No More Learning

We broach here that which is, strictly speaking, neither figurable nor cognizable. It cannot be called literal, he tells us (99), for that would imply its possible con- version into figuration or symbolization. Materiality will be precisely that which is convertible into neither figuration nor cognition. This materiality characterizes an aesthetic vision in its irreducibility. The "eye," he writes, is here its own agent, and not the specular echo of the sun. The trope of the "sea," he writes, functions similarly; although Kant calls it "a mirror," it reflects nothing. And it seems that, for de Man, at this textual instance, the failure of these figures to reflect or to act mimetically disqualifies them as figures. This is no doubt a strange requirement to set upon figures, and I doubt that it is one that he has consistently applied. At any rate, in both cases, the effect of these fig- ures is that they fail to perform their figural function and thus relapse into the material condition of figuration, one that is itself, strictly speaking, not convertible into any figure and not understood by its op- posite, the literal, and not, strictly speaking, even a condition, since this materiality does not support figuration, but exercises a corrosive effect on all figuration. Whereas the phenomenality of the aesthetic rests on an adequate representation, the materiality of aesthetic vision is a pure materiality that makes no reference to adequate representation.
Toward the end of the essay, de Man turns to the chapter titled "The Architectonics of Pure Reason" in the third Critique in which he refers to the organic unity of systems, and this unity is conceived through "the recurring metaphor of the body, as a totality of limbs and parts. " Because the aesthetic will involve the suspension of all refer- ence to organic purposiveness, Kant admonishes that "we must not re- gard as the determining grounds of our judgment the concepts of the purposes which all our limbs serve . . . and we must not allow this unity of purpose to influence our aesthetic judgment. "
If aesthetic judgment is to be separated from the understanding of
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natural unities of purpose, and there is an aesthetic judgment of the body, then it will be precisely of the limbs as severed from the unity of purposes (natural) that the body is. Assuming that this unity of pur- pose is expressed by the notion of substance, and that substance is understood as torso, it would appear that the aesthetic vision of the body would be one of dismemberment wherein the limbs are separated from the torso or the substance of the body. Thus, de Man writes, "we must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body . . . : "we must consider the limbs . . . severed from any purpose or use. "
He writes not only in the imperative, but identifies disarticulation with mutilation, and offers mutilate itself as a transitive verb--we must mutilate--although the following sentence amplifies this meaning by claiming that we must only "consider" the limbs as severed. Inter- estingly, the very formulation that gives us what is prior to figuration and cognition and, indeed, the performative, is one that figures our own "seeing" as a mutilating activity that works on the body. Indeed, de Man makes his pedagogical point by likening this dismembered body to the dismemberment of language. He writes: "To the dismem- berment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sen- tences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters" (113). The use of "corresponds," however, in this last sentence seems to recall the very model of adequa- tion from which materiality as dismemberment is supposed to differ. Here de Man is seeking to trace the relapse of a trope into the materi- ality of the letter, a materiality that grounds and exceeds the trope and that is never exhaustively convertible into the trope itself: the condi- tion of the trope, but also the destiny of its disarticulation.
But why is this point about language introduced through a compari- son or, indeed, a correspondence with the body? And what is the rela- tion between materiality understood as bodily dismemberment and the fragmentation of words into letters and the so-called materiality of aes- thetic vision? In what sense does the dismemberment of the body, which is one that takes place in or for vision, not precisely a figurative operation? If seeing effects this dismemberment, then seeing is figured as a performative, and both the figural and performative dimensions of language remain at work in the description of this materiality, a de- scription that may well have to be fully catachrestic to make any sense at all. Indeed, if the body in pieces is neither figurative nor literal, but material, then it would still follow that the only way to convey that
materiality is precisely through catachresis, as de Man actually does, and so through a figure. If the body is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its effect, in what sense is it dismembered? And if dismemberment is but a sign of a prefigural materiality, then that materiality has been converted into a trope through the very ex- ample that is said to illustrate that nonconvertibility. A figure can func- tion as a substitution for that which is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the figure itself: indeed, this is perhaps where Benjamin on allegory would, if he could, if I would let him, make his eery return. Such a figure is, however, no less a figure than a mimetic one, or one whose terms can be related through means of adequation. So is this body figurable or not? It depends, I would suggest, on how one ap- proaches the question of figurality. If Descartes's body is not literally dismembered, though the language figures that as its effect, in what sense is it still dismembered? And if dismemberment is but a sign of a prefigural materiality, then that materiality has been converted into a trope through the very example that is said to illustrate that non- convertibility. The body does not, then, imply the destruction of figu- rality if only because a figure can function as a substitution for that which is fundamentally irrecoverable within or by the figure itself. 7 Such a figure is, however, no less a figure than a mimetic one, and a fig- ure need not be mimetic to sustain its status as figural.
Clearly, though, the final question here must be to consider this strange separation of the limbs from the body, this repeated scene of castration, the one that Descartes enacts through the grammar that conditions the question he poses of his body in which he is already sepa- rated from that which he calls into question, a separation at the level of grammar that prepares the philosophical question itself, in which the hand that writes the doubt and the hand that is doubted--is it mine? -- is at once the hand that is left behind as the writing emerges in, we might say, its dismembering effect. 8
There is no doubt a hand that writes Descartes's text, and a hand figured within that text as appearing at a distance from the one who looks upon it and asks after its reality. The hand is reflexively spectral- ized in the course of the writing it performs. It undoes its reality pre- cisely at the moment in which it acts or, rather, becomes undone pre- cisely by the traces of the act of writing it performs. If the body is what inaugurates the process of its own spectralization through writing, then it is and is not determined by the discourse it produces. If there is a materiality of the body that escapes from the figures it conditions and
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by which it is corroded and haunted, then this body is neither a surface nor a substance, but the linguistic occasion of the body's separation from itself, one that eludes its capture by the figure it compels.
NOTES
This essay was first presented as an invited lecture at the American Philosophical Association Meetings in December 1987 in Philadelphia. It was re-presented in revised version for the "Culture and Materiality" conference at the University of California at Davis in April 1998, and appeared in Qui Parle 11: 1 (1997).
1. Excellent work reconsidering the relationship of language and materiality in sexual difference is currently being done by Charles Shephardson, Debra Keates, and Katherine Rudolph.
2. "Il me fallait entreprendre se? rieusement une fois en ma vie de me de? faire de toutes les opinions que j'avais rec? ues . . . me de? faire de toutes les opinions. " The text was originally published in Latin in 1641 in France, although Descartes was living in Holland at the time. Descartes apparently had reasons to fear the Dutch ministers reading the text, and so he had a friend oversee its publication in France. It did, however, appear the following year, 1642, in Amsterdam, and the second edition includes the objections and replies. This second edition is usually referred to as the Adam and Tannery version, and it was the basis for the French translations. One of those took place that same year by the Duc de Luynes, and Descartes ap- proved the translation, which is to say that he subjected it to various corrections and revisions. It appeared in revised form in 1647. Hence, we can to some degree think of the French text as one that Descartes approved, and in some instances, wrote, but nevertheless one to which he was willing to attach a signature.
Almost every English version of Descartes will be a translation of the second version of The Meditations. Two French translations were offered to Descartes for approval, one by the Duc de Luynes and another by Clerselier; he chose the one by the Duc de Luynes for The Meditations themselves, and the "objections and replies" translation by Clerselier.
In 1661, Clerselier republished his translation, making corrections, and aban- doning the translation by the Duc de Luynes that Descartes had approved. Many scholarly editions take this to be a more exact and literal translation and have used it as the primary text. Some have complained that the Duc de Luynes's version was too liberal a translation, lacking Descartes's exactitude. And they have made ex- cuses for why Descartes might have accepted the translation--politesse, politics, and the like.
The French that I follow here is that provided by the Duc de Luynes. The English is from The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
3. In the French, he refers to what is "feintes et invente? es par l'imagination," and this notion of "invented" is translated from the Latin: effingo. Knowledge of oneself does not depend on what is feigned or invented, but the Latin term casts doubt on the very denial that Descartes performs.
4. "Je feindrais en effet, si j'imaginais e^tre quelque chose, puisque imaginer n'est autre chose que contempler la figure ou l'image d'une chose corporelle. "
5. Descartes writes, "he has at least left within my power this resolution . . . for although I notice a certain weakness in my nature in that I cannot continually concentrate my mind on one single thought [je ne puis pas attacher continuellement mon esprit a` une me^me pense? e, I cannot continually attach my spirit to the same thought], I can yet, by attentive and frequent meditation, impress [imprimer] it so forcibly on my memory that I shall never fail to recollect it whenever I have need of it, and thus acquire the habit of never going astray" (178).
6. This view corresponds to Lacan's view of the mirror stage as that which per- mits a specular version of the body on the condition of distortion. The subsequent references to Paul de Man's essays are from Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
7. One might usefully consult Walter Benjamin on the status of allegory for precisely such an approach to the figure.
8. See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Ren- aissance (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1990).
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V. Materiality without Matter
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Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ("within such limits")
Jacques Derrida
Translated by Peggy Kamuf
Will this become possible? Will we one day be able, and in a single ges- ture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (we call that an event) and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition (we call that a machine)?
Will we be able in the future (and there will be no future except on this condition) to think both the event and the machine as two com- patible or even indissociable concepts, although today they appear to us to be antinomic? Antinomic because we think that what happens ought to keep, so we think, some nonprogrammable and therefore in- calculable singularity. We think that an event worthy of the name ought not, so we think, to give in or be reduced to repetition. An event ought above all to happen to someone, to some living being who is thus affected by it, consciously or unconsciously. It is difficult, however, to conceive of a living being to whom or through whom something happens without an affection getting inscribed in a sensible, aesthetic manner right on some body or some organic matter.
Notice I say organic. No thinking of the event, therefore, without an aesthetic and some presumption of living organicity.
The machine, on the contrary, is thought to repeat impassively, im- perceptibly received commands. In a state of anesthesia, it obeys or commands a calculable program without affect or auto-affection, like an indifferent automaton. Its functioning, if not its production, does not need anyone. And it is difficult to conceive of a machine-like appa- ratus without inorganic matter.
Notice I say inorganic. Inorganic, that is, nonliving, sometimes dead
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but always, in principle, unfeeling and inanimate, without desire, with- out intention, without spontaneity. The automaticity of the inorganic machine is not the spontaneity attributed to organic life.
This is at least how the event and the machine are generally con- ceived. Among all the incompatible traits that I have just briefly re- called, so as to suggest how difficult it is to think them together as the same "thing," I have underscored these two predicates that are most often attributed without hesitation to matter or to the material body: the organic and the inorganic.
These two commonly used words carry an obvious reference, either positive or negative, to the possibility of an internal principle that is proper and totalizing, to a total form of, precisely, organization, whether or not it be a beautiful form, an aesthetic form, this time in the sense of the fine arts. This organicity is thought to be lacking from so- called inorganic matter. If one day, with one and the same concept, these two incompatible concepts, the event and the machine, were to be thought together, you can bet that not only (and I insist on not only) will one have produced a new logic, an unheard-of conceptual form; against the background and at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster (even more disturbing than what we see on the poster for our colloquium, which represents, I sup- pose, Shelley's "Chariot of Life"). Moreover, it is already necessary to correct this formulation: the new figure of an event-machine would no longer be even a figure and it would not resemble, it would resemble nothing, not even what we call, in a still-familiar way, a monster. But it would therefore be, by virtue of this very novelty, an event, the only and the first possible event, because im-possible. That is why I ven- tured to say that this thinking could belong only to the future--and even that it makes the future possible. An event does not come about unless its irruption interrupts the course of the possible, and, as the im- possible itself, surprises any foreseeability. But such a supermonster of eventness would be, this time, for the first time, also produced by the machine.
Not only, I said. The thinking of this new concept will have changed the very essence and the very name of what we today call "thought," the "concept," "thinking thought," "thinking the thinkable," or "thinking the concept. " Perhaps another thinking is heralded here. Perhaps it is heralded without announcing itself, without horizon of expectation, by means of this old word thought, this homonym or paleonym that has sheltered for such a long time the name still to come of a thinking
that has not yet thought what it must think, namely, thought, namely, what is given to be thought with the name "thought," beyond knowl- edge, theory, philosophy, literature, the fine arts--and even technics.
As a still preliminary exercise, somewhat like musicians who listen to their instruments and tune them before beginning to play, we could try out another version of the same aporia. Such an aporia would not block or paralyze, but on the contrary would condition any event of thought that resembles somewhat the unrecognizable monster that has just passed in front of our eyes. What would this aporia be? One may say of a machine that it is productive, active, efficient, or as one says in French, performante. But a machine as such, however performante it may be, could never, according to the strict Austinian orthodoxy of speech acts, produce an event of the performative type. Performativity will never be reduced to technical performance. Pure performativity implies the presence of a living being, and of a living being speaking one time only, in its own name, in the first person. And speaking in a manner that is at once spontaneous, intentional, free, and irreplace- able. Performativity, therefore, excludes in principle, in its own mo- ment, any machine-like [machinale] technicity. It is even the name given to this intentional exclusion. This foreclosure of the machine an- swers to the intentionality of intention itself. It is intentionality. If, then, some machinality (repetition, calculability, inorganic matter of the body) intervenes in a performative event, it is always as an acciden- tal, extrinsic, and parasitical element, in truth a pathological, mutilat- ing, or even mortal element. Here again, to think both the machine and the performative event together remains a monstrosity to come, an im- possible event, and therefore the only possible event. But it would be an event that, this time, no longer happens without the machine. Rather, it would happen by the machine. To give up neither the event nor the machine, to subordinate neither one to the other, never to re- duce one to the other: this is perhaps a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of "us" working for the last few decades. But who is this "us"? Who would be this "us" whom I dare to speak of so carelessly? Perhaps it designates at bottom, and first of all, those who find themselves in the improbable place or in the uninhabitable habitat of this monster.
Having begun in this manner, as you can very well hear, I already owe you an excuse, many excuses, an incalculable number of excuses. I should apologize, as you say in English, endlessly. In a very limited space and time, "within such limits," I will no doubt fail, by my own
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fault, to negotiate among several necessary compromises and to honor several commitments that are sometimes difficult to reconcile.
There are at least three or four of these. The announced title for my contribution, "'Materiality'"--in quotation marks--"Archival Inter- vention, Virtual Futures," was not one I myself chose, as you might have supposed. Quite a while ago, Tom Cohen and I no doubt evoked this series of themes, but simply as abstract possibilities. Upon receiv- ing the poster for the colloquium, I for the first time saw unfurl before my eyes this intimidating banner that I would never have dared to wave myself: "'Materiality'"--in quotation marks, and yes, I myself would certainly have wanted to add those quotation marks--"Archival Intervention, Virtual Futures. " I nevertheless promised, promised my- self, right away, to do everything to honor as best I could the impos- sible task that had thus been assigned to me. I will therefore attempt to approach in my own way all these formidable questions, even if I pre- fer to withdraw and beat a retreat toward the final title that I myself chose, namely: "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ("within such lim- its"). This is the first compromise.
I owe you an apology for a second compromise. So as to save some time and energy at a moment when I have little of either to spare, I had to reorient in the direction of this colloquium certain sessions of the seminar that I am giving this year in Paris and at UC Irvine on par- don and perjury. By analyzing the filiations of these concepts (on the one hand, the Abrahamic inheritance--that is, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim--and the Greek inheritance, on the other), by formalizing the aporetic logic that torments this history, these concepts, this experi- ence, their present-day mutation on a geo-juridico-political scale in a world where scenes of public repentance happen more and more fre- quently, I insist in this seminar on a certain irreducibility of the work, that is, l'oeuvre. As a possible legacy from what is above all an event, l'oeuvre has a virtual future only by surviving or cutting itself off from its presumed responsible signatory. It thereby supposes that a logic of the machine is in accordance, however improbable that may seem, with a logic of the event. Hence, there will remain some traces, dare I say visible archives, of this ongoing seminar and of its own context. This will not escape you and I do not wish to hide it. In a certain way, I will be speaking solely about pardon, forgiveness, excuse, betrayal, and perjury. You noticed that I began to do so already in order to at- tempt to excuse myself. But my speaking of forgiveness and so forth will not necessarily betray the general contract of our colloquium. And
I will speak neither of myself, nor of my texts on the scene of writing or archive fever, on the signature, event, context, nor on the spirit, the virtual revenants and other specters of Marx, nor even directly of my seminar on forgiveness and perjury. I will speak only of Paul de Man apropos of one or another of his works, for example, apropos of Rousseau and apropos of the announced themes for this colloquium.
These first two compromises were no doubt excessive and inexcus- able. They became also unavoidable from the moment the title, pro- gram, or even the protocol of this colloquium defined implacable im- peratives. To save time, I ought not to undertake to read in its entirety this title, which I hold to be a masterpiece. Nevertheless, I reread it in extenso, for one must register everything about it, including its play with quotation marks--the word Materiality having been freed from quotation marks whereas, in the subtitle, care was taken to put the word materialist in the expression "'materialist' thought" (rather than materialist philosophy or theory) under the strict surveillance of quota- tion marks. I underscore this fact now because, much later, I will won- der apropos of de Man, what might be a thinking of machinistic mate- riality without materialism and even perhaps without matter. The generalization of quotation marks that then becomes necessary would in that case no longer mean in the least that one is citing an ulterior au- thor or text; rather, and quite on the contrary, it would mean that one is performatively instituting a new concept and a new contract with the word. One is thus inaugurating another word, in sum, a homonym that must be put forward cautiously between quotation marks. Another word-concept is thus staged whose event one causes to come about.
The quotation marks signal in this case that one is citing only oneself at the moment of this invention or this convention in a gesture that is as inaugural as it is arbitrary. I now reread, as promised, the complete title: "Culture and Materiality: A post-millenarian conference--a` propos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology--to consider trajectories for 'ma- terialist' thought in the afterlife of theory, cultural studies, and Marxist critique. " This is an impressive series of transactions that called for an equally impressive number of rhetorical performances or theoretical exploits: between culture and materiality, between a corpus or a prop- er name, Paul de Man, more precisely a very particular place of the posthumous corpus, Aesthetic Ideology ("--a` propos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology--"). Here, then, is an inheritance that is also a post- humous work of Paul de Man's to which we are invited to refer, be- tween dashes, in the mode of an "a`-propos" that set me to wondering.
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I wondered about this French idiom, which seems untranslatable and overdetermined enough that, I suppose, it was left like the foreign body it remains in your language. Moreover, and apropos, I had for a moment dreamed of entitling my lecture: "Apropos of apropos, apro- pos of all the meanings and all the uses of a` propos and of the a`-propos in French (a` propos, as you know, can be an adverb, a` propos, or a noun, the a` propos). I had thus dreamed, but perhaps I will do it silent- ly, of examining the modalities and figures of reference that are cross- ing in the inimitable and untranslatable expression a` propos--which allies chance to necessity, contingency to obligation, machine-like as- sociation to the internal, intentional, organic link. When one says "a` propos," "a` propos de . . . ," there is from a pragmatic point of view always a mark of reference, a reference to . . . , but it is sometimes a di- rect reference, sometimes indirect, furtive, passing, oblique, accidental, machine-like, also in the mode of the quasi avoidance of the unavoid- able, of repression, or of the lapsus, and so forth. When one says "a` propos," it is because one is at least pretending to leap at the oppor- tunity to speak, metonymically, of something else altogether, to change the subject without changing the subject, or else to underscore that be- tween what is being talked about and what someone wants to talk about there is either a link of organic, internal, and essential necessity, or else, inversely, an insignificant and superficial association, a purely mechanical and metonymic association, the arbitrary or fortuitous comparison--"by accident"--of two signifiers. And yet it is clear that, at that very moment, one touches on the essential or the place of deci- sion. That is where the thing happens, that is where it comes about. When Rousseau, after having stolen the ribbon, accuses Marion so as to excuse himself (and we will come back to this when we follow de Man's magisterial reading), it is because he denounced, he said, "the first object that presented itself [le premier objet qui s'offrit]. "1 Marion herself, or the name of Marion, being there by chance, by accident, it is as if he leaped on the opportunity and said with a`-propos: "Apropos, it's Marion who gave it to me, I didn't steal it. " The "esprit d'a`-propos," in French, is the art, the genius, but also the technique that consists of knowing how to grab an opportunity, to make the best of it, the best economy of contingency, and to make of the Khairos or the Chaos a significant, archivable, necessary, or even ineffaceable event.
So many other things still remained enormous and enigmatic for me in the "a`-propos" of this title--which says everything in advance, be- ginning with "post-millenarian" and "'materialist' thought" ("materi-
alist" in quotation marks), not to mention everything that is put under the "umbrella" of some "afterlife" ("theory, cultural studies, and Marx- ist critique"). When I read this protocol, I asked myself which theoreti- cal animal or which animal-machine of the third millennium could measure up to this inhuman program. If anyone could ever treat the subject in question, it will not be me, I said as I commanded myself to retreat: withdraw toward your own compromise on the subject of these untenable promises, but make every possible effort not to be too unworthy of the square you've landed on in this jeu de l'oie (a French board game that is something like a cross between Chinese checkers and Monopoly). On the poster, I said to myself, you find yourself for- tunately immobilized in the company of Carla Freccero and Hillis Miller. Each time I look at this poster, it makes me think of a jeu de l'oie for a Californian science fiction. A throw of the dice that is incal- culably well calculated has assigned all three of us, Carla Freccero, Hillis Miller, and me, three immigrants from Yale, the burden, and the word is well chosen, of "material events. "
So I pray you to excuse me, but I will not treat the subject. In his ar- ticle "Excuses (Confessions)," apropos of Rousseau, de Man refers in a note to Austin's "A Plea for Excuses. " But he pays no attention to the fact that this text by Austin itself begins by presenting an excuse. It is thereby altogether enveloped, comprehended, included in the event of this first performative. Everything that Austin is going to say on the subject of the excuse will be at once comprehended and signed by the first gesture of the first sentence, by the performative event that is put to work, precisely, by the first words of "A Plea for Excuses. " With the excuse that they implicitly present, these words of introduction make of this text an event, une oeuvre, something other than a purely theo- retical treatise: "The subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only to be introduced, within such limits. "2 Everything happens as if the title, "A Plea for Excuses," designated first of all and solely Austin's performative gesture that itself presents excuses and alleges limits (time, urgency, situation, context, etc. : "within such lim- its," he says). The title, "A Plea for Excuses," would thus be the name or the description of this lecturer's gesture rather than and before being the announced subject, a theme or a problem to be treated in a theo- retical, philosophical, constative, or metalinguistic mode, namely, the concept or the usage of the word excuses. This text constitutes a "Plea for Excuses," and it even does so in an exemplary fashion. So Austin excuses himself for not treating the excuse in a serious enough fashion.
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He excuses himself for remaining or for leaving his audience in igno- rance on the subject of what is meant by "to excuse oneself. " And this at the moment when (performative contradiction or not), having begun by excusing himself, by pretending to do so, or rather by pretending to pretend to do so, he undertakes to excuse himself for not treating the subject of the excuse. He must, nevertheless, know enough about it, he must presuppose enough on the subject of what his audience knows and understands about it in advance, in so-called ordinary language (which is, moreover, the real subject of this essay), to declare that he will not treat it--even as he introduces it. Will he have treated it? Perhaps. It is for the reader to judge and for the addressee to decide. It is like the scene of writing of a postcard whose virtual addressee would in the future have to decide whether or not he or she will receive it and whether it is indeed to him or to her that it will have been addressed, in the singular or the plural. The signature is left to the initiative, to the responsibility, to the discretion of the other. Get to work. One will sign, if one signs, at the moment of arrival at destination, rather than at the origin, at the moment of reading rather than of writing. (As for the hypothesis according to which Austin as well and already would have allowed himself to get enclosed in a "performative contradic- tion," him without whom we would not even have been able to formu- late a suspicion in this regard, permit us to smile at it along with his ghost. As if it were possible to escape all performative contradiction! And as if it were possible to exclude that an Austin would have had a little fun illustrating this inevitable trap! )
Now, it is not unthinkable that, in Allegories of Reading (a book published just before or even while the texts of Aesthetic Ideology were being prepared), de Man's title "Excuses (Confessions)" also presents the excuses and confessions of de Man himself, if I can put it that way, on some subject or another, and that he played at this scene without playing, that he pretended to play at it, apropos of Rousseau's Confessions and Re^veries, and perhaps, for example (this is only an ex- ample), inasmuch as he only "introduced" it, as Austin said, without really treating it--neither apropos of Rousseau nor in general.
I will add two subtitles to my title, namely, "machine" and "textual event. " These are words de Man uses in "Excuses (Confessions). " I will thus propose that we interrogate together, at least obliquely, the use of these words, machine and textual event, in Allegories of Reading. Their use as well as their supposed meaning. My hypothesis is that de Man reinvents and signs these words, in a certain way, even as he leads
us, if we can still put it that way, toward the "thinking of materiality" that comes to light in Aesthetic Ideology. The coherent use, the perfor- mative inaugurality of these words (machine and textual event), their conceptual effects and the formalization that will follow, in semantics and beyond semantics, this is what will affect in a necessary fashion all of de Man's writing and thus the destiny of all the other words he put to work. For example, but these are only examples, despite their fre- quent occurrence in this book from 1979, the words deconstruction and dissemination. My timid contribution would thus describe only a modest divergence in relation to the gigantic program proposed to us by Tom Cohen, Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski. This displace- ment would remain discreet, micrological, infinitesimal--and literal. Perhaps it will be limited to underscoring "materiality," in place, so to speak, of "matter," then insisting on "thought of materiality," or even "material thought of materiality," in place, if I may put it this way, of "materialist" thought, even within quotation marks.
But we will see what happens when the moment comes.
I
There is a memory, a history, and an archive of confession, a genealogy of confessions: of the word confession, of the rather later Christian in- stitution that bears this name, but also of the works that, in the West, are registered under this title and whose status as works of literature remains to be decided. Augustine and Rousseau, both authors of Confessions, speak more often the language of excuse rather than of pardon or forgiveness. Augustine speaks of the inexcusable (inexcus- abilis), Rousseau of "excusing himself. " I must recall this even though or because, in this context, in the course of his exemplary and from now on canonical reading of Rousseau's Confessions, de Man never speaks of Augustine and of this Christian history. 3 I must make at least some minimal reference to this because the sedimentation in question forms an interior stratum of the very structure of Rousseau's text, of its "textual event. " It is not certain that a purely internal reading can legitimately neglect it, even supposing that the concept of "textual event" (and I remind you that these are de Man's words) leaves stand- ing the distinction between internal and external reading. For my part, I believe that if there is "textual event," this very border would have to be reconsidered.
I don't know if anyone has ever noticed, in this immense archive, that Augustine and Rousseau both confess a theft and both do so in
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book 2 of their Confessions, in a decisive or even determining and para- digmatic place. That is not all: in this archive that is also a confession, both of them confess that, although it was objectively trifling, this theft had the greatest psychical repercussions on their whole lives. Apropos, this apparently insignificant theft was committed by each of them at the precise age of sixteen; apropos, and on top of it all, each of them presents it as a useless theft. Their abusive appropriation did not take aim at the use value of the thing stolen: pears in the case of Saint Augustine, the famous ribbon in the case of Rousseau (presuming that one can know with certainty the use value of a fetishizable thing). Both of them insist on the fact that the use value was null or secondary. Augustine: "For I stole a thing of which I had plenty of my own and of much better quality. Nor did I wish to enjoy that thing which I desired to gain by theft, but rather to enjoy the actual theft and the sin of theft. "4 Rousseau will likewise speak of the trifling value, or even the insignificance, of the ribbon. We will see what fate de Man reserves for what he then calls the "free signifier" of a ribbon become available for a "system of symbolic substitutions (based on encoded significations arbitrarily attributed to a free signifier, the ribbon). "5 Even though, at this point in his itinerary, de Man seems to expose, rather than counter- sign, a psychoanalytic or even self-analytic interpretation of the Lacan- ian type--he speaks of a "general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-analyzing discourse" (ibid. )-- everything seems to indicate that he does in fact consider the ribbon to be a "free signifier," thus indifferent as regards its meanings, like that purloined letter concerning which Lacan said that its content had no importance. I am less sure of this point myself in both cases, as I have shown elsewhere and I will return to it. As you know, the first title de Man thought of giving to this text was "The Purloined Ribbon. "
No more than its immediate use value, Augustine and Rousseau likewise do not covet the exchange value of the stolen object, at least not in the banal sense of the term. It is the very act of stealing that be- comes the object of desire, or the equivalent of its metonymic value for a desire that we are going to talk about. Augustine thus confesses, in book 2 (chapter 4, 9ff. ), the theft of pears. But to whom does he address his confession? In the course of this long confession and the prayer on which it is carried, he addresses the theft itself: "What was it that I, a wretch, loved in you [Quid ego miser in te amavi? ] oh my act of theft [o furtum meum], oh my deed of crime done by night in the sixteenth year of my life, o facinus illud meum nocturnum sexti decimi anni
aetatis meae? " (chapter 6, 12). Augustine himself thus archives his age at the time of the theft. He registers the age he was at the moment of the sin and declares his age to the theft itself. His addressee, the desti- nation of his addressee, his address and his addressee is the theft. He addresses the sin in order to tell it two things, which he thereby ar- chives and consigns: both its date, the date of the event of the theft, and his own age, the age of the thief at the moment of the misdeed. Theft, o theft, my theft (o furtum meum), know that I committed you, that I loved you, like a crime (facinus), theft, I loved you and I perpe- trated you that night when I was sixteen years old.
Rousseau also speaks of his age in direct reference to this theft, at the precise moment when he writes: "this ribbon alone tempted me. I stole it . . . " As always, he speaks of it both to clear himself and to add to his burden of guilt. "My age also should be taken into account. I was scarcely more than a child. Indeed I still was one" (89). That ought to clear him. But he right away adds: "In youth real crimes are even more reprehensible than in riper years. " That ought to aggravate his fault. But he right away adds: "but what is no more than weakness is much less blameworthy, and really my crime amounted to no more than weakness. " He does not say here that he was exactly sixteen years old at the time, but he had pointed it out earlier (I will cite this later) and, moreover, an easy calculation allowed me to deduce without any risk of error that he too was just sixteen years old when, in 1728, dur- ing the summer and fall, he spent three months as a lackey in the house of Mme de Vercellis where the affair of the ribbon took place. 1728: Jean-Jacques, son of Isaac Rousseau, was born in 1712; so he was six- teen years old. Exactly like Augustine. And this theft, which is also confessed in book 2 of the Confessions, was, by Rousseau's own ad- mission, a determining event, a structuring theft, a wound (a trauma, to use the Yale and Cornell neologism), an endless scarring, the repeat- ed access to the experience of guilt and to the writing of the Confessions. And this is true in both cases, even if the experience and the interpreta- tion of guilt appear different, at first glance, in the two cases. As if, through a supplement of fiction in what remains a possible fiction, Rousseau had played at practicing an artifice of composition: he would have invented an intrigue, a narrative knot, as if to knot a ribbon around a basket of pears, a "plot," a dramaturgy destined to inscribe itself in the archive of a new quasi-literary genre, the history of confessions en- titled Confessions, autobiographical stories inaugurated by a theft, each time the paradigmatic and paradisical theft of forbidden fruit or a
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forbidden pleasure. Augustine's Confessions were written before the Catholic sacrament of confession was instituted; those of Rousseau, the converted Protestant, were written after this institution and, more- over, after his abjuration of Calvinism. As if it were a matter for Jean- Jacques of inscribing himself into this great genealogical history of confessions entitled Confessions. The genealogical tree of a more or less literary lineage that would begin with the theft, from some tree, in the literal or the figural sense, of some forbidden fruit. A tree with leaves or a tree without leaves that produced so many leaves of paper, manuscript paper and typing paper. Rousseau would have inscribed his name in the archival economy of a palimpsest, by means of quasi quo- tations drawn from the palimpsestuous and ligneous thickness of a quasi-literary memory: a clandestine or encrypted lineage, a testamen- tary cryptography of confessional narration, the secret of an autobiog- raphy between Augustine and Rousseau, the simulacrum of a fiction right there where both Augustine and Rousseau claim truth, a veracity of testimony that never makes any concessions to the lies of literature (although fiction would not constitute a lie for Rousseau: he explains himself on this score with clarity and acuity in all his refined discourses on the lie, especially in the Fourth Promenade, precisely, where he con- fides to paper the story of the ribbon).
To be sure, before reaching the age of sixteen, Rousseau had already stolen, moreover, he had stolen forbidden fruit, just as Augustine had done. More orthodox than Augustine, he had already stolen apples, rather than pears. He confesses it with delight, lightheartedness, and abundance in book 1 of the Confessions. What is more, he stole con- stantly in his early youth: first asparagus, then apples. He's inex- haustible on the subject, and he insists on his good conscience, up until the theft of the ribbon: since he was punished for all these earlier thefts, he began, I quote, to "voler plus tranquillement qu'auparavant," "to thieve with an easier conscience than before, saying to myself, 'Well, what will happen? I shall be beaten. All right that's what I was made for'" (43) ("Je me disais: qu'en arrivera-t-il enfin? Je serai battu. Soit: je suis fait pour l'e^tre"). As if corporal punishment, physical in- jury, the automatic and justly repaid sanction exonerated him from any guilt, thus from any remorse. He steals more and more, and not only things to eat but also tools, which confirms his feeling of inno- cence. Rousseau, as you know, will have spent his life protesting his in- nocence and thus excusing himself rather than seeking to be forgiven: "Really the theft of these trifles [the master's tools] was quite innocent,
since I only took them to use in his service" (43). The thefts predating the theft of the ribbon when he was sixteen years old engender no feel- ings of guilt; they have no repercussions, there is no common measure with the trauma of the story of the ribbon, at sixteen years old, an episode that is like the credits or the matrix of the Confessions. As is well known, the appropriation of the ribbon was less serious as a theft than as a dissimulating lie. He allowed someone else to be accused, an innocent girl who does not understand what is happening to her: he ac- cused her in order to excuse himself.
I don't know whether there are any archives other than Rousseau's writings (the second book of the Confessions and the Fourth Prome- nade) that give access to this story of the ribbon. If, as I believe, Rousseau was the only testimonial source and the only archivist of the event, every hypothesis is possible (although I will abstain here from making any) regarding a pure and simple invention of the episode of the theft out of a compositional concern (at sixteen years old and in the sec- ond book of his Confessions like the great ancestor of the Confessions, Augustine, with whom, in the ligneous lineage of the same genealogical tree bearing forbidden fruit, it would be a matter of sharing the titles of nobility: the same tree, the same wood, the same paper pulp). A delicate and abyssal problem of conscious or unconscious archivation. De Man does not speak of Augustine. It is true that his project allows him legiti- mately, up to a certain point, to dispense with talking about him. But as for Rousseau, he did read Augustine. And he talks about him. But he does so also, as you will hear, to avoid him. He at least alludes to him, precisely in the same book 2 of his own Confessions. Let us be more precise, since it is a matter of the obscure relations between memory (either mechanical or not), archive, consciousness, the unconscious, and disavowal. Rousseau does not in truth admit that he had read Augustine, Saint Augustine himself, in the text of his great corpus. He recognizes merely that he had nevertheless, without having read it, re- tained many passages from this text. He did not read it but he knew some passages by heart:
"He [an old priest] thought he could floor me with Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory, and the other Fathers, but found to his utter surprise that I could handle all the Fathers as nimbly as he. It was not that I had ever read them. Nor perhaps had he. But I remembered a number of passages out of my Le Sueur [author of a History of the Church and the Empire up to the Year 1000] . . . (70)
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The question remains as to what it means to "know by heart" certain passages cited from a secondary source, and whether the second book of Augustine's Confessions was included there. It all comes down to the faith one can put in a given word, be it a word of avowal or confession.
Another superficial reference to Saint Augustine appears at the end of the Second Promenade. Rousseau briefly names him at that point in order to oppose him. I will not do so here, but one could, "within such limits," reserve a structuring place for this objection and thus for this difference in the archive and the economy of a religious history of con- fession, but as well in the genealogy of autobiographies entitled Con- fessions. The place of the passage, at the end of the Second Promenade, is highly significant. Rousseau has just evoked humanity's "common plot" against him, what he calls the "universal conspiracy [l'accord universel]" of all men against him. 6 Here, then, is an agreement too universal and too "extraordinary to be a mere coincidence. " Not a single accomplice has refused to cooperate with this plot, with this veri- table conjuration, since the failure of just one accomplice would have caused it to fail. Rousseau evokes "human malevolence," a malevo- lence that is so universal that men themselves cannot be responsible for it, only God, only a divine secret: "I cannot help regarding as a divine secret beyond the reach of human reason the plot that I previously saw as nothing but the fruit of human malevolence" (45) ("Je ne puis m'empe^cher de regarder de? sormais comme un de ces secrets du ciel impe? ne? trables a` la raison humaine la me^me oeuvre que je n'envisageois jusqu'ici que comme un fruit de la me? chancete? des hommes. ") This "oeuvre" (translated as "plot"), this fact, these crimes, this conjura- tion, this misdeed of men's sworn [conjure? e] will would thus not de- pend on the will of men. It would be a trade secret of God, a secret im- penetrable to human reason. For such a work of evil, only heaven can answer. But since one cannot accuse heaven any more than human malevolence of such an extraordinary work of evil, of this "universal conspiracy . . . too extraordinary to be a mere coincidence," thus of the necessity of a machination, Rousseau must then at the same time turn toward God and put blind trust in God, in the secret of God: beyond evil and beyond the machination of which he accuses him. It is at this point that he makes a brief allusion to Saint Augustine in order to oppose him. In this last paragraph of the Second Promenade, you will notice the at least apparent de-Christianization of Augustine and of Rousseau's Confessions:
I do not go so far as Saint Augustine, who would have been content to be damned if such had been the will of God. My resignation is of a less disinterested kind perhaps [Rousseau thus confesses that his confessions obey an economy, however subtle or sublime it may be], but its origin is no less pure and I believe it is more worthy of the perfect Being whom I adore. God is just; his will is that I should suffer, and he knows my innocence [this takes us to the other extreme from Augustine, whose Confessions are made, in principle, so as to beg pardon for a confessed fault--God knows I am a sinner--whereas Rousseau confesses every- thing only so as to excuse himself and proclaim his radical innocence; at least at first glance, this will already mark the difference between the theft of the pears and the theft of the ribbon]. That is what gives me confidence. My heart and my reason cry out that I shall not be dis- appointed. Let men and fate do their worst, we must learn to suffer in silence, everything will find its proper place in the end and my turn will come sooner or later. (45)
This "sooner or later," which signs the last words of the Second Promenade, is extraordinary--like other "last words" that are waiting for us: "everything will find its proper place in the end and my turn will come sooner or later. " "Sooner or later": this patience of the virtual stretches time beyond death. It promises the survival of the work, but also survival by the work as self-justification and faith in redemption-- not only my justification but the justification of men and of heaven, of God whose order and indisputable justice will return. This act of faith, this patience, this passion of faith comes to seal in some way the virtu- al time of the work, of une oeuvre that will operate by itself. The work will accomplish its work of work, son oeuvre d'oeuvre beyond its sig- natory and without his living assistance, whatever may be the time re- quired, whatever may be the time to come; for time itself no longer counts in the survival of this "sooner or later. " It little matters the time that this will take, time is given, thus it no longer exists, it no longer costs anything, and since it no longer costs anything, it is graciously given in exchange for the labor of the work that operates all by itself, in a quasi-machine-like fashion, virtually, and thus without the au- thor's work: as if, contrary to what is commonly thought, there were a secret affinity between grace and machine, between the heart and the automatism of the marionette, as if the excusing machine as writ- ing machine and machine for establishing innocence worked all by it- self. This would be Rousseau's grace but also his machine whereby he
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pardons himself in advance. He excuses himself by giving himself in advance the time needed and that he therefore annuls in a "sooner or later" that the work bears like a machine for killing time and redeem- ing the fault, a fault that seems therefore only apparent, whether this appearance be the malevolence of men or the secret of heaven. Sooner or later, grace will operate in the work, by the work of the work at work, in a machine-like fashion. Rousseau's innocence will shine forth. Not only will he be forgiven, like his enemies themselves, but there will have been no fault [il n'y aura pas eu de mal]. Not only will he excuse himself, but he will have been excused. And he will have excused.
Apropos of this extraordinary machine of the future (namely, a machine that by itself, in a machine-like fashion, overturns the machi- nation, the conjuration of all those who would have conspired against Rousseau, of all those enemies who would have universally sworn his demise), apropos also of this allusion to Augustine at the end of the Second Promenade, in a context that de Man no doubt, and perhaps rightly, considered "hors de propos," extrinsic to his "propos," I would like to evoke the beginning of the Fourth Promenade. Allusion is made there to the theft of the ribbon, to the lie that followed it, and to the story of the one whom he will later call, in the same Promenade, "poor Marion. " But I would also like to recognize or see get put in place there a kind of machine that articulates among themselves events of a kind that ought to resist any mechanization, any economy of the machine, namely, oaths, acts of sworn faith: jurer, conjurer, abjurer, to swear, to conjure, to abjure or forswear.
I will first underscore the act of swearing (swearing before heaven in order to proclaim his innocence). Very close by, the word "de? lire" (folly, "irresponsible folly") will have the charge of naming above all the extraordinary coincidence between, on the one hand, the irra- tionality of the machine that is irresponsible or beyond my control, the mechanism that caused me to do evil, and, on the other hand, the ab- solute sincerity, the authentic innocence of my intentions. On the one hand, the extreme self-accusation for an infinite crime, which is incal- culable in its actual and virtual effects (the "sooner or later" of these effects, conscious or unconscious, known or unknown), the coinci- dence or the unheard-of compatibility between this feeling of properly infinite guilt, which is confessed as such, and, on the other hand, the just as unshakable certainty in the absolute, virgin, intact innocence, which will "sooner or later" appear, the declared absence of any "repentance," of any "regret," of any "remorse" for the fault, the theft, and the lie.