No More Learning

. . It is almost inevitable that the breaking up of an establishment should cause some confusion in the house, and that various things should be mislaid. But so honest were the servants and so vigilant were M. and Mme Lorenzi that nothing was found missing when the inventory was taken. Only Mlle Pontal lost a little pink and silver-colored ribbon, which was quite old [un petit ruban de couleur de rose et argent de? ja` vieux]. (86)
These two little words "quite old," "de? ja` vieux," are also omitted by de Man, I don't know why, in his quotation of this phrase, which he extracts therefore from its context and without having cited the pre- ceding paragraph that I would call testamentary. No doubt the in- ventory in the course of which the disappearance of the ribbon was remarked is not the moment of the inheritance itself, but it is some- thing like its inseparable continuation; and Mlle Portal, who "lost" (per- dit) the "little ribbon," had received six hundred livres in inheritance,
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twenty times more than all the servants who had each received, in ad- dition, individual legacies. Rousseau inherited nothing and he com- plains about it. These scenes of inheritance and inventory, which de Man does not evoke, are not the scenes that Rousseau describes before recounting the death of Mme de Vercellis, in a passage where it is al- ready a question of legacies (the entourage of Mme de Vercellis, al- ready thinking about the legacy, had done everything to get Rousseau out of the way and "banish [him] from her sight," as he puts it). No doubt it is to this paragraph preceding the account that de Man refers in the note that had surprised me somewhat ("The embarrassing story of Rousseau's rejection by Mme de Vercellis, who is dying of a cancer of the breast, immediately precedes the story of Marion, but nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme. de Vercellis in a scene of rejection"). It is this sub- stitution that de Man curiously does not believe should be credited. Curiously because, inversely, his whole text will put to work in a deci- sive fashion a logic of substitution. In a later passage, which is not, it is true, his last word on the subject, he talks abundantly of a substitution between Rousseau and Marion and even of "two levels of substitution (or displacement) taking place: the ribbon substituting for a desire which is itself a desire for substitution" (284). Summing up the facts, he writes: "The episode itself is one in a series of stories of petty larce- ny, but with an added twist. While employed as a servant in an aristo- cratic Turin household, Rousseau has stolen a 'pink and silver-colored ribbon'" (279).
Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating it or dismembering it in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion? Why does he amputate two of its own little words before the period: "quite old," "de? ja` vieux"? I have no answer to this question. I say mutilation, am- putation, or dismemberment, or even arbitrary cut to qualify the opera- tion by which a phrase is thus deprived of two of its little words and interrupted in its organic syntax. I do so both because, first of all, that's the way it is, no doubt, and the phenomenon is as strange as it is re- markable (it is indeed an apparently arbitrary amputation and dissocia- tion),14 but also because the general interpretation by de Man of the "textual event" in question will put to work, in a determinant fashion, these motifs (mutilation and dismemberment) as well as the operation of a machinery, as we will see. Moreover, and so as to anticipate things at a somewhat greater distance, among the significations that will later structure the de Manian concept of materiality or material inscription--
although the words matter and especially materialism never occur in "Excuses (Confessions)," a certain lodging seems to be made ready for the welcome de Man will extend to them later)--one finds once again, besides the significations of mute literality and body, those of disconti- nuity, caesura, division, mutilation, and dismemberment or, as de Man often says here, dissemination. Whether one is talking about the body in general, the body proper, or, as in the example of Kleist's Marionetten- theater read by de Man, of the linguistic body of phrases and words in syllables and letters (for example, from Fall as case or fall to Falle as trap),15 these figures of dismemberment, fragmentation, mutilation, and "material disarticulation" play an essential role in a certain "ma- terialist" signature (I leave the word materialist in quotation marks) that insists in the last texts of de Man. How does the concept of ma- teriality or the associated concept of "materialism" get elaborated in the later texts ("Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" and "Kant's Materialism," both in Aesthetic Ideology)? This is a question we can keep in view in the interpretation of Rousseau. We can also keep in view a certain concept of history, of the historicity of history, so as to trace its intersection with this logic of the textual event as material in- scription. When it is a matter of this structure of the text, the concept of historicity will no longer be regulated by the scheme of progression or of regression, thus by a scheme of teleological process, but rather by that of the event, or occurrence, thus by the singularity of the "one time only. " This value of occurrence links historicity not to time, as is usually thought, nor to the temporal process but, according to de Man, to power, to the language of power, and to language as power. Hence the necessity to take into account performativity, which defines pre- cisely the power of language and power as language, the excess of the language of power or of the power of language over constative or cog- nitive language. In "Kant and Schiller" (a lecture delivered at Cornell the year of his death, in 1983, and collected in Aesthetic Ideology on the basis of audiotapes), de Man speaks of thinking history as event and not as process, progress, or regression. He then adds:
There is history from the moment that words such as "power" and "battle" and so on emerge on the scene. At that moment things happen, there is occurrence, there is event. History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality [this hyperbolic provo- cation, in the style of de Man, certainly does not negate all temporality of history; it merely recalls that time, temporal unfolding, is not the
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essential predicate of the concept of history: time is not enough to make history], but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a lan- guage of cognition. (133)
De Man distinguishes the eventness of events from a dialectical pro- cess or from any continuum accessible to a process of knowledge, such as the Hegelian dialectic. No doubt he would have said the same thing of the Marxist dialectic, I presume, if at least the heritage and the thought of Marx could be reduced to that of the dialectic. He also specifies that the performative (the language of power beyond the lan- guage of knowledge) is not the negation of the tropological but re- mains separated from the tropological by a discontinuity that tolerates no mediation and no temporal scheme. It remains the case that the per- formative, however foreign and excessive it may be in relation to the cognitive, can always be reinscribed, recuperated is de Man's word, in a cognitive system. This discontinuity, this event as discontinuity, is im- portant for us if only because it will allow us to go beyond the excuse and come closer to the event of forgiveness, which always supposes irreversible interruption, revolutionary caesura, or even the end of his- tory, at least of history as teleological process. Moreover, one may note with equal interest that, in the same text ("Kant and Schiller"), de Man constructs his concept of event, of history as the eventness of events rather than as temporal process, on the basis of two determinations that are equally important for us: that of irreversibility (forgiveness and excuse suppose precisely that what has happened is irreversible) and that of inscription or material trace:
When I speak of irreversibility, and insist on irreversibility, this is be- cause in all those texts and those juxtapositions of texts, we have been aware of something which one could call a progression--though it shouldn't be--a movement, from cognition, from acts of knowledge, from states of cognition, to something which is no longer a cognition but which is to some extent an occurrence, which has the materiality of something that actually happens, that actually occurs. And there, the thought of material occurrence, something that occurs materially, that leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such-- that notion of occurrence is not opposed in any sense to the notion of writing. But it is opposed to some extent to the notion of cognition. I'm reminded of a quotation in Ho? lderlin--if you don't quote Pascal you can always quote Ho? lderlin, that's about equally useful--which says: "Lang ist die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber das Wahre. " Long is time, but--
not truth, not Wahrheit, but das Wahre, that which is true, will occur, will take place, will eventually take place, will eventually occur. And the characteristic of truth is the fact that it occurs, not the truth, but that which is true. The occurrence is true because it occurs; by the fact that it occurs it has truth, truth value, it is true. (132)
Why did de Man forget, omit, or efface those two words ("quite old," "de? ja` vieux") that qualify also a certain materiality of the enig- matic thing called a ribbon? Was it to save space, as one sometimes does by not citing a text integrally, by omitting passages that are less pertinent for the demonstration under way? Perhaps, but it is difficult to justify doing so for two little words ("quite old") that come just after the words quoted and before the final period. I recall the sentence and underscore certain words: "La seule Mlle Portal perdit un petit ruban couleur de rose et argent de? ja` vieux" ("Only Mlle Portal lost a little pink and silver-colored ribbon, which was quite old"). I under- score in passing that Rousseau says of this ribbon that she "lost it," "le perdit. " On the preceding page, it was said of Mme de Vercellis: "Nous la perdi^mes enfin. Je la vis expirer" ("Finally we lost her. I watched her die").
Might there be a relation of substitution between these two losses signified by the same verb in the same tense, the passe? simple or his- toric past that says--but what does it thereby say and mean to say? -- nous la perdi^mes, elle perdit? I would not swear to such a relation of substitution, but we'll leave it at that.
Excluding a concern for economy and the possibly inconsequential abbreviation of two little words, can one speak of a pure and simple omission by mechanical distraction? If one supposes that such a thing exists, it is all the more puzzling why it would have struck these two words from which de Man, instead of letting them drop, could have drawn an argument or with which he could have reinforced his own argument. To lend coherence to his hypothesis of substitution (between Rousseau and Marion, the desire of Rousseau and Marion, desire and the desire of substitution), the ribbon had itself to be a "free signifier," a simple exchange value without use value. Moreover, if indeed theft is a sin, then no one ever steals anything but exchange values, not use values. If I steal in order to eat, my theft is not really a crime, an evil for the sake of evil. In order to speak of misdeed, the profit must not be located in the usefulness of the fault, the crime, the theft, or the lie, but in a certain uselessness. One has to have loved the crime for itself, for
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the shame that it procures, and that supposes some "beyond-use" of the immediate or apparent object of the fault. But, in relation to imme- diate use, the beyond-use does not mean absolute insignificance and uselessness. Augustine and Rousseau understood that very well. They both emphasize that they stole something for which they had no need and no use. And, moreover, a little further on (and this explains my astonishment), de Man does make allusion to the fact that the rib- bon must be beyond use, "devoid," as he puts it, "of meaning and function," in order to play the role it plays. In the first stage of his analysis, at the level he himself calls elementary, when he is describing one of the ways the text functions (among others, which he will exhib- it later), de Man specifies forcefully that the desire for gift and posses- sion, the movement of representation, exchange, and substitution of the ribbon supposes that it not be, I would say, a "use value" but an exchange value, or even, I would say again (but this is not de Man's term), already a fetish, an exchange value whose body is fetishizable; one never steals the thing itself, which, moreover, never presents itself. Let us read:
Once it is removed from its legitimate owner, the ribbon, being in itself devoid of meaning and function, can circulate symbolically as a pure signifier and become the articulating hinge in a chain of exchanges and possessions. As the ribbon changes hands it traces a circuit leading to the exposure of a hidden, censored desire. Rousseau identifies the desire as his desire for Marion: "it was my intention to give her the ribbon," i. e. , to "possess" her. At this point in the reading suggested by Rousseau, the proper meaning of the trope is clear enough: the ribbon "stands for" Rousseau's desire for Marion or, what amounts to the same thing, for Marion herself.
Or, rather, it stands for the free circulation of the desire between Rousseau and Marion, for the reciprocity which, as we know from Julie, is for Rousseau the very condition of love; it stands for the substi- tutability of Rousseau for Marion and vice versa. Rousseau desires Marion as Marion desires Rousseau. . . . The system works: "I accused Marion of having done what I wanted to do and of having given me the ribbon because it was my intention to give it to her. " The substitutions have taken place without destroying the cohesion of the system, reflect- ed in the balanced syntax of the sentence and now understandable ex- actly as we comprehend the ribbon to signify desire. Specular figures of this kind are metaphors and it should be noted that on this still elemen-
tary level of understanding, the introduction of the figural dimension in the text occurs first by ways of metaphor. (283-84)
Now think of the word ribbon, but also of this figure of a narrow band of silk, velvet, or satin, which one wears on one's head, in one's hair, or like a necklace around the neck. The uncertain origin of the word ribbon probably links the motifs of the ring, thus the circular link, the annular, or even the wedding band, and band, namely, once again the link, as bind or Bund (in Middle Dutch the word, it seems, is ringhband). The ribbon thus seems to be, in itself, doubly enribboned, ring and band, twice knotted, banded, or banding, bande? or bandant, as I might say in French. A ribbon perhaps figures therefore the double bind en soie, in itself, its own silky self. 16 By thus renaming the ribbon of the Confessions, I've been led to associate, without doing it on pur- pose, without expecting it but no doubt not fortuitously, Marion's rib- bon with the typewriter ribbon. De Man has little interest in the mate- rial of the ribbon, as we have just seen, for he takes the thing "ribbon" to be a "free signifier. " But he is also not interested in the verbal signi- fier or the word ribbon. Yet this lost piece of finery from the eighteenth century, the ribbon that Mlle Portal "lost" after we "lost" Mme de Vercellis, was also, once stolen and passed from hand to hand, a formi- dable writing machine, a ribbon of ink along which so many signs transited so irresistibly, a skin on which or under which so many words will have been printed, a phantasmatic body through which waves of ink will have been made to flow. An affluence or confluence of limited ink, to be sure, because a typewriter ribbon, like a computer printer, has only a finite reserve of coloring substance. The material potenti- ality of this ink remains modest, that is true, but it capitalizes, virtually, for the sooner or later, an impressive quantity of text: not only a great flux of liquid, good for writing, but a growing flux at the rhythm of a capital--on a day when speculation goes crazy in the capitals of the stock markets. And when one makes ink flow, figuratively or not, one can also figure that one causes to flow or lets flow all that which, by spilling itself this way, can invade or fertilize some cloth or tissue. Poor Marion's ribbon (which Mlle Portal, who lost it, will not have worn up till the end) will have supplied the body and the tissue and the ink and the surface of an immense bibliography. A virtual library. I would have been tempted, but I will not have the time, to sketch other itineraries apropos of this ink flow: for example, to pass from the figural ink of this ink ribbon across a text of Austin's that I treated elsewhere, precisely
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in Limited Inc (and it is also a text on excuse and responsibility, an analysis that is, moreover, complementary with "A Plea for Excuses"). Austin analyzes there the possibilities of a bad thing one does inten- tionally or unintentionally, deliberately or by accident, by inadvertence (which one can always claim in order to excuse oneself), and so forth. This text is titled "Three Ways of Spilling Ink," by reason of the a`-propos of a first example: a child spills some ink and the schoolmaster asks him "Did you do that intentionally? " or "Did you do that deliberate- ly? " or "Did you do that on purpose (purposely)? "17
This ribbon will have been more or less than a subject. It was al- ready at the origin a material support, at once a subjectile on which one writes and the piece of a machine thanks to which one will never have done with inscribing: discourse upon discourse, exegesis on top of exegesis, beginning with those of Rousseau. In the universal doxa, this typewriter ribbon has become by substitution the ribbon of "poor Marion" whose property it never was and to whom it was therefore never given or returned. Imagine what she might have thought if some- one had told her what was going to happen sooner or later to her ghost, that is to say, to her name and in her name over centuries, thanks to Rousseau or by "Rousseau's fault," on the basis of the act to which she was perhaps one day (will one ever know? could one know it without the archive of the violent writing machine? ) barely the wit- ness, an act of which she was only the poor victim who understands nothing of what is happening, the innocent girl who is perhaps as vir- ginal as Mary. For, with or without annunciation, she will have been fertilized with ink through the ribbon of a terrible and tireless writing machine that is now relayed, in this floating sea of characters, by the apparently liquid element of computer screens and from time to time by ink cartridges for an Apple printer, just the thing to recall the for- bidden fruit and the apples stolen by the young Jean-Jacques. Almost everything here will have passed by way of a written confession, with- out living addressee and within the writing of Rousseau, between the Confessions and the Re^veries dreaming the virtual history of their "sooner or later. "
As piece of a tireless writing machine, this ribbon gave rise--which is why I began by the event, by the event that is archivable as much as it is archiving--to what de Man twice calls, at the beginning and the end of his text, a "textual event. " The second time it is in order to rec- ognize there, as you heard, a dissemination of the textual event called anacoluthon; the first time it is to recall that this event has already the
structure of a repetitive substitution, a repetition of the confession in the confession.
Among all the remarkable merits of de Man's great reading, there is first of all this reckoning with the works of Austin. I say purposely, and vaguely, the "works" of Austin because one value of these works is to have not only resisted but marked the line of resistance to the systematic work, to philosophy as formalizing theorization, absolute and closed, freed of its adherences to ordinary language and to so-called natural lan- guages. There is also, and this is another of de Man's merits, an elabo- ration and an original complication of Austinian concepts. De Man cites "Performative Utterances" and "A Plea for Excuses" precisely at the point at which he writes: "As is well known at least since Austin, excus- es are a complex instance of what he termed performative utterances, a variety of speech acts" (281-82). To illustrate the complexity of this "complex example," he specifies right away that "The interest of Rousseau's text is that it explicitly functions performatively as well as cognitively, and thus gives indications about the structure of performa- tive rhetoric" (282). Now, the opposition between "performative" and "cognitive" was evoked in the first lines of the chapter, which apparent- ly mark the passage from temporality to historicity, a passage that is all the more paradoxical in that it goes from a more political text, the Social Contract, to a less political one, the Confessions or the Re^veries. But it is the phenomenon of this appearance that must be analyzed. If, de Man says, "the relationship between cognition and performance is relatively easy to grasp in the case of a temporal speech act such as a promise-- which, in Rousseau's work, is the model for the Social Contract--it is more complex in the confessional mode of his autobiographies" (278).
In other words, the performative mode of the promise would be simpler than that of the confession or the excuse, notably as regards this distinction cognition/performance. In the preceding chapter, de Man had treated the promise by setting out from the Social Contract. He thus goes from the Social Contract to the Confessions and to the Re^veries, from the simpler to the more complex (where, precisely, the complexity can no longer be undone, and the distinction can no longer operate--at least as I see it, because de Man wants to maintain this dis- tinction even when it seems difficult to do so). In the preceding chap- ters on Rousseau, and in particular in the chapter on the Social Contract, one finds the premises of the chapter we are now reading on "Excuses (Confessions). " I retain at least three of these premises:
1. A concept or an operation of deconstruction: "a deconstruction
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always has for its target to reveal the existence of hidden articulations and fragmentations within assumedly monadic totalities" (249), with- in a binary system, or in "metaphorical patterns based on binary mod- els" (255). Nature becoming a "self-deconstructive term" (249), one will always be dealing with a series of deconstructions of figures.
2. A concept of "machine": a text whose grammaticality is a logi- cal code obeys a machine. No text is conceivable without grammar and no grammar (thus no machine) is conceivable without the "sus- pension of referential meaning. " In the order of the law (and this is valid for any law, it is the law of the law), this means that "Just as no law can ever be written unless one suspends any consideration of ap- plicability to a particular entity including, of course, oneself, gram- matical logic can function only if its referential consequences are dis- regarded. On the other hand, no law is a law unless it also applies to particular individuals. It cannot be left hanging in the air, in the ab- straction of its generality" (269).
3. De Man interprets this contradiction or this incompatibility (the law suspends referential application even as it requires it as verifica- tion) in a striking fashion, in particular in the passage from the Social Contract (read here from the point of view of the promise) to the Confessions or to the Re^veries (read here from the point of view of the excuse). One can overcome this contradiction or this incompatibility only by an act of deceit. This deception is a theft, a theft in language, the theft of a word, the abusive appropriation of the meaning of a word. This theft is not the appropriation of just any word whatsoever: it is the theft of the subject, more precisely of the word chacun, "each one," inasmuch as it says at once the "I," the singularity and the gener- ality of every "I. " Nothing is in fact more irreducibly singular than "I" and yet nothing is more universal, anonymous, and substitutable. This deception and this theft consist in appropriating the word chacun (to appropriate the words each one [s'approprier le mot chacun] are Rousseau's terms; deceit and theft are de Manian translations, which are at once brutal and faithful: when one appropriates, one always steals, and when one steals, one deceives, one lies, especially when one denies it). This deceit and this theft, therefore, are constitutive of jus- tice (which is both without reference and applicable, thus with a refer- ence: without and with reference). De Man is then led to say that "jus- tice is unjust," a formula that I must have retained while forgetting it, while forgetting that I stole it in this way because afterwards, and very recently, I took it up on my own account and ventured it in another
context, without making reference to de Man. The context was an in- terpretation of Levinas, of the logic of the third party and of perjury, namely, that all justice is unjust and begins in perjury. 18 Having con- fessed this involuntary theft, so as to excuse myself for it, I underscore the reference to theft in the chapter preceding the one we are con- cerned with at present on the excuse, and which thus serves as a prem- ise for it.
Here are several lines, but, to be just, one would have to reconstitute the whole context:
The preceding passage makes clear that the incompatibility between the elaboration of the law and its application (or justice) can only be bridged by an act of deceit. "S'approprier en secret ce mot chacun" is to steal from the text the very meaning to which, according to this text, we are not entitled, the particular I which destroys its generality; hence the deceitful, covert gesture "en secret," in the foolish hope that the theft will go unnoticed. Justice is unjust; no wonder that the language of justice is also the language of guilt and that, as we know from the Confessions, we never lie as much as when we want to do full justice to ourselves, especially in self-accusation. (268)
The substitution of the "I" for the "I" is also the root of perjury: I (the I) can always, by addressing myself/itself to (a) you, each one to each one, substitute the other same "I" for this here "I" and change the destination. (An) "I" can always change the address in secret at the last moment. Since every "I" is an "I" (the same and altogether other: tout autre est tout autre, every other is altogether other as the same), since every other is altogether other, (the) I can betray, without the least ap- pearance becoming manifest, by substituting the address of one for the address of the other, up to the last moment--in ecstasy or in death.
Apropos of "Performative Utterances" and "A Plea for Excuses," I call your attention to several strategic and, in my view, important ges- tures. I remark on them, although de Man does not, because they cross with the paths we are following in an amusing way.
First of all, just for laughs, a strange association: the second example of "performative utterances," in the text with that title, is "I apolo- gize" when you step on someone's toes. Now, how does this example come up? Is it symptomatic (a question one must always ask when Englishmen seem to exercise their wit by choosing at random arbitrary, insignificant, joking, or trivial examples)? The text had begun, as always with Austin, in an amusing way when, in what is precisely a deciding
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and performative fashion, he baptizes "performative" what will be de- fined as performative. Why this word, "performative"? Beyond the theoretical or semantic justifications for this terminological choice of an expression consecrated to a regulated use, the choice includes a per- formative dimension: I decide to propose that utterances of this type be called performatives. Austin has decided thus--and it has worked, it has been imprinted on all typewriter ribbons (more or less correctly, because the rigorous definition of the performative is infinitely prob- lematic; but the word is now ineffaceable).
So Austin begins his text as follows:
You are more than entitled not to know what the word "performative" means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word. I remember once when I had been talking on this subject that somebody afterwards said: "You know, I haven't the least idea what he means, unless it could be that he simply means what he says. " Well, that is what I should like to mean. (233)
(This reminds me of my experience with the "ugly" and "new" words deconstruction and differance in 1967 at Oxford; whenever I have misadventures at Oxford, where Austin taught, or at Cambridge, I al- ways think of him. )
The second major example of "performative utterance" will thus be "I apologize" when I step on someone's toes. This example comes up right after the example of the "I do" in the marriage ceremony, the "I do" that marks clearly that I do what I say by saying what I do. Austin has just said that with certain utterances, one says that the person is in the process of doing something rather than saying something: "Sup- pose for example, that in the course of a marriage ceremony I say, as people will, 'I do' (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife). Or again [this "Or again" is sublime] suppose that I tread on your toe and say 'I apologize. ' Or again . . . " (235). This linking by additive contiguity, without transition ("Or again") from the marriage cere- mony to the excuse when I tread on another's toes makes me think ir- resistibly of an Algerian Jewish rite. According to a more or less super- stitious custom, the wedded couple is advised, at the precise moment when their marriage is consecrated in the synagogue, to hurry up and place a foot on the other's foot so as to guarantee for himself or herself power in their conjugal life. One has to hurry and take the other by surprise. One must create the event. The first one who places his or her
foot on the other's will have the upper hand during the rest of their life together, until the end of history: history as occurrence and power. As if, right after the paradigmatic "I do" of the wedding ceremony, one had to excuse oneself or ask forgiveness from the other for this first coup d'e? tat, for the power that is thus violently appropriated by a coup de force. "I do take you for husband (or wife), oh, excuse me, sorry," followed perhaps by an "It's nothing," "no problem," "y a pas d'mal. " At any rate, whatever the response might be to a marriage proposal, it would be necessary to excuse oneself or ask forgiveness. "Marry me, I want to marry you. " Response: "Yes, I beg your pardon" or "No, I beg your pardon. " In either case, there is fault and thus forgiveness to be asked--and it is always as if one had tread on the toes of the other.
By excusing himself for not treating it "within such limits," Austin wonders what the subject of his paper is. He uses the word Excuses, but, he says, one must not be rigid about this noun and this verb. For a while, he had used the word extenuation. The word excuse now seems to him more convenient in this field, even though he includes others there, just as important, such as plea, defence, justification.
I will now propose that we make a detour. For a time and then from time to time, we are going to stop referring to Allegories of Reading, but will come back to it in conclusion.
However, even though the Rousseau I am going to talk about is not always very present in Allegories of Reading, one may always try to reconstitute a possible reading of it by de Man.
IV
As if . . .
Not it was as if, but I was as if. How can one say "I was as if . . . "? For example: "I was as if I had committed incest. " Not it was as if,
but I was as if. The "I" comes to be, as the other used to say, there where it was, there where the neutral, impersonal "it," the "ce," the "c? a," ought to have been--or stay what it will have been.
More than thirty years ago, I inscribed this phrase, "J'e? tais comme si j'avais commis un inceste" (in the translation, it reads: "I felt as if I had committed incest"), as epigraph to the whole second part of Of Grammatology devoted to Rousseau. Signed Rousseau, the "I was as if . . . " comes from the Confessions (book 5, 189). Rousseau describes himself with these words in a passage around the famous and scabrous sexual initiation by Maman. At the beginning of the paragraph, the ac- count (constative, therefore) of a (performative) commitment, a promise
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and, as always, a profession of veracity: "The day came at last, more dreaded than desired. I promised all and did not break my word" (189) ("Ce jour-la`, plustot redoute? qu'attendu, vint enfin. Je promis tout, et je ne mentis pas" [197]). Further in the same paragraph: "No, I tasted plea- sure, but I knew not what invincible sadness poisoned its charm. I was as if I had committed incest . . . " ("Non, je gou^tai le plaisir. Je ne sais quelle invincible tristesse en empoisonnait le charme. J'e? tois comme si j'avais commis un inceste"). He notes that Maman knew no remorse: "As she was not at all sensual and had not sought for gratification, she neither re- ceived sexual pleasure nor knew the remorse that follows" ("Comme elle e? tait peu sensuelle et n'avoit point recherche? la volupte? , elle n'en eut pas les de? lices, et n'en a jamais eu les remords"). She did not come, so there was no fault, no remorse for her. Not only did she know no re- morse, but she had, like God, the virtue of mercy [mise? ricorde], forgiving without even thinking that there was some merit in forgiveness. So Maman never knew any remorse about this quasi incest, and Rousseau justifies her in every regard, he excuses her with all his well-known elo- quence. Now, you know, and Rousseau knew better than we do, how many lovers the lady he called Maman had had. He nevertheless wrote, as if he were speaking of himself: "All her faults, I repeat, came from her lack of judgment, never from her passions. She was of gentle birth, her heart was pure . . . " (190). Several pages later, he is still speaking of her as if he were speaking of himself: "She loathed duplicity and lying; she was just, equitable, humane, disinterested, true to her word, her friends, and what she recognized as her duties, incapable of hatred or vengeance and not even imagining that there was the slightest merit in forgiveness" (191). So she forgave graciously, without difficulty, without forcing her- self. She was mercy itself and forgiveness itself. The following sentence, however, still attempts to excuse the least excusable: "Finally, to return to her less excusable qualities, though she did not rate her favors at their true worth, she never made a common trade in them; she conferred them lavishly but she did not sell them, though continually reduced to expedi- ents in order to live; and I would venture to say that if Socrates could es- teem Aspasia, he would have respected Mme de Warens. "
Maman forgives infinitely, like God. As to her faults, she may be excused, which is what the son sets about to do. One could follow the occurrences of the word forgive, "first jouissance," that of the quasi incest, and this oath: "I can swear that I never loved her more tenderly than when I so little desired to possess her" (189).
Several weeks ago, in Picardy, a prodigious archive was exhumed
and then deciphered. In layers of fauna and flora were found, protect- ed in amber, some animal or other, some insect or other (which is noth- ing new) but also the intact cadaver of another insect surprised by death, in an instant, by a geological or geothermal catastrophe, at the moment at which it was sucking the blood of another insect, 54 mil- lion years before humans appeared on Earth. Fifty-four million years before humans appeared on Earth, there was once upon a time an in- sect that died, its cadaver still visible and intact, the cadaver of some- one who was surprised by death at the instant it was sucking the blood of another! But it would suffice that it be but two hours before the ap- pearance of any living being or other, of whoever would be capable of referring to this archive as such, that is, to the archive of a singular event at which this living being will not have been, itself, present, yes- terday, an hour ago--or 54 million years before humans appeared, sooner or later, on Earth.
It is one thing to know the sediments, rocks, plants that can be dated to a period when nothing human or even living signaled its pres- ence on Earth. It is another thing to refer to a singular event, to what took place one time, one time only, in a nonrepeatable instant, like that animal surprised by catastrophe at the moment, at some instant, at some stigmatic point of time in which it was in the process of taking its pleasure sucking the blood of another animal, just as it could have taken it in some other way, moreover. For there is also a report of two midges immobilized in amber the color of honey when they were sur- prised by death as they made love: 54 million years before humans ap- peared on earth, a jouissance took place whose archive we preserve. We have there, set down, consigned to a support, protected by the body of an amber coffin, the trace, which is itself corporeal, of an event that took place only once and that, as a one-time-only event, is not at all reducible to the permanence of elements from the same period that have endured through time and come down to us, for example, amber in general. There are many things on Earth that have been there since 54 million years before humans. We can identify them and analyze them, but rarely in the form of the archive of a singular event and, what is more, of an event that happened to some living being, affecting an organized living being, already endowed with a kind of memory, with project, need, desire, pleasure, jouissance, and aptitude to retain traces.
I don't know why I am telling you this. Perhaps because I'm planning to talk about cutting and mutilations, and "insect," like "sex," refers to
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cutting and means uncut or uncuttable, in French, non-coupable, aller- gic to section and to segmentation. 19 Perhaps because this discovery is itself an event, an event having to do with another event that is thus archived. Perhaps because we are in the process of interrogating the relation between, on the one hand, impassive but fragile matter, the material depository, the support, the subjectile, the document and, on the other hand, singularity, semelfactivity (that is, the concept of what happens just once), the "one time only" of the event that is thus con- signed, to be confided without guarantee other than an aleatory one, incalculably, to some resistant matter, here to amber.
Perhaps one begins to think, to know and to know how to think, to know how to think knowing, only by taking the measure of this scale: for example, 54 million years before humans appeared on Earth. Or yesterday, when I was not there, when an "I" and above all an "I" say- ing "me, a man" was not there--or, tomorrow, sooner or later, will not be there any longer. On this scale, what happens to our interest for archives that are as human, recent, micrological but just as fragile as confessions or excuses, as some "I apologize" and some asked-for par- dons in a history of literature that, even on the very small scale of human history, is barely a child born yesterday, being only a few cen- turies old or young, namely, a few fractions of a second in the history of life, Earth, and the rest?
Let us now recall the two beginnings of the Confessions, for there are two of them. Let us go back toward the duplicity of these two be- ginnings, of the first word and the before-the-first word. These two beginnings begin, both of them, by saying that what is beginning there begins for the first and last time in the history of humanity. No true archive of man in his truth before the Confessions. Unique event, with- out precedent and without sequel, event that is its own archivation: "This is the only portrait of a man, drawn precisely from nature and in all its truth, that exists and that will probably ever exist [Voici le seul portrait d'homme, peint exactement d'apre`s nature et dans toute sa ve? rite? . Qui existe et qui probablement existera jamais]" (15; 3). This is found in the preamble, which has a strange status that I will talk about in a moment. On the following page, with the opening of the first book and therefore with what one may call the first word of the Confessions, Rousseau repeats more or less the same thing: "I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself [Je forme
une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'exe? cution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer a` mes semblables un homme dans toute la ve? rite? de la nature; et cet homme ce sera moi]" (17; 5).
As if, after 54 million years, one were witnessing in nature, and ac- cording to nature, the first pictorial archive of man worthy of that name and in its truth: the birth if not of man, at least of the exhibition of the natural truth of man.
I didn't know, a moment ago, why I was telling you these stories of an archive: archives of a vampire insect, archives of insects in the pro- cess of making love 54 million years ago--and archives as Confessions. But yes, I think I remember now, even though it was first of all uncon- scious and came back to me only after the fact. It is because, in a mo- ment, I am going to talk to you about the effacement and mutilation of texts, about the falsification of the letter, about prosthesis, and so forth. Now--and here you'll just have to believe me because I am telling you the truth, as always--when I quoted Rousseau, in Of Gram- matology, in 1967, and wrote as an epigraph for the whole section, al- most the whole book, that I devoted to Rousseau, "J'e? tois comme si j'avais commis un inceste," "I was as if I had committed incest," well, the first proofs of the book came back to me with a typographical error that I was tempted not to correct. The printer in fact had written: "J'e? tois comme si j'avais commis un insecte," "I was as if I had com- mitted an insect. " Perhaps the typo was meant to protect from incest, but to protect whom or what? A perfect anagram (inceste/insecte) that, in order to respect the grammatical machine, I had to resolve to rectify and to normalize, so as to return from insect to incest, retracing the whole path, the 54 million years that lead from the insect sucking blood to the first man of the Confessions, an Oedipal man as first man (Hegel) or as last man (Nietzsche), Oedipus dictating there the first, here the last word of man.
We are seeking in this way to advance our research on the subject of that which, in forgiveness, excuse, or perjury, comes to pass, is done, comes about, happens, and thus that which, as event, requires not only an operation, an act, a performance, a praxis, but an oeuvre, that is, at the same time the result and the trace left by a supposed operation, an oeuvre that survives its supposed operation and its supposed operator. Surviving it, being destined to this sur-vival, to this excess over present life, the oeuvre as trace implies from the outset the structure of this sur-vival, that is, what cuts the oeuvre off from the operation. This cut assures it a sort of archival independence or
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autonomy that is quasi-machine-like (not machine-like but quasi- machine-like), a power of repetition, repeatability, iterability, serial and prosthetic substitution of self for self. This cut is not so much ef- fected by the machine (even though the machine can in fact cut and repeat the cut in its turn) as it is the condition of production of a ma- chine. The machine is cut as well as cutting with regard to the living present of life or of the living body: it is an effect of the cut as much as it is a cause of the cut. And that is one of the difficulties in handling this concept of machine, which always and by definition structurally resembles a causa sui.
Forgiveness and excuse are possible, are called upon to go into ef- fect only there where this relative, quasi-machine-like survival of the oeuvre (or of the archive as oeuvre) takes place--where it constitutes and institutes an event, in some manner taking charge of the forgive- ness or the excuse. To say in this way that the oeuvre institutes and con- stitutes an event is to register in a confused way an ambiguous thing. An oeuvre is an event, to be sure, there is no oeuvre without singular event, without textual event, if one can agree to enlarge this notion be- yond its verbal or discursive limits. But is the oeuvre the trace of an event, the name of the trace of the event that will have instituted it as oeuvre? Or is it the institution of this event itself?
I would be tempted to respond, and not only so as to avoid the ques- tion: both at the same time. Every surviving oeuvre keeps the trace of this ambiguity. It keeps the memory of the present that instituted it but, in this present, there was already, if not the project, at least the essential possibility of this cut--of this cut in view of leaving a trace, of this cut whose purpose is survival, of this cut that sometimes assures survival even if there is not the purpose of survival. This cut (both a wounding and an opening, the chance of a respiration) was in some way already there at work, a` l'oeuvre. It marked, like a scar, the originary living pres- ent of this institution--as if the machine, the quasi machine, were al- ready operating, even before being produced in the world, if I can put it that way, in the vivid experience of the living present.
This is already a terrifying aporia (but why terrifying and for whom? this question will continue to haunt us). A terrifying aporia be- cause this fatal necessity engenders automatically a situation in which forgiveness and excuse are both automatic (they cannot not take place, in some way independently of the presumed living "subjects" that they are supposed to involve) and therefore null and void, since they are in contradiction with what we, as inheritors of these values, either
Abrahamic or not, think about forgiveness and excuse: automatic and mechanical pardons or excuses cannot have the value of pardon and excuse. Or, if you prefer, one of the formidable effects of this machine- like automaticity would be to reduce every scene of forgiveness not only to a process of excuse but to the automatic and null efficacy of an a priori "I apologize," I disculpate myself and justify myself a priori or a posteriori, with an a posteriori that is a priori programmed, and in which, moreover, the "I" itself would be the "I" of anyone at all, ac- cording to that law of "deceit" or "theft" we have discussed: usurpation of the singular I by the universal I, ineluctable substitution and sub- terfuge that makes all "justice" "unjust. "
Why would this self-destructive and automatic neutralization, which both is produced by and produces the scene of forgiveness or the apologetic scene, why would it be terrifying and its effects fearsome? One could use other words, more or less grave. In any case, it would be a matter of naming a negative affect, the feeling of threat, but of a threat at the heart of the promise. For what threatens is also what makes possible the expectation or the promise (for example, of a for- giveness or an excuse that I could not even desire, expect, or anticipate without this cut, this survival, this beyond-the-living-present). Right there where automaticity is effective and disculpates "me" a priori, it threatens me, therefore. Right there where it reassures me, I can fear it. Because it cuts me off from my own initiative, from my own origin, from my originary life, therefore from the present of my life, but also from the authenticity of the forgiveness and the excuse, from their very meaning, and finally from the eventness of the event, that of the fault or its confession, that of the forgiveness or the excuse. As a result and by reason of this quasi automaticity or quasi-machine-like quality of the sur-viving oeuvre, one has the impression that one is dealing only with quasi events, quasi faults, quasi excuses, or quasi pardons. Before any other possible suffering or any other possible passion, there is the wound, which is at once infinite and unfelt, anesthetized, of this neu- tralization by the "as if," by the "as if" of this quasi, by the limitless risk of becoming a simulacrum or a virtuality without consistency--of everything. Is it necessary and is it possible to give an account of this wound, of this trauma, that is, of the desire, of the living movement, of the proper body, and so forth, given that the desire in question is not only injured or threatened with injury by the machine, but produced by the very possibility of the machine, of the machine-like expro- priation? Giving an account becomes impossible once the condition of
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possibility is the condition of impossibility, and so forth. This is, it seems to me, the place of a thinking that ought to be devoted to the vir- tualization of the event by the machine, to a virtuality that exceeds the philosophical determination of the possibility of the possible (dynamis, power, Mo? glichkeit), the classical opposition of the possible and the impossible.
One of our greatest difficulties, then, would be to reconcile with the machine a thinking of the event (the real, undeniable, inscribed, singu- lar event, of an always essentially traumatic type, even when it is a happy event, inasmuch as its singularity interrupts an order and rips apart, like every decision worthy of the name, the normal tissue of temporality or history). How is one to reconcile, on the one hand, a thinking of the event, which I propose withdrawing, despite the appar- ent paradox, from an ontology or a metaphysics of presence (it would be a matter of thinking an event that is undeniable but without pure presence), and, on the other hand, a certain concept of machine-ness [machinalite? ]? The latter would imply at least the following predicates: a certain materiality (which is not necessarily a corporeality), technicity, programming, repetition, or iterability; a cutting off from or indepen- dence from the subject--the psychological, sociological, transcendental, or even human subject, and so forth. In two words, how is one to think the event and the machine, the event with the machine, this here event with this here machine? In a word and repeating myself in a quasi- machine-like fashion, how is one to think together the machine and the event, a machine-like repetition and that which happens?
V
In the perspective opened by this repetitive series of questions, we have begun to read what de Man wrote one day, what he inscribed one day, apparently apropos of Rousseau--who was perhaps only an "excuse me" for de Man, just as we read an "excuse me" for Austin at the mo- ment he was getting ready to talk about the excuse in general and excused himself for not doing so, contenting himself apparently with excusing himself, "within such limits. "
I say indeed an "excuse me" of Rousseau. Instead of the excuse in general, or even some generality in general, de Man apparently intends this here "excuse me" of this here Rousseau, even if, as we will see, with the example or the index of this here "excuse me," he appeals to what he himself says he "calls text" ("What we call text," he will have written, a phrase that is followed by a definition of the text in general
that places the word definition in quotation marks). There is, to be sure, a general thematics or problematics in play in these very rich texts. But at the point of the reference, what is at stake, in my opinion, is the singularity of a certain "excuse me" by Rousseau that is, more- over, double, according to the at once ordinary and ambiguous French grammar of this verb that appears at least twice in Rousseau, in strate- gic places, in the same paragraph of the Confessions concerning the theft of the ribbon.
The two occurrences are the object of a very active interpretation by de Man. One of the reasons the use of s'excuser is sometimes deemed improper in French culture is that it can mean either to "offer apolo- gies" or else to clear oneself in advance, to wash one's hands of the confessed fault, which, in truth, since it was not a fault, does not even have to be confessed, still less excused or forgiven. Thus, all this be- comes, as event itself, simulacrum or feint, fiction or scene of quasi excuse. And the machine-ness of this s'excuser draws in like a magnet the whole field of the de Manian analysis.
These two occurrences fall within the space of three sentences, in the paragraph that concludes the second book of the Confessions and the episode of the ribbon. In a fashion somewhat analogous to the scene, at once naive and perverse, in which Austin seems, in "A Plea for Excuses," to excuse himself in advance for not being able to treat the announced subject, namely, the "excuse," Rousseau begins, in a passage that does not appear to interest de Man, by excusing himself for having not even succeeded in excusing himself. He excuses himself for having been unable to exonerate himself of his crime. As if, at bot- tom, one had always to excuse oneself for failing to excuse oneself. But once one excuses oneself for failing, one may deem oneself to be, as one says in French, d'avance tout excuse? or, on the contrary, con- demned forever, irremediably, irreparably. It is the madness of this ma- chine that interests us.
A. Here is the first occurrence of the s'excuser in this last paragraph:
I have been absolutely frank in the account I have just given, and no one will accuse me, I am certain, of palliating the heinousness of my offense [thus, I have surely not convinced you that I was in no way at fault or that my fault was minor, and this is my fault: I have failed, and I am at fault; but--for there is a "but" and it is the "but" that is going to inter- est us--but, as Rousseau is going to explain to us right away, I believe I must explain to you, while justifying myself, why I believed I must do
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it, that is, excuse myself, excuse myself for excusing myself for excusing myself]. But I should not fulfill the aim of this book if I did not at the same time reveal my inner feelings and hesitated to put up such excuses for myself as I honestly could. [Mais je ne remplirois pas le but de ce livre si je n'exposois en me^me tems mes dispositions inte? rieures, et que je craignisse de m'excuser en ce qui est conforme a` la ve? rite? ].
De Man quotes this latter sentence in the original French and in translation. But he then undertakes a surprising operation, which, moreover, has been pointed out by his French translator and for which I can find neither the justification nor the necessity. He adds within brackets a word to the text, an expletive ne. An expletive ne in French is a pleonastic ne. One may either inscribe it or not inscribe it in a sen- tence as one wishes. For example (and this example, which is given in all the dictionaries, is all the more interesting in that it uses a verb found in Rousseau's sentence as changed or augmented by the useless expletive prosthesis that de Man nevertheless utilizes), I can say "il craint que je sois trop jeune" or, just as well and with the same mean- ing, "il craint que je ne sois trop jeune. " These two sentences are strict- ly equivalent in French. Now, what does de Man do? Where Rousseau writes: "Mais je ne remplirois pas le but de ce livre si je n'exposois en me^me tems mes dispositions inte? rieures, et que je craignisse de m'excuser en ce qui est conforme a` la ve? rite? " (which is perfectly clear for a French ear and means "if I feared to excuse myself," and so forth), de Man adds a ne between brackets in his quotation of the French--which is not at all serious and can always be done, pleonasti- cally, without changing the meaning, all the more so in that the brack- ets signal clearly de Man's intervention. But what he also does, and what seems disturbing to me because more serious, because it even risks inducing or translating a misinterpretation in the mind of the reader or in de Man's own mind, is that he then translates, so to speak, this expletive ne into English but without brackets, and he translates it as a "not" that is no longer at all expletive. As a result one reads, in de Man's own translation: "But I would not fulfill the purpose of this book if I did not reveal my inner sentiments as well, and if I did not fear" (here, de Man neither underscores nor brackets the second "not" that he adds even before he quotes the French in parentheses; he as- sumes only the fact of having himself italicized the French excuser and "excuse" in English) "to excuse myself by means of what conforms to the truth. " This confusion, which I do not know how to interpret, risks
making the text say exactly the opposite of what its grammar, its gram- matical machine says, namely, that Rousseau does not fear, he does not want to fear, he does not want to have to fear to excuse himself. He would not fulfill the aim of his book if he did not reveal his inner feel- ings and if he feared to excuse himself with what conforms to the truth. So the correct translation would be exactly the opposite of the one proposed by de Man: "But I would not fulfill the purpose of this book if I did not reveal my inner sentiments as well and if I did fear [or "if I feared" and not as de Man writes, "if I did not fear"] to excuse myself by means of what conforms to the truth. " Naturally, de Man might claim, and this is perhaps what he has in mind when he proceeds to comment at length on this motive of fear, that Rousseau says he does not fear or he must not fear because in fact he does fear, and all of this is disavowal by means of an expletive ruse. 20
Well, let's leave this aside. But, apropos, as it has been and will often be a question of what happens to texts, injuring them, mutilating them, adding prostheses to them (de Man himself mentions the word prosthesis at one point),21 I point out this little thing, just as I pointed out, apropos, de Man's omission of the two little words "de? ja` vieux" in relation to the ribbon. As if, to take up again the example of the dic- tionary I quoted a moment ago, de Man feared that the ribbon "ne fusse (ou fusse) de? ja` vieux ou qu'il craignisse au contraire qu'il fu^t ou ne fu^t 'trop jeune'" (as if de Man feared that the ribbon were too old or on the contrary as if he feared that it were "too young").
Apropos of this first occurrence of m'excuser: the imperative to which Rousseau here seems to submit everything so as to justify the gesture that consists in excusing himself, in not fearing to excuse him- self, even if he does not succeed in doing so in a convincing way, this imperative is, not just the truth itself, not just the truth in itself, but his promise before the truth, more precisely, his sworn promise to write in a truthful and sincere fashion. What counts here is less the truth in itself than the oath, namely, the written promise to write this book in such and such a way, to sign it in conformity with a promise, not to betray, not to perjure the promise made at the beginning of the Confessions or in any case at the beginning of the first book of the Confessions, which is not, as we will see right away, the absolute beginning of the work. I will recall only these few lines (which de Man, of course, supposes are familiar to everyone, but which he does not reinscribe in their necessity of principle that determines the general structure and the whole chain of the Confessions), but I refer you to this whole first page of book 1, a
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page that is at once canonical and extraordinary and whose first ver- sion was much longer. This immense little page would call for centuries of reading by itself alone, as would the reactions that it has incited. The scene of the oath not to betray, of the performative promise not to perjure or abjure, seems to me more important than the theoretical or constative dimension of a truth to be revealed or known. I underscore this point so as to mark once again that the criterion by which de Man distinguishes confession from excuse, as well as an epistemic moment from an apologetic moment, seems to me problematic. At any rate, the moment said to be epistemic, the moment of knowledge, truth, or reve- lation, already depends, from the first line of the book, on a performa- tive promise, the promise to tell the truth, including the truth of the faults and indignities that are going to be mentioned right after, the in- dignities of someone who declares "I may not be better, but at least I am different" ("si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre") and adds that he does not know "whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mold in which she formed me" ("si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m'a jette? "), that is, left his example without possible imitation or reproduction. He does not know, but as for the reader, he or she, sooner or later, will judge:
I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once completed, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.
Myself alone. . . . Let the last trumpet sound when it will [here is the call to appear before the last word], I shall come forward with this book in my hand, to present myself before the sovereign judge, and proclaim aloud: "Here is what I have done, what I have thought, what I have been. " (17)
Commitment to the future, toward the future, promise, sworn faith (at the risk of perjury, promising never to commit perjury), these ges- tures present themselves as exemplary. The signatory wants to be, he declares himself to be at once singular, unique, and exemplary, in a manner analogous to what Augustine did with a more explicitly Christian gesture. Rousseau also addresses God, he invokes God, like Augustine he uses the familiar tu form of address. He addresses his fel- low men through the intermediary of God, he apostrophizes them as brothers: sons of God. The scene of this virtual "sooner or later" re- mains fundamentally Christian.