In this my world or my
language
has waned, and the world has shrunk.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
04-05).
This is called "the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative hole in which it ends itself'(FW122.
03-04) This lapse, the failure to address anyone (beginning the Wake in midsentence--"rivemm, past Eve and Adam's") is a loss of identity (in sleep or nonsense or forgetfulness or sin or sense or order) marked by the loss of any beloved (are we attached to the world through suchattachments?
): "theaphasiaofthatheroicagonyofrecallingaoncelovednumber leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia of misnomering one's own" (FW122.
04-06).
The loss o f love (Eliot's hyacinth girl) and the agony o f recall, not only o f the beloved but
of loving, is a forgetfulness of who anyone is. Language, just as dreams, is a reminder of that agony, "the cruciform postscript" (FW122. 20) The revision of this script is both our
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forgetting ourselves and the kisses of others into "the life he is to die into . . . lost himself or himselfsome somnione sciupiones" (FW293. 04-07). The possibility ofothers is the possibility of love. The failure to address oneselfas oneselfor one's language to others is what I have called the failed intentionality ofthe Wake. This kind oflanguage is marked on the other end by "the accusative hole which it ends itself', that is the objects which are the things themselves, the things that are never themselves words, and within the inverted cnat language' seem absences instead o f presences.
The analogies describing the relation between mind and world, between text and mind, text and world (wax, mirror, lamp, harp, container, etc. ) have been reduced here into a special kind of the self-reflexive nonsense language asking "It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? " (FW94. 09-10) and expecting continually failing
justifications for asking these questions that cannot be answered. This might seem (in many ways correctly) that the analogies o f mind and aesthetics have been replaced by an interpretive stance, but it is not clear that interpretation is always called for. If interpretation cannot claim any particular truth value and is not itself as Wittgenstein suggests, adequate for meaning, it's failure will not count as an adequate stance between mind and world and art.
Do we experience language such that we can experience this between "mind, world" and language as the between of night or nonsense? This following is some evidence for this: "Everyletter is a godsend, ardent Ares . . . To me or not to me. Satis thy quest on" (FW269. 17-20). The Wake is sent to god or from god or to me or not to me. The resistance to "mind, world" metaphors is what Joyce calls "holding tight to that
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prestatuteinourcharter''(FW117. 34-35). Thisholdingtighttothe'discamate',"your disunited kingdom on the vacuum o f your own most intensely doubtful soul"(FW188. 16- 17) "may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense o f the lot, the interpretation
o f any phrase in the whole, the meaning o f every word o f a phrase so far deciphered out o f it. . . "(FW117. 35-118. 02). TheWakecontinuallydisplaysKierkegaard'sclaimthat"there is a difference between writing on a blank sheet o f paper and bringing to light by the application o f a caustic fluid a text which is hidden under another text", but with the difference that there is not any Christian truth underlying any surface of the world or mind {PointofView,40). Iholdoff,therefore,inofferinganytheoryofidentitythatwould explain how "Equal to=aosch" because this does not describe an identity, but a limit between a description ("equal to"), mathematical symbolism (=), a riddle ("aosch"), a self- expression ("aosch"=chaos). This is a limit because "Equal to=aosch" not only does not have a meaning, it cannot have any meaning outside o f an allegory that some reader will construct. Itis,however,notsenselessasadescriptionofalimit. Thuswecanreadthe Wake, to the degree that it is made up ofthis kind ofnonsense, as the self-description and enactment o f shifting limits. But what kind o f limits? limits o f what? As I suggested in the previous chapter one such limit is the vanishing intentionality that marks a limit between our inexistence as something meaningful within language and our ability to invest
ourselves as ourselves through and as language. But this is to say the words 'our', 'ourselves', 'though', 'as', 'within', and 'meaning' all function as limits, as meaningless except as transparent markers of an interpretive position within language games or under theological pressure: reading language as a descriptions of the limits that make our being
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human being human. This is not another kind o f language, but a way reading language as a non-language, or again as Joyce calls it "nat language".
How do you figure language within language iflanguage is all on the same logical level? As nonsense (as dead signs or code), as animate; thus the questions what is language or sense become questions about nonsense and about how, what and why anything,leastofallourselves,isorcanbeanimate. Sentencesorphrasesorlinesbecome "[t]hese ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of allinaprettycheckerwithlamp-blackandblackthorn"(114. 07-11). TheWake,likeThe Book ofKells, seems written with a black ink that "is lamp black, or possibly fish-bone black. "2 Joyce describes the Wake by describing a monkish monument o f Irish culture, and uses this description, with others, as the substance ofthe Wake. The substance of this theological language, however, is their movement emerging out o f domesticity, not read or written but "drawn," for any sensitive person, "first of all in a pretty checker with lamp- black and blackthorn. "
The movement o f words can be characterized in relation to the "comparative safety" of ordinary usage:
It is seriously believed by some that the intention may have been geodetic, or, in theviewofthecannier,domesticeconomical. Butbywritingthithawaysendto end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and
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jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom? (114. 13-20)
The "intention," one way ofofferingjustification (but ofwhat? ), could be geodetic, that is determinedby surveying(butofwhat? );oraneven"cannier"viewwouldbethat "intention may have been. . . domestic economical," L. domesticus or G. oikonomikos, pertaining to the household. These two possibilities (surveying and the domestic) describe the two aspects o f Wittgenstein's philosophy: surveying ourselves, the world and our language (what Kenny called providing "a clear view of the world" and Wittgenstein in his preface called "sketches of the landscape") and a return to ordinary language (the disappearanceoftheproblemsofphilosophyinordinarylanguage). Intherealmofthe ordinary, the translation between Latin and Greek is possible. The world o f sleep is also ordinary, but this thithaways and hithaways (losing control o f the tongue, the "latters slettering down", no one going up and no ladder to throw away since it has already dissolved) requires asking what would be an adequate survey or sketch o f what ordinary world? , limited how? seen as what? , threatened always by the interpretive distortions that allow for the blessing of one among any three brothers (Shem, Japhet, and Ham). The confusion o f interpretation for truth, the replacability o f people and words and commitments under this confusion, is the problem o f Hamlet ("tham Let" and "Hum Lit. )
written into the Wake. This is a tragedy accompanying our inheritance o f language, or maybeofpronounswhere"Semetomyplaceandjupetbackagain". Joyceisconstructing the place of my signs (Gr. <rr||ia), or the sign of me, or the place marked or having a mark set or affixed (Gr. crr|no08To<;) or a cemetery place. Wakean writing seems to place me
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("Semetomyplace") within the surveyable world and loop it back again into a history of origins and disinheritance, placing me with and as Japhet, the 'non-Semitic' son o f Noah, Jupiter from "tham Let", Hamlet, and Ham, the rejected son o f Noah.
If we read this again, the old Greek signs and the Latin imitations, from them that rise, or from Let Rise (a name, a description and a marker, like "ildiot") until Human Literature Sleeps, ask the question "where in the waste is wisdom? " This is a description of how to read: the unity of Greek and Latin in the text (as an example of the language of the Wake) does not communicate, but asks forjustification. And this request is understood as ordinary, as ordinary as waste is and is our desire for wisdom. If 'let rise' both can mean 'arise' and function as the name 'Let Rise', then the confusion o f verb for name (as in "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was God") is the way in whichonecanenterorbenamedbylanguage. Consequently,"whereinthewasteis wisdom? " describes a stance toward ourselves, the world and our language that analogizes the relation between mind and world, by placing our humanity at risk by placing our constructions and our world as a world against us.
This is the effect ofJoyce's lists, to place the world enumerated against us and in this offer targets for sense and identification. But once an identification is made, as a result of an interpretation ('"alphybetty verbage' is a version of the Wake, or "am I a whirling dervish? " or "can the world be built outside of logic or as a list of predicates without any subject[s]? '), the meaning remains unclear. No interpretation is ever adequate because interpretation cannot determine meaning. Is the meaning ofFinnegans Wake the following list?
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My wud! The warped flooring ofthe lair and soundconducting walls thereof. . . were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories,. . . doubtful eggshells,. . . alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries as speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smul, fallen lucifers,. . . counterfeit franks, best intentions,. . . gloss teeth for a tooth,. . . inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son o f Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an I neluctable phantom . . . writing the mystery o f himself in furniture. (FW183. 08- 184. 10)
Furniture and language both constitute the world as limits to myself. This limit is enacted by or as matter, what Berkeley called "the furniture of earth". What is "the mystery of himself'? He writes while sitting in furniture as a piece of furniture determined and defined by materiality. This "mystery o f himself in furniture" becomes at the end o f the Wake, when the sleeper is awakening, the "fumit o f heupanepi world" (FW611. 18). c[F]umit' containsfait (L. as it was) andfarm s (L. oven, fireplace), and can be read as 'bum it'. "[F]umit' can be translated as 'as it as bums and is a furnace. " This burning is stabilized as a thing when "fumit" puns "the furniture of earth. " Consequently, the being andstabilityofthepastcondensedintofurniturecontainsHeracletianflux. "[H]eupanepi' consistsoftheGreekeu(good),pan(all),andepi(upon). Thus"fumitofheupanepi world" can be translated as 'the furniture o f the flux o f the good upon all the world bums
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into a furnace. ' (So that's what it means to confuse the mind and the world! ) As the sleeper awakens into consciousness at the end of the Wake, under the sun and in rising color, "that part of it (fumit of heupanepi world) had shown itself. . . unable to absorbere", that part ofthe matter ofcourse, the matter ofa person organized as time, as change, (thefurnitureofthefluxofthegooduponalltheworldbumsintoafurnace)had shown itself unable to absorb light, because there was little light in the night, and because the mind reflects the world, which with the new sun means this it (this "world, mind") becomes another sun. 3 This is a picture of a mind generating and reflecting the light of the world. But this picture is neither a metaphor nor a model nor a theory ofthe mind. It is, instead, a description o f being between things (furniture) and loss (burning) as a limit to them both. Being between matter and time requires a mode o f self-reflection that generates an T as a limit to meaning. What I mean by this is that one cannot get anymore meaning out our own self-reflection than we can out o f this passage in the Wake. And the meaning of this passage is a description of the limit to the meaning of this passage.
The night is a reordering of oneself and the world into the condition betwixtween things, ideas, concepts, clarity, sense, moments. "Yet is no body present here which was nottherebefore. Onlyisorderothered,Noughtisnulled. FuitfiatX"(FW613. 13-14). Asit was, let it be! What is this reothering, where "nought is nulled", but everything is knot and nat? This kind o f riddle, another riddle o f enveloping facts, can be answered by another riddle: "Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger, Sheholhem, that you will neither serve nor let serve, pray nor let pray? " (FW188. 18-19)
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Language itself can be used as the form o f resistance to the claims o f the world or ofother people on us (the claims, ifone acknowledges any, ofthe Wake). ALP writes,
"I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard Thy voice" (the coming of day or of sense or of a greeting and so on) I asked "So content me now" (FW624. 04-05). Such content appears to be "I pity your oldselfI was used to. Now a younger's there. " (FW627. 06-07). Theoldselfiswhat'I'usedto. . . be,orbecomingwasa "Tobecontinued's tale" (FW626. 18). Being here is also a habit, "I was used to", where the difference between how one describes oneself is not clearly different from how one describes others.
And yet it is exactly the difference between myself and others that allows me to be visibletotheseothers. InInvestigations,Wittgensteinidentifiestwodomainsofknowing: (1) a knowing marked by second and third person claims, and (2) first person claims associatedwithmentalstateslikebeingdepressed,excited,inpain,etc. Thuswecansay 'I know he is in pain,' but not 'I know I am in pain'. Could I doubt this? Or not know that I am in pain?
If we say "'Since yesterday I have understood this word. ' 'Continuously', though? --To be sure, one can speak of an interpretation of understanding, but in what cases? Compare: "When did your pains get less? " and "when did you stop understanding that word? " (PI p. 59)
I can forget that "wissen"means to know, and then all ofa sudden recall it, maybe by saying to myself "/c/z weiss". It is through experiences like this that we imagine an unconscious somewhere behind, beneath, around, even surrounding our consciousness.
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But I might never recall the definition without looking it up or asking a German friend. Thus we might think that our unconscious is a dictionary for our consciousness. Forgetting a word seems like losing it, losing something that is mine.
In this my world or my language has waned, and the world has shrunk.
One can follow the mineness of knowing a word (which does not mean of course that it is private) into the mineness of pain and enter Wittgenstein's discussion of pain. Can I ask someone if I am still in pain? Since I can't my pain seems private. I can also forgetmypain. Imightgethitagain,harder,sothatwhateverwasbrokenbeforegets maskedbyagreaterpain. Thismightbeafunctionofthelimitationsofmynervous system, but we find the same effect in our emotional distress. This is what drives us into homeopathy. I might listen to Chopin's B flat minor Sonata (with its Funeral March) after my wife has left me. This might seem at the time a tragedy, and at least call for catharsis, as Milton says in the Preface to Samson Agonistes "to purge the mind o f those and such like passions, . . . , by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for so Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are us'd against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors. " The passions transformed in tragedy are reduced analogically to a physiologicalprinciple. Weentertheworldthroughthisanalogy. Thesepainsmightbe mine. If I lose this pain have I lost something of mine? Pain, excitement, depression all can be temporally limited to a particular duration. They are contained within time. The mineness of these sensations is my experience, my investment or identification of myself with these mental states. Can I experience the meaning o f the word "wissen"? If not then
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how is it mine? Should we not construe it, after the model in the Tractatus, as a limit of my experience and thus of my world? We want love to be like understanding a world as myworld,notlike'knowing'transitorypain. Inthissensewewantlovetobeamind. 4
The "between" in Finnegans Wake is marking off in negative space these two uses o f 'knowing,' not as logical distinctions tied to theories about first or third person discourse, but as grammatical distinctions organizing our investments in the forms o f our languageasmeaningful. Thisislikeaestheticizinglogicorlinguistics,notassublime(as in metaphysics), but as I suggested as grammatical jokes. The fragments generated by these jokes form a "monthage stick in the melmelode hawr, I am (twintomine) all thees thing"(FW223. 08-09). Thisislikesaying,"Iamallthesefragmentsincludingthis fragment and that and this 'I'. " In my previous discussion of fragments, this self-reflexive turning expresses a demand forjustification, or a configuration ofthe condition ofbeing human within the world as between what Wittgenstein marks as justifications and rights:
"When I say 'I am in pain' I am at any rate justified before myself. " --What does that mean? Does it mean: "If someone else could know what I am calling 'pain', he would admit that I was using the word correctly"?
To use a word without justification does not mean to use it without right. (PI? 289)
This last sentence is either contradictory (an appeal to rights is an appeal to justification) or is a picture of the limit ofjustification. If the latter, justification operates outside first- personclaims: itscriteriaarevisibletoothers. Thusjustification,inthispictureofuse,is not required when expressing pain because how would I be mistaken about my own pain
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(not my own hurt). But does the concept o f right, describing my statements as without justification but with right, attach itself differently to my first person claims? Justification
functions through an interpretive stance from which judgments can be made. Justification operatesinrelationtonormativecriteria. DerivedfromLius(thatwhichisbinding,right, justice, duty), 'justification' or 'justify' configures something or someone in relation to the
interactive order organizing the domain in which this something or someone operates and exists. But this re-ordering requires a mark to express its success. Such a remark, however, is the prime means by which this reordering can take place, and thus from ius is derived iurare, to pronounce a ritual formula or swear an oath. Justice arises not only as an effect o f our promises and betrayals, but it is constituted as such promises through whichwebecomecapableofjusticebecausewecanbejudged. Justicerequiresspeech, because justice is a form of speaking. This speech, however, must be a speaking of a community, an invocation of the particular (an individual or an expression or a sentence) by requiring that it express the whole (thus the standardization of ritual pronouncements and the strictures of tradition). There is, therefore, at least an isomorphism between language and the function ofjustice: both require that the whole be present in the particular. This relation is marked in the derivation o f L iudex, he who points to or show
the law (from whence our judge). Iudex derives from ius and diet (dex), to speak, say, etc. The collapse in our word judge of the act ofjudging (judge as verb) and the person who judges (noun) recalls the same need for the normative to be expressed fully in a particular,inthiscaseasthegroundofauthority. Andthuswespeakoftherighttojudge ('right' cognate with L. rex).
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As I suggested earlier, rights can be given, and thus they are not a given, a ground. Ifjustification is the application ofcriteria ofjudgment, rights are gained when these criteria are given as yours to apply to yourself. In giving rights one is giving recognition ofthoserights. Ifwecompare'Ihavetheright'with'Ihavethejustification'wecansee that the appeal to rights is a first person appeal, while the appeal to justification is an appeal to either second person (as if in a monarchy) or third person (as if in a democracy). Thus we can say "I am justified by my right to X". In this case justification is the applicationofaright. Butthisright,especiallyinWittgenstein'sdescription,isan expression whose self-sufficiency is only determined by our judgment that one is speaking by right (and without justification). How does one conceptualize oneself if one could not speak about, let's say, spiritual pain by right?
This third person appeal underwriting justification reifies rights away from the particularity o f persons and communities. The appeal to right by Wittgenstein is, however, an appeal to the normative usage of language. Normative criteria, whether embedded in language (or any formal structures) or in one's person (through social recognition of self-sufficiency, which therefore involves a self-recognition), erase the differencebetweenfirstpersonandsecondorthirdpersonappeals. Thedifferencewould seem to be the requirements for the application o f the language o f description determined asjustificationofright. Myquestioninghereisnotaboutthefirstpersonstatusofpain (the fact that one could not not know one's own pain), but is about determining what's at stake in Wittgenstein's invocation o f a difference between justification and rights.
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If one can separate the application of criteria from the criteria themselves, then criteria are inadequate to describe the relation between personhood (to which are attached rights) and any totality determining normative standards (towards which justification operates). Becausetheappealtorightswantstoconceptualizepersonhood(or particularity) as a totality determining normative standards personhood is both stabilized (as a ground) and destabilized (as normative). Thus the questions "when does something mean" or 'when do I know how to play chess? " arise when we view ourselves as simultaneously a particular and a universal, as a fragment or at night, or in our attempts to conceptualize both the language games we use to describe dreams and the language games about our self-loss at night. .
The following is another version ofthe Wake which is another version ofthis self- loss:
"Yet it is but an old story, the tale of a Treestone with one Ysold, of a Mons held by tentpegs and his pal whatholoosed on the run . . . drop this jiggerypokery and talk straight turkey meet to mate, for while the ear, be we mikealls or
nicholists, may sometimes by inclined to believe others the eye, whether browned or nolensed, find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. (FW113. 18-29)
The elm and stone are telling a tale of ALP as Isolde (compare this story with Eliot's telling of this story) and of HCE as Gulliver, where the Lilliputians tentpeg him down like sleep and its fragments and details. Someone asks (the text or the reader) to speak "straight turkey", but even in this request a metaphor for plan speaking can become the
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plainfleshof"turkeymeet"(meat). Whynotbuildachurchonthispuninsteadofthepun onSt. Peter? Ordinarylanguagepausesthe"jiggerypokery"ofthisnight,likethelove potion Isolde drank, so that to meet is to mate. Do we believe the evidence of our ears over that of our eyes? Language of the eye or the ear cannot establish certainty. It is a fact about ordinary language just as it is a fact about ordinary life that we might "find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself', where this itself might be language animated into the form of our understanding or ourselves as bodies unsure of our status as animate beings.
In justification the criteria used, the totality invoked (society, language, law), functions as a limit to the particular. In rights the particular (individual, sentence, claim) functions as a limit to the totality. Epistemological justification is therefore an application ofcriteria. Aestheticjustification,likewhenepistemologicalbecomesontological
justification, when knowing ifthe bird is a goldfinch becomes the skeptical problem of determining if the bird is a hallucination, cannot be satisfied by any criteria because these criteria are missing or themselves require justification.
Ifanylinedidjustifythewholewritingwouldcease. Thedemandforjustification is not necessarily met by success. To use it by right opens up the complexity in the use of possession as a justification for freedom, an appeal to citizenship, the community, in this case the community of speakers, the normative conventionalism determining the criteria of language (games) expressed as personhood. The appeal to right here pretends to undercut the demand for justification, but the appeal to right rests on the collapse ofjustification into personhood. Personhood is not something that can be denied; by this I mean even the
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denial of the right to personhood that defined American slavery or describes ethnic and religious conflicts are tacit recognitions ofwhat is being denied. Wittgenstein's arguments that we respond to the pain in another as if to their human physiognomy is true in these cases as well. But is not the case that a right is an expression of personhood? It can only function as such an expression through a logic ofjustification that attaches the right to personhood and not to the land or to gods or to power. (What is a right? Is it like an arm? Do I have the right to my own body? Who says? Why them? Because they have power? what legitimates their power? Their power? And yet the stability o f communities is a function ofthe recognition ofthe legitimacy ofpower). To say that 'rights are human' can be answered by 'so are justifications'. Human rights are nonsensical: 'human rights' would not be called rights at all. All rights proceed through the inclusion within a community where these rights can be acknowledged. Rights, therefore, in their ambiguous relation to justification, describe a way in which we attach our interpretations (about what isjust) to what we are.
What does the demand to justify our words entail, demand, require? Modernism might require that the words themselves justify their sense, answering questions: does this mean? should I read this? is this art? which is to ask what value do these words have? At any point in the Wake none of these questions can be answered. Thus nothing within the textcancountasajustificationbeforethesequestionshavealreadybeenanswered. Thus if the text could offer a justification that would count as a justification it would have already been justified.
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The demand for justification before this text requires the interpretation o f what it means to justify in this case. Every text demands and performs its own justification. If we canjustify the Wake as art, we assume that we have criteria determining what art is, in the way we use criteria in evaluating knowledge claims. But this determination of art is exactlywhatjustificationissupposetoprovide. Soagainthedemandseemsnottomake sense because we do not know what the demand means. Y et without justification art seems vague, blind or pointless.
You say to me, 'You are not justified in thinking that. ' 'Thinking' here means something like 'believing'. The criteria for justification here will be partly dependent on what'that'refersto. Thelegitimacyofmythinking,likemyknowledge,seemsdependent on justified true belief. This justification describes a rationale adequate to the facts or logic or the rules o f discourse or of evidence. Although I cannot make the truth o f any particular claim transparent, I should be able to articulate the facts and reasons that would
justify my belief. I can even show how a belief, my own or someone else's, is a prejudice (of course again this does not make my belief either true or false, just not justified except as a prejudice).
Compare this use o f 'justify' (knowledge) with Milton's self-purported, putative 'motive' in writing Paradise Lost
what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
I may assert Eternal Providence, AndjustifythewaysofGodtomen. (1. 22-26)
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Do we read "And justify the ways of God to men" as a promise to show that God is right? To give God his due? To recognize or establish his rights? No. Is this instead a promise to show that the form ofthe world and ofhumanity is correct? By what standard? How does one determine the criteria by which to judge God and the world (if one already questions God's ways and, therefore, his word)? This goal I think, therefore, should be understoodironically. TheironyofthisgoalrestsonthehumansubsumptionofGod's right tojudge: the human ascension to the possession or the creation ofthe criteria of
judgment. Miltonmusttransformwhatitmeanstojudge(andjustify)sothatwe understand our lives (our very humanity) as a manifestation of God's demand that we
justify our ways to God. Such ajustification, however, requires the acceptance of God's criteria o f evaluation, even though these criteria remain unknown by human beings.
Justification goes through the request that our education be a form of purification. Milton did use justify like this in Areopagitica:
This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a profiiseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. (733)
Thisjustification ofthe ways ofgod is meant to suggest that we must act against these temptations in order to make ourselves (or express ourselves as) virtuous: "that which purifiesusistrial,andtrialisbywhatiscontrary"(728). Thispurification,however,isan attempt to justify ourselves before God.
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In his discussion ofthe theology ofLuther, Barth argues that "the center ofthis theology, then, is the demand for faith as naked trust that casts itselfinto the arms of God's mercy; faith that is the last word that can be said about the possibility of
justification before God" (Calvin 46). Calvin followed Luther in this even more strongly, tying justification to obedience to God by virtue of God's sovereignty (expressed through predestination). Bydescribingjustificationasakindofeducation(orpurification),Milton forces justification from an interpretation into an act. But we must be careful about what this means. A human life becomes itself an interpretation towards God's criteria of
judgment. Interpretation is embedded within a meaning which emerges through the act of transforming oneselftowards God (the totalizing form ofmeaning). Ajustification, as an interpretation,gainsmeaning(andadeterminingscope)initsuse. Thisusemustalsobe
justified in acting toward the good. This may mean nothing to us if we do not imagine ourselves inhabiting moral totalities (in the way we might imagine inhabiting linguistic totalities).
I think my sketch ofMilton's use ofjustification is cognate with Wittgenstein's description o f the grammar o f shame. First, Wittgenstein describes an expression o f hate and derives its meaning as an interpretation o f the total scene:
"At that moment I hated him. " --What happened here? Didn't it consist in thoughts, feelings, and actions? And if I were to rehearse that moment to myself I should assume a particular expression, I think of certain happenings, breathe in a particular way, arouse certain feelings in myself. I might think up a conversation, a whole scene in which that hatred flared up. And I might play this scene through
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with feelings approximating to those of a real occasion. That I have actually
experienced something ofthe sort will naturally help me to do so. (PI? 642)
This is clear enough for my purposes. It is important to see that the sentence "At that moment I hated him" is a judgment or interpretation. It's meaning is, therefore, part of thatinterpretation(meaningisnotalwayslikethis). Therecognitionofthishatredandthe fact ofthis hatred can be interpreted further: "IfI now become ashamed ofthis incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing: of the words, of the poisonous tone, etc. " (PI? 643). Wittgensteinthenaskshowdoesthisshameattachtothishatred. WhatexactlyamI ashamed of? "I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had. " -- And didn't the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole historyoftheincident. "(PI? 644;underlineadded). Whatisincludedinthis"whole history" changes and shifts according to how it is embedded in our lives when we remember this incident.
of loving, is a forgetfulness of who anyone is. Language, just as dreams, is a reminder of that agony, "the cruciform postscript" (FW122. 20) The revision of this script is both our
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forgetting ourselves and the kisses of others into "the life he is to die into . . . lost himself or himselfsome somnione sciupiones" (FW293. 04-07). The possibility ofothers is the possibility of love. The failure to address oneselfas oneselfor one's language to others is what I have called the failed intentionality ofthe Wake. This kind oflanguage is marked on the other end by "the accusative hole which it ends itself', that is the objects which are the things themselves, the things that are never themselves words, and within the inverted cnat language' seem absences instead o f presences.
The analogies describing the relation between mind and world, between text and mind, text and world (wax, mirror, lamp, harp, container, etc. ) have been reduced here into a special kind of the self-reflexive nonsense language asking "It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? " (FW94. 09-10) and expecting continually failing
justifications for asking these questions that cannot be answered. This might seem (in many ways correctly) that the analogies o f mind and aesthetics have been replaced by an interpretive stance, but it is not clear that interpretation is always called for. If interpretation cannot claim any particular truth value and is not itself as Wittgenstein suggests, adequate for meaning, it's failure will not count as an adequate stance between mind and world and art.
Do we experience language such that we can experience this between "mind, world" and language as the between of night or nonsense? This following is some evidence for this: "Everyletter is a godsend, ardent Ares . . . To me or not to me. Satis thy quest on" (FW269. 17-20). The Wake is sent to god or from god or to me or not to me. The resistance to "mind, world" metaphors is what Joyce calls "holding tight to that
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prestatuteinourcharter''(FW117. 34-35). Thisholdingtighttothe'discamate',"your disunited kingdom on the vacuum o f your own most intensely doubtful soul"(FW188. 16- 17) "may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense o f the lot, the interpretation
o f any phrase in the whole, the meaning o f every word o f a phrase so far deciphered out o f it. . . "(FW117. 35-118. 02). TheWakecontinuallydisplaysKierkegaard'sclaimthat"there is a difference between writing on a blank sheet o f paper and bringing to light by the application o f a caustic fluid a text which is hidden under another text", but with the difference that there is not any Christian truth underlying any surface of the world or mind {PointofView,40). Iholdoff,therefore,inofferinganytheoryofidentitythatwould explain how "Equal to=aosch" because this does not describe an identity, but a limit between a description ("equal to"), mathematical symbolism (=), a riddle ("aosch"), a self- expression ("aosch"=chaos). This is a limit because "Equal to=aosch" not only does not have a meaning, it cannot have any meaning outside o f an allegory that some reader will construct. Itis,however,notsenselessasadescriptionofalimit. Thuswecanreadthe Wake, to the degree that it is made up ofthis kind ofnonsense, as the self-description and enactment o f shifting limits. But what kind o f limits? limits o f what? As I suggested in the previous chapter one such limit is the vanishing intentionality that marks a limit between our inexistence as something meaningful within language and our ability to invest
ourselves as ourselves through and as language. But this is to say the words 'our', 'ourselves', 'though', 'as', 'within', and 'meaning' all function as limits, as meaningless except as transparent markers of an interpretive position within language games or under theological pressure: reading language as a descriptions of the limits that make our being
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human being human. This is not another kind o f language, but a way reading language as a non-language, or again as Joyce calls it "nat language".
How do you figure language within language iflanguage is all on the same logical level? As nonsense (as dead signs or code), as animate; thus the questions what is language or sense become questions about nonsense and about how, what and why anything,leastofallourselves,isorcanbeanimate. Sentencesorphrasesorlinesbecome "[t]hese ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of allinaprettycheckerwithlamp-blackandblackthorn"(114. 07-11). TheWake,likeThe Book ofKells, seems written with a black ink that "is lamp black, or possibly fish-bone black. "2 Joyce describes the Wake by describing a monkish monument o f Irish culture, and uses this description, with others, as the substance ofthe Wake. The substance of this theological language, however, is their movement emerging out o f domesticity, not read or written but "drawn," for any sensitive person, "first of all in a pretty checker with lamp- black and blackthorn. "
The movement o f words can be characterized in relation to the "comparative safety" of ordinary usage:
It is seriously believed by some that the intention may have been geodetic, or, in theviewofthecannier,domesticeconomical. Butbywritingthithawaysendto end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and
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jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit. Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom? (114. 13-20)
The "intention," one way ofofferingjustification (but ofwhat? ), could be geodetic, that is determinedby surveying(butofwhat? );oraneven"cannier"viewwouldbethat "intention may have been. . . domestic economical," L. domesticus or G. oikonomikos, pertaining to the household. These two possibilities (surveying and the domestic) describe the two aspects o f Wittgenstein's philosophy: surveying ourselves, the world and our language (what Kenny called providing "a clear view of the world" and Wittgenstein in his preface called "sketches of the landscape") and a return to ordinary language (the disappearanceoftheproblemsofphilosophyinordinarylanguage). Intherealmofthe ordinary, the translation between Latin and Greek is possible. The world o f sleep is also ordinary, but this thithaways and hithaways (losing control o f the tongue, the "latters slettering down", no one going up and no ladder to throw away since it has already dissolved) requires asking what would be an adequate survey or sketch o f what ordinary world? , limited how? seen as what? , threatened always by the interpretive distortions that allow for the blessing of one among any three brothers (Shem, Japhet, and Ham). The confusion o f interpretation for truth, the replacability o f people and words and commitments under this confusion, is the problem o f Hamlet ("tham Let" and "Hum Lit. )
written into the Wake. This is a tragedy accompanying our inheritance o f language, or maybeofpronounswhere"Semetomyplaceandjupetbackagain". Joyceisconstructing the place of my signs (Gr. <rr||ia), or the sign of me, or the place marked or having a mark set or affixed (Gr. crr|no08To<;) or a cemetery place. Wakean writing seems to place me
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("Semetomyplace") within the surveyable world and loop it back again into a history of origins and disinheritance, placing me with and as Japhet, the 'non-Semitic' son o f Noah, Jupiter from "tham Let", Hamlet, and Ham, the rejected son o f Noah.
If we read this again, the old Greek signs and the Latin imitations, from them that rise, or from Let Rise (a name, a description and a marker, like "ildiot") until Human Literature Sleeps, ask the question "where in the waste is wisdom? " This is a description of how to read: the unity of Greek and Latin in the text (as an example of the language of the Wake) does not communicate, but asks forjustification. And this request is understood as ordinary, as ordinary as waste is and is our desire for wisdom. If 'let rise' both can mean 'arise' and function as the name 'Let Rise', then the confusion o f verb for name (as in "In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was God") is the way in whichonecanenterorbenamedbylanguage. Consequently,"whereinthewasteis wisdom? " describes a stance toward ourselves, the world and our language that analogizes the relation between mind and world, by placing our humanity at risk by placing our constructions and our world as a world against us.
This is the effect ofJoyce's lists, to place the world enumerated against us and in this offer targets for sense and identification. But once an identification is made, as a result of an interpretation ('"alphybetty verbage' is a version of the Wake, or "am I a whirling dervish? " or "can the world be built outside of logic or as a list of predicates without any subject[s]? '), the meaning remains unclear. No interpretation is ever adequate because interpretation cannot determine meaning. Is the meaning ofFinnegans Wake the following list?
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My wud! The warped flooring ofthe lair and soundconducting walls thereof. . . were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories,. . . doubtful eggshells,. . . alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries as speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smul, fallen lucifers,. . . counterfeit franks, best intentions,. . . gloss teeth for a tooth,. . . inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son o f Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an I neluctable phantom . . . writing the mystery o f himself in furniture. (FW183. 08- 184. 10)
Furniture and language both constitute the world as limits to myself. This limit is enacted by or as matter, what Berkeley called "the furniture of earth". What is "the mystery of himself'? He writes while sitting in furniture as a piece of furniture determined and defined by materiality. This "mystery o f himself in furniture" becomes at the end o f the Wake, when the sleeper is awakening, the "fumit o f heupanepi world" (FW611. 18). c[F]umit' containsfait (L. as it was) andfarm s (L. oven, fireplace), and can be read as 'bum it'. "[F]umit' can be translated as 'as it as bums and is a furnace. " This burning is stabilized as a thing when "fumit" puns "the furniture of earth. " Consequently, the being andstabilityofthepastcondensedintofurniturecontainsHeracletianflux. "[H]eupanepi' consistsoftheGreekeu(good),pan(all),andepi(upon). Thus"fumitofheupanepi world" can be translated as 'the furniture o f the flux o f the good upon all the world bums
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into a furnace. ' (So that's what it means to confuse the mind and the world! ) As the sleeper awakens into consciousness at the end of the Wake, under the sun and in rising color, "that part of it (fumit of heupanepi world) had shown itself. . . unable to absorbere", that part ofthe matter ofcourse, the matter ofa person organized as time, as change, (thefurnitureofthefluxofthegooduponalltheworldbumsintoafurnace)had shown itself unable to absorb light, because there was little light in the night, and because the mind reflects the world, which with the new sun means this it (this "world, mind") becomes another sun. 3 This is a picture of a mind generating and reflecting the light of the world. But this picture is neither a metaphor nor a model nor a theory ofthe mind. It is, instead, a description o f being between things (furniture) and loss (burning) as a limit to them both. Being between matter and time requires a mode o f self-reflection that generates an T as a limit to meaning. What I mean by this is that one cannot get anymore meaning out our own self-reflection than we can out o f this passage in the Wake. And the meaning of this passage is a description of the limit to the meaning of this passage.
The night is a reordering of oneself and the world into the condition betwixtween things, ideas, concepts, clarity, sense, moments. "Yet is no body present here which was nottherebefore. Onlyisorderothered,Noughtisnulled. FuitfiatX"(FW613. 13-14). Asit was, let it be! What is this reothering, where "nought is nulled", but everything is knot and nat? This kind o f riddle, another riddle o f enveloping facts, can be answered by another riddle: "Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger, Sheholhem, that you will neither serve nor let serve, pray nor let pray? " (FW188. 18-19)
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Language itself can be used as the form o f resistance to the claims o f the world or ofother people on us (the claims, ifone acknowledges any, ofthe Wake). ALP writes,
"I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard Thy voice" (the coming of day or of sense or of a greeting and so on) I asked "So content me now" (FW624. 04-05). Such content appears to be "I pity your oldselfI was used to. Now a younger's there. " (FW627. 06-07). Theoldselfiswhat'I'usedto. . . be,orbecomingwasa "Tobecontinued's tale" (FW626. 18). Being here is also a habit, "I was used to", where the difference between how one describes oneself is not clearly different from how one describes others.
And yet it is exactly the difference between myself and others that allows me to be visibletotheseothers. InInvestigations,Wittgensteinidentifiestwodomainsofknowing: (1) a knowing marked by second and third person claims, and (2) first person claims associatedwithmentalstateslikebeingdepressed,excited,inpain,etc. Thuswecansay 'I know he is in pain,' but not 'I know I am in pain'. Could I doubt this? Or not know that I am in pain?
If we say "'Since yesterday I have understood this word. ' 'Continuously', though? --To be sure, one can speak of an interpretation of understanding, but in what cases? Compare: "When did your pains get less? " and "when did you stop understanding that word? " (PI p. 59)
I can forget that "wissen"means to know, and then all ofa sudden recall it, maybe by saying to myself "/c/z weiss". It is through experiences like this that we imagine an unconscious somewhere behind, beneath, around, even surrounding our consciousness.
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But I might never recall the definition without looking it up or asking a German friend. Thus we might think that our unconscious is a dictionary for our consciousness. Forgetting a word seems like losing it, losing something that is mine.
In this my world or my language has waned, and the world has shrunk.
One can follow the mineness of knowing a word (which does not mean of course that it is private) into the mineness of pain and enter Wittgenstein's discussion of pain. Can I ask someone if I am still in pain? Since I can't my pain seems private. I can also forgetmypain. Imightgethitagain,harder,sothatwhateverwasbrokenbeforegets maskedbyagreaterpain. Thismightbeafunctionofthelimitationsofmynervous system, but we find the same effect in our emotional distress. This is what drives us into homeopathy. I might listen to Chopin's B flat minor Sonata (with its Funeral March) after my wife has left me. This might seem at the time a tragedy, and at least call for catharsis, as Milton says in the Preface to Samson Agonistes "to purge the mind o f those and such like passions, . . . , by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion: for so Physic things of melancholic hue and quality are us'd against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors. " The passions transformed in tragedy are reduced analogically to a physiologicalprinciple. Weentertheworldthroughthisanalogy. Thesepainsmightbe mine. If I lose this pain have I lost something of mine? Pain, excitement, depression all can be temporally limited to a particular duration. They are contained within time. The mineness of these sensations is my experience, my investment or identification of myself with these mental states. Can I experience the meaning o f the word "wissen"? If not then
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how is it mine? Should we not construe it, after the model in the Tractatus, as a limit of my experience and thus of my world? We want love to be like understanding a world as myworld,notlike'knowing'transitorypain. Inthissensewewantlovetobeamind. 4
The "between" in Finnegans Wake is marking off in negative space these two uses o f 'knowing,' not as logical distinctions tied to theories about first or third person discourse, but as grammatical distinctions organizing our investments in the forms o f our languageasmeaningful. Thisislikeaestheticizinglogicorlinguistics,notassublime(as in metaphysics), but as I suggested as grammatical jokes. The fragments generated by these jokes form a "monthage stick in the melmelode hawr, I am (twintomine) all thees thing"(FW223. 08-09). Thisislikesaying,"Iamallthesefragmentsincludingthis fragment and that and this 'I'. " In my previous discussion of fragments, this self-reflexive turning expresses a demand forjustification, or a configuration ofthe condition ofbeing human within the world as between what Wittgenstein marks as justifications and rights:
"When I say 'I am in pain' I am at any rate justified before myself. " --What does that mean? Does it mean: "If someone else could know what I am calling 'pain', he would admit that I was using the word correctly"?
To use a word without justification does not mean to use it without right. (PI? 289)
This last sentence is either contradictory (an appeal to rights is an appeal to justification) or is a picture of the limit ofjustification. If the latter, justification operates outside first- personclaims: itscriteriaarevisibletoothers. Thusjustification,inthispictureofuse,is not required when expressing pain because how would I be mistaken about my own pain
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(not my own hurt). But does the concept o f right, describing my statements as without justification but with right, attach itself differently to my first person claims? Justification
functions through an interpretive stance from which judgments can be made. Justification operatesinrelationtonormativecriteria. DerivedfromLius(thatwhichisbinding,right, justice, duty), 'justification' or 'justify' configures something or someone in relation to the
interactive order organizing the domain in which this something or someone operates and exists. But this re-ordering requires a mark to express its success. Such a remark, however, is the prime means by which this reordering can take place, and thus from ius is derived iurare, to pronounce a ritual formula or swear an oath. Justice arises not only as an effect o f our promises and betrayals, but it is constituted as such promises through whichwebecomecapableofjusticebecausewecanbejudged. Justicerequiresspeech, because justice is a form of speaking. This speech, however, must be a speaking of a community, an invocation of the particular (an individual or an expression or a sentence) by requiring that it express the whole (thus the standardization of ritual pronouncements and the strictures of tradition). There is, therefore, at least an isomorphism between language and the function ofjustice: both require that the whole be present in the particular. This relation is marked in the derivation o f L iudex, he who points to or show
the law (from whence our judge). Iudex derives from ius and diet (dex), to speak, say, etc. The collapse in our word judge of the act ofjudging (judge as verb) and the person who judges (noun) recalls the same need for the normative to be expressed fully in a particular,inthiscaseasthegroundofauthority. Andthuswespeakoftherighttojudge ('right' cognate with L. rex).
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As I suggested earlier, rights can be given, and thus they are not a given, a ground. Ifjustification is the application ofcriteria ofjudgment, rights are gained when these criteria are given as yours to apply to yourself. In giving rights one is giving recognition ofthoserights. Ifwecompare'Ihavetheright'with'Ihavethejustification'wecansee that the appeal to rights is a first person appeal, while the appeal to justification is an appeal to either second person (as if in a monarchy) or third person (as if in a democracy). Thus we can say "I am justified by my right to X". In this case justification is the applicationofaright. Butthisright,especiallyinWittgenstein'sdescription,isan expression whose self-sufficiency is only determined by our judgment that one is speaking by right (and without justification). How does one conceptualize oneself if one could not speak about, let's say, spiritual pain by right?
This third person appeal underwriting justification reifies rights away from the particularity o f persons and communities. The appeal to right by Wittgenstein is, however, an appeal to the normative usage of language. Normative criteria, whether embedded in language (or any formal structures) or in one's person (through social recognition of self-sufficiency, which therefore involves a self-recognition), erase the differencebetweenfirstpersonandsecondorthirdpersonappeals. Thedifferencewould seem to be the requirements for the application o f the language o f description determined asjustificationofright. Myquestioninghereisnotaboutthefirstpersonstatusofpain (the fact that one could not not know one's own pain), but is about determining what's at stake in Wittgenstein's invocation o f a difference between justification and rights.
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If one can separate the application of criteria from the criteria themselves, then criteria are inadequate to describe the relation between personhood (to which are attached rights) and any totality determining normative standards (towards which justification operates). Becausetheappealtorightswantstoconceptualizepersonhood(or particularity) as a totality determining normative standards personhood is both stabilized (as a ground) and destabilized (as normative). Thus the questions "when does something mean" or 'when do I know how to play chess? " arise when we view ourselves as simultaneously a particular and a universal, as a fragment or at night, or in our attempts to conceptualize both the language games we use to describe dreams and the language games about our self-loss at night. .
The following is another version ofthe Wake which is another version ofthis self- loss:
"Yet it is but an old story, the tale of a Treestone with one Ysold, of a Mons held by tentpegs and his pal whatholoosed on the run . . . drop this jiggerypokery and talk straight turkey meet to mate, for while the ear, be we mikealls or
nicholists, may sometimes by inclined to believe others the eye, whether browned or nolensed, find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself. (FW113. 18-29)
The elm and stone are telling a tale of ALP as Isolde (compare this story with Eliot's telling of this story) and of HCE as Gulliver, where the Lilliputians tentpeg him down like sleep and its fragments and details. Someone asks (the text or the reader) to speak "straight turkey", but even in this request a metaphor for plan speaking can become the
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plainfleshof"turkeymeet"(meat). Whynotbuildachurchonthispuninsteadofthepun onSt. Peter? Ordinarylanguagepausesthe"jiggerypokery"ofthisnight,likethelove potion Isolde drank, so that to meet is to mate. Do we believe the evidence of our ears over that of our eyes? Language of the eye or the ear cannot establish certainty. It is a fact about ordinary language just as it is a fact about ordinary life that we might "find it devilish hard now and again even to believe itself', where this itself might be language animated into the form of our understanding or ourselves as bodies unsure of our status as animate beings.
In justification the criteria used, the totality invoked (society, language, law), functions as a limit to the particular. In rights the particular (individual, sentence, claim) functions as a limit to the totality. Epistemological justification is therefore an application ofcriteria. Aestheticjustification,likewhenepistemologicalbecomesontological
justification, when knowing ifthe bird is a goldfinch becomes the skeptical problem of determining if the bird is a hallucination, cannot be satisfied by any criteria because these criteria are missing or themselves require justification.
Ifanylinedidjustifythewholewritingwouldcease. Thedemandforjustification is not necessarily met by success. To use it by right opens up the complexity in the use of possession as a justification for freedom, an appeal to citizenship, the community, in this case the community of speakers, the normative conventionalism determining the criteria of language (games) expressed as personhood. The appeal to right here pretends to undercut the demand for justification, but the appeal to right rests on the collapse ofjustification into personhood. Personhood is not something that can be denied; by this I mean even the
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denial of the right to personhood that defined American slavery or describes ethnic and religious conflicts are tacit recognitions ofwhat is being denied. Wittgenstein's arguments that we respond to the pain in another as if to their human physiognomy is true in these cases as well. But is not the case that a right is an expression of personhood? It can only function as such an expression through a logic ofjustification that attaches the right to personhood and not to the land or to gods or to power. (What is a right? Is it like an arm? Do I have the right to my own body? Who says? Why them? Because they have power? what legitimates their power? Their power? And yet the stability o f communities is a function ofthe recognition ofthe legitimacy ofpower). To say that 'rights are human' can be answered by 'so are justifications'. Human rights are nonsensical: 'human rights' would not be called rights at all. All rights proceed through the inclusion within a community where these rights can be acknowledged. Rights, therefore, in their ambiguous relation to justification, describe a way in which we attach our interpretations (about what isjust) to what we are.
What does the demand to justify our words entail, demand, require? Modernism might require that the words themselves justify their sense, answering questions: does this mean? should I read this? is this art? which is to ask what value do these words have? At any point in the Wake none of these questions can be answered. Thus nothing within the textcancountasajustificationbeforethesequestionshavealreadybeenanswered. Thus if the text could offer a justification that would count as a justification it would have already been justified.
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The demand for justification before this text requires the interpretation o f what it means to justify in this case. Every text demands and performs its own justification. If we canjustify the Wake as art, we assume that we have criteria determining what art is, in the way we use criteria in evaluating knowledge claims. But this determination of art is exactlywhatjustificationissupposetoprovide. Soagainthedemandseemsnottomake sense because we do not know what the demand means. Y et without justification art seems vague, blind or pointless.
You say to me, 'You are not justified in thinking that. ' 'Thinking' here means something like 'believing'. The criteria for justification here will be partly dependent on what'that'refersto. Thelegitimacyofmythinking,likemyknowledge,seemsdependent on justified true belief. This justification describes a rationale adequate to the facts or logic or the rules o f discourse or of evidence. Although I cannot make the truth o f any particular claim transparent, I should be able to articulate the facts and reasons that would
justify my belief. I can even show how a belief, my own or someone else's, is a prejudice (of course again this does not make my belief either true or false, just not justified except as a prejudice).
Compare this use o f 'justify' (knowledge) with Milton's self-purported, putative 'motive' in writing Paradise Lost
what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
I may assert Eternal Providence, AndjustifythewaysofGodtomen. (1. 22-26)
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Do we read "And justify the ways of God to men" as a promise to show that God is right? To give God his due? To recognize or establish his rights? No. Is this instead a promise to show that the form ofthe world and ofhumanity is correct? By what standard? How does one determine the criteria by which to judge God and the world (if one already questions God's ways and, therefore, his word)? This goal I think, therefore, should be understoodironically. TheironyofthisgoalrestsonthehumansubsumptionofGod's right tojudge: the human ascension to the possession or the creation ofthe criteria of
judgment. Miltonmusttransformwhatitmeanstojudge(andjustify)sothatwe understand our lives (our very humanity) as a manifestation of God's demand that we
justify our ways to God. Such ajustification, however, requires the acceptance of God's criteria o f evaluation, even though these criteria remain unknown by human beings.
Justification goes through the request that our education be a form of purification. Milton did use justify like this in Areopagitica:
This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a profiiseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. (733)
Thisjustification ofthe ways ofgod is meant to suggest that we must act against these temptations in order to make ourselves (or express ourselves as) virtuous: "that which purifiesusistrial,andtrialisbywhatiscontrary"(728). Thispurification,however,isan attempt to justify ourselves before God.
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In his discussion ofthe theology ofLuther, Barth argues that "the center ofthis theology, then, is the demand for faith as naked trust that casts itselfinto the arms of God's mercy; faith that is the last word that can be said about the possibility of
justification before God" (Calvin 46). Calvin followed Luther in this even more strongly, tying justification to obedience to God by virtue of God's sovereignty (expressed through predestination). Bydescribingjustificationasakindofeducation(orpurification),Milton forces justification from an interpretation into an act. But we must be careful about what this means. A human life becomes itself an interpretation towards God's criteria of
judgment. Interpretation is embedded within a meaning which emerges through the act of transforming oneselftowards God (the totalizing form ofmeaning). Ajustification, as an interpretation,gainsmeaning(andadeterminingscope)initsuse. Thisusemustalsobe
justified in acting toward the good. This may mean nothing to us if we do not imagine ourselves inhabiting moral totalities (in the way we might imagine inhabiting linguistic totalities).
I think my sketch ofMilton's use ofjustification is cognate with Wittgenstein's description o f the grammar o f shame. First, Wittgenstein describes an expression o f hate and derives its meaning as an interpretation o f the total scene:
"At that moment I hated him. " --What happened here? Didn't it consist in thoughts, feelings, and actions? And if I were to rehearse that moment to myself I should assume a particular expression, I think of certain happenings, breathe in a particular way, arouse certain feelings in myself. I might think up a conversation, a whole scene in which that hatred flared up. And I might play this scene through
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with feelings approximating to those of a real occasion. That I have actually
experienced something ofthe sort will naturally help me to do so. (PI? 642)
This is clear enough for my purposes. It is important to see that the sentence "At that moment I hated him" is a judgment or interpretation. It's meaning is, therefore, part of thatinterpretation(meaningisnotalwayslikethis). Therecognitionofthishatredandthe fact ofthis hatred can be interpreted further: "IfI now become ashamed ofthis incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing: of the words, of the poisonous tone, etc. " (PI? 643). Wittgensteinthenaskshowdoesthisshameattachtothishatred. WhatexactlyamI ashamed of? "I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had. " -- And didn't the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole historyoftheincident. "(PI? 644;underlineadded). Whatisincludedinthis"whole history" changes and shifts according to how it is embedded in our lives when we remember this incident.
