No More Learning

Like Kleist's marionettes, the machine is both "anti-grav," the anamor- phosis of a form detached from meaning [somewhat like the neutral, anonymous, and insignificant "il y a" in Blanchot and Levinas] and ca- pable of taking on any structure whatever, yet entirely ruthless in its inability to modify its own structural design for nonstructural reasons. The machine is like the grammar of the text when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element without which no text can be gener- ated. There can be no use of language which is not, within a certain per- spective thus radically formal, i. e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be concealed by aesthetic, formalistic delusions. (294; emphasis added)
Why this resemblance ("is like")? And why "ruthless"? Why would a text-machine be ruthless? Not mean but ruthless in its effects, in the suffering it inflicts? What relation is there between the ruthlessness of this "text-machine" and what de Man calls, at the end of the trajectory, the "textual event"? This is another way of repeating my initial ques- tion: how is one to think together the machine and the event, a machine- like repetition and what happens? What happens to what? To whom?
De Man speaks only of excuse, never, or almost never, of "pardon" or "forgiveness. " He seems to exclude the specific problem of forgive- ness from his field of analysis (and first of all because both Rousseau and Austin, who are here the guiding references, also speak massively of excuse rather than forgiveness). Unless he considers, perhaps like Rousseau and like Austin, that whatever one says about the excuse is valid as well for forgiveness. That remains to be seen. I have two hy- potheses in this regard.
First hypothesis: de Man sees no essential difference between for- giveness and excuse. This argument can be made but it leaves aside
Typewriter Ribbon 307
308 Jacques Derrida
enormous historical and semantic stakes. The very possibility of this distinction is not problematized. I therefore set it aside.
The other hypothesis would concern as much Austin as de Man: the only pragmatic or performative modality that interests them is what happens on the side of the one who has committed the misdeed, never on the other side, the side of the victim. What they want to analyze is the act that consists in saying "I apologize" rather than "I ask forgive- ness," "I beg your pardon," and, above all, "I forgive" or "I pardon. " Rather than the possibility of forgiving or even of excusing, both of them are interested only in what one does when one says, in the perfor- mative mode, "excuse me" and more precisely "I apologize. " They be- lieve they can consider only the modality of the excuse and that the rest is beyond the limit of the field of their analysis.
So, unless I am mistaken, de Man almost never speaks of forgive- ness, except in passing, as if it were no big deal, in two passages. One concerns what is, he says, "easy to forgive" since "the motivation for the theft becomes understandable. " But here as well, de Man keeps to the side of the one who excuses himself and thinks that it's "easy to forgive":
The allegory of this metaphor, revealed in the "confession" of Rousseau's desire for Marion, functions as an excuse if we are willing to take the desire at face value. If it is granted that Marion is desirable, or Rousseau ardent to such an extent, then the motivation for the theft becomes understandable and easy to forgive. He did it all out of love for her, and who would be a dour enough literalist to let a little property stand in the way of young love? (284)
The other occurrence of the word forgiveness is found in a passage that carries the only reference to Heidegger, whose designation of truth as revelation-dissimulation remains determinant in this whole strategy. De Man inscribes in fact his deconstructive gesture and his interpreta- tion of dissemination--these two insistent words, deconstruction and dissemination, are everywhere and foregrounded in this essay--in a highly ambiguous double proximity: proximity to a certain Lacanianism, readable in what is said both about repression as "one speech act among others," and about desire and language, and even in the re- course to the truth according to Heidegger. But there is the proximity as well, despite this Lacanianism, to a certain Deleuzianism from the pe- riod of the Anti-Oedipus, in what links desire to the machine, I would almost say to a desiring machine. How is one to sort out all these
threads (disseminal deconstruction, Lacanianism, and Deleuzianism) in de Man's original signature? That is what I would like to be able to do, without being sure in the least that I will manage it today.
Here is the allusion to the guilt that is "forgiven":
Promise is proleptic, but excuse is belated and always occurs after the crime; since the crime is exposure, the excuse consists in recapitulating the exposure in the guise of concealment. The excuse is a ruse which permits exposure in the name of hiding, not unlike Being, in the later Heidegger, reveals itself by hiding. Or, put differently, shame used as excuse permits repression to function as revelation, and thus to make pleasure and guilt interchangeable. Guilt is forgiven because it allows for the pleasure of revealing its repression. It follows that repression is in fact an excuse, one speech act among others. (286)
Unless I missed something, these are the only borrowings from the lexicon of forgiveness, in what is a strong genealogy of excuse and for- giveness (here put in the same boat) as economic ruse, as stratagem and calculation, either conscious or unconscious, in view of the greatest pleasure at the service of the greatest desire. We will later get around to the complication of this desire, of its writing machine as a mutilating machine.
If there is also a proper eventness and of a performative type in the moment of the avowal but also in the moment of the excuse, can one distinguish the avowal from the excuse, as de Man attempts to do? Can one distinguish between, on the one hand, the confession as avow- al (namely, a truth revealed-dissimulated according to the revisited Heideggerian scheme) and, on the other, the confession as excuse? For, at the beginning of his text, he proposes clearly isolating from each other the two structures and the two moments, with regard to referen- tiality, that is, their reference to an event--extraverbal or verbal. The distinction that is thereby proposed is alone capable of accounting for, in his view, the divergence, within the repetition, between the two texts, the Confessions and the Fourth Re^verie, which, with a ten-year interval, refer to the same event, the theft of the ribbon and the lie that followed it. But they refer to it differently. The avowal "stated in the mode of revealed truth" has recourse to "evidence" that is, according to de Man, "referential (the ribbon)," whereas the "evidence" for the avowal "stated in the mode of excuse" could only be "verbal. " This is the beginning of a difficult analysis, which often leaves me perplexed. I am not sure, for example, that, if there is reference to an avowal that
Typewriter Ribbon 309
310 Jacques Derrida
admits a misdeed, this reference consists here, as de Man asserts very quickly, in "the ribbon": "the evidence . . . is referential (the ribbon)," he says (280). The reference of the avowal, the fault, is the theft of the ribbon and not the ribbon, and above all, above all, more gravely, the lie that followed, and the verbal act that accused "poor Marion. " Even if de Man is right to recall that "To steal is to act and includes no nec- essary verbal elements" (281), the reference of the avowal is not only to the theft but to the lie that followed.
De Man thus proposes here a distinction that is at once subtle, nec- essary, and problematic, by which I mean fragile, in a process that, at any rate, is of the order of event, doubly or triply so: first, by reference to an irreversible event that has already happened; second, as produc- tive of event and archivation, inscription, consignment of the event; third, in a mode that is each time performative and that we must clari- fy. The distinction proposed by de Man is useful but also problematic. For if there is indeed an allegation of truth to be revealed, to be made known, thus a gesture of the theoretical type, a cognitive or, as de Man says, epistemological dimension in the confession, the confession is not a confession or avowal except to the extent that it in no case allows it- self to be determined by this dimension, reduced to it, or even analyzed into two dissociable elements (the one de Man calls the cognitive and the other, the apologetic). To make known does not come down to knowing and, above all, to make known a fault does not come down to making known anything whatsoever; it is already to accuse oneself and to engage in a performative process of excuse and forgiveness. A declaration that would bring forward some knowledge, a piece of in- formation, a thing to be known, would in no case be a confession, even if the thing to be known, even if the cognitive referent were otherwise defined as a fault (e. g. , I can inform someone that I have killed, stolen, or lied without that being at all an avowal or a confession). For there to be a confessional declaration or avowal, it is necessary, indisso- ciably, that I recognize that I am guilty in a mode of recognition that is not of the order of cognition, and it is therefore necessary that, at least implicitly, I begin to accuse myself--and thus to excuse myself or to present my apologies, or even to ask for forgiveness. There is doubtless an irreducible element of "truth" in this process but this truth, precisely, is not a truth to be known or, as de Man puts it so frequently, revealed. Rather, as Augustine says, it is a truth to be "made," to be "verified," if you will, and this order of truth (which is to be totally rethought) is not of a cognitive order. It is not a revelation. In any case, this revelation, if
one insists on that term, does not consist only in lifting a veil so as to present something to be seen in a neutral, cognitive, or theoretical fashion. A more probing and patient discussion (for I admit that I don't see things clearly enough here) would therefore have to focus on what de Man calls "verification," which allows him, if I have under- stood correctly, to dissociate the confession of the Confessions from the excuses of the Re^veries:
The difference between the verbal excuse and the referential crime is not a simple opposition between an action and a mere utterance about an action. To steal is to act and includes no necessary verbal element. To confess is discursive, but the discourse is governed by a principle of ref- erential verification that includes an extraverbal moment: even if we confess that we said something (as opposed to did) [and this is also what happens with Rousseau, as I recalled a moment ago: he confessed what he said as well as what he did], the verification of this verbal event, the decision about the truth or falsehood of its occurrence, is not verbal but factual, the knowledge that the utterance actually took place. No such possibility of verification exists for the excuse, which is verbal in its utterance, in its effects and in its authority: its purpose is not to state but to convince, itself an "inner" process [this is an allusion to Rousseau's "inner feeling"] to which only words can bear witness. As is well known at least since Austin, excuses are a complex instance of what he termed performative utterances, a variety of speech acts. (281-82)
This series of affirmations does not seem to me always clear and convincing. The "inner process" can also be, it is even always the ob- ject of a reference, even in testimony; and testimony is never simply verbal. Inversely, the determination of the "factual" and of the factual occurrence of something that has actually taken place always passes by way of an act of testimony, whether verbal or not.
I am all the more troubled by these passages inasmuch as de Man seems to insist firmly on a distinction that he will later have to suspend, at least as regards the example he considers, Rousseau, but in my opin- ion throughout. The distinction is in fact suspended, thus interrupted, by the "as well" ("performatively as well as cognitively") that de- scribes, de Man says, "the interest of Rousseau's text"--I would say the interest of Rousseau period, and even, by radicalizing the thing, all "interest" in general: "The interest of Rousseau's text is that it explic- itly functions performatively as well as cognitively, and thus gives in- dications about the structure of performative rhetoric; this is already
Typewriter Ribbon 311
312 Jacques Derrida
established in this text when the confession fails to close off a discourse which feels compelled to modulate from the confessional into the apologetic mode" (282). Yes, but I wonder if the confessional mode is not already, always, an apologetic mode. In truth, I believe there are not here two dissociable modes and two different times, which create the possibility of modulating from the one to the other. I don't believe even that what de Man names "the interest of Rousseau's text," there- fore its originality, consists in having to "modulate" from the confes- sional mode to the apologetic mode. Every confessional text is already apologetic, every avowal begins by offering apologies or by excusing itself.
Let's leave this difficulty in place. It is going to haunt everything that we will say from here on. For what de Man calls "the distinction between the confession stated in the mode of revealed truth and the confession stated in the mode of excuse" (280) organizes, it seems to me, his whole demonstration, whereas I find this distinction impos- sible, in truth undecidable. This undecidability, moreover, is what would make for all the interest, the obscurity, the nondecomposable specificity of what is called a confession, an avowal, an excuse, or an asked-for forgiveness. But if one went still further in this direction by leaving behind the context and the element of the de Manian interpre- tation, it would be because we are touching here on the equivocation of an originary or pre-originary synthesis without which there would be neither trace nor inscription, neither experience of the body nor ma- teriality. It would be a question of the equivocation between, on the one hand, the truth to be known, revealed, or asserted, the truth that, according to de Man, concerns the order of the pure and simple con- fessional, and, on the other, the truth of the pure performative of the excuse, to which de Man gives the name of the apologetic, two orders that are analogous, in sum, to the constative and the performative. By reason of this equivocation itself, which invades language and action at their source, we are always already in the process of excusing our- selves, or even asking forgiveness, precisely in this ambiguous and per- juring mode.
Following a path whose necessity neither Austin nor de Man failed to perceive, we may say that every constative is rooted in the presuppo- sition of an at least implicit performative. Every theoretical, cognitive utterance, every truth to be revealed, and so forth, assumes a testimo- nial form, an "I myself think," "I myself say," "I myself believe," or "I myself have the inner feeling that," and so forth, a relation to self to
which you never have immediate access and for which you must be- lieve me by taking my word for it (which is why I can always lie and bear false witness, right there where I say to you "I am speaking to you, me, to you," "I take you as my witness," "I promise you," or "I confess to you," "I tell you the truth"). This radical and general form of testimoniality means that wherever someone speaks, the false wit- ness is always possible, as well as the equivocation between the two orders. In my address to another, I must always ask for faith or confi- dence, beg to be believed at my word, there where the equivocation is ineffaceable and perjury always possible, precisely unverifiable. This necessity is nothing other than the solitude, the singularity, the inacces- sibility of the "as for me," the impossibility of having an originary and internal intuition of the proper experience of the other ego, of the alter ego. This same necessity is necessarily felt on both sides of the address or the destination (on the side of the addresser and of the addressee) as the place of a violence and an always possible abuse for which the apologetic confession (to use these two de Manian notions that are here indissociable, always indissociable) is already at work, a` l'oeuvre. And not only in Rousseau. But this is also why Rousseau is interesting, as the one who endured in an exemplary fashion this common fatality, a common fatality that is not only a misfortune, a trap, or a curse of the gods; for it is also the only possibility of speaking to the other, of blessing, saying, or making the truth, and so forth. Since I can always lie and since the other can always be the victim of this lie, since he or she never has the same access that I do to what I myself think or mean to say, I always begin, at least implicitly, by confessing a possible fault, abuse, or violence. I always begin by asking forgiveness when I address myself to the other and precisely in this equivocal mode, even if it is in order to say to him or her things that are as constative as, for example: "you know, it's raining. "
Which is why, in the last phase of his interpretation, the one that is most important to him and that concerns the leap from the Confessions to the Fourth Re^verie, when de Man evokes at that point a "twilight zone between knowing and not-knowing," I feel so much in agreement with him that I believe such a twilight does not obscure only an initial clarity or cover only the passage from the Confessions to the Re^veries. This twilight seems to me consubstantial, already at the origin, with confession even in that element that de Man would like to identify as purely cognitive, epistemological, as a moment of revealed truth. De Man argues, in the following lines, for the necessity of the passage
Typewriter Ribbon 313
314 Jacques Derrida
from the Confessions to the Fourth Re^verie. But this seems to me al- ready valid for the Confessions. If I am right, that would make it diffi- cult to maintain the allegation of a change of register between the two, at least in this regard.
But the text offers further possibilities. The analysis of shame as excuse makes evident the strong link between the performance of excuses and the act of understanding. It has led to the problematics of hiding and revealing, which are clearly problematics of cognition. Excuse occurs within an epistemological twilight zone between knowing and not- knowing; this is also why it has to be centered on the crime of lying and why Rousseau can excuse himself for everything provided he can be ex- cused for lying. When this turns out not to have been the case, when his claim to have lived for the sake of truth (vitam impendere vero) is being contested from the outside, the closure of excuse ("qu'il me soit permis de n'en reparler jamais") becomes a delusion and the Fourth Re^verie has to be written. (286)
If "the closure of excuse," at the end of the avowal in the Confes- sions, later "becomes a delusion," it is indeed because it already is there, in the Confessions. And it will remain a delusion after the Fourth Re^verie. But let us leave all that.
III
Let us return to the value of event, of affection by the event that affects and changes things, and especially the past event, inscribed or archived. Irreducible eventness, to be sure. The event in question, which, then, must be retained, inscribed, traced, and so forth, can be the thing itself that is thus archived, but it can also be the event of the inscription. Even as it consigns, inscription produces a new event, thereby affecting the presumed primary event it is supposed to retain, engram, consign, archive. There is the event one archives, the archived event (and there is no archive without a body--I prefer to say "body" rather than "matter" for reasons that I will try to justify later) and there is the archiving event, the archivation. The latter is not the same thing, struc- turally, as the archived event even if, in certain cases, it is indissociable from it or even contemporary with it.
In his reading of Rousseau, de Man is concerned with what he him- self calls a "textual event. " An admirable reading, in fact a paradig- matic interpretation of a text that it poses as paradigmatic, namely, Rousseau's confession and excuse, whether one considers them to be
successive, as de Man wants to do, or as simultaneous and indissociable in both their moment and their structure. A double paradigm, there- fore, paradigm on paradigm. For if de Man's reading is exemplary, and from now on canonical, because of its inaugural character as the first rigorous elaboration, with regard to this famous passage, of certain theoretical protocols of reading (in particular, although not only, of a theory of the performative whose Austinian complications I had fol- lowed and aggravated elsewhere), such a reading itself declares that it bears on a "paradigmatic event" (these are de Man's terms) in the work of Rousseau:
We are invited to believe that the episode [of the stolen ribbon] was never revealed to anyone prior to the privileged reader of the Confessions [this privileged reader, this original addressee of the confession and of the scene of excuse would thus be neither Marion nor any other living person, neither a priest nor God but an anonymous reader and still to come] "and . . . that the desire to free myself, so to speak, from this weight has greatly contributed to my resolve to write my confessions. " When Rousseau returns to the Confessions in the later Fourth Re^verie, he again singles out this same episode as a paradigmatic event, the core of his autobiographical narrative. (278-79)
Right away, in the second paragraph of his introduction, de Man uses the expression "textual event," an expression that will reappear on the last page of the same essay. He continues: "The selection [of the theft of the ribbon and the lie that followed as paradigmatic episode] is, in itself, as arbitrary as it is suspicious, but it provides us with a textual event of undeniable exegetic interest: the juxtaposition of two confes- sional texts linked together by an explicit repetition, the confession, as it were, of a confession" (279; emphasis added).
That this selection is held by de Man to be "as arbitrary as it is sus- picious" is a hypothesis that must be taken seriously, even if one is not prepared to subscribe to it unreservedly. For it subtends in a definitive way de Man's whole interpretation, notably his concepts of grammar and machine. At the end of the text, he will speak of the "gratuitous product of a textual grammar" (299), or yet again, still apropos of this structure of machine-like repetition, of "a system that is both entirely arbitrary and entirely repeatable, like a grammar" (300). Once again I underscore this "like. "
The expression "textual event" is found again in conclusion, very close to the final word--not only of the chapter but of the book since
Typewriter Ribbon 315
316 Jacques Derrida
this is, in de Man's corpus, the last chapter of the last book he will have published and reread during his lifetime. Now, it both is and is not the same "textual event" in question at the beginning of the text. It is the same, to be sure, because it is still a matter of what happens with the paradigmatic passage of the Confessions; but now it has been ana- lyzed, determined, interpreted, localized within a certain mechanism, namely--and we will come back to this later--an anacoluthon or a parabasis, a discontinuity, or, to quote de Man's conclusion, "a sudden revelation of the discontinuity between two rhetorical codes. This iso- lated textual event, as the reading of the Fourth Re^verie shows, is dis- seminated throughout the entire text and the anacoluthon is extended over all the points of the figural line or allegory" (300).
How does this "textual event" inscribe itself? What is the operation of its inscription? What is the writing machine, the typewriter, that both produces it and archives it? What is the body, or even the materi- ality that confers on this inscription both a support and a resistance? And, above all, what essential relation does this textual event maintain with a scene of confession and excuse?
Since we are getting ready to speak of matter, or more precisely of the body, I note in the first place, and, as it were, between brackets, that de Man, very curiously, pays almost no attention (for reasons he doubtless considers justified and that in my view are only partially so) either to the matter and body of the ribbon itself, or to its use, because he holds it to be "devoid of meaning and function," circulating "sym- bolically as a pure signifier" (283), like the purloined letter, at least as it is interpreted by Lacan--to whom I objected that if the content of the letter appeared indifferent, it is because each of the protagonists, and each reader, knew that it signified at least perjury and betrayal of a sworn faith, just as I would observe here that the ribbon is not such a free or undetermined signifier: it has at least the sexualizable significa- tion of ornament and fetish; and by the same token it has perhaps sev- eral others.
De Man is not interested either in the intermediary paragraph be- tween the account of the death of Mme de Vercellis from a cancer of the breast (her double expiration, her last word) and the beginning of the confession of the misdeed that afflicts Rousseau with the "unbear- able weight of a remorse" from which he cannot recover any more than he can ever console himself for it. The paragraph neglected by de Man describes nothing less than a scene of inheritance. It is a question of the will left by Mme de Vercellis, of whom de Man nevertheless says,
as you recall, that there is no reason to "substitute" Marion for her ("nothing in the text," he says, suggests such a "concatenation") and thus a fortiori no reason to replace her with Mme de Warens--of whom de Man speaks only once in this context, and concerning whom I recall that Rousseau had met her for the first time the same year, a few months earlier, their meeting coinciding more or less with their common abjuration, their almost simultaneous conversion to Catholicism. This scene of inheritance seems to me significant, in this place, for countless reasons that I will not develop because they are too obvious. By essence or par excellence, and like every scene of inheri- tance, this one is a scene of substitution (and thus of responsibility, guilt, and forgiveness): substitution of persons and things, in the do- mains of the law governing persons and the law governing things. For one must not forget that the ribbon belongs more or less clearly to this scene and to the patrimony of things and valuables left as legacies. Even if it is a thing without value, as we will see, an old and used thing, its exchange value is caught up in the logic of substitution constituted by the inheritance. And we will once again have to reckon with more than one substitution--those of which de Man speaks and those of which he says nothing.
So that this may be more concrete in your eyes, here are the lines that seem not to interest de Man:
She had left one year's wages to each of the under-servants. But not hav- ing been entered on the strength of her household I received nothing. . . . It is almost inevitable that the breaking up of an establishment should cause some confusion in the house, and that various things should be mislaid. But so honest were the servants and so vigilant were M. and Mme Lorenzi that nothing was found missing when the inventory was taken. Only Mlle Pontal lost a little pink and silver-colored ribbon, which was quite old [un petit ruban de couleur de rose et argent de? ja` vieux]. (86)
These two little words "quite old," "de? ja` vieux," are also omitted by de Man, I don't know why, in his quotation of this phrase, which he extracts therefore from its context and without having cited the pre- ceding paragraph that I would call testamentary. No doubt the in- ventory in the course of which the disappearance of the ribbon was remarked is not the moment of the inheritance itself, but it is some- thing like its inseparable continuation; and Mlle Portal, who "lost" (per- dit) the "little ribbon," had received six hundred livres in inheritance,
Typewriter Ribbon 317
318 Jacques Derrida
twenty times more than all the servants who had each received, in ad- dition, individual legacies. Rousseau inherited nothing and he com- plains about it. These scenes of inheritance and inventory, which de Man does not evoke, are not the scenes that Rousseau describes before recounting the death of Mme de Vercellis, in a passage where it is al- ready a question of legacies (the entourage of Mme de Vercellis, al- ready thinking about the legacy, had done everything to get Rousseau out of the way and "banish [him] from her sight," as he puts it). No doubt it is to this paragraph preceding the account that de Man refers in the note that had surprised me somewhat ("The embarrassing story of Rousseau's rejection by Mme de Vercellis, who is dying of a cancer of the breast, immediately precedes the story of Marion, but nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme. de Vercellis in a scene of rejection"). It is this sub- stitution that de Man curiously does not believe should be credited. Curiously because, inversely, his whole text will put to work in a deci- sive fashion a logic of substitution. In a later passage, which is not, it is true, his last word on the subject, he talks abundantly of a substitution between Rousseau and Marion and even of "two levels of substitution (or displacement) taking place: the ribbon substituting for a desire which is itself a desire for substitution" (284). Summing up the facts, he writes: "The episode itself is one in a series of stories of petty larce- ny, but with an added twist. While employed as a servant in an aristo- cratic Turin household, Rousseau has stolen a 'pink and silver-colored ribbon'" (279).
Why does he cut the sentence, mutilating it or dismembering it in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion? Why does he amputate two of its own little words before the period: "quite old," "de? ja` vieux"? I have no answer to this question. I say mutilation, am- putation, or dismemberment, or even arbitrary cut to qualify the opera- tion by which a phrase is thus deprived of two of its little words and interrupted in its organic syntax. I do so both because, first of all, that's the way it is, no doubt, and the phenomenon is as strange as it is re- markable (it is indeed an apparently arbitrary amputation and dissocia- tion),14 but also because the general interpretation by de Man of the "textual event" in question will put to work, in a determinant fashion, these motifs (mutilation and dismemberment) as well as the operation of a machinery, as we will see. Moreover, and so as to anticipate things at a somewhat greater distance, among the significations that will later structure the de Manian concept of materiality or material inscription--
although the words matter and especially materialism never occur in "Excuses (Confessions)," a certain lodging seems to be made ready for the welcome de Man will extend to them later)--one finds once again, besides the significations of mute literality and body, those of disconti- nuity, caesura, division, mutilation, and dismemberment or, as de Man often says here, dissemination. Whether one is talking about the body in general, the body proper, or, as in the example of Kleist's Marionetten- theater read by de Man, of the linguistic body of phrases and words in syllables and letters (for example, from Fall as case or fall to Falle as trap),15 these figures of dismemberment, fragmentation, mutilation, and "material disarticulation" play an essential role in a certain "ma- terialist" signature (I leave the word materialist in quotation marks) that insists in the last texts of de Man. How does the concept of ma- teriality or the associated concept of "materialism" get elaborated in the later texts ("Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" and "Kant's Materialism," both in Aesthetic Ideology)? This is a question we can keep in view in the interpretation of Rousseau. We can also keep in view a certain concept of history, of the historicity of history, so as to trace its intersection with this logic of the textual event as material in- scription. When it is a matter of this structure of the text, the concept of historicity will no longer be regulated by the scheme of progression or of regression, thus by a scheme of teleological process, but rather by that of the event, or occurrence, thus by the singularity of the "one time only. " This value of occurrence links historicity not to time, as is usually thought, nor to the temporal process but, according to de Man, to power, to the language of power, and to language as power. Hence the necessity to take into account performativity, which defines pre- cisely the power of language and power as language, the excess of the language of power or of the power of language over constative or cog- nitive language. In "Kant and Schiller" (a lecture delivered at Cornell the year of his death, in 1983, and collected in Aesthetic Ideology on the basis of audiotapes), de Man speaks of thinking history as event and not as process, progress, or regression. He then adds:
There is history from the moment that words such as "power" and "battle" and so on emerge on the scene. At that moment things happen, there is occurrence, there is event. History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality [this hyperbolic provo- cation, in the style of de Man, certainly does not negate all temporality of history; it merely recalls that time, temporal unfolding, is not the
Typewriter Ribbon 319
320 Jacques Derrida
essential predicate of the concept of history: time is not enough to make history], but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a lan- guage of cognition. (133)
De Man distinguishes the eventness of events from a dialectical pro- cess or from any continuum accessible to a process of knowledge, such as the Hegelian dialectic. No doubt he would have said the same thing of the Marxist dialectic, I presume, if at least the heritage and the thought of Marx could be reduced to that of the dialectic. He also specifies that the performative (the language of power beyond the lan- guage of knowledge) is not the negation of the tropological but re- mains separated from the tropological by a discontinuity that tolerates no mediation and no temporal scheme. It remains the case that the per- formative, however foreign and excessive it may be in relation to the cognitive, can always be reinscribed, recuperated is de Man's word, in a cognitive system. This discontinuity, this event as discontinuity, is im- portant for us if only because it will allow us to go beyond the excuse and come closer to the event of forgiveness, which always supposes irreversible interruption, revolutionary caesura, or even the end of his- tory, at least of history as teleological process. Moreover, one may note with equal interest that, in the same text ("Kant and Schiller"), de Man constructs his concept of event, of history as the eventness of events rather than as temporal process, on the basis of two determinations that are equally important for us: that of irreversibility (forgiveness and excuse suppose precisely that what has happened is irreversible) and that of inscription or material trace:
When I speak of irreversibility, and insist on irreversibility, this is be- cause in all those texts and those juxtapositions of texts, we have been aware of something which one could call a progression--though it shouldn't be--a movement, from cognition, from acts of knowledge, from states of cognition, to something which is no longer a cognition but which is to some extent an occurrence, which has the materiality of something that actually happens, that actually occurs. And there, the thought of material occurrence, something that occurs materially, that leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such-- that notion of occurrence is not opposed in any sense to the notion of writing. But it is opposed to some extent to the notion of cognition. I'm reminded of a quotation in Ho? lderlin--if you don't quote Pascal you can always quote Ho?
lderlin, that's about equally useful--which says: "Lang ist die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber das Wahre. " Long is time, but--
not truth, not Wahrheit, but das Wahre, that which is true, will occur, will take place, will eventually take place, will eventually occur. And the characteristic of truth is the fact that it occurs, not the truth, but that which is true. The occurrence is true because it occurs; by the fact that it occurs it has truth, truth value, it is true. (132)
Why did de Man forget, omit, or efface those two words ("quite old," "de? ja` vieux") that qualify also a certain materiality of the enig- matic thing called a ribbon? Was it to save space, as one sometimes does by not citing a text integrally, by omitting passages that are less pertinent for the demonstration under way? Perhaps, but it is difficult to justify doing so for two little words ("quite old") that come just after the words quoted and before the final period. I recall the sentence and underscore certain words: "La seule Mlle Portal perdit un petit ruban couleur de rose et argent de? ja` vieux" ("Only Mlle Portal lost a little pink and silver-colored ribbon, which was quite old"). I under- score in passing that Rousseau says of this ribbon that she "lost it," "le perdit. " On the preceding page, it was said of Mme de Vercellis: "Nous la perdi^mes enfin. Je la vis expirer" ("Finally we lost her. I watched her die").
Might there be a relation of substitution between these two losses signified by the same verb in the same tense, the passe? simple or his- toric past that says--but what does it thereby say and mean to say? -- nous la perdi^mes, elle perdit? I would not swear to such a relation of substitution, but we'll leave it at that.
Excluding a concern for economy and the possibly inconsequential abbreviation of two little words, can one speak of a pure and simple omission by mechanical distraction? If one supposes that such a thing exists, it is all the more puzzling why it would have struck these two words from which de Man, instead of letting them drop, could have drawn an argument or with which he could have reinforced his own argument. To lend coherence to his hypothesis of substitution (between Rousseau and Marion, the desire of Rousseau and Marion, desire and the desire of substitution), the ribbon had itself to be a "free signifier," a simple exchange value without use value. Moreover, if indeed theft is a sin, then no one ever steals anything but exchange values, not use values. If I steal in order to eat, my theft is not really a crime, an evil for the sake of evil. In order to speak of misdeed, the profit must not be located in the usefulness of the fault, the crime, the theft, or the lie, but in a certain uselessness. One has to have loved the crime for itself, for
Typewriter Ribbon 321
322 Jacques Derrida
the shame that it procures, and that supposes some "beyond-use" of the immediate or apparent object of the fault. But, in relation to imme- diate use, the beyond-use does not mean absolute insignificance and uselessness. Augustine and Rousseau understood that very well. They both emphasize that they stole something for which they had no need and no use. And, moreover, a little further on (and this explains my astonishment), de Man does make allusion to the fact that the rib- bon must be beyond use, "devoid," as he puts it, "of meaning and function," in order to play the role it plays. In the first stage of his analysis, at the level he himself calls elementary, when he is describing one of the ways the text functions (among others, which he will exhib- it later), de Man specifies forcefully that the desire for gift and posses- sion, the movement of representation, exchange, and substitution of the ribbon supposes that it not be, I would say, a "use value" but an exchange value, or even, I would say again (but this is not de Man's term), already a fetish, an exchange value whose body is fetishizable; one never steals the thing itself, which, moreover, never presents itself. Let us read:
Once it is removed from its legitimate owner, the ribbon, being in itself devoid of meaning and function, can circulate symbolically as a pure signifier and become the articulating hinge in a chain of exchanges and possessions. As the ribbon changes hands it traces a circuit leading to the exposure of a hidden, censored desire. Rousseau identifies the desire as his desire for Marion: "it was my intention to give her the ribbon," i. e. , to "possess" her. At this point in the reading suggested by Rousseau, the proper meaning of the trope is clear enough: the ribbon "stands for" Rousseau's desire for Marion or, what amounts to the same thing, for Marion herself.
Or, rather, it stands for the free circulation of the desire between Rousseau and Marion, for the reciprocity which, as we know from Julie, is for Rousseau the very condition of love; it stands for the substi- tutability of Rousseau for Marion and vice versa. Rousseau desires Marion as Marion desires Rousseau. . . . The system works: "I accused Marion of having done what I wanted to do and of having given me the ribbon because it was my intention to give it to her. " The substitutions have taken place without destroying the cohesion of the system, reflect- ed in the balanced syntax of the sentence and now understandable ex- actly as we comprehend the ribbon to signify desire. Specular figures of this kind are metaphors and it should be noted that on this still elemen-
tary level of understanding, the introduction of the figural dimension in the text occurs first by ways of metaphor. (283-84)
Now think of the word ribbon, but also of this figure of a narrow band of silk, velvet, or satin, which one wears on one's head, in one's hair, or like a necklace around the neck. The uncertain origin of the word ribbon probably links the motifs of the ring, thus the circular link, the annular, or even the wedding band, and band, namely, once again the link, as bind or Bund (in Middle Dutch the word, it seems, is ringhband). The ribbon thus seems to be, in itself, doubly enribboned, ring and band, twice knotted, banded, or banding, bande? or bandant, as I might say in French. A ribbon perhaps figures therefore the double bind en soie, in itself, its own silky self. 16 By thus renaming the ribbon of the Confessions, I've been led to associate, without doing it on pur- pose, without expecting it but no doubt not fortuitously, Marion's rib- bon with the typewriter ribbon. De Man has little interest in the mate- rial of the ribbon, as we have just seen, for he takes the thing "ribbon" to be a "free signifier. " But he is also not interested in the verbal signi- fier or the word ribbon. Yet this lost piece of finery from the eighteenth century, the ribbon that Mlle Portal "lost" after we "lost" Mme de Vercellis, was also, once stolen and passed from hand to hand, a formi- dable writing machine, a ribbon of ink along which so many signs transited so irresistibly, a skin on which or under which so many words will have been printed, a phantasmatic body through which waves of ink will have been made to flow. An affluence or confluence of limited ink, to be sure, because a typewriter ribbon, like a computer printer, has only a finite reserve of coloring substance. The material potenti- ality of this ink remains modest, that is true, but it capitalizes, virtually, for the sooner or later, an impressive quantity of text: not only a great flux of liquid, good for writing, but a growing flux at the rhythm of a capital--on a day when speculation goes crazy in the capitals of the stock markets. And when one makes ink flow, figuratively or not, one can also figure that one causes to flow or lets flow all that which, by spilling itself this way, can invade or fertilize some cloth or tissue. Poor Marion's ribbon (which Mlle Portal, who lost it, will not have worn up till the end) will have supplied the body and the tissue and the ink and the surface of an immense bibliography. A virtual library. I would have been tempted, but I will not have the time, to sketch other itineraries apropos of this ink flow: for example, to pass from the figural ink of this ink ribbon across a text of Austin's that I treated elsewhere, precisely
Typewriter Ribbon 323
324 Jacques Derrida
in Limited Inc (and it is also a text on excuse and responsibility, an analysis that is, moreover, complementary with "A Plea for Excuses"). Austin analyzes there the possibilities of a bad thing one does inten- tionally or unintentionally, deliberately or by accident, by inadvertence (which one can always claim in order to excuse oneself), and so forth. This text is titled "Three Ways of Spilling Ink," by reason of the a`-propos of a first example: a child spills some ink and the schoolmaster asks him "Did you do that intentionally? " or "Did you do that deliberate- ly? " or "Did you do that on purpose (purposely)? "17
This ribbon will have been more or less than a subject. It was al- ready at the origin a material support, at once a subjectile on which one writes and the piece of a machine thanks to which one will never have done with inscribing: discourse upon discourse, exegesis on top of exegesis, beginning with those of Rousseau. In the universal doxa, this typewriter ribbon has become by substitution the ribbon of "poor Marion" whose property it never was and to whom it was therefore never given or returned. Imagine what she might have thought if some- one had told her what was going to happen sooner or later to her ghost, that is to say, to her name and in her name over centuries, thanks to Rousseau or by "Rousseau's fault," on the basis of the act to which she was perhaps one day (will one ever know? could one know it without the archive of the violent writing machine? ) barely the wit- ness, an act of which she was only the poor victim who understands nothing of what is happening, the innocent girl who is perhaps as vir- ginal as Mary. For, with or without annunciation, she will have been fertilized with ink through the ribbon of a terrible and tireless writing machine that is now relayed, in this floating sea of characters, by the apparently liquid element of computer screens and from time to time by ink cartridges for an Apple printer, just the thing to recall the for- bidden fruit and the apples stolen by the young Jean-Jacques. Almost everything here will have passed by way of a written confession, with- out living addressee and within the writing of Rousseau, between the Confessions and the Re^veries dreaming the virtual history of their "sooner or later. "
As piece of a tireless writing machine, this ribbon gave rise--which is why I began by the event, by the event that is archivable as much as it is archiving--to what de Man twice calls, at the beginning and the end of his text, a "textual event. " The second time it is in order to rec- ognize there, as you heard, a dissemination of the textual event called anacoluthon; the first time it is to recall that this event has already the
structure of a repetitive substitution, a repetition of the confession in the confession.
Among all the remarkable merits of de Man's great reading, there is first of all this reckoning with the works of Austin. I say purposely, and vaguely, the "works" of Austin because one value of these works is to have not only resisted but marked the line of resistance to the systematic work, to philosophy as formalizing theorization, absolute and closed, freed of its adherences to ordinary language and to so-called natural lan- guages. There is also, and this is another of de Man's merits, an elabo- ration and an original complication of Austinian concepts. De Man cites "Performative Utterances" and "A Plea for Excuses" precisely at the point at which he writes: "As is well known at least since Austin, excus- es are a complex instance of what he termed performative utterances, a variety of speech acts" (281-82). To illustrate the complexity of this "complex example," he specifies right away that "The interest of Rousseau's text is that it explicitly functions performatively as well as cognitively, and thus gives indications about the structure of performa- tive rhetoric" (282). Now, the opposition between "performative" and "cognitive" was evoked in the first lines of the chapter, which apparent- ly mark the passage from temporality to historicity, a passage that is all the more paradoxical in that it goes from a more political text, the Social Contract, to a less political one, the Confessions or the Re^veries. But it is the phenomenon of this appearance that must be analyzed. If, de Man says, "the relationship between cognition and performance is relatively easy to grasp in the case of a temporal speech act such as a promise-- which, in Rousseau's work, is the model for the Social Contract--it is more complex in the confessional mode of his autobiographies" (278).
In other words, the performative mode of the promise would be simpler than that of the confession or the excuse, notably as regards this distinction cognition/performance. In the preceding chapter, de Man had treated the promise by setting out from the Social Contract. He thus goes from the Social Contract to the Confessions and to the Re^veries, from the simpler to the more complex (where, precisely, the complexity can no longer be undone, and the distinction can no longer operate--at least as I see it, because de Man wants to maintain this dis- tinction even when it seems difficult to do so). In the preceding chap- ters on Rousseau, and in particular in the chapter on the Social Contract, one finds the premises of the chapter we are now reading on "Excuses (Confessions). " I retain at least three of these premises:
1. A concept or an operation of deconstruction: "a deconstruction
Typewriter Ribbon 325
326 Jacques Derrida
always has for its target to reveal the existence of hidden articulations and fragmentations within assumedly monadic totalities" (249), with- in a binary system, or in "metaphorical patterns based on binary mod- els" (255). Nature becoming a "self-deconstructive term" (249), one will always be dealing with a series of deconstructions of figures.
2. A concept of "machine": a text whose grammaticality is a logi- cal code obeys a machine. No text is conceivable without grammar and no grammar (thus no machine) is conceivable without the "sus- pension of referential meaning. " In the order of the law (and this is valid for any law, it is the law of the law), this means that "Just as no law can ever be written unless one suspends any consideration of ap- plicability to a particular entity including, of course, oneself, gram- matical logic can function only if its referential consequences are dis- regarded. On the other hand, no law is a law unless it also applies to particular individuals. It cannot be left hanging in the air, in the ab- straction of its generality" (269).
3. De Man interprets this contradiction or this incompatibility (the law suspends referential application even as it requires it as verifica- tion) in a striking fashion, in particular in the passage from the Social Contract (read here from the point of view of the promise) to the Confessions or to the Re^veries (read here from the point of view of the excuse). One can overcome this contradiction or this incompatibility only by an act of deceit. This deception is a theft, a theft in language, the theft of a word, the abusive appropriation of the meaning of a word. This theft is not the appropriation of just any word whatsoever: it is the theft of the subject, more precisely of the word chacun, "each one," inasmuch as it says at once the "I," the singularity and the gener- ality of every "I. " Nothing is in fact more irreducibly singular than "I" and yet nothing is more universal, anonymous, and substitutable. This deception and this theft consist in appropriating the word chacun (to appropriate the words each one [s'approprier le mot chacun] are Rousseau's terms; deceit and theft are de Manian translations, which are at once brutal and faithful: when one appropriates, one always steals, and when one steals, one deceives, one lies, especially when one denies it). This deceit and this theft, therefore, are constitutive of jus- tice (which is both without reference and applicable, thus with a refer- ence: without and with reference). De Man is then led to say that "jus- tice is unjust," a formula that I must have retained while forgetting it, while forgetting that I stole it in this way because afterwards, and very recently, I took it up on my own account and ventured it in another
context, without making reference to de Man. The context was an in- terpretation of Levinas, of the logic of the third party and of perjury, namely, that all justice is unjust and begins in perjury. 18 Having con- fessed this involuntary theft, so as to excuse myself for it, I underscore the reference to theft in the chapter preceding the one we are con- cerned with at present on the excuse, and which thus serves as a prem- ise for it.
Here are several lines, but, to be just, one would have to reconstitute the whole context:
The preceding passage makes clear that the incompatibility between the elaboration of the law and its application (or justice) can only be bridged by an act of deceit. "S'approprier en secret ce mot chacun" is to steal from the text the very meaning to which, according to this text, we are not entitled, the particular I which destroys its generality; hence the deceitful, covert gesture "en secret," in the foolish hope that the theft will go unnoticed. Justice is unjust; no wonder that the language of justice is also the language of guilt and that, as we know from the Confessions, we never lie as much as when we want to do full justice to ourselves, especially in self-accusation. (268)
The substitution of the "I" for the "I" is also the root of perjury: I (the I) can always, by addressing myself/itself to (a) you, each one to each one, substitute the other same "I" for this here "I" and change the destination. (An) "I" can always change the address in secret at the last moment. Since every "I" is an "I" (the same and altogether other: tout autre est tout autre, every other is altogether other as the same), since every other is altogether other, (the) I can betray, without the least ap- pearance becoming manifest, by substituting the address of one for the address of the other, up to the last moment--in ecstasy or in death.
Apropos of "Performative Utterances" and "A Plea for Excuses," I call your attention to several strategic and, in my view, important ges- tures. I remark on them, although de Man does not, because they cross with the paths we are following in an amusing way.
First of all, just for laughs, a strange association: the second example of "performative utterances," in the text with that title, is "I apolo- gize" when you step on someone's toes. Now, how does this example come up? Is it symptomatic (a question one must always ask when Englishmen seem to exercise their wit by choosing at random arbitrary, insignificant, joking, or trivial examples)? The text had begun, as always with Austin, in an amusing way when, in what is precisely a deciding
Typewriter Ribbon 327
328 Jacques Derrida
and performative fashion, he baptizes "performative" what will be de- fined as performative. Why this word, "performative"? Beyond the theoretical or semantic justifications for this terminological choice of an expression consecrated to a regulated use, the choice includes a per- formative dimension: I decide to propose that utterances of this type be called performatives. Austin has decided thus--and it has worked, it has been imprinted on all typewriter ribbons (more or less correctly, because the rigorous definition of the performative is infinitely prob- lematic; but the word is now ineffaceable).
So Austin begins his text as follows:
You are more than entitled not to know what the word "performative" means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favor, it is not a profound word. I remember once when I had been talking on this subject that somebody afterwards said: "You know, I haven't the least idea what he means, unless it could be that he simply means what he says. " Well, that is what I should like to mean. (233)
(This reminds me of my experience with the "ugly" and "new" words deconstruction and differance in 1967 at Oxford; whenever I have misadventures at Oxford, where Austin taught, or at Cambridge, I al- ways think of him. )
The second major example of "performative utterance" will thus be "I apologize" when I step on someone's toes. This example comes up right after the example of the "I do" in the marriage ceremony, the "I do" that marks clearly that I do what I say by saying what I do. Austin has just said that with certain utterances, one says that the person is in the process of doing something rather than saying something: "Sup- pose for example, that in the course of a marriage ceremony I say, as people will, 'I do' (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife). Or again [this "Or again" is sublime] suppose that I tread on your toe and say 'I apologize. ' Or again . . . " (235). This linking by additive contiguity, without transition ("Or again") from the marriage cere- mony to the excuse when I tread on another's toes makes me think ir- resistibly of an Algerian Jewish rite. According to a more or less super- stitious custom, the wedded couple is advised, at the precise moment when their marriage is consecrated in the synagogue, to hurry up and place a foot on the other's foot so as to guarantee for himself or herself power in their conjugal life. One has to hurry and take the other by surprise. One must create the event. The first one who places his or her
foot on the other's will have the upper hand during the rest of their life together, until the end of history: history as occurrence and power. As if, right after the paradigmatic "I do" of the wedding ceremony, one had to excuse oneself or ask forgiveness from the other for this first coup d'e? tat, for the power that is thus violently appropriated by a coup de force. "I do take you for husband (or wife), oh, excuse me, sorry," followed perhaps by an "It's nothing," "no problem," "y a pas d'mal. " At any rate, whatever the response might be to a marriage proposal, it would be necessary to excuse oneself or ask forgiveness. "Marry me, I want to marry you. " Response: "Yes, I beg your pardon" or "No, I beg your pardon. " In either case, there is fault and thus forgiveness to be asked--and it is always as if one had tread on the toes of the other.
By excusing himself for not treating it "within such limits," Austin wonders what the subject of his paper is. He uses the word Excuses, but, he says, one must not be rigid about this noun and this verb. For a while, he had used the word extenuation. The word excuse now seems to him more convenient in this field, even though he includes others there, just as important, such as plea, defence, justification.
I will now propose that we make a detour. For a time and then from time to time, we are going to stop referring to Allegories of Reading, but will come back to it in conclusion. However, even though the Rousseau I am going to talk about is not always very present in Allegories of Reading, one may always try to reconstitute a possible reading of it by de Man.
IV
As if . . .
Not it was as if, but I was as if. How can one say "I was as if . . . "? For example: "I was as if I had committed incest. " Not it was as if,
but I was as if. The "I" comes to be, as the other used to say, there where it was, there where the neutral, impersonal "it," the "ce," the "c? a," ought to have been--or stay what it will have been.
More than thirty years ago, I inscribed this phrase, "J'e? tais comme si j'avais commis un inceste" (in the translation, it reads: "I felt as if I had committed incest"), as epigraph to the whole second part of Of Grammatology devoted to Rousseau. Signed Rousseau, the "I was as if . . . " comes from the Confessions (book 5, 189). Rousseau describes himself with these words in a passage around the famous and scabrous sexual initiation by Maman. At the beginning of the paragraph, the ac- count (constative, therefore) of a (performative) commitment, a promise
Typewriter Ribbon 329
330 Jacques Derrida
and, as always, a profession of veracity: "The day came at last, more dreaded than desired. I promised all and did not break my word" (189) ("Ce jour-la`, plustot redoute? qu'attendu, vint enfin. Je promis tout, et je ne mentis pas" [197]). Further in the same paragraph: "No, I tasted plea- sure, but I knew not what invincible sadness poisoned its charm. I was as if I had committed incest . . . " ("Non, je gou^tai le plaisir. Je ne sais quelle invincible tristesse en empoisonnait le charme. J'e? tois comme si j'avais commis un inceste"). He notes that Maman knew no remorse: "As she was not at all sensual and had not sought for gratification, she neither re- ceived sexual pleasure nor knew the remorse that follows" ("Comme elle e? tait peu sensuelle et n'avoit point recherche? la volupte? , elle n'en eut pas les de? lices, et n'en a jamais eu les remords"). She did not come, so there was no fault, no remorse for her. Not only did she know no re- morse, but she had, like God, the virtue of mercy [mise? ricorde], forgiving without even thinking that there was some merit in forgiveness. So Maman never knew any remorse about this quasi incest, and Rousseau justifies her in every regard, he excuses her with all his well-known elo- quence. Now, you know, and Rousseau knew better than we do, how many lovers the lady he called Maman had had. He nevertheless wrote, as if he were speaking of himself: "All her faults, I repeat, came from her lack of judgment, never from her passions. She was of gentle birth, her heart was pure . . . " (190). Several pages later, he is still speaking of her as if he were speaking of himself: "She loathed duplicity and lying; she was just, equitable, humane, disinterested, true to her word, her friends, and what she recognized as her duties, incapable of hatred or vengeance and not even imagining that there was the slightest merit in forgiveness" (191).