida consistently reads into the Phaedrus (see PPh, 135, n.
61 and 166, n. 82), in Plato there is neither here nor anywhere else mention of
some sort of primary internal experience of hearing ones own voice, of hearing
oneself speak. Indeed, as dianoia or thinking something out, even the dialogue
of the soul with itself is, as we have already noted, specically said to be

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without voice, aneu phones. And with good reason, for far from being a twovoiced conversation the word here is not dualogue but dialogue this
voiceless thinking consists in the new dialegesthai, which no longer talks
things through time but sorts things out with the spatializing, visualizing dialectike techne of bringing things together and taking things apart
according to the look of them, their eidos. The logos of this dialogos is no longer
Socratic speech but already the Pythagorean reasoning of graphic diagrammatical mathematics. And in the Phaedrus, too, the internal experience said to be
invaded by the external pharmakon of written characters is never called
oral-acoustical.
Furthermore, we must keep in mind that the injurious pharmakon of hupomnesis condemned by Thamus, namely the use of prompts as reminders, is essentially an oral-auditory device (see above on the hupomnesai at 267 e), and the use
of written reminders of what to say, even complete texts, is to be taken only as
an extension of other oral-auditory mnemonic devices such as meters, repetitions, stock phrases, and so forth (PP, 146151). Hence when Plato contrasts
anamnesis with mere hupomnesis here, he is not challenging writing as such but
only the application of writing by an oral tradition. Indeed, as the Menos
example of doubling the area of a square makes clear (82 b ff.), anamnesis itself is
grasped starting from the graphic and diagrammatic and not at all from the
oral and auditory: anamnesis is not at all the minds recovery of something it has
once heard but of something it has once seen. By anamnesis one comes to see and
know (eidenai) again the interrelations obtaining among the looks of things
(eide ) arrayed for ones envisioning, in the case of the Meno, Double, Square,
Diagonal, and so forth. (Compare the Phaedrus 249 c: This, then is remembrance of those things which our soul once saw [touto destin anamnesis ekeinon ha
poteiden hemon he psyche . . .].)10
IV

Where, then, does this leave us with regard to writing and Platonisms metaphysical reductions of otherness to presence to self, and of openness of meaning
to closure and univocity? Is it writing, as Derrida contends, that subverts right
reasoning, ho orthos logos, and must therefore be suppressed and excluded in
Plato? Or is it not rather precisely orality that Plato sees as the danger? Our
study has made clear, I think, that in fact Plato sees the oral tradition, particularly in its potential for sophistical exploitation, as the real threat. But in what
sense could the spoken word, far more than the written, be so radically disruptive that he would seek to counter it, at least in part, with recourse to writing?
First, and as I think Plato recognized, it is not the written word that invades
ones self-presence and disrupts ones autarkeia or self-sufciency but rather the
spoken word. For the one who would read it, any given written word, be it
written on some external surface or be it distributed diagrammatically in
internal mental space, is, despite its deferring to other absent written words, in
view and at the disposal of the reader, who, precisely as a reader or one looking
on, can maintain a theoretical detachment not available to a listener. After all,
readers can always look away from the text whenever they want, but listeners

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cannot so easily escape hearing what is being said to them. Indeed, with Havelock I would argue that it is the displacement of orality by writing that makes
the project of pure theoria, the pure intellects sovereign contemplation of the
timeless ideas possible in the rst place; for as long as one remained a listener to
tales being sung aloud, one remained captivated by them and drawn into the
passions of the protagonists (PP, 197214, 25475). In this regard one need
only compare the Ion, 533 c535 a, for the critique of the rhapsodist, who,
precisely because he sings what he has heard, cannot see and know what he is
talking about.
Hence, if, with Heidegger and contrary to Plato, a Destruktion of presence to
self is the goal, one might better advance an oral and not literary tradition. I
have in mind here an oral tradition unknown to Plato, to be sure, but perhaps
the one most disruptive of later Platonism, namely the Judeo-Christian tradition of the homiletic, pro-phetic word, the word spoken forth. As an
example one might take the You are the one! of 2 Samuel 12:7, which Nathan
attaches to his story of the rich man who stole from a poor man, and which
invades and shatters Davids detachment from the people with whose lives he
had been scheming visually schematizing, we might say and draws him
back into good faith. It is Kierkegaard, perhaps, who, in destroying the consummate Platonist Hegel, has best understood the existential need for converting such scriptural passages as this, that one might read silently, back into the
spoken word that one hears and obeys. Or, as Luke has it, He who has ears to
hear, let him hear [ho echon ota akouein akoueto], and My mother and my
brothers are those who hear Gods word and do it [hoi ton logon tou theou akouontes
kai poiountes] (Luke 8:8, 21).
Second, the spoken word, as we have seen, is not static but temporary and
temporal, and precisely this inconstancy makes it dangerous for the knowledge
that Platonic metaphysics would secure. For if the stabilized truth that we see
expressed and articulated diagrammatically were to be drawn back into expression in the mere voiced word that we hear, as this fades into audibility only to
fade into inaudibility, it would be undermined and lost. What had seemed to
be denitively clear and distinct for us, who could survey it and signify it,
would revert to its ultimate impenetrability. It follows that if the Destruktion of
Platonism is to be at the same time the recovery of the original openness and
indecidability of meaning, the original orality beneath the layers of literary
culture suppressing it must be restored. Not writing is the ramrod with which
to breach the fortress of static metaphysical thought, rather orality.
Indeed, I would argue against Derrida that it is the spoken word, not the
written, that is least susceptible to some sort of eidetic reduction, least susceptible of being reduced to a univocal sign designating some sort of static eidos
and, hence, as Plato fully realized, that remains most open to shifts in meaning.
For the spoken word, if it is not yet, for example, a conventional sign for the
written sign 2, but still part of a premathematical, preliterate voca-bulary, is
not a semeion, not a sign re-presenting something else, at all, but rather an onoma
or name that in naming something lets it be temporarily and ambiguously
what it is as in Achilles, Achilleus, from achos and laos, that is, grief to the
people.11 A written sign such as 2 signies univocally a function in a system

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of signs in the writing in the soul, and other written signs such as to dikaion
or what is just, can give the appearance, at least, of analogously designating
some sort of eidos univocally. But, as I think Plato recognized and feared,
spoken names, onomata, which are heard, do not allow this sort of envisioning,
rather they draw us into an event in which the meaning that they put to us is
constantly becoming new and different.12
We see, then, that the graphic and diagrammatical systematization of differences and relations that Derrida calls arche-writing and that Plato calls the
writing in the soul is in fact not an arche or originary principle prior to voiced
speech and is not presupposed by voiced speech. Indeed, such a structural
grammar is presupposed only once onomata have been converted into semeia
and the temporal event of voiced audible speech has, in subsequent reection,
been stopped, spatialized, and envisioned. After all, grammars are not produced
by native speakers and it was the Romans who rst produced grammars of
Greek. Derrida, in perpetuating optical metaphysics rather than taking it
down, continues to presuppose the priority of written signication over vocal
naming. But he got this wrong: Homer and the great speeches of his oral tale
precede Pythagoras demonstrations and Platos new dialectical art, both of
which are abstractions from our original acoustical involvement in being and
time.

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6
ETHICS OF THE
N A R R AT I V E S E L F

Richard Kear ney

The very notion of selfhood is ostensibly challenged by postmodern declarations of the death of man. From Foucaults apocalyptic antihumanism in The
Order of Things to Derridas pronouncements on the end of man in Margins of
Philosophy, we have grown increasingly accustomed to the claim that the
human subject is an epistemic construct of recent invention whose time has
come and gone. If the self survives at all, it does so, we are told, in the
deconstructive guise of a rhetorical trope, desiring machine or effect of the
signier. In our postmodern age, as Derrida reminds us, the human subject has
become a postman circulating postcards in an endless communications network
without sender and without addressee.
I

The best response to this crisis of self is not, I believe, to revive some substantialist notion of the person as essence, cogito, or ego. Apolegetics is no answer,
and fails furthermore to acknowledge the legitimacy of many postmodern critiques of the substantialist self. A more appropriate strategy, I will argue, is to
be found in a hermeneutics of narrative which seeks to provide us with an
alternative model of self-identity. In this respect, the most tting answer to the
question who is the author or agent? is (as Hannah Arendt reminds us) to tell
the story of a life. Why? Because the enduring identity of a person, presupposed
by the designation of a proper name, is provided by the narrative conviction
that it is the same subject who perdures through its diverse acts and words
between birth and death. The story told tells about the action of the who: and
the identity of this who is a narrative identity. This identity is what Paul
Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative, terms an ipse-self in process rather than an idemself in xity.1
The narrative subject involves an ongoing process of self-constancy and selfrectication which requires imagination to synthesize the different horizons of
past, present, and future. This was something already recognized by Heidegger
in his hermeneutic reading of Kants transcendental imagination in the Kantbuch of 1929.2 The narrative concept of self thus offers a dynamic notion of

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identity (ipse) which includes mutability and change within the cohesion of one
lifetime (what Dilthey referred to as the Zusammenhand des Lebens). This means,
for instance, that the identity of human subjects is deemed a constant task of
reinterpretation in the light of new and old stories we tell about ourselves. The
subject becomes, to borrow a Proustian formula, both the reader and writer of
its own life. Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told (TN, 3: 246).3
The narrative model of self-identity has been developed by a number of
contemporary thinkers, from Ricoeur and MacIntyre to Taylor and Benhabib.
These thinkers develop the basic argument that Enlightenment models of the
disembodied cogito, no less than traditional models of a substance-like self
(idem), fail to appreciate the fundamental processes of socialization processes
through which a person acquires a self-identity capable of projecting a narrative
into the world in which it is both an author and an actor.4 Moreover, the
narrative model of identity suggests that the age-old virtue of self-knowledge,
rst promoted by Socrates and Seneca, involves not some self-enclosed ego but a
hermeneutically examined life purged of nave archaisms and dogmatisms.
The subject of self-knowledge is one claried by the cathartic effect of narratives
conveyed by culture. Self-constancy is the property of a subject instructed by
the gures of a culture it has critically applied to itself (TN, 3: 2479).5
This application of other cultural narratives to ones own narratives is a
necessary critical moment in the hermeneutics of identity. Why? Because
storytelling can also be a breeding ground of illusions, distortions, and ideological false consciousness. In conguring heterogeneous elements of our
experience, narrative emplotment may serve as cover-up. Narrative concordance may mask discordance, the drive for order and unity displacing difference,
happy endings concealing contradictions. Indeed, as Lyotard amongst others
reminds us, even emancipatory narratives can degenerate into oppressive Grand
Narratives, as we see in the Enlightenment, Marxism, or the great monotheistic
religions. The question of power interests cannot therefore be divorced from the
hermeneutic analysis of narrative. We are constantly in need of a hermeneutics
of suspicion (inspired by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche) to be applied to the
deceptive proclivities of narrative. Here, we concur with Edward Said who
observes in Permission to Narrate (1984), and again in Culture and Imperialism
(1993), that narratives frequently operate as representations of will-to-power:
representations which must be challenged by counter-narratives in order that
their abusive tendencies be exposed and, ideally, reversed.6 But these so-called
counter-narratives, as Said recognizes, are themselves forms of narrative
alternative stories to the ofcial story, emergent stories of marginal or truncated
histories, indirect stories of irony and subversion. Such unofcial narratives
brush history against the grain. They put dominant powers in question.
One thinks here specically of the work of postcolonial authors such as Toni
Morrison, Achebe, Beckett, Rushdie, or Ben Jelloun.
A similar argument obtains at the level of individual identity. Here, the
process of narrative critique takes the form of a cathartic clarication whereby
the self comes to know itself by retelling itself. This may occur, for example,
when a subject commits itself to working the bits and pieces of unintelligible
or suppressed experience into a narrative in which it can acknowledge a certain

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self-constancy through change. This model of analytic working-through (Durcharbeitung) applies to both individual case histories and the collective stories of
communities. For, just as psychoanalysis shows how the story of a personal life
comes to be composed through a series of rectications applied to preceding
narratives, the history of a society proceeds from the critical corrections new
historians bring to their predecessors accounts (mythical and historiographical). Communities come to know themselves in the stories they tell
about themselves. Take the classic case of biblical Israel: it is precisely in the
perpetual recounting of its own foundational narratives (Genesis, Exodus,
Kings etc.) that the historical community bearing its name is formed.
Exemplifying the hermeneutic circle of narrative identity, Israel draws its selfimage from the reinterpretation of those texts it has itself created. For communal identity, no less than for personal identity, stories proceed from stories.
To sum up my argument thus far, I would say that for narrative selfhood to
be ethically responsible, it must ensure that self-constancy is always informed
by self-questioning. This requires that narrative identity never forgets its origins in narrative imagination. A critical uidity and openness pertains to narrative identity as long as we recognize that it is always something made and
remade. Hence, a society which willingly reconstitutes itself through a corrective process of ongoing narrative is as impervious to self-righteousness as it is to
self-negation. Any temptation to collective solipsism or fundamentalism is
resisted by the imaginative tendency of narrative to freely vary worlds foreign
to itself. At its best, narrative subjectivity remains open to the possibility of its
own self-deconstruction. For sometimes it is when narrative splits itself into
little narratives, sundered narratives, even antinarratives attesting the impossibility of grand narrative, that it remains most faithful to otherness. It is,
moreover, this same propulsion of narrative beyond itself towards others that
entails the corollary movement towards ethical commitment. Citing the wellknown example of a subjects capacity to keep its promise over time, Ricoeur
afrms that narrative identity is only equivalent to true self-constancy in the
moment of decision: a moment which makes ethical responsibility the highest
factor in self-constancy (CI, 249). Thus, to return to our example of biblical
Israel, we might say that it is the Jewish communitys ability to reimagine itself
through its own narratives which provides it with both the coherent identity of an
historical people and the ethical resource to imagine the narratives of others for
example, Palestinians who oppose them. The call by Jewish thinkers like
Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt for a binational Palestinian-Israeli state is a
case in point. The ethical moment of decision might be seen, accordingly, as an
expression of the Hebraic constancy of narrative memory the memory of the
age-old demand to liberate the imprisoned, to care for the famished, the
widowed, and the orphaned, to welcome the stranger as the other-than-self.
There is a hermeneutic circle here. But there are limits to this selfinterpretation which prevent it degenerating into a vicious circle. First, there is
the decision mentioned above which, though profoundly informed and galvanized by narrative, ultimately cuts across the narrative circuit of selfhood and
stakes a claim for action as we move from text proper back to the life-world.
Second, there is a moment of responsibility towards the other who, although

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heard and witnessed via narratives, is nonetheless irreducible to these narratives

in the nal analysis.
Levinas describes this as the selfs ethical obligation to the face of the other;
while Lyotard and Adorno speak of this limit-marking alterity in terms of a
willingness to surpass narrative in deference to the sublime. Either way, there is
a recognition that narrative subjectivity may indeed have full poetic licence
within the imaginary but encounters limits to its own free play when confronted with the irreducible otherness of the other. Narrative selfhood is ethical
because it is answerable to something or someone beyond itself. So that even
where it knows no censure (within the text), it knows responsibility (to the
other who transcends the text).
In contradistinction to the postmodern paradigm of the postcard, a hermeneutics of narrative is always a case of someone saying something to someone about
something. As such, it insists on a fundamentally intersubjective and relational
dimension to discourse which escapes connement to the prisonhouse of
language.
II

The idea that narrative is ethically vacuous is further belied by the evaluative
dimension of narrative persuasion. Most narratives convey something of the
Rilkean summons: Change your life! This phenomenon of persuasion has
wide-ranging implications for our understanding of the rapport between ethics
and poetics (for example, rhetoric, tropology, textual exegesis, reader reception). Narrative persuasion involves some element of ethical solicitation, however tacit or tangential.
To be clear on this: I am not talking here of a morality of rule, which would
be antipathetic to poetic liberty. I support Ricoeurs maxim that the imaginary knows no censorship and repudiate the intrusion of moralizing dogmatism
in to the free space of creativity. In my view, Rushdie had full poetic licence to
imagine whatever he wanted in The Satanic Verses, as did Kazantzakis in The
Last Temptation of Christ or the Marquis de Sade in La philosophie du boudoir.
What I am talking about here is not a moralism of abstract rules but an ethics
of experience (concerned with cultural paradigms of suffering and action, happiness and dignity). As Aristotle was the rst to acknowledge, poetics teaches
us essential truths about human experience (unlike history which is conned to
particular facts); and these essential truths are intimately related to the pursuit
of possibilities of happiness or unhappiness that is, the desire for the good life
guided by practical wisdom ( phronesis). The ctional narrator presents us with a
variety of ethical possibilities which the reader is then free to choose from,
discarding some, embracing and even realizing others. The narrator proposes;
the reader disposes. But the pact of trust and free exchange struck by narrator
and reader always carries some evaluative charge. The strategy of persuasion
undertaken by the narrator, writes Ricoeur,
is aimed at giving the reader a vision of the world that is never ethically
neutral, but that rather implicitly or explicitly induces a new evaluation

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of the world and of the reader as well. In this sense, narrative already
belongs to the ethical eld in virtue of its claim inseparable from its
narration to ethical justice. Still it belongs to the reader, now an agent,
an initiator of action, to choose among the multiple proposals of ethical
justice brought forth by the reading.
(TN, 3: 249)
A further word on this: it is because ethical phronesis implies just thinking and a
desire for the good that Aristotle considers it has a signicant role in poetic
mimesis. There is no imitation of an action which does not give rise to approbation or reprobation relative to a scale of goodness. And so we may ask what
would remain of the cathartic pity and fear that Aristotle taught us to link to
unmerited misfortune, if aesthetic pleasure were to be totally dissociated from
any sympathy or antipathy for the characters ethical quality (TN, 1: 59). Even
when narrative ction subverts the established system of virtue as is, happily,
often the case it is still engaged, however implicitly, in a process of evaluation: Poetics does not stop borrowing from ethics, even when it advocates the
suspension of all ethical judgment or its ironic inversion. The very project of
ethical neutrality presupposes the original ethical quality of action (TN, 1:
59). We may say then that poetic narratives not only excite emotions of pity
and fear, they also teach us something about happiness and unhappiness that
is, the good life. And what we learn in the narrative imitation of action we
may be inclined to incorporate in our return journey from text to action. This
combination of emotion and learning in ction is what prompts Ricoeur to
identify narrative understanding with phronetic understanding. In a study
entitled Life in Quest of Narrative, he writes:
Aristotle did not hesitate to say that every well-told story teaches us something; moreover, he said that the story reveals universal aspects of the
human condition and that, in this respect, poetry was more philosophical
than history, which is too dependent on the anecdotal aspect of life.
Whatever may be said about this relation between poetry and history, it is
certain that tragedy, epic and comedy, to cite only those genres known to
Aristotle, develop a sort of understanding that can be termed narrative
understanding and which is much closer to the practical wisdom of moral
judgment than to science, or more generally, to the theoretical use of
reason.7
The validity of this observation can be seen in the simple fact that while ethics
often speaks generally of the relation between virtue and the pursuit of happiness, ction eshes it out with experiential images and examples that is, with
particular stories. To understand what courage means, we tell the story of
Achilles; to understand what wisdom means, we tell the story of Socrates, and
to understand what caritas means, we tell the story of Francis of Assisi:
It is the function of poetry in its narrative and dramatic form, to propose
to the imagination and to its mediation various gures that constitute so
many thought experiments by which we learn to link together the ethical

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aspects of human conduct and happiness and misfortune. By means of

poetry, we learn how reversals of fortune result from this or that conduct,
as this is constructed by the plot in the narrative. It is due to the familiarity we have with the types of plot received from our culture that we
learn to relate virtues, or rather forms of excellence, with happiness or
unhappiness.
(OPR, 223)8
These lessons of narrative constitute the universals of which Aristotle
spoke; but they are universals of a more approximate (and particular-sensitive)
kind than those of theoretical thought. We may speak of narrative understanding then, in the sense Aristotle gave to phronesis, by contrast with the abstract
logic of pure theoria.
III

We might summarize the relation between narrative identity and ethical

phronesis sketched above under three basic headings: (1) vision, (2) initiative, and
(3) empathy.
(1) Narrative plays a pivotal role in providing us with ethical vision in that
it enables the self to see essential connections between its actions and its ends
qua good and evil. So that if it is true as Ricoeur emphasizes in his chapters
on Narrative Identity in Oneself as Another that ction serves as an immense
laboratory for experimenting with an endless number of imaginative variations, these experiments are also explorations in the realm of good and evil
(OA, 159, 164). Ethical judgment is not abolished in ction; it is opened up to
increasingly extended horizons of vision. Or to put it another way, narrative
invites ethical judgment to submit itself to the imaginative variations proper to
ction (OA, 164). And this expansion of ethical vision exceeds the conventional
moralities of rule and duty.
(2) Narrative also serves ethical initiative. For the self to see its being-in-theworld in terms of larger possibilities of vision often empowers it to undertake
action, that is, to better identify its goals and motives and so inaugurate a new
beginning: with the help of narrative beginnings which our reading has made
familiar to us . . . we stabilize the real beginnings formed by the initiatives we
take. . . . Literature helps us in a sense to x the outline of these provisional
ends (OA, 162). In other words, the more the self learns about narrative
emplotment in ction, the more the self learns about how to plot its own life
(that is, how to combine and congure the heterogeneous elements of its temporality and identity). Because literary ction enables each self to better perceive the connection between agent, action, and goal in its most concentrated
form, it prepares each of us to become better readers and authors of our own
lives (OA, 159). This involves a certain schematization of the network of goals
and means whereby we are free to try out various courses of action and play with
practical possibilities. Moreover, we can say that this projective function of
narrative actually generates action by furnishing us with a clearing in which
motives may be compared and measured, even if they are as heterogeneous as
desires and ethical commands. It is, then, ultimately in the liberty of narrative

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imagination that I am most at liberty to test my strengths and evaluate my

ethical capabilities.9
This emancipation of ethical initiative applies, once more, not only to the
individual self but to history in the larger sense. Ethical intervention in history
occurs in that moment of initiative when the weight of history that has already
been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted and when the dream of
history yet to be made is transposed into a responsible decision (TN, 3: 208 ff.,
258, 370).10 In this way, the power of initiative proposed by narrative selfhood
synthesizes our dual commitment to the historical horizons of past and future,
tradition and expectations, ideology and utopia.
(3) Finally, narrative serves ethical phronesis in its power to empathize. In
addition to its capacity to envision a new project, evaluate its motivations, and
initiate a realistic course of action, narrative enables each self to identify with
others. Narrative provides selves with an intersubjectivity of freedom without which they would not be inclined to commit themselves to other persons.
There is neither love nor hate, care nor concern, without an imaginary transfer
of my here into anothers there (TA, 227).11 Or, as the homicidal narrator of
John Banvilles novel, The Book of Evidence, confesses: I never imagined her
sufciently . . . yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that
made all the others possible. . . . I could kill her because for me she was not
alive.
This last point challenges, I believe, a certain postmodern assumption that
poetics can have no truck with ethics. Such an assumption sometimes issues in
an aesthetic of deliberate irresponsibility as has been said of Foucault, or in
one of undecidable indifference as has been suggested of Derrida.12 But whatever about the fairness of these charges, they do betray a lingering anxiety that
postmodern poetics, left to itself, can sometimes be a rather feckless game.
What I am claiming here is that the model of narrative identity provides us
with both a poetics and an ethics of responsibility in that it propels us beyond
self-reference to a relation with others (via analogy/empathy/apperception).
This extension of the circle of selfhood involves an enlarged mentality capable
of imaging the self in the place of the other. Hannah Arendt considers this
mentality to be essential to genuine ethical judgment; and I believe Arendt is
right. The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, she
writes, echoing Kants Third Critique,
and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not,
like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and
myself, but nds itself always . . . in an anticipated communication with
others with whom I know I must nally come to some agreement. From
this potential agreement judgment derives its specic validity. . . . It
needs the special presence of others in whose place it must think, whose
perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never
had the opportunity to operate at all.13
This argument nds support in Prousts claim that literary narrative is the form
of human relation nearest to genuine altruism. A claim reiterated by Martha

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Nussbaum in Loves Knowledge when she argues for an ethic of imaginative

perception inspired by art:
When we examine our own lives, we have so many obstacles to correct
vision, so many motives to blindness and stupidity. The vulgar heat of
jealousy and personal interest comes between us and the living perception
of each particular. A novel, just because it is not our life, places us in a
moral position that is favourable for perception and its shows us what it
would be like to take up that position in life. We nd here love without
possessiveness, attention without bias, involvement without panic.14
The point, once again, is not to conate art and life, imagination and reality,
text and action, self and other, but to see how, guarding their distinctive
character, they can interweave and complement each other. I am not arguing
that poetics and ethics are the same, only that they can, at propitious moments,
be mutually supplementary. Poetic narrative can make us freer in ourselves at
the same time as it solicits our moral empathy with others.
Let me sum up then: the representative mode of identity where I represent myself as another may serve to liberate the self from narcissistic interests
without being a liquidation of its singular identity: The more peoples standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the
better I can imagine how I would think and feel if I were in their place, the
stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking (BPF, 221). Ethical
judgment, it appears, entails a basic act of sympathy whereby the self ows
from itself towards the other in a free variation of imagination. Qua dialogue
which opens us to foreign worlds enabling the self to tell and listen to other
stories narrative functions as precondition for the representative subject. It
transgures the self-regarding self into a self-for-another, the moi into a soi.
I submit therefore that current pronouncements on the end of narrative
notwithstanding our postmodern society of spectacle and simulation has
more need than ever of narrative models of identity. Without them, we would
lack the power to transform our self-identity into an ethical mode of selfhood.
Narrative is not, I grant, always on the side of the angels. But as I hope to have
shown it does possess a singular capacity to commit us to a dimension of otherness
beyond the self a commitment which, in the moment of decision, invites the
self to imagine itself as another and to imagine the other as other. Were we
devoid of such narrative imagining we would be devoid not only of poetic
freedom but also, in the long run, of ethical judgment. That is why I ultimately
hold that the good life is a life recounted (OPR, 31).15

PA R T T H R E E

P O E T R Y, P H I L O S O P H Y, A N D
T H E S P I R I T O F H I S T O RY

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INTRODUCTION

M a s s i m o Ve r d i c c h i o

The essays in this section raise each in its own way the issue of the legitimacy of
reading poetic and literary texts philosophically. In reading Beckett, Hlderlin,
and Rilke, the essays attempt to frame the literary text within a philosophical
paradigm, to test it philosophically or to demonstrate its philosophical worthiness. We move from a reading where the philosophical provides the theoretical
basis for understanding the literary (Barker), to a radical positioning where the
literary is excluded in favor of a strictly philosophical reading (Feldman), to an
example of philosophical inuence that determines the poetical through history
(Detsch).
In Stephen Barkers Woburn On My Mind and In My (Minds) Eye: Becketts
Poiesis, literature becomes the illustration for the philosophical or theoretical.
Becketts radio play Cascando gures in Barkers reading as the best example of a
paramodern text that illustrates contemporary theories of discourse from Guy
Debord to Derrida and Lacan who have problematized, each in their own way,
the phenomenon of the paramodern. In Cascando, as in any paramodern text, the
gurative space where visibility becomes visible, there is a virtual space that can
be variously dened as bance, a yawning gap as viewed by Debord; the locus of a
trace as in Derrida; the angst generating phobia in Lacan; or nally as uncanny,
unheimlich, the ubiquitous occultation of the subject, as postulated by Freud, as
that which ought to remain concealed but is revealed. Cascando, or its central
character Woburn, allegorizes the rift between the modernist position of the
subject and the paramodern subversion, the discrepancy between visibility and
framing, between representation and form. In so doing it questions the hegemonic codes of the subject or what in Beckett is a quasi-subjective positionality, and ultimately the very ground on which the subject is encoded. Barkers
reading of Cascando serves to illustrate the type of narrative occlusion characteristic of paramodern art. The text re-enacts the uncanny absence of the subject and the rhetorical transformation in re-presentation. Its narrative is an
enabling unheimlich that denies and conrms, deposits, and erases.
Karen Feldmans The Naming of the Hymn: Heidegger and Hlderlin
follows closely on Heideggers reading of Hlderlin which excludes the possibility of a literary or external reading of the poem in favor of a nonmetaphysical
philosophical reading. Hlderlins poetry stands apart as something unusual,
a poetic saying or telling that does not use a sensuous image to point
to a spiritual meaning. His poetry is not about something and does not

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symbolize, it stands outside both metaphysics and Western art. Der Ister is
not about a river, rather it is a naming that stands for poetic telling. Naming
names the what is which is something other than meaning but calls what is
named into being. It is a telling that is and not about something. The
what that is told in the hymn and the how of its telling are one. The hymn
is the locus for poetic telling, for the unity of the naming and what is named.
Feldman not only reproposes Heideggers reading, but also suggests that
Heideggers what might be said that he hears in the word of the poet, can be
read as the possibility that the poem, indeed, is the journeying and locality, it is
the poetic time of Unheimlichkeit and Heimat. Feldman also recognizes that what
Heidegger claims to observe in Hlderlins poetry is actually his own naming.
It is Heidegger himself who names the river journeying, and thereby names
this determination of coming to be at home. But for Feldman this naming is
perhaps not the word of philosophy derived from a metaphysical distinction
since naming is nothing other than what is named. Heideggers word as intimating something other is not about something else, is not a point of access to
some entity, rather, it poetizes its own essence. It provides an access to being
through a poetic telling of it. For Feldman, the is of Heideggers lectures on
Hlderlin opens the possibility of a different kind of thinking not only of river and
journey but also of the is and of being. This possibility of thinking, however,
does not constitute a content to be discovered by an exterior, interpretive reader;
for this thinking is not but nevertheless might be.
In On Transvaluing History: Rilke and Nietzsche, Richard Detsch does
not focus on a single work by Rilke but discusses the common conception of
history shared by the poet and Nietzsche, as well as the inuence the latter may
have had on the former. The main connection is Nietzsches notion of the
historical which, as Detsch explains, is paradoxically unhistorical since
history concerns historical people only insofar as it serves their life goals. When
this is no longer the case, truly historical people have to forget the past and
seize the moment joyously and fearlessly. Or better yet, for truly historical
people there is no need to forget since they are able to incorporate the past and
transform it as if into their own blood. This is the central notion that brings
together Nietzsche and Rilke. In Rilke it entails keeping the spirit of the past
alive in the present; in Nietzsche it characterizes the task of the overman who
forces being, permanence on a reality that is supremely and absurdly
impermanent. This view of history, which is constant throughout Rilkes
work and life, ultimately justies Rilkes admiration for Mussolini and Italian
Fascism, as well as Nietzsches praise of the new Italian spirit under Fascism.
For Detsch, such an admiration is not the result of Rilkes sickness late in life,
but yet another instance of his belief in the transvaluation of history. Rilke
believed that Italian Fascism incorporated and made visible the spirit of the old
glory of Rome into the present, a spirit he had hoped would bring Rome and
Europe back to the times of Augustus and the rst Roman Empire.
These three readings raise the issue of the interpretation of literature and of
whether philosophy is capable of reading and comprehending literature and to
posit itself with respect to the referential claims the literary work inevitably
makes. At rst the analyses seem to show that a decidedly philosophical

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approach allows us to make sense of the literary. Whether in the form of

inuence, in Detsch, or of a theoretical apparatus in Barker, philosophy seems
to hold the key to explaining and making sense of the literary. This view seems
conrmed in Feldman who reproposes Heideggers nonliterary and nonmetaphysical reading of Hlderlin by completely doing away with the literary. In
the last instance, neither a literary nor a philosophical reading is shown to yield
results.
The status of thinking between philosophy and poetry reveals itself to be
problematic. While thinking seeks refuge in the scientic certainty of the
philosophical, and achieves apparent closure in an interplay of occlusion
and visibility, it runs aground with a more rhetorically aware reading. Even
Feldmans essay whose account seems to follow Heideggers nonliterary reading
approvingly places the validity of such reading into question when she suggests
that his reading is perhaps not nonmetaphysical. This turn of events would
seem to cast doubts on the ability of a strictly philosophical thinking to read
and comprehend the literary. At the same time a literary or poetic thinking also
does not seem to provide the answer. This leaves the between which, however,
is outside the scope of these three essays.

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7
WOBURN ON MY MIND AND
IN MY (MINDS) EYE

SIS
BECKETTS POIE

Stephen Barker

In his elliptical ction, just as in his theater writings, Samuel Beckett conceals
and reveals, frequently simultaneously, through strategies of revelation and
concealment over which he maintains a strict if elusive control. His writing of
lessness, and its manifestations in the obscurity-through-repetition at which he
is such a master, is a key strategy for the (always-problematic) release of information and the building of a vertiginous sense of suspension in the reader.
Becketts obsessive concern with the poiesis enacted by the elusory voix de
raconteur, directly in his prose narratives and indirectly in his dramatic writing,
foregrounds his fascination with and exploration of the agency and the action of
narrative itself. Whatever story Becketts prose may be telling, occluded within
it is invariably a nexus of poetic theory, a theory of poiesis itself, emanated
through the discourse, at play at the liminal extremities of meaning, value, and
communication. This play at the edge of narrative character is typied by the
character of Woburn, who occupies the central characterological place in
Becketts Cascando. Since Woburn typies the Beckettian strategy of occlusion
of character, exploring and working to identify Becketts narration of Woburns
story will serve here as a catalyst for an exploration of Becketts more general
strategy of characterological projection and concealment, and for the allegorical
presence of Becketts highly liminative art.
I

THE THEORETICAL OCCLUSION

Beckett understands consummately and is the master orchestrator of the relationships between levels and kinds of dialectical positionalities in which
indirection and calculated imprecision reign. He shows, in his treatment
of Woburn and other characters, that he understands with rare power and
nuance the schism and the attraction between the modernist notion of the
subject position and its paramodern subversion, its interrogative and parodic
underside. On a larger scale, his paramodern ction, poetry, and drama

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characteristically directly interrogate the vital relationship between visibility

itself, in the idea of image-making, and its active framing, in the form of the
actual image construction through which his stories build. Poiesis, seen by
Beckett as the problematic power to make or to produce narrative and focus
agency, is for Beckett both a highly rened strategy and a production of problematic images. Becketts dialectic of visibility and poiesis, of voice and narrative, so endemic to his work in general, is a focal point for and index of the
paramodern because, mutatis mutandis, it is also the quintessential nexus of
modernist narrative. The works of paramodern artists such as Beckett, or like
Peter Handke, Heiner Mller, Nathalie Saurraute, and, from a different perspective, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and others, actively interrogate the
hegemonic codes of the subject position, or what in Beckett should be called a
quasi-subjective positionality, at the same time that the work interrogates the
very ground for those encodings, by which narrative presents and re-presents
itself, making both visibility as image association and poiesis as narrative expression subject to layered strategies of discursive framing, (de)positing and working within a radically reconstructed locus for a possible narrative subject. That
is to say: visibility, which with its partner the subject-position is the core of the
modernist project both literally and guratively, is itself however only visible
within the larger theoretical framework of poiesis: what is not cognized and
recognized, expressed and therefore framed by expression is not, within an
aesthetic context, visible as such; the seen is, by the time it is recognized as
seen and is thus visible, a double narrative of framework and declaration, of
context and, as it were, content. Indeed, we must work hard to narrate what we
would actually see, through all of our senses, because what we see is a function of the story we would tell about it, inadvertently, a story whose language
occupies the entire broad and spectrum of semiotics, not merely the syntactic
language through which we generally imagine expression to function. Our
cultural navet with regard to this paramodern (and in the sense in which I
invoke it now, poststructuralist) phenomenon indeed its willful denial has
now, at least since Nietzsche, begun to dissipate; the apparently substantiating
voice that traditionally declares and attests to its presence (and in this discussion presence again means invisible in the rst-level mode by which modernism identies itself ), as the culmination of an aesthetic and psychological
paradigm familiar to us since the Renaissance and that nds its roots in Aristotle, reveals itself in the paramodern as the voice of the chimerical double, the
veritable ghost of paramodern liminality. For Beckett as for other paramodern
writers and artists, this is a virtual place, the gurative space of visibility is
appearance (what Guy Debord refers to as the bance, the yawning gap). It has
become a recognized paramodern metaphor in the guise of the trace, the virtual
space of paramodern narrative operation which nds its expression in the
expression of the bance, by which it recognizes itself.
Debords bance, the paramodern gap, which is at once the appearance of the
objectied world and its occlusion, marks the hegemonic presence/absence play
of the exile of human powers into a beyond; separation perfected.1 Where
images are looked at twice, the second time placed within the framework of the
theatrical and theoretical spectacle, the expressible narrative of the visible relies

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on the absence (that is, the trace of the presence) of the apocryphal originary
image, whose nominal immediacy is powerless, and whose role has become that
of catalyst. The radical, occluding distancing of the bance is thus the acknowledgment of the post-modern, and indeed this is the only truly valid use of
this often mistaken term. Modernist locators for the experience of art (artist/
experiencer in a binary operation under the signs of hereness and thereness,
the artist here, the artwork and the experiencer there, where even there is
understood as being substantial, that is, here somewhere else) loosen and give
way in the paramodern, however, as modernist xity has ceased to be a nite
and locatable set of sites, particularly of the artist is ego as vision, and has
become an open set of citations in an unxed and apocryphal informationscape
which constructs artist, artwork, and experiencer as traces of the agents or
agencies to which they seem to refer. The expressible is for Debord the mark of
the (narrative as much as societal) spectacle,
the heir of all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which
was to understand activity, dominated by the categories of seeing; indeed,
it is based on the incessant deployment of the precise technical rationality
which grew out of this thought. It does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. It is the concrete life of all which is degraded into a
spectaculative universe.
(SdS, 19)
For Debord, then, the notion of reality is reversed in the paramodern, inverted
in its relationship with the position of the creative subject, and this is its
logic. This produces, for Debord, Beckett, and the paramodern, a reinscribed
mechanics of perception and expression which enforce and manifest the
inversion of reality, producing what Robert Con Davis calls:
the theatrically distinct opposition between presence and absence, the
condition of difference in a binary system that makes a sign (and semiotics) possible. That is, what stands apart from and yet represents a semiotic
difference is the possibility of representation itself, the signifying possibility. . . . [that] exacts a human cost in that the subject of language is
signied within and, simultaneously, is alienated from language.2
Strictly speaking, the language to which Davis refers is the signifying
possibility, that is, semiosis itself, in both of its guises, not merely either
linear or alphabetic language, but the expressive possibility of representation
per se and the poiesis by which it is manifested forth. This set of phenomena can,
of course, be seen as the alienation and deferral by which the poststructuralist
project has always been dened; it has evolved through a wide variety of aesthetic and theoretical forms much discussed since the late 1960s; in terms of its
relation to the paramodern, a useful description of the paramodern phenomenon is to be found in Lacans (and many others) discourse of the Other, lying
outside self-reexivity (though not outside stories about self-reexivity), the
discursive law against which conscious discourse never transgresses, but
which always produces in its afterglow the anxiety by which we remember at

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least the effect of the prior discourse without inhabiting or even accessing it
(LaN, 852). Though my focus here is not on the unconscious and its discourses,
which bears a fascinating and complex relation to the bance and Beckett, it is
signicant in this occluding separation and the resultant anxiety it produces
and expresses, famously in Freuds scene of writing and what Lacan calls
narrative theory.
In the paramodern as in modernism this action produces anxiety: in the gap
between the absent presence of the visible and the present absence of the
expressible can be detected the means of production of this angst: the expressive
paramodern, as the trace, is the dangerous, all-too-familiar threat of
reconstructed narrative loci for the narrative subject to which Lacan refers in his
discussion of phobia which, unlike for Freud is for Lacan
not the fear of an object, but the confrontation of the subject with an
absence of object, with a lack of being in which he is stuck or caught, in
which he loses himself and to which anything is preferable, even the
forging of that most strange and alien of objects: a phobia.3
The threat (from the modernist perspective) of nonbeing, lodged at the core of
the paramodern as it is at the core of modernism, is central to the parodic
strategies of the paramodern, as the play of the trace institutes an interrogation
of the lack of presence, and thus also of absence, as such, in paramodern narration. The result is a ubiquitous occultation of the subject position (SLP, 83) to a
not-there-ness inhabiting the very notion of voice in the paramodern, showing voice, that most heimlich of traits in the modernist sense, to be dramatically unheimlich, with all of its implicit and explicit morbid [and dreadful]
overtones.4 Paramodern narrative is indeed unheimlich narrative. The constitutive not-there-ness of the voice,5 more radical than an occlusion or occultation
because the hidden is not merely unrevealed but indeed not there, is central to
the paramodern precisely because of its unheimlichkeit. Thus emerges the notion
of the uncanny as the gap; the bance, as Tony Kubiak points out, becomes
spectacular, becomes the phobic object which hides the terror of non-being, the
terror of the chaos behind the harmony of the law, the deep and resolute void6
of ontological unheimlichkeit in and of the paramodern.
It remains to be seen, then, how the paramodern unheimlich, the terror of the
chaos behind the harmony of the law, relates to Freuds. The unheimlich is not
itself morbid nor pessimistic, but produces these effects in the psyche through
its dialectical engagement with the unheimlich (as the simultaneously familiar
and unfamiliar) in the Other. Semiotics and its constitutive gap in the paramodern produce the occultation of the power of the Gaze of the Other; the
Other becomes Other as it is expressed as such. As Derrida points out,7 the
unheimlich (as that which should have remained concealed but is revealed) is
the suspended sign of the concealed, suspended like Nietzsches tightrope in
narrative in order to draw attention to its existence as a mark. Thus is the
unheimlich, the ground of the cultural horror that ranges from Aristotelian
tragedy (as the enculturated evolution of the ritual dithyrambs out of which the
Greek notion of the tragic emerged), at one end of the cultural spectrum, to

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terrorism and bance the occultation of the spectacle at the other.8 The
paramodern unheimlich is thus a dialectical narrative construct, a linguistic
subset of the experiential and linguistic heimlich by and against which it
knows and denes itself, through a process of guratively internal distancing.9 In Freud and the Scene of Writing, Derrida points out the
moments of deferring, the traces, which are in Freud, following on some
themes he develops extensively in a variety of texts dealing with the relation of
the forces at work within the individual relative to those of the collective of
which each is by default a part, the effort of life to protect itself by deferring a
dangerous cathexis, that is, by constituting a reserve [Vorrat]. The threatening
expenditure of presence is deferred with the help of breaching [Bahnung; opening, clearing, forcing] or repetition.10 The deferral to which Derrida refers,
now so familiar to readers of and after deconstructions lessons, is a distancing
at a wide variety of aesthetic levels, in addition to its psychological and social
components. Further, this psychoanalytic difference, Freuds reserve, is
matched by the thematic of literary/aesthetic distance in the paramodern
works of Beckett and others, that focus on, depict, indeed are obsessed by, this
fading, disappearance, occultation.
The unheimlich, as the frightful and energizing play of presence and absence,
of the familiar and the unfamiliar, with all of its Manichean overtones, is thus
vital to the paramodern occlusion of which Beckett is the master and clearest
articulation. In Becketts aesthetic context, the most dramatic consequence of
this occlusion at the level of expression occurs at the level of the image itself:
occultation is pervasive in this realm, as no originary image exists for consciousness; the space of the seemingly originary image, the stimulus to perception and thus to conception and aesthetic consideration, is ipso facto subsumed
into the discursive image or rejected and discarded. Thus the history of the
visible is already the play of concealment and revelation. Let me put this into
two separate frameworks, Debords sociological and Derridas theoretical one.
For Debord, the image has become the nal form commodity reication. . . . the
spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image
(SdS, 30). The economy of the absent image, for Debord, works in this way:
the more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he
accepts recognizing himself in the dominant image of need, the less he
understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the
spectacle in relation to the active man appears in that his own gestures are
no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is
why the spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is
everywhere.
(SdS, 30)
For Debord, wherever the paramodern spectacle exists (and the conundrum of
the paramodern is that the spectacle exists wherever attention is turned), the
commodication of the image is the source of the unheimlich, the alienationrecognition conundrum.
Derrida, on the other hand, follows a labyrinthine path from the nonscripted
proto-emiosis of the unheimlich trace in Freud, through the prewriting of the

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arch-trace, via the symbiosis of memory traces and the mechanical constructs of
semiosis, to the fact that the psyche is indeed a kind of text (WD, 199), and
nally to the need, in dening and depicting the psyche through memory, to
the structure and functioning of writing itself. This process never allows us to
forget that life is threatened by the origin of the memory which constitutes it,
and by the breaching [Debords bance] which it resists, the effraction which it
can contain only by repeating it (WD, 202; my emphasis). Acknowledgment of
this breaching the loss of the originary image within the framework of the
expressive, that has as its equivalent the origin of pain (and of the object-fear by
which phobia is dened) in Freud provides the uncanny opening of the
framework of the discursive trace in Derrida.
To comprehend the hegemonic danger of this strategic move, the unheimlich
proliferation of paramodern discursive frames, one must confront and add to
the Derridean alchemy (that is already in many respects a cousin-German
to Lacans) the Lacanian notion of aphanisis, as Lacan lays it out in Four
Fundamental Concepts.11 Aphanisis (fading or disappearing) and epiphany (as
emergence or revelation) play a precipitous ontological and dialectical game,
according to Lacan, within the realm of the expressibility of the mark of the
subject. Aphanisis, the fading of the subject, is inherent within the Freudian
unheimlich and expresses itself as the condition of loss or disappearance of the
real (paramodern) nature of the subject. The dramaturgy of the subject
inherent in aphanisis, Lacan says, is a construct that produces the ontological
fault line on which the unheimlich and the paramodern rest. This revolution of
the subjects status, and the resultant shift in the way we understand narration,
poses an ontological difculty of the highest order (LaN, 858). Narrative
poiesis lies within the irretrievably unwhole (LaN, 857) nature of the subject
(no wonder men fought to invent a patriarchy and no wonder women are
struggling against it). In the fading of the subject, associated with the desire of
and through the Other, this aphanisis can be seen as a threshold of the power of
the law of the unconscious, and the cornucopic birth of poiesis. Indeed, Lacans
concept of narration and interpretation rest squarely on this ontological fault
line, and only by the strategic suturing of this unwholeness with threads of
ideology (LaN, 857) can we occlude or conceal, behind a psychological and
ideological mask (that is, framework) we must ourselves construct and bring to
any treatment of any subject in any narrative with the hopeful expectation of
producing, critiquing, or obviating signicance, meaning, and wholeness, the
bance on which the paramodern rests.12
II

THE CRITICAL OCCLUSION

Having suggested a theoretical framework and remembering what expressive

frameworks entail in terms of the unheimlich and aphanisis I want to exercise the
critical agency that framework produces, here acknowledging the occlusion by
which critical narratives operate. I know of no better examples of the paramodern occlusion I have been discussing than Samuel Becketts short, 1962 radio
play Cascando,13 which seems at rst to attempt the impossible fusion of narrative and voice, but which confesses a complete aphanisis of narrative and voice.

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Indeed, as is appropriate for the paramodern as read by Debord, Derrida, and

Lacan, both views are defensible and correct. Becketts title, Cascando, itself a
musical term for the fading away of sound,14 is the rst powerful hint at the
complex and unheimlich theme I have been exploring. The piece itself, which
requires about fteen minutes to perform, has three so-called characters: the
Opener, Voice, and Music; the Opener allows, with his, her, or its (we
dont and cant know) with his (lets say; the part was originally played, in
the French ORTF production in 1963, by Roger Blin) rst words, the verbal, or
at least aural, action to begin and continue (though he is full of anxiety about
its ability to do so); the Voice tries, increasingly unsuccessfully, to tell the
story of an absent gure named Woburn; Music is music, which intercedes in
the so-called action at the direction of the Opener when the story is sufciently
enervated as to be in danger of halting altogether. Cascando is a narrative
about narrating, and about the agency to successfully nish a story; it is about
a doubly absent gure called Woburn, to whom some events have seemingly
occurred doubly absent because he is absent from the play and because,
since Cascando is a radio play, all the so-called characters are absent.
Becketts release of salient information about the thematic context of the
piece is adroit, economical, and elemental. Introducing an uncanny voice-uponvoice frame immediately, in a double story, he then immediately explores the
nature of the power of voice to ground or root a or any history in narrative,
written or spoken.
opener:

[Cold.] It is the month of May . . . for me.

[Pause.]
Correct.
[Pause.]
I open.
voice: [Low, panting.] story . . . if you could nish it . . . you could rest
. . . sleep . . . not before . . . oh I know . . . the ones Ive nished . . .
thousands and one . . . all I ever did . . . in my life . . . saying to myself . . .
nish this one . . . its the right one . . . then rest . . . sleep . . . no more
stories . . . no more words . . . and nished it . . . not the right one . . .
couldnt rest . . . straight away . . . another . . . to begin . . . to nish . . .
(C, 137)
The anxious assurance of the Openers voice, coldly telling his story, checking
himself (Correct), then opening the second voice, the occluded and spectacular, fragmented voice of Voice, leads the listener into the paramodern
world of the bance and to the problematic of expressibility. What the Voice
can express is what can be expressed, in shards, resting on the breath that
signies both presence and absence. Voices is the uncanny voice of aphanisis,
the fading of the subject in and because of the narrative by which he is
known to us. Like Woburn, Voice is waiting for night to fall (C, 137)
(which would signify the successful completion of narrative) but which can
never take place. Voices existence, like that of the Opener, depends on the
success and the failure of this closure; that is, the ontological status of both

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voices in the play, that of Opener and Voice, is balanced on the unheimlich
threshold of disappearance.
For the Opener, the narrative line moves in the course of the play from It
is the month of May, for me to yes, correct, the month of May, the close of
May (C, 142); that is, nowhere. For the powerful Opener, narrative is static,
and does not advance. For the Voice, contrapuntally interrupting and being
interrupted by the Opener being opened and closed by the Opener the
desired story of this apocryphal Woburn (vouloir dire?) progresses through a
broken series of broken images that constantly strive both to locate him in
traditionally structured narrative imagery, through a series of falls (rst into
mud, then sand, then onto stones, then into the bottom of a boat (could it be a
relative of Rimbauds) which apparently has oated out to the open sea,
Woburn facedown in the boats wet bilge unable to see anything, possibly dead.
But see how easy it is to be a modernist! Cascando is not, I must constantly
remind myself as a reader or listener, caught within the strange narrativity of
the text, a story about Woburn but about the impossible closure of stories and
the impossibility of telling a story that is not, as the Opener says, in the head,
despite his or its desire for sleep, for no more stories. Woburns
uncanny absent presence, even more than that of Godot, or of the rest of the
world in Endgame, is at play with the dangerous and fearful unheimlich, eluding
the holistic security of narrative substance, and persistently critiquing the very
nature of presence and absence, of the minds eye, and of the drama of narrative
representation, all within the frighteningly uncanny framework of audibly fading narrative power. The seeming agent of Jacques-Alain Millers suture, the
Opener, is a theatricalized quasi-positionality, a spectacle of the ear, out of
which a necessary ction of closure can be momentarily fabricated, then lost,
perpetually, in repeated rounds of images. Not only is the narrative object,
Woburn (the ery burn of woe at the loss of nitude?), eternally lost in the fog
of phrases by which we glimpse him/it, but so are the uncanny tellers, the
Opener and the subordinate Voice. Voices stated desire for the closure/suture of
the story is simultaneously the desire for an escape from the unheimlich link
with the Opener and a marker for Becketts abysmal, elemental rhetoric, the
oscillatory style characteristic of Becketts French (Cascando is Becketts only
play written after Fin de partie in French). This style declares in its very surface
the eeting traces of the authority of the teller, who is present only in the trace
of story.
But Beckett goes further here. This trace of the doubly fading storyteller is
linked, in Cascando as elsewhere in Beckett and the paramodern, to the separation of which Derrida speaks in Truth in Painting, linked to Debords reinscription of the image through the spectacle. In this paramodern realm of the
present-absent image (what I have called elsewhere the videated image), all
consciousness, like all narration, occurs in the bance, the innite distance into
virtual space, between narration and the narration of voice. Beckett cements
this conceptualization of distance by making his short play a radio play, for
which the listeners presence is not required and which produces its effect
through electronic breath. Radio in this respect represents the mechanical
videation of the voice, a distancing through electronic (re)production that

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anticipates the imagistic distancing of cinema, television, video, and current

virtual and cybernetic imaging. Becketts radio play, infused with music, is at
the same time a quintessentially Beckettesque play with word, syntax, and sign
that denies the metaphysical comfort, as Nietzsche calls it, of which presence
(as a hegemonic and aesthetic construct) attempts to fabricate itself.
The Voice, which can be seen or, rather, heard as the unheimlich narrative
voice of the Opener, is literally fading away through the course of the play, yet
like Shelleys coal is never extinguished, as the seeming last traces of story
continue to trickle forth, either from the Voice or from the Opener-proper. The
Opener serves as the Joycean god of the creation, the modernist storyteller, as in
the following passage:
opener: God God.
[Pause.]
There was a time I asked myself, What is it.
There were times I answered, Its the outing.
Two outings.
Then the return.
Where?
To the village.
To the inn.
Two outings, then at last the return, to the village, to the inn, by the
only road that leads there.
An image, like any other.
But I dont answer any more.
I open.
(C, 143)
And to what does the Opener open? To the Voice, who is the uncanny repository of the faded image(s) of Woburn, who is visible, as aural image, because of
the faded expressions of which he/she/it consists. Dont let go . . . nish, says
the Voice following the Openers outburst: Its the right one . . . this time . . .
I have it . . . were there . . . Woburn . . . nearly (C, 143). In the monologues dramatic aphanisis, a dwindling to nothing (or to nearly nothing),
which makes the clearly erroneous claim that this story is the impossible
right one that will allow Voice to sleep (that is, to be silent), one sees
revealed what should not have been revealed (Derridas unheimlich narration,
and the bance across which it is stretched) and at the same time, as always in the
unheimlich, the impossibility of revelation. In the play of narrative indeterminacy, Cascando demonstrates paramodern videation and its uncanny threat.
In the bance between Opener and Voice in Cascando we see that the framework of visibility is indeed iterability itself, but that iterability is devoid of
agency, of meaning (vouloir dire) without reiteration, the repetition or representation by which narrative comes into being. But reiteration is, within
the law of discourse, erasure: simultaneous declaration and occlusion, as in
Voices story of Woburn, and Voices inability to tell it. As Derrida points out
in his critique of Freud, Freud employs metaphoric manipulation in his own
narratives because Freuds stories, Derrida tells us, illuminate the meaning of a

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trace in general (WD, 199). In Derridas acknowledgment of Freuds concentration on the trace, rather than on the story, we see the impetus for Becketts
Opener, at the very threshold of prewriting and of writing. For Freud, Derrida
points out, force [read visibility] produces meaning through the power of
repetition alone (WD, 213). But repetition inhabits visibility originarily
as its death [emphasis mine] (WD, 213); this storytelling power is at the same
time, uncannily, a lack of power, and thus allows language (expressibility) to
come into being, to open. This occurs only through repetition. Traces thus
produce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the period of their
erasure (WD, 226). Becketts Opener is aware of this, or at least seems to be in
his own narrative:
What do I open?
They say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, its in his head.
They dont see me, they dont see what I do, they dont see what I have,
and they say, He opens nothing, he has nothing to open, its in his head.
I dont protest any more, I dont say any more,
Theres nothing in my head.
I dont answer any more.
I open and close.
(C, 140)
However we are to read this constitutive nothing by which Opener denes
what is in his head, and I suggest reading it as precisely the advent of the
uncanny occlusion of narrative being, repetition indeed inhabits visibility
originarily as its death for Opener, as he declares in his next speech:
They say, this is not his life, he does not live on that. They dont see me,
they dont see what my life is, they dont see what I live on, and they say,
That is not his life, he does not live on that.
(C, 140)
This other voice, the voice of they, to which Opener consistently responds,
marks the gaze of the Other and the heimlich world of being from which Opener
and Voice have faded. Indeed, it is precisely this point in the play at which
Becketts stage directions to both Voice and Music become Weakening as
they re-enter the narrative. Becketts direction in Cascando like Derridas
conclusion:
Pure perception does not exist: we are written only as we write, by the
agency within us which always keeps watch over perception, be it internal
or external. The subject of writing does not exist if we mean by that some
sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of
relations between strata. . . . Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found. (WD, 2267)
Becketts drama, like much else in the paramodern, re-enacts the uncanny
absence of the subject and the rhetorical transformation in re-presentation.
Paramodern narrative is thus an enabling unheimlich that denies and

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conrms, deposits and erases. Woburn is indeed, as image and as narrative

construct, on my mind and in my minds eye.
III

THE OCCLUSION DISASSEMBLED

Beckett concludes Cascando with what seems in some respect to be the nal
attempt at Woburns conclusive narrative framing, but which can never be that
which cannot exist: no nal narrative is possible in the world of nonclosure
Beckett shows us. The story may wind down to a trickle, and then sink into an
entropic whiteness on the page, but can never end, in the sense in which
Beckett and his characters so desire it. His efforts at closure in the story of
Woburn, which is indeed a tale of woe and indeed related to the distant and
fading coal with which Shelley objecties both the desire for closure and the
desire that closure be eternally suspended, have this result:
. . . this time . . . its the right one . . . nish . . . no more stories . . . sleep
. . . were there . . . nearly . . . just a few more . . . dont let go . . . Woburn
. . . He clings on . . . come on . . . come on
...........................................
[Silence.]
curtain
And once again, as always, it cant be nished, cant be done.

(C, 144)

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8
THE NAMING OF THE HYMN

LDERLIN
HEIDEGGER AND HO

Karen Feldman

Heideggers 1942 lecture course on Hlderlins Der Ister is about the

distinction between a poems saying and what it says, yet is itself a rethinking
of this distinction; hence the text of the lectures, in rethinking the notion of
being about that governs the usual interpretation of poetry, operates at a
sensitive limit of Hlderlins hymn. That is, Heidegger does not read Der
Ister as telling about anything, because for him the poem is nothing other than
what is told.1 It is difcult, however, to conceive of a poem as being other than
about something, and to articulate anything about a poem without dragging the poetic word into a framework of being about, that is, without
importing a customary conception of representation and interpretation into the
discussion. Thus Heideggers lectures on Der Ister, which read the poem as a
telling of a river rather than a telling about a river, cannot but entangle themselves in the difculty of saying otherwise than about the hymn. Moreover,
our own every gesture of explication, interpretation, and inference reduces the
movement of Heideggers text to being about something, and also reduces it to
something about which to write or speak. That is, we can only say what
Heideggers lectures on Der Ister are by reducing them in one way or another,
in saying what they are about for example, that the lectures are about the
Ister hymn, about the choral song of Sophocles Antigone, about the historical
( geschichtlich) relation between the Germans and the Greeks, and about poetizing. Such interpretive gestures treat the text as an entry to that which the text
is about, whereas Heidegger complicates the distinction between the text and
what it is about by questioning whether the being of Hlderlins poetizing is
different from the being of entities. This essay will attempt to hear the naming in
Heideggers text that undermines or complicates the distinctions which separate
poetic saying from what is said, that is, which hold language apart from being.
Heideggers attempt to read Hlderlins Der Ister as not about a river
thus entails rethinking what a poem is, for if we believe that we know what a
poem is and how to read it, it is only because we have a prior understanding of
poetry as a particular kind of writing that is about something in a familiar
way. Hence Heidegger cautions,

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In order that we do not misinterpret Hlderlins poetic telling a telling

that is quite other by way of our habitual representations, this habituation itself must be recognized for what it properly is.
(GA 53, 26)
The interpretation of poetry requires a general preunderstanding of poetry as
to the way it is about what it is about. Our habitual understanding of representation, of the ways in which poems are about things, is in Heideggers reading inappropriate to Hlderlins river hymn because, as we shall see, he reads
Der Ister as something other than a representation. To approach this other
kind of saying, in which the distinction between the text and that which it
is about is transformed or dissolved, requires rst turning to the ordinary
conceptions of poetry.
The habitual understanding of representation that governs interpretation
assumes that a poem is not just about the sensuous image that the poem
depicts, but about something else that the appearance in the poem signies.
Meaning (Bedeutung) consists in the reference toward a nonsensuous (nichtsinnliche) content. The poems way of being about something thereby takes place
on two levels: the poem is about a sensuous entity, but the entity it is about
stands in for and points toward something of a different order of being, that is,
a particular nonsensuous meaning. Hence the possibility for a poem, allegory,
metaphor, or symbol to mean something depends upon the symbolic image as
the intermediary between the sensuous and nonsensuous realms. The notion of
two realms, sensuous and nonsensuous, belongs not only to poetry but to a
range of thinking and texts that we call metaphysics, precisely because this
thinking presumes that there is a bounded realm of the physical, and
moreover that it is possible to go beyond this physical realm. Heidegger thus
considers the framework in which the symbolic image operates to be a consummately metaphysical one, for only where there is a nonsensuous realm apart
from a sensuous one can there be an image that symbolizes a meaning. The
symbolic image is but one instance of the metaphysical subordination of the
sensuous to the nonsensuous at the level of actuality or truth.
Heidegger claims that while Hlderlins hymns appear in the historical
epoch of metaphysics, the metaphysically determined logic of the symbolic
image does not apply to that poetry, and the kinds of interpretation that make
use of the metaphysical distinction are useless with respect to Hlderlins
hymns. Yet these are all the usual (alle blichen) ways of reading and interpreting poetry. Therefore Hlderlins poetry stands apart as something unusual. If
Hlderlins hymnal poetry is not metaphysical, and metaphysics determines
the different kinds of being belonging to images, poems and entities, then the
very being of that poetry is in question. Hence to tell what that poetry is
requires a telling of a kind of being that metaphysics does not regulate.
So how are we to hear the poetic word, if not by listening for its meaning, if
not as a symbolic image? How are we not to interpret the poem, if interpretation
is also based on the foregoing explanation of meaning? How are we to read the
poem, if not by interpreting it, if not by assuming that it means? To put it
another way, what constitutes actuality and truth when the metaphysical
privilege of the nonsensuous has been set aside?

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What Hlderlins river hymn is can at this stage be said only negatively, for
when Heidegger claims that Der Ister is not about a river, not symbolic, and
not metaphysical, the burden of expressing this other-than aspect falls in
large part upon the word not. But how do we understand the negativity of
this not? For instance, in the statement that Hlderlins hymnal poetry is
not concerned with symbolic images the not cannot be the not of metaphysical opposition. To hear the not as such an ontic negation would be to
understand the hymn as merely an empty image, as a symbolic image that has
been eviscerated of meaning. Such an understanding would yield a view of
Hlderlins poetizing that would in fact participate in the logic of the symbolic and the distinction it makes between sensuous and nonsensuous. This
view would offer a truly meaningless image as the alternative to the symbolic
image. While to read Hlderlins hymn as meaningless imagery maintains a
consistency with Heideggers claim that the poetry is not symbolically
imagistic, this reading nevertheless does not account for the assertion that
this poetry must stand entirely outside of metaphysics, and thus outside the
essential realm of Western art (GA 53, 21), for the characterization of a
meaningless image still depends upon the distinction between image and
meaning.
The is not of the statement that Hlderlins hymn is not concerned with
symbolic images must therefore be something other than an ontic negation. In
this case, somehow the word is in the statement (again, that Hlderlins
hymnal poetry is not concerned with symbolic images) must not be heard as the
is of metaphysical representation, in order not to drag the hymnal quality of
Hlderlins poetry into the metaphysical divisions of being. Herein lies a constitutive difference of the hymn, for the being that is articulated therein is not
the being of an entity, and yet the negativity of this negation is not simply
oppositional. The sequence of negations that characterize what Hlderlins
hymnal poetizing does not do that is, Heideggers declarations that Hlderlins hymnal poetizing does not mean, does not refer, and does not say something about something this sequence of negations also stands as a refusal of
the question What is Hlderlins hymnal poetry? This refusal does not simply
refuse the characterizations of what his hymnal poetry does and is; it refuses to
accept the is, the being of that poetry, as the being of an entity: Only from what
is said poetically here can we come to understand the status of what is (GA 53,
22). Hlderlins river poems do not mean in the manner of a sensuous image,
for their saying determines our understanding of what is (was hier das Seiende ist)
The metaphysical difference between what is a poetic river and what is an
actual river depends not merely on what each is but also upon what the is is,
that is, what being is according to the metaphysical distinction and according to
the poetic saying.
In fact Heidegger does state what the river poems are, but this what is
no static entity. The river hymns are a naming:
The poetic telling of [von] the river is also such naming of the river.
Hlderlins poetizing, particularly during the time of his hymnal poetry,
is this naming.
(GA 53, 25)

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The poetic naming that Heidegger describes is not just saying a name in the
manner of a mentioning in accordance with an appropriate nomenclature.
Poetic naming does not invoke a distinction between the sensuous and nonsensuous, nor a higher actuality at a level of meaning. Furthermore, as Heideggers
own scare quotes around the word of suggest (in saying that the poetic
telling of the river is also such naming of the river), the river hymns do not
tell of the river according to our usual understanding regarding telling of.
Instead, Heidegger claims, Here naming is the name for poetic saying (GA
53, 24). The telling-of that occurs through poetic naming names what is, and
yet not as anything distinct from that which is. The being of the naming and
the being of what is named are not distinct. Thus naming does not merely occur
in Hlderlins poem, it is rather what the poem does in its saying.
If there is no direct access to what poetic naming is in the rst instance, then
to say what is poetic naming as we have in essence just done when this
naming has everything to do with what is in a larger sense, to say what poetic
naming is is to come to it from an outside. In other words, to symbolically
represent what this naming is would be to violate the character of naming as
nonmetaphysical saying, as a saying that does not represent but that brings
forth the being of what it says. The metaphysical outside of such naming
distinguishes between the levels of being of poetic telling and that about which
it tells. Naming cannot therefore be said according to any of the usual symbolic
understandings of what poetry, metaphor, or allegory is.
The difculty of thinking a saying that is not a saying about something,
that is, the difculty of not representing such a nonrepresentational saying,
spreads from Hlderlins hymn to Heideggers lectures, since for Heidegger
to characterize naming as a way of saying something without saying about
it entails that he somehow avoid a metaphysical gesture of representing
Hlderlins naming. Therefore, the name for this naming cannot properly represent this naming, without dragging it into a metaphysically determined distinction between a saying and what is said. With the problem of naming poetic
naming, Heideggers own saying with regard to poetic naming is at a threshold
of philosophy that verges on the very poetizing from which philosophical (that
is, metaphysical) thinking holds him at a distance.
We can follow Heideggers concern for nonmetaphysical poetizing by considering his further name for poetic naming, as indicated by what is said at the
beginning of the course on Der Ister, where Heidegger introduces the term
hymn as the name of both a Greek celebratory song and of Hlderlins river
poem. Indeed the fact that Heidegger thinks Hlderlins river poems as hymns
establishes an essential relation between the poetry and what is poetized:
The hymnos is not the means to some event, it does not provide the
framework for the celebration. Rather, the celebrating and the festiveness lie in the telling itself.
(GA 53, 13)
The hymn exceeds an opposition between means and end, it accomplishes itself
and that for the sake of which it takes place in one gesture. Its telling is the
celebration which it tells in order to celebrate. The what that is told in the

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hymn and the how of its telling are one. There is nothing other than the
telling as the celebration what is told and that for the sake of which it is told
are bound together in the hymn. As the unity of celebrating and the celebration, the hymn is what it sings.
Thus hymn is the name for the poems that name poetically, for the unity of
the naming and what is named. The Greek hymn does not tell about greatness, but rather makes for greatness, bringing it into a poetic language of
celebration. In the unity that the hymn determines is precisely where
Heidegger at the outset calls upon the Antigone:
We thus encounter a turn of phrase in which the noun and verb, humnos
and humnein, are immediately united. The most beautiful example of
which we know are the words of Antigone in the tragedy by Sophocles
. . . not even as preparation of the bridal festival will a celebratory song
ever celebrate me.
(GA 53, 1)
Heidegger considers the unity of noun and verb as the privilege of the hymn,
for the word of the hymn celebrates and is the celebration, tells and is in one
gesture, without any pointing toward, without recourse to any outside, and
without separating the being of the celebrating from the being of what is
celebrated. The privilege of the hymn rests upon its unifying the
celebratory with the celebration. The hymn therefore takes place as a particular
simultaneity or coincidence between the celebratory and the celebration.
The celebratory aspect of the hymn also derives from its relationship to
community. On the one hand, the words of the hymn are what is celebratory,
but on the other hand the hymn is a celebration when it is sung and heard in
public. That is, the originary unity of the hymns celebrating celebration takes
place through song, and this unity occurs in the community, in the publicity of
the singing or performance of the hymn. The distinction between what is
celebrated and the celebration does not obtain in the Greek hymn, perhaps
because it is music above all. Moreover perhaps it is exactly this openness of and
for the community that grants the hymn a special telling, a telling other than
by means of symbolic imagery.
The simultaneity of the hymn, the unity of noun and verb that the hymn is,
derives from its character as something heard that is, from the fact that the
community hears the hymn together and at once, and hears it both as the
celebration and as what is celebrated. Hearing is indispensable for the hymn and
for Hlderlins Der Ister as such a hymn, for one must hear Hlderlins hymn
as the celebration of what is to be celebrated, rather than as a symbolic image
within the epoch of metaphysics. Heidegger cautions,
Are we here faced with the necessity of having to think otherwise, and not
in terms of the symbolic image, what sign and language mean? . . .
Without any knowledge of what sign and language mean here, we
must remain deaf to Hlderlins poetry. This deafness is certainly not a
harmless inability to hear, it is a failure to hearken and an inability to
hearken obediently.
(GA 53, 31)

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Heidegger evokes a danger of deafness with regard to poetic saying, a deafness

that arises from a particular understanding of language that is concerned with
symbolic images. Is deafness an arbitrary gure here, or is there a particular
reason that we are deaf rather than blind or otherwise insensible to poetic
saying? To be able to hearken means that one can hear the word is as poetizing, as naming, rather than as symbolizing, and hear the poetizing as a
telling nding of Being (GA 53, 149). This telling nding evokes an is of
poetizing, an is that one must hear as something other than the is which
characterizes beings. Furthermore the telling to and within a community is
itself the nding of being that the hymn is. The telling and nding occur
simultaneously, for the hymns performance, hearing, and the celebration take
place at one moment that is shared by a community.2
We ought briey to stop and ponder not just whether deafness is an apt
gure here but indeed whether deafness is a gure here at all, where what is at
stake is precisely a thinking otherwise than according to symbolic images. Is
deafness a gure for a form of apprehension that would not be guratively
inclined? To be guratively deaf to Hlderlins telling Being is to hear it as
gurative, to be caught in a metaphysically determined understanding of a
gurative/literal opposition. To be literally deaf to Hlderlins poetry is literally not to hear it at all. Could one be literally deaf but nevertheless hearken to
the hymn? Is there a way to think Heideggers allusion to the danger of deafness
as neither gurative nor literal? To think the deafness at stake here as not literal
and not gurative would mean to think from beyond the deafness that Heidegger
warns of, for it would mean precisely being able to hear the unity of noun and
verb, the poetic telling of what is.
Having considered briey the naming at stake in Heideggers reading of
Der Ister, as a hymnal telling of a river rather than as a telling about a river, let
us conclude with a few remarks on the status of Heideggers own telling.
Heidegger begins his lecture course by stating that its goal is to draw attention to [aufmerksam zu machen] Hlderlins hymns (GA 53, 1). The nature of
this attention, however, is entirely at issue, for what is the proper attentiveness
to Hlderlins hymn? The attention that Heidegger wants to draw to the poem
does not consist in simply bringing ourselves and our understanding to the
poetry, in order to produce an interpretation of and knowledge about the hymn.
Heideggers attention to Hlderlins Der Ister consists rather in an
entangling intimation, as suggested by this statement in the rst lecture:
We must rst become attentive to this poetic work. Once we have
become attentive, we can then pay attention to, that is, retain, some
things that at favorable moments, will perhaps let us attend to, that is,
have some intimation [Ahnung] of, what might be said in the word of this
poet.
(GA 53, 12)
The attending to the poetic work takes place at favorable moments (in gutem
Augenblicken). In such favorable moments, we do not necessarily, but only
perhaps (vielleicht) attend to something, and from it intimate what might be
said in the word of this poet. In other words, Heidegger does not say that in

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good moments we intimate what is said in the word of the poet, as though
intimation were a question of access, or as though intimation were a precursor
to interpretation, for example. Instead, the intimation that Heidegger is
writing about is an intimation of what might be said in the word of this poet. In
other words, intimation yields a possibility. The favorable moment is not a
moment of certainty, not a moment of knowing what Hlderlin is saying, but of
having an intimation of the possibility of his word. This essay has attempted to
attend to Heideggers reading of Hlderlin by shifting the emphasis of attention from the what of what might be said to the being of what might be
said, and moreover to the might, that is, to the possibility of hearing other
resonances of what might be said with respect to Heideggers reading of
Hlderlin.
Yet if our attention to Heideggers lecture course is based upon an attempt to
characterize what is Heideggers word, that attempt necessarily draws
Heideggers telling into a metaphysical determination, that is, as based on a
notion of being about and the being of entities. At issue, however, is not the
simple equation of what a poem or the Ister river is, but the limitations of
language with regard to another understanding of what is:
This illusion of a mere playing with words cannot be overcome directly.
We must even concede that such statements cannot be understood directly
at all in the way that we understand the assertion that today is Tuesday. . . . Yet why do we then pronounce such statements? . . . in order
simply to know that the river is an enigma.
(GA 53, 3940)
The is which equates today and Tuesday is not the same is that appears
in the statement that the poem is the river. The strangeness of the statements
that seem to equate the river, the poem, and naming has its own determination:
to celebrate, in the unity of noun and verb, the enigma of the river and its
being. The is of the poetic telling does not symbolize a kind of equating that
is appropriate to the being of static entities. The is of Heideggers lectures on
Hlderlin therefore opens a possibility not only of river and hymn but also of
the is and of being. Such thinking, the thinking of another is, cannot
constitute a content, however, to be discovered by an exterior, interpretive
reader; for this thinking is not but nevertheless might be.
Postcript
Several years have elapsed between the original composition of the foregoing
reections and their appearance in the present volume. In the interim, the
thoughts and formulations that appear above could perhaps bear revision along
the following lines.
The question of what sort of saying can be contrasted to being about might
be reformulated in terms of performativity, namely in terms of the
accomplishment in saying of what is referred to by that saying. Whether, however, such a performativity can be beyond or other than what Heidegger refers
to as metaphysics remains an open question. Indeed the apparent gulf between
ordinary telling and the dimension of representation on one hand and on the

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other hand a poetic or a performative telling what here is designated

naming calls for examination.3 What is more, the status that Heidegger
accords poetry and Hlderlins poetry in particular would also require further
investigation; indeed it calls for a consideration of the question as to whether
Hlderlin says what Heidegger has him say, and, more generally, as to whether
there is a poetic immediacy that would not be a function of representation
and symbolic images.4 Does the breach in a representational, constative, or
about-oriented discourse, and specically a breach in the direction of doing,
execution, and accomplishment, entail the supersession of representation and
symbolic imagery, or are the realms of representation and performance constituted in part by the very tension between them? The references to intimation
and possibility in the last paragraphs of the paper are indicators of how
Heidegger points in the direction of what might be understood in a broader
context as the difculty of preserving or even approaching, without hypostasizing and reifying, the performative or doing element of saying. Inquiries in
these directions would necessitate a critical perspective on the exegetical,
highly internal reading that is pursued in the pages above.

9
O N T R A N S VA L U I N G H I S T O R Y

RILKE AND NIETZSCHE

Richard Detsch

Aside from Rilkes commentary on Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy (Marginalien

zur Geburt der Tragdie), written in 1900 and found in the literary estate of Lou
Andreas-Salom, there is only one extended reference to Nietzsche in any of
Rilkes works. In an essay he wrote as a nineteen-year-old entitled Bohemian
Strolling Days (Bhmische Schlendertage), Rilke writes: I belong to that group
of people whom Nietzsche calls the historical. Therefore, I avert my glance,
since the present makes me freeze, back to a sun-bathed past [Vergangenheit].1
Only one other comparison of Rilke and Nietzsche that takes this reference
into account has come to my attention: an essay in the 1987 issue of the Papers
of the Rilke Society (Bltter der Rilke-Gesellschaft) by Irina Frowen entitled
Nietzsches Signicance for Rilkes Early Concept of Art (Nietzsches Bedeutung fr Rilkes frhe Kunstauffaung).2 Frowens treatment, however, does not
get much beyond a mere mention of the reference. She deals, for the most part,
with Rilkes commentary on the Birth of Tragedy.3
It is clear from the reference to Nietzsche in Rilkes early essay that the poet
had some acquaintance with Nietzsches second Untimely Meditation: On the
Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, and this before his rst contact with
Lou Andreas-Salom. In it, Nietzsche speaks specically of the historical
people [die historischen Menschen].4 What is interesting and paradoxical about
Nietzsches analysis is that for him the historical people are in reality
unhistorical since history concerns them only insofar as it can be made to serve
their life goals. Nietzsche refers to those who study history dispassionately for
its own sake as hyperhistorical (berhistorisch). They dissect the past until it
becomes something lifeless and produces a feeling of disgust in the observer,
who sees in the disconnected facts only the eternal sameness of the dead. Those
who are truly historical must be able to forget the past when it does not serve
their purposes; for example, when the family or ethnic group to which one
belongs and to which one remains bound by ties of ancestry has skeletons in its
closet, aberrations and even crimes committed in the past to further the designs
of its members. Here, it behooves the truly historical person to sweep aside the
debilitating considerations on the past and, in a gesture foreshadowing the

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overman of Thus Spake Zarathustra, to seize the moment joyously, fearlessly,

and victoriously (NW, 1: 212). There is no mistaking the fact that Nietzsche
delivers what a proponent of imperialism would consider an effective justication of conquest and subjugation when he writes of the formative power of a
person, a nation, a culture as the power to grow in its own way from its own
origins and to reshape and incorporate into itself what is past and what is
foreign (NW, 1: 213). And then Nietzsche envisions the mightiest and most
monstrous of human natures which would not need the balm of forgetfulness
because it would be capable of drawing to itself and into itself all of the past,
its own and what is most foreign to it, and transforming it as if into its own
blood (NW, 1: 21314). There is a connection here not only to the later
Nietzsche and his overman, who, in seizing the present moment wills also the
circular chain of events leading up to it (NW, 2: 40810), but also to the later
Rilke, who writes of past events entering into his own blood. Rilkes letter
from Duino of March 1, 1912, to Lou Andreas-Salom is actually by way of
complaint that he is not able to pursue historical studies in a systematic,
detached way: In my way of taking things in there is something that consumes
them completely; it is as if I suck them up not only from the book but from my
own knowledge. They get into my blood and there they get mixed up with God
knows what and risk being as good as lost.5 In fact, as I will attempt to show
throughout the rest of this study, the incorporation of historical reality into the
inner dimensions (Weltinnenraum) of the poet is one of Rilkes consistent concerns
throughout his life; and with this nding I suggest that Irina Frowen is correct in
rejecting the usual critical practice that divides Rilkes life into phases of development and insisting on the continuity of Nietzsches inuence from beginning
to end (BRG, 32). If Umberto Eco is correct in referring to the Cult of Tradition and the rejection of modernism as the rst two aspects of fascism in his
recent article entitled Ur-fascism for the New York Review of Books,6 then the
unqualied acceptance by both Rilke and Nietzsche of the use to which certain
less savory aspects of the tradition can be put is indicative of the susceptibility of
both to a fascist perspective. For Rilke, this will entail an actual enthusiasm for
the early manifestations of Italian fascism. I have borrowed the term transvaluation (Umwertung), which Nietzsche applies in later works to the replacement
by its opposite of a system of behavioral norms rendered invalid in the light of an
essentially purposeless existence, in order to designate the new emphasis and
empathy that both Rilke and Nietzsche invest in a tradition historians are wont
to examine from a neutral standpoint. In both cases, new validity is attributed to
what was previously thought to be without existential value.
Rilke, in particular, looked to the past, and especially the early medieval
period in European history, as being more real, more truly alive than the
Europe of his contemporaries. For him, the artisans and artists of this bygone
period were able, quite literally, to transform their internal passions and
emotions into external, visible expressions of the same (for example, castles,
cathedrals). This is one sense of my adaptation of the Nietzschean term transvaluation with regard to Rilke. The other sense, for which I have coined the
expression transvaluing history, is specically applicable to Rilkes conviction that at a time when artists are no longer capable of producing visible works

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of such magnicent quality as in the past, he, the modern poet, can nevertheless
immortalize the artifacts and traditions of the past in the inward intensity of
his poetry. In the nal analysis, transvaluing history means simply keeping
what Rilke considers the spirit of the past alive in the present. But Nietzsche
was no less an admirer of the past and despiser of the present than Rilke. Much
of his admiration derives from his profession as a classical philologist. The great
European civilizations of the past constantly elicit his praise and provide him
with the opportunity to heap contempt on his contemporaries. In Beyond Good
and Evil, for example, he writes: The deep respect for age and for tradition
(The whole legal code rests on this double respect.) belief and prejudice in
favor of ancestors and against those to come is typical in the morality of the
mighty; and if conversely the men of modern ideas believe almost instinctively in progress and the future and lack increasingly in esteem for age, the
vulgar origin of these ideas is thus abundantly evident (NW, 2: 731).
The nineteen-year-old Rilke wrote the essay Bohemian Strolling Days at
home in Prague in the autumn of 1895. His memory takes him back to the
summer holidays he spent in northern Bohemia after having completed his
college preparatory studies and his contact there with vestiges of a past that
might draw forth Nietzsches afrmation of the dramatic, immoral deed. Rilke
tells us that he wants to conjure the ghosts that still haunt the ruins of
Tollenstein; and here we must take him at his word, given his lifelong belief in
ghosts. We have, with regard to this belief, not only his own testimony but that
of his friend and patron, the Princess of Thurn and Taxis. This is certainly one
way of keeping the spirits of the past, now perceived in the plural, alive in the
present and therefore illustrative of how Rilke transvalues history. The ghost to
which he makes specic reference is that of one Berechta von Rosenberg, who
was married to a lord of Tollenstein. This lady had taken a fancy to one of the
pages of her husband and had poisoned the latters drink. Having become aware
of his wifes intention, he forced her to also partake in the poisoned beverage.
Since then, Berechta has found no rest and has been driven to nightly rounds of
the castle ruins in search of her desired partner. In the ballad Swanhilde,
written three years earlier, Rilke employs the same theme. Here, the poet has
his female ghost grab her reluctant lover in a manner reminiscent of Goethes
ballad Erlknig, even to the extent that Rilke uses Goethes rhyme pair
Gewalt-Gestalt in one place. This amounts, of course, to an all too obvious
borrowing from the German Romantic tradition; but it is not to be dismissed
as a mere appropriation that provides no indication of the true feelings of the
poet. The threatening force emanating from the spirit of a dead woman seems
to have caused Rilke to exclude himself from consideration of a logical nal
resting place for himself close to his beloved Muzot because of the interment in
the same cemetery of a previous inhabitant of Muzot. This woman had become
insane, having lost two suitors in a duel with each other, and froze to death in
the cemetery near Muzot where she was also buried.
As a sixteen-year-old, Rilke had made the journey on foot to the castle ruins
of Tollenstein. There, he left in the visitors guest book a poem of twelve lines
that, like his ballad Swanhilde, does not distinguish itself by any particular
sign of genius. It was signed with his middle name rst, Maria Ren Rilke, and

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dated July 28, 1892. The young poet extols the walls that had been erected in
the distant past, coldly surveyed by the sober century of the poets contemporaries. These walls remain as witnesses of a power long since lost to the
world and will continue to do so in the future; they will bring to coming
epochs testimony of the past in the midst of the transitory (SW, 2: 1217). The
last line in German: in der Vergnglichkeit Vergangenheit involves more than
just a play of words. The past (Vergangenheit) is contrasted with the transitory
(Vergnglichkeit) as that which will endure. The past, related semantically in
German to the transitory (in English to passing away), has paradoxically taken
on an attribute of the eternal. More than thirty-three years later, Rilke will
write in a letter attempting to explain the Duino Elegies that the transitory
things of this world can achieve permanence through their transformation in
the artistic consciousness. This permanence is, in fact, the true essence of transitory reality because transitoriness plunges everywhere into deep being (RB, 3:
897). In another letter of Christmas Eve, 1917, almost eight years earlier than
the one just cited, Rilke writes to a lady friend of his hope in spite of the death
and destruction of the war. Note the Nietzschean seizure of the proper moment:
Passing away, no, Im not afraid of that, for why would there be in every
experience a moment that turns the measuring devices around so that they
sink to the depths where the moment is without end. This is today my
Christmas: that I imagine this indescribable permanence of everything
that truly existed. Why did it touch us, if not for the sake of our inner
reality so that we may become more inward? And whatever passes away
does not do so until we have taken from it its ability to exist.7
To exist means here to be in the cosmic inner space of the artistic consciousness.
Rilke also takes his cue from Nietzsche in the commemoration of Venice
appearing in his poem of 1908, Late Fall in Venice (Sptherbst in Venedig).
The building of Venice on a foundation of countless tree trunks in the shallows
of an Adriatic lagoon was for Rilke a manifestation of the will: From the
bottom out of old forest skeletons there arises a will (SW, 1: 610). One is
reminded of Nietzsches will to power and also of the great will exhibited
by the caged panther of Rilkes earlier poem (SW, 1: 505). In his novel, The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke speaks further of this will: that Venice,
willed in the midst of nothingess on sunken forests, forced to be and nally so
thoroughly existent (SW, 6: 932). As the poem in honor of the Tollenstein
ruins already suggested, what was accomplished in the past by a strong will has
more reality than the transitory present. In contrast to the empty-headed tourists in pursuit of enjoyment, Rilke sees through the eyes of his Malte what
Venice really consists in: an example of the will at its most demanding and
most severe (SW, 6: 933). It is, therefore, not without signicance that in the
concluding sextet of his sonnet Rilke chooses to envisage not the autumnal
mood of the city in the lagoon (Rilke himself had visited Venice in the late fall
of 1907); rather, a Venetian Admiral of the citys heyday and his military
exploits. These are expressive of the will the poet had earlier invoked. The
poem ends with the adjective fatal, which is descriptive of the eet this

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admiral outts in the poets imagination and is in this context synonymous

with the English word deadly. This might seem out of character to the reader
familiar with Rilkes antipathy toward his time spent at military boarding
schools when he was young.
One should also be aware, however, that he chose for himself the middle
name Caesar, following Ren Maria, in autobiographical notes written at the
age of twenty, well after his unpleasant encounters with the military, and that
his most popular story, written in his twenty-third year, deals with the love and
enthusiastic death of a young ofcer who bore his family name in a battle
during a campaign against the Turks in Hungary in the latter half of the
seventeenth century. From these details, one can deduce that military personalities and events continued to hold a strong fascination for Rilke long after his
negative experiences in military schools. And again, Nietzsche comes to mind,
who, in the Untimely Meditation cited earlier, speaks of the unhistorical condition in which every eld marshal conceives his victory (NW, 1: 21516).
Were Nietzsches eld marshal to assess, in a detached manner, his chances for
victory by weighing the victories against the defeats of the past, he would
probably not want to expose himself and his soldiers to the risks of the battle.
We can assume, also, that if Rilke had let the distaste for military life gained
from his early encounter with the military guide him in his choice of themes for
his writing, then he would never have written his most popular story. Like
Nietzsches eld marshal, so also Rilke and his military hero must act contrary
to what history teaches them in order to be able to act at all.
In the letter from Duino of March 1, 1912, to Lou Andreas-Salom, Rilke
writes that he is steeped in historical studies of Venice. It is the fourteenth
century that interests him above all, and it is important to note his reasons.
This century, he claims, was just the opposite of our twentieth century. Nowadays, the inner feelings of human beings remain encapsulated in human consciousness without the need of nding an equivalent outside. Even material
objects have developed an inner dimension, characterized by what Rilke calls
the vibration of money, and have achieved there a kind of spirituality which
exceeds their tangible reality. In the fourteenth century, however, Rilke nds
that money was still gold, still metal, a beautiful thing, the handiest and most
understandable of all. And a feeling was not content with comporting itself in
some inner realm and becoming something there; hardly was it here than it
sprang into the most appropriate external form of appearance and lled to
overowing a world already full of visible objects (RB, 1: 344). Rilke saw such
a springing into being as a characteristic attitude of the time in the Palace of
the Popes built in Avignon in the fourteenth century. Like the Tollenstein
ruins, it bears witness in modern times to the spirit that once informed it. His
studies of this period of Venetian history, as he writes to Lou, had led him to
Avignon. And what could be more logical, since Avignon was at that time the
centre of Christendom? In an earlier letter to Lou, Rilke describes a sojourn in
Avignon during which he was daily impressed by the massive edice erected by
the Avignon Popes: This hermetically sealed fortress in which the papacy,
feeling decay around its edges, thought to preserve itself, cooking away in one
last genuine passion. No matter how often one observes this desperate house, it

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stands on a rock of improbability; and one gets inside only by vaulting over
everything that is customary and credible (RB, 1: 247). Rilkes Malte sees the
papal palace in much the same way, as an extremely makeshift body for the
homeless soul of all (SW, 6: 912). This edice provides an example of how
feelings and spiritual yearnings in bygone times achieved concrete realization
in a way similar to how the historical gures of this autobiographical novel
mirror the feelings of its modern protagonist. In this way, by endowing the
gures of the past with a signicance stemming from his own inner conicts,
Rilke can again be seen transvaluing history.
Rilke later writes of the protagonist of his novel that the time of his
troubles and troubled times of the Avignon popes are on a par (RB, 3: 891).
Just as in the letter to Lou of 1912 from Duino he complained that so much of
his historical studies became so totally assimilated into the fabric of his own
being that it was lost there, so now he admits that the historical gures dealt
with in his novel are not really historical at all but only expressions of his
protagonists precarious emotional state (Vokabeln seiner Not).8 Such is the gure
of Pope John XXII who reigned over Christendom in Avignon from 1316 to
1334. It was a time, Rilke writes, that had brought haven and hell to earth
and lived by the powers of both in order to survive (SW, 6: 912). As once the
lord of Tollenstein had been the victim of a plot within his own household to
poison him, Pope John now had to be constantly vigilant lest the bowls
seasoned with poison on his table should be his undoing. And then there was
the alleged plot of the Mohammedan ruler of Granada who instigated the Jews
to attack all of Christendom by poisoning the wells. The Jews were supposed to
have commissioned the lepers to cast their decayed tissues into wells from
which Christians drank.9 It was this Pope who rst ordered that the Angelus
bells be rung every evening for the purpose, according to Rilke, of dispelling
the demons of the dusk. In a world so lled with darkness, the most frightening
manifestation of which was the outbreak of the Black Death some thirteen years
after Pope Johns death, it is little wonder that the Pope could be moved to
utter the heretical statement that there would be no enjoyment of the beatic
vision, even for the souls of the blessed, until after the Last Judgment. It is
therefore extremely signicant that Rilke should profess such a strong
attraction to precisely this century and should identify the tribulations of the
protagonist of his autobiographical novel with those of the Avignon Popes.
For Rilke, it was important that the dark side of life death, both physical
and moral evil be seen as an integral part of life. For him, as for Nietzsche, the
afrmation of any one aspect of existence had to mean also the joyous acceptance of the whole of existence, including all those events of ones own past and
the past of the human race that are generally considered immoral and irrational.
Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, was able to identify this area historically as
the Dionysian frenzies that underlay the balanced Apollonian art at the zenith
of Greek culture. He would later posit it philosophically as the eternal return of
the same, the essential mode of all reality with which only the overman can
cope. Just as the Apollonian artist gives shape and harmony to the chaotic
Dionysian expressions of emotions, so the overman must stamp becoming
with the character of being. This, Nietzsche writes in his posthumous

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collection of aphorisms, is the highest will to power (NW, 3: 895). By afrming the truly vicious circle of all existence, the interminable ow of all causes
and effects that leads again and again to the present moment, the overman
accomplishes the superhuman task of forcing being, permanence, on a reality
that is supremely and absurdly impermanent. Nietzsche specically links this
task to the transvaluation of all values in the same collection of aphorisms. He
acknowledges that the thought of the eternal return of the same is the most
difcult thought and then names the means to bear it: die Umwertung aller
Werte (NW, 3: 438). Rilkes artist must also afrm the totality of reality
(Volzhligkeit) which includes cruelty. But not only in art. Rilke asks in a letter
written in December of the rst year of the First World War: Is there something similar in life? Are there conditions of the heart that include the most
cruel for the sake of totality, because the world is not really the world until
everything happens therein? I can imagine God as the being that allows everything, that constantly has before it the whole inexhaustible history of the world
in different guises (RB, 2: 479). Several months after the end of the war, at the
beginning of a sojourn in Switzerland that was to last, with interruptions, for
the rest of his life, Rilke writes in another letter of the relationship between the
human realm and the realm of nature. During the war, human beings, including the poet himself who was never at the front, seemed to be so far removed
from the realm of nature. What, Rilke asks, did the tree, the eld, the
evening landscape know of this wretched, rampaging, killing person? But
Rilke goes on to question the supposed harmony between the peacefully productive human being and nature that was a prerequisite for his own art. There
is a terrifying side to nature also, which is nevertheless to be considered as a
necessary part of its totality (Vollzhligkeit). The difference between the human
being and nature is that the latter has no distance to its cruelty, its terrifying
aspect, whereas human beings, in choosing cruelty, do so knowing that another,
more human, choice is possible and thus cut themselves off from the totality of
possibilities and become the exceptions of humanity. Then Rilke focuses on the
human beings who would act like nature and would not be able to preclude the
negative results of their acts: evil, disaster, suffering, harm, death. Such individuals would be like a rampaging stream that cannot keep from growing in its
destructive force because it cannot prevent the thaw that augments its volume
(RB, 2: 5901).
Such epistolary musings of Rilke must be kept in mind when approaching,
for example, the line from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus: Killing is a form of our
wandering sadness (SW, 1: 758). This is, by the way, the longest sequence of
words to receive emphasis in the sonnets. All of the Sonnets to Orpheus were
written at Muzot after the First World War, but the reference is actually to
prewar hunting outings that Rilke witnessed neat Duino in a barren limestone
region punctuated by caves. As Rilke relates in the sonnet and in a note
explaining it, there was a custom in this region to startle pigeons out of the
caves and shoot them as they ew out. One last such pigeon shoot before the
war is described by the poets friend Rudolf Kassner in his reminiscences of
Rilke. Shortly before his trip to Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a
guest of the Princess of Thurn and Taxis and was such an avid killer of

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animals that a pigeon shoot was arranged in his honor. Rumor was that he
wanted to bring the number of pigeons he had killed to one million. Kassner
stresses the irony of the situation since this man of violence is soon to meet
his own violent end.10 There is nothing of this irony nor of any disapproval of
violence in Rilkes poem. In a didactic, if not pompous tone, Rilke condones
the custom of hunting pigeons by these means as follows:
Far from the onlooker be every breath of pity
Not only from the hunter, who accomplishes alertly and adroitly
What betimes must be done.
(SW, 1: 758)
It is entirely conceivable that this is precisely the kind of time-honored custom
that would complement the artifacts and natural objects Rilke commends to
the angel in the Ninth Elegy. It is our task, Rilke writes, to transform these
things internally, making them invisible and thus eternal.
If it is pity Rilke rejects in this sonnet, such is also the case in another of the
Sonnets to Orpheus in which he deplores the loss of the instruments of torture and
death employed as punishments in the past. He warns those sitting in judgment not to pride themselves on their disposal of these instruments as a sign of
their mercy, for the God of real mercy would come with vehemence and extend
his power more radiantly (SW, 1: 758). These instruments must, evidently, also
nd favor in the sight of the angel and be transformed into something eternal
through the power of art. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Rilke
was a proponent of the death penalty.11
One of the things that impressed Rilke most about the tower he was to
inhabit in the last years of his life was its age. Dating from the thirteen century,
it offered hardly any amenities of modern living. During the rst winter he
spent there, 19212, the remaining Elegies and all fty-ve Sonnets to Orpheus
owed from his pen; he credited this building with having granted them to
him as though it were something alive. He writes yet in the rapture of creative
inspiration to Lou that he went outside to stroke his little Muzot like a big
old animal (RB, 2: 744). Hence, his beloved Muzot is not only a witness to the
past as Tollenstein once was for Rilke but is transformed and assimilated to the
creative impulses of the living poet. Muzot itself, like the pigeon shoot at
Duino and the instruments of torture displayed in many a European castle,
stands as another example of Rilkes transvaluation of history, or to use Ecos
expression: the cult of tradition.
In 1972, Egon Schwarz published in German a book that caused quite a stir
in Rilke circles.12 The English translation was published in 1981 with the title
Poetry and Politics in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke. The book deals in particular
with two long letters Rilke had written in January and February of 1926, the
last year of his life, to an Italian duchess about his admiration for Mussolini and
Italian fascism. These letters were written in French and were rst published in
a Parisian edition of the correspondence between Rilke and the duchess in
1956. Not much was made of these letters until the appearance of the book by
Schwarz, but since then, many voices have been raised defending Rilke and
insisting upon relativizing these vis vis the poets life and work as a whole.

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More recently, in 1992, Joachim Storck, the then vice president of the Rilke
Society, published an edition of Rilkes letters on politics in which the editor
stresses that there are many indications of a more liberal attitude of Rilke
toward political developments (for example, his support of the movement for a
less rigid school system at the turn of the century and of the movement for a
democratic socialism at the end of the First World War) and that the letters at
the beginning of 1926 should be considered as the product of distorted thinking resulting from the sickness that was to claim his life. What the editor does
not concede, however, is that much of Rilkes thinking in these letters bears a
striking similarity to earlier utterances in both epistolary and literary form. In
fact, much of it can be traced back to the historical attitude that Rilke claims
to have in reference to Nietzsche. History is, for Nietzsche, not the abstract,
objective study of the past but something that can be put into the service of
human life. History as it is approached by the historian brings human life to a
standstill where it is coldly dissected in the manner of the natural scientist.
This was the attitude exhibited by the contemporary observers of the
Tollenstein ruins in the poem by the sixteen-year-old Rilke. They could not
perceive the force that remained alive in these ruins and bore witness to a past
outlasting all the intellectual abstractions of the present.
In the letter to Lou of March, 1912, and now again in the letter to the Italian
duchess of January 17, 1926, Rilke looks to the witness of the past to provide
examples lacking to the present: the transformation, in Nietzsches terminology the transvaluation, of inner feelings into external, visible manifestations.
Rilkes inner feelings correspond to Nietzsches symptom of strength on the
part of the valuers, who posit values even though there is no basis in reality for
these values. In Nietzsches universe, which is without any purpose or meaning,
these values are of signicance only to those who posit them; but, they are not
mere gments of the imagination insofar as they represent the only meaningful reality that exists. As Nietzsche sees what is internal becoming external
reality, so too does Rilke, but only in respect to past generations:
In the Middle Ages and until the 18th century the world was a singularly
real world; the professions and the achievements, the destinies, the feelings, and the most secret inner impulses: everything attained a kind of
realization, everything became visible and almost tangible. A very personal sorrow was not satised with transforming the affected being in its
interior; one saw a glorious knight entering a religious order, or a very
noble woman disappearing behind a nuns veil. The pride, the splendor of
nobility were realized in the multitude of palaces and castles; and humble
faith, the most pious distress, the eternal human desolation were joined to
an innite need for duration in erecting, by the hands of innumerable
artisans, the witness and devout deance of the cathedrals. Everything
collaborated in enriching the domain of the visible.
(NW, 3: 557)
Even money, Rilke writes, echoing his words in the letter of 1912, even
money weighed heavily in chests and trunks with its metallic weight that it
still had from the mountain.13

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The present, however, was characterized for Rilke by a scarcity of durable,

visible manifestations of human aspirations. The transformation from the invisible to the visible was now obviously not occurring (as the Seventh Elegy
proclaims, the external world is growing ever smaller. [SW, 1: 711]); so now the
effort must be in the opposite direction: from the yet remaining visible to the
invisible realm of cosmic inner space (Weltinnenraum). This is the task the earth,
in the present time, assigns to us: to recreate it invisible within. Whatever the
direction of the effort, however, it is the creative intensity of the artist in the
splendid isolation of his inner space that is crucial. He creates the only reality of
importance; like Nietzsches overman he puts, through his art, the stamp of
permanent being on the incessant ow of the transient.
And also like Nietzsches overman and Nietzsches historical people,
Rilkes artistic personality acts from an impulse that is beyond good and evil
and stems from an authoritarian dictate (BzP, 465). Thus, the dictator has as
much a place in art as he has in politics, and in neither area will he be deterred
by purely humane considerations or concessions to human freedom:
Isnt it this, that the dictators, the true dictators, have sometimes understood when performing violent acts in a salutary and sure manner? One
does wrong to nature when one imagines it to be slow and gentle. How
many acts of violence, even cruelty, occur out of the depths of its innocence? And one must truly believe that the force used to create order (be it
in art, be it in life) maintains, even where it is abruptly imposed, something of that deep innocence that we attribute to nature.
(BzP, 465)
Such thoughts are not only the by-product of Rilkes sick-bed in the sanatorium near Montreux, as Storck and others would have us believe, but reect
what he had written in earlier letters and in earlier poetry; for example, see
the letter of August 6, 1919, where Rilke connects human cruelty and cruelty
in nature (RB, 2: 5901; BzP, 26975). The difference is that the allusions
to cruelty and violence Rilke had made at various points in his life are now
tied to the phenomenon of Italian fascism under Mussolini: If one knows
a path toward the future, one should not waste ones time avoiding injustice;
one should quite simply surpass it by action. Thats what it seems to me is
happening in Italy right now, the only land prospering and moving upward
(BzP, 467).
The injustice in human acts that is surpassed and cancelled by more action is
also a necessary consequence of what Nietzsches historical people do. For
Nietzsche, the one condition of all that happens is the blindness and
injustice in the soul of the one who acts (NW, 1: 216). Rilke concentrates
much of his effort in the next letter to the Italian duchess (February 14, 1926)
on extolling nationalism over internationalism. Here Rilke treads in the footsteps of Nietzsche; however, one must draw a distinction at the outset. Both
Nietzsche and Rilke are despisers of German nationalism. Both abhor as articial the state Bismarck brought into being under the dominance of Prussia.
This did not prevent both from emphasizing, in their earlier writings, the
necessity of war for ones country over pacist yearning (Rilke) and over

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international nance interests (Nietzsche). In The Greek State, one of ve socalled prefaces sent to Cosima Wagner for Christmas, 1872, Nietzsche writes of
the international money aristocracy that strives to avoid war by establishing a
balance of power among nations and by taking the power to declare war from
the monarchs and giving it to the people or their representatives: They [the
international nance interests] pursue this goal through the broadest possible
dissemination of the liberal, optimistic world view that has its roots in the
doctrines of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, that is, in a completely
un-Germanic, genuinely Romanic, insipid, and unmetaphysical philosophy
(NW, 3: 283). This somewhat negative attitude toward the French or Romanic
traditions and inclination toward the Germanic were replaced in the later
Nietzsche by a European perspective in which the Romanic would assume the
dominant position. Napoleon was Nietzsches example of the kind of leader
Europe should have; and, as always for Nietzsche, only the elite (hhere
Menschen) should participate in governing.
Rilkes early loyalty to the fatherland, as in the poem Answer to the Call
Down with Weapons (Antwort auf den Ruf Die Waggen Nieder!, SW 3: 415
16) was likewise soon to be replaced by a European perspective in which the
Romanic would dominate. The many years Rilke lived in Paris and his time
spent in Italy as well as his preference for Venice were no doubt a factor in this
shift of loyalty. In the letter to the duchess, Rilke decries vague internationalism in addition to the articial nationalism of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm
II. Rilke argues that just as individual human beings must be at one with
themselves before they can think of others, so too nations must have undergone
a nationalistic phase before they can think of uniting with other nations (BzP,
469, 472). It is interesting to note that Heidegger used much the same argument in urging a yes vote in the Nazi-sponsored plebiscite of November
1933 to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations.14
The virtue of nationalism, Rilke maintains, is that it unites the individuals
with each other, with their nation, and with their past. The link with the past is
all-important; its absence was primarily the reason that Rilke could not sense
anything worth appreciating in Germany under Prussian domination and that
he soon came to abhor the war waged by this nation. Anyone knowing how
utterly devastating Rilkes service in the Austrian army was for him might be
surprised to hear him now claim with enthusiasm that he would nevertheless
gladly have served and even died as an Italian or French soldier. He recalls the
young men he had seen earlier in Venice, many of whom would lose their lives
in the First World War, and thinks that they had attached themselves not to an
abstraction like internationalism or humanity but to the yet visible glory of
ancient Rome. They were able not only to participate in the soul of their
country but also to feel themselves as the body of that soul (BzP, 469, 472).
This ability to render feelings and aspirations visible is for Rilke the chief
advantage of earlier times in human history over modern times. Now, nonetheless, the glorious past of Rome seems to be incorporated in the person of the
Duce. It is that unity perceived and consented to, Rilke writes to the incredulous duchess, it is that glorious past of which your soil still bears giant vestiges
that make possible this architect of the Italian will, this forger of a new

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consciousness at the ame fed by an ancient re (BzP, 472). In Italy more so

than in Greece, there is unity of blood and unity of idea. The Romanic idea
was one of those rare ideas that was able to make its force felt throughout the
world not because of its international orientation, but because of its pure
national fervor. To indicate what the Romanic idea was in Rilkes time, the
editor of these letters refers us at this point in his commentary to Mussolinis
own words: In ve years Rome will have to appear as a wonder to the nations of
the world. Vast, well-ordered, powerful, as it was at the time of the rst empire
of Augustus (BzP, 670). The editor suggests that it was likely that Rilke had
read and been impressed by excerpts of Mussolinis speech from which this
quotation was taken. Had he read what Nietzsche had to say about the Italian
national spirit in his last unnished work, he might have agreed with it also. In
comparing the Italian with the English, French, and German national spirits,
Nietzsche writes: The Italian has made by far the freest and nest use of what
it borrowed and has invested a hundred times more than what it has taken out:
as the richest spirit, that had the most to give away (NW, 3: 562).
From the perspective of this study, the conclusion is that for both Rilke and
Nietzsche, the Italian national spirit has succeeded the best in transvaluing
history, in incorporating what they considered to be the spirit of the past into
the present. Unfortunately for the world, this spirit in Mussolinis Italy, as in
Hitlers Germany, would prove to be one of violent conquest and domination.

PA R T F O U R

THE FORCE OF RHYTHM

I N L I F E , P H I L O S O P H Y,
A N D P O E T RY

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INTRODUCTION

Robert Burch

The title of this section is drawn from Nietzsches The Gay Science. Speaking of
the usefulness of rhythm in the ancient world, Nietzsche writes: Above all, one
wanted to have use of that elemental overpowering which one experiences in
listening to music: rhythm is a force [der Rhythmus ist ein Zwang].1 To this
force, Nietzsche ascribes great weight. Was there for the ancient, superstitious
type of person in general, he asks,
anything more useful than rhythm? With it, one could do anything to
advance some work magically; to compel a god to appear, to be near, and
to listen; to make the future in accordance with ones will; to cleanse ones
soul from some excess (of anxiety, mania, pity, vengefulness), and not only
ones own soul but that of the most evil demon without verse one was
nothing; by means of verse one became almost a god. Such a fundamental
feeling can never be entirely erased, and even now, after people have
fought against such superstitions for thousands of years, the wisest among
us are still occasionally the fools of rhythm, if only in that they experience a
thought as truer, if it has a metrical form and presents itself with a divine
hop, skip n jump.
(GS, 140)
It would seem from these remarks that we ought to be suspicious of the force
of rhythm. For how could one presume to have use of a force that was truly
overpowering? Moreover, as Nietzsche himself emphatically declares, the usefulness of rhythm is a superstitious usefulness (aberglubische Ntzlichkeit), implying not only that the belief that one could turn rhythm to ones purposes is a
spurious belief, but also that the Zwang of rhythm is by its nature a deceiving
force. Yet such is the power of the superstition of rhythm, that even in this
serious age, it still occasionally compels and so fools the wisest among us.
But like most matters Nietzschean, this one too is not without its masks and
ironies. Whereas in this enlightened age we understand superstition pejoratively to mean an ignorant belief divorced from true knowledge and power,
thought more originally superstition may well have been the reality of old. It
would constitute that reality in the form of the beliefs (Glauben) that a type
of person in general placed above (ber) a people as their highest values. In
the Zwang der Rhythmus, then, would be heard the voice of their will to power,
their superstition being, as it were, the I-stand-beyond of their creation

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of values, the tablet of their overcomings.2 But even if that were what
superstition was, what it is now is the product of a millennial ght against
supposedly ignorant beliefs. The force of rhythm remains as only a trace of that
former power, with the most serious philosophers of today occasionally
repeat[ing] the sayings of poets to give their ideas power and credibility. Yet,
when it comes to truth this conrming agreement of poetic utterance,
Nietzsche claims, is dangerous. For as Homer says: the bards tell many lies.
Now, if Nietzsche sides here against the fools of rhythm, he does so with
blatant irony. Deliberately disregarding his own counsel, not only does he
appeal to a supposedly poetic saying to make his point, but in doing so
Nietzsche also seems ironically to lie about its source. For it is not the poet
Homer who utters this warning about himself and his ilk, as Nietzsche says,
but the philosopher, Aristotle, for whom it is proverbial ( paroimiakos) that poets
lie.3 Doubtless, Nietzsche knows of this provenance, and knows too, that to end
with a paroemiac saying is itself a metric convention, and is thus a poets lie.
In all of this, moreover, there is a paradox implied in the choice Nietzsche
seems to propose here between truth on the one hand conjoined with certainty as the goal, and a power on the other hand that enables one to do
anything. There is likewise a paradox implied in the juxtaposition of the
superstitious and foolish with the wisest among us. For in a vague echo of
Pauline doctrine,4 it remains ambiguous here whether, in contrast to the seriousness of the philosophers, the wisdom of the wisest among us does not lie
precisely in their still being the fools of rhythm.
The essays gathered in this section all proceed from the assumption that
rhythm and its agnate properties are a force to be reckoned with. Halliburton
initiates this reckoning for us by means of his reections on the phenomenon of
speed, specically as it relates to the character of modernity. That there is some
such relation needs hardly to be said. To remark on the rapid pace of modern
life and the current pre-eminence of the phenomenon speed is nowadays a
commonplace. Moreover, it is likewise a commonplace to take ones stand
decisively in regard to this phenomenon, either celebrating speed in all of its
aspects as the avatar and medium of enlightenment, progress, and prosperity,
or decrying it in the name of a beleaguered sensibility and a past way of life that
was altogether more acceulliant. Yet in studies of modernity, Halliburton
opines, the phenomenon of speed, while sometimes being factored in along
with other matters, is not investigated as thoroughly as its importance warrants. With his contribution to this section, Halliburtons intention is to
begin to redress this deciency.
Of course, within the limits of a short essay, he cannot presume to offer such
a thorough investigation, but only to establish an initial framework or the
indices for one. To be more precise, Halliburtons purpose is simply to identify aspects of the phenomenon of speed which, in considering the character of
modernity, such a framework would have to accommodate, thereby indicating
the many dimensions of the phenomenon that need to be investigated more
thoroughly. In this respect, what is to be emphasized is the plurality of
Halliburtons approach that these are his reections on speed, diverse and
wide-ranging. Thus, it is with self-conscious irony that he moves speedily from

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one aspect of the phenomenon to another, drawing on a variety of thinkers and

literary scholars to highlight its various dimensions in relation to the character
of modernity. In the process, Halliburton gestures toward a need to develop an
appropriate sensibility to speed in this age of relativity and reexivity. Taking his cue from Proust and Wolff, he suggests that we need to become, as it
were, connoisseurs of velocity, developing a capacity to relativize speed so
as to know when and how to employ it to advantage. In this way, then, we may
succeed in taking ourselves beyond xed, blanket judgments of good and bad
with respect to the phenomenon of speed, in which the modernist and futurist
thinking and experience of speed is pitted against that of the romanticist in a
way that leads to standstill or rather leads to the paradoxical standstill of the
romanticists having to ght apace a lost cause.
The second essay in this section speaks more directly to the specic issue of
rhythm. Compelled by rhythm, Aviram writes about it principally as a literary
theorist. For him, rhythm calls for thinking on two accounts. The rst is pedagogical. Students tend to rebel against the seeming authority of meter in the
name of poetry, which they take to be not only not metrical but a rebellion
against meter, yet without them actually knowing much at all about meter.
They know of a rebellion, Aviram says, but not what the rebellion rebels
against. In the meantime, their lives are full of poetry that has great power
for them, and it is all quite metrical. Second, Aviram is concerned specically
with what relationship obtains between subjectivity and rhythm. In this regard,
he juxtaposes the Nietzschean tradition, where, he claims, rhythm provides a
caesura of thought in its subjectivity, with the views of Henri Meschonnic, for
whom rhythm is said to be continuous with the subjectivity of thought.
The discussion which ensues enunciates two seemingly contradictory meanings of rhythm: a conventional meaning where rhythm is regular repetition;
and a meaning where rhythm is the shape or form of subjectivity in discourse.
Rather than trying to resolve these differences directly, either by taking sides or
by making more subtle distinctions, Aviram adopts an Heideggerian strategy.
He points out, quite rightly, that in all of this discussion and debate about
rhythm, and in all of the differences of opinion on the matter, some vague
average understanding and experience of rhythm is always already presupposed.
In order to thematize that understanding and experience so as to discern what
rhythm is, Aviram undertakes a brief phenomenology of something that we
know to be rhythmic, in this case, dance. This phenomenology allows him to
identify in terms, for example, of temporality, spatiality, corporeality, the
essential elements of rhythm in dance from which can be extracted and exhibited the elements of rhythm as such. Aviram concludes with a general
redenition of rhythm, according to which it refers to a regular alteration of
event and non-event and the realization of regularity-as-rule through irregularity. From this sense of rhythm, Aviram adduces implications for an anarchical
model of democracy and freedom, thereby addressing some of his initial concerns about subjectivity. He adduces as well implications for understanding
poetry, and poetic images, as the expression of rhythm, implications which then
bear upon his initial pedagogical problem.
In the nal essay in this section and of the volume Babich considers the

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practice of music, showing how the musical expression of philosophy derives

from the broad denition of music in antiquity. Far from a defunct ideal, a
musical philosophic practice might permit the multiplicity of voices and values
we have come to recognize as more and more necessary. To this end, Babich
attempts, as it were, a fugal reprise of the theme of an integrally musical
thinking. She approaches the exposition of this theme by means of a discussion
of the scene from the Phaedo in which is recounted Socrates ironic attempt to
practice popular music at the end of his life. This episode gives genuine voice to
the thought that philosophy is not opposed to, but is, as Socrates himself
suggests, the highest form of music.5 The second episode of this fugue gives
voice to Nietzsches conception of musical thinking in a way that leads Babich
to the key notion of philosophical concinnity. Concinnity is a musical term
that she has introduced into the discourse to suggest the afnity between reader
and author as a matter essentially of thoughtful attunement. The third voice to be
sounded is that of Heidegger, a discussion of the cadence of his thought
serving to give fullness to the developing theme of the music of thought as
thoughtful attunement.
What this reprise points to is a specically musical thinking as a musical
ethics of philosophy that goes beyond both the traditional metaphysical opposition of philosophy and poetry, and the derivative postphilosophical practices of
a polylogue connoisseurship. The phrase, musical ethics of philosophy, is to
be read here at rst as a subjective genitive. For the issue is that of the very ethos
of philosophy itself as inherently musical (as opposed to, so to speak, a
musical ethics that philosophizing might generate as one branch of its knowledge among others so as to stand in the place of existing ethical models). Yet,
of course, for a philosophizing that is inherently musical, and which, moreover,
resonates with Nietzsches thought, such divisions cannot in the end be maintained. The musical ethics of philosophy would in itself sound the musical ethics of
philosophy as an original ethics.

10
REFLECTIONS ON SPEED

David Halliburton

I wish the regulation of the post ofce adopted by Congress

last September could be put in practice. It was for the riders to
travel night and day, and to go their stages three times a week.
The speedy and frequent communication of intelligence is
really of great consequence.
Thomas Jefferson, 1777
For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now
acting to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind. . . . The
most effective of these causes are the great national events
which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation
of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations
produces a craving or extraordinary incident, which the rapid
communication of intelligence hourly graties.
William Wordsworth, 1850
We declare that the worlds splendor has been enriched by a
new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing motorcar . . . is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samoth race. . . . Already we live in
the absolute, since we have created speed, eternal and everpresent.
F. T. Marinetti

All three of these perspectives proceed from the assumption that speed, in one
or another form, is an essential feature of life from the Enlightenment to the
present.
In Jefferson we hear the very voice of the Enlightenment, clear and poised
but impatient for change, the voice of a type of man an Emerson would call
representative. When Jefferson wonders at the rapid westering of American
settlers, or when he acts to accelerate institutional innovation, he adopts an
attitude toward change that was gaining momentum in his own day, and that
members of advanced industrial societies take for granted in ours. In Wordsworth we hear the voice of the lost cause, the voice of a sensibility beleaguered
by that rapid delivery of news (which is the sense, for both authors, of the term
intelligence) for which Jefferson yearns. But the lost cause is still a cause, so

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that we hear Wordsworths sentiments still being echoed by groups and individual citizens opposing, for example, too rapid deforestation, or, more generally, the excess of information delivered excessively fast. In the third and nal
perspective we hear the voice of the radical visionary, who would speed as a way
to trope the harnessing of high velocities (epitomized by the military airplane)
for programs of violent aggression and conquest. Although that program is
also, in one way, just another lost cause, in another way it is not without
implicit appeal for those who worship, in the spirit of Futurisms founder, at
the altar of speeds peculiar glamor. I have deployed these perspectives, not as
formal indices of my own, but as a way of furnishing dare I say quickly? an
initial framework for the latter.
My essay takes a point of departure, in the rst instance, from social theorists
who have have been paying attention to speed because recent and current social
formations, and especially social systems, as that term is understood by Niklas
Luhmann, have exhibited extremely rapid rates of change combined with structural stasis and immobility. For further and complementary points of departure, I draw on a variety of thinkers and literary scholars, with a view toward
exploring differences and similarities in the area of inquiry that this volume
appropriately calls thinking between philosophy and poetry.
A C C E L E R AT I O N

In The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens, the British sociologist and

intellectual spokesman for New Labour, refers to the careering, or runaway,
juggernaut character of modernity and to the fact that we are aboard it and
not, as we might wish, driving it.1 What makes us feel like passengers rather
than drivers is in part the sheer affect of speed, its ability to capture us like a
passion and rush us on, fuelled by the sheer pace of change which the era of
modernity sets into motion. Traditional civilisations may have been considered
more dynamic than other pre-modern systems, but the rapidity of change in
conditions of modernity is extreme (CoM, 52). In studies of modernity the
phenomenon of speed, while sometimes factored in along with other matters, is
not investigated as thoroughly as its importance warrants. Jean-Franois
Lyotard is a happy exception to this pattern, as attested in a discussion of
gaming in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The context is the
difference between standard competitive games, in which no player knows
what any another knows, and games of perfect information in which any player
knows what any other player knows. In the latter situation,
the best performativity cannot consist in obtaining additional information
in this way. It comes rather from arranging the data in a new way, which
is what constitutes a move properly speaking. This new arrangement is
usually achieved by connecting together series of data that were previously
held to be independent. This capacity to articulate what used to be separate can be called imagination. Speed is one of its properties.2
Unfortunately, Lyotard sometimes leaves us wishing for amplication, and

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such is the case when he engages Luhmanns perspectives on the same issues.
Luhmann argues that modern social systems of all persuasions are burdened
by a complexity that must be reduced in some signicant degree if they are
to become manageable; and manageability presupposes a paradigm of
acceleration surpassing more traditional notions of temporality: If all messages could circulate freely among all individuals, the quantity of the information that should have to be taken into account before making the correct
choice would delay decision considerably, thereby lowering performativity.
Speed, in effect, is a power component of the system (PMC, 61). Desire for
speed and acceleration, like Hobbesian desire, is inherently imperialist. What
we call globalization, the engrossing of the local, the regional, and the national
into planetary patterns, entails important notions of velocity: to be global
is to be connected immediately, not later; while the appeal of a communicative innovation such as the Internet is its claim to deliver what it delivers
more or less instantaneously. The ulterior signicance of such a capability
needs to be examined in relation, for example, to Heideggers notion of
a technological standing reserve; but that is a topic for another time and
another place.
In Social Systems, Luhmann observes that systems have different ways to
solve the problem of gaining time, the rst of which is mnemonic: they can
simply store up in their structures (memory serving as one such structure)
against a time when one aleatory factor or another provides them with an
occasion for realizing potentialities not otherwise feasible. He then turns to the
issue of primary interest to us here.
Second, there is speed: mechanisms that enable the system to increase the
tempo of its own processes vis--vis relevant environmental purposes for
example, stimulate possible environmental processes and to prepare for eventualities, to retreat and recoup, or to avoid specializing in a way that is too sharply
dened and thus too dependent on the environment. One who is faster can do
something else in the meantime.3
The statement appears to assume that specialization slows down systemic
operations; since specialization is always a possibility and often a necessity, does
this merely mean that it should not be permitted in excess, on the understanding that failure, through lack of restraint, may result, entropically, in a drift
from speed-up to slow-down? Perhaps this is the meaning of too sharply
dened, so that the objective of acceleration can be understood only
negatively as doing something else without necessarily knowing in advance
what that something else might be.
Luhmann is richer, if also thicker, when he describes strategies for revising
and reintegrating temporal relations, the chief of which involves the capacity
for actualizing what is temporally not actual, with the risk of remembering or
anticipating incorrectly. He explains that the classical title for this, prudentia
as the feature that distinguished man from the animals, also signied that there
are strict limitations on the correct uses of this potential for actualizing what is
not actual (SS, 46). What these are, Luhmann does not for the moment say;
more to the present point, he assigns equal importance to speed, which must be
conserved, even as speed on other levels of systems and processes (SS, 46) is

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being presupposed, by which I take him to mean that the need for its expenditure is a standard presupposition.
Like Michel Serres, though less often, Luhmann explicitly situates his discourse between philosophy and literature, lending concreteness and texture to
propositions that are otherwise, and sometimes excessively, abstract. Such is the
case with the fabled race between the hare and the wife-and-husband duo of
hedgehogs, which in Luhmanns redaction turns into a story of two kinds of
speed. As his opponents carry on a relay race, the innocent hare scurries on in
the belief that he is running against a single opponent. In other words, the
hedgehogs
can communicate quickly in a very selective way, while the hare can
merely run quickly. Earlier societies seemed satised with such prudentia.
Only in highly complex societies, only in the modern period, is interest in
a time-transcending prudentia overtaken by interest in acceleration: the
eighteenth century discovered that taste can judge more quickly than
reason because it can individualize its criteria and can legitimate them by
self-observation.
(SS, 46)
MEASURING

No American of his generation experiences the dynamics of history more keenly

than Henry Adams, and none struggles harder than he to take the measure of
confusions resulting from the speed of modern developments, especially in
technology. Boldly, Adams strives to develop an explanatory formula capable of
being communicated to a general audience. To do so, however, he must rst
devise an image directly, economically, and graphically capturing the essence of
speed and acceleration as cultural phenomena.
The image needed here is that of a new center, or preponderating mass,
articially introduced on earth in the midst of a system of attractive forces
that previously made their own equilibrium, and constantly induced to
accelerate its motion till it shall establish a new equilibrium. A dynamic
theory would begin by assuming that all history, terrestrial or cosmic,
mechanical or intellectual, would be reducible to this formula if we knew
the facts.4
Invoking the established view that science regards the measurement of
motion as both proximate and ulterior aim, Adams proposes to illustrate
dynamism and acceleration by measuring the rate of coal production in the
nineteenth century, on the assumption that the ratio of increase in the volume
of coal-power may serve as a dynanometer (A, 1168). The latter term, coming
into English usage during the Industrial Revolution, rst refers to an instrument for measuring amounts of energy exerted by human beings or animals
(1810); by 1862 it broadens into a generic term for any instrument capable of
measuring the motive force of an engine. The advantage of this analogy, for
Adams, is that with it he can measure both quantitative increments of production

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and their rates of acceleration. Coal production, it turns out, had been doubling
every ten years between the beginning and the end of the century; so that,
reckoning recursively, the 30,000 horsepower propelling an ocean steamer in
1905 can be seen as being halved for every decade back to 1835, to yield the
equivalent of just 234 horsepower. Rather than follow the authors subsequent
calculations, we would do well to consider the implications of a shift that
Adams makes from quantity to quality. In working out the illustrative ratios
of acceleration (or retardation), he explains, the difculty lies, not with the
calculations applied, but with a qualitative something-or-other beneath,
behind, or beyond the reach of arithmetic. That something-or-other is
intensity.
INTENSITY

In truth, his chief trouble came not from the ratio in volume of
heat, but from the intensity, since he could get no basis for a
ratio there. All ages of history have known high intensities,
like the iron-furnace, the burning-glass, the blow-pipe; but no
society has ever used high-intensities on any large scale till
now. . . .
(A,1168)

How well this generalization might stand up under closer scrutiny must
remain an open question here. My concern is with the tension, so typical of the
author, between the conicting forces and, ultimately, just about everything
counts for Adams as a force of quantity and quality. Universal and unrelenting, never appearing to relax, this tension bears a distinct family resemblance to
the intensities noted above.
The term intensity exerts particular energies not only here, in Adams, but
in the modern age generally. When he introduces the term to English usage,
Sir Robert Boyle, the pioneering chemist and physicist, signies a strained or
very high degree . . . extreme, force, strength, depth, etc. (A, 1665). A hundred years later the scientic overtones become more precise with degree or
amount of some quality, condition, etc.; force, strength, energy; degree of some
characteristic quality, as brightness, etc.; in Physics, as a measurable quantity.
In studies of which Adams was probably aware, Clark Maxwell speaks of intensity in the force of a charged body (1882); while in the early days of the still
camera, intensity registers a quality peculiar to photographic images (1850).
The relevance of the latter to someone like Adams, who closely followed the
increasingly rapid course of technological innovation in his times, hardly needs
to be underscored. We may well underscore, however, the larger fact that here
in Adams, as in the age as a whole, quality and quantity meet head on, with the
former submitting, as it were, to be measured by the latter; and the fact that
while these scientic and technological concerns were exerting their inuence,
the Romantic Robert Southey has been dening intensity as high-strung quality of personal feeling or emotion, and as the poet illustrates by evoking
John Bunyans concentration as he reads his Bible strenuous energy. If
space allowed, we could ponder the factors that drew not only Southey but John

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Keats and William Hazlitt back to the Longinian origins of the aesthetic of
intensity (especially as compounded, as it was for Longinus, with speed).
SPEED AND REVOLUTION

Among collective social phenomena occurring in the last two centuries, none is
more closely associated with speed than the phenomenon of revolution. For
those who apprehend revolution in primarily social, political, and cultural
terms, as the Romantics inclined to do, and as most of us continue to do, the
events in America and France toward the end of the eighteenth century stand as
paradigmatic. Not so for Adams, who fastens his attention on scientic and
technological developments prior to, during, and after the Industrial
Revolution.
Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300. Thought had
more than once been upset, but never caught and whirled about in the
vortex of innite forces. Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it
to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore
of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and
ung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an
elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who never drove down the
Champs lyses without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing
one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an ofcial without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these
bombs would double in force every ten years.
(A, 11712)
Several observations suggest themselves. Most immediate is the kinetic
energy in the style: whirled about, leaped, running to waste, grasped his wrists and
ung him, runaway automobile. The last gure of movement and speed, the
reader will note, anticipates the runaway juggernaut of which Giddens speaks
above. The larger point is that in his representation of speed, Adams here
turns his energies to the quality of feeling in what is occurring. He succeeds,
to the degree that he succeeds, partly by personication: universal forces
grasp the wrist of representative Man and ing him about, and so on. Placing
this gure in the midst of the scene in this way increases the vividness
increases, indeed, the intensity of the representation. There remains, from
the range of rendered effects, the authors superintending irony, which can
speak in mordant tones of bombing force as exemplifying the rates of
progress.
A little further on, he directs the energy of ironys coarser cousin, the
grotesque, to render natures response to human investigations:
Every day nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with
enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man,
who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single
instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war;

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automobiles and re-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became

almost a nervous relaxation.
(A, 1172)
Overall, Adams description manages by implication to subordinate social,
political, and cultural history the very kind that he himself has been
writing to the technologically and scientically represented realm of universal force. In this connection the bomb is dissevered from any immediate or
explicit historical context; to the world-weary author, the event but typies
recurring patterns of human behavior, and if this vaguely implies the danger of
frequenting neighborhoods with government ofces, the entire matter matters
less than the more intriguing calculus of acceleration: in ten years, Adams
predicts, there will be bombs with twice the force.
FUTURITY AND REVOLUTION

In his study of the contemporary fashion system, Roland Barthes not only
recognizes the need to include temporality in his social semiosis; like Adams,
Lyotard, and Luhmann, he specically recognizes the importance of the increasing rate of change as well as the economic foundation of, as it were, programmed speed. There is no secret about the economic implications: Fashion
is sustained by certain producer groups in order to precipitate the renewal of
clothing, which would be too slow if it depended on wear and tear alone; in the
United States, these groups are aptly called accelerators.5 Renewal, in this sense,
means not merely the reintroduction of the same, but, through rhetoric and
other modes of representation, making the same seem new. Last years fashion,
like the fashion of the year before or the year before that, is occluded as thoroughly as possible in the language of this year, of novelty, of the now what
Barthes calls neomania, and rightly associates with the rise of capitalism and
the Renaissance practice, among the well-off, of ordering a new portrait every
time one bought a new costume (FS, 300). Sooner or later, a mania for the new
alters temporal priorities, redirecting desire from the past to the future, where
novelty is, so to say, normative. Increasingly, every new must be represented as
still newer, a dissemination of a forever arriving future that, exhausting itself in
the present, rapidly recedes into the past. Add to this the fact that the every
activity of every agent in the fashion system designer, manufacturer, marketer,
sales clerk is directly or indirectly competitive with every other activity of every
other agent, and you have the ideal condition for systemic inertia at a rapid rate.
Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason already sees the need to interpret
not only the scope of historical changes, together with the intellectual models
or paradigms underlying their interpretation, but the speed of those changes.
In the Great Fear of 1789 the communication of news on what was happening
in the capital occurred at markedly different rates of speed, and the very fact
that it spread more quickly to one locality than to another helped to determine
the quantity and quality of anxiety. What the fear signied
was above all a structure of alterity in relation to Paris. News was
scarce, slow to arrive, and impatiently awaited. . . . it spread unevenly and

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confusedly in the countryside. . . . Thus the contrast between the rapidity

of events in the capital and Versailles and the scarcity of information
showed everyone his passivity in relation to those Others (aristocrats,
deputies of the Third Estate, the Parisian people) who made History in
Paris.6
The premise underlying this and other concepts of tempi is the paradigmatic
power of futurity. The French provincial population does not concern itself
with the remote past a matter for historians but rather with the immediate
past, a past so near that it can seem a dimension of the present. The root
assumption is that the future depends upon speed of reportage: if we are to seize
the opportunities that will enable us to achieve the future we desire, we need to
know as quickly as possible what is going on in the capital. Slow news, like old
news, is no news. There is thus a circularity from the present to the future and
back again to the present; and a commensurate temporality connecting the
period of time it takes to receive the past (as virtual present) to the period of
time it takes to judge it and to apply what is learned from that general judging
to particular cases.
That Sartre already knows this is attested by his approach to the phenomenon of rapid ination in a given market, an approach that clearly anticipates
Barthes concern for acceleration.
The depreciation of money accelerates as everyone tries to get rid of it in
order to acquire real values; but this behaviour determines the depreciation above all by reecting it; in other words, it is future depreciation, in so
far as it imposes itself on the individual to the extent that he foresees it as
the unity of a process which conditions him, and it is this future depreciation which determines present depreciation.
(CDR, 1: 289)
Temporality as here conceived suggests a paradigm shift from the primacy of
the past to the primacy of the future. The shift involves, inter alia, a new sense
of the kinetic relation between past and present, a sense that becomes apparent
with Leibniz, who passes on to posterity not only the foundations of the calculus but the concept of what is for most of us a more important innovation:
insurance. Now, it may at rst appear that the rapid spread of the concept and
practice of writing insurance makes us incline to complacency: let us not worry
about the future; we have taken sufcient care regarding it; and so on. But it is
just as likely that such an orientation, by contracting the distance between now
and later, effectively foreshortens our sense of time, prompting us to do as
quickly as possible whatever it is that we can or wish to do.
In Leibnizs century and before there is abundant evidence of another economic phenomenon geared to futurity and speed, namely, global trade, and
within that nexus, credit. The damage done to the naval hegemony of Britain
from costly wars makes the English realize that their country must mount a
systematically commercial enterprise capable of collective assertiveness and
increasingly swift development. As if to testify to this state of affairs, Herman
Melville complains in effect that in naval matters paradigms and practices are

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being altered too quickly; already Lord Nelsons Victory, overtaken by the tides
of change, lies beached in a museum. In fairly short order, there had come into
being what J. G. A. Pocock calls a political arithmetic, a paradigm for means
of measuring quantitatively what each citizen contributed to the total national
economic and cultural stock. At a very rapid pace, an entity known as Trade
entered the language of politics, and become something which no orator,
pamphleteer, or theorist could afford to neglect and which, in an era of war, was
intimately connected with the concepts of external relations and national
powers.7
The twin phenomena of trade and war emerge not only as powerful forces in
their own right; as accelerating forces, which they also are, they underline the
generative power of the paradigm shift from the dominance of the past to the
dominance of the future:
Credit, or opinion, is the appropriate form for the ancient faculty of
experience to take where money and war have speeded up the operations of
society, and men must constantly translate their evaluations of the public
good into actions of investment and speculation, so that political behavior
is based upon opinion concerning a future rather than memory of a
past.
(MM, 523)
KINESIS

Trade and war are kinetic, they depend on our ability to move quickly to seize
the day before the other does. In the early nineteenth century, such kinesis is
conspicuous, in the United States, with the rapid empowerment of a national
market rationale under President Andrew Jackson, together with the Madisonian vision of a nation speedily escalating and expanding. Pocock, calling
Madisons thought kinetic and romantic, characterizes the American people
and their republic as being in perpetual and kinetic growth (MM, 523). In
the same way Thomas Jefferson, and later Alexis de Tocqueville, observe the
growing restlessness of settlers who, disturbed by the accelerating pace of
migration in their direction, decide, like Huck Finn, to light out for the
Territory.
Turning again to the felt side of kinesis, we encounter velocitation, that is,
the adjustment that occurs as one moves for a sustained period at an accelerated
pace. It is the feeling you have, when you are motoring at sixty miles per hour,
that you are motoring at fty. Speed that is already high as well as continuously
accelerating becomes normative, at least within industrial societies; and as this
proceeds apace on an increasing, indeed global, scale there is an increasing
tendency to lose touch with the basal phenomenon of long time. Pierre
Bourdieu describes this species of time in the following terms: The objects
endowed with the greatest distinctive power are those which most clearly attest
the quality of the appropriation, and therefore the quality of their owner,
because their possession requires time and capacities which, requiring a long
investment of time, like pictorial or musical culture, cannot be acquired in
haste or by proxy.8

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R E F L E X I V I T Y A N D C O M M U N I C AT I O N

Speed and speedy change draw interest, in contrast to the temporality just
described, from a reexivity wherein social practices are constantly examined
and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices
(CoM, 38). Controlled by no overarching paradigm or master narrative, and
driven by market factors and forces not well understood, reexivity can but
speed up its own processing.
To analyze social systems, according to Luhmann, one must begin with the
facts that all processes are communicative processes and that reexivity must be
acquired as communication about communication (SS, 450). Out of all the
possibilities that might be selected for communicative purposes, one must make
a selection; for, the basic form of all processual reexivity is always the selection of selection (SS, 453). Speculating about the feasibility of specialized
reex relationships, Luhmann nds support in areas of specialized
communication
and especially, but not exclusively, in the function domains that have
brought forward symbolically generalized media of communication. Thus
in love, communication has become thoroughly reexive: that one communicates about love and how (bodily behavior is very much a part) is also
a proof of love, and there is no possible proof outside of this selfreference.
(SS, 452)
In the discursive domain of communicating about communicating, there is a
preoccupation with quickening movement, quickening speed, quickening
acceleration. Proust attests to such acceleration everywhere. Watching fashionable people pedalling about on their bicycles, witnessing the increasing speed
of railroad trains and the advent of aviation, riding through the countryside in
his novel motor-car (no pun intended) at the rate of a speeding cannonball, as
he put it: Proust, who went so far as to dub his chauffeur a nun of speed,
became what can only be called a connoisseur of velocities.9
CONNOISSEUR OF VELOCITIES

As early as the fth paragraph of his novel, Proust describes an important

experience of movement and speed. After broadly describing some of his early
experiences of sleep, he depicts an anonymous person dozing off in an
abnormal position in an armchair, whereupon the world will fall topsyturvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time
and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to
sleep months earlier and in some far distant country.10 Moving from this locus
back to his own, Marcel records the physiological sensations occurring at the
moment of awakening, when
everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things,
places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move would make an

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effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its
various members. . . . Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs,
knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it
had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing,
adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness.
(RTP, 1: 5)
Later, Marcel draws a striking analogy between the way in which he composes, as it were, the appearance of the little band of girls, and what amounts
to a sort of speed-reading; his specic point of departure is the code that their
collective appearance presupposes and that Marcel must interpret through
these rapid decipherings of a person whom we see in motion exposing us
thus to the same errors as those too rapid readings in which, on a single
syllable and without waiting to identify the rest, we base instead of the word
that is in the text a wholly different word with which our memory supplies
us (RTP, 1: 6012). Subsequently, in The Captive, his imagination engages
the question of who or what Albertine and Andree truly are, which is to say,
the nature of their essence. In approaching the matter he does not rst speak
of speed in general terms, but rather moves speedily in his exposition, switching in an instant from third-person depiction to second-person apostrophe:
Had either of them a sentimental regard for me? And, in themselves, what
were Albertine and Andre? To learn the answer, I should have to immobilise
you. . . . Thus he switches in an instant from third-person depiction to
second-person apostrophe. Presumably, I am not the only reader who, on
perusing these sentences after some lapse of time, is still caught off guard by
the suddenness of the move. In any case, Marcel then proceeds to engage
speed, of a particular type, thematically; returning to the words that signal
the shift, we may proceed further in examining this communication about
communication:
To learn the answer, I should have to immobilise you, to cease to live in
that perpetual expectation . . . I should have to cease to love you, in order
to x you, to cease to know your interminable and ever disconcerting
arrival, oh girls, oh recurrent ray in the swirl wherein we throb with
emotion upon seeing you reappear while barely recognising you, in the
dizzy velocity of light.
(RTP 2: 242)
High speed such as this, as Proust conceives of it, is neither spontaneous in
origin nor continuous; in a moment it could slip into immobility were it not
for the irruption of bodily enticement:
That velocity, we should perhaps remain unaware of it and everything
would seem to us motionless, did not a sexual attraction set us in pursuit
of you, drops of gold always different, and always passing our expectation.
On each occasion a girl so little resembles what she was the time before
. . . that the stability of nature which we ascribe to her is purely ctitious
and a convenience of speech.
(RTP 2: 242)

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Here, communicating about communicating is quite deliberate, as the author

exposes the linguistic fundament by which our ideas and images of natural
being are continuously if inconspicuously supported. At the same time, the
pattern of rendered movement merges with something like a traditional concern with mutability: the girls, envisioned in the form of drops of gold, so
consistently differ from themselves that their being, as it emerges, carries over
little of the appearance it presented when apprehended earlier.
A signicant shift of a somewhat different order occurs two paragraphs later
when the narrator speaks of the surprising faces that used to appear every day
when, in the dizzy speed of our expectation, our friends presented themselves
daily, weekly, too different to allow us, as they have halted in their passage, to
classify them, to award degrees of merit (RTP 2: 243). Here the difference that
prevents us from comprehending and rewarding the girls, though due to
rapidity, is not due to any rapidity in their being but rather to the velocity
inherent in our way of regarding them.
By Prousts day the notion that the age is an age of speed had become
generally accepted, and even welcomed, despite some dire implications for
culture:
People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they
might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight,
or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the
coaches, which the motor-car, for all that, was to restore to favour. Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though
we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it
rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For the people
who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. (RTP 2: 1545)
Communicating about communicating, Proust suggests that the artist can
command an audience if she does not let the easy glamor of speed beguile to
lower levels of arousal. Somehow the artist must respect the power of density
and patience, and the temporality in Milan Kunderas recent Slowness and in the
entirety of A la Recherche du temps perdu. The sheer hypotactic complexity of the
latter acts to constrain any errant impulse to parse rapidly except on the
Monty Python show, where performers compete at summarizing Proust.
Meanwhile, in the age of bites, e-mail, faxes, nanno seconds, and accelerating
hypervelocity, Wagner devotees in substantial numbers still patiently attend
the Ring, where the ultimate constraint against hurry, the xed notation of the
score with its prescribed tempi, maintains its sway.
SPEED AND TECHNOLOGY

Like Henry Adams, and unlike many other moderns, Proust closely observed
developments in contemporary technology, considering in particular some of
the broader implications of the interrelationship between speed and technology. Before examining these observations, however, we should remind ourselves

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that speed, for Proust, is not an isolated theme, but emerges from a general
background of movement, motion, or kinesis, themselves connected
oppositionally, and sometimes dialectically, with immobility, repose, or stasis.
So intricately are these phenomena wound together that in regarding any one of
them the reader is perforce regarding some or all of the others. A second point
is that the earlier parts of Prousts novel are generally, and ttingly, attuned to
earlier times in the authors represented life, with its relatively bucolic atmosphere and cherished moments of repose, its impressed natural patterns and
its exquisite old churches especially the one at Combray and its overall
nourished nostalgia. Concern with speed already plays a notable role in
Swanns Way, for example, where the memorable experience of the steeples of
Martinville, with their shifting nuances of appearance, is associated with the
venerable technology of the horse-drawn carriage: At a bend in the road I
experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any
other, when I caught sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the
setting sun was playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road seemed to keep them continually changing their position
(RTP 1: 138). This is the authors persona, speaking in a kind of virtual
present about the past. More impressive, and more complex, is the evocation
of the experience that Proust interpellates into the present text as a fragment
of writing executed on the day in question despite the bouncing of his
careering carriage.
Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in that
expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting them by
a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, was come to
join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and yet the three
steeples were always a long way ahead of us . . . Then the steeple of
Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by the light of the setting sun. . . . We had
been so long in approaching them that I was thinking of the time that
must elapse before we could reach them when, of a sudden, the carriage,
having turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had ung
themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop before
being dashed against the porch of the church.
(RTP 1: 139)
Not many writers appear to understand, as does Proust, that architecture is
in large part an art of motion. Henry Adams is a notable exception, with his
vivid rendering of the volatile forces engaging one another in the structure of
the great gothic cathedrals. John Ruskin is, of course, another exception, and
Prousts fascination with Ruskin, as critic of art and architecture, is well documented. In the steeples that Proust describes, verbs of motion render vividly
the same dyamic forces depicted by Adams: rising, climbed, spring, volt; but
perhaps the most vivid evocation comes near the close of the passage when the
steeples ing themselves so abruptly that they almost dash the travelers against
the porch.

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At the end of the sketch, looking back, the young author-to-be, despite
the fact that the horses are hurrying his carriage along, writes down his
impressions of the gradual realignment of the three steeples (those of
Martinville plus the single spire of Vieuxvicq) that approximates a state of
merger: I could see them timidly seeking their way, and . . . drawing
close to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more,
now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and
resigned, and so vanishing in the night.
(RTP 1: 13940)
Where Proust is concerned, the issue of speed, as it subsequently develops,
turns not merely on rapid motion as such, but on its perpetual acceleration, and
on the ways in which contemporary technologies and social practices foster and
perpetuate that acceleration. By way of example, consider bicycle riding, which
in the l890s became an international fad as large numbers of riders and
onlookers poured into velodromes for the races; so commonplace was the association of bicycle riding with aerial motion (we still speak of speed as high) that
some two-wheelers were actually equipped with articial wings. Proust
observes: The young racer mounted her machine. For a moment the bicycle
swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing;
and presently we saw dart away at full speed the young creature half-human,
half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course (RTP 2: 499). Proust compares
the little acousticon of the 1889 Exposition with which one barely hoped to
be able to transmit sound from end to end of a house to the telephones that
soar over streets, cities, elds, seas, uniting one country to another (RTP
2: 367). In The Captive he writes what begins as a paean to this new technology
but ends in ironic deation: I did not leave the telephone without thanking, in
a few propitiatory words, her who reigns over the swiftness of sounds for having
kindly employed on behalf of my humble words a power which made them a
hundred times more rapid than thunder, but my thanksgiving received no
other response than that of being cut off (RTP 2: 499).11 At home with his
thtrephone Proust could enjoy instantaneous reception of broadcasts from
venues such as the Opera; and it is known that he took a keen interest in
photography, where he used it analogically in remarks on mutability. Thus
our way of forming a conception and, so to speak, taking a photograph of
this moving universe, hurried along by Time, seeks on the contrary to make it
stand still (RTP 2: 1063).
Proust was well aware of early attempts to produce a rapid series of images
that might constitute a simulacrum of movement. The development of these
inventions and renements was itself extremely rapid. So closely did one development follow another, near the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth
century, that names for the various processes fairly dashed into view: bioscope,
biograph, kinetoscope, cinematograph, zoopraxiscope are some of the terms.
Proust probably knew of the celebrated experiment facilitated by Governor
Leland Stanford, who owned race horses, and was convinced that, at some point
in time, as they ran at a trotting gait, all four hooves cleared the racing surface.
In a wager with a friend who thought otherwise, Stanford engaged the services
of a photographer, Edward Muybridge, to decide the issue. Setting up

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twenty-four cameras with trip wires to snap one image per camera, Muybridge
in 1879 produced a photographic simulation of rapid movement that proved
Stanfords claim. More importantly, experts have since credited the experiment
with helping to shape the future of what would come to be called motion
pictures. A similar image seems to appear in Prousts imagination when at an
outing of the well-to-do he watches the quick passage of celebrity riders: And
at every moment, Mme. Swann was receiving the salutations of the last belated
horsemen, who passed through in a cinematograph taken as they galloped in
the blinding glare of the Avenue (RTP 1: 487). The description, brief as it is,
captures the failure of synchronicity as meaningful coincidence of being
where one ought to be or desires to be at a given time. And while it is true that
this technology preserves the captured motion, it preserves the belatedness as
well, so that the ironic consequence of the ability to record movement is a
condition of xity.
The same period that saw the advent of motion pictures, give or take a few
years, saw the advent of aviation. Proust makes reference to the number of
aerodromes that have sprouted around Paris and depicts the magic in their
motion:
At any moment, amid the repose of the machines that lay inert and
as though at anchor, we would see one, laboriously pushed by a number
of mechanics. . . . Then the engine was started, the machine ran along
the ground, gathered speed, until nally, all of a sudden, at right
angles, it rose slowly, in the awkward, as it were paralysed ecstasy of a
horizontal speed suddenly transformed into a majestic, vertical
ascent.
(RTP 2: 452)
Far from replacing his fascination with the more established technology of
the railway, Prousts love of aviation complements it, just as it complements his
love of the motor-car. His longest and most searching account of the latter
hearkens back to the early passage, discussed above, which gravitates around
the problem of getting oriented to ones position in space.
It may be thought that my love of magic journeys by train ought to have
prevented me from sharing Albertines wonder at the motor-car which
destroys our conception which I had held hitherto of position in space
as the individual mark, the irreplaceable essence of irremovable beauties.
And no doubt this position in space was not to the motor-car, as it had
been to the railway train . . . a goal exempt from from the contingencies of
ordinary life, almost ideal at the moment of departure, and, as it remains
so at that of arrival, at our arrival in the great dwelling where no one
dwells . . . the station.
(RTP 2: 288)
To enter a city through the railway station is to encounter it more directly and
centrally than is usual with the motor-car; the very name on the front of the
station encapsulates its essence as it waits there like a theater expecting its
audience. But by virtue of its maneuverability, the motor-car enables a fuller

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and more rounded experience for its passengers. In relating what amounts to a
kind of pursuit, Proust depicts
those ever narrowing circles which the motor-car describes round a spellbound town which darts off in every direction to escape it and upon which
nally it drops down, straight, into the heart of the valley where it lies
palpitating on the ground; so that this position in space, this unique
point, which the motor-car seems to have stripped of the mystery of
express trains, it gives us on the contrary the impression of discovering, of
determining for ourselves as with a compass, of helping us to feel with a
more fondly exploring hand, with a ner precision, the true geometry, the
fair measure of the earth.
(RTP 2: 288)
FROM SPEED TO SLOWNESS

In contrast with the short time of everyday experience and the literary
representation of that experience, the long time of number-crunching
demographics looks almost motionless rather as glacially slow structures
appear against the background of swifter microlevel events in the historical
methodology of the Annales School. By way of a cautionary note, the
former cannot simply be identied with the long time of Pierre Bourdieu.
Structures entail extremely long-term patterns in agriculture, transportation,
the spread and control of disease, clothing, mining, metallic and paper
money, and the like. Events, by contrast, are on the scale of, say, modern
diplomatic history, where the success of policies may depend on a particular
communication between the national capital and one of its outposts. More
concretely, the term event would apply to an episode such as the storming of
the Bastille in 1789, a high-prole moment that draws its symbolic power,
however, precisely from the way it assimilates energy from popular resentment over the great inequities in the structural areas noted above. The long
time of Bourdieu, it would appear, seems to fall somewhere between these
other temporalities. At least this is the way these things look to me now as I
return to my starting point, the consequences of modernity, and take the
opportunity of a closing word, rst from Milan Kundera, then from Proust
and Virginia Woolf.
In Kunderas novel entitled Slowness, speed is represented as peculiarly atemporal. The novelist states that a man speeding on a motorcycle is outside time;
in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age,
his wife, his children, his worries, and so has no fear, because the source of fear is
in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.12 Kundera
envisages this atemporality as a mode of ecstasy, and on a rst view one might
be tempted to connect this with the ecstasies of temporality, described by
Heidegger, in which Dasein goes out and forth from stasis. But Heidegger
privileges the future in the belief that one is always already going beyond the
present towards the not yet that is to be. He is highly skeptical, moreover,
about the epochs preoccupation with speed in all its modes. Kunderas thinking runs in the opposite direction:

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Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.
As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body,
forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion. . . . This all
changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then
on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is
noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. (S, 2)
Whether corporeality and materiality are transcended in speed is an aspect of
this passage that I am inclined, as I think Virginia Woolf would be, to question.
Attempting to dene life, Woolf, for her part, offers the following observation:
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being
blown through the Tube at fty miles an hour landing at the other
end without a single hairpin in ones hair! Shot out at the feet of God
entirely naked! . . . Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the
perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. . . . Everythings
moving, falling, slipping, vanishing. . . . There is a vast upheaval of
matter.13
This is from a meditative tale entitled The Mark on the Wall, evoking the
experience of a woman whose imagination meanders back and forth between
the visible mark and the trains of thought to which it gives rise. The sketch
may serve here as a counterstatement to Kunderas de-materializing. When one
is blown through the Tube at fty miles an hour, one does not come out of the
experience bodiless. Quite the contrary: as the wording and the exclamation
point make clear, one is embarassed just because one is so corporeally hairpins
and all there. The mutability Woolf goes on to describe has, perhaps, an
entropic overtone, but make no mistake about the fact that materiality is not
being transcended; do her concluding words not place what has happened
precisely in the context of material being?
The sketch concludes ironically, suspending speed and change, as we are told
that the mark was after all the very epitome of slowness and long time: Ah, the
mark on the wall! It was a snail (MW, 89). But there is more in this ironic
deation than rst meets the eye. For it expresses in a quiet way Bernards
deant confrontation with death at the end of The Waves; a confrontation,
furthermore, that sees the hero, and his archetype Percival, moving with
utmost speed: It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my
hair ying back like a young mans, like Percivals, when he galloped in India. I
strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will ing myelf, unvanquished and
unyielding, O Death!14 In this age of relativity and reexivity,Woolf relativizes
speed bad if it blows you helplessly through the Tube, good if you can
employ it against your enemy. Finally, reexivity is implicit as she takes into
her present account her previous sense of speed as precisely the opposite of what
she now, from a longer temporal perspective, represents it to be.

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11
THE MEANING OF RHYTHM

Amittai Aviram

What is rhythm? Recently, people have been thinking, talking, writing, and
arguing about rhythm. More is at stake in this controversy than mere definitions. On the one hand, thinking about rhythm and language inevitably leads
us to poetry, and what we think has immediate repercussions in both the
teaching and the practice of poetry. On the other hand, rhythm may provide us
with an opportunity newly to understand the relation between language and
the body, a question which is a version of the question always at the core of
metaphysics, and whose importance has never been more evident than it is
today in areas as diverse as aesthetics and politics. This essay is an effort to
contribute to the discussion, rst by looking at the terms of the controversy,
and then by attempting to go beyond it. The latter attempt will take the form,
or at least the style, of a somewhat Heideggerian meditation upon rhythm,
given the evident and often beautiful poetic quality of Heideggers writing.
But unlike Heidegger, I shall also try to make clear the political and social
implications of this question that is, why rhythm is worth thinking about,
why rhythm in poetry matters.
The term rhythm has been used for the past few centuries to mean the regular
occurrence in time or space of a foregrounded event. More specically, both in
music theory and in general discourse, rhythm can mean three distinct things:
(1) a regular beat; (2) a pattern of various elements (such as a poetic meter in
Greek or Latin) which is organized in relation to the regular beat and which is
ultimately repeated as a higher-order rhythm; (3) a realization of the beat or the
pattern, which need not be regular, but whose very irregularities foreground
the regular beat against which it is organized and in relation to which it is
perceived. Insofar as all three of these may be thought of as hierarchical levels of
complexity in the expression of a fundamental regular beat, all three of them
may be called rhythm at present and have much the same signicance in a
theoretical discussion. I shall call this approach the conventional meaning of
the term rhythm. It is the one generally held in modern society.
More recently, however, a few theorists, such as Julia Kristeva, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, and especially Henri Meschonnic and Charles Bernstein, have
challenged this view of rhythm.1 These theorists take their inspiration from an
essay by the great pioneer linguist, mile Benveniste, in which he reveals the
fact that the Greek word rhuthmos had originally meant something quite

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different.2 Akin to the verb rheo, to ow, rhythm in its pre-Platonic sense denotes
the shape (schema) of a moving object such as the water of a stream or the body
of a dancer. It is in the words of Socrates that this form or shape of a moving
body is required to follow measure and order in other words, to be
metrical so that in Plato the term occupies the exact point where the ancient
and modern senses of the word overlap. After Plato, apparently, rhythm has
meant increasingly what it means today. From the point of view of these postBenveniste theorists, the conventional meaning of rhythm today is informed by
measure, what Plato calls metron. These theorists wish to return us to the preSocratic sense, where, they believe, rhythm is closely bound up with subjectivity and discourse. In this essay, I shall be arguing in favor of the conventional,
modern view of rhythm, but for unconventional reasons. For these two meanings
of the word rhythm have more at stake than mere terminology.
The modern, conventional sense of rhythm, for example, may be connected
to the Nietzschean concept of the Dionysian, in opposition to the Apollonian
order, in his The Birth of Tragedy. While Apollo weaves the web of illusions that
makes reason, normal perception, and subjectivity possible, Dionysos presides
over ecstasy, the absence of the principle of individuation the primal unity, or
primal chaos, which is nonsubjective and thus transsubjective.3 If we associate
language in its meaningful, representational nature with Apollo, then rhythm,
even the rhythm of language, is associated with the disruption of meaning,
representation, subjectivity, coherency of image, and so forth an avenue of
return to the Dionysian. It is incorrect to think of either the Apollonian or,
especially, the Dionysian as actual stable states of being. Rather, they are mutually dependent and determining allegories. But the stability of subjectivity can
be dislodged, or rather the inherent instability foregrounded in experience, by
means of a focus toward rhythm.4
The returned pre-Platonic meaning of rhythm moves in virtually the opposite direction. For Meschonnic, for example, the rhythm of a given passage of
either poetry or prose for him, neither can be either more or less rhythmic
than the other is an unquestionable marker of the distinctiveness of each
writer and even each work. Every writer has a personal rhythm. Thus rhythm
leads us precisely toward the subjective from which it leads away in the
Nietzschean tradition, which uses the modern meaning of the term rhythm. For
Meschonnic, rhythm is subjectivity in the written text. Whereas for Nietzsche,
rhythm provides a break a caesura of thought in its individual subjectivity,
for Meschonnic, following Benveniste, rhythm is continuous with history and
thus with the subjectivity of thought.
To be more precise about Meschonnic, rhythm according to him is not a sign
of the subject. How something can mark without being a sign, I dont know.
When Meschonnic says sign, he is referring to the analysis of signs given by
Ferdinand de Saussure a bound relation between a signier and a signied
not the one given by the American C. S. Peirce, which has three parts and is
subtler. Given the Saussurean semiology, Meschonnic regards the sign as
oppressive, because it is intrinsically hierarchical in the relation between signier and signied.5 This strikes me as an instance of throwing the baby out with
the bath-water, to say the least. Nevertheless, in my terms, Meschonnic may be

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right about how individuality is expressed through rhythm, but only because,
as I have mentioned earlier, the modern, conventional denition of rhythm
actually embraces three strata of rhythm. Meschonnic is concerned with the
surface stratum, without attending to the fact that this expressive
sound-process always refers back to the regular beat against which it must be
felt.
Meschonnic takes his start by arguing that the modern, conventional (Western) denition of rhythm is ethnocentric and excludes, say, Hebrew biblical
poetry, which is neither verse nor prose. The matter of biblical poetry is,
unfortunately, beyond the scope of this essay.6 Let me only point out, however,
that the Psalms are assumed to have been sung or chanted and give internal
evidence of being accompanied with instruments. Their melodic traditions,
alas, are lost to us. If I may be allowed the comparison, the printed lyrics of
modern raps, often would give little or no evidence of meter. When a text is
composed to be performed orally to music, a vast variety of subdivisions of the
beat and other effects can nevertheless realize the beat convincingly. What we
usually call metrical poetry is a small subclass of rhythmic verbal art that is, it
is poetry in which the words alone, without musical accompaniment, and when
uttered according to standard rules, are sufcient to realize the beat and may be
recognized easily as regularly rhythmic.
To return to the general phenomenon of the recent trend of citing Benveniste
as Meschonnic and others do, there are several ironies here. The rst is that the
very recourse to the pre-Platonic or pre-Socratic as a rediscovery of truth
beyond the connes of Western illusions is a classically Heideggerian move.
Heideggers project is, in large part, to think the unthought in Western philosophy. Thinking in the Heideggerian sense can attend to what makes philosophy itself possible just as pre-Socratic thought enables us to witness the
unthought suppressed in philosophy from Plato on. Likewise, for Hlderlin, to
whom Heidegger refers about as much as to the pre-Socratics, tragedy reveals
the ground of representation at that climactic moment in which its rhythm is
interrupted by the equivalent of the caesura in poetic meter. Indeed, whereas
for Nietzsche rhythm (or music) itself affords a break in the subjectivity of
thought, for Hlderlin, rhythm is the normality of the subject, and the caesura
is the revelatory moment. Working across the analogy between Heidegger and
Hlderlin, then, we may say that rhythm occupies the position of philosophy,
while the caesura occupies the place of thinking the grounds of philosophy. But
philosophy itself is still a kind of thinking. So the break in thinking is still
thinking. There is nothing outside thought. What would be the unthought of
thinking about the unthought?
Another irony is that the meanings of rhythm in the modern musical and
general senses are not quite the same as they are in Plato. In addition, part of the
general semantic shift should be traced to the shift in the way people have
thought technically about music from antiquity to modernity. In ancient
Greece, what we would call rhythm was inextricable from poetry, which for
the Greeks was the same as music. Dance was also inseparable from this continuum. Theorizing about rhythm was thus the province of grammarians and
rhetoric teachers, who could draw to ones attention the difference between

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short and long syllables both in ordinary speech and in poetry, and could thus
help train one in the science of prosody. An attempt in modern times to
connect the shape of a moving being with subjectivity presupposes a conception of subjectivity which attends that very semantic shift over history. Thus
the recourse to pre-Socratics via Benveniste is not a revelation of the repressed
unthought in Western thinking about rhythm, but rather a rhetorical manipulation of history to bolster a modern artifact of concepts such as authorship,
subjectivity, and the individual concepts which are, after all and despite the
poststructuralist questioning of them, still very much with us.
Finally, there is an irony about Platos own use of the word. For if we keep in
mind the original meaning of the term as Benveniste explains it, Plato actually
recommends, in the Republic, that the form or energy-level (one possible translation) of music be in accordance with a certain typology which itself suggests
the orderliness of the forms. The right music will induce the right character in
the citizen. Thus, if we temporarily treat the ancient idea of character as similar
to the modern idea of subjectivity, it is precisely in Plato that we rst see the
connection between rhuthmos and subjectivity with the former producing the
latter. Rhythm is not so much a sign of subjectivity, as it would be in
Meschonnic, as subjectivity is a sign of rhythm. It makes sense, I think, to say
that subjectivity is a sign of rhythm, but not necessarily in the way that Plato
would suggest in the Republic. For if rhythms form character, as Plato observes,
then who can be outside of that process enough to judge which are the proper
rhythms to be used by the Republic to form good citizens? This is precisely the
same problem of circularity with which we are familiar in terms of ideology and
critique after Marx. But rhythm does come rst in a completely different sense,
as I hope we shall see later. In any event, none of the pre-Socratic sources whom
Benveniste quotes suggest that rhythm is in any sense an expression of subjectivity or, for that matter, of anything else. It suggests no temporality it is
spatial form.
Aside from these paradoxes, the theoretical controversy, which may be seen
as a recent attack on the notion of rhythm as musical or verse meter and thus
of rhythm as a regular beat, brings to the surface a large-scale social problem.
This problem may be seen initially with reference to modern pedagogy. Theorists such as Kristeva, Meschonnic, and Bernstein are still writing as if
people were overtrained in conventional metrical poetry and as if they were
liberating us from these archaic shackles. Of course, the assault on meter has
been going on now for well over a century! Today, students come out of
school, not in the condition of knowing meter too well and wanting to rebel
against it, but of not knowing meter at all, and being taught that poetry is
not metrical and is almost always a rebellion against meter. In other words,
they know of a rebellion but not what the rebellion rebels against. They come
out with the impression that poetry is the sincere expression of personal
feelings in writing, especially if it is short and not developed as an argument.
A diary jotting is in this view a poem. Since this absolutely conventional and
thoroughly institutionalized view of poetry has been passed off as rebellion, it
becomes nearly impossible to dissuade students of it. If you try to do so, then
you are the authority against whom they have all along known that they must

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rebel. For, although they dont know meter, they do know that meter is
authority.
Yet meanwhile, their lives are full of poetry. This poetry has great power for
them, and it is all quite metrical. When they are children, they have nursery
rhymes and Dr. Seuss books. As adults, they have song lyrics and raps. People
hear this poetry and they memorize it. And in the moments which Noam
Chomsky rightly recognizes as the most democratic expressions in our society,
public demonstrations, people chant to express their political will in meter. No
one at those moments cries out that he or she is being tyrannized by the
authority of meter. No one worries about his or her subjectivity or individuality, any more than would someone in the middle of a basketball game stop
playing because the rules are not his or her rules. Meter is part of the game
people wish to play. The saturation with poetry of peoples lives, including
their truly political lives, is not a sign of their weakness but of their strength.
But this poetry generally does not come into the classroom.
When the teacher speaks of poetry, the students feel disempowered: I cannot
understand poetry; poetry isnt for me. Their attitude toward poetry is remarkably analogous to the attitude of modern citizens toward democracy: I cannot
understand the issues; they do not concern me; I have no power anyway. The
teaching that removes rhythm from poetry systematically prevents people from
being competent in poetry in much the same way as, in Chomskys analysis,
media systematically prevent people from truly engaging in democracy. We are
telling our students: poetry is not about your body. Media are telling people:
democracy is not about your issues. But of course, its subtler: media make
people think that the real issues are the issues they cover face-lifts and
divorces, football contracts and school prayer. Likewise, students come away
thinking that what they have been taught has liberated them from some terrible authority so that they are completely unconscious of the real, ubiquitous, and potentially deeply political role of poetry in their lives.
Our current failure to teach and speak of poetry in a way that makes sense of
its role in politics and culture, then, has everything to do with the question of
rhythm. And the current shift among certain thinkers towards a novel, but also
supposedly pre-Socratic, redenition of rhythm, though apparently coming out
of a sincere desire for political liberation, ironically only repeats the very deafness to rhythm that lies at the core of this failure to maintain the connection
between poetry and politics in a meaningful way. The revolution in thinking
about rhythm does not seem to have taken into account the very powerful
possibilities of the more conventional denition of rhythm to allow poetry to
work politically democratically.
To review: we seem to have two meanings to rhythm. On the one hand, in
the conventional meaning, rhythm is a regular repetition. On the other hand, it
is the shape or form of subjectivity in discourse, the way language sounds
aside from its lexical meanings (Meschonnic). In the rst instance, rhythm is a
disruption of the principle of individuation and therefore of subjectivity
(Nietzsche). In the second, rhythm is what enables a reader to identify the work
of a particular author (Meschonnic). In this set of oppositions, between
Nietzsche and Meschonnic, subjectivity itself is at issue: individuality,

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although necessary, constrains freedom and clothes the truth with illusions for
Nietzsche, whereas for Meschonnic, subjectivity seems to be the truth and to
express freedom. As for Kristeva, both Nietzsche and Kristeva would agree that
a momentary apprehension of freedom outside individual subjectivity is good
(either because it is true or because it is revolutionary). But for Nietzsche,
following the conventional view of rhythm, rhythm disrupts individuation
insofar as it is rhythmic that is, musical, regular; whereas for Kristeva, rhythm
disrupts subjectivity most when it is least metrical or when meter can be most
ignored. Although Kristeva and Meschonnic clearly differ about the value of
subjectivity in poetry, they fundamentally agree that rhythm is most real when
it is not regular; whereas Nietzsches theory seems to work best when by
rhythm we mean what we mean in ordinary conversation that is, something
referring to a regular beat. The contradiction between these two meanings of
rhythm is not resolvable.
In some ways, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe may be thought of as trying to
bridge the gap. He does this by having the two senses of rhythm, the one
shaping and the other breaking thought, lead one into the other. LacoueLabarthes approach provides a way of thinking the relation between rhythm
and thinking in such a way that rhythm can be both the caesura of thought and
the thought in the midst of which a caesura appears. After all, rhythm is both
continuous and discontinuous. It is simultaneously a process and a regular
interruption of a process. For example, the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik nds
himself haunted by melodies at certain moments in his life such as the
moment he receives news of the death of his teacher, Freuds disciple Karl
Abraham. He tries unsuccessfully for 25 years to come to an analytical understanding of this musical obsession. The melody that haunted Reik was a break
in his thought it came at the failure of theory; but it also was precisely what
called up theory, what propelled him onward in discourse. It shaped the subject
of the obsession by breaking the continuity of the subject (see TR 197200).7
But although Lacoue-Labarthe brings us a step closer to understanding the
effects of rhythm, his theories bring us no closer to understanding what rhythm
actually is. Before the analysis of rhythm, rhythm is already there. Before
subjectivity, rhythm is. Before the disruption of subjectivity, rhythm is. What
is rhythm? It is a question worthy of Heidegger, and in his absence, we must
imitate an echo of his rhythms.
To speak as some theorists have done for the past century, including most
recently Meschonnic and Bernstein of expressive rhythms, of rhythms of
ordinary speech, of rhythms of life or for that matter, of rhythms of the
calendar, of the seasons, of trafc, or even of ideas or of the soul does have
meaning. But these terms have meaning only because we already have some
knowledge of rhythm. We would not speak of a rhythm of life unless we
could bring to mind something that was truly and without a doubt rhythmic.
Because we not only know rhythms but can produce rhythms at any time, we
are able to see absolutely anything in life in relation to these rhythms and
therefore as, in effect, rhythmic.
Certain things we know are rhythmic. Music, dance, and traditional poetry
(which might be sung to music and even danced to) are rhythmic. Childrens

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jumping rope while chanting a rhyme is rhythmic, as is their clapping of hands

in a game of pat-a-cake. Some of our exercises are rhythmic: running, swimming, pedalling a bicycle, lifting weights in sets of reps, bouncing a basketball
on a resounding oor. Work may be rhythmic, too. Older forms of work were
thoroughly rhythmic and often accompanied by song: the tilling of elds with a
hoe or a pickaxe, the moving of earth with a shovel; the sowing, reaping,
hauling on foot, and winnowing of grain; the kneading of bread; the spinning
of yarn and the weaving of cloth on a hand-loom with its rebounding shuttle;
sweeping oors and shaking out rugs; nailing boards to build a house; the
marching of soldiers. The older forms of industry also involve rhythms,
although perhaps more deadening ones: the repetitive addition of a single part
in a factory assembly-line; the repetitive banging, whirring, humming, pounding, screaming, or crashing of machinery. These rhythms do not give rise to
song, but lull workers into a dangerous sleep so that they might be crushed by
the machines.
It should hardly be a surprise, then, that poets abandon rhythm beginning
around the middle of the nineteenth century, when these deadly rhythms have
become so prominent, nor that poets and thinkers should begin to think of
rhythm as somehow monotonous, constraining, or oppressive. Our work today
is freed of rhythm. Typing a keyboard, answering the phone, making plans,
meeting clients these activities are not accompanied by song, they require
thought and attention to the unpredictable changes which they provoke.
Meanwhile, rhythm has never disappeared. How could it? Rhythm has shifted
from the entire world of work and play to the specialized world of play alone.
But since poetry has become a profession and thinking can only be justied if it
serves industry, poetry has remained in the world of work rather than that of
play, and thinking has brought us to where we are now where, unsure of what
we should know, we must ask the very question: What is rhythm?
Let us go into the realm of play, where we are certain to encounter rhythm.
We enter a room full of people dancing to music that is perhaps only slightly
too loud. It is important that we have come here to think about rhythm.
Because the more people talk strangely about the rhythms of prose or the
rhythm of life or a new and irregular rhythm or the rhythm of subjectivity, the more they already know what rhythm is and it is, in fact, what we
nd when we enter this room with people dancing. That is how we know what
rhythm means. No one will ever understand the phrase prose rhythms unless
he or she has witnessed something like this room. We have entered the room.
We can see that they are dancing, even though each one of them is doing
something different. Some of them are moving in subtly different ways and
are watching each other. Most are moving in drastically different ways and are
not watching each other. Yet we can see, not only that they are all dancing, but
that they are dancing to the same beat. Their bodies are making different
rhythms, but they are also participating in the same rhythm. They are engaging
in rhythm together. This is clearly true, but it is also quite paradoxical.
We say participating or engaging in rhythm. Are they the receivers of
rhythm? No doubt they must hear (or feel, even if they are deaf ) the rhythm
of the music to which they are dancing. But they are also the givers, the

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producers of rhythm. Which are they rst, receivers or givers of rhythm? At the
moment that they are dancing, it is impossible to tell. The receiving is a
giving, the giving a receiving.
While they are dancing to the same rhythm, engaging in the same rhythm,
their behavior is social. We all know that dancing is a social occasion. But this
does not mean that they agree with each other, or even that they are communicating with each other in any meaningful way. They may be dancing quite by
themselves and yet, insofar as they are dancing to the same beat, they are
social. Their sociality is not a unity. It is also not a communication.
The people dancing share their dancing and share the rhythm to which they
dance. Their dancing is a sharing, even if they are dancing without partners,
and even if they are dancing off by themselves. But their sharing is not an
exchange of what each has to give as his or her individual gift to an individual
other. There is no exchange of gifts. If there were, there would be indebtedness.
We dont know what these people think. Insofar as there are many and that
people generally do not think alike, we assume that they would disagree about
many things if they were talking with each other instead of dancing here. But
they clearly agree about what the beat of the music is. In fact, they may disagree
about virtually every other thing, but they agree about the rhythm. But this is
in part because they are not here to discuss the beat or to arrive by investigation, analysis, and negotiation at a consensus of what the beat is. That would
certainly not be dancing! As we have already noted, every body may be moving
differently, and yet they all are dancing to the same beat. If asked, every one
will know this, although, while answering, every dancer may momentarily fall
out of the beat in order to think about it and answer our question. The dancers
are dancing now. They know that their dancing is to the same beat, so long as
they dont have to think too much about it.
Doubtless, rhythm goes on in time. Music, dance, traditional poetry, older
forms of work, and newer forms of play are rhythmic and they all unfold in
time. In this, are they not unlike the images of painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture? But these, too, unfold in time. To study an image takes
time. How does one experience a building? As one passes ones eyes along a
colonnade, descends a staircase, or rises in an elevator, as one walks slowly and
deliberately through a lobby, noticing the pillars at regular intervals or the
patterns of tiles on the oor or ceiling, one is obviously engaging in the rhythm
which the building has to offer.
But if architecture is rhythmic, it is also spatial and still. In this, is architecture not unlike music and dance, which are never still but always moving?
But the rhythm of music and dance also bring about a stillness as well.
Although the body of the dancer moves in time, the beat remains the same.
What does it mean to say that the beat remains the same? The anticipation of
the beat, which stands in a stillness before us, matches the memory of the beat,
which stands in a stillness around us, beneath us. It is only if, say, the tempo
momentarily changes that the stillness is momentarily disrupted. Even if such a
tempo forms part of a larger pattern that can be anticipated, then we return to
stillness. Rhythm allows us to move with great energy but to remain still and
serene all the while.

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Neither the stillness nor the movement inherent in rhythm are attributes of
measure. We may describe rhythm by measuring it by counting or by drawing a graph or a musical score, for example. In these graphs, a horizontal axis
will represent time. But insofar as these measures reveal the regularity of
rhythm, that of the underlying beat, they do so only because we are standing
outside rhythm. The energetic stillness of rhythm is exchanged for the cumulative movement of counting and of acquiring knowledge. Measure is not
rhythm, but a representation of rhythm. These forms of measure are good
representations, however. When we read them right, we see the rhythm inherent in them just as we saw the rhythm in the building by walking through it.
In this process, our reading of the time line becomes the movement of anticipation and memory, and the stillness of the graph matches the stillness of the
matching of the time before us and the time beneath us. But it is because some
theorists think that traditional poems are merely in measure that they can view
their rhythm as a constraint. They see meter as an aspect of style, whereas in
fact it is an aspect of writing that conceals the rhythmicity of poetry but that
simultaneously reveals it in all its paradoxes in the act of reading.
Between the anticipation of the beat and the memory of its fulllment, there
opens a space the Heideggerian space in which Being is disclosed. This is also
a Nietzschean space, in which I am not myself, because there is nothing
there. Hence, it is a place of freedom. Paradoxically, the regularity of the beat
underlying all rhythms that modern theorists confuse with the mere imposition
of rules is precisely what affords this freedom from any determinism because
there is no object of determination. Yet I am still myself insofar as I am
allowing the beat to take hold of me; no one and nothing is forcing me.
Insofar as the beat is a rule, moreover, it is a rule which we follow willingly
and gladly. If we didnt, we could not dance! One doesnt worry about whether
dancing to the same beat as others diminishes ones individual will. One dances
because one is tired of the burdens of individual will, tired of discovering the
intricate ways in which it is really the mask of a compulsion, and one wishes to
be free. That is why one goes to dance after work. To dance is not to obey a mob
but to agree to play.
In many ways, what one nds on the dance-oor is the model of
democracy or better, of anarchy, which is the principle of democracy put into
workable practice in its most radical form. Anarchy is the absence of a ruler, not
the absence of rules. The rules are subject to agreement from moment to
moment the rules of a truly playful game. Even constitutional republics, let
alone some tyrannies, only pretend to have the willful participation of the
people. Democracy and anarchy are not answers to the political problem of
justice but questions. What is democracy? What is freedom? When are we free?
If we freely go to the polls to elect unanimously the sole candidate who had
sufcient cash to advertise constant attacks on his rivals, and if even his rivals
were only those who had sufcient cash to pose as rivals, then are we free, and is
this a democracy? To learn more about democracy, we turn to the rhythms of
the dance-oor. At the core of rhythm is freedom, but there is no will, since
there is no subject of will. How can we speak of democracy if people are merely
dancing? Is this not a mystical cult of surrender?

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Bodies express the rhythm. Each body expresses the rhythm differently. We
say: She is expressing herself through dance. We put it this way because we
think that the self comes rst but that is precisely what keeps us from ever
hearing the beat or dancing to it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say:
Dance is expressing itself as her; or: She becomes herself as she dances. It is
because we can point to her and say Yes, that is the way she dances that we
may become confused into thinking that rhythm is what enables us to distinguish individuals by witnessing the mark of their subjectivity. This confusion arises because rhythm, as I said in the beginning, refers to several things.
These things (three) may be reduced to two: a regular alternation of event and
nonevent and the realization of this regularity-as-rule through an irregularity.
We call the irregular realization of the beat rhythm because we refer it back
to the beat, because we treat it as something which conceals the beat but which
also enables us to witness its revelation. Because of this relationship, it would
be possible hypothetically to call anything whatsoever rhythmic, since we are
always capable not only of engaging in a beat but in producing one to serve to
make the world rhythmic. Nowadays, we sometimes need to exert this effort
because freedom has become a crucial question.
If the expression of rhythm takes the form of images, and these images are
told in words, and these words, in turn, are the manifestation of the beat, then
the beat does not express feelings or ideas, but rather the images and propositions express rhythm. This is poetry. Poetry enables us to witness the movement from rhythm to meaning as dance bears witness to the movement from
rhythm to the subjective individuality of the body. But in both cases, the
representation of rhythm in the nonrhythmic eld constantly refers back to the
rhythmic and nonrepresentational. Poetry does this through allegory. Poetrys
images allegorize the sublime power of rhythm as it poses a challenge to
language, and they also allegorize the impossibility of this representation of
something so heterogeneous to representation as rhythm. In this regard,
Lacoue-Labarthe is right that rhythm both shapes and breaks thought. But
rhythm is the caesura of thought, as in poetry, precisely because rhythm goes
on. A caesura in poetry only strengthens our anticipation of the rhythm that
will return both to give forth and to disrupt the play of meaning in imagery.
Poetry then does what all knowledge, including scientic knowledge, does: it
makes sense of a world by representing it, but contains within it the signs that
the world is not representation and thus cannot allow a representation to be
found that is perfectly commensurate with it. The failure of knowledge is also
its success, because it is what enables us to be free.
Neither poetry nor knowledge could possibly be without both this success
and this failure. We could not possibly do without these, for they are what we
are: expressions of what happens in a space of freedom as rhythm. One may say
that the thoughts expressed in this very essay bear an analogous relationship to
the truth, both revealing and falling short. And, as it happens, parts of the essay
may appear rhythmic to realize a beat. But this essay is not poetry. For us to
learn more about the relation between the physical power of rhythm and the
constructive effort of language, we must turn to poetry itself.

12

MOUSIKE

TECHNE

THE PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE

O F M U S I C I N P L AT O , N I E T Z S C H E ,
AND HEIDEGGER

Babette E. Babich

An einem schnen Tage lt sich ja fast jede Sangart hren, und

die Natur, wovon es her ist, nimmts auch wieder.
Viel hat von Morgen an,
Seit ein Gesprch wir sind und hren voneinander,
Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang.
Friedrich Hlderlin, Friedensfeier
T O W A R D S A M U S I C A L P R A X I S I N P H I L O S O P H Y:
P L AY I N G T E M P E R A M E N T A N D T H O U G H T

The Muses and music in general are named . . . from mosthai,

searching, and philosophy.
Plato, Cratylus 406 a

In the broad historical provenance of the conception of the practice of music,

mousike techne, ancient Greek culture includes philosophy.1 Thus and traditionally, Heraclitus invokes the greater merits of the hidden attunement, or the
backstretched connection that is the secret of harmonious variance. For
Pythagoras, both mathematics and philosophy are born from the structural
nature of music. And with the regulative measure following from an understanding of the political/ethical effects of musical tuning, Plato builds an ideal
musical city founded on the same well-tempered measure and, in a similar
fashion, Aristotle invokes the ethical ideal of musical harmony (Nicomachean
Ethics, 1131 a1134 b).
In this essay, I retrace the broad denition of music in antiquity to justify the
sense in which one may speak of the music of philosophy. And to articulate
the practice of philosophy as such a music, I recall Socrates own account of the

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contest between the highest music (philosophy) and the lowest kind of music
(rhymed and hymned), along with a musical reading of Nietzsches aphoristic
style, and I briey review Heideggers thought in its more serialist than paratactic musical dynamic.
THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC

Mousike, according to Liddell and Scott, is dened as any art over which the
Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry.2 For Homer, the art of the Muse (Mousa,
Moisa, Mosa) embraced the broadest range of the ne arts as eloquence or
cultivation in general. And to be mousomai, for Pericles, meant to be educated or
cultured. Thus the appellation musical (mousikos) would characterize one
skilled in music but also generally, a votary of the Muses, a man of letters and
accomplishment, a scholar (L&S).3
For Thrasybulos Georgiades, the term Musik, at the same time as it reects
the resources of the Greek mind intrinsically linked to this same broad musicality, also expressed the Eigenart or essence of each work in particular. It is for this
reason that Georgiades emphasizes that in its grammatical form, Musik is not
substantive but primordially or prototypically adjectival, corresponding to the
muses: Es bedeutet <musisch>, <auf die Musen bezogen>.4 Because music articulates itself as an activity in play, music in its very primordial essence can never
be a nished, objective, or given work. Accordingly, a musical education is
only dynamically possible through musical activity.5 This active dimensionality reects the unique character of the Greek language.
For Georgiades, an intrinsically Western perspective presupposes the eld
of tension which formed between the word and art, between language and
music. The mousike of antiquity . . . does not recognize this distinction (ML,
134).6 There is thus an incompatibility between the ancient conception of
music and our contemporary understanding of music, which like art, refers to a
world apart from the everyday.7 Because, according to Georgiades, art and truth
formed an indissoluble unit for the ancient Greek, it is misleading to translate, mousike, simply as music and it cannot even be termed art in our sense
(ML, 134). Thus rigorously dened, even the semi-Whiggish Warren Anderson concurs that the modern word, music, should not be used to render
mousike. The Greek term designates here the oral training in poetry sung to
lyre accompaniment or recited without it that had for so long been the means
of transmitting the values and precepts of Greek culture (M, 143).
As mousike is only partly equivalent to the contemporary conception of
music, our tendency to reduce music to the organized art of sound obscures
the equiprimordial sense in which Musik is the quintessence or enabling element of intellectual or spiritual education and in which Musik gures as the
determining force of both individual and societal character or ethos. It works as
such because of the essentially, literally musical difference Georgiades constantly emphasizes between the language of archaic Greece and contemporary
Western languages. The fundamental musicality of antique Greek resides in
the tonic interval of xed time: long or short, that is also what Georgiades
names its static character (its masked dimension, paralleling the xed expression


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of the masks of ancient Greek theater). The very inexibility or rigor of

archaic Greek compels the speaker/hearers active or ethical engagement. If the
Western verse line is not a musical but rather a linguistic form, the musicalrhythmic structure of the ancient Greek verse line, by contrast, reected the
music of the language: The ancient Greek word comprised within itself a rm
musical component. It had an intrinsic musical will. Because individual
syllables could be neither extended nor abbreviated (ML, 45), the Greek
language was expressed in consummate, completed time. The rhythmic principle of antiquity is based not on the distinction between the organization of
time (the measure, system of accents) and its lling in (with various note
values) but rather on intrinsically lled-in time (ML, 45). For this reason,
music was indistinguishable from speech. Yet because of this inextricably compound character, mousike had enormous edicatory powers. The speaking subject was engaged not only as a speaker but always also as active listener. Because
of this doubly aspected engagement of atttentive articulation, ancient Greek
presupposed a community and possessed a community-building power nearly
impossible to imagine today. For Georgiades, this implies a fundamental ethic
of responsibility which dares him to claim that the effect of a Hitler would have
been impossible in Ancient Greece (MR, 48).8 But only the pristine resonance
of the linguistic constitution of ancient Greek mousike can ensure discrimination at such an ethical height. After song has been sundered, emptying its
spirit in the written text, rendered as (distinct) prose and (distinguishable)
poetry/music, there is no philosophy (not even Levinass, perhaps especially not
Levinass) that can be proof against such use/abuse. The development of prose
out of music separates music and text it is no accident that this begins with
the institution of writing whereby the text is liberated from its originally
musical expression in the full measure of time.9 I shall argue that today we need
to restore the music of thought by a deliberate attunement. If what was once
inherently resonant in the original language of philosophy has been silenced by
the letter, the obscured possibility of resonant, responsive thinking may yet
admit recollection.
PHILOSOPHY AS HIGHEST MUSIC: THE TECHNICAL
C A S E O F S O C R AT E S

Pythagoras esoteric, exactly allopathic, conception of a musical harmony

between world and soul renders music the soul of philosophy.10 In his Republic,
Plato agreed with traditional wisdom concerning the consequences of any
changes to the musical modulation of the state: when the modes of music
change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.11 Where
writing (just because it is writing) underlines what is no longer a universal
practice,12 Platos expression of philosophy as a kind of music invokes a very
traditional conception of music. As the love of wisdom or theory, philosophy
installs itself precisely in the place of music as the highest or noblest kind of
music. And it is in this same correspondent, musical company that the idea of
the musical practice or ethos of philosophy is more than a matter of metaphor.
In apparent tension with the negative judgment on music rendered by the
Republic, the question of the right relation between music and philosophy is
addressed in the Phaedo, which is also the question of the primacy of philosophy

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over poetry or music. The ethos of music represented both the very Pythagorean
possibility of harmonious resonance of soul and world as well as, and especially
in its more popular modes, posing the most effective threat to the rational
dominion of the soul. Music in its breadth could be regarded as constituting a
vital danger to philosophy (as the highest music beyond popular music and
poetry) and consequently, music threatened the singularly ethical dominion of
philosophy as the project of conceiving and living a well-ordered or examined
or good life. As the greatest of erotics, in Nietzsches words, an ironic Socrates
left the world nothing but music without a text, and called philosophy the
highest music in a teasing gesture that inevitably alienates and embitters the
rest of music.13
Socrates, the amateur sleuth of the good, pretending incompetence and distraction as a ruse to convert (convict) his interlocutors (on the model of televisions Lt. Columbo), was notoriously fond of seemingly vulgar and simple
allusions and oaths, as well as banausic and pedestrian examples. We all know
that the immortality of the soul is the theme of the Phaedo, where Socrates
recounts his eleventh hour musical excercises. Soul or not: the dialogue is all
about the body beginning (and ending) with strikingly graphic references
and physical descriptions. The pathos of the body includes pain and feeling,
especially erotic feeling. Thus the dialogue begins with Socrates sending away
his wife, to spare himself (we are told) the unseemly sounds of her anguish.
Scholars are quick to advert to the typically ironic foreshadowing of the later
lamentation of Socrates manly disciples at the dialogues conclusion, ignoring
the relevant detail of Xanthipppes tacitly intimate support of his last earthly
night (the dialogue begins with his male friends waiting impatiently for morning light for his jailors to permit entry).14 In the same bodily context (and it is
the same metaphor within a Platonic context), Socrates fetters are loosened and
Plato offers us the sight of Socrates rubbing his legs (a dissonantly homely
image, not unlike the paradoxical picture of Heraclitus surprised by his
admirers with his back to the kitchen stove). Socrates here remarks on the very
Greek tension between pain and pleasure, and this resonantly erotic detail, by
analogy, is likened to the death that is to come. We need not add that we are
further offered so many details of Socrates death that it is possible to
reconstruct the ancient aetiological understanding of herbal pharmaceuticals,
nor need we advert to the typically scholarly blush that awaits any reference to
the precise place where the poison rises to call forth Socrates last words referring to a rooster as a debt for healing.
In this confessional context, Socrates reports that all his life he was persistently visited with the same unusual dream gure, repeatedly uttering an
imperative caution. The oneiric warning never varied: make music (Phaedo
61 a).15 Throughout his life Socrates had always assumed that because philosophy itself represented the apex or culmination ( phlosoas men ouses megistes
mousikes) of the musical arts (61 a), he had always already been in compliance
with the dreams command, dedicated as he was to philosophy. But the recurrence of the dream remained perplexing and the circumstance of his death
sentence brought him to rethink his life-long interpretation of philosophy
as music in the highest sense. And in an ironic gesture of superstitious


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appeasement that does not accidentally recall the pious preoccupations of Cephalus in the Republic the same place where Plato subjects music to the most
stringent regulations Socrates says that he casually turned to practice music
in the commonly accepted sense: composing a hymn of praise to Apollo
together with a few common verses (construed from Aesops fables).16 As the
parallel with the Republic suggests, it is not difcult to extend this observation
of Socrates very musical achievement to the composition of the dialogue as
playing the song itself.17
To take the Socrates of Platos Phaedo at his word is to invert the order of
indebtedness which is the pattern of its nal irony. There is no challenge to the
conception of philosophy as the highest music in the ultimate recourse to
everyday musical kinds. Indeed, the point of the conclusion is reinforced by the
lyre lessons West tells us Socrates takes at the end of his life, because as West
also tells us, like champagne to us, for the Greek, Music is constantly associated with celebration (AGM, 14).18 Given the Platonic representation of the
body as the prisonhouse of the soul, Socrates causal reection on the relation
between pain and pleasure at the moment of his preliminary liberation from his
fetters at the start of the dialogue foreshadows the ultimate Platonic ideal of
liberation from the illusions of earthly life. And we nd a similar parallel
between the vulgar practice of music, sacriced by way of expiation to the
healer god, Apollo, the dream god or the leader of the Muses, Mousegetes,19 and
the rooster Socrates asks Crito to sacrice to the vulgar or peoples god of
healing, Asklepius.20
Confessing a vain conviction in precise accord with Greek tradition, Socrates
appeals to the popular practice of music. Thereby he exploits an exoteric image
for the sake of his most consistent account of the priority of soul or pure form
over body or sullying matter. But if we have learnt nothing else from Freud, it
is the secret of the secret as confessed or betrayed in such an overtly provocative
manner. And we wait for the second master of suspicion to hear Nietzsche
wondering about the character of a Socrates who might have lived a life not
dedicated to philosophy as the highest music but to the breadth of music as
such.
T H E T H I N K E R S C O N C I N N I T Y: N I E T Z S C H E A N
D I S C R I M I N AT I O N A N D R E S O N A N C E

Nietzsche may well be the philosopher most often associated with music.21
Indeed, we are told that Nietzsches entire life was caught up within or
captivated (umgreift) by music.22 But this musical connnection differs from the
interpretations of Nietzsche as a nihilist or metaphysician, or the college-level
mistake of reading him as an existentialist, if only because it is not an
interpretation. From the start, Nietzsche himself insists on reading his writing as music. But to say that this is Nietzsches own dictation does not make its
signicance clear. How should we read Nietzsches advice, for example, to
count Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsches major work as popularly received,
exactly as music? How do we begin to parse this un-book as a book of parables,
modeled, as we are instructed by so many commentators, on the gospels? Are

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the gospels a kind of music too, or, more dangerously ironic than Socrates
Aesop, has Nietzsche merely set the New Testament in (all-too-free) verse? To
give the question of the self-declared musicality of Nietzsches texts another
edge, how do we read Nietzsches claim in his self-criticism of his rst book, as
this descriptive assertion could catch the exactly poetic sensibilities of Stefan
George: it should have sung, this new soul and not spoken!23
To answer these questions I have elsewhere had recourse to a borrowed
metaphor, in the somewhat conceptually dissonant term, concinnity. I take the
term in its very harmonic musical sense, largely afne to the sense of the Latin
concinnitas as rhythmically attuned diction. It is concinnity that resounds in the
well-rounded or happy phrase. The architectural sense belongs to or is part of
the originally rhetorical term employed by Cicero and Seneca to indicate the
successful musicality of expression.24 But where one may speak of music as
liquid architecture and where Nietzsche insisted on architectural resonances to
describe his denition of the grand style, the term concinnity as I employ it,
recalls its own traditionally architectural meaning in addition to its rhetorically
musical sense.25 This properly architectural signicance originates with Albertis denition of concinnity as the coordinate harmonization of naturally
divergent or contrasting parts.26
The need for such musicality in reading (and thought) is not gurative (or
allegorical and so able to be conceived as an isolated interpretive turn) but a
rstly literal (that is, textually explicit) and indeed ultimately tropologically
(anagogically) fundamental prerequisite for a triadic resonant hermeneutic of
the aphorism written, as Nietzsche writes, and he declares that he writes, in a
reader-ironizing counterpoint. And on Nietzsches authors or compositional
side, such a musical or aphoristic style supports or enables an account of the
world without truth, without event, without remainder.27 Yet most immediately relevant because most pernicious is that this same musicality leaves his
text (deliberately) liable to misunderstanding through simplistic or shortsighted or attened and consequently inadequate readings. Mis- or short readings exemplify the connection between the aesthetic nihilism that inheres in
the pathos of truth and the interpretive truth of truth, the truth of illusion, or
the truth of the world as will to power.28
The elusiveness of Nietzsches style derives from the specically
Heraclitean and intrinsically musical tension of his aphorisms. By virtue of
this literally compositional tension, the aphorism can and must be read
against itself. In other words, the music of Nietzsches aphoristically composed
text inevitably plays upon both sides of the listening/reading dynamic. The
advantage of what I call musical reading is patently useful for the interpretation of any aphorism or any rhyme, or any joke but such musicality may not
be dispensed with in the case of Nietzsches aphorisms. Falling short of the
aphorisms music, the prosaic reader, deaf to the resonance of the text, like
Socrates uncomprehending vision of the music of tragedy, not only fails to get
it as we say, but as a failure unawares, such an error is effectively incorrigible.
This does not mean that Nietzsche will not be understood: it turns out that
it is no kind of philosophic achievement to get a sense of Nietzsches meaning,
in contrast, say, with Kant. Despite his hyperbolic anxiety regarding his post-


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humous reception, it would seem a simple matter to understand or read

Nietzsche. Every Nietzschean aphorism has always at least two points, if not
indeed more. This characteristically Nietzschean excess permits most readers to
come away with at least a partial notion of the text. This means that Nietzsches
esotericism is inclusive rather than exclusive and such an esoteric style is articulated by means of the aphorism which, precisely in its musical expression, is
effectively able to distinguish readers and readings on the readers part.
The musical dimensionality of Nietzsches aphoristic style is able to instigate
an ironic reversal or provocative inversion of best intentions (this is the reective core of esoteric Protestantism). Thus, for example, bristling in a forest of
related aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche warns Anyone who ghts
with monsters should take care that he does not in the process become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into
you.29 Without hearing its resonantly rhetorical English, without a specically attuned or musical reading, the reader may catch Nietzsches reference to
monsters and the danger of the abyss while missing his emphatic melancholy.
Taking Nietzsches words atly or atomistically, as logically ranged terms and
not as the reticulated elements of a provocatively framed aphorism, obscures
their inherent backwards (and rhythmically musical) reex. And it is no accident that a number of readers offer interpretations assuming that the monstrosity of the abyss is a specic or accidental and hence avoidable enemy and that
the point of the statement is tactical avoidance rather than a caution confessing
the inevitable entanglement of engaging corruption or evil. The threat of the
abyss thus becomes yet another threat to modernity, a thing to be banished
with the light, like a monster lurking in the closet, or a fault to be paved or
smoothed over with the landll of values.30 But for Nietzsche and this is
the Kantian dimension that would most intrigue Heidegger the knowers
confrontation with the abyss inevitably admits the abyss in the knower. All
engagement is relational. Like the backwards and forwards relationality of
Nietzsches reconstruction of the human subject poised by rather than merely
posing the object of judgment, there is a coordinating movement inherent in
the progress of verse and music. Correspondingly, and this is important, a
musical reading is impossible unless the reader holds with as one must when
listening to (reading) a poem or a piece of music the beginning through to
the end.
A similar interpretive dynamic accounts for the typically attened reading of
the warriors maxim listed at the start of Twilight of the Idols: From the military
school of life, and which continues What does not kill me makes me
stronger.31 Here, the prose or routine reading overshoots the emphatic prelude
as context: one reads Nietzsches contention as literal, literally prosaic truism.
Nietzsche, one takes it, says the same thing as any military or personal sports
trainer might say: what doesnt kill one, makes one stronger. This too includes
a challenge against the declaration. And the title of the maxim, the one for
whom such a personal rule might be supposed, offers a backwards echo: from
such a perspective on strength and intensication, but also compulsion, blind
loyalty, and humiliation, it is said, and said from within a military mode, that
what doesnt do one in, leaves one better off or makes one stronger. Or so the

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tired veteran hears the tale told from Pericles Athens to Lincolns Gettysburg
and still today in everymans army. Nor is it untrue as such, rather it is only and
exactly half true, just as to be half-dead is also to be half-alive. On matters
military, Archilochus reclining on his spear to drink in a dialectic reection
poised with this very posture muses on the attunement of two truths held in
balance. For the rst: Some Saian sports my splendid shield: / I had to leave it
in a wood, / but saved my skin. Well I dont care / Ill get another just as
good.32 What is then usually rendered in helpful translation as living to ght
another day, promises another kind of restitution or payback. The more suitable leaving-present33 Archilochus threatens for his future return can only be
dealt from a mercenarys perspective beyond the military school of life.34
Nietzsches Kriegschule des Lebens captures the brutality of the training ground
from the precise advantage of an irony that goes beyond it. This is what
Hollywoods soldier means by the promise: Ill be back.
Taking up the musical sense of the aphorism keeps both its subject matter
and its development as parts of a whole. Thus positions, statements at variance
with one another are not simple contradictions but contrapuntal (the terminological contrast need not be taken literally but can be read metaphorically here,
as music), balanced exactly in their opposition in the backstretched connection Heraclitus long ago compared to that found in the (philosophic) bow of
life and the (musical) lyre.35
Nietzsche named music the intimation that perhaps the solution to the
suffering of existence was not its redemption (religion) or alleviation (modern
science) but its intensication, in the Rausch, the intoxicated play of the Dionysian, standing as the frozen music of the grand style, a name for a life ventured
or vaulted in time. Like other musicians, Nietzsche called it joy. Nietzsches
project for a different, unequal philosophy of ghting with monsters, the abyss,
or the military school of science, as a philosophy of art and life recalls the
promise made by the dying Socrates to himself: to practice music. What music
is, what architecture, what life turned through art and desire upon itself in time
names is never will to power but rather: eternal return.
THE CASE FOR HEIDEGGERS MUSICAL STYLE:
BLESSING MUSES

3 6

If I argue that a musical concinnity (that is: reading with ones ears, where the
notion of resonant reading, like the labyrinth of stomachs and intestines of
Nietzsches bovine metaphor of rumination, recalls in a purely metonymic parallel the whorls of the outer and inner ear)37 is indispensable for a reading of
Nietzsche as philosopher, a philosophical reading of the Heidegger who links
poetry with thinking must be no less musically accented. A musical attunement is required to read the Heidegger who took continual pains to our no
less enduring annoyance to remind us that we are still not thinking. Where
Heidegger invokes the nearness of thinking and poetry, the saying or ringing of
the same that is said in silence is the inherently musical silence of Heideggers
favorite emphasis: the caesura. And this is the key to the musical serialism of
Heideggers style. Such a musical reading may enable us to go beyond both the


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seductive resonance of Heideggers text (as George Steiner characterizes its

esoteric dimension, following Lwith and Arendt) as well as its well-publicized
cognitive opacity.38
To sketch this with an abbreviated illustration, the later lecture course Was
heit Denken? not only offers an acoustic resonance in the German of the title
an allusiveness which cannot be heard in the English, What Is Called
Thinking? but exemplies the works stylistic advance. It also turns reexively on a reading of Nietzsche, where Heidegger writes (in a fashion which
would inspire Derridas stylistic appropriation of the same trope in Spurs), We
ask: what is called thinking and we talk about Nietzsche.39
Beyond what Heidegger names one-track [or academic] thinking,
Heideggers strategy in his style of writing is sustainedly paedagogical: he
provokes as the effect of a deliberate shock, as a claim dropped contrary to
expectations, running against the grain of ordinary academic discourse and
philosophic expectations. This strategy famously backres (it leads to frustration at one extreme, and violent denunciation at another) but I argue that it can
also teach the forbearance necessary for poetic renunciation or thoughtful attention. The three point strategy (provocation, intensication, return) works
against what Heidegger regards as the ordinary tendency of scholarly thickness:
one-sidedly dogmatic statements heard and perceived as such by thinkers
locked into one-track thinking (WhD, 26). In this serially musical strategy,
Heidegger does more than remind us that we need (as Nietzsche likewise
emphasized that we need) to learn to think.40
Reecting on the paratactic framing of Parmenides gnomon needful: the
saying also thinking too: being: to be, Heidegger illuminates this same ringing silence: We call the word order of the saying paratactic in the widest
sense. . . . For the saying speaks where there are no words, in the eld between
the words which the colons indicate (WhD, 186). For Theodor Adorno, the
same paratactic character captures the modern essence of a-tonal music as well
as Hlderlins poetry.41 Adorno is far from Heideggers defender but his suggestion offers us a way to approach a hearing of the rather more serial than
paratactic spareness of Heideggers reection on the participial construction of
blossoming, taking blossoming together with owing, being together to
catch the mutual relation, the backwards/forwards movement of the participial
form as musical. Once serialism is counted in place of the paratactic tact of
Heideggers reading of Parmenides, the answer to what is called thinking may
be sounded forth: Thinking means: letting-lie-before-us and so taking-to
heart also: beings in being (WhD, 224). And so taking-to-heart also, also.
As an atonal tonality, a musical serialism in the philosophical text can teach
us to interrupt our own always already-knowing. In this interruption, we
literally take a step back, turn to another beginning, and in this way, but only
as a sheer and fading possibly, we may yet come to hear Heideggers resonant
word, as the melos of the appropriative event. Saying for Heidegger is the
mode in which Appropriation speaks (WhD, 266). Saying speaks in every
word, in silence, and most particularly as the event of Appropriation, as what
catches us up, as Ereignis, in the melos of the song that in saying speaks.
Expressing the way in which we might be so appropriated as the melos of

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Ereignis, the melodic mode, the song which says something in the singing is
the frame of song, arraigned as what lets be, what lauds, all present beings,
allowing them into their own, their nature (WhD, 266). These are the words
of song: das Lied das singend sagt, sung between mortal experience and mortal
converse when Hlderlin promises in his poem Friedensfeier: . . . but soon we
shall be song. . . . bald sind wir aber Gesang.42
The music of philosophy is not a static achievement but a possibility of
answering song or reective resonance, that is also what Heidegger named
thinking. For thought of this kind, we need less the promise of novelty (or the
possibility of a consummation) than to learn to listen for the possibility of
harmony is the possibility of reticent or open attunement. This takes us back
again to the musical ideal of Greek antiquity where no one speaks who does not
also at the same time listen and where the key to ethical virtue is not the
imperative of law but measure or ttedness attuned to the music of the heart,
the music of life, but above all attuned to the singular possibility of attunement
itself: the backstretched connection.
Silence can be the kind of attunement in its ringing, its tolling knell or
breath, that holds itself out, not sounding what it already knows but seeking an
attending, listening word in reply. Such an attunement attends to language,
nature itself, or indeed the very venture of philosophy. For to say soon we shall
be song is to propose that we may yet come to hear what is said in what is
sung, as the song of praise or wonder that is the sounding shock of wonder: the
ringing silence or dazzled mien of philosophic thought broken open at its
inception. The paradox is not the disappointment of a misappointment, if it is
also that, but inheres in any insight into what is, any astonishment before being
and in the face of the nature Heidegger spent a life trying to teach us not to go
beyond.
It is music that invites one to think by hearing what is said both in the words
and between the lines in the style of expression, attending to the unsaid in what
is said at the end of philosophy. This music of thought is the reason one still
speaks, however bemusedly, of the music of the heart or the echoing knell of
sounding or attuned silence.43 The ethical praxis of music in philosophy teaches
the heart to listen, as Nietzsche says, by teaching it the same reticence that
matters so much for Heidegger: allowing the impetuous heart that Plato despaired of holding, to stay, to dwell, to keep its peace, teaching the soul to
hearken to the many voices on that day of perfect beauty on which, as Hlderlin
writes, nearly every art of song may be heard.44

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

A
AGM
BPF
BRG
BzP
C
CDR
CI
CM
CoM
DC
E/S
EB
EDS
ESD
FS
G
GA 19
GA 53

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Lewis Rowell, Thinking About Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Music. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Tbingen: Mohr, 1965;
Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1989.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 19848.
Amittai Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Jacques Derrida, Lcriture et la diffrence. Paris: ditions du Seuil,
1967; Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978.

184

WH
WhD
WMD

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1942.
Martin Heidegger, Was heit Denken? Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1954;
What Is Called Thinking? Trans. F. D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray. New
York: Harper & Row, 1968.
A. M. Dale, Words, Music and Dance. In Collected Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

NOTES

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
THINKING BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY
(ROBERT BURCH)

See e.g., Jeremy Bentham, Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh, 1843), 8: 242; 2: 497.

Gottlieb Frege, Schriften zur Logik und Sprachphilosophie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1971), 38ff.;
English translations from Posthumous Writings, trans. P. Long & R. White (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1979), 126 ff.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 49, 56; English translations
from Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964),
39, 445.

See Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), 26; hereinafter P. Also Living On: Border Lines, in Deconstruction and Criticism,
ed. G. Hartmann (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 84; and Lcriture et la diffrence (Paris:
ditions du Seuil, 1967), 423; English translations from Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 289; hereinafter WD.

E.g., Plato Laws 3. 682 a.

Aristotle Poetics, 1451 b.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1925), 2: 3279 (8: 8). Also, Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica (Amsterdam: Verlag A. M.
Hakkert, 1965), 3941 (58).

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St Martins, 1924), 29 (B xxx).

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis and New York,
1950), 116 (Ak. 4: 367).

10

Hannah Arendt, Thinking (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1977), 15; hereinafter T.

11

Insofar as Hegel renders the ontological difference of Being and beings to be absolutely
essentially no difference at all, Heidegger claims that in a certain sense Hegel is farther
from him than any other metaphysical position (Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens
[Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1962], 28; English translation from Time and Being, trans. J.
Stambaugh [New York: Harper & Row, 1972], 26).

12

Martin Heidegger Einleitung to Was ist Metaphysik?, in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), 206; English translation from Introduction to What is Metaphysics?,
in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
286; hereinafter PM.

186

NOTES

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433

13

Martin Heidegger, Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch, in Vortrge und Aufstze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 193. English translation from . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . in
Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 218; hereinafter PLT.

14

Derrida makes a similar point. Since everything becomes metaphorical, there is no

longer any literal meaning, and hence no longer any metaphor either ( Jacques Derrida,
Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 258).

15

I am following here the entry for rhuthmos from Liddell and Scotts A Greek-English Lexicon
(Oxford, 1996), 1576.

16

Plato Protagoras, 326 b.

PA R T O N E : E T H I C S O F W R I T I N G
CHAPTER 1
GESTURE AND WORD: THE PRACTICE OF PHILOSOPHY
AND THE PRACTICE OF POETRY (CARLO SINI)

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).

Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003 a 33.

These two untitled poems by Paul Celan rst appeared in the collection, Lichtzwang
(1970), and are reprinted in, Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bnden. Hrsg. Beda
Allemann und Stefan Reichert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), Bd. 2, 31213.
The present translation was made exclusively for this volume by the editors.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 19141916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1976), 512 (Wittgensteins emphasis), 6, 43.

CHAPTER 2
T H E R I S E A N D FA L L O F R E A L I T Y: S O C R AT E S , V I R T U A L
R E A L I T Y, A N D T H E B I R T H O F P H I L O S O P H Y F R O M T H E
SPIRIT OF WRITING (ALESSANDRO CARRERA)

These observations are loosely based on Carlo Sini, La realt virtuale e la realt alla
lettera. Una riessione sulle problematiche della rappresentazione, in Lincanto del ritmo
(Milan: Tranchida, 1993), 6985.

Alfred J. Kallir, Sign and Design: The Psychogenetic Source of the Alphabet (Plymouth:
Latimer, Trend & Co., 1961).

Carlo Sini, Etica della scrittura (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1992); hereinafter EDS. See also Sini,
Filosoa e scrittura (Bari Laterza, 1994).

In Semiotica e losoa (Bologna, 1978), 27799, Sini had already pointed out the importance of the myth of Herakles at the crossroad (narrated by Prodicus) as the rst assessment
of the epistemic role of the Greek alphabet.

Kallir is often quoted by Sini in Etica della scrittura as well as in other works. It will be
useful to point out that when Sini began considering the origins of writing as the basis of

NOTES

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187

philosophic practice, every less-than-absolute conventionalism was being regarded with

the same suspicion that a Lamarcks follower would have expected at a Darwinist convention. To question the arbitrariness of the sign was tantamount to pleading guilty to
vulgar metaphysical habits. The disagreement is echoed in the conversation between Sini
and Gianni Vattimo Le parole e le cose, Filosoa al presente, ed. by Gianni Vattimo
(Milan, 1990), 94107. Sinis close reading of the historians of writing (Kallir, Havelock,
Ong, and Gelb) is grounded, apart from Nietzschean inuences, in Vico. Vicos statement
on the history of grammata as the true history of mankind has been crucial to Sini since
Passare il segno (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1981), namely in the chapters on Vicos Psychohistorical strategy (as Sini calls it), where Sini argues that the inquiry on how the
scientic and technologic man writes has priority over any musing on logos, Being, or
truth (321).
6

According to Heidegger, truth has always been considered more as a problem of logic
than as a fundamental philosophical question. Not even in Nietzsche is the question of
truth free from the chains of logic. See Martin Heidegger, Domande fondamentali della
losoa. Selezione di problemi della logica (Milan: Murisa, 1988), 15. Italian translation
by U. M. Ugazio of Grundfragen der Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 45 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984), 7. English translation, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard
Rojcewicz & Andr Schuwer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1994), 8.

It has been argued that Heideggers notion of concealment (lethe ) is precisely a writing
effect that originated from the word aletheia; see John D. Caputo, The Myth of Aletheia,
in Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). It is a very
delicate point, in which the entire Heideggerian theory of truth is at stake. It may be that
in the future the philosophical community will decide that the Heideggerian notion of
aletheia was nothing more than Heideggers foundation myth, in the same manner that
the Freudian theory of the primordial pack has now lost any scientic appeal and is
merely regarded as the foundation myth of Freuds personal anthropology. Philosophy as
autobiography, as Nietzsche was wont to say. The creation of myth, albeit dressed up in
philosophical garments, is still the best way to answer to an unreachable origin, to an
inconceivable birth. It is still the best way to follow Platos light.

Alphabet, we may say, is the content of logical form [Lalfabeto, si potrebbe dire, il
contenuto della forma logica]. See also Carlo Sini, La voce della scrittura, Archivio di
losoa, 60, 13 (1992): 32.

In La nascita della losoa (Milan Adelphi, 1975), 10316, Giorgio Colli suggested that,
more than just the eld where the truth of Being is decided, philosophy is a literary genre
championed by Plato as a reaction to the rampant pervasiveness of the sophistic dialectic
in Athens agora. Collis statement is provocative enough, but it needs to be rephrased.
Before Platos time there was no literature and no literary genres. Neither Homer nor
Hesiod nor Pindar knew what literature was. Dialectic and political rhetoric were being
established at the core of Athens life, and the alphabetic transcription of the Homeric
poems was being fostered by Pisistratus. The coincidence of these three events made it
possible to divide the writing eld into visible and recognizable objects like epic poetry,
lyric poetry, history, rhetoric, philosophy, and science (like Euclids Elements). Plato is not
the father of a literary genre as much as he is the father of a writing mode. In this regard,
Sini has suggested modifying the Husserlian denition of the philosopher as mankinds
ofcer into ofcer of a writing mode [ funzionario di una prassi di scrittura]. See Carlo
Sini and R. Fabbrichesi Leo, Variazioni sul foglio-mondo (Como: Hestia, 1994), 19.

10

If semiotics were not a secularized ontologic theology, Umberto Eco could not have said
that the true protagonist of The Name of the Rose is Gods innite omnipotence. See his
interview in Jesus, 4/4, April 1982, now in Stauder, Umberto Ecos Der Name der Rose

188

NOTES

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PA G E S

3441

(Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1988), 159. I am grateful for the suggestion to Constantino
Marmo, editor of the Italian annotated edition of Il nome della rosa.
11

In De la grammatologie ([Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967]; English translation, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1974]; hereinafter OG), Jacques Derrida mentions Vico three times, admitting that Rousseau might have derived some of his linguistic ideas from him. Sinis criticism on Derrida
deals with the binary notion of sign (signier/signied) that Derrida has uncritically
derived from De Saussure, while ignoring the triadic model proposed by C. S. Peirce
(Representamen-Interpretant-Object). Derrida maintains that even though Peirce was
rst in criticizing logocentrism, nothing is thinkable outside the current Saussurian
notion of sign, regardless of how metaphysical or theological it remains.

12

See the chapter on F. Creuzer in Carlos Sini, Il simbolo e luomo (Milan: Egeo, 1991), 91
141, and Sinis introduction to A. Bumler, F. Creuzer, J. J. Bachofen, Dal simbolo al mito
(Milan, 1983).

13

The question has been raised by Rocco Ronchi in Il losofo e le lettere, his introduction
to the Italian translation of Ignace J. Gelb, A Study of Writing (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1963). See Gelb, Storia della scrittura (Milan: Spirali, 1993), xxxviii.

14

Sinis work uctuates between the passion for genealogical inquiry and the thoroughness
of the theoretical and hermeneutic approach. Each one of his genealogical works (Passare
il segno, Il simbolo e luomo) is balanced by straightforward theoretical investigations, such
as Etica della scrittura or Immagini di verit; English translation, Images of Truth.

15

The Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto has called private language (lingua privata) the dialogue between mother and infant. See Carlos Sini, Nota all Elegia in petl, in Poesie
19381986, ed. Stefano Agosti (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), 321. Sini has written extensively (mainly in Images of Truth) on the conict between public language, or the language
of logos, and private language, unthinkable within the borders of logos and yet experienced
by anyone in everyday life.

16

On the Heraclitean sentence see Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, PM, 269 ff. Disagreements notwithstanding, Sinis motto remains Derridas seminal remark at the very
beginning of De la grammatologie, namely that what, in the last twenty centuries, has been
summed up as language, from now on will be increasingly regarded as writing. Without
going back two thousand years, in seventies Italy as well as in France, what Sini now calls
practica used to be covered by a wide semantic eld bestowed upon the world language.
At stake was the multiplicity of languages, and whether there was (or there wasnt) one
metalanguage capable of uniting the different languages in dialectical synthesis. Thus,
what was prassi in the sixties became linguaggio in the seventies, and what used to be
linguaggio has now evolved into scrittura. See also Alessandro Carrera, Lesperienza dell
istante. (Milan: Lanfranchi, 1995), and Consequences of Unlimited Semiosis: Metaphysics of the Sign and Semiotic Hermeneutics in Carlo Sinis Thought, in Cultural Semiosis:
Tracing the Signier, ed. Hugh J. Silverman [Continental Philosophy, vol. 6], (New York
and London: Routledge, 1998).

CHAPTER 3
ANALOGICAL THINKING AS A FRIEND OF
INTERPRETIVE TRUTH: REFLECTIONS BASED ON
CARLO SINIS

IMAGES OF TRUTH

(FORREST WILLIAMS)

Carlo Sini, Images of Truth (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), translated, with
an Introduction, by Massimo Verdicchio (hereinafter IT ); Italian original, Immagini di
verit: dal segno al simbolo (Milan: Spirali, 1985), hereinafter IV.

NOTES

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189

Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942); hereinafter WH.

Pepper and Sini speak similarly of what the former terms radical skepticism and dogmatism. Sini rejects both the purest nihilism and relativism as the most dogmatic
and inconsistent of forms (IT, xxviii; IV, 9] and the metaphysical will to dominate
experience totally (IT, 153; IV, 194).

Encyclopaedia Britannica (hereinafter EB), 1992, vol. 11, Figures of Speech, 196.

Kant did see t in his First Critique to assign a philosophical place of honor to analogical
thinking in his transcendental deduction of the third set of Categories. Only in the Third
Critique, however, which is at last beginning to receive the major attention it deserves, is
the whole issue of analogical thinking in effect broached, under the heading of reective
judgment. Cf. Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Forrest Williams, Philosophical Anthropology and the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, 17288.

As I have already indicated, I do not wish, of course, to make the unwarranted psychological claim that Sini himself ever had any such analogical transfer from the discourse of
literary criticism in mind at the time. Likewise, inasmuch as I am speaking here of
analogy, not identity, I am not suggesting that the child-moon experience is itself what
we would properly call a poem; nor, by the same token, that Sinis metainterpretational
analysis is itself an exercise of literary criticism rather than of philosophical inquiry.
Indeed, the thrust of analogical thinking is precisely to block simplistically logical
identications: a/b :: c/d is never to be confused with either a/b = c/d or its negation.
See also infra, n. 11.

See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1964), 167.

One might think here of Sartres concept of a detotalized totality. See Jean-Paul Sartre,
Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: NLB, 1976), 286; hereinafter CDR.

Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night; William Ernest Henley,
Invictus.

10

If anyone should claim to nd aspects of Invictus that would make it a good poem, that
would not affect the thesis, but would only argue for insufcient critical discernment on
my part in this particular instance. In that case, any other example of poetic imposture
could be substituted in order to illustrate the point of the example, since the issue belongs
to philosophy, not to any given effort at literary criticism as such.

11

This is not to say that one must have explicitly reected on poetic discourse, much less be
a practicing literary critic (as I certainly am not); only that one must have reected to
some degree, whether implicitly or explicitly, on the sort of experience most familiar
to us through poetry (or art forms). Whether or not such mental tutelage is actually put
to use in philosophic inquiry depends, needless to say, on innumerable imponderables of
individual interest, temperament, and mental formation. See also supra, n. 6.

PA R T T W O : T R U T H , T E X T S , A N D T H E N A R R AT I V E S E L F
INTRODUCTION (ROBERT BURCH)

G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1991), 38 (14).

190

NOTES

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PA G E S

5965

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1969), 414.

PM, 241.

PLT, 218.

CHAPTER 4
WHEN TRUTH BECOMES WOMAN: MALE TRACES
A N D F E M A L E S I G N S ( E V E TAV O R B A N N E T )

The rst half of the title of this chapter belongs to James Watson, who, in his own
inimitable way, brought a number of us together under its auspices and challenged us to
see what we could do with it.
1

Jacques Derrida, perons/Spurs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 36; hereinafter E/S.

Jacques Derrida, Psyche. Inventions de lautre (Paris: ditions Galile, 1987), 11; hereinafter
PSY.

Emmanuel Levinas, De Dieu qui vient lide (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 122; English translation, Of
God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

For some interesting recent constructions of the history of this conjuncture, see James
Kugel ed., Poetry and Prophecy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), and Hatab, Myth
and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Roger Sherman Loomiss translation in The Grail (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), 33; hereinafter G.

Dante, Divine Comedy (New York: M, 1955), Paradiso, Canto 31, 712; hereinafter DC.

In A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York, 1946), Journals, 16, 6; hereinafter KA. See also
Lon, Either Muse or Countermuse: The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex in Kierkegaards
Aesthetics.

Friederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974), 124. See also Rosalyn Diprose, Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance, in
Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Interestingly enough, the mother is the rst object of the grail-knights quest.

10

See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982). Bynum nds that these female images of Christ stem from the writings of men
rather than of women, and generally from the writings of prelates and monks who stressed
detachment from family and from the world and dependence on God. She also argues that
this occurs at a moment of the spiritual history in which Christ comes to be seen as the
mediator who joins our substance to divinity and as the object of profound experiential
union (130).

11

See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), and for a specic example of the use of such gures, see George
Economou, Natura, in Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, forthcoming).

NOTES

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191

12

Hesiod, Theogeny, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Loeb Classical Library), trans.
H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), 8194.

13

See esp. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typographies, in Mimesis des articulations (Paris:

Aubier-Flammarion, 1975) and Limitation des modernes (Paris: Flammarion, 1986). Derrida makes the same point in Glas (Paris: ditions Galile, 1974) and Parages (Paris:
ditions Galile, 1987); hereinafter PAR.

14

Jacques Derrida, Feu la cendre (Paris: Des Femmes, 1987), 27; English translation, Cinders,
trans. N. Lukackum (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

15

Jean-Luc Nancy, Discours de la syncope (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976), 5, 12.

16

Psalm 30.

17

Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 26.

18

Jacques Derrida, La vrit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 21, 7; English translation, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17, 3.

19

Luce Irigaray, Passions lmentaires (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1982), 19, 74; English
translation, Elemental Passions, trans. J. Collie & J. Still (London: Athlone Press, 1992),
23, 81.

20

Luce Irigaray, Sexes et parentes (Paris, 1987), 155; English translation, Sexes and Genealogies,
trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 144.

21

As Rosi Braidotti conrms, much of Irigarays work in the 1980s centered on countering
and responding to Derrida. It seems to me Irigarays need to counter Derrida mythography, which she rightly perceived as destructive to women, helps to explain her transition from celebrating womens love for each other to celebrating heterosexual unions. As
Irigaray points out: one of the dangers of love between women is the confusion of
identity, the non-respect or non-perception of differences (Luce Irigaray, thique de la
diffrence sexuelle [Paris, 1984], 66; English translation, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans.
C. Burke and G. Gill [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993], 63; hereinafter ESD). In
other words, Irigaray wants to avoid falling into the same self-reexive trap as Derrida.

22

Luce Irigaray, La croyance mme (Paris, 1983), 99; hereinafter CM.

23

Hlne Cixous and Catherine Clment, La jeune ne (Paris: Union gnrale dditions,
1975), 157; English translation The Newly Born Woman, trans. B. Wing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 182.

24

Michle Le Doeuff, Ltude et le rouet (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1989), 18; English translation Hipparchias Choice, trans. T. Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 21, and The Philosophical Imaginary (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 118; hereinafter PI.

CHAPTER 5
O R A L I T Y A N D W R I T I N G : P L AT O S
PHARMAKON

PHAEDRUS

AND THE

R E V I S I T E D ( P. C H R I S T O P H E R S M I T H )

I shall refer here to the English translation, Platos Pharmacy, which appeared in
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
61171; hereinafter PPh.

192

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7391

Martin Heideggers words are frher, anfanglich, and ursprnglicher. Though I draw upon
Heidegger extensively here, this essay is not intended as an explication or even application of any of his specic works. However, my uses of Heideggerian themes to elaborate
the Phaedrus should be compared with Heideggers own treatment of the dialogue in
Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes, Gesamtausgabe, Bd 19 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992),
30851; English translation, Platos Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); hereinafter GA 19.

Though other works of Eric Havelocks have followed on the subject of the transition
from orality to literacy in Greece, his Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1963) remains, in my view, the most interesting philosophically (hereinafter PP). It
points out the differences in the oral-acoustical and literate-visual experiences of reality or
being and argues convincingly that the transition from the ontology of Homer to the
ontology of Plato presupposes a shift from the oral-acoustical to the literate-visual.

See, in particular, The Voice That Keeps Silence in Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (La voix et la phnomne) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 7087.

Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit is intended to be a phenomenological exposition of the

temporality of human existence and of the concomitance of being and not being in any human
being which follows from this temporality. Seen this way it is continuous with
Heideggers later expositions of the being of the thing and the artwork.

See Martin Heidegger, Vortrge und Aufstze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 14562, Bauen,
Wohnen, Denken, and 16381, Das Ding. See also Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1963), 768, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes; English translation,
Building Dwelling Thinking, The Thing, and Origin of the Work of Art in PLT.

See Martin Heidegger, Platos Doctrine of Truth, in PM.

See H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tbingen: Mohr, 1965), 34460; English
translation, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1989), 325 ff; hereinafter TM.

See OG, 910.

10

We note, in this regard, that not all of Theuths literary inventions are to be rejected.
After all, among his other discoveries, the games of draughts and dice are not listed rst
here. Rather, as Derrida conveniently overlooks, numbers, calculation, geometry, and
astronomy (Phaedrus 274 d), and these Pythagorean sciences, all of which presuppose a
break with the oral tradition and a turn to the graphic and diagrammatical, gure
prominently in Platos own educational curriculum (see Republic 510 cd and 5257 d).

11

See Gregory Nagy, Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979), 6983, The Name of Achilles.

12

Ultimately New Testament scholars of the interpretive school, for example, Raymond
Brown, Robert Karris, et al., who see the meaning of its narratives as evolving rather than
historical, presuppose just this point.

CHAPTER 6
E T H I C S O F T H E N A R R AT I V E S E L F ( R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y )

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984
8), vol. 3, hereinafter TN; Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), hereinafter OA.

NOTES

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193

This function of narrative identity relates broadly to the three temporal ecstasies of
Heideggerian Dasein which Heidegger himself traces back to the schematizing function
of transcendental imagination in Kants First Critique. For a more detailed commentary
on Heideggers reading of Kants concept of transcendental imagination see my Wake of
Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 18995.

It is worth recalling here that the story of a society, no less than that of an individual life,
is also perpetually regured by the real and ctive stories it tells about itself. A societys
self-image is also a cloth woven of stories told.

See in particular Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5 ff.

See also Martha Nussbaums insightful analysis of the role literary imagination plays in
the development of ethical self-knowledge and judgment in Loves Knowledge (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), hereinafter LK, especially following studies, Flawed
Crystals: Jamess The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy, Finely Aware and
Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination, Perceptive Equilibrium:
Literary Theory and the Soul, and Narrative Emotions. These studies, Nussbaum
explains, argue for a conception of ethical understanding that involves emotional as well
as intellectual activity and give a certain type of priority to the perception of particular
people and situations, rather than to abstract rules. They argue, further, that this ethical
conception nds its most appropriate expression and statement in certain forms usually
considered literary rather than philosophical and that if we wish to take it seriously we
must broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these texts inside it.
They attempt to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry,
between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements (LK, ix). Nussbaum goes on to
make the following statements: the fresh imagination of particularity (provided by
ction) is an essential moral faculty (LK, 237); allowing oneself to be in some sense
passive and malleable, open to new and sometimes mysterious inuences, is part of the
transaction and part of its value. Reading novels . . . is a practice of falling in love. And it
is in part because novels prepare the reader for love that they make the valuable contribution they do to society and to moral development (LK, 238); Novels can be a school for
the moral sentiments, distancing us from blinding personal passions and cultivating
those that are more conducive to community. Proust goes so far as to say that the relation
we have with a literary work is the only human relation characterized by genuine altruism, and also the only one in which, not caught up in the vertiginous kaleidoscope of
jealousy, the reader can truly know the mind of another person . . . there is a real issue
here and I do not think we can fully understand the ethical contribution of the novel
without pursuing it (LK, 240). Several of Nussbaums arguments for an ethical imagination nd support in other contemporary theories e.g., Arthur Dantos idea of
transgurative literature, Northrop Fryes notion of educated imagination, Frank
Lentriccias concept of art for lifes sake, Iris Murdochs claim that art is the most
educational thing we have, or Marshall Gregorys thesis of the vicarious imagination
inspired by Sir Philip Sidneys Apology for ethical literature: Narratives have the
power to move us because they are empirical, which is the grounds of their vividness,
because they provide deep companionship, which means that they are fullling. And
what moves us, of course, also forms us. . . . History and literature both possess an
immense power to educate. Since modernisms elevation of the notion of aesthetic purity
and structuralisms elevation of the notion of linguistic indeterminateness, the educational power of both literature and history has nearly been forgotten, especially by
critics and academics. Writers, however, continue to assert literatures and historys educational power (Selfhood Forged and Memory Enriched: Narratives Empirical Appeal
to the Vicarious Imagination [forthcoming]).

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), hereinafter CI; Permission to Narrate, London Review of Books, February 29 1984. Also on the role of narrative in

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nationalist movements see Tony Judts review essay, The New Old Nationalism in The
New York Review of Books, 61, no. 10, May 26 1994, 4451.
7

Paul Ricoeur, Life in Quest of Narrative, in On Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 1991),
223; hereinafter OPR.

One might explore links here between Ricoeurs version of a phronetic understanding of
experience and Deweys notion of emotional thinking. Another useful parallel may be
found in John Bergsons analysis of the ethical role of narrative in The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974). I am grateful to Mark Muldoon for bringing Bergsons ethical concept of narrative to my attention. For a detailed
reading of Aristotles notion of phronesis and its relation to ethics and modern thought,
see Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1993).

Ricoeur, Imagination in Discourse and Action, in Du texte laction (Paris: ditions du

Seuil, 1986), 21336, in particular 2247; hereinafter TA.

10

Ricoeur acknowledges an ethical and political task for narrative imagination in insuring
that the tension between the horizon of expectation (future/utopia) and the space of
experience be preserved without giving way to schism (TN, 3: 258). Here the narrative
imagination takes on the role of a social imagination in both its ideological function of
legitimation and its utopian function of subversion. Both these socio-political axes presuppose a certain ethical vision of the good life that is, the conguration of communal life
by narrative imagination. See Peter Kemps excellent analysis of this question in thique
et narrativit (Aquinas [Rome], 29, 1986) where he argues that the acceptance or rejection
of ideologies and utopias is only possible on the basis of this imaginative vision of the
good life in society. If ethics is a vision rather than a rule, it consists of intuitive models
for action and not of purely abstract maxims. By imagining and narrating wise forms of
action and communication it expresses the practical truth of human life. Kemp writes:
This imagination is not possible without narrative, because without emplotment there
would be no sense in unfolding some models for action. Thus ethics must necessarily be
the narrative conguration of the good life. Had this not from the start been congurated
by stories, it would not have been capable of being integrated either into the authors
works or into those of the historian as that vision which would never affect the reader in
an ethically neutral manner. It would have the same affect as a foreign body in the eye.
This raises the vexed question of criteria for judging and adjudicating between rival
narratives. The narrative conguration of ethics which is invoked to evaluate between
stories is, Kemp concludes, to be found on a different level to that of the stories themselves. Nevertheless, he does not appeal to some Archimedean point or metanarrative,
admitting that the ethical evaluation of narratives can only be based on other narratives.
But Kemp refuses to see this as a vicious (rather than a healthy) hermeneutic circle: This
does not necessarily mean that ethical criticism is arbitrary. The stories on which an
ethics well rooted in life are founded are those whose guiding power remains throughout
history, and which, in times of crisis, have demonstrated their ability to encourage
people to stop thinking in terms of xed ideas. Though Kemp does not, unfortunately,
cite any examples of these guiding narratives, I take him to be referring to the abiding
ethical stories of resistance, heroism, charity, and courage that inform the great traditions
of ethical humanism and fraternity the classical stories of Socrates and Seneca, the
biblical stories of Moses, Jesus, St. Frances, the mythical stories of Antigone, Achilles,
Iphigenia, etc. Each ethical culture, Western and non-Western, contains a series of
recurring and paradigmatic narratives which each historical generation hermeneutically
retrieves and retells in order to preserve and cultivate its sense of ethical memory,
identity, and responsibility. For a development of these ideas see T. Peter Kemp,
Toward a Narrative Ethics: A Bridge between Ethic and the Narrative Reection of
Ricoeur, 6587.

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195

11

This empathic power, what we might call with T. S. Eliot auditory imagination, is also
adverted to by Gadamer when he speaks of a learning through suffering with the other
when we recognize our own nite limits and begin to listen to the other: anyone who
listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine
human bond. . . . Openness to the other involves recognizing that I myself must accept
some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do this (TM, 361).
For Gadamer the properly hermeneutic understanding is one that allows the other to
really say something to us, to listen, and to respond.

12

See James Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 5; and
my dialogue with Derrida entitled Deconstruction and the Other in my Dialogues with
Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester, 1987). See also Honi Habers critique of
Foucaults postmodern denial of selves and community in Beyond Postmodern Politics (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 73133.

13

Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Culture, in Between Past and Future (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin, 1977), 2201; hereinafter BPF. See also J. Isaacs discussion of this
theme in Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992),
16770.

14

LK, 162; and see the extended note 5, supra.

15

If it is true that ction is only completed in life and that life can be understood only
through the stories that we tell about it, then an examined life, in the sense of the word as
we have borrowed it from Socrates, is a life recounted. This recounted good life entails
both poetics and ethics, both the free play of ction and the responsibility of ethics or to
put it in Yeatsian terms, both perfection of the life and of the work. But this complementarity of narrative poetics and ethics is not a matter of identity; it is by guarding over
each others difference and distinctness that poetics and ethics best serve each others
mutual interests and aims.

P A R T T H R E E : P O E T R Y, P H I L O S O P H Y, A N D T H E
SPIRIT OF HISTORY
CHAPTER 7
WOBURN ON MY MIND AND IN MY (MINDS) EYE:
BECKETTS

SIS (STEPHEN BARKER)

POIE

Guy Debord, La societ du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1971), 20; hereinafter SdS.

Rgis Durand, Lacan and Narration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1983), 849; hereinafter LaN.

Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Pyschoanalysis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981), 1501, n. 172; hereinafter SLP.

Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 148.

I have referred to this occulted ciphering elsewhere as videation, calling attention to the
electronic coolness with which it manifests itself. Even in the real of staged drama, as for
example in Handke or Saurraute, not to mention Beckett, this coolness is associated either
with a certain mechanization of the occluded subject, as in Krapps Last Tape, Kaspar, or
The Silence, or with an actual absence of the key signatory or signatories of the piece, either
through narrated absence (e.g., Godot) or a narrative of absence (e.g., Cascando, Film,

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Offending the Audience). Becketts Cascando offers a perfectly postmodern focus for the
videated image, since not only does Woburn not appear in the piece, but all voice in it
is electronic, to be heard in disembodied form on the radio.
6

Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22;
hereinafter ST.

Derrida extensively discussed this paradox in his lectures at the University of California at
Irvine in the spring of 1993.

See Kubiaks Stages of Terror for a rst-level discussion of this phenomenon; indeed Kubiak
locates the terror he explores in the ontological confrontation with the non-being . . . the
terror of nothing . . . the missing presence, which Kubiak calls Deimos (ST, 23).

My discussion of this distance occupies a good deal of Autoaesthetics (Atlantic Highlands:

Humanities Press, 1992), where I develop a notion of writing power derived from the
tranget inevitably produced by textuality and metaphoricity; it is, I believe, the core of
the cap Angst of the artist/writer in a linguistic age.

10

WD, 202.

11

Jacques Lacan Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 2078.

12

With regard to the aphanisis of the subject in Lacan, see LaN, 863, and for further
evidence that it is inherent in the unheimlich and in paramodern narrative theory. In this
regard, one might think of Nietzsches critique of presence and language in On Truth
and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, Derridas extensive critique of Freud in Freud and
the Scene of Writing (WD) and of the aesthetic voice in Truth in Painting, Certeaus
notion of the heterology of speech in Heterologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), and Debords critique of the image in SdS (avoiding Debords direct politicization of the image but emphasizing its alienation), to produce a sense of the trace
[in the Derridean sense] of the storyteller forming a residue in the/any story. This trace is
the source of the terror and the chimerically vital energy of narrativity commonly
explored in the paramodern.

13

Samuel Beckett, Cascando and Other Short Pieces (New York Grove Press, 1968), hereinafter
C.

14

Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 202.

CHAPTER 8
THE NAMING OF THE HYMN: HEIDEGGER AND
LDERLIN (KAREN FELDMAN)
HO

The lectures of Heideggers 1942 course are collected in volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe, entitled Hlderlins Hymne Der Ister, (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), hereinafter GA
53. English translation, Hlderlins Hymn: Der Ister (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1996). The course is divided into three sections, the second of which centers on
Sophocles Antigone. This paper will focus on Heideggers reading of Der Ister, primarily
as treated in the volumes rst section.

The shared moment of the community returns us to 1 where Heidegger claims,

Every essential poetizing also poetizes anew the essence of poetizing itself (GA 53,
8). We now hear poetizing not as a symbolically imagistic relationship to meaning,

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197

but as a naming of what is. The anew here, however, along with its punctuating
marks, opens up another side of the Der Ister course, that is, the questions of a
poetic time and of beginning, for the telling nding of Being (GA 53, 149) arises
out of a poetic time, a temporality of the river, that is not in time. The metaphysical
determination of a symbolic image rests upon a notion of intratemporality, a time in
which the image is thought rst, and then stands for an idea. But does the image
stand, are the image and the idea accessible to thinking out of a uniform presence? The
symbolic image is only possible on the basis of this leveled-out time. Yet if presence and
poetic temporality are opened up by the word of the poem, then the vanishing and
intimating river of the Ister hymn does not run its course in time. Instead, Heidegger
claims, it is itself underway or along a path that does not take place in time but rather is
of time itself.
3

For a comprehensive overview of the signicance of naming in Heideggers work, see

Dieter Thom, Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1990), pp. 65984.

See Paul de Man, Heideggers Exegeses of Hlderlin, in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 24666.

CHAPTER 9
O N T R A N S VA L U I N G H I S T O RY: R I L K E A N D N I E T Z S C H E
(RICHARD DETSCH)

Rainer Maria Rilke, Smtliche Werke (Frankfurt: Insel, 1966), 294; hereinafter SW. All
translations from the German and French originals are my own.

Bltter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 14 (1987), 2134; hereinafter BRG.

Frowen makes the point that Rilke learned from Nietzsche how to reconcile the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in his own art and thus overcome the subjectivity of his
early poetry (BRG, 24). She misses the mark, however, when she maintains later in her
essay that Nietzsche differs from Rilke in that Rilke always needed a counterpart in order
to spur on his art: the unnished God of the Book of Hours and the angel of the Duino
Elegies, whereas for Nietzsche there was no counterpart, only his own mystical selfapotheosis (BRG, 33). Frowen ignores the fact that much of Rilke criticism sees precisely
this self-apotheosis in Rilkes poetry and considers his God and his angel as projections of
his own creative will. It is at least arguable that there is no contrast between Rilke and
Nietzsche here.

Friederich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bnden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Karl Hanser,
1966), 1: 217; hereinafter NW.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Frankfurt: Insel, 1987), 1: 343; hereinafter RB.

New York Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 11, June 22 1995, 14.

RB, 3: 891.

Elizabeth Schmidt-Pauli, Rainer Maria Rilke: Ein Gedenkbuch (Basel: Benno Schwabe,
1940), 10910.

As Egon Schwarz demonstrates, Rilke himself was not without a degree of anti-Semitism
in a way typical of a non-Jewish native of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Signicantly

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130146

from the point of view of the present study, Rilke nds Jews lacking in genuineness. They
would thus exhibit a defect characteristic of modern times in contrast to the more
genuine aspects of the medieval period. See Rilkes letter to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart of
January 16, 1923. He writes of the Jew, who is not all that he brings, transmits . . . so
that, to the extent that we are able to make it our own, we are delighted to keep what was
brought but nally and suddenly feel the bringer to be too much, too near, in fact nothing
but obtrusive because he is not identical with what he brings (and could bring thousands
of other things and tomorrow possibly even the opposite) (Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an
Nanny Wunderly-Volkart [Frankfurt, 1977], 2: 848). Nietzsche manifests a similar attitude toward the Jews when he writes of the Jewish feeling for which everything natural
is disgrace itself (NW, 2: 132).
10

Rudolf Kassner, Rilke (Pfullingen: Neske, 1976), 54.

11

Marga Wertheimer, Arbeitsstunden mit Rainer Maria Rilke (Zrich: Oprecht, 1940), 16.

12

Egon Schwarz, Das verschluckte Schluchzen (Frankfurt am Main: Anthenum, 1972).

13

Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe zur Politik (Frankfurt Insel, 1992), 446; hereinafter BzP.

14

Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Guido Schneeberger, 1962), 1446,

14850.

PA R T F O U R : T H E F O R C E O F R H Y T H M I N L I F E ,
P H I L O S O P H Y, A N D P O E T R Y
INTRODUCTION (ROBERT BURCH)

Friederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 140. Hereinafter
GS.

Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin,
1954), 58 (15).

Aristotle Metaphysics, 983 a3.

1 Corinthians, 1. 205.

Plato Phaedo, 61 a.

CHAPTER 10
REFLECTIONS ON SPEED (DAVID HALLIBURTON)

Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990),

53, 191; hereinafter CoM.

Jean-Franois Lyotard, Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1984), 52; hereinafter PMC.

Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 456; hereinafter SS.

Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (New York: Library of America, 1993),
1167; hereinafter A.

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199

Roland Barthes, Fashion System (New York, Hill & Wang, 1983), 97; hereinafter FS.

John-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith and ed.
Jonathon Re (London: NLB, 1976), 295.

J. G. A. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975),

425; hereinafter MM.

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 281.

William C. Carter, Proustian Quest (New York and London: New York University Press,
1992), 9. Carter offers valuable information on phenomena of speed in Prousts lifetime.

10

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 2 vols., trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff, (New
York: Random House, 1934), 1:5; hereinafter RTP. Despite the unsatisfactory English
title of these volumes, the quality of the translation is generally very high; I have therefore cited from it in my text. I have also checked problematic terms and passages against
the original French and where necessary have made silent corrections. For example, at
2:449 by should be but (mais).

11

The journal Annales dhistoire social et conomique was founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre
and March Bloch and was later joined by the historian who was ultimately the best
known of the group, Fernand Braudel.

12

Milan Kundera, Slowness (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 12; hereinafter S.

13

Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall, originally published in the collection entitled A
Haunted House, posthumously published in 1944 by the Hogarth Press created by Leonard
and Virginia, and reprinted in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (New York
Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1989), 89; hereinafter MW.

14

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931; rpt. New York Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1959), 297.

CHAPTER 11
T H E M E A N I N G O F R H Y T H M ( A M I T TA I AV I R A M )

Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Julia Kristeva,
Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, The Echo of the Subject, 139207; Henri Meschonnic, Critique du
rythme (Paris: Verdier, 1982).

mile Benveniste, La notion de Rythme dans son expression linguistique, 32635.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1967), 16144.

For further discussion, see my Telling Rhythm (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1994); hereinafter TR.

See Meschonnic, Rhyme and Life, 90107.

See Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven, 1981).

See TR, 197220.

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CHAPTER 12
TECHNE
: THE PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE
MOUSIKE
O F M U S I C I N P L AT O , N I E T Z S C H E , A N D H E I D E G G E R
(BABETTE E. BABICH)

See especially M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), hereinafter AGM; as well as Warren D. Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), hereinafter M; and for a perspective including the
culture of ancient Rome: Giovanni Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), hereinafter MGR. In addition, see Lewis
Rowell, Thinking About Music (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), hereinafter TaM; Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton, 1983); and, more rigorously, A. M.
Dale, Words, Music and Dance Dale, in Collected Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 15669: hereinafter WMD.

Denitions and source references quoted from An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon,

Founded Upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scotts Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1889), 520; hereinafter L&S.

Comotti further elaborates the broad scheme of music in antiquity: in the fourth and
fth centuries b.c., the phrase mousikos aner would be used to indicate an educated man,
able to comprehend poetic language in its entirety. The unity of poetry, melody, and
gesture in archaic and classical culture made the rhythmic-melodic expression contingent
on the demands of the verbal text. The simultaneous presence of music, dance, and word
in almost all forms of communication suggests also the existence of a widespread musical
culture among the Greek peoples from the remotest times (MGR, 5).

Thrasybulos Georgiades, Musik und Rhythmus bei den Griechen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958),
45; hereinafter MR. Of course, not every account of music in antiquity admits such a broad
connection to the muses and to culture in general. A critical exception is Warren Anderson. In Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (cited above; M), a book dedicated to delineating what he takes to be the truly musical, Anderson seems to understand the specically
sounding essence of music in a quasi-autochthonous sense, as the amateur musician
opposed to the expert theorist or philosopher. The opposition Anderson proposes nds an
instrumentally sounding music in rather determined distinction to the extreme variety of
ancient references, where these references do not reect the difference between the amateur
and the professional musician as this difference is understood in todays musical culture.
Andersons focus on just the music one might play (his book might also have been titled,
Musical Instruments and Musicians in Ancient Greece) while (very!) laudable on many
accounts misses the ancient breadth of the term exemplifying instead the monologically
modern and very Western distinction between music and language. Yet even Anderson
concedes the broad referentiality of antique music where he notes, with careful reference to
Plutarch (and thereby, at least in the Spartan context, of the virile activity of music as
Terpander expresses it), that Mousa stands for music and poetry in all their manifestations
as essential cultural expressions of the city-state (M, 64). But Anderson outdoes
Nietzsche in repeated references to Socrates rabble origins (Socrates was a stonecutters
son). The claim that Socrates hated music because he did not understand it would be
better if Anderson had only worded it in this wise, reminiscent as it would have to be of
Nietzsches verdict on the death of tragedy, due to a failure of understanding on the joint
parts of Socrates and of Euripides. As it is, Anderson inserts a genteel, dissonantly
Victorian vision of ancient Athens, with the well-born Plato expertly playing in a
chamber music trio on a ve- or seven-stringed lyre, with his high-born companions on
the syrinx or aulos. It is unclear that music playing counted as such a class-based diversion
or even that facility with musical instruments would have been limited to the upper
classes the function and status of ute players in the Symposium and especially in comedy
would seem to run contrary to this assumption of music-lesson culture.

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201

Musische Erziehung durch musische Bettigung, (MR, 45).

Thrasybulos Georgiades, Music and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1982), 134; hereinafter ML.

Thrasybulos Georgiades writes The art of the Western World presupposes something
which lies outside its own boundaries. . . . Similarly, the poetry of the Western World
presupposes simple prose as its ultimate source . . . (ML, 134)

The political question which can be posed against any philosophical text after the
unspeakable (now: in the antique Greek sense) experience of the Second World War or
whether on its basis a Hitler could or could not be countenanced as the ethical touchstone that rates a Levinas above a Heidegger, becomes a fruitless one on this reading.

In general terms, mousike functions only within the complex of ancient Greek culture. For
this reason A. M. Dale could write that Classical Greek needed no Wolan doctrine of
poetic supremacy because song, with its dance, [i.e., music] was a function of the words
themselves when they were alive that is in a performance. To say this is not to make
of music a Hanslickian reserve. For Dale, the performance as such, itself an epiphany of
Greek culture and its communal foundation, demanded everything society had to offer it.
As a performance, the musical event, the event of words, music and dance, required a
staging and a consummate celebration: one great occasion in all its bright splendour, its
aglaia, round an altar, or in the orchestra, or processionally. . . . With the passing of the
kind of society which required and supported public performances of this kind, the living
art of this supple polymetry soon perished; it shrank and petried into the words on
paper, so unskillfully preserved that even the proper ordering of the phrases quickly faded
from memory (WMD, 168). Gary Tomlinson points to the difculty inherent in the
metaphorical language implicated in such an ethical (versus cosmic) ideal of harmony in
a chapter entitled Modes and Planetary Song: The Musical Alliance of Ethics and Cosmology, in his book Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993). For casual purposes, a philosophical ethics or style of philosophizing represents an
exemplary doing of philosophy consummate in the sense given to the expression of
practical artistry, where it is important to note that one speaks of the proper, comme il faut,
wie es sich gehrt, exactly when it is not ordinary.

10

According to Theon of Smyrna, the Pythagoreans called music the harmonization of

opposites, the unication of disparate things, and the conciliation of warring elements. . . . Music, as they say, is the basis of agreement among things in nature and of the
best government in the universe. Mathematica, I.

11

Plato, Republic 4. 424 c. Damon, as Rowell writes, one of Socrates teachers, was one of
the earliest authors to suggest a specic conception between music and the formation of
the human character (TaM, 51).

12

See for a contemporary discussion of the issues at stake, beyond the likewise relevant
current debate on performance practice, Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

13

Socrates literary silence is also what saves him from stasis. As Adorno writes, music
and literature alike are reduced to immobility by writing. Theodor Adorno, Quasi una
Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 295.

14

The gentlemans club or (male) biased conviction that Xanthippe was a nag and a drag on
Socrates and that he sought to have as little to do with her as possible is gainsaid by the
very fact that Socrates, once a student of Diotima, was at his age, married and, likewise at
his age, blessed with young sons the very ones he invoked during his trial under the ruse

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of not mentioning their vulnerability or youth. But it is the fact that he has such young
sons which tells us that his marriage was something other than a sham (it was no doubt a
hardship, but the trouble would have been largely on Xanthippes side given the breadless
pursuit that occupied his time). From the Greek perspective, a marriage limited to the
expression of intimate relations was routine. Companionship or conversation had to wait
for Bernard Shaw.
15

The command was the literal: O Socrates, make and practice music (Plato Phaedo 60 e).
We may assume that the god of the dream could be named Apollo, as we are justied in so
doing by way of metaphor (as the dream-god par excellence) or else metonymy (the
Apollo who held state executions in abeyance for the duration of his feast).

16

The ironic point is that in a Platonic scheme, such a routine rendering of real music or
poetic composition necessarily limits the poet to the unreal world of myth or fable. The
joke equates Aesop with Apollo. Or perhaps as Socrates is said to resemble Marsyas,
Aesop is better equated with Dionysos.

17

Cf. Plato Republic 531 a532 c. Although by quoting these esoteric lines from the Republic
I also invoke the elegant referentiality of the subtitle to Ernest G. McClain, The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach: Nicholas Hays, 1978), I have noted
important reserves concerning the exactly metaphorical limits of this expression of the
force of analogy itself as what Graham Pont applauds as an identication of the analogia
or proportion of 6:8:9:12 and the three means it encodes, arithmetic, geometric, and
harmonic to show how Plato applied the precise mathematics of tuning and temperament to the quantitative modelling of political systems and the ne attunement of the
ideal city-state (Graham Pont, Analogy in Music: Origins, Uses, Limitations, in Metaphor: A Musical Dimension, ed. J. C. Kassler [Basel: Gordon and Beacon, 1994], 195). My
metaphorical reservations respond to Georgiades broader reading, a reading which would
not subsume the ideal of musical harmony to the mathematics or rationality of the same
just where mathematics and rationality begin from that harmony and not the other way
round as well as to rpd Szab, The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics (Dordrecht and
Boston: Reidel, 1978), whom Pont himself cites: 132 ff. For the contrary emphasis, see
Robert Brambaugh, Platos Mathematical Imagination, (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1954).

18

West refers to Socrates tutelage in the lyre on p. 26, citing Plato Euthydemus 272 c.

19

Richmond Y. Hathorn, Greek Mythology (Lebanon: American University of Beruit, 1977),

162.

20

The contrast between the world of images and the world of ideas, between pious petition
in the face of bodily sickness (Asklepius) and the new program of scientic theoretical
medicine represented by the followers of Hippocrates deserves further investigation.

21

For a philosophical discussion of Nietzsche and music, see my treatment of Nietzsches

concinnity in my Introduction and Chapter One of Nietzsches Philosophy of Science (Albany,
1994), as well as and for greater musicological rigor, books and essays by Friedrich Love,
Roger Hollinrake, Curt Paul Janz, George Liebert, among a great many other names. An
extensive but nevertheless still incomplete bibliography on the theme may be found
in Nietzsche and Music: A Partial Bibliography, New Nietzsche Studies 1, 12 (1996):
6478.

22

Curt Paul Janz, Nietzsche Verhltnis zur Musik seiner Zeit in Nietzsche-Studien 7
(1978), 30826.

23

Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,

NOTES

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176

203

1967) Preface: Attempt at a Self-Criticism: 3, 20. German text in Smtliche Werke.

Kritische Studienausgabe, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980, c. 196777), vol. 1, 15; hereinafter
KSA.
24

For concinnity in music, see, in general, Jan La Rue, Guidelines for Style Analysis, (Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 1992). Concinnity is a rhetorical term employed by Cicero
(Orator 19.65; 24.81; 25.82) and Seneca and by Alberti in a musico-architectural context
(see note 25 below). In a mechanical extension, Graeme Nicholson uses the term concinnity in a carpenterly sense to express the tting and jointure of Heideggers use of the
German Fug or Fgung, as in mortise and tenon, or coordination of the organs of human
sexual expression. See Graeme, Nicholson, Illustrations of Being (Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press, 1992), 2723. It is also used as a term for facilitating concourse in
urban transportation studies and has been utilized in descriptions of Hindu ethics.

25

According to Vitruvius, music was among the essential formational requisites for the
practice of architecture, and listed the following desiderata: Let him be educated, have
skill with a pencil, . . . have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music
. . . (1.1.3). Such a knowledge of music was useful for practical (mostly military) reasons,
Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the
canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune balistae, catapultae, and
scorpiones to the proper key (1.1.8), where the correct note heard by the skilled
workman served as a kind of acoustic level. The same understanding would ensure the
sounding proportions of theaters together with the bronze vessels (in Greek hecheia)
which are placed in niches under the seats in accordance with the musical intervals on
mathematical principles. These vessels are arranged with a view to musical concords or
harmony . . . (1.1.9), where such an arrangement evidently served to amplify the actors
voice. Vitruvius assumption of the importance of music for architecure is echoed in
Albertis claim that the intellectual edication is inspired by lines and gures pertaining
to music and geometry, (De re aedicatoria, 7. 10, cited in Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural
Principles in the Age of Humanism, [New York: Norton, 1971], 9). Wittkower explores the
role of Harmonic Proportion in Architecture and Palladios conventions in particular at
critical length. For Wittkower, Albertis claim can only be understood if we recall that for
Alberti, music and geometry are fundamentally one and the same; music is geometry
translated into sound, and that in music the very same harmonies are audible which
inform the geometry of the building. Robin Maconie, a music critic captivated by the
literal interpretation of such a notion, is more emphatic than Rudolf Wittkower when he
declares that The Palladian interior can be considered in precisely the same terms as a
recording studio, save that the studio designer seeks to avoid those eigentones Palladio
sought to generate. (See Robin Maconie, Concept of Music [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990], 160 ff.) Wittkower however notes that such resonant notions for the theory of
proportional design is out of style, where he cites the substance of Julien Guadets
critical reserve in lments et thorie de larchitecture, concerning je ne sais quelles proprits mystrieuses des nombres ou, encore, des rapports comme la musique on trouve
entre les nombres de vibrations qui dterminent les accords. For Wittkower, if Guadets
sobriety is beyond reproach, the problem remains: Les proportions, cest linni this
terse statement is still indicative of our approach. That is the reason why we view
researches into the theory of proportion [that is: musical or harmonic proportion BB] with
suspicion and awe. But the subject is again very much alive in the minds of young
architects today, and they may well evolve new and unexpected solutions to this ancient
problem (154).

26

Atque est quidem concinnitas munus et paratio partes, quae alioquin inter se natura destinctae
sunt, perfecta quadam ratione constituere, ita ut mutuo ad speciem correspondabat. Alberti, De re
aedicatori libri decem 9.5 (1962, 815). Cited by Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Architektur &
Harmonie (Cologne: Dumont, 1982), 23. In this same context, beyond the reference to
urban transport and Hindu ethics (note 29), Naredi-Rainer also notes Luigi Vagnettis

204

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176179

comprehensive investigation of the word concinnitas and its verbal afnities which
apparently may be taken as far as the word cocktail. See Vagnetti, Concinnitas, riessioni
sul signicato di un termine albertiano in Studie documenti du architecture 2 (1973):
13961.
27

Thus a specically musical temperament is required just to follow (to read) Nietzsche in
his textual ventures. Without a musical reading, Nietzsche offers only contradictions and
logical infelicities at best a kind of poetry for philosophers with a taste for it, at worst,
sheer nonsense. Nietzsche quite literally plays philosophical perspectives upon philosophical perspectives along with conceptual terms. It is thus for the sake of winning the
great part of Nietzsches philosophy that a resonantly musical reading is needed. Within
such a dispositionally resonant interpretation, oppositions or contrasts evident in the
conceptual independence of the pairs truth/science and genealogy/morals can be heard as
posed in accord.

28

I have offered a book to illustrate this point with regard to the philosophy of science and
the epistemic and methodological signicance of Nietzsches thought for this tradition:
Babich, Nietzsches Philosophy of Science. Here I illustrate the musical (philosophical) reading of an aphorism by contrast with a atly opposed or literal approach.

29

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 68. The German is useful here: Wer mit Ungeheuern kmpft, mag
zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst,
blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein (KSA 5, 98).

30

G. Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss (New York: Knopf, 1994).

31

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hotlingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), hereinafter cited as TI, 23.

32

Archilochus, Elegies, 5. See West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci (Oxford, 1955) and, for the English
translation cited, M. L. West, Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 14.

33

Archilochus, Elegies, 6.

34

For another example, in a provocatively brief declaration, a two point epigram is offered
against the iconic image of truth: All truth is simple. Is that not a compound lie? .
TI, 23. The epigram undoes itself here overtly, but here, as it may be claimed in every
Nietzschean stylistic case, without dissolving the original contrast. And it is this original
contrast that matters.

35

I echo the emphasis drawn by Tracy B. Strong, Introduction, Twilight of the Idols, trans.
P. Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

36

Martin Heidegger, The Thinker as Poet in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A.

Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 14.

37

This assertion converges with (it admittedly does not follow) Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies (Paris: ditions Gallile, 1984).

38

George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 30, 43 ff.

39

Martin Heidegger, Was heit Denken? (Tbingen, 1954), 85; English translation What
Is Called Thinking? trans. F. D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row,
1968), 131; hereinafter WhD.

NOTES

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179180

205

40

Saying we are still not thinking is not tuned to a key of melancholy and despair
even if it is not a piece of optimism. If the assertion nevertheless seems tuned in a negative
and pessimistic key (WhD, 35), Heidegger argues that that seeming is itself a result of
the fact that we are still not thinking. This turns Heidegger from an atention to the
keynote to the character or resonant way in which it speaks. Here Heideggers musical
allusion is overt: Way here means melody, the ring and tone, which is not just a matter
of how the saying sounds (WhD, 35).

41

Hlderlins method, steeled by contact with Greek, is not devoid of boldly formed
hypotactic constructions, parataxes are noticeable as elaborate disturbances that deviate
from the logical hierarchy of subordinating syntax. Hlderlin is irresistibly drawn to
forms of this sort. The transformation of language into a concatenation, the elements of
which combine in a manner different from that of judgment, is a musical one. Theodor
Adorno, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 197086 [20 volumes]), vol. 11, 57.
Translation from the citation in Rolf Wiggershaus, Frankfurt School. Its History, Theories,
and Political Signicance, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 528.

42

Holger Schmid reads this passage productively and suggestively, taking Heideggers
account of showing (Zeigen) as the propriative, ownmost mode of Appropriation: als
eigenster Weise des Ereigens. Diese Weise nun, in der das Ereignis spricht soll nicht
Modus, sondern Melos bedeuten: das Lied das singend sagt. But, Schmid continues to
note beyond Heideggers quiet institution of melos as the mode in which Appropriation
speaks, that with this invocation of song in reference to Hlderlin a good deal remains to
be thought: Das zuletzt zu Denkende ist also das zu Erfahrende, das Lied. Schmid,
Kunst des Hrens. Orte und Grenzen der hermeneutischen Erfahrung (Cologne: Blnow, 1999),
124.

43

This tuning is what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of philosophizing with a hammer
not an invitation to a reign of nihilism or self-assertive, fascist violence but an attunement
in accord with Pythagoras rst musing on the differential sounds rung out by hammer
blows in the blacksmiths forge: the veritable and still unsounded harmony of the world.
For further reections, see Babette E. Babich, Between Hlderlin and Heidegger:
Nietzsches Transguration of Philosophy in Nietzsche-Studien 29 (2000): 267301.

44

For a prelude to the music of the poem Friedensfeier, Hlderlin prefaces the nal
version with a plea for the readers kindliness with regard to the poems language as what
must be given voice because such tones not only exist but reect the untrammeled variety
of existence itself: On a beautiful day, nearly every art of song may be heard, and born of
nature, whence they are come, nature it is that receives them again . . . An einem schnen
Tage lt sich ja fast jede Sangart hren, und die Natur, wovon es her ist, nimmts auch wieder.
Friedensfeier, Friedrich Hlderlin, Smtliche Gedichte (Wiesbaden: Aula, 1989), 327.
See, for a bilingual edition, Hlderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems ed. Eric I. Santnem
(New York: Continuum, 1990), 2278.

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INDEX

Abraham, Karl 166

acceleration 145, 146, 1502
Adams, Henry 1469, 194
Adorno, T.W. 94, 179
Quasi una fantasia 197, 200
Aesop 175, 176, 197
aesthetics 1516, 19, 25
Alberti, Leon 176, 198, 199
alterity 6, 94
Amittai, Aviram 141, 146, 195, 197
analogy 425, 55, 185n5, 185n6
Anderson, Warren D 172, 195
Andreas-Salom, Lou 125, 126, 129, 130,
132, 133
aphanisis 110, 111, 192
appearance 85
Archduke Franz Ferdinand 131
Archilochus 178, 199
Arendt, Hannah 4, 91, 93, 97, 179
Aristotle 3, 6, 17, 18, 19, 22, 33, 83, 94, 95,
96, 106, 189n8
on Tragedy 108, 140, 141, 143
Nicomachean Ethics 171, 194
Asklepius 175, 197
Augustine (St.) 23
Augustus 102, 136
Avignon Popes 129
Pope John XXII 130
Babich, E. Babette 141, 142, 171, 199, 200
Barker, Stephen 101, 103, 105.
Barthes, Roland 149, 150, 194
Beckett, Samuel 6, 92, 101, 105115
Cascando 110115, 191, 192
Godot 112
Endgame 112
Fin de partie 115, 191
Being 1517, 1921, 324, 367, 59, 80,
181n11, 183n5, 183n9, 188n5
Benhabib, S. 92
Bentham, J. 1
Benveniste, mile 1613, 195
Bernstein, Charles 1616, 195
Beuys, Joseph 106

Bismarck, Otto 134

Blin, Roger 111
Bourdieu, Pierre 151, 158, 194
Boyle, Robert, Sir 147
Brambaugh, Robert 197
calling 37
Carrera, A. 1112, 13
Carter, William C. 194
castration 6768
Celan, Paul 23
Certeau, Michel de
Heterologie 192
Chomsky, Naom 165
Cicero 176, 198
Cixous, H. 71
Cohn, Ruby 192
Colli, Giorgio 28, 183n9
common sense 43, 467, 50
Comotti, Giovanni 195
concinnity 142, 176, 178, 198, 199
culture 17
Dale, A.M. 195, 196
Dante 23, 63, 65
Davis, Con Robert 107
Debord, Guy 101, 10612, 191, 192
Derrida, Jacques 5, 6, 11, 12, 32, 34, 35,
60, 61, 62, 63, 669, 71, 738,
809, 91, 97, 101, 10814,
181n14, 184n11, 184n16, 187n21,
188n10
Freud and The Scene of Writing
192
Otiographies 199
Truth in Painting 118, 192
de Saussure, Ferdinand 162, 184n11
desire 645, 67, 70, 71
de Tocqueville, Alexis 151
de Man, Paul 192
Detsch, Richard 1013, 125
differance 61, 66, 68
difference 6, 21, 35, 37, 5960, 67, 70, 71,
77, 80, 82, 84, 187n21, 191n15

216

INDEX

discourse 28, 29, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, 45,

66
distance 67, 70, 71
Durand, Rgis 191
Eco, Umberto 126, 132, 184n10
eidos 79, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 143
epiphany 68, 70, 110
essence 35, 60, 75, 76, 91
ethical intervention 97
ethics 212, 25, 35, 309, 62, 938, 189n5,
189n8, 190n10, 191n15
Euripides 196
existence 80
Feldman, Karen 1013, 117
Frege, G. 1
Freud, Sigmund 92, 101, 10814, 166, 175,
191
Frowen, Irina 125, 126, 193
genealogy 3637, 39
George, Stefan 176
Georgiades, Thrasybulos 1724, 195, 196,
197
German romantic tradition 127
gesture 21
Giddens, Anthony 144, 148, 194
globalization 145
Goehr, Lydia 197
Goethe, Wolfgang Erlkning 127
Guadet, Julien 198
Halliburton, David 140, 141, 143
Handke, Peter 106, 191
Hathorn, Richmond Y. 197
Havelock, E. 22, 34, 73, 87, 188n3
Hazlitt, William 148
Hegel, G.W.F. 4, 6, 21, 38, 42, 59, 60, 88,
181n11
Heidegger, Martin 3, 45, 6, 11, 1516, 20,
23, 25, 33, 34, 41, 46, 48, 49, 55, 59,
60, 67, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 88, 91,
1013, 11724, 135, 142, 145, 158,
161, 163, 166, 169, 171, 17780,
181n11, 183n6, 183n7, 184n16,
187n2, 188n5, 188n2, 192, 196, 198
The Thinker as Poet 199
What is called Thinking? 200
heimlich 108, 109
Henley, W.E. 13, 50, 535
Heraclitus 171, 174, 176, 178
hermeneutics 41, 49, 55, 91, 92, 93
Himmelfarb, G. 199
Hippocrates 197

Hitler, Adolph 136, 173, 196

Hobbes, Thomas 149
Hlderlin, Friedrich 101, 103, 11724
Der Ister 11723, 163, 171, 179, 180,
192, 200
Homer 172
identity 6, 5960, 656, 70, 91, 97, 98,
185n6, 187n21, 188n2, 190n10
imitation 17, 95
indifference 37, 60, 97
Industrial Revolution 146, 148
interpretation 29, 412, 45, 49, 55, 734,
77, 92, 93
intersubjectivity 97
Irigaray, Luce 61, 68, 70, 71, 187n21
Italian Fascism 102, 126, 132, 134
Jackson, Andrew 151
Janz, Curt Paul 197, 198
Jefferson, Thomas 143, 151
Kaiser Wilhelm II 135
Kallir, A.J. 31, 33, 183n5
Kant, Immanuel 4, 23, 44, 91, 176, 185n5,
188n2
Kassner, Rudolph 131, 132, 193
Kearney, Richard 62
Keats, John 148
Keifer, Anselm 106
Kierkegaard, Sren 63, 65, 88
kinesis 151
Kristeva, Julia 161, 164, 166,195
Kubiak, Tony 108, 191
Kugel, James 195
Kundera, Milan 154, 158 (Slowness) 194
Lacan, Jacques 101, 1078, 110, 111, 191,
192
Lacoue-Labarth, Philippe 65, 161, 166,
170,195
La Rue, Jan 198
language 1720, 24, 2939, 42, 43, 668,
84, 184n16
Leibnitz, G.W. 150
Levinas, Emmanuel 63, 94, 173, 196
Liebert, George 197
lifeworld 93
Lincoln, Abraham 178
Lwith, Karl 179
logic 1718, 24, 314, 36, 43, 60, 183n6
Longinus 148
Love, Friedrich 197
Luhmann, Niklas 1446, 149, 152, 194
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 92, 94, 144
The Postmodern Condition 149, 194

INDEX

McClain, Ernest G. 197

Maconie, Robin 198
Madison, James 151
Marinetti, F.T. 143, 144
Marx, Karl 164
mathematics 29, 81, 835, 87
Maxwell, Clark 147
meaning 25, 1720, 22, 24, 315, 37, 67,
75, 83, 84, 88
Melville, Herman 150
memory 78, 79, 93
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 46
Meschonnic, Henri 1616, 195
metaphor 423, 63, 702, 77, 79, 181n14
metaphysics 1516, 20, 25, 35, 38, 59, 60,
61, 73, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 88, 89, 117,
120, 123
Miller, Jacques-Alain 112, 192
Monty Python Show 154
mood 48
Mussolini, Benito 102, 132, 1346
Muybridge, Edward 156, 157
Mller, Heiner 106
myth 17
Nancy, Jean-Luc 68
Napoleon, Bonaparte 135
Naredi-Rainer, Paul von 199
narrativity 62, 9198, 188n2, 189n8,
190n10
nature 2930, 32, 69
Nelson, Horatio, Lord 151 (Victory)
Nicholson, Graeme 198
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 6, 28, 42, 65, 66, 92,
102, 106, 108, 113, 183n6, 183n7
On the Use and Disadvantage of History for
Life 125
This Spoke Zarathustra 1257, 175
Beyond Good and Evil 127, 12830, 177,
199
Birth of Tragedy 130, 162, 195
eternal return 130, 131, 1336
The Gay Science 139, 140, 142, 162, 163,
165, 166, 169, 171, 174, 176
Twilight of the Idols 177, 179, 180, 192,
199
On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral
Sense 193, 194, 196, 197
New Nietzsche Studies 198, 199, 200
Nussbaum, Martha 189n5
ontology 1819, 34, 5960, 73, 80,
181n11, 188n3
other (the) 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 71, 93, 94,
97, 98, 190n11
otherness 6, 59, 63, 79, 93, 98

217

paramodern 101, 10512, 114

Parmenides 179
Paul (St.) Pauline doctrine 140, 194
Peirce, C.S. 12, 25, 35, 38, 41, 45, 46, 48,
49, 50, 162, 184n11
Pepper, S. 42, 185n3
Pericles 172, 178
phallogocentrism 60, 63, 65
Plato 1, 18, 19, 22, 30, 33, 34, 369, 59, 61,
69, 739, 809, 1624, 171, 1735,
180, 183n7, 183n9, 188n3, 188n10,
194, 196, 197
Pocock, J.G.A. 151, 194
poet (the) 1617, 223
poiesis 3, 1013, 117
Pont, Graham 197
post-metaphysics 56, 11, 22, 34, 38
presence 612, 736, 79, 80, 88
Princess of Thurn and Taxis 127, 131;
(Rilkes Italian Duchess) 1325
Proust, Marcel 97, 141, 1528, 189n5;
Remembrance of Time Past 194.
proximity 67, 70
Psalms 163
public world (the) 457, 54
Pythagoras 171, 173, 174
Pythagoreans 196
reading 23, 31, 80, 82, 95, 189n5
reality 18, 2732, 35, 48, 98
Reik, Theodore 166
representation 20, 24, 279, 76, 78, 79, 85,
92, 98
responsibility 93, 94, 97, 190n10, 191n15
rhythm 67, 223, 36, 51, 54, 72, 13941,
161, 163
in Ancient Greece 164
Ricoeur, Paul 62, 91, 93, 94, 96, 189n8,
190n10
Rilke, Rainer Maria 6, 15, 94, 101, 102,
125127
Bohemian Strolling Days 125, 127
Swanhilde 127
Duino Elegies 128
Late Fall in Venice 128
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
12831
Sonnets to Orpheus 1316, 193
Rimbaud, Arthur 112
Rosenberg, Berechta von 127
Rowell, Lewis 195
Ruskin, John 155
Said, Edward 92
sameness 20, 60, 678
Sarraute, Nathalie 106, 191

218

INDEX

Sartre, Jean Paul, Critique of Dialectical

Reason 149, 150
Schmid, Holger 200
Schmidt-Pauli, Elisabeth von 193
Schneeberger, Guido 193
Schwarz, Egon 132, 193
self (the) 13, 53, 59, 61, 62, 68, 76, 78, 79,
88, 91, 92, 968
selfhood 918
self-identity 5960, 62, 91, 92, 98
self-knowledge 92, 189n5
Seneca 176, 198
Serres, Michel 146
Seuss (Dr.) 165
Shaw, George Bernard 197
Shelley, Mary 11315
signs 6372, 746, 78, 88, 183n5, 184n16
Sini, C. 5, 6, 1113, 325, 38, 39, 4150,
55, 183n4, 183n5, 184n9, 184n11,
184n16, 185n3, 185n6
skepticism 42, 49, 185n3
slowness 158, 159
Socrates 142, 162, 171, 1736, 178, 196,
197
Sophocles 117, 121
Antigone 117, 121, 192
Southey, Robert 147
speech 73, 76, 78, 79, 827, 89
speed 140, 1436, 151, 152, 154, 158, 159
Stanford, Leland (Governor) 156, 157
Steiner, George 179, 199
Storck, Joachim 133, 134
Strong, Tracy B. 199
sublation 59
subject (the) 18, 215, 45, 53, 91, 92
Szab, rpd 197
technology 27, 28, 31
Thom, Dieter 192

Thomas, Dylan 13, 50, 51, 53, 55

trace 345, 39, 601, 6372, 74, 75, 78
Trimpi, Wesley 195
truth 25, 1722, 289, 31, 35, 36, 412,
45, 49, 59, 60, 61, 6372, 76, 78, 79,
81, 83, 85, 94, 183n5, 183n6, 183n7,
183n9
uncanny 101, 108
Unheimlich(keit) 102, 10813
vagnetti, Luigi 199
velocitation 151
velocity 152
virtual reality 2732, 38
Vitruvius 198
voice 32, 36
Wagner, Cosima 135
Wagner, Richard 154
Wertheimer, Marga 193
West, M.L. 195, 197
Wiggershaus, Rolf 200
Williams, F. 1113
will to power 32, 92
will to truth 36
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 24, 25, 54
Wittkower, Rudolf 198
Wolff, Christian 141
Woolf, Virginia 158, 159, 194
words 20, 23, 814, 88
Wordsworth, William 143
world-sheet 5, 11, 13, 25
writing 1625, 28, 31, 329, 612, 63, 65,
68, 702, 73, 756, 789, 812, 848,
183n5, 184n16
Wunderly-Volkart, Nanny 193
Xanthippe 174, 197

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays selected for this volume were originally produced in connection with
the eighteenth annual conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL), which was held at the University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Canada. The theme of that conference was Thinking Between
Philosophy and Poetry. The editors would very much like to thank the contributors to this volume, who not only responded to the invitation to engage in a
thinking between philosophy and poetry but who also generously reworked
their papers for publication to create an integral, freestanding volume.
Thanks are due also to the IAPL Executive Committee at the time of the
conference ( John Carvalho, Dalia Judavitz, Hugh J. Silverman, and Wilhelm J.
Wurzer) for their tremendous organizational work and for reading and discussing the more than two hundred papers that were submitted, as well as to the
many colleagues, students, and support staff at the University of Alberta who
helped with the local arrangements. In addition, thanks are due to the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to the Vice-President
Academic and to the Dean of Arts, University of Alberta, as well as to the
Consuls General in Alberta for the Governments of France, Ireland, and Italy
for their nancial support of the conference. Funds to assist in the initial
preparation of this volume for publication were provided by the Support for the
Advancement of Scholarship Endowment Fund, Faculty of Arts, University of
Alberta.
Above all, the editors would like to thank Hugh J. Silverman, Executive
Director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, and
Editor-in-Chief of the series Textures: Philosophy/Literature/Culture, in which
this volume appears. Without his tireless efforts neither the original conference
nor this volume of essays would ever have been a reality.
We wish to thank the New Directions Publishing Company, New York, and
the estate of Dylan Thomas, represented by David Higham Associates, London,
for permission to quote in full Dylan Thomass poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into
That Good Night. We wish also to thank Grove/Atlantic Inc., New York, for
permission to cite from Samuel Becketts Cascando. Additionally we would like
to thank Random House, New York, and the Random House Group, London,
for permission to cite from C. K. Scott Montcrieff s translation of Prousts The
Remembrance of Things Past. We wish also to thank Oxford University Press for
permission to quote in full M. L. Wests translation of an untitled poem by
Archilochus.

This page intentionally left blank

CONTRIBUTORS

Amittai Aviram is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches literary theory and poetics. His book, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994), presents a new
way of reading poetry. An active metrical poet, he has been developing a
theoretical basis for a new formalist criticism.
Babette E. Babich is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University
and Adjunct Research Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. She
is editor of the two volume collection, Nietzsche and Science, forthcoming in the
Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science series, and From Phenomenology to Thought,
Errancy and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson (1996). She is author
of Nietzsches Philosophy of Science (1994), as well as various essays on aesthetics,
the museum, and continental philosophy of science/technology. Executive Secretary of the Nietzsche Society (US), Babich is also a founding editor (with
David Allison) of New Nietzsche Studies.
Eve Tavor Bannet is Professor of English and Womens Studies, and Chair of
English at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. Her books include Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan (1991), and Postcultural Theory: Critical Theory after the Marxist Paradigm (1993).
Stephen Barker is Professor of Arts and Drama at the University of California
at Irvine, and Director, EAP Study Center in Lyons/Grenoble (France). He has
published widely on Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Beckett, Cocteau, Jarry,
Faulkner, Arthur Miller, and literary and aesthetic theory and philosophy. He
is the author and has edited: Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self After Nietzsche;
Excavations and Their Objects: Freud and the Collecting of Antiquity; and Signs of
Change: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern. Now editing Interrogating Images, he has
lectured extensively on art, art theory, art history, and the integration of art and
society.
Alessandro Carrera is Lettore, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the
Department of Italian, New York University. He lectures and publishes in the
areas of opera; modern poetry; music and literature. He is author of Il dio del
labirinto, a serial novel (1987); La torre e la pianura (1994), a novel in four
stories; La stagione della strega (1998) which won the Arturo Loria Prize for
short ction (Carpi, Italy); and A che punto il Giudizio Universale, twelve short
stories (1999), a nalist at the Settembrini Prize for short ction (Mestre,
Italy).
Richard Detsch is Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages, University of
Nebraska at Kearny. His publications include Georg Trakls Poetry (1993), as
well as numerous articles on German poetry and literature.

222

CONTRIBUTORS

Karen Feldman is Assistant Professor, Department of Rhetoric, University of

California at Berkeley, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany (19978). Her
publications include Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (with W. McNeill) as
well as articles and reviews in the area of contemporary Continental philosophy.
David Halliburton is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Modern Thought at Stanford University. He is the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A
Phenomenological View (Princeton); Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger
(Chicago); The Color of Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane (Cambridge); The Fateful
Discourse of Modernity (Stanford).
Richard Kearney is Professor of Philosophy at University College, Dublin,
and Visiting Professor at Boston College and the University of Paris. His many
publications include States of Mind (1996), Poetics of Modernity (1995), Modern
Movements in European Philosophy (1994), Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern (1991), and The Wake of Imagination (1988).
Carlo Sini is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Milan. He
is founding editor of the journal Luomo un segno and the author of numerous
books, including studies on phenomenology, semiotics, Whiteheads process
philosophy, and American pragmatism. His book Images of Truth has been
recently translated into English.
P. Christopher Smith is Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts,
Lowell. His Ph.D., awarded in 1966, was completed under H. G. Gadamer
at the Karl Ruprecht University, Heidelberg. He has translated various books
by Gadamer, and his most recent book, on communications theory, is The
Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (1998).
Forrest Williams is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado
at Boulder. His publications include Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, as well as numerous articles and reviews in contemporary
Continental philosophy.

EDITORS

Massimo Verdicchio is Professor of Italian, University of Alberta, Edmonton

(Canada). His publications include Naming Things: Aesthetics, Philosophy and
History in Benedetto Croce; Of Dissimulation: Allegory and Irony in Dantes Commedia, as well as translations of works by Massimo Cacciari, Mario Perniola,
and Carlo Sini.
Robert Burch is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Alberta, Edmonton (Canada). He publishes in the areas of German Idealism, phenomenology, and philosophy of technology, in addition to
his work on the interplay of philosophy and literature.