Ertert
Ertert
Ertert
I
RO DO L PHE GASCHE
Of Minimal Things
Rodolphe Gasche
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
1999
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 1999 by (he Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Most of the essays included in this book have been published previ-
ously. "Ecce Homo, or The Written Body" is reprinted from Looking After
Nietzsche, edited by L. A. Rickels, by permission of the State University of
New York Press © 1990, State University of New York; all rights reserved.
"Type-Writing Nietzsche's Self" appeared under the title "Autobiography
as Gestalt" in Why Nietzsche Now?, edited by D. T. O'Hara, pp. 271-90
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). I thank Indiana University
Press for permission to reprint this text. "Tearing at the Texture" was first
published under the title "Saturnine Vision and the Question of Differ-
ence: Reflections on Walter Benjamin's Theory of Language" in Benjamin's
Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, edited by E. Naegele, pp. 83-
104 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). I am grateful to Wayne
State University Press for letting me republish this essay. The chapter
"Cutting in on Distance" reproduces the essay "Objective Diversions: On
Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Me-
chanical Reproduction,'" published in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: De-
struction and Experience, edited by A. Benjamin, pp. 183-204 (London:
Routledge, 1994). I am thankful to Indiana University Press for permission
to include in this book "Floundering in Determination," which first ap-
peared in Commemorations: Reading Heidegger, edited by J. Sallis, pp. 7-19
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). "Tuned to Accord" is
reprinted from Heidegger Toward the Turn, edited by J. Risser, by permis-
sion of the State University of New York Press © 1999 (forthcoming),
State University of New York; all rights reserved. "Canonizing Measures"
is reprinted here from the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19, nos. 2
and 20 (1997): 203-14. "Like the Rose-Without Why" was written for a
Vlll Acknowledgments
special issue of Diacritics entitled Heidegger: Art and Politics, which I guest-
edited with Anthony Appiah 19, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1989): 101-13. I am
grateful to The Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint
this piece. The chapter "Perhaps: A Modality?" first appeared in the Grad-
uate Faculty Philosophy Journal 16, no. 2 (1993): 467-84. A first version, in
French, of "On the Nonadequate Trait" appeared in Les Fins de l'homme:
A partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, pp. I33-61 (Paris: Galilee, 1981). I am
thankful to the University of Minnesota Press for permission to republish
"Joining the Text" from The Yale Critics, edited by J. Arac et al., pp. 156-75
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); copyright 1983 by the
University of Minnesota, all rights reserved. "On Re-Presentation" is
reprinted from The Southern Journal of Philosophy 32, supplement (1993):
1-18. I thank the University of Minnesota Press for permission to reprint
my introduction, "Reading Chiasms," from A. Warminski, Readings in In-
terpretation, pp. ix-xxvi, 195-96 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987); copyright 1987 by the University of Minnesota, all rights re-
served. ''A Relation called 'Literary'" was prepublished in ASCA, Brief 2
(Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and Interpretation), pp.
17-33 (1995)· The final chapter of the book, "The Felicities of Paradox," is
republished from Maurice Blanchot: Literature, Philosophy, and Ethics,
edited by C. B. Gill, pp. 34-64 (London: Routledge, 1996).
I am indebted to Judith Still for her translation (from French) of
"Ecce Homo, or The Written Body." Very special thanks go to Leonard
Lawlor, who took it upon himself in the early 1980s to translate (also
from French) "On the Nonadequate Trait." I am particularly pleased to
be able to include his translation in this volume. Finally, I wish to thank
Dickson Tang, who assisted me in the preparation of the manuscript.
Contents
Introduction
5 Floundering in Determination 10 5
6 Tuned to Accord 122
12 On Re-Presentation 242
x Contents
13 Reading Chiasms
14 ''A Relation Called 'Literary'"
Notes 347
Index 375
OF MINIMAL THINGS
Introduction
things, only relative things, which have less reality than their foundation;
in the case where being-toward-another-thing differs from its foundation,
the extramental reality of relations is, according to Duns Scotus, that of a
"tiny being," or, in Richard of Mediavilla's terminology, a minus ens. 3 For
Thomas Aquinas, a real, or categorial, relation inheres only in the subject,
or foundation, of a relation, and the category of relation itself is "the weak-
est or least real" of all the categories. Relation is an entity, or thing, "so
weak (debilis) that it requires for its support an entity that is 'more perfect'
than itself" For this reason, Aquinas asserts, many have mistaken relations
for merely intramental realities. 4 Indeed, being in the mind, as opposed
to being outside the mind, is held to imply diminished being (ens dimin-
utum) and has been attributed to relations, particularly to relations that
are the result of comparisons. s Although a realist, Aquinas therefore ad-
mits that relations have the least of all being. Their ontological status is
thus best described as one of minimal things. Aquinas writes, "Relatio
praedicamentalis est accidens minimae entitatis" ("A predicative relation
is an accident of the least being").6 With this, the Scholastic philosopher
provides a definition of relation broad enough to be shared by most of the
philosophers of his time. A relation is an ens minimum, minimum under-
stood as the superlative of parvus, and, hence, in the sense of something
that is excruciatingly small, the smallest of all entities or things. As a
"minimum de entitate,"7 a relation has the ontological status of a real
thing. Yet compared to substance, which exists primarily, the accidental
natute of relation-regardless of whether it receives its being from the
substance or possesses its own being-entails that the being this thing
can claim as its own is minimal.
While the title of this book, OfMinimal Things, refers to the above
Scholastic definition of relation, it does not follow that the ensuing stud-
ies on the concept of relation embrace the Scholastic substance/accident
ontology. To a large extent, the emergence of a logic of relations in the
last century results from the insight that the substance/accident ontology
significantly limits the analysis of relation. But as is shown by the ongoing
discussion of whether relations are internal or external-in other words,
on whether they have a merely intramental reality or a mind-independent
status-the question of their specific type of existence has not been re-
solved despite all the advances in the understanding of the logical form
4 Introduction
subject come toward it in the first place? If this is a necessity that is struc-
turally implied in the very thought of relation, then is relation not pri-
marily a response, a yes, to a prior invitation? More fundamentally still,
does such possibilization of relation by the relatum, and the subject of the
relation's acceptance and response to the invitation, not also suggest that
relation is an occurrence, a happening, an event? Finally, what is the sta-
tus of the subject from which the relation seems to originate, if relation is
essentially a being-toward-something-other? And how does the nature of
such an outgoing subject in turn affect the nature of relation?
For a relation to relate to something other than its subject implies
being with respect to others, as the classical conception of relative terms
acknowledges. What are the ramifications of this respect for the thinking
of the subject of a relation? Conversely, how does the fact that the "ob-
ject" of a relation is the "object" of a relation's direction toward it impact
on the object itself? From early on, self-relation, or identity, has been rec-
ognized as an extreme case of relation in which its two terms coincide. At
its most basic, identity has been determined as the relation that any ob-
ject can and must have to itself in order for it to be what it is. Consider-
ing, however, that objects stand in relation to one another, at least some
breach of their identity would seem to be required for them to be able to
hold themselves, or be held, to some other thing. More importantly, does
not self-identity as such include a demarcation from and, hence, a trait
toward some other? Or ultimately, as in the case of the Ab-solute, or in
the absence of any already constituted other, must not self-identity also
include a demarcation from and a trait toward the empty place of an-
other? If this is the case, no consideration of the notion of relation can ab-
stract from the fact that the relatum to which another is held is by defini-
tion only within the place of the other. More precisely, in addition to
being the other to which the subject relates, and independently of
whether this other is the subject itself as in the relation of self-identity, the
relation is not conceivable without heeding that space and place of the
other-a place that can be occupied but that no host can ever saturate,
and that is, by definition, a place awaiting another to come. But if the
subject of a relation is dependent in this manner on the other, the subject
is never at its place, either. In its place, too, there is "only" a subject to
come. If, then, relation is essentially being-toward, and with respect to,
Introduction 9
something other, can relation have an essence of itself at all? Does the re-
ferring to another that constitutes relation affect relation itself, its own in-
telligible identity, especially if one takes into account that the other, even
if it is the Ab-solute, only occupies the space of otherness? A relation,
which is nothing but the trait of being-held-toward-another, is what it is
only insofar as it points away from an identity of its own. The relational
directedness toward something other than itself, which paradoxically pro-
vides a relation with its own identity, shows relation to the other to pre-
cede all identity. It is this further ramification tied in with the notion of
relation-namely, the nonsymmetrical weighing of the other, and the
place of the other, over all other moments of a relation-that no study of
the issue can ignore.
But in a relation, not only does the subject tend toward the other
with all the indicated implications for the subject, but also the relatum of
the relation lets the subject come into a relation to it. There is no relation,
then, without a prior opening of the possibility of the being-toward-
another by which the subject· is allowed to arrive "in" the place of the
other. Without this gift of an opening for a subject to turn toward the
other, no relation would ever be able to occur. 10 Three things, at least, fol-
low from this. First, to rethink the notion of relation requires that one
take into account the event of relation anterior to relation. Second, to re-
think rel.ation requires as well that the occurrence through which relation
becomes possible no longer be understood in terms of relationality. Fi-
nally, to engage the opening event of relationality is not possible without
at the same time reconceiving the traditional philosophical ways of think-
ing of possibilization.
The very concept of relationality carries with it a reference to the
nonrelational. Philosophical reflection has taken account of this exigency:
The skeptics acknowledged it by their negation in the name of the trope
par excellence-that is, the principial (genikotatos) trope of relation-of
what is said to be without relation, or kath'auta. Hegel did so by demon-
strating that the Ab-solute is the highest form of relation in that it ac-
complishes relation to itself and thus relates relation to the nonrelational.
Finally, more contemporary thinkers have heeded relationality's reference
to the nonrelational by emphasizing the indivisible unity between that
which is absolutely without relation (thus, isolated to the point of radi-
IO Introduction
stretching from, the place of the other to the place of the subject of a re-
lation, according to a relation that combines with modes of comportment
that are no longer conceivable in terms of relation or nonrelation. These
knots qua knots hold the traits together and thus provide reasons, ac-
counts, explications, as it were, but at the same time let themselves be un-
done again. These inevitably plural knots are none other than the mini-
mal things that I have alluded to.
Given that the essays collected in this volume have been written
over a span of more than twenty years, the reader should not be surprised
to find that, although relation is their common theme, they reflect on this
issue in contexts, from perspectives, and according to styles and modes of
approach that are quite different. The earliest essays, the two contribu-
tions on Friedrich Nietzsche particularly, take up the problematic of rela-
tion with respect to questions pertaining to the self, the body, and the
name as figures of propriety (das Eigentliche), and with the aim of con-
ceiving of a way of relating to the self that escapes the Hegelian dialectics
of self and other. By contrast, the essays on translatability, communica-
bility, and reproducibility in the work of Walter Benjamin, written in
critical debate with current trends in interpreting Benjamin, elaborate on
this thinker's plight of sketching out a way of relating to the Absolute,
that is, to that which by definition precludes all relation. It is a way of re-
lating, as we shall see, that cuts apart the ties by which concepts and the
fabric oflanguage have sought to trap the Absolute. Most of the essays on
Heidegger discuss his attempt to foreground logical relation (and deter-
mination) and the classical conception of truth as adequation in the fun-
damental structures of Dasein's comportment to the world, to others, and
to itself But these essays also follow Heidegger through some of his later
efforts to recast the concept of relationality itself, especially in light of the
other to whom (or to which) relation is said to be directed, and from
which the "subject" receives the possibility of response as a gift. How
thinkers (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida are
the examples) relate to one another is a further angle from which I broach
the question. Finally, in the last chapters of this book, which touches on
the writings of Stephane Mallarme, Franz Kafka, and Maurice Blanchot,
I take issue with the relation of literature and philosophy, more precisely,
with relation as conceptual discourse and relation as fiction. The investi-
Introduction I3
UNTIMELY RELATIONS
1
as are, for instance, the book entitled Daybreak, a sea animal, the sun, the
self, and the name of Nietzsche. How can a body, a unified body, be con-
stituted from the starting point of these metaphors, such diverse meta-
phors? If each metaphor is an image of the body, it is, at the same time,
only one of its traits, so that assembling these traits constitutes the body
in question. It is in fact the Aristotelian question: what makes man "one"
(hen}?-a unity on which the very name of man is founded (the denomi-
nation: man),l a question that should be introduced here in order to ex-
amine the principle that justifies the term "body" for the set of metaphors
in question. Certainly they are not the result of that contradiction through
which, as Gaston Bachelard says in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, "we most
easily achieve originality." He goes on to say, "When it is directed towards
objective knowledge, this need for originality over-estimates the impor-
tance of the phenomenon, materializes slight differences, ascribes causes to
accidents, just in the same way in which the novelist imagines a hero en-
dowed with an unlikely number of special qualities and portrays a willful
character through a series of inconsistent actions."2
But although these metaphors, in Nietzsche, do not attest to con-
tradiction, nonetheless his text exhibits clear pretensions to originality,
and that these are embodied in the metaphoric chain of which we are
speaking. Now, since the self of the signatory who seems to unify, to
gather together the chain of metaphors (for a moment, at least), is taken
up and reabsorbed by the chain itself, the question of the unifying prin-
ciple is raised over and over again. The impossibility of enclosing or of
closing up the question once and for all represents perhaps the major rea-
son why we cannot talk properly about the body proper. If the organiz-
ing principle of the metaphors for the body is abolished (or is repre-
sented) in the very chain that it is supposed to totalize, then the need to
keep going back to a new unifying trait opens up the discourse of the
body to the infinite importation of metaphors that are always foreign, al-
ways improper. The impossibility of preventing the unifying trait from
tumbling into the series that is to be unified bears witness to disequilib-
rium as an essential mark of the body, a mark whose first effect is the
body's impropriety. This amounts to saying that the body does not prop-
erly belong to anyone.
The body is thus characterized by this tendency to disintegrate into
'Ecce Homo, ' or The Written Body 19
Without claiming to exhaust this passage, let us stress a few points: these
three things-the book (Daybreak), the sea animal, and Nietzsche-may
be substituted for one another. What may be said of one is equally true of
the others. The same thing is to be found under the skin of the book as in
the bodies of the sea animal and of Nietzsche. The book, in fact, contains
sentences like "ends" or "tails" (Zipfel), which allow you to bring some
memory up from the depths. The book thus seems like a collection of
20 U N TIM ELY R E LA T ION S
ends or tails. Now this is equally true of the body of the sea animal and of
Nietzsche himself, basking among the rocks, sharing secrets with the sea.
Nietzsche tells us that this book is distinguished by its art of fixing things
that easily flit by, that is the moments, the instants he calls "divine
lizards." But lizards cannot be caught. You can barely get hold of them;
they escape almost immediately, leaving their tails in your hand. The sea
animal and the book, like Nietzsche's body, are thus nothing more than a
set of broken tails, of lost tails, of dead tails. Like that other body that is
largely made up of a tangle of snakes, the medusa (a jellyfish). In this way
the lizards represent "divine moments" flitting by noiselessly; after they
have gone, all that remains is an end, a tail left in your hand, which al-
lows you to re-create them in memory. In order to fix them, to stop them,
to catch hold of them, of their moment of presence, you must know how
to use an instrument that, like the blade of a knife, cuts the vanishing
moment from its full presence, leaving only, to use a term from Rous-
seau, "commemorative signs."4 Of course, the instrument is not the spear
of that young Greek god, in whom we recognize the Apollo 5auroktoros
of Praxiteles, 5 but an instrument no less steely, that is, the point of a pen.
The bodies of the book, the sea animal, and Nietzsche are thus consti-
tuted by work, by an operation of the pen that consists in fixing divine
moments, of gathering together under a quivering skin a set of sentences,
or tails, or phalluses, which are only ever commemorative signs of the lost
actuality of that presence of a whole body. Nevertheless, in spite of, or
rather because of, the cut-off, dead, and petrified nature of these instants
that make up the body, this is a body that "lies in the sun, round, happy,
like some sea animal basking among rocks." Paradoxically, it is that oper-
ation of the pen, fixing a set of moments by depriving them of their full
momentariness, which results in the body as such: a happy pile of dead
moments. And what was said of each individual sentence, that it is pre-
sented as a lizard's cut-off tail, is valid for the book, for the corpus of
aphorisms, for the whole body. For Nietzsche's body itself is no more than
a petrified divine instant, formed, like the book, of phrases carved in
granite. It is itself no more than the product of the action of a steely point
that fixes that body in its momentary nature. 50 it is not surprising that
the body only appears as one metaphor among others, caught in the
chain book, sea animal, sun, and so on. The body, like the book, is the ef-
'Ecce Homo, ' or The Written Body 21
fect of the pen: it is a fixed moment. But what does "fixed" mean? To
what extent is fixing a property of the body? Where it appears as petrifi-
cation, does it merge with the very momentariness of the body? This is
what we must try to elucidate by moving to another level.
Speaking of another ofhis works, Nietzsche writes, "Human, All Too
Human is the monument of a crisis" (p. 283). And again, "Human, All Too
Human, this monument [Denkmal] of rigorous self discipline with which
I put a sudden end to all my infections ... " (p. 288).
A monument then, insofar as Human, All Too Human is an event
marking a close, an end. Now, a sudden beginning may equally give rise
to monuments. This is the case with Zarathustra, a monument that,
Nietzsche tells us, occupies a place apart among his works ("Among my
writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by itself," p. 219). Zarathustra,
indeed, put apart in this way from the rest of Nietzsche's works, is the
monument erected in honor of that divine moment when Nietzsche was
first struck by the idea of the Eternal Recurrence. The place where the
revelation occurred was, according to Nietzsche, "a powerful pyramidal
rock not far from Surlei" (p. 295). This rock itself represents the idea of
the Eternal Recurrence inasmuch as, by its resistance to the elements, to
the work of time, and to decomposition, it recurs ceaselessly as a new in-
stant, as an original beginning. So the idea of recurrence appeared to
Nietzsche like a petrified rock, the Eternal Recurrence being, in addition,
nothing more than a pyramidal block resisting time. This contrasts, how-
ever, with what Nietzsche reports in Ecce Homo concerning the months
preceding the encounter with the rock at Surlei: "If I reckon back a few
months from this day, I find as an omen a sudden and profoundly deci-
siv~ change in my taste, especially in music. Perhaps the whole of
Zarathustra may be reckoned as music; certainly a rebirth of the art of
hearing was among its preconditions" (p. 295). So a radical change in his
appreciation of music precedes the event at Surlei, and also the erecting
of Zarathustra as a monument. The rock, the pyramidal block in itself,
does not utter a sound; it is voiceless. Consequently, if the whole of
Zarathustra may be reckoned as music, it is something like a symphony of
rocks (silent in themselves), a symphony that would make the stones
dance as petrified divine moments. Notwithstanding the fact that stone is
already an affirmation against time (as decadence), already a petrified for-
22 UN TIM ELY R E L A T ION S
mula for the affirmation of that instance in which the temporality proper
to the Eternal Recurrence erupted into the temporal continuum, it must
still be reconstructed into a symphony that, once again, liberates the in-
cidental idea of the Eternal Recurrence from its stony straitjacket. The
music in question is pyramidal music, for it is important that the petrified
product of the incidental moment is not just any rock but a shaped block,
like the pyramidal block at Surlei. This is perhaps even clearer in the fol-
lowing passages from Ecce Homo. The first refers to The Gay Science:
"What is here called 'highest hope'-who could have any doubt about
that when he sees the diamond beauty of the first words of Zarathustra
flashing at the end of the fourth book?" (p. 293). And, in the chapter
"Why I Am So Wise," explicitly with regard to Zarathustra: "Those who
have eyes for colors will compare it to a diamond" (p. 234). A diamond,
the hardest of stones and literally invincible, is a cut stone. Nietzsche rep-
resents Zarathustra, or the idea of the Eternal Recurrence that strikes him
at Suriei, as durable stone, finely cut, resistant to the vicissitudes of time.
The diamond that is Zarathustra will repeat for all eternity what hap-
pened to Nietzsche at the site of that other indestructible stone, the pyra-
midal block not far from Suriei. Petrified signs of divine moments.
Further support for this interpretation comes from what Nietzsche
says about the nature of his words, in particular at the end of the third
book of The Gay Science. It is here that the relationship between the orig-
inary moment and the petrification of that moment becomes clear: "Or
when at the end of the third book he reads the granite words in which a
destiny finds for the first time a formula for itself, for all time?" (p. 293).
Granite words then, phrases formed out of hard crystalline material cor-
responding to the formulation of a destiny that is articulated for the first
time and for all eternity! The event, the "incidental" moment, is so fleet-
ing that it must be hewn in durable material suitable to its divine nature
in order to hold it, to fix it. Only in this way will the instant appear as
what resists the time of decadence. The instant when continuous time is
suddenly, sharply broken by a time foreign to that temporality must be
slipped into a durable atemporal material so that the instant may repeat
itself, becoming eternal outside time as the recurrence of that divine mo-
ment. G What appears in Ecce Homo as a topography is the philosophical
landscape, marked by the eruption of the eternal, of the untimely (Un-
'Ecce Homo, ' or The Written Body 23
How often have I been told by the "instruments" themselves that they had never
heard themselves like that.-Most beautifully perhaps by Heinrich von Stein,?
who died so unpardonably young. Once, after he had courteously requested per-
mission, he appeared for three days in Sils Maria, explaining to everybody that
he had not come to see the Engadine. This excellent human being, who had
walked into the Wagnerian morass with all the impetuous simplicity of a Pruss-
ian Junker ... acted during these three days like one transformed by a tempest
of freedom, like one who had suddenly been lifted to his own height and ac-
quired wings. (p. 227)
currence cuts into it, is transmuted into stone so that it might last beyond
the vicissitudes of temporal decadence. The Greek typos, meaning image,
image of images, model, and so on, comes from the term typtein, which
means, among other things, to cut. The type is then indeed the cut
stone, 8 a stone that encloses the image of images and whose form matches
that image: a precious stone, then. Ecce Homo is nothing other than the
attempt to constitute a body for oneself by writing oneself in granite
words, by fixing the divine instants of a life, sparkling, like precious
stones; it is nothing other than the effort to erect oneself as a monument
by fixing oneself with the steely point of a pen. For Nietzsche himself,
Nietzsche as body, is nothing other than an event, an instant in which an
untimeliness outside time erupted into the time of decadence, and in
which, in order to last, it had to turn to stone. This applies equally to Ecce
Homo, in which Nietzsche's written body will form an instant, a supple-
mentary monument in the topography that makes up the book and in
which is inscribed the divine moment when the idea of the Eternal Re-
currence erupted in Nietzsche's body. And so, in the last analysis, Nietz-
sche, his body, will have been no more and no less than an articulation of
the idea that he conceived-the Eternal Recurrence itself.
II
In order to think the type-body, the cut or written body, the printed
body, we shall turn our attention to another metaphorical network in
Ecce Homo. Let us begin, for example, by taking a look at what Nietzsche
says to us when he is at his lowest ebb physically, in the declining years of
his life. That moment coincides with a general exhaustion (Gesamter-
schopfung), which explains the deterioration of all his organs. That ex-
haustion, in fact, should be understood as a weakening of the self as to-
tality or whole. The general exhaustion is the sign of a loss of self as
totality. Now, this morbid state, one of extreme weakness, a state that also
corresponds to an aberration of the instincts, is, according to Nietzsche, a
preparation for a refining of the organs, inasmuch as the illness is at once
the culmination of decadence and an interruption of that decadence. It is
then that Nietzsche acquires "that filigree an," that skill in grasping both
properly and figuratively, that touch for nuances, which, in the end, will
'Ecce Homo,' or The Written Body 25
permit him to take himself in hand and make himself healthy again. "I
took myself in hand, 1 made myself healthy again: the condition for
this-every physiologist would admit that-is that one be healthy at bot-
tom [dass man im Grunde gesund ist]" (p. 224). With those fingers and
that filigree art Nietzsche will reassemble the exhausted organs, organiz-
ing them into a new totality that corresponds to being healthy at bottom,
in other words to what Nietzsche calls "the nethermost self" (das unterste
Selbst), and that coincides (as we will see in the following chapter) with
the name, or the type, of Zarathustra.
But that reorganization, that reassembling of the parts of the body,
merges with an arithmetical operation. So we shall turn our attention
briefly to that mathematical level. Nietzsche in fact calculates his "self,"
that on which the totality of his body is founded. From the outset, Nietz-
sche posits himself as being a totality at bottom, that is to say, at bottom a
totality; and taking away the fact that he is a decadent, he gets to the op-
posite of decadence, that is to say, health. ''Apart from the fact [Abgerech-
net] that 1 am a decadent, I am also the opposite" (p. 224). It is already
no longer Nietzsche's totality that suffers from a general exhaustion, for
by means of this little operation of subtraction, Nietzsche has already got
himself back in hand. He writes, ''As summa summarum ['overall'] I was
healthy" (p. 224). This is understandable, inasmuch as summa summarum
means apart from decadence, but also and equally means despite deca-
dence-in that health, at bottom, allows making use of decadence, trans-
forming it into a means for health.
Let us briefly outline the calculation of the summa summarum. The
first condition of the reconstitution of its totality is complete isolation. In
complete independence the subject is able to guess what is good for him,
sich zu erraten, and to thrive, wohl zu geraten. This thriving, indeed, this
Wohlgeratenheit, becomes the necessary condition for performing the cal-
culation in question. Nietzsche tells us about the person who is thriving:
He has a taste only for what is good for him; his pleasure, his delight cease where
the measure of what is good for him is transgressed. He guesses what remedies
avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what
does not kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything
he sees, hears, lives through, his sum [seine Summe 1: he is a principle of selection,
he discards much. (p. 224)
26 UN TIM ELY R E LA T ION S
and souls-that I no longer take seriously" (p. 242). Why are books a
form of recreation for Nietzsche; why does he not take them seriously?
Because Nietzsche is himself his own book, because his writing is the
writing of his body. The first reader of the book-body, of the type-body,
Nietzsche cannot take an interest except in books that he already consid-
ers his. "Otherwise I almost always seek refuge with the same books-ac-
tually, a small number-books proved to me" (p. 243). These books that
are already proved to him are books always already signed by Nietzsche-
more precisely, the names of the authors are all pseudonyms for Nietz-
sche. fu much by what they demonstrate as by the names of their au-
thors, these books are already a part of the text of the written body. These
books do not slow down the accelerated metabolism of the written body.
On the contrary, this body will easily assimilate and dispose of them, re-
taining the one fact that the books are not foreign to it but are always al-
ready itself.
Consequently, to calculate his sum also means to have space for
everything in his body. "Nothing in existence may be subtracted, noth-
ing is dispensable" (p. 272). But everything that enters this body must be
marked with the index mine. Even the contradictory and the opposite will
enter into the composition of this body provided that they are my oppo-
sites, my contradictions. So this writing-body, book-body, or type-body
bears witness to a Dionysiac affirmation insofar as it is the field where op-
posing forces do battle. In other words, it is a work of art. We suggested
that climate and place, diet, and so on, are not only the conditions of the
body's elaboration but equally a part of it. They are a part of it inasmuch
as they are metaphors. Take for instance the passage in Zarathustra that is
cited at the end of the chapter "Why I Am So Wise": "Gone is the hesi-
tant gloom of my spring! Gone the snowflakes of my malice in June.
Summer have I become entirely, and summer noon" (p. 234). These sea-
sons are in fact metaphors for seasons. They are seasons that have become
mine (and are, for that reason, marked with a possessive adjective or pro-
noun). It is they that make up, one might say, the matter of the body, in-
sofar as this body-a rapid metabolism-stores them only in order to ex-
pend them, borrowing from them the movement that, as metaphor for
the changing seasons, becomes the circulation of metaphors of (in) the
body. The writing-body, then, is a metaphorical metabolism, the meta-
'Ecce Homo, ' or The Written Body 29
phorical set of transformations that take place within an organism and the
set of metaphorical transformations that constitute a body.
III
One cannot help noticing that Nietzsche describes himself as dis-
tinguished by traits (Zuge) , as being ausgezeichnet, as being remarkably
marked. In "Why I Am So Wise" Nietzsche enumerates some of his traits.
Here he states the last of them: "May I still venture to sketch one final
trait of my nature that causes me no little difficulties in my contacts with
other men? My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly un-
canny sensitivity" (p. 233). This final trait, which concerns cleanliness
(proprete), is a trait that is Nietzsche's very own (propre). The cleanliness
in question further implies that the traits distinguishing Nietzsche's body
are proper traits, and that this is quite different from other men's bodies,
which are constituted by improper traits (traits both improper and un-
suitable). One could ev~n say that the difference between Nietzsche's
body and that of his contemporaries is that Nietzsche's is a body made up
of proper traits or of signs, as we shall see. This body excludes any patho-
logical trait: "There is no pathological trait in me; even in periods of se-
vere sickness I never became pathological; in vain would one seek for a
trait of fanaticism in my character" (p. 257). In the same way, he excludes
all "traces of struggle," "any trace of tension," and so on (p. 258). That
leads us, in accordance moreover with the sign of propriety, to make a dis-
tinction between two kinds of traits: "signs of healthy instincts" (Zeichen
gesunder Instinkte) on the one hand and those of decadent instincts on the
other. The healthy instincts characterizing Nietzsche testifY that his body
has a different origin. Difference is inscribed in a comparison with men
honored as the first, whom Nietzsche considers as non-men: "When I now
compare myself with the men who have so far been honored as the first,
the difference is palpable" (pp. 256-57). A privilege, a Vorrecht, is associ-
ated with this other origin of Nietzsche's body, the privilege of having the
supreme finesse necessary to discern all the indications of healthy in-
stincts. Nietzsche is distinguished, then, by signs, by indices of healthy in-
stincts: their traits characterize him as a body of signs (ausgezeichnet). In
this capacity he possesses "a subtler sense of smell ... than any other hu-
30 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
man being before me" for the signs of the ascent and decline of instincts.
But what is the relation in fact between a body of signs and the subtle
sense in question? Nietzsche writes as follows:
My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so
that the proximity or-what am I saying?-the inmost parts, the "entrails" of
every soul are physiologically perceived by me-smelled. This sensitivity fur-
nishes me with psychological antennae with which I feel and get a hold of every
secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character-perhaps the
result of bad blood, but glossed over by education-enters my consciousness al-
most at the first contact. If my observation has not deceived me, such characters
who offend my sense of cleanliness also sense from their side the reserve of my
disgust-and this does not make them smell any better. (p. 233)
One can already recognize here a first difference between the two systems
of signs: the healthy signs are those of a clean (propre) and transparent
body, while the signs of bad instincts bear witness to the abundant dirt
hidden at the bottom of these bodies. That dirt seems to stand in oppo-
sition to the nature of the sign itself; in that it is an obstacle to the trans-
parent clarity, the weightlessness, of the sign, that body will not yet have
become a body of signs, in fact, a body at all. Or again, as long as there is
still something at the bottom (dirt, in that it is hidden), the body will not
be a true body of signs. The bottom is the result of a process of sedimen-
tation, of things that have not yet become light and transparent. Nietz-
sche, for his part, lays claim to a perfect transparency, and his body moves
in a limpid, diaphanous element: '~ has always been my wont-extreme
cleanliness in relation to me is the presupposition of my existence; I per-
ish under unclean conditions-I constantly swim and bathe and splash,
as it were, in water-in some perfectly transparent and resplendent ele-
ment" (p. 233). This holds equally true for mountain air: air, like water, is
a clear element in which a body of signs can move about. Here there is no
longer occasion to speak about a sedimented bottom; everything is trans-
parency and weightlessness.
In addition to this subtle sense for dirt-encrusted depths, he has a
sense for healthy instincts. This second sense is associated with an opera-
tion of distinction or respect, or Auszeichnung: "To this day I still have the
same affability for everyone; I even treat with special respect rich bin selbst
voLler Auszeichnung] those who are lowliest: in all of this there is not one
'Ecce Homo, ' or The Written Body 31
This order of rank among opposite terms keeps them at a distance one
from another. Each new trait that becomes part of the composition of the
body of signs contributes to spacing that body out (and making it
lighter). Distance, as the condition of possibility of the hierarchy, pre-
vents the body from returning to chaos. Spacing, the preventing of chaos
in this body of signs, is all the more urgent in that a vast sum of traits is
needed to give form to the type corresponding to the revaluation of val-
ues. By inscribing a set of contradictory traits in the body, organizing
them so that they form a new hierarchy that literally excludes nothing,
the type-body already represents on the level of the body a first reevalua-
tion of values. The incorporation of so many traits within the type-body
in fact transgresses the model of the individual hitherto prevailing, in
such a way that the written body is a transgression of the volume of what
32 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
and Wagner. What we have said about the names of the old Frenchmen is
equally true of these names: they are in collusion with the name of Nietz-
sche. This is most visible in the case of Voltaire. Human, All Too Human
was originally dedicated to Voltaire; this is what Nietzsche writes about it
in Ecce Homo: "Voltaire was above all, in contrast to all who wrote after
him, a grandseigneur of the spirit-like me.-The name of Voltaire on
one of my essays-that really meant progress-towards me" (p. 283).
Clearly it is Nietzsche's strategy to bind himself, to bind his own body to
all these names: the second edition of Human, All Too Human no longer
bears the name of Voltaire. Nietzsche substitutes his proper name for
Voltaire's, and reappropriates once again his writing for himself; but this is
possible only if Voltaire has always been another name for Nietzsche.
That names may be substitutes for other names is in fact what may be
read in the case of the names of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche, in
Ecce Homo, speaks of The Birth of Tragedy as a "practical application to
Wagnerism, as if that were a symptom of ascent" (p. 270). He continues,
"In this respect, this essay was an event in the life of Wagner: it was only
from that moment on that Wagner's name elicited high hopes." The
event, then, is the linking of two names, that of Nietzsche with that of
Wagner. It is an event in the life of Wagner insofar as that linking elevates
the name of Wagner. Nietzsche gives us to understand, however, that that
connection was a mistake on his part, just as Wagner was not an ascend-
ing sign. There remains, however, the problem of knowing how a liaison
between the two names had been possible. First of all let us note that The
Birth of Tragedy was a "practical application to Wagnerism." The effect
(like the fascination) of that work, that is to say, the timely effect which it
enjoyed at the period, was a zeitgemasser effect. It follows that Nietzsche's
critique of The Birth of Tragedy, a critique that works toward ridding it of
the name of Wagner, intends to free the book of its timely aspects by
showing that that work was untimely even when it first appeared.
But let us get to what makes the liaison between the names of
Nietzsche and Wagner possible. Nietzsche provides a first explanation in
the following manner:
I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is ca-
pable-the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one besides him had
34 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
wings; and given the way I am, strong enough to turn even what is most ques-
tionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus to become stronger, I call
Wagner the great benefactor of my life. That in which we are related-that we
have suffered more profoundly, also from each other, than men of this century
are capable of suffering-will link our names again and again, eternally; and as
certainly as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, just as cer-
tainly I am and always shall be. (pp. 250-51)
The bond between Wagner and Nietzsche is such that Nietzsche can turn
to his advantage what was most questionable and dangerous in connec-
tion with the name of Wagner, the name of decadence par excellence. It is
in this way that Nietzsche, being healthy at bottom, knows Wagner bet-
ter than Wagner knows himself Moreover, what Nietzsche recognizes in
the life of Wagner is pain, what might be called an untimely suffering. It
is this untimely suffering, in fact, that lies at the root of the relationship
between the two names. That the suffering attributed by Nietzsche to
Wagner is no more than Nietzsche's own suffering can only be justified
insofar as Wagner is only another name for Nietzsche. "That the two Un-
timely Ones distinguished by the names of Schopenhauer and Wagner
contribute much (0 the understanding of, or even to the formulation of
the proper psychological questions about, these two cases, I should not
wish to assert-excepting, as seems fair, some details" (p. 280).
Let there be no misunderstanding about this suffering that makes
the union of these names possible: it is not the suffering of the man, Wag-
ner, that is to say, of the empirical Wagner. It is more a question of an un-
timely suffering, of a trait that distinguishes Nietzsche. Notice the turn of
the phrase cited: The UQtimely Ones are distinguished (abgezeichnet) by
the names of Schopenhauer and Wagner. These names have nothing in
common with their empirical support. Nietzsche continues, "What I was
fundamentally trying to do in these essays was something altogether dif-
ferent from psychology: an unequaled problem of education, a new con-
cept of self-discipline, self-defense to the point of hardness, a way to
greatness and world-historical tasks was seeking its first expression" (p.
280). What can be read in the following passage is that the suffering that
binds together the names of Wagner and Nietzsche has nothing to do
with Wagner himself, nor with his music: "A psychologist might still add
that what I heard as a young man listening to Wagnerian music really had
'Ecce Homo, 'or The Written Body 35
The proof of that, as strong as any proof can be, is my essay on ~gner in Bay-
reuth: in all psychologically decisive places I alone am discussed-and one need
not hesitate to put down my name or the word "Zarathusrra" where the text has
the word "Wagner." The entire picture of the dithyrambic artist is a picture of
the pre-existent poet of Zarathustra, sketched with abysmal profundity and with-
out touching even for a moment the Wagnerian reality. (p. 274)
The pathos of the first pages is world-historical; the glance spoken of on the
seventh page is Zarathustra's distinctive glance; Wagner, Bayreuth, the whole
wretched German pettiness are a cloud in which an infinite mirage of the future
is reflected. Even psychologically all decisive traits of my own nature are pro-
36 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
jected into Wagner's-the close proximity of the brightest and the most calami-
tous forces, the will to power as no man ever possessed it. (p. 275)
It is Nietzsche who is the mirage thus projected onto the names of Wag-
ner and Schopenhauer, but it is Nietzsche only inasmuch as he is an un-
timely mirage, inasmuch as he is a fiction. The traits of Nietzsche-his
proper traits and those of his type-are projected onto something (Wag-
ner and Nietzsche) that is primarily only an accidental reality. That real-
ity gathers in traits that are fundamentally foreign to it: "This is the
strangest 'objectivity' possible: the absolute certainty about what I am was
projected on some accidental reality-the truth about me spoke from
some gruesome depth" (p. 275). The projection of one's own traits, of
oneself as a future type, presupposes an absolute certainty about what one
is. But one can be what one is only by projecting proper traits onto an ac-
cidental reality: what one is can be objectified only after an alienating
projection. Hence the necessity of recuperating that alienated self, the
obliterated name.
"Schopenhauer and Wagner or, in one word, Nietzsche" (p. 277). It
is true that the fact of tying his name to that of another implies distinc-
tion. Nietzsche writes, "I honor, 1 distinguish by associating my name
with that of a cause or a person: pro or con-that makes no difference to
me" (p. 233). Distinction is at the same time creation of a sign for oneself,
for one's own body. This creation is, however, an alienation, and after-
wards the proper and originary name must be restored. Nietzsche tells us
this about Wagner, about his relationship with him: "What reached a de-
cision in me at that time was not a break with Wagner: I noted a total
aberration of my instinct; of which particular blunders, whether Wagner
or the professorship at Basel, were mere symptoms" (p. 286). So employ-
ing names, particularly timely, proper names, in order to make a body of
signs for oneself also represents an aberration of the instincts in that
healthy instincts are directed at the untimely. Even Nietzsche's proper
name ("Nietzsche") does not fulfill these conditions. This name does not
represent a lasting solution, for "Nietzsche" remains the name of a timely
being. However that may be, the supplementation of oneself by foreign
names cannot be avoided in the constitution of oneself as body. When,
for instance, Nietzsche attempts, in The Untimely Ones, to develop a con-
cept of self-discipline and self-defense as a world-historical task, he puts
'Ecce Homo, ' or The Written Body 37
(197 6 )
Translated by Judith Still
Type-Writing Nietzsche's Self
the latter being, for Heidegger, the modern rendition of the Platonic idea.
Indeed, partaking of that monumental history discussed by Nietzsche in
The Use and Misuse ofHistory-a history that consists in the continuum
of all immortal figures (Gestalten) through which Being has been articu-
lated typologically or, as Nietzsche also puts it, monographically-Ecce
Homo has been thought to continue not only the romantic project but
also, more fundamentally, the project of modernity in which the Greek
notion of eidos is determined as Gestalt, and of which romanticism is but
one, however important, variation. 6
What, then, is a Gestalt? The Gestalt, as Heidegger conceives of it, is
not simply the Hegelian notion of the figures or shapes of consciousness
(Gestalten des Bewusstseins) that are, according to the Phenomenology of
Spirit, the living incarnations of the concept, or in shorr, "actualized es-
sentiality" in history. 7 Nor is it the Gestalt of Gestalt psychology, that is, a
whole that encompasses more that the sum of its parts, and that is the
source of all Sinngebung. If, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heideg-
ger determines (as he explains himself in the Addendum from I956),
Gestalt from the perspective of the Greek notion of morphe-and the no-
tion of Ge-stell as the gathering of the bringing-forth into the rift-design
as bounding outline, or peras-Gestalt comes to designate truth's being
fixed in place (its Festgestelltsein), the very mode in which truth is estab-
lished (eingerichtet) in Being itself.B Undoubtedly, Heidegger's later use
of the notion of Gestalt, for instance in "What Are Poets For?" and The
Question ofBeing, differs considerably from this very general but, in fact,
grounding or originary meaning. Indeed, if Gestalt initially translates the
Greek experience of the coming forth of truth into the limits of a form,
Heidegger's later use of the term is much more narrow. It refers only to
the modern way in which truth is set into place, that is, to the way it is
bent to the Western destiny of Being. Whereas for the Greeks morphe as
Gestalt formulates the way in which Being comes forth into presence (An-
WCsen), that is, into an appearance or aspect (Ansehen, or Aussehen), and is
thus linked to the notion of idea, Heidegger's later use of Gestalt is re-
stricted to modernity's representational (Vorstellung) actualization of what
it conceives as Being. Although it is the modern version of the Greek idea,
Gestalt also displaces this originary Greek notion of the coming into an
appearance. Yet what does the modern concept of Being amount to,
42 V N TIM ELY R E L A T ION S
must suffice here. I wish to evoke the beginning of the second part of the
Discourse on the Method, where the subject of meditation could be shown
to constitute himself according to what Heidegger calls the four horizons
of Being. Held up by the winter in southern Germany, "the whole day
shut up in a room heated by an enclosed stove," the subject Descartes
turns away from the book of the world in order to study himself, and dis-
covers that only as one single person is he able to make all his thoughts
converge toward one and the same ethical end, and, consequently, attain
truth. 12 Thus, on, hen, agathon, and aletheia govern the constitution of
the subject (Descartes), who by representing himself within the horizon
of these four determinations represents Being as the subjectivity of the
thinking subject: ego cogito. One could make a similar point for Rous-
seau, whose obsession with transparency and sincerity can be shown to
depend on the idea of a self-affection of light and whose desire for up-
rightness depends on the Greek notion of stasis as an essential determina-
tion of Being as presence.
After these all-too-sketchy remarks concerning the Gestalt of auto-
biography as the modern version of the Greek notion of idea, I wish to
argue, in what follows, not only that the figure of Zarathustra is, as Hei-
degger has indicated, a Gestalt but that Nietzsche's self-representation in
Ecce Homo fits that characteristic as well. But further, I hope to demon-
strate that if in Ecce Homo Nietzsche obeys, in a first move, the logic of
Gestalt in order to elaborate a conception of Being as type (Typus), that is,
Being in the shape of a great personality, he subverts this representation
of Being in a second move, and with it the modern notion of subjectivity
and self-reflection. With this second move, a move linked to writing and
the economy of his texts, Nietzsche breaks away not only from the ro-
mantic heritage but, more fundamentally, from the modern representa-
tion of Being and the form of autobiography in which Being is self-
reflectively represented. Writing his self, type-writing it, to be precise,
Nietzsche undercuts nothing less than representation itself, representa-
tion as Vorstellung, in other words, the modern, hence subjective, way of
fixing Being into place.
The duality of Nietzsche's enterprise in Ecce Homo is manifest be-
ginning with its subtitle, borrowed from Pindar: How One Becomes What
One Is.!l If this subtitle can be read as a Parmenidean interpretation of
44 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
Being as something lasting and standing in and on itself, this same subti-
tle also calls for a Heraclitean reading of Being as becoming. However, it
is just as possible that Nietzsche may not have been concerned in his "au-
tobiography" with these metaphysical concepts of Being as either stasis or
becoming. 14 Indeed, I will argue that from the start Nietzsche operates in
the interval between these two complementary metaphysical determin-
ations of Being. Contrary to Heidegger's forceful argument that the
thought of "the eternal return of the same" attempts to escape Platonism
only to remain caught in its simple reversal, Nietzsche, in his intent to
elaborate the time and space of this great thought, stages another notion of
history, of time and space beyond what governs the metaphysical duality
of Being and becoming. As we will see, the great thought of the eternal
return of the same also undermines the very notion of the Gestalt and, in
the same stroke, the genre of autobiography. With the thought of the eter-
nal return of the same, we thus face the need to rethink self-presentation.
To avoid being mistaken for someone else, or even for his own work
and, in particular, for some of its Hegelian overtones (and thus perhaps
for Hegel himself),15 Nietzsche decides to narrate his life, more precisely,
to tell himself his life. 16 This self-revelation, or revelation of oneself to
oneself, clearly continues and repeats the autobiographical gesture of
Descartes's second meditation. I? Yet this enterprise, which grew to matu-
rity at a very particular moment in Nietzsche's life and which finds ex-
pression at a singular juncture in the text of Ecce Homo-namely on the
intercalated leaf between the preface and Ecce Homo "properly" speak-
ing l8-results from conflicting forces and soon enough reveals itself to be
self-contradictory. Seeing himself under pressure to declare who he is,
Nietzsche experiences this necessity as an inevitable condescension and a
fatal descent (Niedergang) opposed to the instincts of distance. This in-
terplay between necessity and the pride of the instincts in the attempt to
reappropriate his former work and to make up or complete his life
through self-presentation, rather than to assure a contemporaneity with
himself and his fellowmen, leads only to an ever greater dissimilarity with
himself and to an even greater distance with regard to his own self. How-
Type- Writing Nietzsche's Self 45
II
The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I
am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father, while as my
mother I am still living and becoming old. This dual descent, as it were, both
from the highest and the lowest rung on the ladder of life, at the same time a
decadent and a beginning-this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that free-
dom from all partiality in relation to the total problem of life, that perhaps dis-
tinguishes me. (p. 222)
Nietzsche starts tracking his history as a history with a double origin from
the moment at which he becomes aware that to recover from his sickness
he must return to his "nethermost self" (p. 287). This return is coupled
with a developing interest in medicine, physiology, and the natural sci-
ences. At the expense of the (in truth, decadent) preoccupation with his-
tory, this interest, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is supposed to
further an active "ignorance in physiologicis," through which a rearrange-
ment of his personal history becomes possible in terms and for the bene-
fit of his nethermost self. Let me, then, follow Nietzsche through this ex-
ploration of his buried nethermost self.
First, we need to recall the unusual beginning of Nietzsche's career
as a writer. He states: "This beginning is exceedingly strange. I had dis-
covered the only parable and parallel in history for my own inmost expe-
rience-and thus became the first to comprehend the wonderful phe-
nomenon of the Dionysian" (pp. 271-72). It is a strange beginning,
indeed, for it reveals that the actuality of Nietzsche's life has a pendant in
the past. This similarity of the two temporal moments of past and pre-
sent, but especially the parallelism of Nietzsche's experience and the
Dionysian, explains his penetration of the phenomenon of the Dionysian
itself. Further, the coincidence in question shows history to be double.
On the one hand, there is a repetition or return of the past-Dionysian,
or Heraclitean, history. On the other hand, there is history properly
speaking, history as linear-the Apollonian and Socratic fall-away from
cyclical, or Dionysian, history. But both histories are double as well. Lin-
ear history is decadent history, and cyclical history is predicated on be-
coming and destruction. Dionysus has a double origin: twice born, once
from the womb of the princess Semele, once from the leg of Zeus. Nietz-
sche's origin, parallel to the Dionysian phenomenon-its parable (Gleich-
nis)-is similarly a double origin.
50 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
own father. Yet what does it mean for Nietzsche still to be living and be-
coming older as his mother? A mother's role is to carry a child for the full
term. But not yet due to be born, his time not yet having come, he will re-
main, as his mother, indefinitely pregnant with himself If, as Pierre Klos-
sowski suggests, Nietzsche does not father himself because he dies as his
own father, neither is he his own mother, because he does not give birth to
himself2 7 As Nietzsche holds, "I live on my own credit: it is perhaps a
mere prejudice that I live" (p. 217).
Insofar as Nietzsche stands on the highest rung on the ladder of life,
the further role of the father is to take that life from him. The wicked her-
itage, and the death as one's own father, impedes all possible becoming
from the outset. But this misfortune is also what allows Nietzsche to short-
circuit the process of linear decadence. Deprived of the possibility of a
continuous climb from the lowest to the highest rung on the ladder oflife,
Nietzsche escapes altogether the time of decadence, that is, linear histori-
cal time. As he himself as his own mother carries himself endlessly for the
full term, he grows old "at the same time a decadent and a beginning."
More succinctly, since Nietzsche is already dead as a beginning capable of
development to its end, Nietzsche remains an eternal beginning, a begin-
ning that is already its own end. Congenitally deprived of linear develop-
ment and decline, Nietzsche enjoys the privilege of a life in which he re-
peats himself eternally as the same, a life of becoming. By taking place in
and as the interval of beginning and decadence, this repetition, or return, of
oneself as a stillborn beginning, and as a selfsame that does not wish to be-
come different, opens a third space. 28 Before any further exploration of this
space, I note that Nietzsche characterizes it as a neutral space. Although
the interface of Nietzsche's Doppelnatur-opened up, for instance, by the
interruption of the flow of time in sickness-generates a state of "fullness
and [thel self-assurance of a rich life," as well as a space rich in perspectives
"toward healthier concepts and values" (p. 223), it is not a dialectical space.
Nor is it a place where complementary or self-contradictory doubles re-
solve into nullity or abstract nothingness. Instead, Nietzsche's dual de-
scent, which provides him with the most subtle smell for the "signs of
ascent and descent"-"I know both, I am both" (p. 222}-qualifies this
intermediary space of the return of the same as a space of neutrality, or
rather, impartiality, toward "the total problem ofIife."
52 U NT I MEL Y R E LA T ION S
III
years I did not read a thing-the greatest benefit I ever conferred on my-
self" (p. 287). This blindness-during which Nietzsche is unable to see
three steps ahead, and which he experiences 30 years after his father's
death, at the precise moment when he reaches his father's age, 36-is also,
I argue, a kind of self-punishment for having slain himself as his own fa-
ther and for having committed incest with himself as his own mother. At
the fork in the road, in the interface of the way upward and the way
downward, and at the moment when Nietzsche looks both forward and
backward, that is to say, at the moment when he finds himself as the same,
Nietzsche repeats all the moments of the triangular oedipal configuration.
The oedipal triangulation, which necessarily structures the becoming of
the subject in a genealogy predicated on continuous and cumulative time,
would thus also seem to be vital to one's becoming a type. What does this
repetition stand for? What does the fact that even in becoming a type it
cannot be circumvented indicate? Does it simply mean that there is no
difference in essence between a self-conscious subject encrusted in a ge-
nealogy and a type who dismisses any apology?30 Is the moment of medi-
ation the same in both cases? Does the third space, the unusual space of
the interval, become absorbed by this triangulation? These are some of the
questions we must ask. But before I can begin answering them, a further
investigation of Nietzsche's temporary blindness is necessary.
This loss of sight, which prevents Nietzsche from seeing more than
three steps ahead, is connected to three days of migraines during which
Nietzsche excels in dialectics: "In the midst of the torments that go with
an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting
of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought
through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circum-
stances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough" (pp.
222-23). If Nietzsche reminds us right away that he considers "dialectic as
a symptom of decadence; for example in the most famous case, the case
of Socrates" (p. 223) (similar, indeed, with its three operative steps, to the
three-day migraine, the vision reduced to three steps, and the triangular
configuration), then the book Dawn, to which Nietzsche gives birth dur-
ing these three days, announces necessarily a new beginning. But what is
this new beginning that comes about only through, and as, a repetition of
triple steps and triangular figures?
Type- Writing Nietzsche's Self 55
Even though this figure three is a figure of closure that presides over
the movement of speculative thought in a totalizing perspective, Nietz-
sche makes this figure turn upon itself and transforms it into a sign oflib-
eration. Heintich von Stein, who came to visit Nietzsche for three days, is
a case in point. Nietzsche recalls, "This excellent human being, who had
walked into the Wagnerian morass with all the impetuous simplicity of a
Prussian Junker ... acted during these three days like one transformed by
a tempest of freedom, like one who has suddenly been lifted to his own
height and acquired wings" (p. 227). Nor should one forget in this con-
text the following passage, also from Ecce Homo: "With a dithyra.mb like
the last one in the third part of Zarathustra, entitled 'The Seven Seals,' I
soared a thousand miles beyond what was called poetry hitherto" (pp.
265-66). At once symptomatic of decline and of ascent, the new begin-
ning is born from the superior and exceeding excellence of the very repe-
tition of these threefold figures. If Nietzsche enjoyed "a dialectician's clar-
ity par excellence," it is precisely because by its repetition, dialectics
becomes a liberating force. The new beginning takes shape through and
as a repetition of the totally mediated and speculatively closed tertiary fig-
ures. Only through the repetition of these totalizing tertiary figures is it
possible to displace their decadent limitations and implications and to
open up the space-the third space-of the same. I recall that all these
triple and tertiary figures presuppose an intermediary space-the space
of the interval-in which they tie into one the interval's respective relata,
or foundations. However, in the capacity of totalizing figures, both the
number three and the threefold of the triangulations are blind to this in-
termediary space. They are, therefore, blind as well to their repetition in
the space and as the space, in which their possibility is rooted, a repeti-
tion that is a return of the same, insofar as, precisely, this repetition dis-
places these figures' mastering power.
Such blindness of dialectics can be witnessed, for example, in the ar-
guments that Eugen Fink advances to support the claim that the third part
of Zarathustra represents the central part (Herzstuck), the mean, the mid-
dle (die 'Mitte') of the work. According to such arguments, this third part
is "the natural end of the work," that is, the part in which Zarathustra-
Nietzsche returns for the third time "in order to find himself as the essen-
tial middle [wesentliche Mittel of his thinking," and the part that, hence,
56 UNTIMELY RELATIONS
guages" (p. 255). He continues, "Languages are not strangers to one an-
other, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interre-
lated in what they want to express." But languages are not akin to one an-
other as far as their words, sentences, and linguistic structures are
concerned, nor are they related through the content that they individu-
ally impart:
Rather, all suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every
one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant. Yet this one thing is
achievable not by any single language but only by the totality of their intentions
supplementing one another: the pure language. Whereas all individual elements
of foreign languages-words, sentences, associations-are mutually exclusive,
these languages supplement one another in their intentions. (p. 257)
What Benjamin establishes here as "a law [that] is one of the fundamental
principles in the philosophy of language" (p. 257), namely, that all singu-
lar languages intend one and the same thing (eines und zwar dasselbe), had
already been thematized in the earlier essay "On Language as Such" under
the name of communicability. The latter stipulated that language, qua lan-
guage, qua linguistic medium, communicates only the unmediated com-
munication of its own communicating. And just as this medium-related
quality presupposes a distancing from language's instrumental functions,
so language's intention toward pure language becomes manifest only if
languages become thoroughly denaturalized. Such denaturalization of nat-
ural language- the task par excellence of translation-is achieved by trans-
lation's focusing not on a language's intended objects but on the mode of
its intending, or on what the Scholastics called modus significandi-the
mode, or intention, of meaning (Art des Meinens).12
By finding in his own language those tendencies or intentions to-
ward pure language that transcend its own natural condition, the transla-
tor produces "in that language the echo of the original" (p. 258). In this,
his enterprise resembles the Adamic naming language as described in
"On Language as Such." As Benjamin establishes in this essay, man can
name things only because they communicate their expression, their lin-
guistic being to him. What they express is their communicability, their
each-time-singular intention to communicate: "Their language passes
into man" when man contemplates (Anschauen) things and names the
72 I N TEN DIN G THE NON R E L A T ION A L
tensive form [darstellen, indem sie es keimhaft oder intensiv verwirklicht J."
The mode of representation in question, a mode "of so singular a nature
that it is rarely met with in the sphere of nonlinguistic life" (a mode, by
the way, that originates in chemistry) allows only for an "intensive-that
is, anticipative, intimating-realization" of the hidden relationship be-
tween the languages (p. 255). What is true of translation, that it "is only a
somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of
languages" since "an instant and final rather than a temporary and provi-
sional solution to this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind,"
is valid for Adamic naming language, and for philosophy as well (p. 257).
Although man, in "On Language as Such," is shown to be "the speaker of
language" since "he speaks in name," this only "vouches for the fact that
language as such is the mental being of man," and not for the one realiz-
ing language as such in naming, that is, the divine word itself (p. 65).
Adam's naming language, which answers things' language, is, notwith-
standing its importance, only one moment of "the uninterrupted flow
of ... communication [that] runs through the whole of nature, from the
lowest forms of existence to man and from man to God" (p. 74). Philos-
ophy too, and its thought of difference, is only one rung on the ladder
leading to what Benjamin terms doctrine (Lehre), which is concerned
with the divine, or pure difference itself. 13
As Benjamin knew very well, the translation by name of the differ-
ence that things communicate to man in their expression, as well as a
translation's articulation of what in the original's language hints at the
hidden kinship of languages, establishes a community between two
spheres that needs an ultimate grounding in a higher sphere. However
perfect the language may be into which the less perfect language is trans-
lated, "the objectivity of this translation" must be guaranteed by God, he
reminds us (p. 70). Indeed, as Benjamin argues in "On Language as
Such," it is only because the divine word created things, which thus con-
tain as a residue "the germ of the cognizing name," that man can name
things in the first place (p. 70). Benjamin demonstrates a fine philosoph-
ical sensitivity when he declares that man's task of naming things "would
be insoluble were not the name-language of man and the nameless lan-
guage of things related in God and released from the same creative word,
which in things became the communication of matter in magic commu-
Tearing at the Texture 75
nion, and in man the language of knowledge and name in blissful mind"
(p. 70). For naming and translation to be possible, a prior "identity of the
creative word and the cognizing name in God" must, indeed, be assumed
(p. 70). The identity of the creative and at the same time cognizing divine
word-this ultimate community-is the condition of possibility of all
expression and all naming, or translation.
In his "Program of the Coming Philosophy," where, in the name of
a unitarian approach to the question of the ultimate ground, Benjamin
takes a critical stand against the Kantian division between epistemology
and metaphysics, or again, between criticism and dogmatic philosophy,
Benjamin had already severely criticized the Kantian philosophical notions
of experience and cognition. Yet the metaphysics targeted in this essay still
envisioned the possibility of a higher form of specifically philosophical
cognition and experience in which the "absolute, as existence," God for
short, could be encountered in un mediated fashion (p. 109). Although
such concepts of experience and cognition already turn philosophy into
the doctrine of religion with its immediate absolute certainty of the ab-
solute, Benjamin continued to think the latter as cognitively apprehensible
in systematic unity. But by the time of his later work-The Origin ofGer-
man Tragic Drama-Benjamin had given up hope that mere thought
could conceptually come to grips with the fundamental identity and unity
of the ultimate ground. In the Goethe essay, Benjamin had established
that the unity of philosophy, its system, is in no way within the reach of
philosophical questioning (p. 334). Truth, he states in "The Epistemo-
Critical Prologue," "is devoid of all intention, and certainly does not itself
appear as intention. Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly
intentional ones." Its mode of existence is that of "an intentionless state of
being." The prior identity that, as seen, must underlie both poles of a
translation process can no longer be approached philosophically since, as
he writes, "truth is the death of intention." 14 All attempts to come to grips
with it cognitively, by attempting to ensnare truth in the "spider's web" of
thought "as if it were something which came flying in from outside," show
philosophy still to be in the grips of myth. 1'i Cognition is still intentional
and relational, and thus mediated by natural desires and ends. Benjamin
writes: "Knowledge is possession. Its very object is determined by the fact
that it must be taken possession of-even if in a transcendental sense-
76 INTENDING THE NONRELATIONAL
cal difference that alone can make it meaningful, and that alone can grant
significance to the fundamental philosophical law not to mix.
As mentioned, from a philosophical viewpoint, communicability
and translatability are finite concepts of transcending and difference. As
such they might seem to mix the incommensurable dimensions of the
universal and the particular. But that such mixing does not occur is
shown by the fact that Benjamin's notion of language-not unlike Kant's
notion of the sublime, which only negatively represents the realm of
ideas-refers to that same ideal realm by violently destroying language's
aesthetic and structural characteristics. In precisely this manner, com-
municability and translatability avoid mixing domains. In aesthetic con-
siderations, reference to theological concepts does not imply any
metabasis eis allo genos ("a mixing of genres"), as Benjamin remarks in
The Origin o/German Tragic Drama, but serves instead to demarcate lev-
els in the first place so that the theoretical paradoxes that distinguish
these considerations can be solved. In the same way, the finite concepts
of difference, rather than implying an illegitimate confusion of levels of
thought, secure their distinction by likewise representing (darstellen)
what pertains to "the higher domain of theology," in the very destruc-
tion of the networks of language. 17 Such destruction, as discussed above,
makes the difference.
This concept of difference, then, is not simply a philosophical con-
cept. Benjamin agrees with Kant that reference to the absolute ground as
absolutely Other is inevitable. He also agrees with Kant that such a
ground cannot be known in its difference from objects of nature. Thought
cannot hope to conceptualize it, or realize it in consciousness. Yet Ben-
jamin refuses, not only in "Program of the Coming Philosophy" but
throughout his writings, to go along with Kant's injunction to keep criti-
cism and metaphysics separate. For Benjamin to conflate the two realms is
not to indulge in empiricism, or what amounts to the same, in the leveling
demonic forces of myth; on the contrary, such conflation serves only to re-
alize difference in the first place. Benjamin proceeds from the assumption
that actual reference by (critical) philosophy to the higher domain of the
ground is what endows philosophy with its distinguishing trait. Although
it cannot think the ground, it actually anticipates it in the existent. In that
sense critical philosophy is for him always already theology, but not theol-
Tearing at the Texture 81
the demonic forces of fate is, because it exists (as opposed to merely phe-
nomenal and cognitive nondifference), anticipatory of the being of the
ideas-or to use another of Benjamin's expressions, the being of the "in-
divisible unity," or, rather, as the German original puts it, "the crackless
[sprungloseJ unity of truth."20
Cutting in on Distance
The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical ob-
jects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We
define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however
dose it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your
eyes a mountain range on the horiwn or a branch which casts its shadow over
you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image
makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the
aura. (pp. 222-23; 479)
the definition of the aura [of natural objects] as a 'unique phenomenon of a dis-
tance however close it may be' represents nothing but the formulation of the cult
value of the work of art in categories of space and time perception. Distance is
the opposite of closeness. The essentially distant object is the unapproachable
one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult value. (pp. 243; 479)
What is the aura, actually? A strange weave [Gespinstl of space and time: the
unique appearance or semblance of a distance, no matter how dose the object
may be. While resting on a summer's noon, to trace a range of mountains on the
horiwn, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or
the hour become part of their appearance-that is what it means to breathe the
aura of those mountains, that branch. 9
The phrase "until the moment or the hour become part of their appear-
ance," which is absent from the otherwise very similar passage in "The
Work of Art," shows the aura to be constituted as a web in which space
and time (Augen blick, Stunde) are interwoven so as to create the condi-
tions for a mountain range or a branch to become the unique appearance
of a distance. All by themselves insignificant, space and singular moment
when woven together transform these mountains and that branch into
the singular coming into presence of a distance entirely different in kind
from that of the far-off mountains or the nearby branch.
To sum up, then, the auratic is the attribute of the thing, or object-
like appearing of something beyond appearances, that thus becomes ef-
fective, actual, real. As such a materialization of a distance become power,
the auratic object, whether belonging to cult or to art, is authentic and
Cutting in on Distance 91
has authority. It has authority in that powers hold sway in it. It is always
unique and singular because in it a distance has taken on a concrete ap-
pearance. It is thus not surprising that Benjamin would reject, along with
the auratic work, "values" such as singularity, uniqueness, and authentic-
ity, since in essence they are nothing but the result of the appearing as
thing or object of a spiritless substratum that thus acquires a power to
hold sway. Benjamin writes, "the unique value of the 'authentic' work of
art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value" (pp. 224;
480). Nor, therefore, should it come as a surprise if Benjamin celebrates,
along with the disappearance of the aura, the decay of the object in con-
temporaryart. IO
But before taking up that issue, the lack of any essential difference
between the auras of objects and of human beings remains to be estab-
lished, as does the fact that Benjamin mourns the loss of neither. In sec-
tion 6 of "The Work of Art"-the section mainly referenced by Susan
Buck-Morss and others to claim a concomitant negative valorization by
Benjamin of the decay of the aura-Benjamin argues that although pho-
tography displaces cult value all along the line, it does not give way with-
out resistance. He then writes:
It retires into an ultimate retrenchment kin letzte Verschantzung, that is, a tem-
porally last form of retrenchment, before it will have been displaced for good]:
the human countenance [Menschenantlitz] ... The cult of remembrance ofloved
ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the
last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression
of a human face [Menschengesichtsl. (pp. 225-26; 485)
pation of object from aura which is the most signal achievement of the
latest school of photography," Benjamin remarks. Atget's pictures, he
adds, remove "the makeup from reality"; "they pump the aura out of re-
ality like water from a sinking ship." This achievement, prefiguring sur-
realist photography's "salutary estrangement between man and his sur-
roundings," is largely the result of the emptiness and the absence of
mood (stimmungslos) characteristic of his pictures. II
But more important is the fact that Benjamin does not valorize the
human face, as have several of his interpreters. To make this point, it is
useful to look once again to "A Small History of Photography." Here Ben-
jamin argues that die aura or "atmospheric medium" that hovers about
the people in early photographs, and that lends "fullness and security to
their gaze even as it [the gaze] penetrated that medium," endows the hu-
man face (and likewise the folds of the protagonists' frock coats, into
which the aura has seeped) with immortality.12 In these early portraits,
"the human countenance had a silence about it in which the gaze rested,"
because the portraiture of this period still sheltered the reproduced from
cont:lct with actuality. "Everything about these early pictures was built to
last," Benjamin writes. They convey "an air of permanence," and assure
immort:llity to the portrayed not only as members of a rising bourgeois
class but as living human beings. 13 As the photography essay states, the
aura of the human countenance in early photography is technically con-
ditioned-it is indeed a function of "the absolute continuum from the
brightest light to darkest shadow," of the prevailing darkness and the
penumbral tone of the early photographs. 14 But the aura stems as well
from the ideological nature of these photographic subjects-imperialist
bourgeoisie-and in particular (here I return to "The Work of Art") from
the fullness, security, and rest that photographs lend to the face in its mere
natural singularity. If, in this latter essay, Benjamin evokes the aura of the
pictured human face, he thinks primarily of the faces of absent or dead
loved ones (ftrn or abgestorben). The early photographs portray singular
living beings now absent or dead, that is, beings in whose countenances
mere lijf-natural, biological life-has taken on phenomenal shape. The
aura of the human being, whether in pictures or in real living persons, is
a function of the unique and singular appearance as thing of something
for which Benjamin, continuing a tradition that originated in Aristotle,
Cutting in on Distance 93
knows only contempt-das blosse Leben, mere natural life. Such life, Ben-
jamin asserts in the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, is life that has be-
come guilty (verschuldetes Leben ).1) As the singularizing shining forth of
mere life, the human face is not essentially different from the unique and
singular objects that are the coming into appearance of a distance. 1(,
Benjamin's analysis of the difference between the actor on stage and
the actor in front of the camera (Apparatur) in section 9 of "The Work of
Art" is a case in point. He writes:
For the first time-and this is the effect of the film-man has to operate with
his whole living person, yet forgoing the aura. For aura is tied to his presence
[Hier undJetzt 1; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on stage, emanates
from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor.
However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted
for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with
it the aura of the figure he portrays. (pp. 229; 489)
The camera, unlike the eyes of stage viewers, allows nothing to appear or
shine into singularizing presence. No distance can manifest itself here in
the unique shape of a thing, human body, or face. Indeed, Benjamin's
whole discussion of what happens to the actor who represents himself to
the camera presupposes that time and space, here and now, are no longer
the forms that frame or shape what the camera "eye" registers. Camera
pictures are free pictures, detached from the outset from all space and
time and thus also reproducible from the outset. The images are com-
pletely stripped of anything that could make them appearances. The pas-
sage quoted above links the aura of the actor to the presence, here and
now, on stage, of "his whole living person." On stage, the whole living
person comes into an appearance for the spectators. The aura that sur-
rounds the actor is a function of this singularizing phenomenalization of
the mere life that animates his whole person. Before the camera, by con-
trast, life loses its phenomenalizing power; it forgoes its ability to create
appearances and, hence, aura.
To conclude the preceding attempt to define "aura," it must thus be
remarked that if Benjamin, without hesitation or regret, rejects the sin-
gularity of both objects and human faces, it is because the human face,
too, is an object in the sense discussed above-an objectified distance.
94 INTENDING THE NONRELATIONAL
longer allow for contemplation is their shock character. The dadaist work
of art is "an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it
happened to him, thus acquiring tactile quality," Benjamin asserts. With
this latter quality, he continues, "it promoted a demand for film, the dis-
tracting [ablenkendes] element of which is also primarily tactile, being
based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the specta-
tor" (pp. 238; 502). He concludes, "By means of its technical structure,
the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers [aus dieser
Emballage befreit] in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the
moral shock effect" (pp. 238; 503).20 In film, something held back by
dadaist art is fully liberated. But, as we still have to see, this is also a lib-
eration from something and for something.
Indeed, what precisely is it that happens in shock? In shock, the
viewer becomes diverted from the object that causes the shock. With this,
the possibility of contemplation (Versenkung) or concentration (Samm-
lung) in front of the object comes to a stop. Instead, the beholder be-
comes preoccupied with reacting to the shock to which he has been sub-
jected. Through the violent shake that the dadaist work produces in the
spectator and with which he must come to grips in one way or another,
the work itseif deflects from itself, from the thing or object that it is. It
distracts the viewer from its singular appearance and diverts him toward
what at first would seem to be some sort of subjective reflection on, or
Durcharbeitung of, the violent disturbance that has occurred to him.
With dadaist art, and even more so with film since its distracting element
rests on structural features such as cutting and montage, the object char-
acter of the artwork recedes entirely, and thus a radical diversion from
what attracts-the singular object of the aura tic work with its luring and
enticing qualities-has effectively been achieved. 21 An aesthetics of shock
is thus nonobjective. In it the object has become diverted and deflected.
It thus has all the allure of Kantian aesthetics, with its subjective bent.
Yet, despite the striking similarities, is the subject who seeks to come to
terms with his experience of shock the Kantian subject, and does he
achieve his goal in a process of reflection or judgment?
Auratic works of art lure the spectator into a state of concentration
and contemplation, more precisely into immersing himself in the object.
Benjamin writes: "A man who concentrates before a work of art is ab-
Cutting in on Distance 97
sorbed by it [versenkt sich darein]. He enters into this work of art the way
legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting"
(pp. 239; 504). Yet such absorption by the work presupposes that its
viewer be an individual subject. The cult value of the work, Benjamin
emphasizes, demands not just "that the work of art remain hidden" but
also that it can only "be viewed by one person or by a few," "the priests
in the cella," or the private art collector (pp. 225; 483-84). Concentration,
contemplation, absorption presuppose a single spectator, or very few, who
in front of the authentic, authoritative artwork lack the power ro control
themselves or each other. The moviegoer, by contrast, is no longer the one
viewer. It is a mass public, a collective subject from the start. For the mass
of individuals in the movie theater, concentration on or contemplation of
the artwork is out of the question. First, what they relate to is, as said be-
fore, no longer a thing that could lay claim to authority. Moreover, the
content viewed by these moviegoers is not the representation of some
spellbinding exotic reality (geographical or social) but, as Benjamin's em-
phasis on Russian movies demonstrates, themselves as actors and workers
at work. 22 Second, contemporary man, Benjamin insists, relates in a crit-
ical fashion to what he views. He writes, "it is inherent in the technique
of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its ac-
complishments is somewhat of an expert" (pp. 231; 492). Film invites
what Benjamin terms "a progressive reaction." This reaction "is charac-
terized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment
with the orientation of the expert .... With regard to the screen, the crit-
ical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide" (pp. 234; 497).
This critical attitude, entirely at odds with the contemplative attitude de-
manded by auratic art, is the ownmost property of the mass individual,
more precisely, of the mass audience. Indeed, as Benjamin claims, mass
individuals check their reactions against one another. He contends that
"individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response
they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in
the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each
other" (pp. 234; 497). Third, the subject who seeks to come to grips with
the effects of shock experienced in film-Benjamin characterizes the
movie theater as a training ground for acquiring the transformed mode of
perception required by modern life-is thus an autonomous subject of
98 I NT END I N G THE NON R E L A T ION A L
sorts. As a mass, the hIm audience is in control of itself; it checks and col-
lectively tests its reactions to shock-shock produced by a work that no
longer exercises any authority over its beholder. Free from all domination,
this collective subject, testing against one another the success of each in-
dividual in dealing with shock, reflects itself into a free, independent sub-
ject that gives itself the rule, as it were. This is the source of the "great so-
cial significance" (pp. 234; 497) that Benjamin attributes to a nonauratic
art form in which the object has been successfully repelled. If with these
new media, art assumes a new function-a political role, to be precise-
it is because art has become the training ground for the proletariat, or
rather the masses, ro constitute itself as a collective subject by developing
all by itself the necessary skills to survive in contemporary society.
Yet what sort of autonomy is it that the moviegoers achieve in the
dark depths of the movie house? Has this collective subject the substantial
unity of the Cartesian, or the merely formal unity of the Kantian subject?
Does the reflection upon self that comes with the repulsion of the object
grant the subject an awareness of his cognitive and suprasensible abilities?
Can this process of coming to terms with the shock effect even be un-
derstood as a reflective coiling upon self? To answer these questions,
however schematically, the effects brought about by the violent distur-
bance of shock needs to be addressed. As Benjamin puts it, referring to
the effects of the hIm images, "the spectator's process of association in
view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden
change. This constitutes the shock effect of the hIm" (pp. 238; 503). Or,
to refer to the photography essay, the cameras images "paralyze the asso-
ciative mechanisms in the beholder."23 In other words, the effect caused
by shock is precisely the hampering of a subject's constitution of itself, its
ability to cohere with itself so as to form a center. Benjamin quotes
Georges Duhamel as a witness for this loss of all inner continuity with
self: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been
replaced by moving images." Whereas the spectator "can abandon him-
self to his associations" before a painting, "before the movie frame he can-
not do so" (pp. 238; 502). It comes therefore as no surprise that Benjamin
characterizes the new mode of participation of the mass audience in the
movies as one of distraction (Zerstreuung). Not only does art in the age
of mechanical reproduction deflect from the object, distract it, as it were,
Cutting in on Distance 99
but further the collective subject of the critical reception of the new art
forms is a distracted beholder. His associative mechanisms are interrupted
by shock, and although he responds to the shocks that assail him through
"a heightened presence of the mind" (pp. 238; 503), he does so in a dis-
tracted manner. The collective subject, consequently, is neither a sub-
stantial nor a formal center that would ground its autonomy. It is a dis-
tracted subject in all the senses of the word. Yet compared to the
individual who lets himself be immersed in the auratic work, or who in
front of it weaves an equally mythical identity for himself while aban-
doning himself to his associations, this distracted collective subject and
its behavior toward art is, according to Benjamin, the answer to the ques-
tions that humanity faces today. The new kind of behavior that issues
from the mass's matrix (neugebohren hervorgeht) is undoubtedly a form
that appears first in the "disreputable form" of distraction as diversion, or
entertainment, Benjamin admits (pp. 239; 503). Similarly, the new sub-
ject that collectively emerges with the loss of the aura coincides, at first,
with what one contemptuously and condescendingly refers to as the
masses. But this much is clear: both this distracted behavior and this cen-
terless subject are credited by Benjamin with representing a solution to
the problems of his time. The heightened presence of mind of this col-
lective subject is not self-consciousness (individual or class conscious-
ness). When Benjamin notes that, in contrast to the traditional viewer
who becomes absorbed by art, "the distracted mass absorbs [versenkt in
sich 1the work of art" (pp. 239; 504), it is not only to stress the scattering
of the work of art as object in the mass and its replacement by the shock
effect, bur to characterize the mass's state of mind as so permeable that
paradoxically it cushions against all attack. 24 But, perhaps more signifi-
cantly, this remark forces us to conceive of the state of mind of the dis-
tracted mass, as set up by Benjamin, along lines akin to the classical di-
vide between high and low culture. According to this opposition, the
state of mind of the masses is characterized by absentmindedness, habit-
ual modes of thinking, and unfocused, incidental relating to its sur-
roundings. It is separated by a gulf from the self-consciousness of the
(bourgeois) individual. Indeed, what Benjamin valorizes in the masses
coping with shock are precisely these despised states of mind. Philosoph-
ically speaking, such a mental disposition is empirical consciousness.
100 I NT END I N G THE NON R E LA T ION A L
ize the mass audience reaction to the shock effect of the film. Indeed, this
critical achievement is accomplished not merely in a state of distraction
but by habit as well.
As Benjamin's discussion of architecture would seem to suggest, the
kind of relation to art that becomes dominant with film is in truth a lib-
eration of the modes of reception of buildings by the masses since time
immemorial, modes repressed by auratic art. Since the beginning of ar-
chitecture, the masses have appropriated buildings, not through "atten-
tive appropriation" but by habit. It "occurs much less through rapt atten-
tion than by noticing the object in incidental fashion" (pp. 240; 505).
Such habitual ways of appropriation determine both the tactile and opti-
cal reception of works of architecture. This mode of reception of art cul-
minates in the masses' consumption of films, and has, according to Ben-
jamin, "canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of
perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical
means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by
habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation" (pp. 240; 505). Indeed,
the thrust of Benjamin's argument is that the problems he refers to have
been successfully solved only when they have been mastered "in a state of
distraction [since this] proves that their solution has become a matter of
habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the ex-
tent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception" (pp. 240;
505). In these times, the only problem solving that has a chance of suc-
ceeding is that which occurs in incidental fashion but has become habit-
ual, hence repetitive and reproducible and not unique or singular, and
which consequently does not focus or concentrate on what causes the
problems. Only the masses are up to these tasks, Benjamin claims. "Indi-
viduals are tempted to avoid these tasks," presumably because of the fatal
attraction exercised by the causes, or objects, of these problems. Against
them the individual, acting alone, cannot protect himself. Only in con-
junction with other individuals in a mass can he develop the repetitive ha-
bitual modes of reaction that prevent him from falling prey to the spell of
what obtains here and now. In the movie theaters, the mass audience
practices distracted and habitual problem solving. "The film makes the
cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in
the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this posi-
102 INTENDING THE NONRELATIONAL
It is not by giving something a definite character that we first discover that which
shows itself-the hammer-as such; but when we give it such a character, our
seeing gets restricted to it in the first instance, so that by this explicit restriction of
our view, that which is already manifest may be made explicitly manifest in its
definite [in seiner Bestimmtheitl character. In giving something a definite charac-
ter, we must, in the first instance, take a step back when confronted with that
which is already manifest-the hammer that is too heavy. In "setting down the
subject," we dim entities down to focus in "that hammer there," so that by thus
FLoundering in Determination I09
dimming them down we may let that which is manifest be seen in its own defi-
nite character as a character that can be determined. (p. I97)
"just letting one see what is present-at-hand, and letting one see it in a
definite way. This leveling of the primordial 'as' of circumspective inter-
pretation to the 'as' with which presence-at-hand is given a definite char-
acter is the speciality of assertion." This derivative "as" that constitutes the
structure of determining assertion is called the apophantic "as" (p. 201).
Determination, therefore, is not a primary discovering. In Logik,
Heidegger emphasizes that "assertive determination never determines a
primary and originary relation to what is." Because it is derivative, stem-
ming from the originary as-structure of circumspective understanding-
the result of a leveling modification of this as-structure-it can never "be
made the guiding thread for the question regarding Being." "Determina-
tion," he concludes, "is itself as well as its whole structure a derivative
phenomenon. "7
If determination is thus a restrictive mode of discovering that pre-
supposes modified structures of understanding and a reduction of the
world to the present-at-hand, what then is the status of the word Bestim-
men in the discourse of Being and Time? Indeed, not only does Heidegger
demonstrate the derivative character of determination as a concept and a
mode of interpretation, but he continues in that work to make use of the
terms bestimmen and Bestimmung (as well as numerous words of the same
root) in a variety of ways. I shall address the status of the notion of be-
stimmung in Being and Time by suggesting that it is not merely a question
of stylistics, and not simply a theoretical question, but a question con-
cerning the Stimmung (the mood andlor the coherence) of Heidegger's
discourse. Heidegger, while discussing the leveling of primary under-
standing in determining assertion in his 1925126 Marburg lectures, makes
a distinction that may give us a lead on the question of the word Bestim-
men in the work of 1927:
When I say: This piece of chalk is white, then this assertion about something
with which I am dealing is not an assertion that as such would primarily relate
(as far as its content is concerned) to my dealings. If I said, while writing: The
chalk is too hard ... then I would make an assertion within my performance
[Verrichtung], within writing .... This assertion: "The chalk is roo sandy," is not
only a determination of the chalk, but at the same time an interpretation of my
behavior and of not being able to behave-of not being able to write "correctly."
In this assertion I do not wish to determine this thing, that I hold in my hand,
Floundering in Determination III
as something that has the properties of hardness or sandiness, bur I wish to say:
it hinders me in writing; thus the assertion is interpretatively related to the writ-
ing activity, i.e. to the primary dealings of writing itself, i.e., it is assertion as in-
terpretation of being-in-as being-alongside. H
we read "that along with the equipment to be found when one is at work.
those Others for whom the 'work' is destined [bestimmtJ are 'encountered
too'" (p. 153). In all these cases, the term is used in a casual, ordinary way.
A definitely more technical use of Bestimmung occurs in Heidegger\
text when the task of phenomenological description or interpretation be-
comes characterized as one of determining the structures of its objects (in
paragraph 14, for example). In this latter case, Bestimmung means in die
Bestimmtheit bringen, "to give definiteness to," or "to raise to a conceptual
level the phenomenal content of what has been disclosed" (pp. 117, 179).
Although Dasein, the object of the phenomenological analysis of Being
and Time, is thoroughly different from objects present-at-hand, Heideg-
ger continues to characterize his whole investigation as an existentiale Bes-
timmung, as an attempt to exhibit the Grundbestimmungen des Daseins.
But even more questionable is a third type of reference to the concept of
determination.
The structures that constitute the meaning of Being are said to "lie
beyond every entity and every possible character [seiende Bestimmtheitl
which an entity may possess" (p. 62). Hence the meaning of Being "de-
mands that it be conceived in a way of its own, essentially contrasting
with the concepts in which entities acquire their determinate signification
[Bestimmtheit]" (p. 26). But not only does Heidegger characterize phe-
nomenology as the Bestimmungsart of Being; he also seeks to make Being
itself determinate, and that according to the essential determinative struc-
tures for the character of its Being (seinsbestimmende) (p. 38). At stake in
such an analysis is Being's originary Sinnbestimmtheit (its "temporal de-
terminateness"), which has to be made thematic in an overcoming of "the
very indefiniteness [Unbestimmtheitl" in which vague and average under-
standing holds Being, by means of a return to "those primordial experi-
ences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of
Being [Bestimmungen des Seins J."9
One may perhaps wish to object here that this use of the word and
notion of Bestimmung with reference to what the analytic of Dasein is to
achieve and to Being itself is not to be taken literally, that the term is used
in quotation marks, so to speak. Yet although in Logik he had clearly
stated that Being is not an object for any possible Bestimmung,10 in Being
and Time Heidegger does not make the slightest effort to counter possible
Floundering in Determination II3
mode of relating derived from a more fundamental mode, and thus there
is nothing originary to it. Bestimmung as a philosophical terminus tech-
nicum is just as common as its customary signification. But is there then
a proper signification of Bestimmung, a signification in which that word
would properly be thought and inhabited? It must be noted here that the
derivation and limitation of Bestimmung in Being and Time does not yield
a proper meaning of that word. No fundamental meaning of Bestimmung
is produced in this work to account for the juxtaposition of the different
usages of that word by showing them to be derived from that word's
proper meaning. 12 As a result, a certain disparity seems to prevail between
the various occurrences of the word in question in Being and Time, a dis-
parity that would be considerably complicated if one were to include in
this investigation the additional and major signification of Bestimmung as
vocation or destination. If, however, all these manifold usages of Bestim-
mung (and its variants) can be related, it is certainly not because of some
more originary meaning of the term. Another law than that which com-
mands the relation of the improper to the proper must regulate their dis-
tribution. Let me recall that assertive determination is a derivative mode
of interpretation, one that presupposes and replaces the more primordial
mode of interpretation in circumspective understanding. Understanding
and state-of-mind (Bejindlichkeit) are the two constitutive ways in which
Dasein is its "there" and are equiprimordial with discourse (Rede). State-
of-mind is one of the basic ways in which Dasein's Being is disclosed to it
as its "there." Such disclosure takes place in what is called "our mood, our
being-attuned [Stimmung, Gestimmtseinl" (p. 172). Heidegger writes, "In
having a mood, Dasein is always disclosed moodwise as that entity to
which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in this way it has been
delivered over to Being which, in existing, it has to be" (p. 173).13 Such
disclosure, Heidegger adds, is not knowledge in the sense of being known
as such. The "that-it-is" disclosed to Dasein in its being-attuned does not
express "ontologico-categorially the factuality belonging to presence-at-
hand." Whereas the latter "becomes accessible only if we ascertain it by
looking at it," the "that-it-is" disclosed in Dasein's state-of-mind by con-
trast has to be conceived "as an existential attribute [existenziale Be-
stimmtheitl of the entity which has being-in-the-world as its way of be-
ing." In being-attuned, Dasein "is always brought before itself," not as
Floundering in Determination II5
beholding itself but as "finding itself in the mood that it has" (p. 174). In
this prereAexive and precognitive mode of finding itself, Dasein expet'i-
ences its thrownness, that is, the facticity of always already being its own
"there," not as such, not abstractly, but in a specific way, as belonging to
a determined world and as being alongside determined intraworldly
things. This "that-it-is" in which Dasein finds itself in the mood that it
has (als gestimmtes Sichbefinden), and "which, as such, stares it in the face
with the inexorability of an enigma" (p. 175), represents, by its very fac-
ticity, the matrix for existential-hermeneutical understanding (according
to the as-structure), as well as for its derivative, apophantic interpretation.
In being-attuned, Heidegger continues, Dasein has, in every case, already
disclosed "being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first ofall to
direct oneselftowards something" (p. 176). But if being-attuned permits di-
recting oneself toward something in the first place, it is because Dasein
encounters the world in such a way that what it encounters can matter to
it (von innerweltlich Begegnendem angegangen werden kann). Only be-
cause, in being-attuned, the world is experienced as a world that can "af-
fect" us can understanding be primarily circumspective, and under given
circumstances can be "just sensing something, or staring at it" (p. 176).
In other words, Stimmung is the condition not only of the possibil-
ity of circumspective interpretation but of its modification and leveling
in determining assertion as well. Without the primordial disclosedness of
Stimmung, or Gestimmtheit, and its matricial structures, no such thing as
Bestimmung would be possible. Stimmung, in a sense prior to all psychol-
ogy of moods, that is, in the sense of a fundamental existentiale, is thus
the original, decisive thought and word upon which Bestimmung (the
thing and the word) are based. With Stimmung we thus seem to have
found a proper and fundamental mode of "awareness" to which the tech-
nical philosophical term Bestimmung as well as the customary term Be-
stimmung can be connected according to a scheme of deduction; still, it
is not a proper meaning of Bestimmung. Even where Bestimmung is prop-
erly understood (as in Being and Time, but especially in The Question of
Truth), it never becomes a proper word, a word inhabited by thought (a
gewohntes Wort as opposed to a gewohnliches Wort). Thus, although with
Stimmung we have in principle a proper deduction of the possibility of
Bestimmung, the problem I alluded to remains. There is no proper use of
II6 COMING INTO RELATION
Tuned to Accord
losophy. Nor may it even wish to do so, since common sense is blind to
what philosophy sets before its essenrial vision," he writes (p. II8). But
what is possible is to lift the commonsensical and "philosophical" concept
of truth as accordance above its isolation, and to relate it to an inrerpre-
tation of the whole-the Being of all beings. In short, what is possible for
thought is a one-way approach to the commonsensical concept of truth
as accordance, by which this concept, without common sense's knowl-
edge, becomes grounded in the order of Being. It is this approach that
Heidegger has set out to make in "On the Essence of Truth."
The traditional criterion for the truth, then, is accordance. Accor-
dance renders Obereinstimmung, which in turn translates the Greek ho-
moiosis or orthothes and the Latin adaequatio. In ordinary, everyday
speech, one says es stimmt, "it is in accord," or simply "it is true." Truth,
consequently, is "what accords, the accordanr [was stimmt, das Stim-
mende]" (p. II9). Such stimmen is at least dual, and refers to the Oberein-
stimmung-or as Heidegger also says, to Einstimmigkeit, that is, unison,
unanimity, consonance, agreement, and so forth-of, on the one hand,
"a matter with what is supposed in advance regarding it and, on the other
hand, ... of what is meant in the statement with the matter" (p. 119).
Everyone agrees-layman and philosopher alike-that truth is what ac-
cords. All have come to the agreement-univocally-that this definition
of truth is in accord. Heidegger undoubtedly knows that stimmen also has
the meaning of casting a vote, of having a voice, of exercising a political
franchise. Indeed, the usual (and metaphysical) concept of truth has ju-
ridical and political connotations. Something's being in accord is based
on a unanimous casting of votes, on a ringing of all voices in unison.
Truth as accord is the result of an egalitarian leveling of voices that cele-
brate the consonance-that is, absence of heterogeneity-between mat-
ter and meaning or between matter and proposition. In shoft, the essence
of the universally valid and self-evidenr concept of truth as accordance is
justice in the sense of Gerechtigkeit: what is in accord is nothing less than
"correct" (richtig) and "right" (recht). 2
Having argued that accordance is dual, Heidegger also reminds us
of the hierarchy of ontological and logical dependence between the two
modes of the common concept of truth. Indeed, propositional truth
(Satzwahrheit) rests, by right, on material truth, on the onric truth of
124 COM I N GIN TOR E LA T ION
the other, of a prior fitting of matter and proposition to their divine con-
ception. Without such original directedness of matter and proposition to
the idea within the unity of the divine plan of creation, no proposition
could hope to achieve any accordance whatsoever. Heidegger remarks,
"Throughout, veritas essentially implies convenientia, the coming of beings
themselves, as created, into agreement with the Creator, an 'accord' with
regard to the way they are determined in the order of creation [ein 'Stim-
men' nach der Bestimmung der Schopfongsordnung 1" (p. I2I). Consequently,
accordance (Stimmen, Ubereinstimmung, Einstimmigkeit), whether of ma-
terial or propositional truth, is grounded in the "being destined for one
another" (Bestimmung) of matter and idea, matter and proposition, ac-
cording to divine plan. There is no possible accordance without a prior
"being directed to one another" of the items that make up the accord, and
without the end in view that such a destination represents. Furthermore,
no correctedness is possible without a certain justness, rectitude, righ-
teousness, by which justice is done-in the last judgment-to the goals
or ends (Bestimmung) of the divine creation and its order.
It is essential to remark here that this theological account of the
"being fitted for one another" of matter and idea, matter and proposition,
continues to hold true for all secular notions of truth as long as they are
based on accordance. Any concept of truth constituted by Ubereinstim-
mung, or simply by Stimmen, presupposes directedness toward one an-
other of what are to accord with one another, within the horizon not so
much of the te/os of a plan of creation as of a world order in general. Fur-
ther, when secularization has reached its climax, it is the possibility of a
universal planification, or ordering into a plan, of all objects that under-
lies truth as accordance. In a radically secularized world, truth as accor-
dance presupposes, indeed, the ontological possibility of a universal sub-
jectibility to ends, not just to a particular end or to multiple ends; the
possibility of absolutely everything lending itself to ends. In short, all ac-
cordance rests on destination, or in general terms, on what one might call
destinability. All Stimmen as Ubereinstimmen presupposes Bestimmung by
an order, or more generally, by the possibility of yielding to order. The
prefix Be- of Bestimmung confers the directed ness toward an end upon
the consonant agreement of the Stimmen through which truth rings.
With these developments, which correspond to section I of "On the
126 COMING INTO RELATION
tive the statement conforms [richtet es sich 1 to beings. Speech that directs
itself accordingly is correct (true) [richtigJ" (p. 124).
To sum up: presentative statement, and with it, the possibility of
truth as accordance, presupposes-to the extent that it is first and fore-
most a comportment (an act of relating)-an open region in which it can
stand open, not merely to what shows itself pure and simple but to the
particular way in which things take their stand. Such a presentative state-
ment can achieve accordance only if it conforms itself to the directive that
things that present themselves as such give to the presenting proposition.
This, then, is the point where the inner possibility of accordance comes
into view. Accordance as a presenting comportment rests on the state-
ment's being directed toward something that itself (and from itself) in-
structs the statement as to what and how it (the thing) is. In short, by fo-
cusing on the open region as a domain of relatedness, it becomes clear
that accordance (stimmen) presupposes-and this is its inner possibil-
ity-that a concordance occurs, between the being directed toward
(richten) of the statement and the indicating or ordering (Weisung) by the
thing that is to be presented. Truth as accordance thus requires the possi-
bility of an accord more originary than the one between statement and the
thing as it is. Truth will not occur if the directional traits of richten and
weisen do not accord. These traits are the particular modifications of the
general traits that characterize comportment as such-as to holding one-
self in (sichhalten) an openness in which one holds on to (sich an ... hal-
ten) something that presents itself by itself (das selbst vorstellig wird)-
and that obtain for presenting comportment. Without the possibility of
the "synthesis" of these traits, there can be no accord between a statement
and the thing it presents.
The inner possibility of accordance is thus the synthesis of the more
fundamental accord between the trait that causes the proposition to re-
spond to the particular way in which a thing is and the equally particular
trait by which a thing indicates what and how it is. But precisely because
this inner possibility of adequation rests on the more originary accord of
specific (and actually very determined) directional traits, another question
arises as to the ground of this inner possibility. What are the general con-
ditions of the being-fitted-to-one-another of richten and weisen, without
which a statement could not hope to secure the accord between itself and
130 COMING INTO RELATION
tion, the thing must be drawn to, must be free for, being said as it is. It is
the enabling countertrait to the trait of pointing out, by which a thing
gives its directedness to statement. Such being-free-for, and the corre-
sponding being-drawn-to-being-said, are the two countertraits, to those
of rich ten and weisen, that represent the ground or essence of (correct) ac-
cOl·dance. This double being-free-for, or more precisely, the finely tuned
accord of these two freedoms-which are directed against one another
and which embrace one another in the open region-is the essence of
truth as correspondence. Truth as accord is grounded in a stimmen of
these two countervectorial traits, traits more originary than those that
make up the synthesis of the inner possibility of accordance. As the
ground of truth as correspondence, this is a stimmen more originary than
that which makes up its inner possibility.
In the section entitled "The Essence of Freedom," Heidegger sets
out to further refine the notion of freedom, that is, of being free for what
presents itself in the open of an open region, a freedom he characterizes as
"letting beings be" (p. 127). Freedom, as the ground of truth as corre-
spondence or accordance, he argues, can serve only as "the ground of the
inner possibility of correctness ... because it receives its own essence
from the more original essence of uniquely essential truth [der einzig
wesentlichen \%hrheitl" (p. 127). The twice-double accord of the direc-
tional and coumerdirectional traits, which makes truth as accordance
possible and grounds it, will consequently depend on a gift that it re-
ceives from that more originary and unique truth. G By inquiring into how
freedom, as the ground of the inner possibility of truth as accordance, re-
ceives its own essence from a more originary conception, if not happen-
ing, of truth-of a truth that does not primarily reside in correspondence
and that escapes (to some extent at least) the logic of Bestimmung in its
double meaning of definition and destination because the very meaning
of these terms depends on this truth's occurrence-we shall encounter
the third step by which the classical notion of truth will be foregrounded.
Freedom, as the ground of the possibility of truth as correctness, is
the being free for what is opened up in an open region (das Offinbare
eines Offinen). Such freedom lets beings be the beings they are, since it re-
sponds to the things that present themselves in the open region of com-
portment. Yet in this response and "subsequent" letting-be, the freedom
132 COMING INTO RELATION
in question shows itself to be engaged "with the open region and its
openness [das Offine und dessen Offinheit 1 into which every being comes
to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself" (p. 127). In
other words, for accordance to be possible-that is, for a proposition to
be able to direct itself according to the directive given by the thing to the
thing-not only must the proposition be free for what presents itself in
specificity (for its was sein and so sein); but it must also, and primarily, re-
late to the open region itself in which (as which) the presencing-as-such
of the thing occurs. For there to be an accord between statement and
matter, statement (as a modification of comportment, that is, as open re-
latedness, offinstandiger Bezug) must from the start be open or free, not
so much for what is in the open as for the openness of the open itself. It
must from the start be free to accommodate, not the thing in its speci-
ficity itself but the openness of what is opened up in the open. Without
being bound by the openness of the opened up, a statement could not
possibly hope to come into accord with what presences itself as such in
an open region. As open relatedness, comportment is engaged with dis-
closedness first and foremost. But Heidegger writes:
To engage oneself with the disclosedness of beings is not to lose oneself in them;
rather, such engagement withdraws [entfaltet sich in einem ZUrUcktreten vorl in
the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what
and how they are and in order that presentative correspondence might take its
standards from them. As this letting-be it exposes itself [setzt sich aus] to beings
as such and transposes [versetzt] all comportment into the open region. Letting-
be, i.e., freedom, is intrinsically exposing [aus-setzend], ek-sistent. Considered in
regard to the essence of truth, the essence of freedom manifests itself as exposure
to the disclosedness of beings. (p. 128)
dance can take its standards from beings, and beings can present thelll
selves on their own terms, only if such comportment is, in its freedom for
what is opened up as such in the open region, freedom for the open n:-
gion and its openness, or for things' self-revealing. This engagement with
disclosedness is not a more profound ground for accordance but the
framework without which the inner possibility of truth as correctness and
its ground in freedom could not be what they are. Yet an accord that can
be shown to resonate through the accords that make up the inner possi-
bility and the very ground of truth as correspondence is certainly not a
condition of possibility or ground anymore. It is an accord, by contrast,
which is required in order to speak of inner possibility and ground in the
first place, and of accord and accordance as well. But there is perhaps still
another reason why this latter accord is dissimilar to those that constitute
inner possibilities and essences.
Heidegger hints at such a dissimilarity when, toward the end of sec-
tion 4, he notes that if truth is primarily freedom, that is, engagement
with disclosedness, then covering up, concealment, and distortion are
equally primordial possibilities of truth. In short, if, as we have seen, the
more originary essence of freedom as the essence of truth harbors an ac-
cord, then it must also be inhabited by a certain dis(ac)cord. We shall
thus have to pursue our analysis of the more refined accord, which we
have seen orchestrating both the inner possibility and the ground of
truth. This ever more refined accord must accord, it would seem, with a
trait that accounts in an essential manner for the possibility of covering
up, namely, un-truth.
At the beginning of the section entitled "The Essence of Truth,"
Heidegger claims that freedom, as disclosive letting beings be, is "engage-
ment in the disclosure of being as a whole as such [des Seienden im Ganzen
als einem solchen]" (pp. 130-31). Similarly, the last paragraphs of the previ-
ous section had contended that the experience of unconcealment is that of
Being as a whole (p. 129). The exposure to the disclosedness of beings, in
which freedom as letting beings be is rooted, is exposure to, and disclosure
of, what all beings qua beings imply, that is, Being as a whole, the open-
ness as disclosed openness as such. Now Heidegger writes that any com-
portment, to the extent that it is open (offenstandiges Verhalten), "flourishes
[schwingt] in letting beings be" (p. 130). It flourishes thus in the essence of
Tuned to Accord 135
such, i.e., the mystery [Geheimnisl" (p. 132). What Heidegger calls "the
one mystery" is not just the exact counterpart of disclosedness or the
openness of the open. Being as a whole as such attunes and accords every-
thing ceaselessly. But Being as a whole as such, the openness of Being, is
wrenched from concealedness. It is "derived" from Being's concealedness.
The concealing of this concealedness-the mystery-is older than all
letting-be, and this also implies that it does not comport with the disclo-
sure of disclosedness in a symmetric fashion. It does not harmoniously ac-
cord with it in a unitary synthesis. The concealing of concealedness, in-
deed, refers what ceaselessly accords, Being as a whole, not to a definite
or determined trait that would be the bipolar correspondent to the ac-
cording trait (and which could lend itself to entering into accord with the
according trait), but to an abyssal trait. The mystery names the inner
limit not only of truth as correspondence but of truth as aletheia as well.
All disclosing letting-be, with the inescapable dissimulation of Being as a
whole that goes with it, is itself "dependent" on the concealing of what is
concealed. 10 This concealing is, as Heidegger puts it, "the fundamental
occurrence [Grundgeschehen 1" on which letting-be and the withdrawal of
Being that accompany it hinge (p. 134). Although this concealing is the
ineluctable abyss, or blind spot, that accompanies truth as aletheia (and
by extension truth as adaequatio or homoiosis), it is also older than truth,
not only because singular accordance presupposes the withdrawal of Be-
ing as a whole to which it must be attuned, but because the disclosure of
Being as a whole itself entails that it be wrenched from concealedness.
The concealing of what is concealed-of Being as a whole-is the dis-
symmetric (and abyssal) countertrait to which that which ceaselessly ac-
cords-Being as a whole-relates. The ultimate synthesis, then-the
third, but perhaps fourth, fifth, sixth step in Heidegger's attempt to fore-
ground truth as accordance-is no longer an accord, strictly speaking. It
is certainly not the accord of accord and discord. Rather, in it the accord
comes to stand in a relation to its limit. What attunes and accords cease-
lessly is not inhabited by discord. There is no Verstimmung intrinsically
linked up with the enabling accord of Gestimmtheit. The dissymmetry of
this ultimate synthesis precludes the possibility that any simple opposite
of Stimmung should enter into a relation to it. This dissymmetry also pre-
cludes the possibility that the limit of Stimmung should be thought by
140 COMING INTO RELATION
canon and canonicity when thought extracts itself (in a relation of con-
tinued implication) from the philosophical? To sketch the beginning
of an answer to this question, I will briefly analyze some passages from
" ... Poetically Man Dwells ... "
Although Heidegger discusses only poetic dwelling in this essay, the
proximity between poetry and thinking suggests that, after due al-
lowances, everything established about poetic dwelling will be true of
thinking dwelling as well. What then does Heidegger say in " ... Poeti-
cally Man Dwells ... " that might pertain to my question regarding
canonicity and canon in postphilosophical thought? Heidegger sets out to
claim that what is usually called the existence of man has to be under-
stood in terms of dwelling. "Dwelling" does not in this case refer to
"merely one form of human behavior alongside many others"; rather it
refers to what may be the "basic character of human existence [des men-
schlichen Daseins J."7 Understood essentially, dwelling characterizes the
human being's mode of being in the between of sky and earth. Like the
fundamental structure of being-in-the-world analyzed in Being and Time,
dwelling has eminently ethical, or rather proto-ethical connotations-as
will become evident as soon as the mode of "relationship" that dwelling
has to both sky and earth comes into view. Poetry, Heidegger continues,
is what "causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell
[eigentliches Wohnenlassen]" (p. 215). It is capable ofletting-dwell precisely
because poetry is a measuring (Messen), Heidegger adds. Indeed, it is a
measuring that has "its own metron, and thus its own metric" (p. 221).
What does this metron consist in that serves as a measure for poetic mea-
suring, and thus dwelling? What is this standard against which letting-
dwell must be judged? And what is a measure to begin with?
A measure (metron, mensura, Mass) is either an ethical, aesthetical
concept or one pertaining to the philosophy of nature. In my analysis of
Heidegger's essay I will only be concerned with its ethical meaning.
Werner Marx has defined the essential traits of the traditional, that is,
onto-theological conception of measure as follows:
Measure is a "standard measure" that contains as such the demand of an ought.
Preceding the measuring act, it has the mode of being ofa "transcendence." At
the same time, it has the "power" to determine the human being "immanently."
Therein lies the deciding significance of a measure, namely its "binding oblig-
146 COMING INTO RELATION
ingness." It has the power to remain the "same" in different situations, and as
such it has the characteristics of "obviousness" and "unambiguity. "R
measures himself as a mortal in the between of earth and sky is the god-
head. But Heidegger specifies: the godhead is a measure for the mortals
that span the dimension of the between only insofar as the godhead is the
Unknown One. He writes, "for Holderlin God, as the one who he is, is
unknown and it is just as this Unknown One that he is the measure for the
poet" (p. 222). This means that Heidegger conceives of measure-taking in
terms of the structure of aletheic concealment in disclosure. Indeed,
"something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself,
must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is un-
known, and he is the measure nonetheless" (p. 222). If the appearing god-
head is to be the measure for mortals, it can only be insofar as he appears
as the one who conceals himself and remains concealed or unknown. But
if the godhead reveals himself as a measure only if he appears as the Un-
known One, the measure contains in Heidegger's terms a mystery (Ge-
heimnis). With this Heidegger's notion of measure shows itself to lack the
essential features of "obviousness" and "unambiguity," as well as those
that pertain to the enduring identity of the idealities that traditionally
constitute a measure. Heidegger adds: "Not only this, but the god who
remains unknown, must by showing himselfas the one he is, appear as the
one who remains unknown. God's manifestness-not only he himself-
is mysterious." The mystery thus pervades the very manifestness of the
measure, as opposed to what manifests itself as measure (god); the very
appearing of god must occur in such a way that it shows only withdrawal
in the openness of the open of what comes to the fore. It is thus not god
properly speaking who is the measure for man, but the way in which god
as the unknown becomes manifest as withdrawn. We read:
The measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is re-
vealed as such by the sky. God's appearance through the sky consists in a disclos-
ing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest
what is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed
in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god appears as the unknown by way
of the sky's manifestness. This appearance is the measure against which man
measures himself. (p. 223)
The metron of poetic dwelling is a mode of appearing that lets us see what
conceals itself (god, the heavenly, the immortals) in such a way that the
concealed remains concealed. The strange (befremdlich) metron that Hei-
148 COM I N GIN TOR E LA T ION
dence. Yet, of this metron of poetic and thinking dwelling we cannot bur
speak as if it was a transcendence, a measure, or a canon in the traditional
sense. This difficulty-that the metron is not a canon yet cannot be con-
ceived of or talked about except by being raised above its immanence in
poetic or thinking dwelling-can be dealt with provisionally by taking
the following lead from Jean-Fran<,:ois Lyotard. Resorting, in The Dif-
ftrend, to the Kantian distinction between determinant and reflective
judgments, he characterizes the stakes of philosophical thought (in post-
philosophical thinking, if you wish) as directed toward "discovering its
(own) rules rather than ... supposing their knowledge as a principle."ll
In other words, the law of thinking, its metron, has to be understood as a
reflective law rather than as a principle. It can only be incessantly discov-
ered, since it is not a law that is fixed once and for all. It can only be re-
flected upon, in the occurring of philosophical thinking, as a law, to use a
Heideggerian formula, that is always only on the way to itself. The metron
of thought is not frozen into canonicity. It is a canonical law only in a
process of approximation. Hence, when the law of thought turns into a
law, thinking ends, and the disciplines begin. When the reflective deter-
mination of the measure of thinking and poetry comes full circle, the
measure becomes transformed into a canon. In the canons of the disci-
plines, thinking has abandoned the reflective search for its immanent
rule. All that is left, in that case, of the ethical dimension of the metron of
poetic or thinking dwelling is the individual and specialized disciplines'
demand that their standards be specific, and that they take the singularity
of the domains they govern into account.
The foregoing developments about the relation between metron and
canon implicitly contain an answer to the question regarding the role of
the transcendental in the measure of thought. But before articulating this
response, I shall make another brief detour through Heidegger's discus-
sion of "measure" in " ... Poetically Man Dwells ... " He writes: "The
measure taken by poetry yields, imparts itself-as the foreign element in
which the invisible one preserves his presence-to what is familiar in the
sights of the sky. Hence, the measure is of the same nature as the sky"
(p. 226). Although the sky (along with everything beneath it) is the ele-
ment of the appearing and disclosure of the unknown godhead, the fa-
miliar sights (Anblicke, or images, as Heidegger also calls them) remain
Canonizing Measures 151
In short, then, beyond the disciplines and their canons, beyond phi-
losophy and its standards, thought and poetry encounter the metron for a
mode of thinking and poetry that allows for no canon. Such modes of
thinking and poetry do not give rise, therefore, to disciplines. The mea-
sure given by such a metron to thinking and poetry, the metric it provides
for their movement (Gang), is one of steps (Schritte) , if not of leaps
(Sprunge), of the decisive steps of questioning that, in the case of think-
ing, at least, mark its measured course, its way.
"Like the Rose-Without Why"
nition. In order to understand how epochal principles have also been con-
stitutive for acting, one has only to clarifY how the tradition has conceived
of the relation between theory and praxis. Traditionally, praxis has always
been legitimized by theory. To the question "What is to be done?"
philosophers have replied by relying "on some standard-setting first whose
grounding function was assured by a 'general' doctrine, be it called ontol-
ogy or something else" (p. I). Practical philosophy, Schiirmann argues,
has always borrowed its prime scheme from first philosophy, namely "the
reference to an arche, articulated according to the attributive pros hen or
the participative aph'henos relation. Theories of action not only depend in
general on what prevails as ultimate knowledge in each epoch but, fur-
thermore, they reproduce the attributive-participative schema as ifit were
a pattern" (p. 5). This schema springs from philosophy's attempt to
achieve knowledge in the domain of the sensible. Without referring the
sensible manifold to some One, no knowledge or verification of the sensi-
ble is possible. Since the Greeks conceived of the political as translating
"an ahistorical order, knowable in itself, into public organization, for
which that order served as an a priori model and as a criterion for a poste-
riori legitimation" (p. 39), speculative philosophy has remained the father
of practical philosophy. Its categories have been not sui generis but $1eriv-
ative from philosophy's doctrine of substance. The formal identity be-
tween the two is constituted by "the principial reference as such, the pros
hen" (p. 38), that is, the relation to the first, the one, a relation that both
grounds and gives a telos to all acting. Hence the history of the epochal
principles-what Schiirmann also calls "referential history" (p. 43)-is,
inevitably, a history "where the principia set themselves up as tete, as the
ends for man, for his doing and his speculating" (p. 42).
Principles that are both foundational and teleocratic organize the
specific economies of presence that make up referential history. Conse-
quently, they can be understood as a priori principles. Yet these principles
arise and fade away, and therefore are not transcendental a prioris, but
rather "factual a priori(s), finite" (p. 57). The genealogist, as Schiirmann
determines him, seeks to conceptualize this rising and waning, this com-
ing into presence and withdrawing of economic arrangements of pres-
ence (of words, things, and actions) that are encompassing each time, but
precarious as well since they pass away. However, a phenomenology of
"Like the Rose-Without Why" 159
"The Origin Is Said in Many Ways," he continues this history of how ori-
gin is understood in the tradition by focusing on Duns Scotus, and on
what happens when arche becomes translated as principium. The origin
manifests itself during the epoch of Latin philosophy via reason, the law
of the mind; and rather than ruling over becoming (movement), the ori-
gin now rules a hierarchical order. When origin becomes principium, the
Greek idea of origin as beginning is covered over "for the sake of retain-
ing pure domination." But the locus where origin can show itself has
changed as well. Human fabrication "has lost its paradigmatic role in the
constitution of knowledge. Another site now functions as the center of
things knowable and renders fabrication and know-how secondary, deriv-
ative. The domain from which the medievals understand the origin is no
longer man-made change, but gubernatio mundi, the government the
supreme entity exercises over things" (p. 112). For Duns Scotus the su-
preme entity is the Divine Substance, which governs what is called "the
essential order" (p. IIO). This new epochal position of origin as princip-
ium-and this is characteristic of the Latin Middle Ages-reflects the ob-
servation of a religious heritage. It comes to an end when the rule of a sov-
ereign entity-God.-is replaced by the rule of evident truth. This new
reversal in the thinking of origin was inaugurated by Leibniz, argues
Schiirmann. In Leibniz's Monadology, "the essential order dominated by a
princeps is replaced by the logical order dominated by a principium"
(p. 112). With this reversal, "to speak of a principle no longer means to fol-
low the course of a kinetic trajectory nor to follow the lead of a religious
transmittal. Rather, it means to confine oneself to the realm in which hu-
man knowledge is the principal, the principial, problem" (p. In). More
precisely, with this new reversal, the mind's representation of facts be-
comes the issue. Such representation is shown to be rooted in the princi-
ple of sufficient reason, that is to say, in an axiom, a linguistically articu-
lated law. A principle, henceforth, "is the starting point, the origin, of an
argument," and thus one can conclude that with the reversal brought
about by Leibniz, "the origin has been transferred from the field of essen-
tial causes to the field of causes that regulate representation" (p. II3).
The three epochs of principial thought described here clearly evi-
dence that the history of what has been taken to be the origin represents
a series of principles that are fundamentally "ultimate ontic referents"
"Like the Rose-Without Why" 161
(p. II4). The major punctuations of what was thought as the first are sen-
sible substance with Aristotle, divine substance in the Middle Ages, and
the human subject who posits principles of reason during the Age of En-
lightenment, that is, the Age of Modernity. But origin as "presencing," as
the mere coming into presence of an epoch, can never be something pre-
sent. That by which a whole economy of presence abruptly surges for-
ward is, rather, as Heidegger put it, "nothing." To think what opens a
field of presence, an epoch, it is thus necessary to reach beyond the con-
ception of origin as arche and principle. The outline of the history of the
various ways in which the origin has been cast from Aristotle to the mod-
erns suggests, indeed, that in the course of this history the origin has been
constantly covered up by the ultimate ontic principles. Three tasks follow
from this: first, to deconstruct the different stamps of origin in the his-
tory of Western thought; second, to engage the Heideggerian notion of
Ur-sprung as precisely the thought of the mere surge of presence; and fi-
nally-the major task-to elaborate on the "logic" that governs the be-
coming arche or principle of the origin.
Schiirmann, taking his lead from Heidegger, dispatches the first task
by confronting, in particular, Aristotle with the pre-Socratic's understand-
ing of origin and by pointing out that traces of this understanding per-
vade his Physics and Metaphysics. But the thrust of this deconstruction lies
in the underlying assumption that a colossal category mistake stands at
the beginning of the Western quest for the first. Indeed, Aristotle's dis-
covery that the pros hen-a schema that, as Schiirmann notes, "rightfully
pertains only to the Physics"-can be applied to all domains and to all
branches of philosophy causes all philosophy since Aristotle to speak
"with the voice of a physicist." Yet "this totalitarian sweep of the relation-
to-one" that opens the history of the epochs of principial thought (pp.
42-43)-a sweep that affects all acting and thinking in general by trans-
posing the ideas of causality and finality or goal-directedness from the do-
main of artisanal making to all other domains-is a metabasis eis allo genos
(p. 256). With this confusion of levels of thought, which started in Aris-
totle's extension of Physics to Metaphysics and by which the thinking of the
One becomes obstructed, begins the long errancy of the rich history of
Western thought as one of arising and waning principial epochs. For the
whole of European philosophy, the ascendancy of the idea of substantial-
162 COMING INTO RELATION
ing as presencing, in other words, the singular angle under which the orig-
inary shapes itself differently each time. Indeed, in this sense, "category"
recovers its prephilosophical meaning of "manifesting" (p. 161). The cate-
gorization that Schtirmann attempts in this part of his book seeks to free
the formal continuities, the invariants, "according to which the many net-
works of epochal presence have differed from presencing." He finds these
categories in what Heidegger had called Grundworte, and classifies them
in three classes, which have six categories each. Space does not permit me
to do justice to this extremely powerful and exemplary articulation
through which Schtirmann wishes "to wrest originary presencing from
the original shifts in presence" (p. 162). A few words must suffice.
The three classes of categories that Schtirmann shows to be opera-
tive in Heidegger's later works are prospective, retrospective, and transitional
categories. This distinction is a function of the movement of the analytical
glance at the whole of the history of Being. Reading this history from its
inception in pre-Socratic thinking, one obtains the prospective categories,
which are modes of saying the coming into light of presence as well as its
withdrawing: ron, physis, aletheia, logos, hen, no us. Reading from the his-
tory's conclusion, or closure-from metaphysic's end in technology-one
gains access to the retrospective categories. In a truly striking if not
provocative interpretation of Heidegger's writings on Nietzsche, Heidegger
on Being and Acting demonstrates that although these writings speak for-
mally about Nietzsche, materially they are about technology. Rather than
taking his retrospective categories directly from what he has established
about the end of metaphysics, Heidegger substitutes the Nietzschean dis-
course for the technological economy at the end of metaphysics, Schtir-
mann argues. Thus, the will to power, nihilism, justice, the eternal return
of the same, the transmutation of all values, and the overman become
transmuted so as to speak of technology and to denote the categories of
the economy of closure. What these retrospective categories make evident
is that the essence of technology, the germ of metaphysics' completion and
death, has always already inhabited Western thought from Plato on. In
order to describe the shifts and crises between eras, that is, the phenome-
non of reversal as such, Heidegger proposes the following transitional cat-
egories: ontological difference / world and thing, there is / favor, uncon-
cealment / event of appropriation, epoch/clearing, nearness/fourfold, and
"Like the Rose-Without Why" 165
II
sionality" or indifference in the era of closure (p. 195). The eternal return
indicates the becoming one of all differences. Yet if such a collapse into
one of all differences, and all constructs of otherness, is rendered epoch-
ally possible by technology, thus shaking metaphysics in its most funda-
mental exigencies, it is because this possibility of the impossibility of dif-
ference has been prepared for a long time. Indeed, the doctrine of
difference constitutive of metaphysics is itself rooted in "the Platonic re-
versal where eon turned into the difference between to estin and to ti es-
tin" (p. 194). In other words, the annulment of difference at the end of
metaphysics confirms the beginning of metaphysics as the reduction of
premetaphysical difference, verbal-nominal difference, or ontological dif-
ference. The flattening of thought, its loss of depth and motility at the
end of metaphysics, is thus, a function of the loss of transcendence in
metaphysical transcendence.
The transmutation of all values, interpreted as a retrospective cate-
gory, reveals that the becoming illusion of all the supreme values of West-
ern metaphysics in the era of technology and the converse valuation of
what is empirically verifiable-the manipulable and the manufacturable
(that is, the sensible)-occur through a reenactment of what is constitu-
tive of metaphysical thought: hierarchical distinction. In Schilrmann's
words, "The technological transvaluation, first understood by Nietzsche,
inverts the high and low established at the beginning of metaphysics-
and thereby renders it the greatest homage, permuting from within, from
bottom to top, the valuative game" (p. 197). Like difference and indiffer-
ence, the beginning and the death of metaphysical thought are intimately
interconnected. If all the fundamental values of Western philosophy be-
come illusions in the era of metaphysical closure, it is because "estima-
tion, the preference for one region of entities over others, the attribution
of rank," is a constitutive ingredient of metaphysics-and its fatal agent
as well (p. 198). Indeed, the backbone of metaphysics, namely the dis-
tinction between a world of being and a world of becoming, a distinction
that is itself derived from "the forgotten ness of the differential One"
(p. 198), is the patron difference between what is high and what is low.
The elevation of the low to the rank of the only true reality in technology
thus confirms metaphysics in its role as an estimating approach rendered
possible by the initial forgetting of the ontological difference.
"Like the Rose-Without Why" 167
and the many, being and entities, being and thought, all oppositions in-
herited from Parmenides" (p. 210). The dismissal of these oppositions,
which helped metaphysical thinking to conceive of the essence of what is,
becomes necessary at the closure of Western thought since the transcen-
dence (being, substance) and the reduplication (being as being) now ap-
pear to miss the simple presencing. What had been the very condition for
Western thought's appropriateness to presence-its gesture of transcend-
ing and of reduplicating what is as such-shows itself to be based on the
forgetting of the question of difference, the question in whose form pres-
encing first came into view. Although one must still call thinking at the
fringe of metaphysics "transcendental" in spite of the fact that "transcen-
dental" obfuscates the difference that the issue of thought-presenc-
ing-makes (by transcending entities and incorporating difference into
the transcending), thought conserves transcendentalism's formal frame.
2. The issue to which thought responds at the borderline of meta-
physics is presencing, the originary, as opposed to the economies of pres-
ence, the original. As discussed above, showing forth is the most precar-
ious object that thought can have. It can be beheld only through its
various modalities, but as soon as a modality of presencing has occurred
and is past, it is lost forever. It is thus characterized by "extreme finitude"
(p. 17), as is thought that responds to presencing. In addition, presenc-
ing (itself) has no history, no destiny. This absence of finality in pres-
encing leads to a repeal of the reign of goals in thinking (first and fore-
most, by ceasing to be cognitive). Thinking, we read, "does not have any
contents, properly speaking, to pursue .... Thinking lacks any external
end" (p. 257). Multiplicity is a function of presencing's essential finitude.
Once thematized, it "proves to be irreducibly manifold .... It shows that
prior to the binary struggle between veiling and unveiling, presencing
de-centers the process of manifestation" (p. 144). The thought that cor-
responds to such manifoldness in presencing is, consequently, irre-
ducibly plural and dispersed.
3. Yet such finitude, plurality, and absence of ends does not imply
that thought, or presencing for that matter, would lack all identity. Un-
doubtedly, the simple showing forth that thinking reaches out for in a
"transcendental" move is not one origin. Still, the originary unfolding has
a unity of its own. Schiirmann speaks of this unity as a Parmenidean
"Like the Rose- Without Why" 169
eis alio genos. Rather than thinking the originary in terms of what covers
it up, thought would, finally, be able to think the originary in its own
unique singularity and finitude. Such a thinking, free of all category mis-
take and beyond the confusion of levels of thought, is a kind of thought
that in its very singularity and contingency would achieve what thinking
in metaphysics has been unable to do but which has always been the
dream of philosophy-to be a discourse about what is possible, and to
hold itself as discourse in the very dimension of the possible.
So much for thought. What about acting after the break? What
"other acting" corresponds to the "other thinking"? The provocative the-
sis of Heidegger on Being and Acting is that "the other acting" is not the
symmetric counterpart of thought, as it has traditionally been in practical
philosophy. The guidelines for acting after the turning do not follow as
usual from what has been established about an-archie thought. Although
such acting can only be an-archie itself, since all principles have withered
away, this anarchism does not proceed from an ascendance of theory over
praxis. On the contrary, as Schlirmann convincingly demonstrates, for
the later Heidegger, a certain acting becomes "the transcendental condi-
tion for thought" (p. 233). With this the traditional relation between
thinking and acting has become inverted. He writes, "The practical a pri-
ori for understanding fully that deterioration and its virtualities inverts
the sequence of condition and conditioned in which the tradition has
placed thinking and acting" (p. 244). This inversion is in fact a subver-
sion of the ancient distinction between theory and praxis: If "Heidegger
makes action deprived of arche the condition of the thought which decon-
structs the arche," then Heidegger inscribes himself, as Schlirmann re-
marks, "in a tradition entirely different from that of Aristotle" (p. 7). But
what sort of acting makes up such a practical a priori? Such acting must,
in the same way as thought in the age of closure, respond to the event of
appropriation and be open for presencing-in Heidegger's terminology,
resolute presencing-in its coming to pass. The different modes of acting
that Schiirmann analyzes-Gelassenheit and Abgeschiedenheit, for in-
stance-show this a priori acting to be free from all ends. By virtue of its
responsive nature to the aletheio-logical constellations, this acting is re-
sponsible acting. And, finally, by its unattachment, such acting challenges
current business, anticipating another path or destiny, another constella-
"Like the Rose-Without Why" 171
tion beyond the present one. But the acting that constitutes the a priori
for the thinking of presencing at the rurning is not just any acting. Al-
though Gelassenheit, Abgeschiedenheit, and so forth, are concrete modes of
behavior, their status is that of a transcendental a priori for a thought that
articulates and enacts the possible as possible. Being without goal, as well
as being unattached, the acting before all thinking responds to the event
of presencing by maintaining its potentialities in suspense. It is an acting
at the limit of acting in that it affirms the play without consequences of
the merely potential, the "sheer superabundance with no purpose or end"
of the event itself (p. 18).
Since a discourse on the practical a priori does not tie acting to the
conceptual pivot of the relation to the One, it is not properly speaking a
practical philosophy. Practical philosophy is, by definition, derived from
a first philosophy. Nonetheless, the discourse in question is one on act-
ing, but in advance of all norms. Schurmann writes, "From the transcen-
dental 'subject' of Idealism, to the Dasein of the Existential Analytic, to
the 'thinking' of the Topology of being, the discourse on man progres-
sively deprives itself of the very possibility of approving or condemning,
and especially of commending, concrete behavior, whether individual or
collective" (p. 208).
Heidegger's lack of interest in the immediate and concrete future of
mankind is well known, and, as Schurmann remarks, "runs quite deep"
(p. 208). And, indeed, all that Heidegger seems to have envisioned for the
destinal break with metaphysics is an economy "whose only time struc-
ture is originary," trusting "that the event could become our sole tempo-
ral condition, one without principial overdeterminations" (p. 273). Yet in
such an economy of the originary, everything-action, thoughts, and
things-"perdures" in its mere showing forth as (manifold) possibility. It
is goalless, hence without aim and without why. It is as if the economy of
the originary represented the concrete realization of the transcendental
realm of the conditions of possibility for the phenomenal, but of this
realm alone without the phenomena that it makes possible. But what
makes such a comparison inappropriate is that in the economy envi-
sioned, the distinction in question no longer obtains.
From the simple point of view of presence, everything in such an
economy of the originary is like the rose of which Heidegger writes, after
I72 COMING INTO RELATION
Angelus Silesius, that it "flowers because it flowers" (p. 259). In The Es-
sence ofReasons, Heidegger speaks one more time about the "rose-with-
out why." The simile serves to point at the most hidden essence of man,
yet he adds immediately: "We cannot however pursue this thought any
further here" (p. 38). That this thought can be thought, that it can even
become the (perhaps multiple) element for thought as such-in which
thought comes into its essence(s)-is the thesis around which Schiir-
mann's argument develops, and is what his book, unmistakably, succeeds
. .
m provmg.
Perhaps: A Modality?
tered in the mystery, and honors this mystery by letting it be the mystery
that it is. Obviously, in the context of the passage analyzed, perhaps per-
forms a function entirely different from the usages in ordinary language
or in philosophy. Moreover, its role appears to be intrinsic to a certain
thinking, to what Heidegger had called thoughtful Saying.
It has been remarked, by Ute Guzzoni in particular, that the "cate-
gories" to which the later Heidegger has recourse are, as "compared to
those of the philosophical tradition, marked by an entirely different char-
acter: they are of an onticity and concreteness that implies a fundamen-
tally new manner of generality."? I intend to argue as well that they take
up what in the eyes of traditional philosophy represent the very signifiers
of ordinary, everyday language. Nevertheless, these signifiers do not enter
Heidegger's discourse unchanged. They certainly do not operate in it ac-
cording to the functions assigned to them by traditional grammar, that is,
by metaphysics. Take, for instance, Heidegger's redefinition in "The Na-
ture of Language" of the term "only": "The 'only' here does not mean a
limitation, but rather points to ... pure simplicity" (p. 93). But it is with
the word perhaps that I will be concerned. I will proceed to a further ex-
ploration of its new role in Heidegger's text, not through additional re-
finement on the word's status in a sentence such as the one already com-
mented upon, but by reflecting on the gesture of thought in which it
occurs, and, perhaps, must occur.
I already pointed out that unlike all other texts by Heidegger, "The
Nature of Language" makes profuse use of the modalizer perhaps. It must
be noted as well that in this text, Heidegger revises his long-standing def-
inition of the essence of thinking as questioning. For the first time, indeed,
thinking is said here to be primarily a listening. He states: "the authentic
attitude [Gebardel of thinking is not a putting of questions-rather, it is a
listening to the grant, the promise [Zusagel of what is to be put in ques-
tion" (p. 71). Calling up his assertion in "The Question of Technology"
that "questioning is the piety of thinking," Heidegger now claims, "the
true stance of thinking cannot be to put questions, but must be to listen to
that which our questioning vouchsafes-and all questioning begins to be
a questioning only in virtue of pursuing its quest for essential being [son-
dern das Horen der Zusage dessen sein muss, wobei alles Fragen dann erst an-
ftagt, indem es dem \Vt>sen nachfragt]" (p. 72). Thus it may well be that this
Perhaps: A ModaLity? 179
that poetry and thinking belong within one neighborhood" (p. 80).
"Neighborhood" implies that each one-thinking and poetry-is only
what it is next to, in the proximity of the other, and in a region they both
share. Yet if thinking cannot be determined in and from itself alone, if it
must be determined in relation to its other (and vice versa), thinking can-
not be ratio, "calculation in the widest sense" (p. 70). It does not ground
in itself, it does not have the certitude of the cogito. What thinking is and
what it is to achieve remain dependent, as it were, on thinking's neighbor,
its other: poetry. With this an essential uncertainty, one not of the order
of empirical approximation, necessarily distinguishes thinking, and espe-
cially the thinking experience. It is in this context in the essay that Hei-
degger's talk of "supposition" (Vermutung) becomes significant. Deriving
from the German verb vermuten ("to suspect, to assume, to suppose, to
presume"), Vermutung is to be understood as a tentative supposition, as-
sumption, conjecture, or opinion, as the thought of something probable,
or in keeping with the facts. 9 In German law, Vermutung has the sense of
either praesumtio foeti, meaning that it may suffice as proof for a case and
not require any presentation of evidence to substantiate it, or praesumtio
iuris, meaning that it may require such evidence in the case of a grounded
supposition or hypothesis. But commonly the term Vermutung refers to
assumptions that are only presumed, conjectured, surmised. A thinking
based on suppositions is akin to ordinary, everyday conjecturing and de-
void of all rigor. What is thus assumed is only vermutlich, probable, possi-
ble, perhaps. Until raised to the status of a working hypothesis, for which
there is already grounded evidence, there is no place for suppositions in a
propositional discourse, in a discourse with scientific or philosophical pre-
tensions. But "The Nature of Language," and to a lesser extent some of
the other essays in On the way to Language, make frequent use of the term.
From what we have already seen, Heidegger's suppositions cannot
ultimately be grounded suppositions in the sense of scientific or philo-
sophical hypotheses. It is just as unlikely that they would represent un-
modified incursions of ordinary thinking or sloppy language in his own
meditations. For a better grasp of how to conceive the status of these sup-
positions, let us take another example. Heidegger remarks, "despite the
fact that since the early days of Western thinking, and up into the late
period of Stefan George's poetic, thinking has thought deep thoughts
182 COMING INTO RELATION
about language, and poetry has made stirring things into language," lan-
guage has not been given voice "in its essential being." He then observes,
"We can only conjecture [vermuten J why it is that ... the being of lan-
guage nowhere brings itself to word" (p. 81). The reasons Heidegger of-
fers to explain why language's speaking has always been overheard point
to the propositional treatment oflanguage in philosophy. "There is some
evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express it-
self in words-in the language, that is, in which we make statements
about language," he claims (p. 81). But even so, language "holds back its
own origin and so denies its being to our usual notions"; it effectively
speaks "the withholding of the being of language," thus putting itself
"into language nonetheless, in its most appropriate manner" (p. 81). So
why have philosophy and poetry not been able to respond to this mani-
festation of language? The reasons must lie deeper than philosophy's
(and, poetry's?) propositional nature. "We may avoid the issue no longer,"
Heidegger asserts. "Rather, we must keep on conjecturing [vermuten J
what the reason may be why the peculiar speech of language's being
passes unnoticed all too easily. Presumably [vermutlich] part of the reason
is that the two kinds of utterance [des Sagens] par excellence, poetry and
thinking, have not been sought out in their proper habitat, their neigh-
borhood" (p. 81). Only if philosophy and poetry are advised as to the
neighborhood that prevents them from being rooted in themselves inde-
pendently of all relation to an Other does the chance arise for a thinking
and a poetic experience that would do justice to language itself
Like all the other examples of such conjecturing that could be cited
from "The Nature of Language," the one just dealt with shows to what
extent Heidegger's thinking persists in suppositions and in making further
conjectures on the basis of what had been inferred from merely, it would
seem, presumptive evidence. Although Heidegger seems to suggest on
one occasion-while discussing the kind of hint that the guide word "The
being of language: the language of being" offers to thinking in order to
achieve the neighborhood with poetry-that conjecturing is a prelimi-
nary approach to "a thought-worthy matter for which the fitting mode of
thinking is still lacking," conjecturing is not reducible to something ulti-
mately to be superseded by thinking (p. 96).10 But even so, although these
conjectures do not enjoy the status they have in philosophical or scientific
Perhaps: A Modality? 183
discourse, they are not for the same reason deficient modes of thinking.
Instead of revealing a relaxation of standards, a slippage into mere opining
and belief, conjecturing is here intimately linked to the thinking experi-
ence itself. Supposition is the peculiar mode of a thinking that, rather
than questioning (in our case) the essence of language, is receptive to the
address, the grant, and the promise of language (prior to any particular
content conveyed). It is thinking itself, and not opining, that arrives at
suppositions. Heidegger writes, "if the nearness of poetry and thinking is
one of Saying, then our thinking arrives at the assumption [ciann gelangt
unser Denken in die Vermutung 1that the occurrence of appropriation acts
as that Saying in which language grants its essential nature to us" (p. 90).
Presuming, or conjecturing, is not just one of thinking's possible modes;
rather, in the neighborhood of poetry, the thinking experience proceeds
primarily in this mode, characterizing thinking in its essence. At the end
of "The Nature of Language," after recasting once again the guide word
for his approach to language, which now reads "It is: the language of be-
ing," Heidegger recalls the last lines of George's poem, in whose neigh-
borhood he sought the possibility of a thinking experience with language.
The last line is: "Where word breaks off no thing may be." Heidegger
concludes, "now, thinking within the neighborhood of the poetic word,
we may say, as a supposition [denkend, vermutend sagendl: An 'is' arises
where the word breaks up" (p. 108). Undoubtedly, what Heidegger wishes
to say in this passage-in which he steps back from the word and its
sound, which for George gives being, to the soundless, the stillness, from
which both the word and the "is" arise as gift-is that authentic thought
(eigentliches Denken) can proceed in the mode of presumption once it is
in the neighborhood of the poetic. But denkend, vermutend sagen, shows
conjecturing to be a mode of thinking in its own right, a mode of think-
ing that in essence is conjectural. Rather than excluding supposition or
relegating it to a secondary mode, thinking here embraces it. Having
noted that thinking and poetry are fWO wholly different kinds of Saying,
Heidegger remarks, "we should become familiar with the suggestion [wir
mochten uns mit der Vermutung befreunden 1that the neighborhood of po-
etry and thinking is concealed within this farthest divergence of the Say-
ing" (p. 90). Thinking, in the neighborhood in question, all ears to the
address of language, stands in an amiable relation to supposition.
184 co M IN G INTO RE LATI 0 N
By taking up our stay in the speaking oflanguage, the chance presents it-
self that language may grant us its nature. This is the chance that lan-
guage gives thinking in the mode of conjecture-the chance of becom-
Perhaps: A Modality? 185
(p. 92). The guide word is to indicate how to arrive at the assumed near-
ness of poetry and thinking. For Heidegger, "it is not merely an expedient
that our attempt to prepare for a thinking experience with language seeks
out the neighborhood of poetry; for the attempt rests upon the supposi-
tion that poetry and thinking belong within one neighborhood. Perhaps
this supposition corresponds to the imposition [vielleicht entspricht diese
Vermutung der Zumutung] which we hear only vaguely so far: the being
of language-the language of being" (p. 80). The supposition that both
poetry and thinking share a region, and that their determination is always
suspended from the relation to their respective other, is thus, perhaps,
what the imposition of the guide word demands that we think and en-
dure. The guide word requests that we suppose, and that the supposition
in question correspond to what is imposed on us. Vice versa, what strikes
thinking as a flagrant imposition is also something that thinking has pre-
sumed or conjectured. Heidegger remarks, "we conjecture what it is that
might be imposed upon thinking [Wir vermuten, was dem Denken zuge-
mutet sein konnte]" (p. 85, translation modified). On the one hand, sup-
position is a tending toward what our thinking has to endure as an im-
position; on the other hand, the imposition is an imposition only if it
comes from a source that thinking can entertain only in the mode of a
supposition. Moreover, as is quite obvious from all the passages quoted,
the relations of correspondence between supposition and imposition lack
any certainty. They mayor may not be the case. Indeed, the thinking that
experiences the imposition and that conjectures what it is that is imposed
on it is not a thinking that seeks to gain knowledge but a thinking expe-
rience with language, more precisely with what in language is other, lan-
guage's address or grant. It is a thinking that "knows" that nothing can
guarantee this experience, and hence all it seeks are the conditions that
enable thinking to possibly make such an experience. 12 '''Possibility' so
understood, as what enables, means something else and something more
than mere opportunity [mehr als die blosse Chance]," Heidegger notes
(p. 93). The guide word, as we have seen, hints at how to arrive at the as-
sumed "place that gives us room to experience how matters stand with
language" (p. 92). But to enter that place effectively is a matter of luck
(Gluck). Heidegger writes: "If we were to succeed for once [wenn es ein-
mal gluckte] in reaching the place to which the guide-word beckons us,
Perhaps: A Modality? 189
as an Other. The uncertainty here, then, signaled by all the perhapses (and
modal auxiliaries, such as "could," "may," etc.), which condition all of
this thinking's gestures, is bound up with the responsive nature of this
thinking. A thinking that, prior to all questioning (of the nature of lan-
guage, for instance), is a listening to what directs itself toward it (Saying,
for instance)-in short, a thinking that attends to the Other (language as
address or grant, for example)-unfolds only within the limits of the per-
haps. It owes (itself) to the Other. I'; In "The Nature of Language," per-
haps registers this suspension of all thinking certitude about language
from the Zusage or Zuspruch of language. Perhaps is the mark of think-
ing's bestrangement by the Other as address. Yet even a thinking success-
fully modalized by a perhaps is not a sure confirmation of its responsive
character. Perhaps is, as it were, modalized by itself. Indeed, it is up to the
Other whether, perhaps, a response to its address has taken place. The
thinking experience is, therefore, in essence always a singular event, in-
deed, a question of luck, more precisely of happy luck, of Gluck.
In conclusion, the modalizer perhaps is not necessarily a characteris-
tic of everyday discourse. It is not necessarily the sign that assertions are
put in suspension. In a discourse of a thinking experience, which Heideg-
ger clearly demarcates from the philosophical inquiry into the essence of
language, perhaps modalizes thinking's gesturing toward an Other. But as
we have seen, such an attempt to seek the enabling conditions for an ex-
perience with an Other no longer proceeds in a sequence of statements.
The various stages of the way to language-"way" understood as what lets
arrive (Gelangenlassen) (p. 92) -cannot be scientifically verified or falsi-
fied. Yet, for the same reasons, perhaps is no longer a grammatical-logical
category in such a meditation. Since it no longer characterizes proposi-
tions or statements, it is no longer a modality. Perhaps perhaps is here suc-
cessfully removed from its customary usage. However, no certainty allows
us to state that this is the case. Perhaps is the mark of a response, but as a
response to the Other, it remains infinitely suspended from it.
PARTlY II
ihrer eigenen scharfsten Vereinzelung auf das jeweilige Dasein) (BT, p. 63).
Heidegger will not abandon this "finitistic" conception of Being even
when he eventually replaces the Dasein analytic with the interrogation of
the history of Being. "There is Being only," he writes in Identity and Dif-
flrence, "in this or that particular historic character [in dieser und jener
geschichtlichen Pragung]."2 What I want to emphasize here-and this is
my first thesis-is that the finitude of Being does not lie in the fact that
Being appears only by means of the exemplary being that is Dasein or
only in the diverse historical "sendings" of Being, but rather lies in what
Being and Time, for example, calls the equiprimordiality of Being and the
truth of Dasein (BT, p. 272). In other words, the finitistic conception of
Being depends entirely on the nature of its relation. What must hold our
interest here is the constellation (a term Heidegger uses in Identity and
Difference), the belonging-together that characterizes the relation of Being
and Dasein, their Zugehorigkeit, on whose basis alone we will be able to
conceive the terms that are related here. The question of finitude must be
conceived as a question of relation, a question of the relation of what,
considered apart from that relation, arises out of the metaphysical order:
Being and finite man in their presence.
What therefore is relation (Bezug)? We can certainly begin to an-
swer this question by citing the following negative definition Heidegger
gives in "What Are Poets For?" when he discusses the use of this word in
Rilke's authentic poetry:
We only half understand Rilke's word Bezug-and in a case such as this that
means not at all-if we understand it in the sense of reference or relation. We
compound our misunderstanding if we conceive of this relation as the human
ego's referring or relating itself to the object. This meaning, "referring to," is a
later one in the history of language. Rilke's word Bezug is used in this sense as
well, of course; but it does not intend it primarily, but only on the basis of its
original meaning. Indeed, the expression "the whole Bezug" is completely un-
thinkable if Bezug is represented as mere relation. 3
Beziehung and relation are, indeed, only the formal determinations un-
covered "directly by way of 'formalization' from any kind of context,
whatever its subject-matter or its way of Being" (BT, p. 108). Just as the
system of reference that constitutes the significance of Dasein's world-
hood is allowed to be understood as a network of relations only at the
price of a leveling down that empties all these relations of their own con-
tent, the relation between Being and the being of man can be amenable
to a functional analysis only by sacrificing the very specificity of this
relation.
As Being and Time attempts to demonstrate, such a relational and
functional analysis is rigorously applicable only to the present-at-hand
(Vorhllntlmes) , to the beings, therefore, whose Being has the nature of
pure substantiality. In contrast to the ready-to-hand, which is ontologi-
cally prior and in whose opening our daily encounter with beings occurs,
Vorhandmheit designates a mode of Being that depends on the function
of an epistemological relationship between an (abstract and mundane)
subject and the world represented as an object. In Being and Time, Hei-
degger insists upon the fact that "a 'commercium' of the subject with a
world does not get created for the first time by knowing, nor does it arise
from some way in which the world acts upon a subject." Moreover,
knowing, for Heidegger, "is a mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-
the-world" (BT, p. 90). The assumption of relations between a subject
and an object is possible "only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is
as it is" (BT, p. 84). Thus, in Being and Time, Heidegger will attempt to
ground ontologically the subject-object relation (and a fortiori the estab-
lishment oHormal relations between objects) in a mode of Dasein, in this
being that has for its Being a relation of Being to its Being (Seinsverhalt-
nis). In other words, he is forced to establish that all subject-object rela-
tions are opened onrologically only in the interior of the relation (Bezug)
of Dasein and Being.
On the Nonadequate Trait 199
The relations between man and Being, the relations that found the rela-
tions confining the human to a subject conversing with an object, appear
here as a "between," as a clearing (Lichtung) between. In what follows, I
am going to try to highlight this intermediary nature of the relation-the
Zwischen of the Bezug-within which alone something like a relation of
a subject to an object can take place. I will begin, therefore, by explicating
the major features that, according to Heidegger, characterize the relation
between man and Being. I will extract these features from Heidegger's
own discussion of the Dasein analytic in "The Letter on Humanism."
The Dasein analytic asserts that man must first be thought as Da-
sein determined by its being-in-the-world and as a being relating itself to
itself through the Being that is to be. Paradoxically (although this might
200 RHYTHM AND ZIGZAG
relation, and the Geziige (the whole of what is in relation), all of which
presuppose the openness of the relation or the openness of the Verhaltnis,
are, however, because of the nature of the openness of Verhaltnis, its orig-
inary and at each time particular actualization.
How then are we to understand the relation between Verhaltnis (re-
lation) and Verhalten (comportment)? In "On the Essence of Truth," Hei-
degger conceives Verhaltnis as the "fundamental comportment of letting
be [Verhaltenheit des Sein-lassens]," that is, as freedom (BW, p. 129; my
translation). Opening itself in the openness of this Verhaltenheit, all com-
portment (Verhalten) appears then as "being attuned in a way that dis-
closes beings as a whole" (BW, p. 131). All comportment presupposes and
simultaneously reveals the openness of the relation. As Vorenthalt (with-
drawal or concealment, or privation), the Verhaltenheit (fundamental com-
portment) of Verhaltnis also entails its own concealment because of the
Verhalten (comportment and restraint) that actualizes it.
As letting beings be, freedom is intrinsically the resolutely open bearing [Vt>r-
hiiltnis] that does not close up in itself. All comportment is grounded in this
bearing and receives from it directedness toward beings and disclosure of them.
Nevertheless, this bearing toward concealing conceals itself in the process, letting
a forgottenness of the mystery take precedence and disappearing in it. (BW,
PP·133-34)
II
they are capable of death as death. Mortals are who they are, as mortals, present
in the shelter of Being [Gebirg des Seins J. They are the presencing relation to Be-
ing as Being [Sie sind das wesende Verhaltnis zum Sein aLs Sein J. (PLT, pp. 178-79)
The belonging of humans to the Earth lies not only in their allowing the
Earth to be illuminated in a world but also in their furnishing of a shel-
ter for the revealed Earth. This shelter is precisely death. By dying, man
offers a crypt to the Earth unconcealed in the openness of a world.
Thereby, he remains faithful to the Earth, which is nothing other than its
own withdrawal into unconcealment. Man's finitude, namely, his being
capable of death as death, is destined by the Earth. His finitude becomes
then the Gebirg des Seins, its own shelter, its own withdrawal.
When Heidegger, however, writes in "Building, Dwelling, Think-
ing" that man dies "continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the
sky, before the divinities," man's death is still being thought as a function
of the Earth revealed as the fourfold (Geviert) (PLT, p. 150). The fourfold
is the present articulation of the world, the world that itself represents the
Earth's illumination. Heidegger says in "The Thing," "When we s~y mor-
tals, we are then thinking of the other three along with them by way of
the simple oneness of the four" (PLT, p. 179). These other three are the
earth, the sky, the divinities; with them, man participates in the fourfold
of the world. In other words, as Dasein determined by its being-in-the-
world, man dies continuously. The world of the fourfold is, as I men-
tioned, the clearing and illumination of the Earth. In this world, the
Earth appears as the fourfold of the earth and sky, of the humans and di-
vinities. And the Earth's appearance as the fourfold will become folded
back again into itself, into this same Earth, in order to be sheltered there.
(On this subject we should consult "The Origin of the Work of Art.")
This double movement affecting the earth-world relation holds as
well for the relations between the four parts of the fourfold. Before demon-
strating this, we must note first that Heidegger conceives the belonging-
together of the four parts of the fourfold in terms of reflection.
Earth and sky, divinities and mortals-being at one with one another of their
own accord-belong together by way of simpleness of the united fourfold. Each
of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Each therewith re-
flects itself in its own way into its own, within the simpleness of the four. This
mirroring does not portray a likeness. The mirroring, lighting each of the four,
206 R H Y T H MAN D ZIG ZAG
appropriates their own presencing into the simple belonging to one another [Das
SpiegeLn ereignet, jedes der Vier LichterJd, deren eigenes WeserJ in die einfoLtige verei-
nigung zueinanderJ. (PLT, p. 179)
How does the continuous death of man take place in the reflecting play
of the fourfold? By re-fleeting the presence of the other three parts: the im-
mortals, the sky, and the earth. Death therefore is the specifically human
way that enables the other three to reach what is proper to them, while
man discovers what is proper to him by dying in the re-flection of the
other three. Thus the fact of being able to die as death is an essence that is
sent back to man by way of the other three. This mirror-play of the four-
fold, instead of elevating man to the status of an autonomous subject re-
flecting itself in a homogeneous reflection, can enter into its own essence
only by means of his own self-effacement in the letting-be of the others.
This self-effacing movement, which characterizes the relation of man to
the other three pans, holds as well for each part. Each of them has a par-
ticular manner of self-effacement by means of letting the others be, and
therefore by means of being re-flected, by the others, into what is its own.
How are we to understand, then, the whole play of the fourfold?
Heidegger writes:
Mirroring in this appropriating-lighting way, each of the four plays to each of the
others. The appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own, but
it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being towards one
another.
The mirroring that binds into freedom is the play that betroths each of the
four to each through the enfolding clasp of their mutual appropriation [aus dem
foLtenden HaLt der vereignung J. None of the four insists on its own separate par-
ticularity. Rather, each is expropriated, within their mutual appropriation, into
what is proper to it, its own [zu einem Eigenen enteignetJ. This expropriative ap-
propriation [enteignende vereignen J is the mirror-play [das SpiegeL-Spiel] of the
fourfold. Out of the fourfold, the simple onefold of the four is ventured. (PLT,
p. 179; translation modified)
The reflecting play of the fourfold's four parts is identical to the move-
ment that characterizes the relation of Being as a relation to its appear-
ance in its own openness, that is, as appearing as comportment and as the
whole of what is joined. Thus this play must be understood as a expro-
priative mutual appropriation. Through this play, as we have seen, each
On the Nonadequate Trait 207
of the four parts acquires what is its own by a reRection that lets the oth-
ers be. Through self-effacement, by becoming the mirror for the other,
the self is sent back, by this other, to what is properly its own. The proper
(or what is one's own) therefore is never constituted by speculative reRec-
tion; there is propriety in the fourfold only insofar as there is always al-
ready expropriation. Instead of reRecting the parts into themselves, the
mirror-play of the fourfold dislocates them.
This mirror-play, a play of expropriative mutual appropriation, is a
play that every process of propriety presupposes. Something can become
"properly" proper only by abstracting from this originary play. Thus, the
play of fourfold, which is the Earth revealed and concealed as world (and
nevertheless refolded again back into the Earth), is not only a play of re-
lations decentered in their very structure but also and especially a play
preceding every reRective and speculative movement. This mirror-play of
the relation (of Bezug or Verhaltnis), appearing here as the openness of the
world, is nothing less than what Heidegger attempts to think as the com-
plex simplicity of thought as this relation itsel£ In order to demonstrate
this, it is necessary first to re-Iegate, re-Rect, re-fold, the play of the world,
the mirror-play, into what it brings to appearance, into the Earth, there-
fore, into Being.
III
We turn therefore to " ... Poetically Man Dwells ... ," to the "be-
tween," to the Zwischen or entre-deux, of the earth and sky. From this "be-
tween" as dimension, man lifts his gaze to the heavens. This span, this di-
ametrical measure of dimension, opens what we traditionally call the
space where the sky and the earth come to be opposed. "Man does not
undertake this spanning," says Heidegger, "just now and then; rather,
man is man at all only in such spanning" (PIT, p. 221). By dwelling be-
tween the sky and the earth, man actualizes his very relation to Being. Be-
cause of this, we are now going to have to interrogate how "relation" and
"between" communicate. Man actualizes the relation to Being (to the Be-
ing of the relation) by remaining in between the sky and the earth, or
again, by participating in the double "between" of the fourfold. We must
try then to conceive this "communication" in its greatest generality. The
208 RHYTHM AND ZIGZAG
relation and the "between" can each in turn, however, be thought only in
a singular way. Will it be necessary then to proceed by generalizing on the
basis of the whole of all the particular manifestations of the relation and
the "between"? Certainly not. This procedure would amount to reducing
the relation and the "between" to their most empty concepts. Before
sketching an answer to these questions, I shall begin by analyzing a par-
ticular case of communication between the relation and the "between,"
the logos.
In the section of Being and Time entitled "The Concept of Logos,"
Heidegger determines this primary mode of being-in-the-world as an es-
sentially aphonic apophansis (a letting something be seen, a making man-
ifest). The logos is also said to let "something be seen in its togetherness
with something-letting it be seen as something" (BT, p. 56). Conse-
quently, the apophantic function is doubled by a synthetic function. This
double function of the logos, simultaneously apophantic and synthetic,
according to Heidegger, positively binds together all the equivocal signi-
fications of this term. In the later essay "Logos," where Heidegger con-
tinues to penetrate the double nature of the original meaning of the lo-
gos, the primordial relation of man and being appears as a speaking, a
discourse, a recounting-all terms that translate the Greek term legein. In
"On the Being and Conception of Physis in Aristotle's Physics B, I," Hei-
degger translates the word "legein" with the German "lesen": gathering or
collecting. 1O In fact, the literal usage of "legein" denoted leading the scat-
tered and its multiplicity back into a unity and thus making manifest
what was previously in withdrawal. It denoted letting something be seen
in its entry into presence. Heidegger writes:
In the Greek definition of the essence of the human being, Legein and logos mean
the relation on the basis of which what is present gathers itself for the first time
as such around and for human beings. And only because human beings are in-
sofar as they relate to beings as beings, unconcealing and concealing them, can
they and must they have the "word," i.e., speak of the being of beings. But the
words that language uses are only fragments that have precipitated out of the
word, and from them humans can never find their way to beings or find the path
back to them, unless it be on the basis of legein. Of itself Legein has nothing to do
with saying and with language. Nonetheless, if the Greeks conceive of saying as
legein, then this implies an interpretation of the essence of word and of saying so
On the Nonadequate Trait 209
unique that no later "philosophy oflanguage" can ever begin to imagine its as yet
unplumbed depths. I I
ing and man as such, but not on the basis of either Being or man. Earlier,
in Being and Time, when defining the nature of being-in (/n-Sein), Hei-
degger stresses that this mode of the Being of Dasein must not be confused
with a property "that is effected, or even just elicited, in a present-at-hand
subject by the 'world's' Being-present-at-hand." Heidegger continues:
But in that case, what else is presented with this phenomenon than the commer-
cium which is present-at-hand between a subject present-at-hand and an Object
present-at-hand? Such an interpretation would come closer to the phenomenal
content if we were to say that Dasein is the Being of this "between." Yet to take
our orientation from this "between" would still be misleading. For with such an
orientation we would also be covertly assuming the entities between which this
"between," as such, "is," and we would be doing so in a way which is ontologi-
cally vague. The "between" is already conceived as the result of the convenientia
of two things that are present-at-hand. (BT, p. 170)
testifies to the finite nature of the relation considered in its greatest gen-
erality. The "simple milieu," then, is what differs essentially, insofar as it
is the "more primordial origin," from what it produces, while existing as
a finite origin consisting of the same nature as that berween which it "is."
This "simple milieu" as the relation berween the legein of the mortals and
the legein of the logos is the logos (itself) as the relation of relations, pre-
cisely because of this finitude. The logos as the "berween" is the difftrant,
the other oflin the same (Selbe). This milieu, Heidegger says, is the "more
primordial origin" of the legein as comportment (Verhalten) and of the
logos as relation (Verhaltnis). But it is this origin only insofar as the legein
and the logos, to which it gives way, are the very dissimulation of this
"simple milieu." Once more, the "logic" of the mirror-play, such as the
discussions of the fourfold and of the relations berween man and Being
made clear, turns our (0 constitute as well the thought of the "simple mi-
lieu," the thought of the logos as such. Because the issue here is to think
Being as the "berween," we are going to see that Heidegger will soon
"simplify" this logic of the mirror (which must not be confused with a
specular reflection) in order to unify it with what he calls the "trait."
Before demonstrating this, however, we shall pause for a moment
and try to think the milieu as such. Immediately, the milieu must be dis-
tinguished from what it is not, and here we shall make use of "What Are
Poets For?" Heidegger's "simple milieu" must not be confused with
Rilke's "unheard-of Open." Insofar as it is Being thought within the hori-
zon of the forgetfulness of Being, Rilke's "unheard-of Open" abstracts
from the whole of beings in order (0 represent the milieu of attraction
that Being has for beings, the milieu that puts beings in equilibrium and
that mediates them within the draft of the "whole Bezug" (PLT, p. lO5).
Despite its invisibility, this milieu or Open is still a milieu belonging to
the order of the heart, to the order of interiority where the things of the
world come (0 lose what opposes this order in order to be elevated into
the undivided presence of the Erinnerung of all exteriority; it is therefore
not the openness that the "simple milieu" represents for Heidegger. In-
stead of being openness in the sense of Unverborgenheit, Rilke's "unheard-
of Open" is therefore "what is closed up, unlightened, which draws on in
boundlessness" (PLT, p. lOG). Contrary to the "unheard-of Open," in
which Rilke turns subjective experience inro a reversal of consciousness,
On the Nonadequate Trait 213
the "simple milieu" cannot be the object of any sort of immediate en-
counter. Since it is an origin that always reveals itself only in its dissimu-
lating effects, the "simple milieu" lets itself neither be felt right on the
body nor be apprehended intellectually; the experience of the simple mi-
lieu, according to Heidegger, is possible only in the Dichtung of thought.
Thus, for example, in "'Wenn wie am Feiertage'" ("As on a holi-
day ... "), Heidegger describes the extremely mediated relations that the
poet (the intermediary between the people and the heavens) maintains
with the immediate, with the "simple milieu" from which all mediation
flows: "Since neither the humans nor the divinities ever happen to fulfill
by themselves the immediate relation to the Sacred, the humans are in
need of the divinities and the heavens are in need of the mortals."14 By
means of the love that mediates the humans and the divinities, the latter
"do not precisely belong to themselves but to the sacred, which is for them
the rigorous essence of mediation, the law" (EHD, p. 69). Thereby expro-
priated, the divinities send to the poetic mediator "den losgebundenen
Blitz," the liberating lightning bolt that enables the immediate to be said
by letting it be in its fundamental inaccessibility (EHD, p. 70). By means
of "the sweetness of the mediate and mediating speech," the poets "must
leave to the immediate its immediacy and however at the same time as-
sume its mediation as the Unique" (EHD, p. 71). Such is the task incum-
bent upon the poets: to remain in relation "to the highest mediators."
That the Sacred would be then confined to a mediation by god and the poets,
and gives birth therefore to the hymn, this precisely threatens to pervert the very
Being of the Sacred. The immediate becomes thereby mediate. Because the
hymn awakens only with the awakening of the Sacred, the mediate comes from
the immediate itself. (EHD, pp. 72-73)
Let us return then to Rilke's "unheard-of Open": it appears now that this
Open is an immediate transformed into the mediate, the very contrary of
the immediate, the very contrary of all mediation. However, in the speech
of an authentic poet like Holderiin, as Heidegger says, mediation lets the
immediate be. It lets the "the terror of immediacy be" without turning it
into its contrary (EHD, p. 71). Based on the model of authentic poetry,
the dichtendes Denken that is called to think the "simple milieu" (the "be-
tween" or the relation as such) has the purpose ofletting these be and not
214 R H Y T H MAN D ZIG ZAG
transmuting them into their contrary: to think them in a way that does
not confuse them with what they mediate, with what in them and by
them appears in order to obfuscate them as the origin, to think them in
such a way that they are not changed into empty and abstract universals,
to think them, instead, in their essential finitude.
IV
Yet presencing is not unveiled only under the form of the opposi-
tion present-absent. It is as well the very clearing where this appearing
takes place. "Presencing brings unconcealment along with itself. Unconceal-
ment itself is presencing. Both are the Same, though they are not identi-
cal" (EGT, p. 55). And that is not all: as unconcealment and the openness
of all appearing, presencing is also its own dissimulation, the closing of
its opening. Presence is thus also the absence of unconcealment, an ab-
sence that is not "simply absentness; rather, it is a presencing, namely, that
kind in which the absencing (but not the absent thing) is present."17
Presencing is double (zwei or zweifach) in a double sense. First, it is
double by relating to what the absent and the present bring to light,
thereby obfuscating presencing itself. Second, it is double in that it is
then again the openness and the closure of its own appearing in the dyad
of the present and the absent. Although two times double, presencing is
only one (einfoltig). Revealing itself according to this double trace (Spur),
presencing is the unitary fold (Einfolt). Presencing, manifesting itself ac-
cording to the double trace as the unitary fold, comes to language as the
self-relation to what is present. This relation (Beziehung), says Heidegger,
is unique (tine Einzige). It remains "altogether incomparable to any other
relation. It belongs to the uniqueness of Being itself" (EGT, p. 52). This
relation is presencing itself. Illuminating itself according to the double
trace, the relation, nevertheless, does not appear as such. It implies in no
way, Heidegger says, that "difference appears as difference" (EGT, p. 51).
The relation, difference as such that never appears as such, remains yet to
be thought.
Let us begin by considering the relation of presencing to itself in
the double trace by which it is manifested in self-reservation. The double
way in which presencing appears, either as the present and the absent, or
as the very clearing of this manifestation, is the same. The question of the
relation, then, is stated as follows: How is the same related to itself?
The same, we note immediately, is clarified by what Heidegger des-
ignates under equiprimordiality (Gleichursprunglichkeit). This equipri-
mordiality defines the plural ontological characteristics of an original ir-
reducible phenomenon. In Being and Time, we see that the multiplicity of
these characteristics must not be derived from a simple primal ground.
This multiplicity is constitutive (BT, p. 170). How are we to think the re-
On the Nonadequate Trait 217
"By the manner of its saying, the Greek announces that concealing-and
therefore at the same time remaining unconcealed-exercises a com-
manding preeminence over every other way in which what is present
comes to presence. The fundamental trait of presencing itself is deter-
mined by remaining concealed and unconcealed" (EGT, pp. 106-7).
Aletheia designates nothing other than the fundamental trait. This
fundamental trait is, as Heidegger notes in "The Anaximander Fragment,"
the trait pure and simple, the Zug of the early illumination of Being. The
aletheic trait is the most primordial unconcealment-reconcealment, Ereig-
nis in its greatest simplicity. According to the "logic" of the fundamental
trait, however, its unconcealment as Being, as presencing, is of such a sort
"that thinking simply does not pursue it" (EGT, p. 26). Between two
"veilings," between the primordial hiddenness and the hiddenness that
follows the unhiddenness, the unveiled trait not only is double but also is
folded unequally. Because the trait in its self-relation does nor overlap with
itself, because it is nor adequate to itself, the unveiled trait is folded back
into what is veiled. What prevails in the trait is its re-trait, its withdrawal.
Hci<ieggcr, in "The Anaximander Fragment," refers to the trait as a
sign: "Al; it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws. Being thereby holds
to its truth and keeps to itself. This keeping to itself is the way it reveals
itself early on. Its early sign is A-letheia. As it provides the unconcealment
of beings it founds the concealment of Being" (EGT, p. 26). The aletheic
trait is dominated by this "keeping to itself," by the reconcealment, the
veiling, forgetfulness, and so on. The trait is no longer simple; it is uni-
tary only on the condition of being thereby unequally refolded. Revealed
in the "early hours" of Western destiny as Being in order immediately to
go back into forgetfulness, this trait is presencing as relation and differ-
ence, and is therefore the relation as such, the difference as such. At its
deepest level, this trait is only the "as" as such.
Are there any means left by which to excavate the fold of the trait
and its unequal overlapping in the retrait? Fuge, the fault that joins, the
jointure that differs, is another name for the trait. In "Aletheia" Heidegger
notes "that the jointure [Fugel thanks to which revealing and concealing
are mutually joined [ineinanderfiigen 1must remain the invisible of all in-
visibles, since it bestows shining on whatever appears" (EGT, p. lIS).
Joined by being turned toward itself, the fold of the Fuge, withour any ap-
On the Nonadequate Trait 219
domain, that is, the relation "which originally and always comes to vi-
brate [Schwingen 1as a comportment [Verhalten]" (BW, p. 124; translation
modified). The most original comportment, however, is none other than
language: "the most delicate and fragile vibration" (ID, p. 38; translation
modified).
(19 80)
Translated by Leonard Lawlor
11
Bur because the word is shown in a different, higher rule, the relation to
the word must also undergo a transformation. Saying attains to
a different articulation, a different me/os, a different tone.
-Martin Heidegger
ings. The question of Being is thus the question of finitude par excellence,
precisely because it is an investigation into the ontico-ontological differ-
ence. Heidegger's subsequent determination of Being in terms of tem-
porality and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), that is, in terms of finitude, is
only a consequence of this inquiry into the difference itself.7 As differ-
ence, as Unter-Schied (as Heidegger will later spell this word), the mean-
ing of Being or Being as such is, then, radically different from a roman-
tic chiasm as an endlessly engendering and procreating gap, as well as
from any constituting transcendental in either a Kantian or a Husserlian
fashion. The rift of Being (Puge des Seins), instead of engendering, fini-
tizes everything that is to be referred to it as to the locus of the thing's
coming forth. 8
This being established, it becomes possible to indicate how Hei-
degger's most penetrating meditations on Being as Being culminate in the
idea of the trait. Instead of representing a mere weakness of Western
thought, says Heidegger, the obliteration of the question of Being is in-
scribed in the original event (Ereignis), at the dawn of Western meta-
physics itself. This event is characterized by the fact that Being originally
revealed itself only to withdraw again instantly. The forgetting of Being
is, coruequendy, the very destiny of Being (Geschick des Seins). However,
this forgetting of Being, which is characteristic of Western man, brings
about the danger of a growing alienation from that destiny itself. Hence
the necessity of a step back in a gesture comparable to Nietzsche's active
forgetfulness, so that this withdrawal may lift again the original retreat of
Being at the moment of its revelation. Such a stepping back, such a with-
drawal of withdrawal, is no reflection, as if the original event were some-
thing that could be objectified by a subject. It is what Heidegger calls a
Besinnung or an Andenken that allows for the return of the forgotten.
Consequently, the question of Being yields to the "double, equivocal
movement," or more precisely, to the threefold movement that distin-
guishes the "logic" of the trait.
But since the forgetting of Being is decreed by Being itself, and
since the step back coincides with a listening to Being (horen auf), to
think the history of the forgetting of Being, as well as to inaugurate a de-
struction of the tradition of this forgetting by Western philosophy, is to
think Being as such. And Being as such appears to be "nothing" but this
Joining the Text 225
the theater}. Toward the end of this essay, Mallarme ascertains that for
him, who has meditated about men and about himself, there is nothing
else in the mind but "an exact account of purely rhythmical motives of
being which are the signs by which it can be recognized [un compte rendu
de purs motifi rythmiques de tetre, qui en sont les reconnaissables signes J." 18
For Mallarme then, as for Heidegger, Being is neither substance nor form
in the sense of eidos. It is rhythm. Mallarme evokes the purely rhythmical
motives of Being; Heidegger speaks of "the domain pulsating in itself [in
sich schwingender Bereich]," of "the moving wave [bewegende Woge]," of
language as "the all-containing undulation [alles verhaltende Schwing-
ung]," and so on. 19 Both mean by "rhythm" an ordered and recurrent al-
ternation. Both evoke what had been considered, until Emile Benveniste's
essay "La notion de 'rythme' dans son expression linguistique" (The no-
tion of rhythm in its linguistic expression), its etymological root: rein (the
regular flow of waves). But both Mallarme and Heidegger also refer to
the genuinely Greek meaning of "rhythm" as the well-proportioned
arrangements of parts in a whole. Heidegger writes: "Rhythm, rhusmos,
does not mean flux and flowing, but rather form [FugungJ. Rhythm is
what is at rest, what forms [fogt) the movement of dance and song, and
thus lets it rest within itself Rhythm bestows rest. "20
This meaning of rhuthmos or rhusmos-which, as Benveniste has
argued, dates back to the inventors of atomism, Democritus and Leucip-
pus-is equivalent to schema and approximately signifies something like
form, configuration, disposition. Just as Mallarme claims to havediscov-
ered purely rhythmical motives of Being by meditating on himself and
others, so the Greeks employed rhuthmos to designate the individually
distinctive form of the human characterY As Heidegger stressed in his
seminar on Heraclitus (1966), this meaning of rhythm as "form" implies
a determination of "form" as imprint, seal, and characterY Yet, precisely
this meaning of rhythm is to be found in what Mallarme calls sceau,
moule, coupe, and so on. Let us quote one example of Being as a mold,
drawn from "Solennite" (Solemnity):
Sign! at the central abyss of a spiritual impossibility that nothing is exclusively to
all, the divine numerator of our apotheosis, some supreme mold that does not take
place insofar as that of any existing object: but, in order to animate a seal in it, it
borrows all the scattered, unknown, and richly floating veins, then to forge them. 2.1
Joining the Text 229
(Signe! au goufTre central d'une spirituelle impossibilite que rien soit exclusive-
ment tout, Ie numerateur divin de notre apotheose, quelque supreme moule qui
n'ayant pas lieu en tant que d'aucun objet qui existe: mais il emprunte, pour y
aviver un sceau tous gisements epars, ignores et flottants selon quelque richesse,
et les forger.)
Because the supreme mold to which Mallarme refers does not take place
in the guise of an existing object-because this mold does not exist in the
same way as the existing objects (it does not take place altogether)-it is
then, like the essence, the truth or meaning of Being, no longer of the or-
der of what is present, that is, just another being. Like Being, the
supreme mold withholds itself in what springs forth from it.
Mallarme likes to decipher the visible signs of Being as rhythm (if
me plait de les partout dechiffrer). These signs of Being as rhythm are to be
discovered in what Mallarme designates as "great traits." At the end of
"Notes sur Ie theatre," we read:
Note that beyond the narration create<;l to imitate life in its confusion and vast-
ness, there are no means by which to theatrically reproduce an action, except to
rediscover by instinct and through elimination one of these great traits, here not
the least pathetic; it is the eternal return of the exile, his heart filled with hope, to
the eanh which was forsaken by him but changed into an ungrateful one, now
someone at the point where he must leave it voluntarily this time, where! with a
glance he surveys the illusions suggested to his youth by the beckoning of the na-
tive land. 24
(Tenez que hors du recit fait a l'imitation de la vie confuse et vaste, il n'y pas de
moyen de poser sceniquement une action, sauf a retrouver d'instinct et par elim-
ination un de ces grands traits, ici non Ie moins pathetique, c'est I'eternel retour
de l'exile, coeur gonfle d'espoir, au sol par lui quitte mais change ingrat, main-
tenant quelconque au point qu'il en doive partir cette fois volontairement, ou!
en enveloppant d'un coup d'oeilles illusions suggeres a sa jeunesse par Ie salut
du lieu natal.)
gin), etc., when the veil is, without being, torn, for example when one is
made to die or come laughing" (p. 213). The manner in which the double
structure of the hymen relates to itself is that of a reflection without pen-
etration: "The entre of the hymen is reflected in the screen without pene-
trating it" (p. 2(5). This reflection without penetration, this doubling with-
out overlaying or overlapping of the hymen, this is what constitutes, as the
fictional milieu of Mallarme's "Mimique," the textual mark as a remark.
If the mime of" Mimique" only imitates imitation, if he copies only
copying, all he produces is a copy of a copy. In the same manner, the hy-
men that comes to illustrate the theatrical space reduplicates nothing but
the miming of the mime. Miming only reference, but not a particular ref-
erent, Mallarme keeps the Platonic differential structure of mimesis intact
while radically displacing it. Instead of imitating, of referring to a referent
within the horizon of truth, the mime mimes only other signs and their
referring function. Signs in the text of "Mimique" are made to refer to
what according to metaphysics is only derived, unreal, unpresent, that is,
to other signs. Such a doubling of the sign, of a sign referring to another
sign and to its function of referring, is what Derrida calls re-marking.
"'A mpy of a copy, a simulacrum that simulates the Platonic simu-
lacrum-the Platonic copy of a copy ... have all lost here the lure of the
present referent and thus find themselves lost for dialectics and ontology,
lost for absolute knowledge" (p. 219). This double sign, a sign referring to
another sign, reflecting itself in it without penetrating it and without
overlaying it, is the textual instance. The operation and re-marking that
constitutes it is an operation by which what traditionally was conceived
of as a mark for a present referent becomes duplicated and refers not to
itself but to something similar to it, another mark. This re-marking of the
Platonic simulacrum-a scandal in the horizon of truth-gives rise to a
tertium quid. "Tertium datur, without synthesis," writes Derrida (p. 2(9).
It is the textual instance, to be conceived of no longer as yielding to the
Platonic opposition of copy and original but as a genuinely third entity.
The textual instance as illustrated by the hymen as a re-mark, as a
reflection without penetration, as a duplication without identity, escapes
and precedes all ontology of the text. All ontologies of the text, whether
they determine text in terms of the sensible, the intelligible, or dialecti-
cally as form, remain within the horizon of metaphysics and its Platonic
Joining the Text 233
[does sol without any possibility of its fitting back over or into itself,
without any reduction of its spacing" (p. 251). But if the re-mark repre-
sents a sort of doubling where the two sides of the fold do not coincide
with each other although they mirror each other, the textual instance is
not reflexive. It is precisely the excess of reflexivity, the supplement that
exceeds what is reflected in the folded mark, that raises it to the status of
a textual instance. "The fold is not a form of reflexivity. If by reflexivity
one means the motion of consciousness or self-presence that plays such a
determining role in Hegel's speculative logic and dialectic, in the move-
ment of sublation (Aufhebung) and negativity (the essence is reflection,
says the greater Logic), then reflexivity is but an effect of the fold as text"
(p. 270). The re-mark is a dissymmetrical instance. It is constituted by a
supplement that exceeds any self-mirroring of the two sides of the fold.
Dissemination, writes Derrida in "Outwork," "is written on the reverse
side-the tinfoil-of this mirror" of specular reflection (p. 33).
To get a better understanding of the dissymmetrical and supple-
mentary nature of the nonreflexive folding of the textual instance, it may
be useful to circle back to the figure of the hymen, which may have ap-
peared as nothing but a theme in Derrida's reading of Mallarme. The hy-
men, as a theme, becomes a sort of totalizing emblem that is thus made
to refer back upon itself in a gesture of closure. Indeed, as a supplemen-
tary mark the hymen comes to represent metaphorically and metonymi-
cally the whole series of double marks that constitute the text of "Mimi-
que." But at the same time, this mark is also only one among the many
marks that form the text. The mark of the hymen, consequently, names
the whole series of the double marks of the text by tropologically supple-
menting it while remaining inscribed in it. Yet of the fan (eventail), an-
other Mallarmean image, Derrida writes:
This surplus mark, this margin of meaning, is not one valence among others in
the series, even though it is inserted in there, too. It has to be inserted there to
the extent that it does not exist outside the text and has no transcendental privi-
lege; this is why it is always represented by a metaphor and a metonymy (page,
plume, pleat). But while belonging in the series of valences, it always occupies
the position of a supplementary valence, or rather, it marks the structurally nec-
essary position of a supplementary inscription that could always be added to or
subtracted from the series. (pp. 25J-52)
236 RHYTHM AND ZIGZAG
The supplementary mark, instead of closing the text upon itself, instead
of reflecting it into its own as a totalizing image is supposed to do, illus-
trates nothing but what Derrida calls "the general law of textual supple-
mentarity" (p. 254). The surplus mark re-marks the whole series of the
double marks of the text by illustrating what always exceeds a possible
closure of the text folded, reflected upon itself. In excess of the text as a
whole is the text "itself."
Any double mark can, in this manner, represent the exceeding sup-
plement of textuality. Any double mark can represent what makes the to-
tality of all textual instances possible. In other words, any textual instance
can assume the function of naming the whole series of the marks of a text
insofar as it occupies the position of a supplement to that totality, a sup-
plement that (as the text itself) is the locus of the "engendering" of the
whole series. Suffice it to say that this "engenderment" of the whole series
by its exceeding supplement is neither that of an emanation or creation
of any sort nor a constitution by means of a transcendental instance.
The double mark is folded upon itself in such a manner that what
exceeds its reflection becomes the locus of its coming forth; the double
mark is abysmally dissymmetrical. In the context of "The Double Ses-
sion" this may be the most concise determination of a textual instance.
Rigorously speaking, only when understanding the notion of text in this
manner can the text be said to have any deconstructive properties. If one
neglects the fact that text is the dissymmetrical excess of the folded mark,
one will fall prey to textual fetishism, and one will mistake its operation
of deconstruction either for the romantic notion of a chiastic engender-
ing (and destruction, or rather ironization) of the self-reflexive text, or for
the dialectic sublation of opposite terms in the reflexive and speculative
gesture of the philosophy of identity.
Because the textual instance is determined in terms of supplemen-
tarity, of an excess to itself, it will never be able to come into appearance
as such. Because of what always exceeds the text as its supplementary
scene of "engendering," the text as such necessarily remains concealed.
When revealing itself as a whole, as a series of double marks, the text
folds itself at once back into what, as a supplementary mark of compre-
hension, represents tropologically the whence of the whole series. For this
very reason, there cannot be a phenomenology of the text. Especially not
joining the Text 237
textual trace in even a Heideggerian fashion. Let us, indeed, not forget
that, of all things, the phenomenon par excellence is Being. But before at-
tempting to face what distinguishes the question of the text from the
question of Being, the similarities of the two questions must first occupy
us. In sum, the logic of the trait as retrait that subtends the Heideggerian
notion of Being, and the particular locus (Ortschaft) that Heidegger at-
tributes to Being-its place at once inside and outside all the conceptual
dyads that it allows to come forth or as which it shows itself-are the ma-
jor formal similarities between the Heideggerian and the Derridean ques-
tioning. If these findings correctly indicate the level of philosophical re-
flection on which Derrida elaborates his notion of text, a level that indeed
excludes all pragmatic, empirical, rationalistic, and dialectical approaches,
and if they also hint at the nature of the problems that Derrida tries to
solve by the question of the text, do they also allow us to conclude, as
Gerard Granel does with regard to the Derridean notion of writing, that
the question of Being and the question of the text are one and the same?
Were they identical, why would Derrida shrink from admitting this iden-
tity? Grand suggests that Derrida may hesitate to confess the essential
similarity of the two questions because of a "remaining kinship ... be-
tween the [HeideggerianI Difference which crosses out the origin, the
ground, self-proximity, in short all the modalities of presence, and what it
crosses out in this manner."28 Although involved in the same philosoph-
ical enterprise of questioning Western metaphysics, Heidegger and Der-
rida would differ in their perception of the other of metaphysics. Granel
adds: "Is the breeze of Danger that blows 'on the other side'-once one
has climbed, followed and left the ridge of metaphysics-simply not the
same, or is it not sustained and recognized by Heidegger and Derrida in
the same way?"29 When in Writing and Diffirence Derrida agrees with
Emmanuel Levinas on the necessity of leaving the climate of Heidegger's
philosophy, this statement may serve to support Granel's argument. The
difference between the two philosophers may well be presented as one of
tone, of accent, of style, and so on, if one recalls certain of Derrida's re-
marks: On one hand, toward the end of "Violence and Metaphysics,"
Derrida wonders whether Heidegger's question of Being is not essentially
a theological question and whether what Heidegger calls the historicity of
Being can be thought without invoking an eschatology. On the other
Joining the Text 239
remains within the horizon and the themes of Western philosophy. One
of these themes, the major one, has always concerned being. The ques-
tion of Being in all its radicality, and perhaps precisely because of its rad-
icality, continues this problematic. Despite Heidegger's extraordinary use
of language, his philosophy remains subjected to the traditional ways in
which these problems were expected to be solved. Moreover, in conceiv-
ing of the quest for the meaning of Being in terms of a history of the fates
of Being, Heidegger bends to the traditional canon of problems that con-
stitutes philosophy, saving, in addition, the pretension of classical philos-
ophy to universality. If these all-too-hasty remarks contain a grain of
truth, then the question of the difference between Heidegger and Derrida
cannot be reduced simply to one of climate or tone.
Derrida has made it clear that the word "text" can be substituted for
the word "Being." "Text" is a translation for "Being." It is a word, the use
of which became indispensable to him in a very specific historical situa-
tion. For this very reason its importance is only strategic, and there is no
intrinsic value to it. Thus while naming Being, the text is also something
very different, if not without any relation at all to Being.
To conclude, let us try to assess as succinctly as possible the differ-
cmc.e at issue. To begin with, one has to realize that Derrida's determina-
tion of metaphysics in terms of ethico-theoretical decisions opens up an en-
tirely different level of debate than Heidegger's conception of metaphysics
as a forgetting of Being. Consequently, with this passage to the order of
discourse of philosophy, to its textual organization and rhetorics, the Hei-
deggerian notions of trait, between, fissure, and so forth, become displaced
in such a way as to form, together with the specifically Derridean notions
of supplementarity, diffirance, re-mark, text, and so on, "tools" that serve
to account for the "deep structures" organizing the conceptual, reflexive,
and speculative discourse of philosophy. In other words, though the no-
tion of text in Derrida is formally the same as the notion of Being-as-trait
in Heidegger, it assumes a very different function in Derrida's enterprise.
But the break between Heidegger's question of Being and Derrida's
investigations of what is only provisionally termed "text"-an inquiry
that, by the way, may no longer yield to the order of the question in Hei-
degger's sense-is even more thorough. It is almost indiscernible, but
nonetheless all the more piercing.
Joining the Text 241
A reading that moves across a text, traversing it from one end to the
other, going over the whole of its surface, is a reading intent on covering
it, exhausting it. The endless iterations of this movement would be lim-
ited by the boundaries of the text alone. Husserl could have described
this manner of proceeding through a text as reading in "zigzag fashion."
Indeed, despite what this term connotes of drunkenness and erratic mo-
tion, it enjoys a quite special status in Husserl's methodological reflec-
tions. In Logical Investigations, for instance, Husserl notes that although
"systematic clarification, whether in pure logic or any other discipline,
would in itself seem to require a stepwise following out of the ordering of
things, of the systematic interconnection in the science to be clarified,"
such smooth and continuous development is unsuited to lay down the
phenomenological foundation of logic. He adds: "Our investigation
can ... only proceed securely, if it repeatedly breaks with such systematic
sequence, if it removes conceptual obscurities which threaten the course
of investigation before the natural sequence of subject-matters can lead up
to such concepts. We search, as it were, in zig-zag fashion." As the two
distinct vowels of the term suggest, to zigzag is to move in two different
directions, to take sharp turns at alternate angles. The zigzag breaks with
the direct line, straying from its progressive continuity. But, as Husser!
contends, this break with systematic exposition does not sacrifice clarity.
On Re-Presentation 243
On the contrary, to defer that goal by swerving from the direct road only
serves to better secure its initial concerns. Commenting on his use of the
term "zigzag" to describe the mode of exposition in phenomenological
investigations, he notes that it is "a metaphor all the more apt since the
close interdependence of our various epistemological concepts leads us
back again and again to our original analyses, where the new confirms the
old, and the old the new."! From Logicallnvestigations, but also from The
Crisis ofEuropean Sciences, it is evident that zigzagging follows necessarily
from a certain circularity proper to the phenomenological concern with
meaning and its systematic clarification. Husser! writes in The Crisis:
We find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of the beginnings is to be
gained fully only by starting with science as given in its present-day form, look-
ing back at its development. But in the absence of an understanding of the be-
ginnings the development is mute as a development of meaning. Thus we have no
other choice than to proceed forward and backward in a zigzag pattern; the one
must help the other in an interplay.2
continuity finds its hold on the text's "crags and jagged prongs [die
Schroffin und Zacken]" that escape a reading concerned with continuity.3
Grasping these cliffs and jags for support, reading displays a zigzag
movement. But the zigzag is also elicited by the fact that the movement
beyond must constantly negotiate with the text to be left behind. To the
extent that the transition to a beyond is the effect of a traversal of the
text, the passage in question commences an unending commerce be-
tween the text left behind and its beyond, which is all the more intimate
since the possibility of the new text cannot causally be derived from the
first. Indeed, the function words "through" and "across" also suggest a
means, agency, or intermediary. Going beyond the text can only be
achieved by way of the text, by going through it and remaining indebted
to what has been left behind. Zigzagging is thus no longer limited to a
subservient procedure in the establishment of sense; rather it exceeds
meaning, and becomes the rule of such establishment. Since nothing es-
capes this rule, neither the text at the beginning nor the beyond for
which it has been left, the movement of zigzag ultimately turns into
what a reading that goes through texts has to center in on and what it
conceptualizes as such.
Zigzag circulation in this sense, without "circularity or linearity,"
without "a regulative horizon of totalization," is precisely, as Leonard
Lawlor has shown in Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the
Thought ofRicoeur and Derrida and elsewhere, a distinctive trait of Der-
rida's writings on Husserl, one that sets his approach apart from Ricoeur's
appraisal of Husserl's work, and from the dialectical hermeneutics it seeks
to develop.4 In his account of Derrida's analysis of Husserl's "The Origin
of Geometry," Lawlor shows how Derrida illuminates all of Husserl's
zigzag movements-"between the genetic and the structural project, be-
tween the specificity of the geometrical science as a cultural product and
culture in general, between a posteriori and a priori, between finally ori-
gin and end."5 If Derrida characterizes this zigzag course as "a detour and
a surprising turnabout,"6 this is because, as Lawlor notes, Husserl's Ruck-
ftage ("questioning back") for the origin of geometry and for its genesis,
never seem to arrive at the sought destination. For Lawlor, steering this
zigzag course results less from dodging the possibly disquieting conse-
quences of a radically genetic approach than from a positive recognition
On Re-Presentation 245
the main concern of his thought, Husserl reveals "to what point [he felt
that] all true genesis would run the risk of jeopardizing the phenomeno-
logical and philosophical purpose in general, and even entirely doom it
to failure" (PC, p. 206). Thus if Derrida concludes, in Le probfeme de fa
genese, that the overcoming that Husserl's philosophy calls for can consist
in either an overcoming that merely prolongs his philosophy with all its
inherited difficulties, or "a radical reformulation that amounts to a com-
plete conversion" (PC, p. 41), several things become clear about the pro-
fessed need for a reading of Husser! that moves across his text.
First, the necessity of such a reading derives from an insight into
the limits not of Husserl's philosophy in the first instance but of philoso-
phy in general-into an inevitable insufficiency that is a function of the
essentialist exigencies on which philosophy necessarily rests and without
which no philosophy with its required rigor could come into its own.
What is remarkable about Husserl's thought, however,-and this helps to
explain the unquestionable privilege that his thought enjoys throughout
Derrida's work-is that all the while that he faithfully sticks to the ele-
mentary exigency of eidetic reduction, he also recognizes the need for a
transcendental inquiry into temporality as constitutive of essences. Such
an inquiry, however, is not without potentially unsettling consequences.
Indeed, with such an emphasis on constitution, genesis, and history, a
tension arises in Husserl's phenomenology that undoubtedly culminates
in paradox, contradiction, aporia, and even sheer confusion, but that also
harbors the possibility of explicitly bringing to light the limits of philos-
ophy in its classical form. To read across the text, then, follows from the
need to "resolve," so to speak, the Husserlian dilemma by working out
the contradictory demands of philosophy in what Derrida at one point
had called "a theory of philosophical discourse."] J
Second, the overcoming sought by a reading that moves across the
Husserlian text remains indebted to Husserlian phenomenology. For it is
phenomenology itself that "seems, continuously and incessantly, to have
prepared a vast methodological access to a sphere that is not very acces-
sible to phenomenological elucidation," as is the sphere of genesis (PC,
p. 206). Furthermore, the radical conversion of phenomenology at which
Le probfeme de fa genese aims (and which consists in thinking the contra-
dictory demands of Husserl's thought together in and as an infinite zigzag)
248 R H Y T H MAN D ZIG ZAG
tion," and hence with "a priori synthesis," have remained the thrust of
Derrida's reading through Husser!'
I understand the following developments as a long footnote to an
already quite long footnote by Derrida himself in the chapter of Speech
and Phenomena titled "Meaning as Soliloquy." This footnote is of special
interest to me since Derrida closes it by saying that in it he has indicated
"the prime intention-and the ultimate scope-of the present essay,"
that is, of Speech and Phenomena as a whole (SP, pp. 45-46). If I linger
on this footnote, it is in order to further clarify the implications of a read-
ing that moves across the Husserlian text, this rime in a hook that, unlike
the early genesis book, is "more than a simple interpretation of Husserl,"
to quote Rudolf Bernet. 13 Describing his reading as going through
Husserl's text, Derrida specifies this as meaning that it "can be neither
simple commentary nor simple interpretation" (SP, p. 88).
The context in which the footnote in question occurs needs to be
briefly outlined. In the First Logical Investigation, characterized by "Fore-
word II" as having a "merely preparatory character," Husser! engages
nonetheless in an analysis of "essential distinctions" on whose possibility
and purity rests, in principle, the entire phenomenological enterprise (LI,
p. 48). Although "expressions were originally framed to fulfill a commu-
nicative function," they "also playa great part in uncommunicated, inte-
rior mental life," Husser! contends in the First Logical Investigation (LI,
pp. 276,278). Despite the brevity of the analysis devoted to expression in
solitary mental life, this particular analysis is absolurely crucial to the
whole of the Logical Investigations in that it demonstrates not only that
living in the understanding of expressions is possible, whether they are
addressed to anyone or not, bur that such an experience of the meaning
of expressions is in truth the more essential experience. In the course of
his analysis, Husser! remarks that all intimation (Kundgabe), hence also
all indication, or sign function, is absent from silent soliloquy. Meaning-
ful expression in solitary mental life is still linked to words, but unlike
words in communicative discourse, those in the intimately unified expe-
rience of sense-filled expression in silent mental life do not serve as indi-
cations, not even "as indications, of one's own inner experiences" to one-
self (LI, p. 279). No self-intimation takes place here. In soliloquy one
does not communicate something to one self (as an Other). Moreover, in
250 RHYTHM AND ZIGZAG
And Derrida concludes: "In imagination the existence of the word is not
implied, even by virtue of intentional sense. There exists only the imagi-
nation of the word, which is absolutely certain and self-present insofar as
it is lived" (SP, p. 44). Now what has Husserl achieved by eliminating
phenomenality, and with it reference to the existence of the word, from
the presentative imagination of words in solitary mental life? He has,
Derrida contends, succeeded in isolating "the subjective experience [Ie
vecu subjectif 1as the sphere of absolute certainty and absolute existence"
(SP, p. 44). Yet in reflecting on the argumentation itself by means of
which Husserl arrives at this result, he notes that it "would be fragile in-
deed if it merely appealed to a classical psychology of the imagination"
(SP, p. 45). After recalling Husserl's critique of the psychological concep-
tion of the image, according to which it is a picture-sign whose reality in-
dicates the imagined object, Derrida stresses that the argument by which
imagined words are stripped of reference to existing words rests on an un-
derstanding of imagination as a phenomenal experience that does not be-
long to reality-whose status is that of a reell component of conscious-
ness-and of the image as intentional or noematic, in other words, as
even less real than the act of imagination in that it is a non-reell compo-
nent of consciousness. In short then, Husserl's contention that it is possi-
ble to isolate an experience of meaning in which meaning can be intuited
and evidenced as such presupposes the possibility of construing inner dis-
course as an irreality through and through.
The footnote in question thus occurs in the context of an assessment
of Husserl's conception of imagination and the image as nonreal compo-
nents of consciousness. Having quoted Husser! from Ideas Ion the neces-
sity of conceiving experiences as differences that concern consciousness
(rather than as being constituted by material characters), Derrida writes:
252 RHYTHM AND ZIGZAG
The original phenomenological data that Husser! thus wants to respect lead him
to posit an absolute heterogeneity between perception or primordial presen-
tation (Gegenwartigung, Prasentation) and re-presentation or representative re-
production, also translated as presentification (Vergegenwartigung). Memory, im-
ages, and signs are re-presentations in this sense. Properly speaking, Husser! is
not led to recognize this heterogeneity, for it is this which constitutes the very
possibility of phenomenology. For phenomenology can only make sense if a pure
and primordial presentation is possible and given in the original. This distinc-
tion (to which we must add that between positional [setzendel re-presentation,
which posits the having-been-present in memory, and the imaginary re-presen-
tation [Phantasie- Vergegenwartigung], which is neutral in that respect), part of a
fundamental and complex system, which we cannot directly investigate here, is
the indispensable instrument for a critique of classical psychology, and in par-
ticular, the classical psychology of the imagination and the sign. (SP, p. 45)
In his inquiry into what sanctions the essential distinctions that are to be
brought to logical clarity in the First Logical Investigation, Derrida high-
lights one particular distinction. Although it is not the final one, against
whose foil all the other distinctions are to be situated-indeed, it is said to
be part of a complex system of similar distinctions-this particular one en-
joys a special privilege in that its conception of a radical irreality and self-
sufficiency 6f phenomenological experience is a clear expression of phe-
nomenology's attempt to secure an autonomous domain for itself free of all
the objective references in which psychology remains entangled. The dis-
tinction in question stipulates the possibility and the existence of a "lived
experience [that] is immediately self-present in the mode of certitude and
absolute necessity" (SP, p. 58), hence, of a pure perception, or originary
presentation, in which the given gives itself in simple and unadulterated
presence. Distinct from re-presentation, presentation, or more precisely,
primordial presentation is free from the delegating or representative func-
tion of indicative signs. Indeed, the indivisibility of the presence to self of
what is given in the mode of immediate presence assures the irreducibility
of re-presentation (Vergegenwartigung, Reprdsentation) to presentative per-
ception. As a modification of presentation, representation is then some-
thing that happens to presentation from the outside. Yet as Derrida will
show throughout Speech and Phenomena, the distinction between presen-
tation and re-presentation, however essential and necessary it might be,
cannot be upheld in the purity required by the phenomenological project
On Re-Presentation 253
mines "the ultimate form of ideality, the ideality of ideality ... [as] the liv-
ing present, the self-presence of transcendental life" (SP, p. 6). Now, ac-
cording to Husserl, an authentic ideality, that is, an ideality that is, must
be one that can be infinitely repeated in the identity of its presence. Yet for
Husserl, an "ideality is not an existent that has fallen from the sky." Con-
sequently, its origin has likewise to be "the possible repetition of a produc-
tive act" (SP, p. 6). Given, further, that the "metaphysical form of ideal-
ity" (SP, p. 7) has been shown to be the presence of the living present, it
follows that Derrida's analyses in Speech and Phenomena-analyses of
what breaches originary presentation, or perception, from within-would
center in privileged fashion on this repetition constitutive of ideality in
terms of the re-presenting modalities of presentation. But the possibility
of such repetition, without which ideality in the form of the present could
not come about, is precisely, as Derrida will show throughout Speech and
Phenomena, what serves to establish an "irreducible nonpresence ... an
ineradicable nonprimordiality" in the living present as well, and hence, in
nonworldly ideal objects (SP, pp. 6-7). The crux of Derrida's argument
consists. then. in demonstrating that Husserl's own descriptions of the
movement of temporality and the constitution of intersubjectivity unmis-
taleably establish repetition-and with it everything that ought to derive
from presence-to be required by presence and all ideal objectivity in
general. Considering the space at my disposal, I cannot reconstruct in de-
tail the various steps of Derrida's complex analysis. Let me only say that the
titles under which repetition assumes the constituting role in question are
all of the order of modifications of presentation, primarily, re-presentation
and appresentation. In Derrida's own words:
it is a question of (I) the necessary transition from retention to re-presentation
(Vergegenwiirtigung) in the constitution of the presence of a temporal object
(Gegenstand) whose identity may be repeated; and (2) the necessary transition by
way of appresentation in relation to the alter ego, that is, in relation to what also
makes possible an ideal objectivity in general; for intersubjectivity is the condi-
tion for objectivity, which is absolute only in the case of ideal objects. (SP, p. 7)
ence, for a present now to come about, implies that it must harbor repeti-
tion in the mode of a re-presentation of what once was but no longer is
present. Moreover, since ideality cannot be constituted except in relation
with an Other, a repetition of the originary presentation in the form of
analogical appresentation must inhabit originary presentation from the
start. As Derrida maintains, such repetitive representation or appresenta-
tion within ideality and its form of presence "does not impugn the apo-
dicticity of the phenomenological-transcendental description, nor does it
diminish the founding value of presence" (SP, p. 7). The reason for this is
that the nonpresence in question is not just any nonpresence. The most
singular status of such re-presentation and appresentation follows from
their being not derivative upon or secondary to a prior presence but neces-
sarily implied by all presence or ideality. Derrida writes: "What in the two
cases is called a modification of presentation (re-presentation, ap-presenta-
tion) (Vergegenwiirtigung or Appriisentation) is not something that happens
to presentation but rather conditions it by bifurcating it [en fa fissurant] a
priori" (SP, p. 7). Limiting myself to the question of re-presentation, I
note only that Derrida speaks of it as a "primordial representation" (SP,
p. 57), that is, as an originary Vergegenwiirtigung upon which presentation
in the form of Ulrstellung itself, and as such, is shown to depend. It is thus
certainly not a question of criticizing or doing away with Husserl's essential
distinctions, among them the distinction between presentation and re-
presentation. On the contrary, Derrida's intention is to show that what
these essential distinctions seek to isolate in purity can only be (success-
fully) achieved if, say, originary presentation is made to presuppose a prior
re-presentation, that is, the constituting movement of a representation that
lacks as yet a constituted presence to relate to.
In the course of investigating the distinctive criteria with which
Husserl demarcates a domain proper to phenomenology and radically sep-
arate from psychology, Derrida focuses in particular upon the isolation of
an experience of originary presentation, of presentation in the shape of
UlrsteLLung, which Husserl in general asserts to be irreducibly different
from all modes of re-presentation. Derrida illuminates a limitation of this
isolated sphere that is also-paradoxically-a condition of possibility for
demarcating the sphere in question and thus securing (within these lim-
its) the possibility of a pure experience of meaning in the Husserlian sense.
256 RHYTHM AND ZIGZAG
In the context here under examination, and only in this context at first,
the limit takes the form of generalized or originary re-presentation.
In his essay "Derrida et la voix de son maitre" (Derrida and the voice
of his master), Rudolf Bernet asks whether "in his crusade against the phi-
losophy of presence, Derrida does not gather too fast under one banner
these different forms of representation that are imagination, repetition, the
concrete occurring of a generality, and representation by means of a
sign."14 Needless to say, only an extremely detailed and careful analysis of
Derrida's discussion of all these modes of representation could provide an
answer to Bernet's question. For the moment, therefore, the following re-
mark must suffice. Undoubtedly, all of the following (and I name only a
few) are taken as different aspects of representation: presence (Gegenwart);
presentation (Gegenwartigung or Prdsentation); representation in the gen-
eral sense of Vorstellung, that is, as the locus of ideality in general; re-
presentation as repetition or reproduction, that is, as a modifYing Vt>rge-
genwdrtigung including imaginary representation; and representation in
the sense of what occupies the place of another Vorstellung, that is, what
Husserl calls Rqriismtation, Repriisentant, or Stelivertreter. But rather than
being lumped together or rendered identical, all these different senses of
the term "representation" are shown to be distinct elements of what Der-
rida refers to as a "representative structure" (SP, p. 50), which itself has a
repeatable formal identity. According to this structure, Vorstellung as the
locus of ideality in which expression in the Husserlian sense partakes nec-
essarily implies all the other possible modifications of representation that
Husserl, for his part, had confined to the sign-function and to commu-
nicative manifestation. And the reverse also holds. This notion of a repre-
sentative structure is that the sign and language in general necessarily in-
clude the possibility of a representation in the sense of Vorstellung. This
representative structure in which presentation and the modifications of re-
presentation are tied together with necessity is, for Derrida, "signification
[Bedeutung] itself." From the start, this structure causes actual inner or
outer discourse to be "involved in unlimited representation [representat-
ivite indejinie]" (SP, p. 50). At all moments, therefore, signification itself
must be characterized by re-presentation in general, or "originary" re-
presentation. ls To put the matter in terms of the footnote that I am com-
menting upon, everything begins by re-presentation.
On Re-Presentation 257
such, whether the repetitive force of the living present, which is re-presented in
a supplement, because it has never been present to itself, or whether what we call
with the old names of force and diffirance is not more "ancient" than what is
"primordial." (SP, p. 103)
For all these reasons, one must conclude that in order to conceive of the
representative structure, or the originary re-presentation, one "will have
to have other names than those of sign or representation" (SP, p. 103).
From this inevitable need to approach the relationship between presence
and representation in terms other than those of re-presentation and sign-
function, one must conclude that no word or concept can ever hope to
represent it adequately. For structural or, say, representative reasons, the
term "re-presentation" must open itself and make room for other terms,
such as "force" and diffirance, to name only those explicitly mentioned by
Derrida. Although the term "re-presentation" had imposed itself in the
context of a discussion of Husserl's efforts to radically distinguish phe-
nomenology from psychology and had been a meaningful term in that
context alone, this term must hence be repeated, substituted, and supple-
mented with a difference by other terms. The same reasons that call for
the replacement of the term "re-presentation" also make possible the ex-
tension of that term to other contexts, in which case, however, the expli-
catory achievements of the term change as well.
To conclude, let me circle back to the question of re-presentation's
primordiality with respect to presentative perception, and hence also to
the living present itself. If it is true that all presentation, or perception in
the Husserlian sense, presupposes the possibility of a repetition in the
shape of a re-presentation that is constitutive, and which thus does not
double something already constituted, then "the presence of the per-
ceived present can appear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously com-
pounded [compose continument] with a nonpresence and nonperception,
with primary memory and expectation (retention and protention)" (SP,
p. 64). What follows from this is, as Derrida recalls in the final para-
graphs of Speech and Phenomena, that "there never was any 'perception';
and [that] 'presentation' is a representation of the representation that
yearns for itself therein as for its own birth or its death" (SP, p. 103). But
even though presentative perception never existed and never will exist in
the purity and self-identity sought by Husserl, it exists as the desire of it-
On Re-Presentation 259
self, as fissured by a re-presentation that holds out its birth, or that in-
scribes within it the mark of finitude that is the possibility of death. The
question to be asked therefore concerns the relation between, on the one
hand, presentation and the perceived living present, and on the other
hand, re-presentation, non perception, and nonpresence. Although Der-
rida also speaks of this relation as a being rooted (enracinee) in finitude
(SP, p. 67), his characterization of it as a relation in which presentation
continuously compounds with re-presentation, or in which the possibility
of presence and primordial truth in the phenomenological sense depends
on a compromise with nonpresence, needs here to be especially empha-
sized. If the present of self-presence, and presentation, for that matter, are
not simple but, as Derrida writes, "constituted in a primordial and irre-
ducible synthesis" (SP, p. 6r), in which they compound and incessantly
compromise with a primordial re-presentation and nonpresence, then
this relation of synthesis has, indeed, the "form" of a zigzag, or more pre-
cisely, of a movement of infinite referral of one term to "its" dissymmet-
rical Other. Zigzagging thus describes the consequent movement of the
genesis, or constitution, of presence and of its presentation-of a consti-
tution that does not fall back on something already constituted. In draw-
ing out a zigzag of this kind, by repeatedly breaking with its systematic
exposition, Derrida no longer follows Husserl's prescription to proceed
securely in the search for truth in the phenomenological sense. He also
goes much further than exhibiting the numerous zigzag movements to
which, according to Ie probleme de fa genese, Husserl more or less unwill-
ingly seems to have had recourse in order to delay the always-promised
description of authentic transcendental genesis. Neither a methodologi-
cal device on the way to and within the horizon of truth nor a necessary
but unfortunate detour, the constituting movement of zigzag that I have
sketched out here makes good on Husserl's demand for a genuine tran-
scendental genesis. But in doing so, this zigzag shows that making good
on this demand implies jeopardizing the phenomenological principles
themselves. Conversely, only by interminably putting their purity at risk
can they be maintained as philosophically effective principles-inter-
minably, in the movement of a zigzag.
PART V II
Reading Chiasms
rida understands Being itself from the past (and not only beings, as in the
case of Heidegger). Discussing supplementary substitution at one point
in Of Grammatology, Derrida asks, "How was it to be [etait-elle a etre]-
for such is the time of its quiddity-what it necessarily is?"2 Throughout
Of Grammatology, this temporal structure of was to be appears as the
structure of an imperfect tense that makes it possible for what ought to
have been (aura or aurait du etre)-namely, presence and, in the last in-
stance, Being itself-to come into being. Yet since the absolute past in
question can never become present, since it is not the trace of an already
constituted and bygone present, it is also, as that which withdraws from
what it lets come to the fore, that which ultimately makes presence and
Being impossible. Contrary to the a priori, therefore, the always already is
not only a condition of possibility but a condition of impossibility as well.
Having named the time of the quiddity of the always already as the
time of what had to be in order for something to be, Derrida has shown
that the always already is another expression for the concept of essence, or
more precisely-and this explains the substitution of always already for
essence-for a certain temporality at the origin of essence. The time of
the quiddity of the always a/ready is, indeed, the time of quiddity. Let us
recall here that quidditas is the consecrated translation not of ti esti but of
the Aristotelian expression to ti en einai. This strange formula-strange
because of its double use of the verb to be and the unexpected use of the
imperfect tense-answers the question of what a thing's essence and es-
sential attributes are. It states that the essence of a thing is what it has
been. The Scholastics translated this formula quod quid erat esse, and one
will certainly remember Hegel's famous coining of the same formula: We-
sen ist was gewesen ist. Accordingly, what a thing is in and by itself
(kath'auto) is determined retrospectively. It is revealed as a past, as what it
was to be. Now one may interpret this anteriority of essence either in a
Scholastic fashion as what something existent already was before its actu-
alization or realization or, with Pierre Aubenque, in a probably more
Greek fashion as pertaining to the essence of things of the sublunar world
only and as a reflection of the fact that here in the sublunar world essen-
tial accidents may, ex post, have contributed to determining what a thing
or a man will, in the end, have turned out to be. 3 In either case, this an-
teriority is still understood in terms of an already constituted time. Yet
Reading Chiasms 267
the past that Heidegger and in particular Derrida refer to with the always
already-the time of quiddity, the time of the essence of Being-is a
temporalizing passive synthesis that allows the temporal differences of
past, present, and future to appear in the first place. Always already before
constituted time, this absolute past or passivity, to which no intramun-
dane concept or metaphor corresponds, accounts for the fact that the an-
teriority of essence, and the permanence of its presence, have been de-
pendent not so much on a particular passage of a given time sequence as
on a structure of temporal referral in general. It is this very structure of
temporal referral that Derrida calls absolute past or absolute passivity and
that he refers to with the expression always already. In short, then, the
term always already articulates the "quiddity" of quiddity, and is, accord-
ing to its nature as a past that was never a past-present and that conse-
quently can never become fully present, at once the condition of possi-
bility and impossibility and impossibility of essence. The temporality of
the always already, although it reveals what makes essence possible, is at
the same time the a priori of a counteressence that prevents it from ever
coming into its own, from ever being absolutely itself. An irreducible part
of chance and probability is thus shown to enter into the constitution of
an essence, yet such contingency and accidentality are not graspable
through the Aristotelian distinction of inessential accidents and essential
accidents (symbebekota kath'auta), in which the latter forms a constitutive
part of what has been the essence of a thing or human being. Decon-
struction, in a Derridean sense, is the double affirmation of essence and
counteressence, and the expression always already is nothing other than
this affirmation.
This lengthy (yet, obviously, all too brief) elaboration on the ex-
pression always already should not only clarify what is meant by this no-
tion but also give an inkling of the leading hypotheses that organize
Warminski's exploration of the relational and differential space of the in-
between. His formula "always already and always not yet" is a clear echo
of Derrida's double affirmation as well as of the latter's search for a priori
infrastructures or undecidables that function as conditions of possibility,
conditions that, at the same time, limit what they constitute. In what fol-
lows, it remains for us to examine the terms in which Warminski thema-
tizes in-between structures, as well as the manner in which these struc-
268 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
that aspires to total adequation with the text. Yet this faithfulness that
seems to characterize reading is pushed here to such a point that, para-
doxically, it reveals the constitutive lack of all ultimate textual propriety.
To suppress the twofold narrative between the bipolar agencies of a text
by deciding, say, on either its literal or its figurative meaning is to erase
the literary qualification of the text. The literary reading that is faithful to
the text insofar as it accepts, in Warminski's own words, "the text as it
appears, and presents itself, to us: that is, as a written text to be read"
(p. II3) "independently" of its history of reception and response-with-
out, however, pretending to any immediate access to it-is a reading that
focuses on the play of relations constituting the two-way narrative of the
interface between dyadic images, concepts, or principles in a text. Ac-
cording to Warminski, such a literary reading is what "always comes be-
fore the text of the interpretation (Auslegung, Erliiuterung) as its condition
of possibility, but ... also always goes after the text of the interpretation
as its condition of impossibility" (p. I50). Indeed, if every movement of
thought and its interpretation are vulnerable to being seen, taken, or read
literarily, this is because these movements and interpretations can never
hope to master or subsume the simulation and mimicry of literary read-
ing. Literary reading, or reading in short, is thus that reading which, by
being faithful to the play of relations that forms the in-between space of
dyadic textual items, demonstrates the impossibility of reading in the
sense of interpreting. And the text that is being read in this manner ap-
pears, then, as a narrative of the impossibility of reading, that is, as the
impossibility of mastering except in always limited readings that are be-
ing reread (i.e., undone by the text's neglected and opposite possibilities
of interpretation). Contrary to interpretation, which represents an oper-
ation of decision making in a totalizing perspective, reading is the reading
of the text's unreadability, that is, of its structural incapacity to lend itself
to unequivocal and unproblematic totalizations. By centering on the re-
lational intertwining that characterizes textual bipolar organization, read-
ing aims at what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe once called a certain "active
neutrality of the interval between [entre-deux].") This space of neutrality
is not the space of what the New Critics called ambiguity. It lends itself
neither to mediating semantic sublation nor to the pathos of undecid-
ability. Sharply distinguishing between ambiguity and undecidability,
Reading Chiasms 271
Warminski conceives of the latter as the space of a truly and radically un-
decidable difference, that is, of an undecidability that undermines all pos-
sibility of pathos by putting the reading subject into question.
As should be evident by now, Warminski's interrogation of the in-
tegrating achievements of interpretation is not governed by a totalizing
perspective. He certainly does not conceive of the double bind of inter-
pretation in either a reflexive or a speculative manner. On the contrary,
Warminski's work is de constructive precisely insofar as it attempts to syn-
thesize the interplay of mutually self-limiting interpretations in a non-
dialectical way. Given Warminski's conception of the history of interpre-
tation and of the structure of texts as a web of essentially bipolar and
dyadic elements, the structure or figure that will account for the set of re-
lations that characterizes the space between poles will be primarily that of
chiastic reversal. It is in the figure of the chiasm that all the threads of
Warminski's analyses initially seem to converge.
Although we are cautioned not to take terms of this kind for master
words or slogans, it may well be appropriate to clarifY what is meant by
the term chiasm before discussing how the chiasm may offer a nondialec-
tical "solution" to the problem of the interplay of textual elements and to
the relation between text and interpretation. Since both de Man and Der-
rida have systematically referred to this figure, Warminski's use of the
term-at the crossroads between the two thinkers-may indeed inter-
weave various determinations of chiasm from different sources into a
unique combination.
Chiasm or chiasmus is an anglicization of the Greek chiasma, which
designates an arrangement of two lines crossed like the letter X (chi) and
refers in particular to cross-shaped sticks, to a diagonally arranged ban-
dage, or to a cruciform incision. As a grammatical and rhetorical device,
the figure of chiasm corresponds, basically, to inverted parallelism. In chi-
asm, the order of words in one of two balancing clauses or phrases is in-
verted in the other so as to produce the well-known crisscross effect. It is
not without interest to note that this figure has received rather negative
valorization from the early scholiasts on to the more recent standard
handbooks of rhetoric. It is usually considered deliberately contrived and
artificial, no more than a practical device. Such negative judgment still
resonates in the Dictionnaire de poetique et de rhetorique, where Henri
272 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
Morier writes, "The chiasm would only be a sort of silly affectation were
it not motivated by a superior reason, the desire for variation, the need for
euphony and expressive harmony."6 But chiasm, which occurs in great
abundance in ancient writing, especially in Near Eastern literature, but
in Greek and Latin literature as well, is a decisive ordering principle em-
ployed on all levels of complexity, that is, with respect not only to sounds
but to thoughts as well. As John W. Welch notes, it "may give structure to
the thought pattern and development of entire literary units, as well as to
shorter sections whose composition is more dependent on immediate
tones and rhythms."? Certainly, where chiasm is predominantly gram-
matical and rhetorical, its function may be merely ornamental and may
amount to an unpretentious play on crossover effects of words and
sounds. But in Hebrew and other Oriental literatures, and, as Welch has
shown, in the Greek and Latin literary arena as well, chiastic inversion
also rises to much more elaborate levels when it assumes the function of
a constructive principle, or structural principle of form. When used as an
ordering device of thoughts, the chiastic reversal is also called hysteron
protmm (i.e., the latter first). The grammarians and rhetoricians think in
particular of Homer's fondness for having his characters answer plural
questions in a reverse order. Welch remarks, "hysteron proteron describes
passages which are constructed so that their first thought refers to some
latter thought of a preceding passage, and their latter thought, to some
preceding passage's former thought."8 Although the hysteron proteron is
formally equivalent to the chiasm of formal rhetoric, it is functionally dif-
ferent insofar as it gives order to ideas and not merely to words or sounds.
As distinct from chiasm-a distinction largely responsible for the relega-
tion of chiasm to a secondary and merely ornamental role-the hysteron
proteron is said to serve as a principle for creating continuity without the
use of transitory particles between multi termed and contrasting passages. 9
The careful ligaturing undertaken by the hysteron proteron in order to
achieve unbroken and continuous succession in a narrative, as Samuel E.
Bassett has shown, is basically a psychological device, a function of the re-
lation of the (Homeric) poet to his listener, "which assists the narrator to
hold the attention of his listener with a minimum of effort on the part of
the latter."lo Bur grammatical, rhetorical, or psychological explanations
cannot exhaust the role of chiasm. Indeed, when employed in order to
Reading Chiasms 273
for the rhetorical dimension of the text, a dimension that makes it an in-
finitely self-deferring and self-exceeding totality. It thus appears that the
structure of the chiasm as thematized by de Man, although originating in
the tradition of rhetoric, is also a debate with the chiasm as a form of
thought. In short, the chiasm, as a rhetorical structure, suspends the to-
talizing functions of the literal and the figural in a text and, as a figure,
endlessly defers (temporalizes, historicizes, allegorizes) the closure of a
text-by either its content or its form-through the infinite substi-
tutability implied by its asymmetry. Understood in this manner, the fig-
ure of chiasm is one among several figures analyzed by de Man in a sim-
ilar perspective.
In Positions, Derrida states that all writing is caught in and practices
chiastic reversals. "The form of the chiasm, of the X, interests me a great
deal, not as a symbol of the unknown, but because there is in it ... a kind
of fork ... that is, moreover, unequal, one of the points extending its
range further than the other," he writes. 15 But this asymmetry becomes
visible, according to Derrida, only if one understands the chiasm's mak-
ing of cross-connections-and the double participation that it implies-
no longer as the mixing of previously separate elements into the punctual
identity and simplicity of a coincidentia oppositorum but rather as a refer-
ral back (renvoi) "to a same that is not the identical, to the common ele-
ment or medium of any possible dissociation." 16 As Derrida points out in
Archaeology ofthe Frivolous, instead of simply folding opposites into one
unity, "the chiasm folds itself with a supplementary flexion."I? This sup-
plementary fold makes the chiasm a structure that refers all mediation of
opposites-whether reflexive or speculative, whether by analogy or di-
alectically-to "the medium in which opposites are opposed, the move-
ment and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or
makes one side cross over into the other."18 It is the very reference to this
reserve that makes the chiasm an unequal fork. Hence, it is neither sim-
ply constitutive nor simply disruptive of totality; rather it is the figure by
which a totality constitutes itself in such a manner that the reference to
the reserve or the medium of dissociation inseparably inscribed into the
figure clearly marks the scope and limits of totality. No unity engendered
chiastically includes within itself the play of difference to which it must
refer in order to constitute itself.
276 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
(the supposed end of La folie du jour), which is equally folded back inside
to form a pocket and an outer edge while extending itself to the upper
edge. What consequently becomes clear is the following: since a border
encloses an interiority only if this border refers to its outer other, and
since this reference to the other cannot but be inscribed within the inte-
riority, not only do borders acquire an extremely twisted structure, but
the interiority, the very space where the relationship of the form to itself
takes place, appears to be at the same time the gathering space of the dou-
ble invagination that crosses out the identity of the formY
It is important to note that in "Living On," Derrida's analysis of a
text's relation to its limits does not broach this problem in general terms.
Not only does "Living On" deal with this question solely insofar as the
text as a narrative is concerned, but its scope is even more restricted to the
extent that it is narrowed down to a narrative narrating a demand for a
narrative. Double invagination, as a structure of the borders of a text,
thus pertains, at first, only to a text determined in such a manner; it does
not represent a truth of all texts. It would, therefore, be foolish to look for
it in all texts, totalities, envelopes, or enclosures. The borders of texts are
not always de focto doubly invaginated. Yet it is a possibility that can come
about in any kind of ensemble. Although the structure of double invagi-
nation has been developed only with respect to a very determined sort of
text, it could potentially affect all texts since texts are made up of traces.
Traces are not only referential but also iterable. "The chiasma of this dou-
ble invagination is always possible, because of what I have elsewhere called
the iterability of the mark," writes Derrida. 23 Indeed, this possibility of it-
eration is that of duplication, and where one has duplication one also has
the possibility of crisscross invagination. Yet if double chiastic invagina-
tion is the result of the iterability of the trace, it is always possible, and
hence a necessary possibility that has to be accounted for when determin-
ing the nature and the status of an ensemble. If this possibility, however,
delimits ensembles, if it makes determining their edges structurally im-
possible, then it points to an essential unfinishedness of all ensembles.
This unfinishedness "cannot be reduced to an incompleteness or an in-
adequacy" since these latter are only the negatives of completion and ad-
equacy; unfinishedness constitutes ensembles into textsY By illimiting
ensembles, unfinishedness generalizes the text.
278 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
tion take place. The two sides of such slanting oppositions cannot be rec-
onciled or mediated because they are either not symmetrical at all or sym-
metrical to such a degree that they become indistinguishable; therefore,
the two sides of such oppositions cannot enter into a relation of negative
determination. They cannot be in a relation of otherness to one another,
and hence they remain radically undecidable. Like a cleft at the heart, and
to the side, of the chiasm, they prohibit all conclusive exchange. These
bipolar agencies become recuperable only after the philosophical art of
division, differentiation, and difference establishes a contact, and thus a
unity, between them. In themselves, however, they remain in a transverse
position to such chiastic or dialectical appropriation, irrevocably divided
against themselves, or radically indistinguishable.
Contrary to appearances, Warminski's work is thus less concerned
with the chiasm per se and its effects than with the chasm in the chiasm.
Unlike de Man, for whom the figure of the chiasm describes the endless
deferral of the closure of the text, and Derrida, for whom the chiasm is a
structure of referral that always divides a totality by what it believes is left
at its borders, Warminski seems to consider the chiasm as the fatal figure
or structure of interpretative discourse. In this figure, each interpretative
discourse, as a discourse of mastery, becomes reversed by its complemen-
tary other. For Warminski, it is the figure of the logic of the unreading of
each particular interpretation of a text, a logic that ensures it will be itself
undone by the text it decides upon. It is also the movement by which one
interpreter's thought is turned upside down by his counterpart. The chi-
asm, then, not only is the form of thought (of interpretation and philos-
ophy) that makes totalizations possible, but is also the form that makes
these totalizations undo each other-endlessly, or always again. As a func-
tion of unreading, and of the millenary constraint of interpretation by the
frameworks of the tradition, the chiasm is also an operator of idealization,
and of the substitution of one ideal construct for another. The gap that,
for reading, becomes tangible at the heart of the chiasm is both what ulti-
mately makes chiastic mastery of thought possible and what makes it for-
ever a mock mastery. At the core of the chiasm one sees either an absence
of contact between infinitely distant terms or terms contaminated by each
other to such an extent that all attempt to distinguish between them cor-
responds to an arbitrary decision or an act of violence. This excessive gap
284 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
that this assessment misses the thrust of Derrida's thought and in partic-
ular evades a debate with the way in which the relation between literature
and philosophy is approached in Derrida's work. For Habermas's massive,
if not clumsy, conceptuality and binary schematic reductionism itself
leads to a leveling of differences between Derrida's thought and the de-
constructionism in literary theory and, perhaps, in literature itself. In the
chapter from Habermas's Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Postmetaphysical
thought) from which I have been quoting, entitled "Philosophie und
Wissenschaft als Literatur" (Philosophy and science as literature), !talo
Calvi no's conception of language personified by the character Marana,
who is in search of "the truth about literature," is said "to coincide, and
not fortuitously so, with Derrida's theory." Habermas even speaks of
"Marana/Derrida." In this exercise of neutralizing distinctions by pulling
them into the stream of monotonous indifference, Habermas, however,
admits that Calvino, in elaborating the theory of language in question, is
much more consistent and consequential than Derrida. 5 But could it not
be that this inconsistency imputed to Derrida's approach to language, lit-
erature, and the difference between genres of texts derives more from its
difference from what Habermas thinks it to be?6
For a number of reasons, Derrida has not made it easy for us to ad-
dress the relation between literature and philosophy either without ambi-
guity or without immediately falling prey to an understanding determined
by the already constituted poles of the difference. If one believes that phi-
losophy and literature are positive, known entities, then one can think of
their relation only in terms of the differents themselves. In this case, one
must see philosophy or literature as dominating, embracing, or subser-
viently yielding to its Other, or alternatively as involved in a more or less
harmonious and reciprocal exchange, unrelenting struggle, or dialectical
interplay of sublation. But if deconstruction presents an invitation to re-
think the relation between philosophy and literature, it does so by calling
our attention to the relation itself as a relation of constitution, to use clas-
sical terms. The question with deconstruction is no longer whether one or
the other is primordial, more essential, or broader, whether one is made to
tremble by its richer, more plentiful or more abyssal Other, and the like,
but how philosophy and literature become, or more precisely, begin to be-
come what they are in their respective difference. A deconstructive focus
288 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
on the relation between philosophy and literature requires not only that
both be taken seriously in their irreducible difference but also that differ-
ence be seen to rest on an infinite bringing forth of itself and its respective
differents. For deconstruction, the difference between philosophy and lit-
erature is not an established, positive given. On the contrary, what makes
philosophy philosophy and literature literature takes place in a constitut-
ing "process," in which philosophy calls upon literature as an (rather than
its) Other so as to be able to demarcate itself and be what it is in difference
from something like literature. Neither is literature, for its part, without
such address to an Other on whose response depends the possibility for lit-
erature to be what it is.? However, despite the constitutive role that litera-
ture plays with respect to philosophy, and vice versa, it does not follow
that literature is in a privileged position. As we shall see, literature is not
poetry, or Dichtung. Literature is only one of philosophy's possible Others.
But there are other reasons for the difficulties of assessing within de-
construction the relation between philosophy and literature. The first is
that, to date, Derrida has given not one but several answers to the ques-
tion of how philosophy and literature relate. Since what might be called
Derrida's "performative turn," such plurality appears to be inevitable. The
answers provided to that question are not only context-bound but also al-
ways necessarily singular, especially insofar as they have the structure of
answers. Intimately combining categorial statement and idiomatic singu-
larity, Derrida's elaborations on the relation in question afford no easy
generalization, and hence defY application. Indeed, what follows from de-
construction's concern with accounting in a radically "genetic" mode for
the surge of philosophy in difference from literature and vice versa is that
a response to that demand must be invented each time anew.
From what I have said so far it should be clear that a deconstructive
treatment of the relation between philosophy and literature is of necessity
an investigation into what philosophy calls "conditions of possibility."
Classically, the inquiry into conditions of possibility is a transcendental
inquiry, in that with it human reason, rather than remaining in its own
sphere of the experience and cognition of objects, transgresses its cogni-
tive achievements by inquiring into how reason can have objects to begin
with, that is, into reason's object-constituting achievements. Within the
context of Kant's thought, it is the noumenal and phenomenal divide that
'/I Relation Called 'Literary''' 289
What is at stake here is certainly not that the philosophy of law would be
literature, and even less that its claim to authority and autonomy would
be undermined or canceled out by the presence in its core of narrativity
and fiction. First of all, with the "as if," narrativity and fiction are said to
be only almost, or more precisely, virtually present in the pure and in prin-
ciple unrepresentable law. In other words, they are present as possibilities,
not as actualities. In addition, if Derrida can say that the thought of the
pure law seems a priori to shelter narrativity and fiction, it is because he
understands these possibilities to be conditions, rules, laws under which
alone the thought of pure law becomes possible. In short, then, there is
an a priori structural necessity for the pure moral law, or legal thought in
general, to be inhabited not by actual narrativity, fiction, or literature but
by their virtual possibility. The philosophical, in the shape of moral
thought, must combine with the possibility in its core of an Other-that
is, here, with the literary-if it is to be possible at all. 9 Apart from the fact
that we here encounter a novel concept of an a priori condition of possi-
bility, a concept that is novel as well with regard to how philosophy and
literature relate, the dependence of the law upon the possibility of fiction
and narration also points to a recast conception of the universal and the
singular. That this is the case should become clear below when I turn to
Derrida's elaborations on the literary status of "Before the Law."
First, however, I recall that Derrida begins his text by listing a num-
ber of axiomatic beliefs regarding identity, unity, singularity, authorship,
completion or noncompletion, generic belonging, and so on, which, in
292 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
our Western culture, predetermine our approach and hence prejudge the
work in question. Present from the start in the way we think about works,
the system of these conventions explains why we take it to be self-evident
and "a priori, inviolable" (p. 184) that a work is characterized by identity,
unity, and unicity, for instance. 10 Yet even though all these conventions
are now guaranteed by positive law, "by a set oflegal acts which have their
own history" (p. 185) and their "lot of 'guardians,' critics, academics, lit-
erary theorists, writers, and philosophers" (p. 215), the conditions of what
is thus presupposed of works actually remain enigmatic (pp. 184-85). The
attribution of a work to the realm of literature is a case in point. Indeed,
as Derrida notes, the criteria to which we resort in defining a work as a
literary phenomenon-narrativity or, more narrowly, "fictional, allegori-
cal, mythical, symbolic, parabolic narrative, and so on" (p. 186)-are not
sufficient to establish a rigorous distinction, since narrativity does not be-
long exclusively to literature and since "there are fictions, allegories,
myths, symbols, or parables that are not specifically [proprement] literary"
(pp. 186-87). Yet the law guarantees a work's literariness, its distinction
from nonliterary works, just as it "requires and guarantees that ... the
presumed reality of the author ... [is] one thing, while the fictitious char-
acters within the story [are] another," even though the distinction in
question is "as fragile as an artifice" (p. 185). Given, on the one hand, the
flagrant lack of truly specific and hence rigorous marks of distinction to
explain the literariness of a work, its belonging to the realm of the literary,
and on the other hand, the consensus that there must be a proper differ-
ence between the literary and the nonliterary, a consensus moreover cod-
ified by positive law, the question as to how the distinction is made, on
what basis and by whom becomes important. Regarding the determina-
tion that a work is literature, Derrida asks: "Who decides, who judges,
and with what entitlement ... ?" Put this way, however, this question is
that of a subject who would claim to understand a work (Kafka's "Before
the Law," for instance) as literary, "and [who] would classifY it conven-
tionally as literature; s/he would believe that s/he knew what literature
was and would merely wonder, being so well armed: what authorizes me
to determine this relation as a literary phenomenon? Or to judge it under
the category of 'literature'?" (p. 188). But the subject's presumption to
know in advance what literature is, together with his question about what
'~ Relation Called 'Literary''' 293
self that escapes it, and where it takes itself at its true beginnings,"13 to
what I have previously termed Derrida's performative turn. To evaluate
this turn, it is important to recall what Derrida says about the possibility
(not actuality), implicit not only in Kafka's story but in any text, oflaying
down the law-and laying it down in the first place for itself. The perfor-
mative turn in Derrida is to be characterized by the passage from a merely
argumentative mode to doing and saying, by "saying what it does by do-
ing what it says" (p. 212). More precisely, in the performative turn (the act
of) saying does not simply produce a said, it produces a said that, before
it applies to anything else, first applies to itself. Speaking of the identity of
Kafka's text, Derrida notes that it is "the effect of a juridical performative.
This (and it is no doubt what we call the writing, the act and signature of
the 'writer') poses before us, preposes or proposes a text that lays down the
law, and in the first place with respect to itself. In its very act, the text pro-
duces and pronounces the law that protects it and renders it intangible"
(p. 2(2). The text respects what it says. It is first to yield to the claims it
makes. A saying that thus expects its own propositions to respect what
they advance-a saying, consequently, in which handed-down distinc-
tions such as form and content, discourse and argument, saying and the
said, writing and the written, and so forth, become foregrounded-such a
saying is performative in the Derridean sense. This performative-which
is not to be understood from its opposite, the constative-is the adequate
mode of relating to what precedes all divisions, distinctions, and separa-
tions as their law.
To the question of what and who decides whether Kafka's parable
belongs to literature Derrida shall thus give no direct answer. Nor will he
answer the transformed, sharpened question, not, however, because of
some incompetence or belief "that when it comes to literature we cannot
speak of a work belonging to a field or class, that there is no such thing
as a literary essence" (p. 187). Rather, essential reasons prohibit the ques-
tion from being answered in the first place, and especially from being an-
swered in general, universal terms, by establishing or invoking a universal
law. Derrida admits that in the position of being before "Before the Law"
(before the text of Kafka's parable, first of all), he is "less interested in the
generality of these laws or these problematical conclusions than in the
singularity of a proceeding which, in the course of a unique drama, sum-
'/:/ Relation Called 'Literary''' 297
mons them before an irreplaceable corpus, before this very text, before
Before the Law" (p. 187). I note that the inquiry into the question that a
knowing subject poses to him- or herself about his or her rights to judge
a work to be literary, summons it "'before the law,' before Before the Law"
(p. 188). The essay, then, is concerned with how such general laws fare be-
fore the tribunal of a singular text, in particular before a text about the
law; and being before the law, it is, more precisely, concerned with how
general laws about the essence of literature-that literature has no
essence, that it is not rigorously identifiable, that no specific criterion ex-
ists for it to be demarcated absolutely, that there is no proper name for it,
and so forth-are in their very generality tied up with a certain singular-
ity. The laws in question that are to establish the truth about literature-
that, for instance, there is no truth to, of, or about literature-even those
claims are thus summoned before a unique, irreplaceable singular (text)
in a proceeding (prods) that itself is singular, since the mode of the relat-
ing of universality to the singular is, each time, marked by singularity as
well. Derrida writes: "There is a singularity about relationship to the law,
a law of singularity which must come into contact with the general or
universal essence of the law without ever being able to do so" (p. 187). As
should thus be obvious, the emphasis on the inevitably singular relation
to the law does not mean that there would be no universal thrust to it but
means instead that singularity is the condition under which there can be
something like a law at all, a law that is pure, nonrepresentable, and as
such, in purity, inaccessible. In "Before the Law," we thus see Derrida in-
quiring into "a law of singularity" that makes the encounter between the
order of the universal and the order of the singular at once possible and
impossible, where the impossible is not to be understood as the simple
negative modality of the possible. It is a law for the "conflict without
encounter between law and singularity, [for] this paradox or enigma of
being-before-the-Iaw" (p. 187). It is a law that the law must be pure, non-
representable, untouchable, inaccessible, and that it must be possible to
stand before its universality as a singular human being as well. In short,
it is a law that the law must be both a universal and a singular law, that
the universal law must be a singular law, the law for a singularity. As Der-
rida's invocation of the Greek term ainigma reveals, the conflict between
universal law and singularity, rather than making itself amenable to a
298 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
lates, appearing, in so doing, before that law, which appears before it,"
Derrida remarks that "nothing really presents itself in this appearance"
(p. 191). "Here, we know neither who nor what is the law, das Gesetz"
(p. 207). The invisibility of the law, its hiddenness-one does not know
what sort of law it is (natural, moral, judicial, political?) or whether it is a
thing, a person, a place, or something else-is a function of the transcen-
dence of the law qua law. Its unconditionality and universality require
that it remain unrepresentable. As such, the law cannot be known; it es-
capes phenomenality. For it to become visible, and hence accessible,
would mean for the law to stop being the law: "the very universality of the
law exceeds all finite boundaries" (p. 196). But, paradoxically, by this same
necessity, the law becomes divided and separated from itself. "Itself" is
prohibited, it prohibits "itself," since all relation to itself, all exhibition of
and to itself in propria persona would amount to an impermissible phe-
nomenologization. Yet such discontinuity with itself is unavoidable. "This
silence and discontinuity constitute the phenomenon of the law" (p. 192),
Derrida writes. He adds: "Originary division of the law. The law is pro-
hibited" (p. 204). In short, then the law exists only as a divided law, a law
that divides (first of all, itself). Yet since the law is nothing in itself-no
presence that could be entered-the paradox of submitting to the law is
that one can only be before the law. The law also instigates a dividing line
that runs between itself and what is before it and is, as Derrida suggests,
ultimately nothing but this power of topological division and separation.
Between the law and its subject an absolute difference prevails by virtue
of which the subject's position is that of being before the law in a topo-
logical or spatial sense of the word "before." But this law also causes the
subject to be an "outlaw," to always be, in a temporal sense, before the
law, and hence this law is also the law of temporalization, or temporaliz-
ing division. From this follows the singular nature of all relating to the law
in that all singular subjects "must come into contact with the general or
universal essence of the law without ever being able to do so [doit se met-
tre en rapport sans jamais pouvoir Ie foire]" (p. 187). The division between
the order of the law and that of the singular subject is radical to such a de-
gree that the conflict between the two is a "conflict without encounter"
(p. 187). However, this is nor yet the end of the divisions and differences
that the law instigates. As Derrida's analysis of Kafka's story demonstrates,
300 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
ing: on the one hand, the idiomatic (French) sense of relation as account,
report, narrative, statement; on the other, the, as it were, categorial sense
of close connection, in particular, of reference. As "Before the Law" ar-
gues, the literary is a mode of reference to the law, but in a fictional mode
(as opposed to the cognitive or practical mode of philosophy). Now, if
both philosophy and literature are constituted by the inscription of the
possibility of their respective Other, in other words, by a relation to an
Other, then literature and philosophy are never present to any theoreti-
cal gaze, never established once and for all. Their identity is owed to the
Other and consequently admits no essentializing arrest. Rather, they are
marked by temporality, by the temporality of a future, and a futural time,
a time that is not of the present. They will always have been in the fu-
ture-a venir.15
There is no way that I could even come close to doing justice to
Oerrida's reading of Kafka's parable and his multilayered analysis of the
modes in which the story narrates a story whose content has all the allure
of a philosophical topos. In order to conclude, I must nonetheless briefly
speak of it. One way of doing this is to tease out Oerrida's explicit state-
ments about the law, to "systematize" them and to reformulate the ques-
tions I have been asking in terms of and with respect to this issue about
the law. At the beginning of the essay he raised a question that may be
rendered more clearly now that we know he was concerned with under-
standing the specificity of the philosophical and the literary from the pos-
sibility of the Other encrypted in each of them. He writes: "What if the
law, without being itself transfixed by literature, shared the conditions of
its possibility with the literary object" (p. 191). What, finally, are these
shared conditions? How is one to conceive of them? What is their onto-
logical status, if they have any?
From what we have seen, the specificity of the literary, and likewise
the philosophical, depends on the inscription within its core, not of a
positive Other, and certainly not of its Other, but merely of the possibil-
ity of an Other. With this elaboration of the virtual "presence" of the pos-
sibility of literature in philosophy and of the possibility of philosophy in
literature, Oerrida invokes what Heidegger had called the neighborhood
of poetry and thinking, intent on recasting the thought of a common
ground for both. This recasting happens in several ways: first, by consid-
302 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
is prejudged by the law. But it, or she or he, "is also, in both an infinite
and a finite way, the prejudged ... as a subject before a judgment which
is always in preparation and always being deferred. Prejudged as having
to be judged, arriving in advance of the law which only signifies 'later'"
(pp. 2 0 5- 6 ).
The unpresentable and inaccessible law is such a law only if it is the
law for something or someone. Hence, the law calls, and demands a re-
sponse, a responsible response. Since I am interested here in figuring out
the shared conditions of possibility of the literary object and the law,
which are made to appear before one another in "Before the Law," I need
to ask what literature must be in order to be able to appear before the law
in the first place, and what it could mean for it to respond responsibly to
the law's call. At this point we must briefly digress to consider the status
of the "literary," as opposed to poetry, belles lettres, verbal arts in general,
not to mention Heidegger's Dichtung. Why does Derrida inquire into the
relation between philosophy and literature rather than into the one be-
tween philosophy and poetry? Undoubtedly there are several reasons.
One of these is that literature has indeed a relation to the law in several
senses. As we have already seen, literature, in the absence of any intrinsic
determinative criteria, is the object of a legal jurisdiction, a juridical per-
formative. Indeed, a number of axiomatic beliefs sanctioned by law tell us
what literature is. Since the history of these conventions and presupposi-
tions, as well as the law that guarantees them, "is very recent" (p. 185)-
the law in question became established between the late seventeenth and
early nineteenth centuries in Europe-the literary object is a thoroughly
historical and hence singular object (unlike poetry, seemingly less histor-
ical, rooted in natural law and as old as mankind). Because it is consti-
tuted by a law or set of laws, literature, rather than poetry, belles lettres,
and so forth, is summoned in Derrida's essay before the law. Derrida
writes: "IfI speak of 'literature' rather than of poetry or belles-lettres, it is
to emphasize the hypothesis that the relatively modern specificity of lit-
erature as such retains a close and essential rapport to a period in legal
history" (p. 214).
But literature has a relation to the law in still another sense. First, I
note that in the position before the law, the man of the country decides
not to enter the law. "This contradictory self-prohibition allows man the
304 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
a power to produce performatively the statements of the law, of the law that lit-
erature can be, and not just of the law to which literature submits. Thus litera-
ture itself makes the law, emerging in that place where the law is made. There-
fore, under certain determined conditions, it can exercise the legislative power of
linguistic performativity to sidestep existing laws from which, however, it derives
protection and receives its conditions of emergence. (p. 216)
In short, then, before the law, literature makes the law and gives it to itself
This is how it acquires an identity and specificity, which, however, obtain
only to the extent that they are sanctioned by the law that they subvert.
Yet at the very moment that literature plays the law and gives the
law to itself, thus acquiring a specificity of its own, literature also, para-
doxically, runs the risk of jeopardizing its own identity. Indeed, what are
the "certain determined conditions" under which "literature can play the
law, repeating it while diverting or circumventing it" (p. 216)? At this
juncture, Derrida invokes "the referential equivocation of certain linguis-
tic structures" (p. 216). What seems to remain at work in a literary text,
after all that does not necessarily belong to literature has been cast off, is
something that has
an essential rapport with the play of framing and the paradoxical logic of bound-
aries, which introduces a kind of perturbation in the "normal" system of refer-
':4 Relation Called 'Literary''' 305
In the fleeting moment when it plays the law, a literature passes literature. It is
on both sides of the line that separates law from the outlaw, it splits the being-
before-the-Iaw, it is at once, like the man from the country, "before the law" and
"prior to the law." Prior to the being-before-the-Iaw which is also that of the
doorkeeper. But within so unlikely a site, would it have taken place? Would it
have been appropriate to name literature? (p. 216)
is a question that arises about the mode in which the making of differ-
ence is to be thought in the absence either of any "true," specific differ-
ence, or any consensual difference. What are these conditions, what must
they be, what "only" can they be, if we take into account that the law here
is a "force of law," a law of "forced" difference?
As Derrida recalls, for the law to be the law, for it to have categorial
authority, it "must be without history, genesis, or any possible derivation"
(p. 191). To intervene as an absolutely emergent order, the law "cannot be
constituted by some history that might give rise to any story" (p. 194).
And yet, as Freud's Totem and Taboo demonstrates, "the inaccessible in-
cites from its place of hiding. One cannot be concerned with the law, or
with the law of laws, either at close range or at a distance, without asking
where it has its place and whence it comes" (p. 191). Incited by the purely
categorial thought of a law without origin, Freud invents the event of the
murder of the father to explain the origin of the moral law. As Derrida
shows, it is the story of an event in which nothing happens (especially
since what originates from it, the law, already presupposes the moral law);
it is a pure story, one that is only narration, because it narrates nothing.
"If there were any history [of the moral law], it would be neither pre-
sentable nor relatable: the history of that which never took place," Der-
rida claims (p. 194). Freud's idiomatization of the moral law through the
fiction of the murder of the father is precisely this, a fiction called upon,
incited by the moral law, but a fiction that annuls itself, the pure fiction of
a nonevent. This idiomatization and narrativity at the core of categorial
thought-mind you, not a narrative or positive fiction but the "fiction of
narration as well as fiction as narration: fictive narration as the simu-
lacrum of narration and not only as the narration of an imaginary his-
tory"-is not only the origin of law but, as Derrida underlines, the ori-
gin of literature as well (p. 199). With this notion of a pure fiction of a
quasi-event, of a fiction in which nothing is narrated but which the
purely categorial calls upon and thus harbors in its core, Derrida, within
the singularizing parameters of the texts discussed, puts his finger on the
general condition of possibility shared by both the philosophical thought
of the law and literature. To share this condition of possibility does not
imply that the law would be "itself transfixed [transie] by literature" or
vice versa. For on the one hand, this condition of possibility is not yet lit-
'/1 Relation Called 'Literary'" 307
erature but only its possibility. On the other hand, literature in the proper
sense can only stage this pure fiction by simultaneously gesturing in its
core toward the law. Rather than being itself this pure fiction in purity,
literature, while enacting this fiction, must compromise with the possible
thought of something categorially without origin.
I return to Kafka's parable. According to Derrida, "Before the Law"
tells of a law of which we know neither who nor what it is. Kafka's text is
not a text of philosophy, science, or history. "Here one does not know the
law, one has no cognitive rapport with it; it is neither a subject nor an ob-
ject before which one could take a position." Knowledge of neither who
nor what the law is: "this, perhaps, is where literature begins," Derrida re-
marks (p. 207). But the story in question, in which nothing happens, in-
deed in which the threshold of the law is never crossed and which thus
seems to recount a nonevent, also relates the origin of the law in the man's
decision to adjourn his entrance into the law. In forbidding himself to
cross the threshold, he not only makes the inaccessible law accessible but
also makes the law the law and becomes a subject of the law. As a result,
this apparently pure story, relating an event in which nothing takes place,
is pregnant with the germ of the philosophical thought of the law. In lit-
erature, then, the pure fiction that it shares as a condition of possibility
with philosophy cannot not turn into, say, a call for something like the
Second Critique.
A pure story, or the fiction of narration, is the condition of possibil-
ity that literature and philosophy (philosophy as moral philosophy, more
precisely) share. To quote Derrida: "the fictitious nature of this ultimate
story which robs us of every event, of this pure story, or story without
story, has as much to do with philosophy, science, or psychoanalysis as
with literature" (p. 209). In classical terms, one could, if this were indeed
possible, call it a transcendental narrativity. It is pure in that it relates
nothing, but as narrativity it is also the condition for the idiomatization
of what, in principle, is cut off from singularity, namely, the categorial.
But a note of caution is required here. One cannot simply proceed to
generalize what has been set forth in "Before the Law." The pure story,
we have been told, cannot be simply cut off from the texts through which
it became elaborated. The question itself from which Derrida started, a
question with a transcendental thrust, namely, whether literature and
308 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
philosophy, or the thought of the law, share the same condition of possi-
bility, is itself marked by singularity. In conclusion, one final quote from
the very beginning of the text: "In order to formulate this question [au-
jourd'hui, today] in the briefest manner, I will speak of an appearance, in
the legal sense, of the story and the law, which appear together and find
themselves summoned one before the other: the story, as a certain type of
relation, is linked to the law that it relates, appearing, in so doing, before
that law, which appears before it" (p. 191).
15
cern with the essence of literature is, of course, not accidental. It results
not from the narrowness of the questioner but rather from "the form of
the question" itself. Thus arises the necessity of understanding why the
reflective approach comes to grips with literature only by disparaging it.
But such an inquiry may well locate this failure in the insufficient degree
to which literature has become disparaged. Might it not be that literature
offers itself to understanding only where it is radically put into question,
only where it is seen as a nullity? Certainly, in "Literature and the Right
to Death," Blanchot suggests that reflection, with its gravity and serious-
ness, with the importance that it attributes to itself and its object, must
withdraw in the face of literature. The retreat of the reflective and essen-
tializing attitude signals that "literature once again becomes something
important, essential, more important than the philosophy, the religion or
the life of the world which it embraces," he writes (p. 302). Throughout,
his essay, Blanchot seeks to hold the philosophical question, and hence
philosophy as a whole, at bay so that literature can make itself manifest in
all its force and importance. When it comes to literature, although one
cannot avoid asking the philosophical question, it is, to cite Roger La-
porte, "la question de trop" ("the uncalled-for question"}.2 But oddly
enough, the distancing of the philosophical gesture in hopes of doing jus-
tice to literature also belittles literature. Literature reveals itself as some-
thing vain, vague, and impure. Refusing the essentializing approach, lit-
erature becomes its own self-negation. It denounces itself as deceitful, as
illegitimate. But this movement of self-negation does not stop here: "lit-
erature is not only illegitimate, it is also null," Blanchot adds (p. 301). It
is hard to imagine what could be more devastating to literature, yet this is
the radical consequence of Blanchot's concern with literature itself, of his
attempt to understand it by holding "the form of the question" in check.
Putting aside the question so that literature can manifest itself from
itself thus means that literature presents itself as a nullity, or more pre-
cisely, as its own absence. To state the matter differently, as soon as the
question regarding the essence of literature is put on hold, literature
reemerges as the question itself, and of itself. The nullity of literature has
in fact allowed literature to appear, to manifest itself, as the question of
its own possibility. This is a question entirely different from that of Jean-
Paul Sartre, for example. Indeed, it is a question that the nullity oflitera-
The Felicities ofParadox 3II
ture addresses to itself and with which it itself coincides. It is nothing but
that question, a "pure" question as it were, one whose subject is as much
a nullity as its object, a question that presumes no self-present essence of
what it questions.
"Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when litera-
ture becomes a question," Blanchot writes (p. 300). The question, to be
rigorously demarcated from the writer's self-questioning, with which lit-
erature is said to begin is literature's own question about "the possibility
of writing" (p. 300). Literature becomes a question in the act of writing
in which the writer's pen, without asking why it writes, will always have
passively performed that question. "Now you have done what you did
not do; what you did not write has been written: you are condemned to
be indelible," a writer tells his pen (p. 300). This question is "present on
the page" once writing has taken place. It is not asked by the writer; and
perhaps even without his knowledge, it incessantly addresses itself to him
as he writes. And once the writing is done, it speaks to the reader. But
this quasi-objective question addresses itself questioningly not primarily
to the writer and the reader but "to language, behind the person who is
writing and the person who is reading, by language which has become lit-
erature" (p. 301). From this it follows that this question that is the begin-
ning of literature is not a self-reflexive question. For at the beginning
there is nothing yet to reflect upon in the hope of achieving self-identity.
The question is addressed to Others-the writer, the reader, common
language. Moreover, since literature begins only as literature becomes a
question, the question on the page asks questioningly about the possibil-
ity of becoming a question as well. Addressed to Others, the question is
in question as well.
Left to itself, free from the impositions of the reflective and essen-
tializing question, literature comes into being as being nothing but the
question of its own possibility, begins where it becomes such a question.
It reveals itself in its beginning, beginning to exist as the question, and
continuing to exist only as its incessant beginning. If literature, then, is
constituted by the question of its possibility, is this question perhaps a
transcendental question in a philosophical sense? Since the question is all
that literature is, it would seem not to be so. If the question that is litera-
ture were in a position to enable anything, it would only be itself, or what
312 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
amounts to the same, namely literature, "this concern that literature has
with itself" (p. 301). What is more, remaining suspended from the re-
sponse of the Other to whom it is addressed, this question, rather than
constituting literature in a technical sense, voids it. The question about
the possibility of writing or literature coincides with literature's own self-
negation. It is the latter's "own negation" (p. 301). Ifliterature begins with
the question concerning its possibility, then literature is not, has not yet
been, and has no essence as yet. It exists as this absence of itself, as the
question of its possibility. In the absence of the reflective gesture and "the
form of the question," literature presents itself as a mere nullity.
The question, to quote Blanchot, is "the secrecy of works and loath
to emerge into broad daylight [au sein de l'oeuvre ... repose siLencieuse-
ment La meme interrogation]." Moreover, "the meaning of this question
is ... difficult to discover." It tends to disguise itself under all the ap-
pearances it takes, especially by turning into art's self-indictment, into
the "prosecution of art and art's capacities and goals" (p. 301). Since it
concerns the possibility ofliterature, the work, or writing, we will have to
ask whether this silent question at the heart of literature does not derive
from what Blanchot establishes about the involvement of literature with
the whole. In The WOrk of Fire, he notes that "this All in which poetry
now finds itself involved also involves it in an extreme intensity of mys-
teries, questionings, and oppositions" (p. 116). Is it because ofliterature's
ambition to be the whole that it cannot but begin and take shape as a
question? As will become clear hereafter, this concern with the whole is a
concern with meaning, with meaning itself, and as such. Although I will
put off a discussion of literature's claim to totality until later, the follow-
ing remark on Kafka's thinking already provides a clue. It is, says Blan-
chot, "a style of thinking that plays at generalization but is thought only
when caught up in the density of a world reduced to the unique in-
stance." Kafka's thought concerns the general; more precisely, it plays at
thinking the general, but at the same time, "it is singular, that is to say, it
rightly belongs to a single person; in vain does it use abstract terms ... it
resembles a strictly individual story." Because of this embedment of the
thought of generality in the thickness of the world or in an individual his-
tory, Kafka's thinking "is not completely thinking [n'est pas non pLus tout
afoit une pensee]." It is not quite thinking since it is unable to "rest easy
The Felicities ofParadox 313
in the general" with which thought is intrinsically tied up. And yet, while
this thinking occurs only as a singular shape, it remains thinking, for it is
not confined to incommunicable absolute solitude (pp. 3-4). Not quite
thinking, but thinking nevertheless, literature and poetry make the "gen-
eral depend on what is unique," as Blanchot notes in his essay on Rene
Char. But such dependence and its lack of rest causes literary thinking to
amount to essentially nothing but the "anxiety of a movement without
beginning or end." To understand that in a poem the general depends on
what is unique "is also to understand why the poem is division, vexation,
torment" (p. 1m). In other words, if the generality constitutive of think-
ing in literature is intrinsically dependent on uniqueness and singularity,
this thinking, unable to ground itself in a higher truth, is tortured by a
dependence on something that stands in a relation of contradiction to it.
It is a thinking that, put into question by singularity, is tormented by the
question of what underwrites it. It puts itself into question and becomes
the question of itself. In literary thinking, thinking then is reduced to
"nothing" but a question concerning itself. The shape that thinking takes
when its entirety has shrunk to an interrogation about itself is nothing
other than the question concerning its possibility.
When thus allowed to negate itself, become a nullity, and be re-
duced to the condition of its possibility, literature works a marvel. Allud-
ing to the surrealists, Blanchot remarks, "ifliterature coincides with noth-
ing for just an instant, it is immediately everything, and this everything
begins to exist: what a miracle [grande merveille]" (pp. 301-2). Sheltered
from the reRective question, left free to be a nullity, literature reveals, in
lieu of an essence, the opposite pulls of paradox. Its existence coincides
with the marvelous movement by which an absence, emptiness, or nul-
lity turns into everything, the existing totality of the whole. Pushed to its
extreme in a literature that assumes the nullity in question-where liter-
ature becomes "the exposure of this emptiness inside, ... open[edl up
completely to its nothingness, realiz[ingl its own unreality" (p. 3m)-this
nullity becomes an extraordinary force, the force of everything, of the
whole (Ie tout). Blanchot writes, "as long as this nullity is isolated in a
state of purity, it may constitute an extraordinary force, a marvelous
force" (p. 301). The aim of what follows-an analysis of Blanchot's essay
in light of this marvel-is to argue not that Blanchot delights or even rev-
314 R E LA T ION AT THE C R 0 S S R 0 ADS
els in paradox but rather that paradox is the necessary although insuffi-
cient condition for the happening of the chance of literature. If paradox
plays such a role in his understanding of literature, if he celebrates it as a
marvelous force, it is because Blanchot, against the prevailing opinion of
paradox as logical antinomy and hence as having been fully accounted
for, takes such antinomy to be the fortunate condition for a possible (yet
not for that matter necessary) happening of literature.
Given the dominating presence of Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit
in "Literature and the Right to Death"-a presence visible not only in
the numerous themes borrowed from Hegel but especially in the order
in which Blanchot develops his arguments-one could be tempted to
classify the movement from nullity to everything as a Hegelian dialecti-
cal inversion, and paradox as merely a speculative proposition and leap
(Satz). Undoubtedly, this temptation is neither fortuitous nor entirely
unjustified. It would even seem to impose itself, for does not Blanchot's
own mode of exposition and argumentation in the essay have all the ear-
marks of a dialectical proceeding? Certainly Blanchot has recourse to this
man who lived some 150 years before to substantiate his contention that
the "volatizing and volatile force which literature seems to have become"
(p. 302) today is not the result of passing historical conditions but is co-
extensive with literature itself, once philosophical reflection and its es-
sentializing question have been put at a remove. Nonetheless, it would
be difficult to reduce Blanchot's subsequent description and analysis of
all the contradictions faced by the writer, the work, and literary language
to a display of the contradictory moments of literature's dialectical self-
manifestation. 3 Are not precisely all these Hegelian references, whether
thematic or formal, part of the movement by which literature, after
philosophical reflection has retreated, "once again becomes something
important, essential, more important than ... philosophy" (p. 302)? Of
Mallarme, Blanchot holds in The Space of Literature that "his Hegelian
vocabulary would merit no attention, were it not animated by an au-
thentic experience."4 The same is true of Blanchot's own borrowings
from Hegel. Right from the start, he acknowledges that his remarks on
Hegel "are quite remote from the text of the Phenomenology and make no
attempt to illuminate it" (p. 302). These remarks serve nonphilosophical,
nonreflective purposes. ';
The Felicities of Paradox 315
letting the reader be the true author of the work-have any chance in
succeeding. Valery's answer to this dilemma, based on a reRection on the
technique involved in the creation of an art work, fails as well, Blanchot
argues. But what of the claim that this disconcerting ordeal reveals some-
thing objective about the work, something of the order of "the truth of
the work, where the individual who writes-a force of creative nega-
tion-seems to join with the work in motion through which this force of
negation and surpassing asserts itself" (p. 308)? This idea of a synthesis of
work and individual, in Hegel's terms, the "Thing itself" ("the matter in
hand itself," A. V. Miller translates), plays, Blanchot admits, "a vital role
in the literary undertaking" (p. 308). Yet what Hegel understood to be a
(still abstract) Concept gained by self-consciousness in the process of its
self-realization through the work, and hence a (first) solution to the con-
tradictions in question, is immediately shown to engender yet another set
of contradictions.
It is necessary already, but particularly in anticipation of what Blan-
chot will establish about the new set of contradictions, to broach the
question about the notion of contradiction itself as used in "Literature
and the Right to Death." Are the exigencies between which the writer
and his work find themselves contradictions in a strict sense? First, what
is one to make of the fact that while elaborating upon the conRict a writer
encounters when attempting to write, Blanchot describes as contradic-
tions moments that for Hegel call upon one another? Although Hegel
speaks of contradiction when he begins his discussion of the dialectical re-
lations between work and individual (der Grundwiderspruch des Werks),
the analysis of the moments of talent and action serves only to show that
the individual, eager to bring about a work, is caught in a (nonvicious)
circle. Hegel writes: "The individual who is going to act seems, therefore,
to find himself in a circle in which each moment already presupposes the
other, and thus he seems unable to find a beginning, because he only gets
to know his original nature, which must be his End, from the deed, while,
in order to act, he must have that End beforehand." Hegel emphasizes
that the individual "is beginning, means, and End, all in one." Talent, ac-
tion, and end, being intimately interconnected (verkniipft) as his own
moments, are sublated contradictions from the start. The contradictions
between them are only contradictions on the face of it. Hegel even speaks
318 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
must be the essence of the work that can never be adequate to its ideal.
But should the writer opt for the second game, and relinquish this claim,
pretending to write for the reader alone, he again fools himself and the
reader as well. "Were [he] not concerned with literature as his own action,
he could not even write" (p. 309). Blanchot offers the politically engaged
writer as an illustration of the mechanics of the second game. The exam-
ple, neither arbitrary nor a veiled reference to Blanchot's political in-
volvement with the far right, comes from the same chapter of the Phe-
nomenology that Blanchot has been following through its consecutive
moves.? Although the engaged writer claims to be on the side of a Cause,
as soon as the Cause claims him, he shows himself to be "only on his own
side" (p. 309). The analysis of the politically engaged writer allows Blan-
chot to indicate yet another "equivocation," as he now calls it. If the
writer disengages himself from worldly causes, turning himself rather to
the wall, he transforms that wall into the world, not a solitary universe
but a space that "contains within itself a point of view which concerns
everyone" (p. 310). The writer who withdraws into pure self-intimacy
fools himself and his readers in the same way as the engaged writer. Play-
ing off Hegel's ruminations in "The Spiritual Animal Kingdom" regard-
ing the honest consciousness-the consciousness whose truth is the
"Thing itself" or "the true work"-in which he concludes that the hon-
est consciousness owes its honesty to its own thoughtlessness and thus is
caught up in a number of deceptions of both self and others, Blanchot
draws the much less dialectical conclusion that, paradoxically, deceit is
the necessary condition of the writer's honesty. Blanchot writes: "What is
striking is that in literature, deceit and mystification not only are in-
evitable but constitute the writer's honesty, whatever hope and truth are
in him" (p. 310). There is no escaping the contradictions that the writer
faces when he approaches the task of writing, nor, when the work is com-
plete, is there any escape from the equivocations just mentioned. Self-
deception and the deception of others are the writer's inescapable condi-
tion. But this mystification and deceit are not simply negative, for they
represent the condition under which a writer can be a writer, that is, hon-
est and truthful. Without the equivocations in question, the writer would
be absolutely unable to realize the truth that is in him.
To throw this "logic" of contradiction and equivocation more clearly
320 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
ments, that is, to an impossible task, literature's response pivots upon it-
self and becomes the questioning of its own possibility.
Yet although the hostile rules' demands on the writer are such that
one might think of literature as merely the dream of a response, literature
is not nothing. Literature is not a passive manifestation on the surface of
the world; it is a concrete intervention in the world, Blanchot claims.
Closely following Alexandre Kojeve's rendering of the master/slave chapter
in the Phenomenology, in which work is defined "as the force of history, the
force that transforms man while it transforms the world" (p. 313), Blan-
chot ascertains that "a writer's activity must be recognized as the highest
form of work" (p. 313), and that his work is one "to an outstanding degree"
(p. 313). However, in spite of these new references to Hegel, a concept of
work emerges from these developments concerning the book as a work
that does not easily square with the Hegelian concept. Blanchot states:
when 'life endures death and maintains itself in it' in order to gain from
death the possibility of speaking and the truth of speech."ll He con-
cludes, "This is the 'question' that seeks to pose itself [a saccomplir J in
literature, the 'question' that is its essence [e1tre]" (pp. 321-22). As we have
seen already, the question of the possibility of literature is the silent ques-
tion at the heart ofliterature. But in what sense can we identify as a ques-
tion the fact that the Revolution is that historical moment in which "life
endures death and maintains itself in it" in order to gain (for whom? life
or literature?) "from death the possibility of speaking and the truth of
speech"? Blanchot himself puts "question" between inverted commas.
The "question» that makes up the heart of literature is not simply a ques-
tion. It is not an essence; it only seeks to pose itself, or rather, to carry it-
self out, to formulate itself as a question. This "question» seeks to become
the question, to cross the threshold of silence and to articulate itself as
literature. But what is the question that literature, after speaking to the
writer, reader, and common language, addresses to the Revolution in
which it mirrors itself? Undoubtedly, it is a question concerning its pos-
sibility as well. The question is addressed to the Revolution in the first
place because "revolutionary action is in every respect analogous to ac-
tion as embodied in literature: the passage from nothing to everything,
the affirmation of the absolute as event and of every event as absolute»
(p. 319). Undoubtedly, the question concerns the paradox that there is
only life in death, and that speech and its truth are rooted in the human
being's mortality. In these decisive moments of history "when everything
seems put in question» (p. 318), the question is, first, active negation: it
creates an emptiness. But, second, this emptiness is the immediate real-
ization that "everything is possible» (p. 318). As Blanchot's account of the
Reign of Terror demonstrates, the passage from nothing to everything is
achieved in the Revolution by holding out a maximum of contradictions.
For our purposes let us only point out that in the Reign of the Terror, the
first act, the act of negation, is also the final act; that the individual is
universal freedom itself; that to be alive is to be dead; that to die is to be
alive and to achieve absolute freedom; that death has no importance but
is also "the richest moment of meaning» (p. 320); that there is nothing
more to be done since all has been done, and so on. The task ofliterature
is to emulate this infinite power to endure contradiction, and thus to al-
The Felicities of Paradox 327
requires that before any word is spoken, there must be a sort of immense
hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all creation into a total sea"
(p. 323). Things only enter language as universal and ideal things, de-
prived of the singularity of their being, without their "flesh-and-blood re-
ality" (p. 322). Language is the medium of universality, Hegel says at the
beginning of the Phenomenology. In the daylight oflanguage, in its never-
ending light, to use Blanchot's words, beings dissolve in their here and
now, to resuscitate in the universal signification that is Being.
For Blanchot, the annihilation thtough which signification comes
about in language is in the end a function of the human being's mortality.
It announces real death: "my language means that this person, who is
right here now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence
and her presence, and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which
there is no existence or presence" (p. 323). But more important is the fact
that real death, the inevitable possibility of real destruction, makes lan-
guage possible as an idealizing and universal medium of signification.
More precisely, language is the mode in which the factuality of death has
acquired universality and the ontological status of ideality. Language is
the thought of death, death as thought. According to "Literature and the
Right to Death": "My language does not kill anyone. But if this woman
were not really capable of dying, if she were not threatened by death at
every moment of her life, bound and joined to death by an essential
bond, I would not be able to carry out that ideal negation, that deferred
assassination which is what my language is" (p. 323). In other words, mor-
tality is the condition under which language can proceed to that idealiz-
ing destruction of a singular reality in the flesh, thus making it ideal and,
by the same token, the object of a possible address. Without the prior an-
nihilation of immediate existence by means of which the latter is sepa-
rated from itself, made other than itself in its singular and unique exis-
tence, it could not possibly become an Other for me to address. 12 But for
me to speak, I too must be a universal subject, that is, I must be distanced
from myself. "The power to speak is alone linked to my absence from be-
ing," Blanchot explains (p. 324). As soon as I say"!," "it is as though I
were chanting my own dirge" (p. 324). It is not as a full, dominating, and
self-certain presence that I achieve the ideal destruction through which
the Other becomes not only the Other of a possible address but an Other
The Felicities ofParadox 329
in the first place. "No fullness, no certainty can ever speak; something
essential is lacking in anyone who expresses himself," Blanchot notes
(p. 324). Death thus appears to be intrinsically linked to the possibility of
language. Without negation of the singular being in the name, no Other
would arise, nor would I be in a position to be a possible speaker. More-
over, not only does negation separate the other being from the unique-
ness of its existence, or myself from myself, but it also opens the space be-
tween me and an Other, thus providing the essential condition for all
possible communication and understanding. "My speech is a warning
that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly
appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there be-
tween us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what
prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all
understanding." Blanchot can therefore conclude that "without death,
everything would sink into absurdity" (pp. 323-24).
Several consequences follow: if the one who speaks must negate his
existence, and negate the existence of what he speaks abour, "if true lan-
guage is to begin," "language can begin only with the void" (p. 324). Lan-
guage at its most fundamental, prior to any linguistic act, be it even that
of naming, is the voice of mortality. "When I first begin [to speak], I do
not speak in order to say something; rather, a nothing demands to speak,
nothing speaks, nothing finds its being in speech, and the being of speech
is nothing" (p. 324). At its most primordial, language is death as the
opening of signification, death itself become meaningful. It is the empti-
ness of death separated and detached from itself, the void turned to ide-
ality, real death metamorphosed into universality. What speaks at the be-
ginning, before I say anything, is nothing but signification, meaning pure
and simple, language itself We must now ask the question regarding the
status of negativity in language. Undoubtedly, Blanchot is much indebted
to Hegel's concepts of negation and negativity. But his emphasis on death
as the condition for the ideality of language, for the constitution of the
Other, and more generally for communication, shows negation to enjoy a
status unlike that which it occupies in Hegel. Take, for example, the
negation incurred in a linguistic relation with a human being who is at
first a singular and unique existence. By annihilating that existence in the
immediacy of its being, by making it "other than his being" (p. 324),
330 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
represent" (p. 326). But with this the conflictual tasks ofliterary language
are not yet exhausted. Indeed, since the negation constitutive oflanguage,
and thus of the life of the spirit and of the light of the day, "cannot be cre-
ated out of anything but the reality of what it is negating" (pp. 326-27), a
question arises for literary language: what it is that was lost in the begin-
ning? Literature thus becomes haunted by the thought of what had to be
put to death for language to come to life. It turns into a search for what
preceded it. But this inquiry into the moment anterior to the "wonderful
power" of speech puts literature into contradiction with itself (p. 327).
"How can I recover it," Blanchot asks, "how can I turn around and look
at what exists before, if all my power consists of making it into what exists
after" (p. 327). Indeed, the double bind in which literature finds itself
caught is that the search for what had to be excluded from language for
language to arise in the first place is inevitably linguistic. Literature can
devote itself only to this search because it has already proceeded to the an-
nihilation of the something in question. "The torment of language is
what it lacks because of the necessity that it be the lack of precisely this
etre
[ce qu'il manque par fa necessite ou il est d'en Ie manque]. It cannot even
name it," Blanchot concludes (p. 327).
Literature begins where literature becomes a question. This ques-
tion, which is now addressed to language itself, shows itself to be a ques-
tion that for structural reasons arises with necessity. By virtue of being
"the terrible force that draws beings into the world and illuminates them"
(p. 326), language must seek the "something" that had to be excluded.
But the very reasons that prompt this quest also render impossible any
satisfactory answer to this question. Indeed, a definite answer to this
question would amount to nothing less than a collapse of language.
In its (impossible) quest for what precedes language, literature dis-
covers the materiality of language. This materiality-the reality, physical-
ity, opacity of the word-no longer the obstacle that it was to a literature
that sought to attain absence absolutely in and for itself, now becomes
the writer's "only chance," Blanchot ascertains (p. 327). The happy fact
that language is physical-"Yes, happily, language is a thing" (p. 327)-
becomes the chance of acceding to the senseless, the anonymous, and the
obscure that precedes it. But such a literature is not the world itself, a
"negation asserting itself," but rather "the presence of things before the
332 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
world exists" (p. 328). As Blanchot notes, literary language's attempt "to
become the revelation of what revelation destroys ... is a tragic en-
deavor" (p. 328). Indeed, in this inevitable quest for the moment anterior
to language, literature experiences its inability to escape universality. Un-
doubtedly, literary language may succeed in destroying the meaning of
the word as the word becomes itself an obscure thing, but this meaning-
lessness is itself meaningful in that it represents what had to disappear for
language to become meaningful. Blanchot writes:
When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into something
obscure and meaningless, wirness to the primordial obscurity, what has disap-
peared in this case-the meaning of the name-is really destroyed, but signifi-
cation in general has appeared in its place, the meaning of the meaninglessness
embedded in the word as expression of the obscurity of existence, so that al-
though the precise meaning of the terms has faded, what asserts itself now is the
very possibility of signifying, the empty power of bestowing meaning-a strange
impersonal light. (p. 329)
it must ally itself "with the reality of language," now "a matter without
contour," in which words have become opaque and hence meaningless
(p. 330). But there are also limits to this latter drift. Blanchot remarks:
Beyond the change that has solidified, petrified, and stupefied words two things
reappear in its metamorphosis: the meaning of this metamorphosis, which illu-
minates the words, and the meaning the words contain by virtue of their appari-
tion as things .... Literature has certainly triumphed over the meaning of words,
bur what it has found in words considered apart from their meaning is meaning
that has become thing: and thus it is meaning detached from its conditions ...
wandering like an empty power ... the simple inability to cease to be, but
which, because of that, appearlsl to be the proper determination of indetermi-
nate and meaningless existence. (p. 331)
slope is a literature of realism, like that of Flaubert, which seeks its real-
ization through meaningfol prose, that is, by means of a language that ex-
presses things according to their meaning. Yet Flaubert's realism demon-
strates that such a language, insofar as it corresponds to everyday speech,
is not sufficiently meaningful. Meaningful prose must therefore correct
this situation by seeking a language able to recapture the movement of
negation itself without which there is no meaning. Meaningful prose dis-
covers this language, and its corresponding art form, in the language and
art of Mallarme. Unlike ordinary prose, Mallarme's language, which "rep-
resents the world for us, ... teaches us to discover the total being of the
world," safeguards the movement of negativiry by which meaning be-
comes truth (p. 333). On the second slope is poetical language, that side of
Mallarme's poetry, for example, concerned not with negation and mean-
ing but with the materialiry oflanguage. Poetical language is interested "in
what things and beings would be if there were no world," B1anchot states.
Francis Ponge, who "has gone over to the side of objects, sometimes he is
water, sometimes a pebble, sometimes a tree" (p. 334), is exemplary of the
literature of this slope. But as Blanchot points out, though none of the
works characteristic of the second slope can be called works of prose, their
attempt to describe things as they would describe themselves cannot but
have recourse to meaningful prose if they are to give expression to the
muteness of things or to the senseless. While it is true that those prose de-
scriptions of poetical language do not belong to the world in the same way
as Flaubert's realism, but rather belong "to the underside of the world,"
they remain "perfectly meaningful prose" (p. 335), harboring a language of
negativiry and meaning in poetical language itself
Each slope veers away from itself to the other. But as the discussion
of poetical language in "Literature and the Right to Death" demonstrates,
being always already on the opposite slope is the sole condition under
which literature can hope to be truthful. One cannot choose one's spot in
literature "because literature has already insidiously caused you to pass
from one slope to the other and changed you into something you were
not before. This is its treachery," Blanchot writes. But "this is also its cun-
ning version of the truth [La est sa traitrise, la aussi sa verite retorse]"
(p. 333). Blanchot's discussion of how both meaningful prose and poetical
language supplement, correct, or fulfill each other heightens the possibi-
336 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
death and maintains itself in it" (p. 336). The passage from one slope to
the other never ceases. It does not die. Indeed, death, to the extent that it
might be the hope of language, is not simply an end but the negative to
be held out for language to achieve truth. I now return to the question of
the contradictions, equivocalities, and paradoxes that constitute literary
language on all its levels and in all its manifestations. Is there a matrix for
all of literature's ambiguities? More precisely, where does this ambiguity
originate, and what is its ultimate and most economical structure? It has
been observed that "a fundamental ambiguity seems to inhabit all of
Blanchot's thinking." 13 My question is whether this ambiguity can be de-
scribed in such a way that the manifold paradoxes, contradictions, and
equivocalities can be derived from it. Yet what would a "fundamental am-
biguity" have to be for it to have a grounding or explicatory value? What
"fundamental ambiguity" could, beyond indistinctness, uncertainty, and
obscurity, have a constituting function? The last pages of "Literature and
the Right to Death" perhaps harbor an answer to these questions.
"If we want to restore literature to the movement which allows all
its ambiguities to be grasped, that movement is here: literature, like ordi-
nary speech, begins with the end, which is the only thing that allows us to
understand," Blanchot remarks (p. 336). In the final analysis, then, all the
ambiguities that make up literature and its language stem from this fun-
damental ambiguity that it must begin with the end, in other words, with
death, with death's intrinsic ambiguity.
If we are to speak, we must see death, we must see it behind us. When we speak,
we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is what makes language
true, but at the same time [this] void is reality and death becomes being. There
is being-that is to say, a logical and expressible truth-and there is a world, be-
cause we can destroy things and suspend existence. This is why we can say that
there is being because there is nothingness: death is man's possibility, his chance,
it is through death that the future of a finished world is still there for us [eest par
elle que nous reste l'avenir d'un monde acheve]; death is man's greatest hope, his
only hope of being man. (pp. 336-37)
The argument of this passage, which also illuminates the title of Blan-
chot's piece, is familiar by now. Without the real possibility of death, no
idealizing detachment of beings from themselves and hence no univer-
sally shareable meaning is possible.1 4 Man's humanity depends on his
338 RELATION AT THE CROSSROADS
eventual death, to which man as man must thus claim to have a right. If
he could no longer die, he could no longer be human. But as this passage
also underscores, although death is a necessary condition, a right, it is not
a sufficient reason for ideality, universality, and communality to occur.
Death entails no guarantee whatsoever that being, man, or literature will
be. No cause or mechanical relation exists between death and what it can
render possible. Death is merely the possibility, chance, or hope for be-
ing, man, the world, literature to come into being. Death is ambiguous
in more than one respect, but first and foremost in the following: on the
one hand, its negation can be final, without any effect; on the other hand,
it is a possibility for something to occur, come, arrive-for the world to
be a world, to have a future, for a future finished world. This fundamen-
tal ambiguity is communicated to everything for which the end becomes
the chance for a beginning. This ambiguity that structures death, death's
structural ambiguity, needs further illumination.
In Blanchot's discussion of Kafka's belief that literature might be a
way out of the ambiguity of the human condition, in which he shows
such a quest merely to transform death as the impossibility of dying into
the mockery of immortality, he raises the question of the power of litera-
ture. Why, he asks, could "a man like Kafka decide that if he had to fall
short of his destiny, being a writer was the only way to fall short of it
truthfully?" (p. 341). This question, posed against all the contradictions,
equivocalities, and paradoxes ofliterature that have been staged up to this
point, seems unanswerable. The reason for its being unanswerable is not
contingent, but, as will become clear hereafter, it is unanswerable by right
if answering means "to clear it up" (p. 341). "Perhaps this is an unintelli-
gible enigma," Blanchot holds, "but if it is, the source of the mystery is
literature's right to affix a negative or positive sign indiscriminately to
each of its moments and each of its results" (p. 341). This "strange right,"
he claims, is "linked to the question of ambiguity in general" (p. 341).
This right, in which the power of literature is rooted, is thus not one
more characteristic of literature added to its contradictory, equivocal,
paradoxical nature. For not only does this right give rise to the contradic-
tory nature of literature, but it will also help us to understand both am-
biguity in general and the particular reason, or rather the minimal ambi-
guity, on which all ofliterature's ambiguity hinges.
The Felicities of Paradox 339
It is as though there were a hidden trap here to force ambiguity to reveal its own
traps, and as though in surrendering unreservedly to ambiguity, literature were
attempting to keep it-out of sight of the world and of the thought of the
world-in a place where it fulfills itself without endangering anything. Here am-
biguity struggles with itself [l'ambiguite est La aux prises avec elle-memel. (p. 341)
This original double meaning, which lies deep inside every word like a condem-
nation that is still unknown and a happiness [bonheur 1that is still invisible, is the
source of literature, because literature is the form in which this double meaning
has chosen to show itself behind the meaning and the value of words, and the
question it asks is the question asked by literature. (p. 344)
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
I. "The fact that a thing is itself is the single reason and the single cause to be
given in answer to all such questions as 'why the man is man, or the musician
musical,' unless one were to answer 'because each thing is inseparable from itself,
and its being one just meant this.'" And again: "In the case of all things which
have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the
whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause; for even in bodies contact
is the cause of unity in some cases, and in others viscosity or some other such
quality. And a definition is a set of words which is one not by being connected
together like the Iliad, but by dealing with one object. What, then, is it that
makes man one; why is he one and not many?" Aristotle, Metaphysica, in The
Works ofAristotle, vol. 8, trans. W D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), I041a
15-20 and I045a 5-15.
2. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis ofFire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 80.
3. All quotations from Ecce Homo are from Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Ge-
nealogy ofMorals " and "Ecce Homo," ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1967), p. 290. All page references in the text of this chapter are to this
edition.
4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Musique, in his Oeuvres completes
(Paris: Fume, 18 35), 3: 744.
5. See, for instance, Pliny, Natural History, bk. 34, chap. 70.
6. The whole meaning of recurrence in Nietzsche depends, in fact, on the de-
termination of that nature of the recurring which is the moment.
Notes to Chapter 2 349
CHAPTER 2
erably limits the scope of Gilles Deleuze's reevaluation of the question of who one
is. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 75-78.
22. Derrida writes: "It is out of the unfolding of this 'same' as differance that
the sameness of difference and of repetition is presented in the eternal return."
Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in "Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on
Husserls Theory ofSigns, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1973), p. 149.
23. See in particular Bernard Pautrat, "Nietzsche Medused," in Looking After
Nietzsche, ed. L. A. Rickels (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 159-74.
24. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 25-29. As to the image of the die,
see, for example, Use and Abuse ofHistory, p. 20, where Nietzsche speaks of the
real historical nexus of cause and effect, which, rightly understood, would only
prove that nothing quite similar could ever be cast again from the dice-box of
fate and future.
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage, 1974). p. 224.
26. On December 29, 1888, Nietzsche wrote to Meta von Salis: "thank
heaven that in all my instincts I am a Pole and nothing else." Nietzsche, Selected
Letters, p. 343.
27. Klossowski concludes his analysis of the passage concerning Nietzsche's
double origin as follows: "Hence, Nietzsche was never the father of himself be-
cause he was dead as his father." Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Cir-
cle, trans. D. W Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 189.
28. Nietzsche seems here to elaborate on a fragment by Heraclitus in which
birth is seen to be an adversity. The fragment reads as follows: "When they are
born, they are willing to live and accept their fate (death); and they leave behind
children to become victims of fate." Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
Philosophers (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 26.
29. "THE THIRD EYF.-What! You are still in need of the theatre! are you still
so young? Be wise, and seek tragedy and comedy where they arc hettn acted, and
352 Notes to Chapter 3
where the incidents are more interesting, and the actors more eager. It is indeed
by no means easy to be merely a spectator in these cases-but learn! And then,
amid all difficult or painful situations, you will have a little gate leading to joy
and refuge, even when your passions attack you. Open your stage eye, that big
third eye of yours, which looks out into the world through the other two."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Day ofDawn, in Complete Works ofNietzsche, ed. Levy,
1964),9: 353·
30. "For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own
law, joys, and rights-that may well have been considered hitherto as the most
outrageous human aberration and as idolatry itself The few who dared as much
always felt the need to apologize to themselves, usually by saying: 'It wasn't l.'
Not I! But a god through me." Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 191.
31. Fink, pp. 65, 82, II4, u8.
32. Nor does it coincide with the Heideggerian notion of the "unmediated
character of a [genuine] beginning." Heidegger defines this as follows: "A gen-
uine beginning, as a leap, is always a head start, in which everything to come is
already leaped' over, even if as something disguised. The beginning already con-
tains the end latent within itself" Heidegger, "Origin of the Work of Art," p. 76.
33. Ibid., p. 14. See also Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2: 9, where Heidegger under-
stands Nietuche's self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) as precisely the opposite of idle
self-mirroring (Sellntbtspiegtlung).
CHAPTER 3
1. For the Lutheran connection, see Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 126-27.
2. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 14-15.
3. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker, Untersuchun-
gen zu seinem Friihwerk (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976).
4. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, ed. G. Scholem and T. W. Adorno (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), I: 372.
5. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. I (covering [913-26), ed. M. Bul-
lock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996),
p. 202. All page references in the text of this chapter are to this edition.
6. Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 16.
7. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 40.
8. Jacques Derrida, "Des Tours de Bahel," trans. J. F. Graham, in Difference in
Translation, ed. J. F. Graham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 180.
Notes to Chapter 4 353
CHAPTER 4
I. Benjamin's borrowing of some conceptions from Kant does not preclude
his rejecting of other, major aspects of Kant's doctrine. Thus, in the essay "Pro-
gram of the Coming Philosophy" (trans. M. Ritter, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aes-
thetics, History, ed. G. Smith [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989],
pp. 1-12), Benjamin, although positioning Kant as the starting point for a new
philosophy, severely criticizes him for maintaining distinctions such as intuition/
intellect, subject/object, and epistemology/metaphysics. Indeed Benjamin relin-
quishes all the major distinctions constitutive of Kant's critical enterprise in the
First Critique. He does so in order to overcome what he calls the remnants in
Kant of the religious and historical blindness of the Enlightenment, and to es-
tablish a higher concept of experience-higher than "naked, primitive, and self-
evident [empirical] experience"-in which experience is "reduced to nadir, to a
minimum of significance," in which "something absolute" is encountered,
namely God, and which would characterize the coming philosophy as a theol-
ogy or as a metaphysics. But Benjamin disagrees with Kant's doctrine of aesthetic
judgment as well, and dismisses the phenomenology of experience on which it is
based. A~ Claude Imbert has argued, Benjamin objects to Kant's aesthetics be-
354 Notes to Chapter 4
16. The concept of the aura can be a positive instrument of analysis only if
entirely recast. This is what Andrew Benjamin has set out to do in "The Decline
of Art: Benjamin's Aura," in Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-
Garde (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 143-54.
17. Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Selected Writings, vol. I (cov-
ering 1913-26), ed. M. Bullock and M. W Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1996), p. 249.
18. Benjamin, One ~y Street, p. 251.
19. Ibid., p. 252.
20. Benjamin's analysis of dadaism ought to be read in conjunction with his
parallel developments on the shock experience in the great nineteenth-century
metropoles, particularly in his "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Benjamin,
Illuminations, pp. 155-200.
21. Shock is thus not to be understood as merely the "denial of sense," as
Burger construes it in Theorie der Avantgarde (p. 108). With this, the meaning of
shock is restricted to what Benjamin had called "the moral shock effect."
22. "Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in
our sense but people who portray themselves-and primarily in their own work
process. In Western Europe the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies con-
sidCl'ation to modern man's legitimate claim to being reproduced" (pp. 232; 494).
1,. Benjamin, OM ~y Sfrttt, p. 2.56.
24. A carefuJ. reading of section 3 of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" would
be requiml here.
25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p. 153.
2.6. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. V. L.
Dowdell (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1978), p. 102..
27. Ibid., p. 104.
28. Everything, indeed, that Benjamin advances about the genre of the novel
in "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" (in Benjamin, Selected
Writings, I: n6-2oo)-its prosaic, sober nature-suggests that the film is the
novel's legitimate heir.
29. Kant, Anthropology, p. 77. For the important role of absentmindedness in
the fianeur, see Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire."
CHAPTER 5
I. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977), p. 365.
2. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Ho[~
tadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 35.
Notes to Chapter 6 357
3. Ibid., p. 126.
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 88. All page references in the text of this
chapter are to this edition.
5. Marrin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, vol. 21 of Gesam-
tausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), p. 158.
6. Ibid., p. 156.
7. Ibid., pp. 159-60.
8. Ibid., p. 157.
9. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 40, 25, and 44. An Introduction to Meta-
physics refers even to Being as "determinate, wholly indeterminate Being (Sein
als das bestimmte vollig Unbestimmte)." Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to
Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1959), p. 78.
10. Heidegger, Logik, p. 160.
II. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 366.
12. Certain developments in "On the Essence of Truth" (in Heidegger, Basic
Writings) and also the hyphenation of Be-stimmung in What Is Philosophy? sug-
gest that there is perhaps a proper meaning of that word, a meaning upon which
the technical (and current) meaning of the term depends.
13. In a handwritten comment in the margins of his own copy of Being and
Time, Heidegger notes with respect to the quoted passage, "dass es zu seyn hat:
Bestimmung!" (Sein und Zeit, vol. 2 of Gesamtausgabe [Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1977], p. 56). I translate: "that is has to be: destination!" Being at-
tuned to, disclosedness, and destination are thus intimately interlinked. It is a
nne example of how the temporal meaning of determination becomes tied into
Heidegger's attempt to foreground the question of determination in that of state-
of-mind, in moods.
14. Heidegger, Logik, p. 308.
15. Ibid., p. 294-
16. Ibid., p. 322.
17. See in this context Michel Haar, Le Chant de fa Terre (Paris: LHerne,
1985), pp. 88-102.
18. See, for instance, the reference work Der Grosse Duden.
CHAPTER 6
I. Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, ed. D. F.
Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 121. All page references in the text of
this chapter are to this edition.
2. For how justice, as universal egalitarian leveling, is revealed at the end of
358 Notes to Chapter 6
a historical mankind, that is, for its vocation, its teleology, its Geschick. Heideg-
ger's attempt to foreground the classical conception of truth thus lays the
groundwork for accounting for the (modern) distinction oflogical and historical
determination, and the exchanges between the two. Heidegger's developments
toward what we have seen to amount to a "fundamental" theory of accord lead in
such a direction.
8. See Birault, Heidegger et l'experience de fa pensee, p. 496.
9. This eclipse is also the reason for the inevitable plurality of, and hence dis-
cord between, the goals or ends (Bestimmungen) to which all particular truth
claims (Obereinstimmungen) must yield.
10. Heidegger touches here on the limits of phenomenology, on what one
could call a constitutive blind spot of a philosophy of appearing as such.
CHAPTER 7
I. Here I follow Michael Murray's distinctions in his essay "Philosophical
Canon as Series, Score, and Scepter" (forthcoming).
2. See, for instance, Ernst Robert Curti us, European Literature and the Latin
Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1973), pp. 256-72.
3. Immanuel Kant, Logik, in Kants gesammelte Schriften (Akademie-Ausgabe),
(Berlin: de Gruyter), II: 13.
4. See Hermann Krings, "Denken," in Handbuch philosophischer Grundbe-
griffe (Munich: Kosel, 1973), I: 274-88.
5. As Reiner Schiirmann has forcefully argued in Heidegger on Being and Act-
ing: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. C.-M. Gros (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1987), philosophy, since Aristotle discovered that the pros hen could
be applied to all regions of the world, has spoken "with the voice of a physicist"
(pp. 42-43). See Chapter 8 below, "Like the Rose-Without Why."
6. Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, ed. D. F.
Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 140-41.
7. Martin Heidegger, " ... Poetically· Man Dwells ... ," in his Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 214-15. All
page references in the text of this chapter refer to this edition.
8. Werner Marx, Gibt es auf Erden ein Mass? (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
1986). p. 25. My translation.
9. Martin Heidegger, "A Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings. pp.
240-41.
10. Ibid., p. 242
II. Jean-Fran<,:ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. trans. G. Van
Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). p. xiv.
360 Notes to Chapter 9
CHAPTER 8
1. Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in Basic Writings, ed. D. F.
Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 231.
2. Reiner Schlirmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to An-
archy, trans. C.-M. Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). All page
references in the text of this chapter are to this work.
3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 79-80.
4. Schlirmann makes a clear distinction between "deconstruction" and "dis-
mantling" (in a Marxian and Nietzschean sense).
5. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, "The Principle of Reason: The Univer-
sity in the Eyes ofIts Pupils," Diacritics 13 (Fall 1983): 18-19.
6. For instance, on p. 6, where Schlirmann writes, "Still a principle, but a
principle of anarchy."
7. I put the word in quotation marks to distinguish the sense intended here
from the systematicity of metaphysical systems.
CHAPTER 9
I. Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand
die Philosophie nehme-dargestellt an den Werken des Herrn Krug," in Wtrke
in zllJllMit B4ndm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 2: 201. Wilhelm
Traugott Krug became the successor of Kant at the University of Konigsberg.
2. Ibid.
3. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854).
4. Hegel, "Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme,"
p.202.
5. Ibid., p. 189·
6. Martin Heidegger, "The Nature of Language," in On the \"%y to Language,
trans. P. D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 92. All page references
in the text of this chapter are to this edition of Heidegger's essays on language.
7. Ute Guzzoni, ldentitiit oder nicht: Zur Kritischen Theorie der Ontologie
(Freiburg: Alber, 1981), p. 222.
8. This is the case in particular with Heidegger's interpretation of the Stefan
George poem in "The Nature of Language." See, for instance, pp. 66-67, 85.
9. Any more extensive exploration of the philosophical implications of the
notion of Vermutung within Heidegger's work will have to return to Nicholas of
eusa's De conjecturis.
ro. Another example suggesting the merely provisional role of presupposition
occurs in "The Way to Language," when Heidegger states, "a thinking that pur-
Notes to Chapter 10 361
sues the Appropriation can still only surmise it [dieses erst vermuten)' and yet can
experience it even now in the nature of modern technology" (p. 131).
II. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 190-91.
12. Let me also invoke here Hans Blumenberg's call, undoubtedly gesturing
in the direction of Nicholas of eusa, upon the courage to conjecture (Mut zur
Vermutung). Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 13; see also p. 39.
13. The poem by George, 'The Word," which Heidegger discusses at length
in "The Nature of Language," represents for the latter a turning point in George's
poetry, more precisely, the point where his poetry becomes lyric song (Gesang), in
other words, great poetry. This poem has not only "turned out well," as the trans-
lator suggests, but has succeeded in becoming a lyric song of language (das zum
singenden Lied von der Sprache gegliickt ist, p. 69). This, too, is a matter of luck.
14. Beftemdung, in addition, means astonishment, surprise. It might thus be
interesting to link it to the question of the thaumazein and the pleasure of theo-
ria, and to show that the thinking experience envisioned by Heidegger is a philo-
sophical experience of a kind altogether different from the one at the heart of the
Western tradition.
IS. Although "Other" in the context of "The Nature of Language" refers only
to the address, grant, or promise of language, the structure of "relating" devel-
oped here can be extended to all kinds of Others, human and divine Others in-
cluded. Such is the case, for instance, in Emmanuel Levinas's essay from 1965,
"Enigme et phenomene," in which perhaps is shown to be the "new modality" for
the enigma, irreducible to the modalities of being and certitude. Emmanuel Lev-
inas, En dtcrouvant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp.
209, 214. For a discussion of the status of the perhaps in Levinas, see Krzysztof
Ziarek, "Semantics of Proximity: Language and the Other in the Philosophy of
Emmanuel Levinas," Research in Phenomenology 29 (1989): 242-43.
CHAPTER 10
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 244. Page references given with the ab-
breviation BT in the text of this chapter are to this edition.
2. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York:
Harper and Row, 1969), p. 66. Page references given with the abbreviation ID in
the text of this chapter are to this edition.
3. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. !O5. Page references given with the abbreviation
PLT in the text of this chapter are to this edition.
362 Notes to Chapter II
4. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977), pp. 203-4. Page references given with the abbreviation BW in the
text of this chapter are to this edition.
5. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Wegmarken, vol. 9 (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1996), p. 332. My translation.
6. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 9: 184. My translation.
7. To distinguish the Earth that Heidegger opposes to the world in "The
Origin of the Work of Art" from the earth that appears in the fourfold, I use up-
per case "E" when the first is meant and lowercase "e" when the second is meant.
The French translations of Heidegger make such a distinction and therefore war-
rant my doing so.
8. Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, ed. W. Brock (Chicago: Regnery
Gateway, 1949), p. 274.
9. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Ca-
puzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 25. Page references given with the
abbreviation EGT in the text of this chapter are to this edition.
ro. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. W McNeil (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 213.
II. Ibid., pp. 213-14.
CHAPTER II
clitic 2, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 19. See also the translator's note on the word retrait
(p. 5); the translator, to preserve as much as possible the variety of meanings this
word has in French, decided to leave it untranslated.
2. Ibid., p. 22. 3. Ibid., p. 29.
4· Ibid., p. 31. 5· Ibid., p. 33·
6. "If we are inquiring about the meaning of Being, our investigation does
not then become a 'deep' one [tiefiinning), nor does it puzzle out what stands be-
hind Being. It asks about Being itself insofar as Being enters into the intelligibil-
Notes to Chapter II 363
ity of Dasein. The meaning of Being can never be contrasted with entities, or
with Being as the 'ground' which gives entities support" (Martin Heidegger, Be-
ing and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson [New York: Harper and
Row, 1962], pp. 193-94). What remains is a deepening of this very question, a sys-
tematic exploration of what according to Heidegger is equiprimordial (gleichur-
spriinglich) with this question.
7. If Heidegger, as Henri Biraulr has demonstrated in "Heidegger et la pen-
see de la finitude" (Revue internationale de philosophie, 1960, no. 52), progres-
sively abandons the concept of finitude, it is to avert the theological implications
of this concept. However, what Heidegger originally aimed at when using the
concept of finitude continued to preoccupy his thought in the form of the idea
of a historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) and destiny (Geschick) of Being.
8. No doubt, this critique of the transcendental and of the romantic chiasm
is far from unequivocal. Yet such Heideggerian notions as "coming forth," "set-
ting forth," "belonging to," etc., and in particular the notion of the gift (Gabe)
of Being or of the Word, have to be understood as such an attempt to think more
originally and to reinscribe the idea of constitution or of engenderment.
9. "The Anaximander Fragment," in Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking,
trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 26.
10. Cf. Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).
II. Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, vol. 21 of Gesam-
tausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), pp. 127-61.
12. The doctrine of an analogy of Being and its meanings, a doctrine that
seems to go back to Thomas Aquinas's Aristotle exegeses, may be contrary to the
spirit and the letter of Aristotle's text and represent a "Platonization" of Aristotle,
as Pierre Aubenque argues in Le probleme de l'etre chez Aristote (Paris: P.U.F.,
1966), pp. 198-206. Nonetheless, it is important to realize that Heidegger's ques-
tion of the meaning of Being originated in his 1907 reading of Franz Brentano's
dissertation, On the Several Senses ofBeing in Aristotle (1862), which pursued pre-
cisely the Aquinian exegesis of Aristotle.
13. Gerard Granel's excellent review of Derrida's OfGrammatology, published
in 1967 in Critique, has remained one of the very few commentaries to address
pertinent questions to the work of Derrida. Here Granel already asked Derrida
about the difference between the question of writing (ecriture) and the question
of Being. Indeed, the attentive reader of both Heidegger and Derrida will not be
able to avoid recognizing the striking structural similarities between writing and
Being, and between text and Being. Gerard Granel, "Jacques Derrida et la rature
de J'origine," reprinted in Gerard Granel, Traditionis Traditio (Paris: Gallimard,
197 2 ).
364 Notes to Chapter 11
timore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 117-71. As to the prob-
lem of eschatology in Heidegger, see, for instance, Heidegger's comment, "As
something fateful (geschickLiches), Being itself is inherently eschatological." Hei-
degger, "The Anaximander Fragment," p. 18.
3I. Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor," p. 24.
32. Granel, pp. I26-2 7·
33. Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme," in Margins of Philosophy, trans.
A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 51-52, 63.
34. See the last pages of Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme." See also Jacques
Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1979), especially on how, according to Derrida, the issue of propria-
tion and appropriation (Ereignis) bears on the question and the meaning of Be-
ing (pp. 119-21).
CHAPTER 12
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 261. Page numbers given with the abbrevia-
tion LI in the text refer to this edition.
2. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis ofEuropean Sciences and Transcendental Philos-
ophy, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 58.
3. Walter Benjamin, "Central Park," trans. L. Spencer and M. Harrington,
New Gennan Critique, no. 34., (Winter 1989): 33, translation modified.
4. Leonard Lawlor, Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the
Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 2. See also
Leonard Lawlor, "Political Risks: On Derrida's Notion of Differance," Research
in Phenomenology 21 (1991): 88.
5. Lawlor, Imagination and Chance, p. 93.
6. Ibid., p. 96.
7. Ibid., p. 102.
8. Ibid., p. 25. See also p. 46.
9. Jacques Derrida, "Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on Husserls
Theory of Signs, trans. D. B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), p. 88. Page numbers given with the abbreviation SP in the text refer
to this edition.
10. Jacques Derrida, Le probleme de fa genese dans fa philosophie de Husserl
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p. 179. Page numbers given with
the abbreviation PG in the text refer to this edition.
II. This was the title of Derrida's seminar at the Ecole Normal Superieure in
1969-70 .
12. In the Avertissement to Le prob/eme de fa genese, written almost 30 years af-
366 Notes to Chapter 12
ter the book itself to preface its long-delayed publication, Derrida claims that "to
distance [himself] from either phenomenology or dialectics has never been
for ... [him] without remorse" (PG, p. vii). Undoubtedly this means that the
break is not only with phenomenology properly speaking but with the kind of
philosophy with which he had hoped, at the time, to be able to solve Husserl's
dilemmas. It also implies quite powerfully that a reading bent on exiting from
the text of phenomenology is not simply a breaking with it.
13. Rudolf Bernet, "Derrida et la Voix de son Maitre," Revue Philosophique de
la France et de l'Etranger, special issue on Derrida, 2 (1990): 166.
14· Ibid., p. 159.
15. From everything laid out, it should be obvious that representation in all
senses of the word is not a "negative" value for Derrida. Even though infinite re-
peatability in the form of representation and its modifications destroys the possi-
bility of pure expressivity in simple self-identity, it is the finite condition for the
upsurge of the primordial impression, as well as for its "ever renewed upsurge and
virginity" (SP, pp. 65-66). Representation is neither discredited in the name, for
instance, of immediacy, nor valorized as a reason for simply relinquishing all
claims at originarity, primordiality, or self-identical presence. In his opening ad-
dress to the eighteenth meeting of the French-speaking philosophical societies
in Strasbourg, France, in 1980, entitled "Sending: On Representation," Derrida
makes this point once again quite forcefully. After acknowledging that the con-
cept of representation has been attacked from many places, and that representa-
tion is often considered bad, he holds that determining language, for example, as
representation, is not something that "came about one day and of which we could
rid ourselves by a decision when the time comes." On the contrary, he continues,
"the authority of representation constrains us, imposing itself on our thought
through a whole dense, enigmatic, and heavily stratified history. It programs us
and precedes us and warns us too severely for us to make a mere object of it, a
representation, an object of representation confronting us, before us like a theme"
(Social Research 49, no. 2 [Summer 1982): 304). As Derrida shows in this talk, the
attacks on representation are intimately linked to the dominant status that repre-
sentation has achieved in modernity, where "everything which becomes present,
everything which happens or presents itself is apprehended within the form of
representation. The experience of what-is becomes essentially representation.
Representation becomes the most general category to determine the apprehension
of whatever it is that is of concern or interest in any relation at all" (p. 310, trans.
slightly modified). Indeed, since with modernity the category of representation
serves to articulate "all the modifications of the subject in its relationship with an
object," the "great question" for this epoch becomes necessarily one regarding
"the value of representation, of its truth or its adequacy to what it represents"
Notes to Chapter I3 367
(ibid.). The criticism of representation and even blunt opposition to it, as can be
found, respectively, in Hegel and Nietzsche, are called forth by the category of
representation itself. In addition, such criticism and opposition are carried out
with the help and within the system of representation, that is, in the name "of
immediacy, of original simplicity, of presence without repetition or delegation." A
deconstruction of representation, Derrida adds, must thus differ from criticism
of representation that combines with "the worst regressions" (p. 3Il). A decon-
struction cannot consist in an attempt to overcome representation. First, because
all the concepts by means of which one would seek to get beyond it are "essen-
tially marked by the structure and the closure of representation" (p. 304). Second,
because "representation" might not have a unifYing semantic meaning that would
allow it to be confronted and overcome as such. If"Sending: On Representation"
does, indeed, attempt to deconstruct representation, it does so precisely by es-
tablishing the linguistic (i.e., idiomatic) as well as the lexical and nominal limits
that prohibit the constitution of a semantic unity of the word or concept in ques-
tion. On one hand, in Speech and Phenomena Derrida seeks to draw our, via
Husserl's distinctions concerning presentation and re-presentation, a representa-
tive structure that accounts for the possibility (and eventual purity-limits) of
these distinct differences On the other hand, the 1980 Strasbourg address in-
quires into the singularizing differences resulting from the historical develop-
ments of the notion of representation, its Latino-Germanic translation (such as
the relation between repraesentatio and Wlrstellung and Darstellung), and the mul-
tiple and irreducible uses within one idiom of the word "representation" and all
its modifications. In the 1980 address, Derrida, more attentive than ever to the
differences between the uses and the concepts of representation, hopes to estab-
lish the necessary and nonsuppressible reference (renvoi) to other idioms that re-
stricts knowing what representation is within the limits of one single idiom.
CHAPTER 13
I. Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Ho/derLin, HegeL, Heidegger
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). All page references in the
text of this chapter are to this edition.
2. Jacques Derrida, Of GrammatoLogy, trans. C. C. Spivak (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 200.
3. Pierre Aubenque, Le probLeme de i'hre chez Aristote (Paris: P. U. F., 1966),
PP·46o -7 2 .
4. Wolfgang Iser, The Act ofReading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1980), pp. 130-31.
5. Philippe Lacoue-Labarrhe, TJpography, trans. C. Fynsk (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 235.
368 Notes to Chapter 13
fore, distinguished by repose, happiness, fullness, and so on. Although the syn-
thesizing power of chiastic reversal in reverie is not put into question by
Bachelard-to the contrary, he forcefully emphasizes it-the unbreached totali-
ties it engenders are, for him, always concrete, particular, and finite openings.
But as in Merleau-Ponty, in Bachelard this finitude does not impinge on the gen-
erality of these openings toward the world. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of
Reverie, trans. D. Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
31. Jacques Derrida, "The Law of the Genre," trans. A. Ronell, in Glyph 7
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. z19.
32. On several occasions, let us also note, Derrida has pointed to the fact that
the logic that rules philosophy's desire to achieve closure and continuity resem-
bles the "sophistry" of the borrowed kettle Freud refers to in Interpretation of
Dreams and in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. But does the contra-
dictory coherence designated by the "sophistry" in question not represent a kind
of perversion of chiastic totalization and, thus, a "symptom" of the impossibility
of philosophy's ever achieving its goal? Since deconstruction must be understood
as the attempt to account for philosophy's contradictory coherence, its critical re-
lation to chiasm as a device productive of philosophical continuity may well be
much broader and more essential than we have outlined here.
33. For a discussion of chiasm in Heidegger, see Fran~is Mattei, La mlta-
a
physique fa limite (Paris: P.U.F., 1983), pp. 49-162.
34. "The essence of a riddle consists in describing a fact by an impossible
combination of words" (Aristotle, Poetics, trans. W. H. Fyfe [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1927], 1458a 24-30). Let us recall here that the riddle
called either ainigma or griphos in Greek takes its name from a specific kind of
fishnet. Indeed, the riddle is braided in the same way as a fishnet, that is, through
intertwinement of opposite terms. See Konrad Ohlert, Rotsel und Gesellschafts-
spiele der alten Griechen (Berlin: Mayer and Miller, 1886).
35. De Man, Allegories ofReading, p. 49.
CHAPTER 14
1. J lirgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufiiitze
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 242-44; translations from this edi-
tion are mine. For a more detailed discussion of Habermas's contention that de-
construction conflates rhetoric and logic, see my Inventions of Difference: On
Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 109-15.
2. Habermas, p. 247. 3. Ibid., p. 260.
4· Ibid., p. 247· 5. Ibid., p. 255·
6. This is not the place for a detailed critique of Habermas's reductive pre-
sentation of Derrida's thought. One hint about how and where such a critical de-
370 Notes to Chapter 14
bate ought to take place must suffice here. Habermas contends that "Derrida
works on Husser! and Saussure not differently than on Artaud" (p. 243). Since
The Origin of Geometry, Derrida has been working in light of the difference be-
tween the literary and the philosophical text. When confronting Husserl's and
Joyce's enterprises, Derrida makes the point in The Origin of Geometry that
Joyce's generalization and totalization of all equivocalities is not possible without
universal univocality in the Husserlian sense. When confronting Genet and
Hegel, Derrida asserts in Glas that the singular literary work of Genet presup-
poses, as a condition of its uniqueness, a minimal kind of universally shareable
intelligibility (under the form of the gl) that makes it partake, in spite of all its
difference, in Hegel's attempt to determine the intelligibility of the entirety of all
conceivable Others to the system. In Derrida's writings on Artaud, Ponge, or
Kafka, one finds a similar respect for the difference between discourses, but such
respect does not exclude an investigation into the condition that underwrites
such difference.
7. An Other must always be invented for something to be, but by the same
token, such inevitable invention also means that no being can ever be taken for
granted, for being what it is.
8. As Derrida's reference in the essay "Before the Law" to Heidegger's talk of
Being as the "transcendent" demonstrates, his concern is not limited to question-
ing the Kantian concept of transcendence and transcendental conditions of pos-
sibility. .Jacques Derrlda, Acts ofLitn-ature, ed. D. Attridge (New York: Routledge,
1992), p. 106. All page references in the text of this chapter are to this edition.
9. The virtual inscription of the Other in the pure law can also manifest it-
self through a certain theatricality of the law. In "Plato's Pharmacy" (in Jacques
Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981)), for instance, Derrida shows to what extent Plato's philosophical
discourse on truth is inevitably linked to a theatrical play, a family scene about
legitimate descent and bastardy. Since the possibility of presentation and singu-
larization is inscribed in the philosophical notion of an intelligibility free from
all sensibility, the trace of the philosophical discourse's other within itself affects
the intelligibility and purity it aspires to, and thus solicits a rethinking of the
concepts themselves.
10. An extended version of "Before the Law" was presented by Derrida as a
lecture in 1982 at a colloquium in Cerisy (Normandy) on the work of Jean-
Frant;:ois Lyotard. The title of the lecture then was "Prejuges: Devant la loi" (Pre-
judgments: Before the law). It was published in Jacques Derrida et aI., La Jaculte
de Juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 87-139.
II. In The Other Heading, Derrida writes: "Whatever the answer may be, the
question remains. I would even say this is necessary: it should remain, even be-
yond all answers." Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Eu-
Notes to Chapter IS 37I
rope, trans. P'-A. Brault and M. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
I992), pp. 16-17.
12. Habermas, p. 45. After giving his definition of "the abyss of irrationality"
(pp. 159-60), Habermas avers that irrationality characterizes not only Heideg-
ger's "mystical thought of Being," Wittgenstein's "therapeutical treatment oflan-
guage," Derrida's "deconstructive activity," and Adorno's "negative dialectic" but
many others as well.
13. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 54.
14. For a more refined understanding of why the possibility of the Other,
with respect to which an identity is the identity that it is, necessarily inhabits this
identity, see the various analyses that Derrida has devoted to the notion of the
trait, particularly in Jacques Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor," trans. F. Gasd-
ner et aI., Enclitic 2, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 6-33-
15. The reasons for this futural dimension of literature and philosophy are
structural, and not because these disciplines would be ideals to be infinitely ap-
proximated. Hence, there is nothing romantic about the temporality of a venir.
CHAPTER 15
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 302. All page references in the text of this
chapter are to this edition.
2. Roger Laporte, Etudes (Paris: P.O.L., 1990), p. 23.
3. The concepts borrowed from Hegel do not simply project their dialectical
power upon Blanchot's developments; they also suffer a significant mutation
within Blanchot's text, thus exhibiting possibilities that Hegel might not have ac-
counted fot. Let me also refer here to Andrzej Warminski's Readings in Interpre-
tation: Hoiderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), where he argues that Blanchot, in his readings of Hegel in the 1940s,
rewrites Hegel's concepts, "in particular, the concepts of the negative and death)
in another place, to the side" (p. 185).
4. Maurice B1anchot, The Space ofLiterature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 109.
5. To substantiate this point, a careful parallel reading of Blanchot's essay and
Hegel's Phenomenology would of course be required. Such a comparison would
have to determine the exact points of Blanchot's departure from Hegel. Here let
me only note that there is never anything marvelous about a dialectical inversion.
It occurs with necessity, in all logical rigor.
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1977), pp. 240-41.
372 Notes to Chapter 15
7. In his analysis of how consciousness deceives itself and others, Hegel dis-
tinguishes different ways in which things happen to it independently of its own
making, but which consciousness claims nonetheless for itself. Hegel writes, "an
event of historical importance [Weltbegebenheitl which does not really concern
him, he makes ... his own; and an interest for which he has done nothing is, in
his own eyes, a party interest which he has favoured or opposed, and even com-
bated or supported." Ibid., p. 248.
8. See also Blanchot, Work ofFire, p. 80.
9. The writer is a stoic ifhe endures his condition, a condition that, however,
allows him to acquire not personal but universal freedom. He is a skeptic, or ni-
hilist, as Blanchot also calls him, if "he negates everything at once, and he is
obliged to negate everything, since he deals only with everything." Finally, he is
an unhappy consciousness "since he is a writer only by virtue of his fragmented
consciousness divided into irreconcilable moments." Work ofFire, p. 318.
IO. To suspect that Blanchot's discussion of revolutionary terror refers
covertly to his own association with right-wing movements in prewar France and
that it is a late attempt to come to grips with it misreads completely the status of
the fourth temptation. Blanchot takes up the theme of terror for the same rea-
son that he has discussed the three temptations of stoicism, skepticism, and un-
happy con.sciowness and the dialectic between talent and work, work and indi-
vidual, namely. because he borrows his themes from Hegel's Phenomenology,
following at rimes even the latter's order of exposition. Ifindeed the theme of ter-
ror enjoys a special privilege over all the other themes, this is not because it
stands in for a personal past of guilt but because, deriving from the conflicts pre-
viously discussed, it becomes the place par excellence for exemplifying all the
paradoxes that make up literature and literary activity. Moreover, the theme of
revolutionary terror in question concerns terror in the name of freedom, not the
terror of the far Right. To take this discussion as an implicit acknowledgment by
Blanchot of his own political past is not only to give in to arbitrary association
but also to spell out a whole "philosophy" of the literary text. Whatever the crit-
ical methods are, including the seemingly progressive ones of structuralism, by
means of which associations of this kind are made, the literary text is reduced to
the expression of, in this case, a shameful experience. A literary criticism thus
limited to hunting down in the literary text the signs of scandalous political in-
volvement is indeed nothing but a pretext for a return to an autobiographical
and anecdotal understanding of literature. Apart from foreclosing all reflection
on how the "universally" valid medium of literature relates to empirical (and in
particular to private, secret, hidden) factuality, such an approach trivializes his-
tory by reducing its constituting agents or forces, its course, and its disasters to
the simple effects of individual actions. A commonsense or, rather, vulgar con-
Notes to Chapter I5 373
ception of work, writer, and history presides over such an approach. This is, of
course, not to disqualify all sociopolitical contextualization of the text, nor even
to deny encrypted within it a reference to a secret. Such analyses, however, re-
quire that the text be first recognized as text.
II. In 1941, Jean Paulhan, in Les fleurs de Tarbes, ou La Terreur dans les lettres,
compared the violently antirhetorical and subjectivist literary criticism that be-
gins with Sainte-Beuve, and that finds in Henri Bergson its metaphysical legit-
imization, to the Terror during the French Revolution. This criticism is bent on
reading literature as coinciding with the spirit of the creator, oblivious to the fact
that literature requires rhetorical skills, in other words, that it is made of words.
The first victims of the French Terror, as Paulhan argues, were also those distin-
guished by their talents. See Jean Paulhan, Les fleurs de Tarbes, ou La Terreur dans
les fettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 61-77. Blanchot's designation ofliterature
as the "Reign of the Terror" refers, of course, to this work by Jean Paulhan.
12. It has been remarked with barely restrained indignation that in "Litera-
ture and the Right to Death," Blanchot's main example illustrating the destruc-
tive power of language is that of a woman: "For me to be able to say, 'This
woman,' I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause
her to be absent, annihilate her" (Work ofFire, p. 322). The choice of the exam-
ple is not fonuitous, of course. In question are indeed the linguistic and onto-
logical conditions under which a thing in general, an animal (the cat), and a hu-
man being can become an Other to begin with. To elaborate on how something
can become an Other is also to inquire into the conditions of possibility of rela-
tion, communication, exchange. It would seem that this can be done most
poignantly by taking "woman" as the example.
13. Frans:oise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'ecriture (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1971), p. 92.
14. Henri Meschonnic, in a essay entitled "Maurice Blanchot ou I'ecriture
hors langage" (Les Cahiers du Chemin 20 [1974]: 79-II6), has taken Blanchot to
task for his linkage of language, as a medium of ideality and universality, to de-
struction, negation, and death. Meschonnic, who opposes a scientific, or semi-
otico-semantic, interpretation oflanguage to what he deems to be a "mythology
of langage" (p. 90) whose dualism reveals its metaphysical postulates (p. 95), pri-
marily objects to Blanchot's privileging of the word as characteristic of language
as a whole. No doubt, in "Literature and the Right to Death," Blanchot ap-
proaches language (and its idealizing function) primarily from the name. But the
name is, for B1anchot, clearly and first of all a word. Where language becomes
conceived in its materiality, the "name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of
nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence" (Blanchot,
Work of Fire, p. 327). Here the name is shown to regress to the word. It is the
374 Notes to Chapter 15
words that for Blanchot make up language, and the word is not thought from the
name. "The meaning for the meaning of words," which can be that of either ma-
teriality or negativity, springs from "an ambiguous indeterminacy that wavers be-
tween yes and no," and which as the end of the essay demonstrates is that of
death (p. 343). Moreover, in his analysis of the word, he draws on a variety of im-
plications that come with the traditional concept of the word itself, and that
thoroughly displace its metaphysical status, as well as its potential for giving rise
to what Meschonnic terms a "mysticism of lost unity and of the end to come"
(p. IOO). As an example of such emphasis on potentially dislocating traits of the
word, I quote the following from Blanchot's essay: "Take the trouble to listen to
a single word: in that word, nothingness is struggling and toiling away, it digs
tirelessly, doing its utmost to find a way out, nullifYing what encloses it-it is in-
finite disquiet, formless and nameless [sans nom] vigilance" (p. 326).
Index
Absolute, the, 6, 8-9, 12, 75, 81 138-39, 203, 214, 218-19, 225, 229-
accordance (Obereinstimmung), n6, 30, 237-38, 240-41, 26 5-66, 357n9,
123, 125-n6, 135-136, 358n 5, 358n7, 363m3, 365n30; as event, 148; as
359 n 9 Gestalt, 40-42; and man (Dasein),
Adorno, Theodor, I02, 371m2 196-204; meaning of, 362n6, 365n34;
aesthetics, 83, 84, 96; of shock, 96, I02 as presencing (Anwesen), 214-16;
Alain, 154 question of, III, II8, 223-26, 230,
"always already,» 264-267 237-38, 240-41, 363nI3, 365n34;
Apollo, 23, 49; Sauroktoros, 20 thinking of, 154, 214
Aquinas, Thomas, 3, 363nr2 Benjamin, Andrew, 356nr6
Aristotle, 1-2, 4, 6-7, 18, 47-48, 92, Benjamin, Walter, 12, 61-I02, 243,
154,159,161, 170, 233, 266-67, 273, 353 nr 9, 353 nr , 354n3, 355n 5, 355nro,
280, 359n5, 363nl2 356mo, 356m8
Artaud, Antonin, 370n6 Benveniste, Emile, 228
Assad, Maria, 364nr8 Bergson, Henri, 373nn
Atget, Jean Eugene Auguste, 91-92 Bernet, Rudolf, 249, 256
Aubenque, Pierre, 266, 363nr2 Birault, Henri, n8, 363n7
Augustine, Saint, 42 Blanchot, Maurice, 12, 173, 189, 276,
aura, 84-I02, 353nI, 354n3, 355nIO, 295, 309-43, 371n3, 371n5, 372n9,
356nr6 37 2nro , 373 ml- 12, 373 m 4
autobiography, 39, 42-45, 58 Blumenberg, Hans, 36rnn
body, 17-21, 23-24, 26-32, 36-38
Bachelard, Gaston, 18, 368n30 Brandes, Georg, 350nI6
Bakunin, Mikhail, 157 Brentano, Franz, 363nI2
Bassett, Samuel E., 272 Buck-Morss, Susan, 81, 84
Baudelaire, Charles, 69 Burger, Peter, 354n3, 356ml
Being, 40, 43-44, 46, 112, 134-36, Byron, George Gordon, 38
376 Index
79, 146, 164, 166, 202, 230, 232-34, re-presentation, originary, 252-59
273, 37 0n 9 representative structure, 256-58, 367nI5
Polyclitus, 142 rhythm, 2[9, 228-3[
Ponge, Francis, 335, 370n6 Ricoeur, Paul, 244
possible, the, 17°-71 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 197, 212-13
possibility, 188-89, 253, 277, 29[, Rorty, Richard, 4, 347n8
297-9 8, 30I, 30 7, 320, 327, 337-38, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20, 43
34[-43; condition of, 66-67, 152, 17[, Russell, Bertrand, I
Socrates, 32, 37, 49, 54, 35In20 357n2, 370n9; as accordance, 1I6-17,
Stein, Heinrich von, 23, 55 122-35, 139, 202, 359n9; as aletheia,
Stimme (voice), 1I7-21 41, 133, 136, 139, 217, 225; as occur-
Stimmung (state of mind, mood, dispo- rence, 131; phenomenological, 253,
sition), IIO, II4-21, 139-40 259
type (Typus), 23-24, 31-32, 36-38, 40,
technology, 156, 164-66 43,52-54,58,349n8
text, 69, 226-27, 230-41, 243-44,
269-71, 274, 277-78, 286, 296, undecidability, 203, 217, 230-31, 233-
304-5, 363n1 3, 364nl7 34, 270, 284
things, minimal, 3-6, 10-12 un-truth, 134, 138, 293
thinking: conjectural, 182-83, 185,
189-90; as a listening, 178-79, 186, Valery, Paul, 317
190-91; literary, 312-13; philosophi- Voltaire (Franc;ois-Marie Arouct), 33
cal, 143-45, 148-50, 153, 165, 167-70,
179, 181, 190-91; and poetry (Dich- Wagner, Richard, 33-38, 55
tung), 181-83, 188, 213-15, 301-3; as Warminski, Andnej, 263-64, 267-71,
questioning, 178-79. 183, 190-91; 280-84, 37m 3
systematic, 163. 167 Welch, John W, 272
time. ~. 51, 53-54. 93 Whitehead, Alfred North, 1
trait, 212, 217, 221-25, 229-30, 240, Witte, Bernd, 61-62
342, 371nI4; fundamental, 217-18; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 371m2
as retrait, 218-19, 221-22, 225, 230, Wolff, Christian, 107
238,36201 Wolin, Richard, 65
Tran Duc Thao, 248
translatability, 66, 68-80 Zeno, 280
translation, 35, 66, 68-78 Zeus, 49
truth, 43, 64, 73, 75-77, 79, 82, 148, Ziarek, Knysztof, 36Inl5
230, 233, 257, 278 293, 297, 336-37, Zohn, Harry, 87, 353m2
Cultural Memory in the Present