No More Learning

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.
But taken for myself alone ("Moi seul": Rousseau insists on both his solitude and his isolation, forever, without example, without prece- dent or sequel, without imitator), the same oath also commits, begin- ning at the origin, all others yet to come. It is a "without example" that, as always, aims to be exemplary and therefore repeatable. It will not be long before Rousseau apostrophizes others: in a defiant tone, he calls them to imitation, to compassion, to community, to sharing what cannot be shared, as if he were appealing to them not only to judge whether nature did well in breaking the mold in which she formed him, but also to see to it that this mold be not forever broken. This ap- peal to others and to the future belongs to the same time, to the same moment as the "myself alone," the only portrait "that exists and that will probably ever exist. " This is what the pre-beginning will have said, as we will see in a moment. "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. " This "probably" says the aleatory, the non- probable, improbable space or time, thus delivered over to uncertainty or to the wager, virtual space or time, the incalculability of the absolute perhaps in which the contradiction between the without example and the exemplary will be able to insinuate itself, worm itself, and survive, not surmount itself but survive and endure as such, without solution but without disappearing right away:
Eternal Being, let the numberless legion of my fellow men gather round me, and hear my confessions. Let them groan at my depravities, and blush for my misdeeds. [So everyone should be ashamed and confess with him, for him, like him, provided that one read and understand him. ] Let each of them in turn reveal his heart at the foot of Thy throne with equal sincerity [what counts, therefore, is not the objective truth, referred to the outside, but veracity referred to the inside, to the internal feeling, to the adequation between what I say and what I think, even if what I think is false] and then let any man say if he dares: "I was better than he" ["je fus meilleur que cet homme-la`," a formula one finds very frequently in Rousseau].
Apropos of this act of sworn faith, in the final form of the work this beginning is only a quasi opening. It is preceded by another little page, still shorter and without title, something like an avant-propos, a before- the-first-word that would also call for an infinite analysis. I will have to be content, within such limits, with signaling one or two little things. This before-the-first-word of the Confessions is found only in the
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Geneva manuscript, as it is called, and it is in a different handwriting than that of the Confessions (the handwriting is larger and looser says the editor of the Ple? iade edition in a note that in effect concerns the material body of the archive or the ribbon of textual events). This before-the-first-word announces, repeats, or anticipates the first words of the Confessions, to be sure. One reads there in fact, right away with the first words, the challenge whose hubris I have just recalled: "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. " But in the logic of this challenge, the little phrase is followed by something else altogether that will not appear on the actual first page, which resembles it in many other ways. The following sentence makes an appeal to every reader to come, sooner or later. It asks whoever might be in a situation to do so not to destroy this document, this archive, this subjectile, the support of this confession--literally a notebook, a "cahier. "
Here, then, for once, one time only, is something that precedes and conditions the confession. Here is something that comes before the vir- tually infinite oath that assures the performative condition of truth. What precedes and conditions the performative condition of the Confessions is thus another performative oath or rather another perfor- mative appeal conjuring, beseeching others to swear an oath, but this time regarding a body, a "cahier," this here "cahier" of this here body in a single copy, a single exemplaire: unique and authentic. This copy or exemplaire can be reproduced, of course, but it is first of all reducible to a single original and authentic copy, without other example. This body of paper, this body of destructible, effaceable, vulnerable paper, is ex- posed to accident, mutilation, falsification, or revenge. Rousseau is going to conjure (that is his word, for this appeal is another performa- tive, another recourse to sworn faith, in the name "of my misfortunes," "by my misfortunes," Rousseau says), but he is going to conjure also "in the name of all humankind. " He is going to conjure, that is, beseech men unknown to him, men of the present and of the future, not to "an- nihilate," sooner or later, his work. This "cahier," which he confides to future generations, is at once "unique" and, in that it is an original archive, it is the "one certain monument. " This document, this "cahier" is a "monument" (a sign destined to warn and to recall in the form of a thing exposed in the world, a thing that is at the same time natural and artifactual, a stone, amber, or another substance). Here is this appeal. It comes just after the first sentence, the one that is more or less equivalent to the first paragraph of the Confessions:
Whoever you are whom my destiny or my confidence has made the arbiter of the fate of this "cahier" [I underscore the deictic, "this here cahier," which functions only if the "cahier" in question has not been destroyed, already destroyed], I beseech you [je vous conjure] by my misfortunes, by your entrails [it would be necessary to analyze this se- ries of things in the name of which he swears and guarantees this act of swearing and conjuring: he adjures, he swears by calling upon others to swear with him, he conjures/beseeches them], and in the name of the whole human race [here, the guarantor in the name of which Rousseau swears, conjures, adjures, and calls on others not to abjure is almost in- finite: after my misfortunes and your entrails, it is the "sooner of later" of the whole human race, past, present, and to come] not to annihilate an unique and useful work, which can serve as the first piece of com- parison for the study of men, a study that is certainly yet to be begun [so, although it is unique and concerns me alone, it is exemplary for the study of men in general, a study to come for which this document will be the instituting arche-archive, something like the first man caught in absolute amber], and not to remove from the honor of my memory the only certain document [I underscore "only" because if this monumental document is vulnerable, it is because it is the only one and irreplaceable] of my character that has not been disfigured by my enemies. (3)22
This page was published only in 1850, based on a copy of the Moultou manuscript, as it is called, that was made by Du Peyrou in 1780. By its inspiration, it is comparable to the many analogous and well-known things Rousseau wrote when he began to fear that E? mile had fallen into the hands of the Jesuits, who would have sought to mu- tilate it. What is very quickly termed his persecution complex was fix- ated, as you know and as many texts attest, on the fate of the manu- scripts or the original copies, on the authentic arche-archive, in some fashion (Rousseau Juge de Jean Jaques, 1772, Histoire du pre? ce? dent e? crit, 1776). Concerning this whole problematic, I refer you to the splendid and well-known chapters that Peggy Kamuf devoted to Rous- seau, to this Rousseau, in her Signature Pieces. 23
The end of this adjuration explicitly announces the time when, sooner or later, none of those who are called upon to swear, adjure, conjure in this way will still be alive: "Finally, if you yourself are one of these implacable enemies, cease being so with regard to my ashes and do not carry over your cruel injustice to the time when neither you nor I will any longer be alive. "
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The logic of the argument consists, to be sure, in calling on others to save this "cahier," to promise not to destroy it, but not only for the future; rather, in truth and first of all, so that they may now bear wit- ness to themselves, in the present, of their generosity, more precisely, so that they may bear witness that they have been able to forswear vengeance--thus that they have been able to substitute a movement of understanding, compassion, reconciliation, or even of forgiveness for a logic of retaliation and revenge. Even though, Rousseau suggests, everything is still to be decided for the future, in the future when nei- ther you nor I will still be there, you can nevertheless right away today have the advantage, realize a benefit, a profit at present, from the antici- pation now of this future perfect; you could right now look yourself in the eye, love yourself, and honor yourself, beginning at this very in- stant, for what you will have done tomorrow for the future--that is, for me, for this here "cahier" that by itself tells the first truth of man. That is the present chance offered to you already today, if you read me and understand me, if you watch over this manuscript, this "cahier": you will thus be able to honor yourself, love yourself, bear witness to yourself that you will have been good "at least once. " This offered chance is also a wager, a logic and an economy of the wager: by wager- ing on the future, for the future of this "cahier," you will win at every throw, since you draw an immediate benefit, that of bearing witness in your own eyes as to your goodness, that of having thereby a good image of yourself right away, without waiting, and of enjoying it no matter what happens in the future. Logic and economy of a wager whose import cannot be exaggerated for all our calculations and our whole relation to time, to the future and to survival, to the work [l'oeu- vre] and to the work of time. De Man does not analyze this logic of the wager in Rousseau.
He did so, mutatis mutandis, apropos of Pascal, in "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion" (I take advantage of this remark to recall the superb essay that Geoffrey Bennington has devoted to this reading, precisely around a certain machine: "Aberrations: De Man [and] the Machine"). 24
A least once, launches Rousseau's apostrophe, here is the chance I offer you. I beseech you to seize it. For once at least, you will not have been guilty, you will be able to forgive yourself. Better than that, for once at least, you will not even have virtually to excuse yourself or ask for forgiveness for having done wrong, for having been "wicked and vindictive. " This end of the before-the-first-word is sculpted by the multiplicity of these temporal modes (almost all of them are there) and
by all the possible blows of this "at least once" that plays on all these virtualities of time, of the "sooner or later" of yesterday and tomorrow: ". . . to the time when neither you nor I will any longer be alive; so that you may at least once bear the noble witness to yourself of having been generous and good when you could have been wicked and vindictive-- if it is the case that the evil one bears a man who has never done any [myself] can be called vengeance. "
Apropos of this avant-propos, we could have devoted an abyssal development to this archivation, to the exceptional treatment that this before-the-first-word, this little page of the Geneva manuscript, will have undergone. On the one hand, the sheet was cut (the editors of the Confessions in the Ple? iade edition write: "the sheet has been imperfect- ly cut about halfway up" [1230]). On the other hand, right on the cut sheet, one can see "traces" (once again, this is the editors' term) of a dozen additional lines that have been effaced, but that remain as ves- tiges of the effacement. They remain, but as illegible traces ("The page must have had another dozen lines whose traces can be seen, but the sheet has been imperfectly cut about halfway up"). This confirms the vulnerability of the effaceable document. The archive is as precarious as it is artificial, and precisely in that very place where the signatory puts on guard, appeals, beseeches, warns against the risk of whatever might come along, as he says, "to annihilate this work. " Even if he is the one who erased this dozen additional lines and cut the sheet, this demonstrates a priori that he was right to worry: the archive document is transformable, alterable, even destructible or, in a word, falsifiable. The authentic integrity is, in its very body, in its proper and unique body, threatened in advance. Sooner or later, virtually, the worse can happen to it. Although it is presented as the only "certain monument," the little document could have not been there. After these contingent ups and downs, these apre`s-coups, these recompositions, here it is now at the head of the Confessions, before the exordium and the self- presentation in the form of the exemplary promise addressed at once to you, "Eternal Being," and to all of you, "the crowd of my fellow men. " The "I beseech you" not to "annihilate" this "cahier" is not only a before-the-first-word; it is the performative eve of the first per- formative, an arche-performative before the performative. Younger or older than all the others, it concerns the support and the archive of the confession, the very body of the event, the archival and auto-deictic body that will have to consign all the textual events engendered as and by the Confessions, the Re^veries, Rousseau Juge de Jean Jaques, or other
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writings in the same vein. Arche-performative, the arche-event of this sequence adjures one to save the body of the inscriptions, the "cahier" without which the revelation of the truth itself, however uncondi- tional, truthful, sincere it may be in its promised manifestation, would have no chance of coming about and would be in its turn compro- mised. Perhaps we have here, apropos (but this would deserve long and careful analyses), a historical difference between Augustine's Con- fessions and those of Rousseau, whatever Christian filiation they no doubt share, but in a quite different way. Why is it so difficult to imag- ine this archival protocol at the beginning of Augustine's Confessions? This question would require that we articulate many problematics of different styles among themselves.
B. We were in the process of reciting the two occurrences of Rous- seau's s'excuser in the last paragraph of the second book of the Con- fessions. The second occurrence of the "I excused myself" comes sever- al lines after the first. After having said "I would not fulfill the purpose of this book if I did not reveal my inner sentiments as well, and if I feared to excuse myself by means of what conforms to the truth," he continues:
Never was deliberate wickedness further from my intention than at that cruel moment. When I accused that poor girl, it is strange but true that my friendship for her was the cause. She was present in my thoughts, and I excused myself on the first object that presented itself [je m'excusai sur le premier objet qui s'offrit]. I accused her of having done what I in- tended to do myself. I said that she had given the ribbon to me because I meant to give it to her. (88)
Despite the proximity in the text, despite the semantic or grammati- cal analogy, this "I excused myself" does not refer to the same object or the same time as the first occurrence ("if I feared to excuse myself"). The first occurrence refers to an ulterior event, the last in time since it is a matter of excusing oneself by writing or while writing the Confessions. The second occurrence refers to an earlier time: what Rousseau did, that day, by accusing Marion. In other words, Rousseau does not want to fear to excuse himself in the Confessions by telling how and why he already excused himself, so many years earlier, at the time of the theft of the ribbon. Without forcing things too much, one could perhaps say that the first "excuse oneself" (the first event in the order of the text and according to the time of the Confessions) is a first "excuse oneself" on the subject of the second "excuse oneself," even
though this second "excuse oneself" refers, in the order of real events, as we say, to an anterior or first moment. Unlike the first, the second "excuse oneself" recalls a past anterior to the writing of the Confessions. Rousseau first of all excused himself by means of the first object that offered itself and he must now, and in the future, without fear, excuse himself on the subject of this past excuse. He must not fear to excuse himself on the subject of a fault that consisted in excusing himself by lying. And he has, moreover, just recognized that he risks being less convincing with excuse number two (in the Confessions) than excuse number one (at the moment of the crime).
VI
Having arrived at this point, I submit to you in conclusion a few hy- potheses or interpretations whose performative imprudence I assume, apropos of the extraordinary event constituted by de Man's reading of Rousseau, a reading to which I above all wanted to pay tribute by rec- ognizing everything I owe to it. It is as a testimony of gratitude that I believe I should offer here a few supplementary footnotes.
De Man does not treat this couple of excuses, this excuse on the subject of an excuse, as I am in the process of doing. I will nevertheless venture to assert, while attempting to demonstrate (and I am not sure of being able to do this today), that his whole interpretation fits be- tween these two times, which are also two events and two regimes of the "excuse oneself. " Not, as seems to be the most manifest appear- ance and as he says and wants to say himself, between the excuses of the Confessions and those of the Re^veries, but between the two times of the excuse already in the Confessions itself. Approaching the second phase of his reading, the one that interests him the most, he declares, moreover:
We have, of course, omitted from the reading the other sentence in which the verb "excuser" is explicitly being used, again in a somewhat unusual construction; the oddity of "que je craignisse de m'excuser" is repeated in the even more unusual locution: "Je m'excusai sur le pre- mier objet qui s'offrit" ("I excused myself upon the first thing that of- fered itself," as one would say "je me vengeai" or "je m'acharnai sur le premier objet qui s'offrit. " . . . )25 Because Rousseau desires Marion, she haunts his mind and her name is pronounced almost unconsciously, as if it were a slip, a segment of the discourse of the other . . . the sentence is phrased in such a way as to allow for a complete disjunction between
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Rousseau's desires and interests and the selection of this particular name. . . . She [Marion] is a free signifier, metonymically related to the part she is made to play in the subsequent system of exchanges and sub- stitutions. She is, however, in an entirely different situation than the other free signifier, the ribbon, which also just happened to be ready-at- hand, but which is not in any way itself the object of a desire [I men- tioned my reservations on this subject earlier, but de Man goes a little further]. . . . But if her nominal presence is a mere coincidence, then we are entering an entirely different system in which such terms as desire, shame, guilt, exposure, and repression no longer have any place.
In the spirit of the text, one should resist any temptation to give any significance whatever to the sound "Marion. " For it is only if the act that initiated the entire chain, the utterance of the sound "Marion," is truly without any conceivable motive that the total arbitrariness of the action becomes the most effective, the most efficaciously performative excuse of all. (288-89)
Here is a disarticulatable articulation of allusions to contingency, to the "almost unconscious," not only to the discourse of the other, but to the "fragment of the discourse of the other," to the discourse of the other as fragmented discourse, therefore mutilated, half-effaced, redis- tributed, deconstructed, and disseminated as if by a machine. This dis- articulated articulation of allusions is relayed, in the whole text, by a number of analogous motifs: the machine, the arbitrary, mutilation, prosthesis, and so forth.
I do not find Rousseau's constructions as "strange" as de Man twice says they are; I have explained why on the subject of the expletive added by de Man in French and transmuted in advance into a pure and simple negation in English. As for "sur le premier objet qui s'offrit," the thing is very clear in French even if de Man is right to say that this may in fact make one think of "je me vengeai" or "je m'acharnai sur le premier objet"--yes, or as well, I would say, one might think of "a` propos, je me pre? cipitais sur le premier objet qui s'offrit," "a`-propos, I leaped on the first object that presented itself," "je me jetai sur le pre- mier objet qui s'offrit a` propos," "I threw myself on the first object that presented itself apropos. "
It would be necessary to reread together, step by step, de Man's whole text. Since that is not possible, here are some hypotheses or interpretations.
In the first place, de Man also analyzes Rousseau's text as "the first
object that offered itself. " He constantly supposes (a number of his for- mulations show this clearly) that the text (here apropos of s'excuser) is exemplary, that is, at once singular (therefore an irreplaceable event) and yet, according to the very machine described here, valid for every text--and thus, as de Man said in the preceding chapter on the Social Contract, for everything that "we call text. " The performative formu- lation of this "we call text" is assumed as such--and I want to reread it. The phrase appears just after the passage in which it is a question of the "theft," of stealing "from the text the very meaning to which, ac- cording to this text, we are not entitled":
We call text any entity that can be considered from such a double per- spective: as a generative, open-ended, non-referential grammatical sys- tem and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence. The "definition" of the text also states the impossibility of its existence and prefigures the allegorical narratives of this impossibility. (270)
I commented on and interpreted these words "We call text" (text in italics) and these quotation marks around definition in Me? moires for Paul de Man. 26 If what is said here about what we "call" text (fol- lowed by a "definition" in quotation marks) is valid for every text, ex- emplarily and metonymically (metonymically is my addition; in any case it is not metaphorically, for de Man is explaining here the dis- placement of the metaphor, including the metaphor of the text, espe- cially of the text as body, into something else), then it is valid as well for de Man's text, which includes itself, and by itself, in what he "calls" and "defines" in this fashion. I do not think de Man would have rejected this consequence: his writings can and should be read as also politico-autobiographical texts, a long, machine-like performa- tive, at once confessional and apologetic, with all the traits that he himself, in an exemplary way, trains on this object that offers itself and that is called, for example, and apropos, Rousseau. (It is true that even if there were, for de Man as for Rousseau, other objects on other stages, one may wonder why Rousseau gave such emphasis and privi- lege to this theft and this perjury, when he was sixteen years old, in the genesis of the Confessions; and why de Man hounds him, s'acharne sur lui, so lovingly, as if he were after him in this trace. )
Without any doubt, many passages would demonstrate, in their very letter, that Rousseau's text, however singular it may be, serves here as exemplary index. Of what? Of the text in general, or more rigorously
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(and this makes a difference that counts here) of "what we call text," as de Man says playing with the italics and with the "definition" that he gives by putting the word definition in quotation marks. These are literal artifices that mark at the same time (1) that de Man assumes the performative and decisional character of the responsibility he takes in this appellation and this "definition" and (2) that one must be atten- tive to every detail of the letter, the literality of the letter defining here the place of what de Man will call materiality. The literality of the let- ter situates in fact this materiality not so much because it would be a physical or sensible (aesthetic) substance, or even matter, but because it is the place of prosaic resistance (cf. "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" in Aesthetic Ideology, where de Man concludes with these words: "prosaic materiality of the letter") to any organic and aesthetic totalization, to any aesthetic form. And first of all, I would say for my part, a resistance to every possible reappropriation. Perhaps in a fash- ion that is analogous (notice I do not say identical) to that "fonction re? fe? rentielle" whose "trap" would be "inevitable," according to the phrase of de Man's that Andrzej Warminski inscribes in epigraph to his luminous introduction to Aesthetic Ideology. The materiality in ques- tion--and one must gauge the importance of this irony or paradox--is not a thing; it is not something (sensible or intelligible); it is not even the matter of a body. As it is not something, as it is nothing and yet it works, cela oeuvre, this nothing therefore operates, it forces, but as a force of resistance. It resists both beautiful form and matter as substan- tial and organic totality. This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, it seems to me, matter, but materiality. Assuming the risk of this formula, although de Man does not do so himself, I would say that it is a materiality without matter, which, moreover, allies itself very well with a formality without form (in the sense of the beautiful synthetic and totalizing form) and without formalism. De Man, it seems to me, in his thinking of materiality, is no more materialist than he is formal- ist. To be sure, on occasion he uses these two words to accentuate and accompany a Kantian movement, an original reading of Kant. At the end of "Kant's Materialism," he speaks of an "absolute, radical for- malism," and while taking all possible precautions regarding this per- formative nomination and appellation, regarding this act of calling, he adds: "To parody Kant's stylistic procedure of dictionary definition: the radical formalism that animates aesthetic judgment in the dynam- ics of the sublime is what is called materialism" (128). I have added emphasis to suggest that this "what is called" gives a good measure of
the audacity in this materialist interpretation of the sublime. But de Man does not himself assume, it seems to me, a philosophical or metaphysical position that one might complacently call materialism. This force of re- sistance without material substance derives from the dissociative, dis- membering, fracturing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter. 27 To a letter whose dissociative and in- organic, disorganizing, disarticulating force affects not only nature but the body itself--as organic and organized totality. From this point of view, even though the word matter is not pronounced, nor even the word materiality, this thinking of the materiality of the letter already silently marks the chapter of Allegories of Reading that we are in the process of reading and that attributes a determinant role to dismember- ment, mutilation, disfigurations, and so forth, as well as to the contin- gency of literal signifiers. The textual event is inseparable from this for- mal materiality of the letter. I say formal materiality or literality because what one might call in quotation marks or italics "materialism"--it would be better to say the re-noun, the re-nomination, the re-calling of materiality--requires a consequent reckoning with formality. You heard it at the end of the text "Kant's Materialism. "
Valid for what de Man calls text, this becomes just as pertinent for his text itself, this very text of his--which thus becomes a case of what he is talking about and does not fail to present itself in that fashion, more or less ironically. Just one example. It says something about the values of machine, mechanicity, and formality toward which I will then turn, after having left under construction, an endless task, the project not only of showing the politico-performative autobiographicity of this text of de Man's, but of reapplying to it in a quasi-machine-like way what he himself writes on one of the first objects that offered it- self, namely, the text of Rousseau--and the texts of a few others. If the confession of the Confessions, even after one distinguishes it as a mo- ment of truth from the apologetic text of the Re^veries, cannot be a text of pure knowledge, if it includes an irresistible and irreducible perfor- mativity in its cognitive structure, well then, likewise, the performativi- ty of the de Manian text prohibits one from reducing it to an operation of pure knowledge. Here, then, is an exemplary passage: apropos of Rousseau's text, its object is the text and language in general, in its law, in a law that is itself without individual reference or application (as grammar of political law--the notion of grammar is to be understood with reference to the trivium and the quadrivium, as Warminski shows very clearly in his indispensable study). This grammar of the law is a
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machine of the letter (gramma), a letter machine, a writing machine, a typewriter. Exemplarity in general is this difficult marriage between the event and the typewriter. De Man writes: "The machine is like [I would be tempted to insist heavily, perhaps beyond what de Man would him- self have wanted, on this word like that marks an analogy, the "like" of a resemblance or of an "as if," rather than an "as"] the grammar of the text when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element without which no text can be generated" (294).
It is not said that the machine is a grammar of the text. Nor that the grammar of the text is a machine. One is like the other once grammar is isolated from rhetoric (performative rhetoric or cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, according to another distinction). The machine is determined on the basis of grammar and vice versa. Isolated from its rhetoric, as suspension of reference, grammar is purely formal. This is valid in general: no text can be produced without this formal, gram- matical, or machine-like element. No text and no language. De Man right away adds, speaking of language after having spoken of text, and here they amount to the same thing: "There can be no use of language which is not, within a certain perspective, thus radically formal, i. e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be concealed by aes- thetic, formalistic delusions. The machine not only generates, but also suppresses, and not always in an innocent or balanced way" (ibid. )
We see here, already (but dare I say already without teleological il- lusion? ), the insistence on the formal, on formality, in truth on gram- matical or machine-like formality, in opposition to aesthetic illusions but also formalist illusions in the philosophy of art or the theory of lit- erature. This is a gesture and a strategy that de Man deploys in a sys- tematic way in Aesthetic Ideology.
My only ambition would thus be, on the basis of this text from Allegories of Reading, to sketch out a kind of deduction, in the quasi- philosophical sense, of the concept of materiality (without matter). It is not present here in that name but I believe one can recognize all its traits. However, in the texts gathered under the title Aesthetic Ideology, this concept will occupy in that name a thematic place.
Despite the association of materiality and the machine, why are we not dealing here with a mechanistic materialism? No more than with a dialectical materialism? It is because the de Manian concept of materi- ality is not, dare I say to his credit, a philosophical concept, the meta- physical concept of matter; it is, it seems to me, the name, the artifac- tual nomination of an artifactual figure that I will not dissociate from
the performative signature I spoke of a moment ago. It is a sort of in- vention by de Man, one could say, almost a fiction produced in the movement of a strategy that is at once theoretical and autobiographical and that would need to be analyzed at length. To say it is a fiction (in the de Manian sense) does not mean that it is without theoretical value or philosophical effect, or that it is totally arbitrary; but the choice of the word materiality to designate "this" is in part arbitrary, in part necessary in relation to an entire historical space (the history of philoso- phy and, for example, of the diverse possibilities of philosophies of mat- ter, the history of literary theory, political history, ideological camps, and so forth), in short, to a contextualized world, to a worldwide con- text in which de Man is calculating his strategy. And placing his bets.
To attempt the deduction I've just described on the basis of this text, I will take (too quickly) into account the different predicates (which are so many predicaments, de Man might say, who liked this word a lot), the different predicating traits that constitute inseparably and irreducibly this concept of materiality. Without having yet been named, this concept of materiality, in Allegories of Reading and no doubt in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, plays a role that I will not call organizing, for obvious reasons, but rather trenchant, decisive. (I am insisting on the concept of materiality and not of matter. This is not easily said and I leave intact the problem of the choice of this word ma- teriality that brings with it a high essentializing risk where it should ex- clude, in its interpretation, any semantic implication of matter, of sub- stratum or instance called "matter" and any reference to some content named matter; it risks thereby meaning only "effect of matter" without matter. ) This concept of materiality determines the concept of textual event that, as you recall, is named as such at least twice, and twice as- sociated with what de Man, for his part, calls in his fashion, but literal- ly and often in this text, "deconstruction" and "dissemination. "
I will cut out several motifs that are finally indissociable in what is at bottom one and the same perspective, one and the same performa- tive strategy.
1. First of all, the inscription of the textual event--and this will later be one of the traits of the materiality of matter--is a machine-like de- construction of the body proper. This is why I said, using a formula- tion that is not de Man's, that materiality becomes a very useful gener- ic name for all that resists appropriation. De Man writes, moreover, from another point of view, in "Promises (Social Contract)": "There is nothing legitimate about property, but the rhetoric of property confers
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the illusion of legitimacy" (262). He also analyzes the "fascination of . . . proper names" in Proust (ibid. ). Materiality is not the body, at least the body proper as organic totality. This machine-like deconstruc- tion is also a deconstruction of metaphor, of the totalizing metaphori- cal model, by a dissociative metonymic structure (a gesture that, I sug- gested, has some affinity with a certain Lacanianism allied with a certain Deleuzianism). The preceding essay on the Social Contract called for "the deconstruction of metaphorical patterns" (255), there where "the attribute of naturalness shifts from the metaphorical totali- ty to the metonymic aggregate" (259). This movement becomes more precise in the essay on the Confessions. In the context of an analysis of the Fourth Promenade, de Man writes, for example: "But precisely because, in all these instances, the metaphor for the text is still the metaphor of text as body (from which a more or less vital part, includ- ing the head, is being severed), the threat [my emphasis] remains shel- tered behind its metaphoricity" (297). When Rousseau is concerned no longer with the text of Tasso or Montesquieu but with the Confessions, then "the metaphor of text as body make[s] way for the more directly threatening alternative of the text as machine" (ibid. ). I underscore threatening: from the preceding text to this one, one passes from the promise to the excuse, to be sure, as from one performative to another, but also from the promise to the threat (fear in the face of a cruel men- ace). As I have tried to show elsewhere,28 this threat is also and already constitutive of any promise, and is not at all, as common sense and the theorists of speech acts would have it, irreducibly opposed to the promise (which, to common sense, may in fact seem to be able to promise only something good: one does not promise something threat- ening; this is what I contest, but we'll not pursue the point here).
On the following page, de Man raises the stakes. To the same men- acing machination of the body proper and its metaphor he adds the "loss of the illusion of meaning":
But in what way are these narratives threatening? As instances of Rousseau's generosity they are . . . more inept than convincing. They seem to exist primarily for the sake of the mutilations they describe. But these actual, bodily mutilations seem, in their turn, to be there more for the sake of allowing the evocation of the machine that causes them than for their own shock value; Rousseau lingers complacently over the de- scription of the machine that seduces him into dangerously close con- tact: "I looked at the metal rolls, my eyes were attracted by their polish. I
was tempted to touch them with my fingers and I moved them with plea- sure over the polished surface of the cylinder" (1036). In the general economy of the Re^verie, the machine displaces all other significations and becomes the raison d'e^tre of the text. Its power of suggestion reach- es far beyond its illustrative purpose, especially if one bears in mind the previous characterization of unmotivated fictional language as "machi- nal. " The underlying structural patterns of addition and suppression as well as the figural system of the text all converge towards it. Barely con- cealed by its peripheral function, the text here stages the textual machine of its own constitution and performance, its own textual allegory. The threatening element in these incidents then becomes more apparent. The text as body, with all its implications of substitutive tropes ultimately always retraceable to metaphor, is displaced by the text as machine and, in the process, it suffers the loss of the illusion of meaning. (298)
This loss of the illusion of meaning is also sometimes, as passage from metaphor to metonymy and as fiction, the loss of the illusion of refer- ence: "In fiction thus conceived the 'necessary link' of the metaphor has been metonymized beyond the point of catachresis, and the fiction becomes the disruption of the narrative's referential illusion" (292).
2. The word machine is here singled out, apparently, in the text of Rousseau: "It is certain that neither my judgment, nor my will dictated my reply, but that it was the automatic result [l'effet machinal] of my embarrassment" (1034; quoted by de Man, 294). But the word and the concept of machine are found again, re-elaborated, and redistrib- uted everywhere: in Kleist, Pascal, and already in the Social Contract when Rousseau speaks of what there is "in the wheels of the State" [dans les ressorts de l'E? tat], namely an "equivalent of the principle of inertia in machines" (272). This word-concept machine is thus insepa- rable from motifs of suspended reference, repetition, the threat of mu- tilation, and so forth--and interpretation as the de Manian practice of deconstruction-dissemination.
3. This deconstruction implies a process of de-metaphorization and also, by the same token, of machine-like dis-figuration. Another ex- ample allows one to deduce a third motif of this concept of materiality, namely, a mechanical, machine-like, automatic independence in relation to any subject, any subject of desire and its unconscious, and therefore, de Man doubtless thinks, any psychology or psychoanalysis as such. (This point remains to be discussed: Where is one then to situate the af- fect of desire and especially of threat and cruelty? Is there not a force of
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nondesire in desire, a law of desubjectivation in and as the subject itself? These are so many questions that I would have liked to deploy before this magnificent text, which I find sometimes too Lacanian, sometimes insufficiently Lacanian, in any case insufficiently "psychoanalytic. ")
The deconstruction of the figural dimension is a process that takes place independently of any desire; as such it is not unconscious but mechani- cal, systematic in its performance but arbitrary in its principle, like a grammar. This threatens the autobiographical subject not as the loss of something that once was present and that it once possessed, but as a radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance of any text. (298; emphasis added)
Once again, the term like in the phrase "like a grammar," the status of which phrase can be as difficult to pin down as Lacan's "like a lan- guage": "The unconscious is structured like a language. " As difficult and no doubt very close, even in its implicit protest against psychology-- or against psychoanalysis as psychology, be it that of desire.
Because this deconstruction should be, according to him, indepen- dent of any desire (which, although I can only say it quickly, seems to me both defensible and indefensible, depending on the concept of de- sire one puts to work), de Man goes beyond his first attempts at inter- pretation of the purloined ribbon (the logic of Rousseau's desire for Marion, substitution between Rousseau and Marion, symbolic circula- tion of the ribbon that, as "pure signifier," is substituted for a desire that is itself "desire for substitution," both desires being "governed by the same desire for specular symmetry" and so forth). But because this logic of desire seems to him to be, if not without pertinence, at least unable to account for the textual event, de Man wants to go further. On two occasions, within an interval of two pages, he declares: "This is not the only way, however, in which the text functions" (284) or "But the text offers further possibilities" (286). He then goes from the Confessions to the Re^veries, from the excuse for what happened to the excuse for the writing of the excuse, for the pleasure taken in writing what happened and thus for the pleasure taken in excusing himself.