It would be necessary, of course, to
mobilize
other readings de Man under- took around the motifs of the materiality of inscription and effacement (cf.
Paul-de-Man-Material-Events
This is one of the reasons that de Man never says, it seems to me, matter, but materiality.
Assuming the risk of this formula, although de Man does not do so himself, I would say that it is a materiality without matter, which, moreover, allies itself very well with a formality without form (in the sense of the beautiful synthetic and totalizing form) and without formalism.
De Man, it seems to me, in his thinking of materiality, is no more materialist than he is formal- ist.
To be sure, on occasion he uses these two words to accentuate and accompany a Kantian movement, an original reading of Kant.
At the end of "Kant's Materialism," he speaks of an "absolute, radical for- malism," and while taking all possible precautions regarding this per- formative nomination and appellation, regarding this act of calling, he adds: "To parody Kant's stylistic procedure of dictionary definition: the radical formalism that animates aesthetic judgment in the dynam- ics of the sublime is what is called materialism" (128).
I have added emphasis to suggest that this "what is called" gives a good measure of
the audacity in this materialist interpretation of the sublime. But de Man does not himself assume, it seems to me, a philosophical or metaphysical position that one might complacently call materialism. This force of re- sistance without material substance derives from the dissociative, dis- membering, fracturing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter. 27 To a letter whose dissociative and in- organic, disorganizing, disarticulating force affects not only nature but the body itself--as organic and organized totality. From this point of view, even though the word matter is not pronounced, nor even the word materiality, this thinking of the materiality of the letter already silently marks the chapter of Allegories of Reading that we are in the process of reading and that attributes a determinant role to dismember- ment, mutilation, disfigurations, and so forth, as well as to the contin- gency of literal signifiers. The textual event is inseparable from this for- mal materiality of the letter. I say formal materiality or literality because what one might call in quotation marks or italics "materialism"--it would be better to say the re-noun, the re-nomination, the re-calling of materiality--requires a consequent reckoning with formality. You heard it at the end of the text "Kant's Materialism. "
Valid for what de Man calls text, this becomes just as pertinent for his text itself, this very text of his--which thus becomes a case of what he is talking about and does not fail to present itself in that fashion, more or less ironically. Just one example. It says something about the values of machine, mechanicity, and formality toward which I will then turn, after having left under construction, an endless task, the project not only of showing the politico-performative autobiographicity of this text of de Man's, but of reapplying to it in a quasi-machine-like way what he himself writes on one of the first objects that offered it- self, namely, the text of Rousseau--and the texts of a few others. If the confession of the Confessions, even after one distinguishes it as a mo- ment of truth from the apologetic text of the Re^veries, cannot be a text of pure knowledge, if it includes an irresistible and irreducible perfor- mativity in its cognitive structure, well then, likewise, the performativi- ty of the de Manian text prohibits one from reducing it to an operation of pure knowledge. Here, then, is an exemplary passage: apropos of Rousseau's text, its object is the text and language in general, in its law, in a law that is itself without individual reference or application (as grammar of political law--the notion of grammar is to be understood with reference to the trivium and the quadrivium, as Warminski shows very clearly in his indispensable study). This grammar of the law is a
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machine of the letter (gramma), a letter machine, a writing machine, a typewriter. Exemplarity in general is this difficult marriage between the event and the typewriter. De Man writes: "The machine is like [I would be tempted to insist heavily, perhaps beyond what de Man would him- self have wanted, on this word like that marks an analogy, the "like" of a resemblance or of an "as if," rather than an "as"] the grammar of the text when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element without which no text can be generated" (294).
It is not said that the machine is a grammar of the text. Nor that the grammar of the text is a machine. One is like the other once grammar is isolated from rhetoric (performative rhetoric or cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, according to another distinction). The machine is determined on the basis of grammar and vice versa. Isolated from its rhetoric, as suspension of reference, grammar is purely formal. This is valid in general: no text can be produced without this formal, gram- matical, or machine-like element. No text and no language. De Man right away adds, speaking of language after having spoken of text, and here they amount to the same thing: "There can be no use of language which is not, within a certain perspective, thus radically formal, i. e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be concealed by aes- thetic, formalistic delusions. The machine not only generates, but also suppresses, and not always in an innocent or balanced way" (ibid. )
We see here, already (but dare I say already without teleological il- lusion? ), the insistence on the formal, on formality, in truth on gram- matical or machine-like formality, in opposition to aesthetic illusions but also formalist illusions in the philosophy of art or the theory of lit- erature. This is a gesture and a strategy that de Man deploys in a sys- tematic way in Aesthetic Ideology.
My only ambition would thus be, on the basis of this text from Allegories of Reading, to sketch out a kind of deduction, in the quasi- philosophical sense, of the concept of materiality (without matter). It is not present here in that name but I believe one can recognize all its traits. However, in the texts gathered under the title Aesthetic Ideology, this concept will occupy in that name a thematic place.
Despite the association of materiality and the machine, why are we not dealing here with a mechanistic materialism? No more than with a dialectical materialism? It is because the de Manian concept of materi- ality is not, dare I say to his credit, a philosophical concept, the meta- physical concept of matter; it is, it seems to me, the name, the artifac- tual nomination of an artifactual figure that I will not dissociate from
the performative signature I spoke of a moment ago. It is a sort of in- vention by de Man, one could say, almost a fiction produced in the movement of a strategy that is at once theoretical and autobiographical and that would need to be analyzed at length. To say it is a fiction (in the de Manian sense) does not mean that it is without theoretical value or philosophical effect, or that it is totally arbitrary; but the choice of the word materiality to designate "this" is in part arbitrary, in part necessary in relation to an entire historical space (the history of philoso- phy and, for example, of the diverse possibilities of philosophies of mat- ter, the history of literary theory, political history, ideological camps, and so forth), in short, to a contextualized world, to a worldwide con- text in which de Man is calculating his strategy. And placing his bets.
To attempt the deduction I've just described on the basis of this text, I will take (too quickly) into account the different predicates (which are so many predicaments, de Man might say, who liked this word a lot), the different predicating traits that constitute inseparably and irreducibly this concept of materiality. Without having yet been named, this concept of materiality, in Allegories of Reading and no doubt in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, plays a role that I will not call organizing, for obvious reasons, but rather trenchant, decisive. (I am insisting on the concept of materiality and not of matter. This is not easily said and I leave intact the problem of the choice of this word ma- teriality that brings with it a high essentializing risk where it should ex- clude, in its interpretation, any semantic implication of matter, of sub- stratum or instance called "matter" and any reference to some content named matter; it risks thereby meaning only "effect of matter" without matter. ) This concept of materiality determines the concept of textual event that, as you recall, is named as such at least twice, and twice as- sociated with what de Man, for his part, calls in his fashion, but literal- ly and often in this text, "deconstruction" and "dissemination. "
I will cut out several motifs that are finally indissociable in what is at bottom one and the same perspective, one and the same performa- tive strategy.
1. First of all, the inscription of the textual event--and this will later be one of the traits of the materiality of matter--is a machine-like de- construction of the body proper. This is why I said, using a formula- tion that is not de Man's, that materiality becomes a very useful gener- ic name for all that resists appropriation. De Man writes, moreover, from another point of view, in "Promises (Social Contract)": "There is nothing legitimate about property, but the rhetoric of property confers
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the illusion of legitimacy" (262). He also analyzes the "fascination of . . . proper names" in Proust (ibid. ). Materiality is not the body, at least the body proper as organic totality. This machine-like deconstruc- tion is also a deconstruction of metaphor, of the totalizing metaphori- cal model, by a dissociative metonymic structure (a gesture that, I sug- gested, has some affinity with a certain Lacanianism allied with a certain Deleuzianism). The preceding essay on the Social Contract called for "the deconstruction of metaphorical patterns" (255), there where "the attribute of naturalness shifts from the metaphorical totali- ty to the metonymic aggregate" (259). This movement becomes more precise in the essay on the Confessions. In the context of an analysis of the Fourth Promenade, de Man writes, for example: "But precisely because, in all these instances, the metaphor for the text is still the metaphor of text as body (from which a more or less vital part, includ- ing the head, is being severed), the threat [my emphasis] remains shel- tered behind its metaphoricity" (297). When Rousseau is concerned no longer with the text of Tasso or Montesquieu but with the Confessions, then "the metaphor of text as body make[s] way for the more directly threatening alternative of the text as machine" (ibid. ). I underscore threatening: from the preceding text to this one, one passes from the promise to the excuse, to be sure, as from one performative to another, but also from the promise to the threat (fear in the face of a cruel men- ace). As I have tried to show elsewhere,28 this threat is also and already constitutive of any promise, and is not at all, as common sense and the theorists of speech acts would have it, irreducibly opposed to the promise (which, to common sense, may in fact seem to be able to promise only something good: one does not promise something threat- ening; this is what I contest, but we'll not pursue the point here).
On the following page, de Man raises the stakes. To the same men- acing machination of the body proper and its metaphor he adds the "loss of the illusion of meaning":
But in what way are these narratives threatening? As instances of Rousseau's generosity they are . . . more inept than convincing. They seem to exist primarily for the sake of the mutilations they describe. But these actual, bodily mutilations seem, in their turn, to be there more for the sake of allowing the evocation of the machine that causes them than for their own shock value; Rousseau lingers complacently over the de- scription of the machine that seduces him into dangerously close con- tact: "I looked at the metal rolls, my eyes were attracted by their polish. I
was tempted to touch them with my fingers and I moved them with plea- sure over the polished surface of the cylinder" (1036). In the general economy of the Re^verie, the machine displaces all other significations and becomes the raison d'e^tre of the text. Its power of suggestion reach- es far beyond its illustrative purpose, especially if one bears in mind the previous characterization of unmotivated fictional language as "machi- nal. " The underlying structural patterns of addition and suppression as well as the figural system of the text all converge towards it. Barely con- cealed by its peripheral function, the text here stages the textual machine of its own constitution and performance, its own textual allegory. The threatening element in these incidents then becomes more apparent. The text as body, with all its implications of substitutive tropes ultimately always retraceable to metaphor, is displaced by the text as machine and, in the process, it suffers the loss of the illusion of meaning. (298)
This loss of the illusion of meaning is also sometimes, as passage from metaphor to metonymy and as fiction, the loss of the illusion of refer- ence: "In fiction thus conceived the 'necessary link' of the metaphor has been metonymized beyond the point of catachresis, and the fiction becomes the disruption of the narrative's referential illusion" (292).
2. The word machine is here singled out, apparently, in the text of Rousseau: "It is certain that neither my judgment, nor my will dictated my reply, but that it was the automatic result [l'effet machinal] of my embarrassment" (1034; quoted by de Man, 294). But the word and the concept of machine are found again, re-elaborated, and redistrib- uted everywhere: in Kleist, Pascal, and already in the Social Contract when Rousseau speaks of what there is "in the wheels of the State" [dans les ressorts de l'E? tat], namely an "equivalent of the principle of inertia in machines" (272). This word-concept machine is thus insepa- rable from motifs of suspended reference, repetition, the threat of mu- tilation, and so forth--and interpretation as the de Manian practice of deconstruction-dissemination.
3. This deconstruction implies a process of de-metaphorization and also, by the same token, of machine-like dis-figuration. Another ex- ample allows one to deduce a third motif of this concept of materiality, namely, a mechanical, machine-like, automatic independence in relation to any subject, any subject of desire and its unconscious, and therefore, de Man doubtless thinks, any psychology or psychoanalysis as such. (This point remains to be discussed: Where is one then to situate the af- fect of desire and especially of threat and cruelty? Is there not a force of
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nondesire in desire, a law of desubjectivation in and as the subject itself? These are so many questions that I would have liked to deploy before this magnificent text, which I find sometimes too Lacanian, sometimes insufficiently Lacanian, in any case insufficiently "psychoanalytic. ")
The deconstruction of the figural dimension is a process that takes place independently of any desire; as such it is not unconscious but mechani- cal, systematic in its performance but arbitrary in its principle, like a grammar. This threatens the autobiographical subject not as the loss of something that once was present and that it once possessed, but as a radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance of any text. (298; emphasis added)
Once again, the term like in the phrase "like a grammar," the status of which phrase can be as difficult to pin down as Lacan's "like a lan- guage": "The unconscious is structured like a language. " As difficult and no doubt very close, even in its implicit protest against psychology-- or against psychoanalysis as psychology, be it that of desire.
Because this deconstruction should be, according to him, indepen- dent of any desire (which, although I can only say it quickly, seems to me both defensible and indefensible, depending on the concept of de- sire one puts to work), de Man goes beyond his first attempts at inter- pretation of the purloined ribbon (the logic of Rousseau's desire for Marion, substitution between Rousseau and Marion, symbolic circula- tion of the ribbon that, as "pure signifier," is substituted for a desire that is itself "desire for substitution," both desires being "governed by the same desire for specular symmetry" and so forth). But because this logic of desire seems to him to be, if not without pertinence, at least unable to account for the textual event, de Man wants to go further. On two occasions, within an interval of two pages, he declares: "This is not the only way, however, in which the text functions" (284) or "But the text offers further possibilities" (286). He then goes from the Confessions to the Re^veries, from the excuse for what happened to the excuse for the writing of the excuse, for the pleasure taken in writing what happened and thus for the pleasure taken in excusing himself. And in fact, Rousseau clearly suspects what he calls his "pleasure in writing" at the end of the Fourth Promenade.
4. Beyond this logic and this necessity of desire, materiality implies the effect of arbitrariness. The systematic recourse to this machine- like value of the arbitrary (which is relayed by a series of equivalents, notably the gratuitous, the contingent, the random, or the fortuitous),
whether one is talking about "the gratuitous product of a textual grammar" (299), the "random lie in the Marion episode" (291), the "absolute randomness of language," the "arbitrary power play of the signifier" (296), the "gratuitous improvisation, that of the implacable repetition of a preordained pattern. Like Kleist's marionettes . . . " (294), the fortuitous proximity of the ribbon and Marion (293), the "excuse of randomness in the Confessions" (291), the "total arbitrari- ness" (291) of "the sound 'Marion'" (289)--a name that, despite its alleged contingency and even though de Man makes no remark to this effect, we can now no longer separate from either Marie/Mary or mari- onette. The Marion of the ribbon will have been the instant, the blink of an eye of a fictive generation, just the time of a literary Passion and Pieta`, the intercessor in a marriage of reason between the Virgin Mary and all her marionettes. Or, if you prefer, Marion the intercessor re- mains also in the literary archives of Christian Europe like the sister- in-law of all the automatic virgins that still amble about between the Gospels and Kleist.
Even though de Man does not say it, at least not in this way, the eventness of the event requires, if one wants to think it, this insistence on the arbitrary, fortuitous, contingent, aleatory, unforeseeable. An event held to be necessary and thus programmed, foreseeable, and so forth, would that be an event? De Man associates this feeling of arbi- trariness with the experience of threat, cruelty, suffering in dismember- ment, decapitation, disfiguration, or castration (the abundance of whose figures he isolates in Rousseau). What conclusions should be drawn from this?
There is the conclusion that de Man himself draws, namely, that this suffering is in fact what happens and is lived, but "from the point of view of the subject": "This more than warrants the anxiety with which Rousseau acknowledges the lethal quality of writing. Writing al- ways includes the moment of dispossession in favor of the arbitrary power of the play of the signifier and from the point of view of the sub- ject [my emphasis], this can only be experienced as a dismemberment, a beheading, or a castration" (296).
De Man therefore wishes to describe what it is in deconstruction- dissemination (that which "disseminates," he says, as "textual event" and as anacoluthon "throughout the entire text" [300]) that operates independently of and beyond any desire. The materiality of this event as textual event is what is or makes itself independent of any subject or any desire.
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It is a logic that has something irrefutable about it. If, on the one hand, the event supposes surprise, contingency, or the arbitrary, as I emphasized a moment ago, it also supposes, on the other hand, this ex- teriority or this irreducibility to desire. And therefore it supposes that which makes it radically inappropriable, nonreappropriable, radically resistant to the logic of the proper. Moreover, what elsewhere I have called exappropriation concerns this work of the inappropriable in de- sire and in the process of appropriation.
Without being able to develop it here, I would draw another conse- quence that no doubt goes beyond what de Man himself says or would say. It is this: By reason of this unforeseeability, this irreducible and inappropriable exteriority for the subject of experience, every event as such is traumatic. Even an event experienced as a "happy" one. This does, I concede, confer on the word trauma a generality that is as fear- some as it is extenuating. But perhaps we have here a double conse- quence that must be drawn in the face of the speculative inflation to which the word is today subject. Understood in this sense, trauma is that which makes precarious any distinction between the point of view of the subject and what is produced independently of desire. It makes precarious even the use and the sense of all these words. An event is traumatic or it does not happen. It injures desire, whether or not desire desires or does not desire what happens. It is that which, within desire, constitutes it as possible and insists there while resisting it, as the im- possible: some outside, irreducibly, as some nondesire, some death, and something inorganic, the becoming possible of the impossible as im-possible.
It is on this stage no doubt that arise the questions of the unforgiv- able, the unpardonable, the inexcusable--and of perjury.
There you are, pardon me for having spoken too long. I cut things off here, arbitrarily.
But not without saluting once again the spirit, I mean the ghost, of my friend. One day, de Man wrote this: "whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn't need Rousseau, he doesn't need anybody else. "29 As you have seen quite well, this is of course not true. De Man was wrong. I needed Paul de Man. But I need- ed him no doubt in order to show in my turn, many years later, that he, Paul de Man, perhaps had no need of Rousseau in order to show and to demonstrate, himself, what he thought he ought to confide in us. That is what I was suggesting by insisting on the exemplarity, and for
example, the exemplarity of de Man's autobiographico-political texts apropos of Rousseau, materiality, and other similar things.
I am so sad that Paul de Man is not here himself to answer me and to object. But I can hear him already--and sooner or later his text will answer for him. That is what we all call a machine. But a spectral ma- chine. By telling me I am right, it will tell him he is right. And sooner or later, our common innocence will not fail to appear to everyone's eyes, as the best intentioned of all our machinations. Sooner or later and vir- tually already, always, here now.
NOTES
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1953), 88; the translation, as here, will often be modified to remain closer to the literality of Rousseau's text. Page references to the French are to: Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 1, Les confessions: Autres textes autobiographiques, Bibliothe`ques de la Ple? iade (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
2. J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," in Philosophical Papers, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175. Since delivering this lecture, I have published a text titled "Comme si c'e? tait possible--'within such limits,'" in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3 (1998).
3. The brief allusions de Man makes (pp. 10, 68, 101, 102) in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), do not touch at all on this history.
4. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Double- day, 1960), book 2, chapter 4, 70.
5. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 287.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979), 44.
7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Creed of a Priest of Savoy, trans. Arthur H. Beattie (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1956), 80.
8. If I had the time, I would have liked to demonstrate that where the two au- thors of Confessions speak the language of the excuse, the one of the "inexcusable" (inexcusabilis), the other of "excusing himself," they inscribe their utterances in the thickness of an immense Christian, and first of all Paulinian, archive, in a palimpsest of quotations and quasi quotations, which, moreover, Augustine ex- hibits as such, notably in his borrowings from the Epistle to the Romans (I, ii, 20).
9. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," 185.
10. Paul de Man, "Kant and Schiller," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warmin-
ski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133.
11. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
12. Derrida is exploiting here, as he has often done, the opposite meanings of
the homonymic expressions: plus de, no more, and plus de, more. --Trans.
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360 Jacques Derrida
13.
It would be necessary, of course, to mobilize other readings de Man under- took around the motifs of the materiality of inscription and effacement (cf. "Shelley Disfigured," where it is a question of the materiality of inscription; and "Auto- biography as Defacement," both in The Rhetoric of Romanticism).
14. On arbitrariness and gratuitousness, see Allegories of Reading, 357.
15. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 89; "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's 'U? ber das Marionettentheater,'" in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
16. Derrida is exploiting the homonymic possibilities of soie (silk), soi (self), and the expression en soi (in itself). --Trans.
17. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 274.
18. See Derrida, Adieu a` Emmanuel Le? vinas (Paris: Galile? e, 1997).
19. The term non-coupable, in addition to the meaning being adduced here,
commonly signifies: not guilty. --Trans.
20. When this lecture was delivered, I did not know, I confess, that Ortwin
de Graef had already pointed out what he calls in quotation marks "the 'mistake' in de Man's translation," or again "de Man's erratic anacoluthonic translation" ("Silence to Be Observed: A Trial for Paul de Man's Inexcusable Confessions," Yale Journal of Criticism 3: 2 [1990]: 214-15; also in Postmodern Studies 2 [1989]). I thank Erin Ferris for having brought this publication to my attention.
21. "The mutilation seems to be incurable and the prothesis [sic] only serves to mark this fact more strongly" (295-96).
22. The paragraph from the Geneva manuscript is not included in the transla- tion of the Confessions. --Trans.
23. Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1988).
24. Geoffrey Bennington, "Aberrations: De Man (and) the Machine," in Legisla- tions: The Politics of Deconstruction (London and New York: Verso, 1994).
25. These two common expressions, which use the same construction as "je m'excusai sur," mean "I took my revenge on . . . ," "I took it out on the first thing that presented itself. "--Trans.
26. Jacques Derrida, Me? moires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 143. 27. "We must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body in a way that is much closer to Kleist than to Winckelmann . . . material disarticulation not only of nature but of the body. . . . To the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dis- memberment of language, as meaning-producing tropes are replaced by the frag- mentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters. In Kleist's text, one would isolate the dis-
semination of the word Fall . . . " (Aesthetic Ideology, 88-89).
28. In "Avances," preface to Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan (Paris:
Minuit, 1995).
29. "An Interview with Paul de Man," in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 118.
Contributors
judith butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection; and Excitable Speech, as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminist theory, and queer theory. Her most recent work on Antigone and the politics of kinship, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, is forthcoming.
t. j. clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51; Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution; The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers; and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.
barbara cohen is senior editor and director of HumaniTech,
a center for the application of technology to humanities research and teaching at the University of California, Irvine. She previously taught French and art and has written several articles on the dynamics of art education in the public schools.
tom cohen is the author of Anti-Mimesis (from Plato to Hitchcock) and Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin,
361
362 Contributors
de Man, and Bakhtin. He is currently completing Re-Marking Hitchcock, editing The Cambridge Companion to Derrida, and coediting a volume titled Technicity, "Life," the Animal. He is cur- rently chair of the English department at the University of Albany, SUNY.
jacques derrida is director of studies of the E? cole des Hautes E? tudes in France and professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published numerous books, including Memoirs for Paul de Man, Specters of Marx, Politics of Friendship, Monolingualism of the Other, and Archive Fever.
barbara johnson teaches at Harvard University in the depart- ments of English and comparative literature, where she holds the title of Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society. She is author of The Critical Difference; A World of Difference; The Wake of Deconstruction; and The Feminist Difference. She has edited sever- al volumes and is the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination.
ernesto laclau is professor of political theory and director of the doctoral program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He is author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (with Chantal Mouffe); New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time; and Emancipation(s).
j. hillis miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He previously taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities. He is the author of many books and articles on literature and literary theory, most recently Reading Narrative and Black Holes.
arkady plotnitsky is professor of English and the director of
the theory and cultural studies program at Purdue University. He has written extensively on English and European romanticism, critical theory, continental philosophy, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His books include In the Shadow of Hegel; Complementarity: Antiepistemology after Bohr and Derrida; a co- edited volume (with Barbara H. Smith), Mathematics, Science, and
Postclassical Theory; and a forthcoming study, The Invisible and the Unknowable: Modern Science and Nonclassical Thought.
laurence a. rickels, professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of The Vampire Lectures (Minnesota, 1999); The Case of California; and Aberrations of Mourning; and editor of Acting Out in Groups (Minnesota, 1999). His three-volume study Nazi Psychoanalysis
is forthcoming (Minnesota). He also works as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles.
michael sprinker was a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review. His books include Imagining Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust.
andrzej warminski is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Readings in Interpreta- tion: Ho? lderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minnesota, 1987) and editor of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology (Minnesota, 1996). His Material Inscriptions is forthcoming.
Contributors 363
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Index
Compiled by Geoffrey Manaugh, University of Chicago
Entries in boldface notate texts writ- ten by author indexed.
Abraham, Karl, 158, 171
Abram, David, 150 n. 27
Adorno, Theodor, 153-54, 156-57 Althusser, Louis, xviii, 32-33, 35- 45,
46 n. 7, 46 n. 8, 46-47 n. 12, 47 n. 16, 47-48 n. 18, 48 n. 19, 189, 202 n. 8, 204 n. 9
Aristotle, 37-38, 237
Augustine, Saint, 285-91, 310, 322,
359 n. 8
Austin, J. L. , xxiv n. 14, 14, 25,
283-84, 301-2, 307, 308, 312, 325, 327-29, 337
Badt, Kurt, 97
Bander, Peter, 159, 161
Bataille, Georges, 54, 86 n. 8 Baudelaire, Charles, xxiii n. 4, 6-11,
205, 207, 208-14, 224 n. 4 Benjamin, Walter, ix-x, xiv, xxiii n. 3, xxiii n. 4, xxiii n. 6, 115, 117-19, 120, 121, 122-26, 128, 129, 131, 133, 138, 146 n. 9, 147-48 n. 17,
148 n. 18, 148 n. 23, 149 n. 26, 151 n. 31, 153-54, 156-57, 165,
167-68, 201-2 n. 5, 271, 273
n. 7
Bennington, Geoffrey, 344 Berkeley, George, 186
Blake, William, xviii, 76
Blanchot, Maurice, 54, 243, 301-2 Bloch, Robert, 168
Bohr, Niels, 55-62, 69, 75, 86 n. 9,
86-87 n. 10, 87 n. 13, 87-88 n. 19 Booth, Wayne, 201-2 n. 5
Brecht, Bertolt, 38, 43-45, 47 n. 16,
48 n. 20
Burroughs, William S. , xii Butler, Judith, xx, 46-47 n. 12,
254 -74
Cadava, Eduardo, 123
Cage, John, 47 n. 13
Cavell, Stanley, 152 n. 38
Ce? zanne, Paul, xviii, 49, 58, 72, 77,
88 n. 24, 93-112
Clark, T. J. , xvii, xviii, 49, 72, 93-113 Cle? ment, Catherine, 172-73
Cohen, Barbara, xx-xxv
Cohen, Tom, vii-xv, xv-xvi, xvii,
xix, 114-52, 280, 285
Collins, George, 146 n. 4 Cremonini, Leonardo, 39-40, 42-43
365
366 Index
Deleuze, Gilles, 85 n. 1, 145 n. 4, 308-9
Derrida, Jacques, viii, xvi-xvii, xx-xxi, 25, 30 n. 8, 30 n. 10, 30 n. 13, 46-47 n. 12, 50, 54, 58-59, 68, 83, 85 n. 1, 86 n. 4, 86 n. 8, 88 n. 24, 123, 133, 149 n. 25, 153, 190, 197, 201 n. 3, 204
n. 12, 204 n. 15, 212, 224 n. 5, 258-59, 277-360
Descartes, Rene? , xx, 255, 258-68, 271-72, 272 n. 2, 272 n. 3, 272-73 n. 4, 273 n. 5
Dickinson, Emily, 111 Diderot, Denis, 82
Eagleton, Terry, 32 Einstein, Albert, 55, 80
Fehrenbacher, Douglas, 219 Felman, Shoshana, 225 n. 17
Fiore, Edith, 176-77 n. 13 Fontanier, Pierre, 238-39, 252 n. 11 Foucault, Michel, 255-56 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 254 Freccero, Carla, xxi, 283
Freud, Sigmund, 37-38, 154, 156, 158-59, 165, 170, 177 n. 16, 177 n. 17, 212
Fry, Roger, 105-7, 109-10
Galilei, Galileo, 65, 87 n. 14, 87 n. 17
Gasche? , Rodolphe, 47 n. 14, 47 n. 15, 47-48 n. 18, 53-54, 79, 85 n. 1, 86 n. 6
Genette, Ge? rard, 204 n. 11, 237, 243, 252 n. 8, 252 n. 14
Geuss, Raymond, 193, 198, 199-200 Godard, Jean-Luc, 45, 145 n. 4 Goddard, Robert H. , 162
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 37 Graef, Ortwin de, 360 n. 20
Gramsci, Antonio, xvii, xix, 234, 239, 243
Greenberg, Clement, 105, 112-13 n. 13
Guattari, Fe? lix, 85 n. 1
Hegel, G. W. F. , x, xxiii n. 7, xxiv n. 12, xxiv n. 13, 3, 31 n. 23, 38-39, 54, 77, 100, 102, 123, 145 n. 4, 148 n. 21, 151 n. 34, 186-87, 193, 195-97, 198, 199, 201 n. 5, 333
Heidegger, Martin, 4, 123, 308 Heisenberg, Werner, 61, 69
Hillis Miller, J.
the audacity in this materialist interpretation of the sublime. But de Man does not himself assume, it seems to me, a philosophical or metaphysical position that one might complacently call materialism. This force of re- sistance without material substance derives from the dissociative, dis- membering, fracturing, disarticulating, and even disseminal power that de Man attributes to the letter. 27 To a letter whose dissociative and in- organic, disorganizing, disarticulating force affects not only nature but the body itself--as organic and organized totality. From this point of view, even though the word matter is not pronounced, nor even the word materiality, this thinking of the materiality of the letter already silently marks the chapter of Allegories of Reading that we are in the process of reading and that attributes a determinant role to dismember- ment, mutilation, disfigurations, and so forth, as well as to the contin- gency of literal signifiers. The textual event is inseparable from this for- mal materiality of the letter. I say formal materiality or literality because what one might call in quotation marks or italics "materialism"--it would be better to say the re-noun, the re-nomination, the re-calling of materiality--requires a consequent reckoning with formality. You heard it at the end of the text "Kant's Materialism. "
Valid for what de Man calls text, this becomes just as pertinent for his text itself, this very text of his--which thus becomes a case of what he is talking about and does not fail to present itself in that fashion, more or less ironically. Just one example. It says something about the values of machine, mechanicity, and formality toward which I will then turn, after having left under construction, an endless task, the project not only of showing the politico-performative autobiographicity of this text of de Man's, but of reapplying to it in a quasi-machine-like way what he himself writes on one of the first objects that offered it- self, namely, the text of Rousseau--and the texts of a few others. If the confession of the Confessions, even after one distinguishes it as a mo- ment of truth from the apologetic text of the Re^veries, cannot be a text of pure knowledge, if it includes an irresistible and irreducible perfor- mativity in its cognitive structure, well then, likewise, the performativi- ty of the de Manian text prohibits one from reducing it to an operation of pure knowledge. Here, then, is an exemplary passage: apropos of Rousseau's text, its object is the text and language in general, in its law, in a law that is itself without individual reference or application (as grammar of political law--the notion of grammar is to be understood with reference to the trivium and the quadrivium, as Warminski shows very clearly in his indispensable study). This grammar of the law is a
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machine of the letter (gramma), a letter machine, a writing machine, a typewriter. Exemplarity in general is this difficult marriage between the event and the typewriter. De Man writes: "The machine is like [I would be tempted to insist heavily, perhaps beyond what de Man would him- self have wanted, on this word like that marks an analogy, the "like" of a resemblance or of an "as if," rather than an "as"] the grammar of the text when it is isolated from its rhetoric, the merely formal element without which no text can be generated" (294).
It is not said that the machine is a grammar of the text. Nor that the grammar of the text is a machine. One is like the other once grammar is isolated from rhetoric (performative rhetoric or cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, according to another distinction). The machine is determined on the basis of grammar and vice versa. Isolated from its rhetoric, as suspension of reference, grammar is purely formal. This is valid in general: no text can be produced without this formal, gram- matical, or machine-like element. No text and no language. De Man right away adds, speaking of language after having spoken of text, and here they amount to the same thing: "There can be no use of language which is not, within a certain perspective, thus radically formal, i. e. mechanical, no matter how deeply this aspect may be concealed by aes- thetic, formalistic delusions. The machine not only generates, but also suppresses, and not always in an innocent or balanced way" (ibid. )
We see here, already (but dare I say already without teleological il- lusion? ), the insistence on the formal, on formality, in truth on gram- matical or machine-like formality, in opposition to aesthetic illusions but also formalist illusions in the philosophy of art or the theory of lit- erature. This is a gesture and a strategy that de Man deploys in a sys- tematic way in Aesthetic Ideology.
My only ambition would thus be, on the basis of this text from Allegories of Reading, to sketch out a kind of deduction, in the quasi- philosophical sense, of the concept of materiality (without matter). It is not present here in that name but I believe one can recognize all its traits. However, in the texts gathered under the title Aesthetic Ideology, this concept will occupy in that name a thematic place.
Despite the association of materiality and the machine, why are we not dealing here with a mechanistic materialism? No more than with a dialectical materialism? It is because the de Manian concept of materi- ality is not, dare I say to his credit, a philosophical concept, the meta- physical concept of matter; it is, it seems to me, the name, the artifac- tual nomination of an artifactual figure that I will not dissociate from
the performative signature I spoke of a moment ago. It is a sort of in- vention by de Man, one could say, almost a fiction produced in the movement of a strategy that is at once theoretical and autobiographical and that would need to be analyzed at length. To say it is a fiction (in the de Manian sense) does not mean that it is without theoretical value or philosophical effect, or that it is totally arbitrary; but the choice of the word materiality to designate "this" is in part arbitrary, in part necessary in relation to an entire historical space (the history of philoso- phy and, for example, of the diverse possibilities of philosophies of mat- ter, the history of literary theory, political history, ideological camps, and so forth), in short, to a contextualized world, to a worldwide con- text in which de Man is calculating his strategy. And placing his bets.
To attempt the deduction I've just described on the basis of this text, I will take (too quickly) into account the different predicates (which are so many predicaments, de Man might say, who liked this word a lot), the different predicating traits that constitute inseparably and irreducibly this concept of materiality. Without having yet been named, this concept of materiality, in Allegories of Reading and no doubt in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, plays a role that I will not call organizing, for obvious reasons, but rather trenchant, decisive. (I am insisting on the concept of materiality and not of matter. This is not easily said and I leave intact the problem of the choice of this word ma- teriality that brings with it a high essentializing risk where it should ex- clude, in its interpretation, any semantic implication of matter, of sub- stratum or instance called "matter" and any reference to some content named matter; it risks thereby meaning only "effect of matter" without matter. ) This concept of materiality determines the concept of textual event that, as you recall, is named as such at least twice, and twice as- sociated with what de Man, for his part, calls in his fashion, but literal- ly and often in this text, "deconstruction" and "dissemination. "
I will cut out several motifs that are finally indissociable in what is at bottom one and the same perspective, one and the same performa- tive strategy.
1. First of all, the inscription of the textual event--and this will later be one of the traits of the materiality of matter--is a machine-like de- construction of the body proper. This is why I said, using a formula- tion that is not de Man's, that materiality becomes a very useful gener- ic name for all that resists appropriation. De Man writes, moreover, from another point of view, in "Promises (Social Contract)": "There is nothing legitimate about property, but the rhetoric of property confers
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the illusion of legitimacy" (262). He also analyzes the "fascination of . . . proper names" in Proust (ibid. ). Materiality is not the body, at least the body proper as organic totality. This machine-like deconstruc- tion is also a deconstruction of metaphor, of the totalizing metaphori- cal model, by a dissociative metonymic structure (a gesture that, I sug- gested, has some affinity with a certain Lacanianism allied with a certain Deleuzianism). The preceding essay on the Social Contract called for "the deconstruction of metaphorical patterns" (255), there where "the attribute of naturalness shifts from the metaphorical totali- ty to the metonymic aggregate" (259). This movement becomes more precise in the essay on the Confessions. In the context of an analysis of the Fourth Promenade, de Man writes, for example: "But precisely because, in all these instances, the metaphor for the text is still the metaphor of text as body (from which a more or less vital part, includ- ing the head, is being severed), the threat [my emphasis] remains shel- tered behind its metaphoricity" (297). When Rousseau is concerned no longer with the text of Tasso or Montesquieu but with the Confessions, then "the metaphor of text as body make[s] way for the more directly threatening alternative of the text as machine" (ibid. ). I underscore threatening: from the preceding text to this one, one passes from the promise to the excuse, to be sure, as from one performative to another, but also from the promise to the threat (fear in the face of a cruel men- ace). As I have tried to show elsewhere,28 this threat is also and already constitutive of any promise, and is not at all, as common sense and the theorists of speech acts would have it, irreducibly opposed to the promise (which, to common sense, may in fact seem to be able to promise only something good: one does not promise something threat- ening; this is what I contest, but we'll not pursue the point here).
On the following page, de Man raises the stakes. To the same men- acing machination of the body proper and its metaphor he adds the "loss of the illusion of meaning":
But in what way are these narratives threatening? As instances of Rousseau's generosity they are . . . more inept than convincing. They seem to exist primarily for the sake of the mutilations they describe. But these actual, bodily mutilations seem, in their turn, to be there more for the sake of allowing the evocation of the machine that causes them than for their own shock value; Rousseau lingers complacently over the de- scription of the machine that seduces him into dangerously close con- tact: "I looked at the metal rolls, my eyes were attracted by their polish. I
was tempted to touch them with my fingers and I moved them with plea- sure over the polished surface of the cylinder" (1036). In the general economy of the Re^verie, the machine displaces all other significations and becomes the raison d'e^tre of the text. Its power of suggestion reach- es far beyond its illustrative purpose, especially if one bears in mind the previous characterization of unmotivated fictional language as "machi- nal. " The underlying structural patterns of addition and suppression as well as the figural system of the text all converge towards it. Barely con- cealed by its peripheral function, the text here stages the textual machine of its own constitution and performance, its own textual allegory. The threatening element in these incidents then becomes more apparent. The text as body, with all its implications of substitutive tropes ultimately always retraceable to metaphor, is displaced by the text as machine and, in the process, it suffers the loss of the illusion of meaning. (298)
This loss of the illusion of meaning is also sometimes, as passage from metaphor to metonymy and as fiction, the loss of the illusion of refer- ence: "In fiction thus conceived the 'necessary link' of the metaphor has been metonymized beyond the point of catachresis, and the fiction becomes the disruption of the narrative's referential illusion" (292).
2. The word machine is here singled out, apparently, in the text of Rousseau: "It is certain that neither my judgment, nor my will dictated my reply, but that it was the automatic result [l'effet machinal] of my embarrassment" (1034; quoted by de Man, 294). But the word and the concept of machine are found again, re-elaborated, and redistrib- uted everywhere: in Kleist, Pascal, and already in the Social Contract when Rousseau speaks of what there is "in the wheels of the State" [dans les ressorts de l'E? tat], namely an "equivalent of the principle of inertia in machines" (272). This word-concept machine is thus insepa- rable from motifs of suspended reference, repetition, the threat of mu- tilation, and so forth--and interpretation as the de Manian practice of deconstruction-dissemination.
3. This deconstruction implies a process of de-metaphorization and also, by the same token, of machine-like dis-figuration. Another ex- ample allows one to deduce a third motif of this concept of materiality, namely, a mechanical, machine-like, automatic independence in relation to any subject, any subject of desire and its unconscious, and therefore, de Man doubtless thinks, any psychology or psychoanalysis as such. (This point remains to be discussed: Where is one then to situate the af- fect of desire and especially of threat and cruelty? Is there not a force of
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nondesire in desire, a law of desubjectivation in and as the subject itself? These are so many questions that I would have liked to deploy before this magnificent text, which I find sometimes too Lacanian, sometimes insufficiently Lacanian, in any case insufficiently "psychoanalytic. ")
The deconstruction of the figural dimension is a process that takes place independently of any desire; as such it is not unconscious but mechani- cal, systematic in its performance but arbitrary in its principle, like a grammar. This threatens the autobiographical subject not as the loss of something that once was present and that it once possessed, but as a radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance of any text. (298; emphasis added)
Once again, the term like in the phrase "like a grammar," the status of which phrase can be as difficult to pin down as Lacan's "like a lan- guage": "The unconscious is structured like a language. " As difficult and no doubt very close, even in its implicit protest against psychology-- or against psychoanalysis as psychology, be it that of desire.
Because this deconstruction should be, according to him, indepen- dent of any desire (which, although I can only say it quickly, seems to me both defensible and indefensible, depending on the concept of de- sire one puts to work), de Man goes beyond his first attempts at inter- pretation of the purloined ribbon (the logic of Rousseau's desire for Marion, substitution between Rousseau and Marion, symbolic circula- tion of the ribbon that, as "pure signifier," is substituted for a desire that is itself "desire for substitution," both desires being "governed by the same desire for specular symmetry" and so forth). But because this logic of desire seems to him to be, if not without pertinence, at least unable to account for the textual event, de Man wants to go further. On two occasions, within an interval of two pages, he declares: "This is not the only way, however, in which the text functions" (284) or "But the text offers further possibilities" (286). He then goes from the Confessions to the Re^veries, from the excuse for what happened to the excuse for the writing of the excuse, for the pleasure taken in writing what happened and thus for the pleasure taken in excusing himself. And in fact, Rousseau clearly suspects what he calls his "pleasure in writing" at the end of the Fourth Promenade.
4. Beyond this logic and this necessity of desire, materiality implies the effect of arbitrariness. The systematic recourse to this machine- like value of the arbitrary (which is relayed by a series of equivalents, notably the gratuitous, the contingent, the random, or the fortuitous),
whether one is talking about "the gratuitous product of a textual grammar" (299), the "random lie in the Marion episode" (291), the "absolute randomness of language," the "arbitrary power play of the signifier" (296), the "gratuitous improvisation, that of the implacable repetition of a preordained pattern. Like Kleist's marionettes . . . " (294), the fortuitous proximity of the ribbon and Marion (293), the "excuse of randomness in the Confessions" (291), the "total arbitrari- ness" (291) of "the sound 'Marion'" (289)--a name that, despite its alleged contingency and even though de Man makes no remark to this effect, we can now no longer separate from either Marie/Mary or mari- onette. The Marion of the ribbon will have been the instant, the blink of an eye of a fictive generation, just the time of a literary Passion and Pieta`, the intercessor in a marriage of reason between the Virgin Mary and all her marionettes. Or, if you prefer, Marion the intercessor re- mains also in the literary archives of Christian Europe like the sister- in-law of all the automatic virgins that still amble about between the Gospels and Kleist.
Even though de Man does not say it, at least not in this way, the eventness of the event requires, if one wants to think it, this insistence on the arbitrary, fortuitous, contingent, aleatory, unforeseeable. An event held to be necessary and thus programmed, foreseeable, and so forth, would that be an event? De Man associates this feeling of arbi- trariness with the experience of threat, cruelty, suffering in dismember- ment, decapitation, disfiguration, or castration (the abundance of whose figures he isolates in Rousseau). What conclusions should be drawn from this?
There is the conclusion that de Man himself draws, namely, that this suffering is in fact what happens and is lived, but "from the point of view of the subject": "This more than warrants the anxiety with which Rousseau acknowledges the lethal quality of writing. Writing al- ways includes the moment of dispossession in favor of the arbitrary power of the play of the signifier and from the point of view of the sub- ject [my emphasis], this can only be experienced as a dismemberment, a beheading, or a castration" (296).
De Man therefore wishes to describe what it is in deconstruction- dissemination (that which "disseminates," he says, as "textual event" and as anacoluthon "throughout the entire text" [300]) that operates independently of and beyond any desire. The materiality of this event as textual event is what is or makes itself independent of any subject or any desire.
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It is a logic that has something irrefutable about it. If, on the one hand, the event supposes surprise, contingency, or the arbitrary, as I emphasized a moment ago, it also supposes, on the other hand, this ex- teriority or this irreducibility to desire. And therefore it supposes that which makes it radically inappropriable, nonreappropriable, radically resistant to the logic of the proper. Moreover, what elsewhere I have called exappropriation concerns this work of the inappropriable in de- sire and in the process of appropriation.
Without being able to develop it here, I would draw another conse- quence that no doubt goes beyond what de Man himself says or would say. It is this: By reason of this unforeseeability, this irreducible and inappropriable exteriority for the subject of experience, every event as such is traumatic. Even an event experienced as a "happy" one. This does, I concede, confer on the word trauma a generality that is as fear- some as it is extenuating. But perhaps we have here a double conse- quence that must be drawn in the face of the speculative inflation to which the word is today subject. Understood in this sense, trauma is that which makes precarious any distinction between the point of view of the subject and what is produced independently of desire. It makes precarious even the use and the sense of all these words. An event is traumatic or it does not happen. It injures desire, whether or not desire desires or does not desire what happens. It is that which, within desire, constitutes it as possible and insists there while resisting it, as the im- possible: some outside, irreducibly, as some nondesire, some death, and something inorganic, the becoming possible of the impossible as im-possible.
It is on this stage no doubt that arise the questions of the unforgiv- able, the unpardonable, the inexcusable--and of perjury.
There you are, pardon me for having spoken too long. I cut things off here, arbitrarily.
But not without saluting once again the spirit, I mean the ghost, of my friend. One day, de Man wrote this: "whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn't need Rousseau, he doesn't need anybody else. "29 As you have seen quite well, this is of course not true. De Man was wrong. I needed Paul de Man. But I need- ed him no doubt in order to show in my turn, many years later, that he, Paul de Man, perhaps had no need of Rousseau in order to show and to demonstrate, himself, what he thought he ought to confide in us. That is what I was suggesting by insisting on the exemplarity, and for
example, the exemplarity of de Man's autobiographico-political texts apropos of Rousseau, materiality, and other similar things.
I am so sad that Paul de Man is not here himself to answer me and to object. But I can hear him already--and sooner or later his text will answer for him. That is what we all call a machine. But a spectral ma- chine. By telling me I am right, it will tell him he is right. And sooner or later, our common innocence will not fail to appear to everyone's eyes, as the best intentioned of all our machinations. Sooner or later and vir- tually already, always, here now.
NOTES
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1953), 88; the translation, as here, will often be modified to remain closer to the literality of Rousseau's text. Page references to the French are to: Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, vol. 1, Les confessions: Autres textes autobiographiques, Bibliothe`ques de la Ple? iade (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
2. J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," in Philosophical Papers, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175. Since delivering this lecture, I have published a text titled "Comme si c'e? tait possible--'within such limits,'" in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3 (1998).
3. The brief allusions de Man makes (pp. 10, 68, 101, 102) in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), do not touch at all on this history.
4. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Double- day, 1960), book 2, chapter 4, 70.
5. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 287.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (London: Penguin, 1979), 44.
7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Creed of a Priest of Savoy, trans. Arthur H. Beattie (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1956), 80.
8. If I had the time, I would have liked to demonstrate that where the two au- thors of Confessions speak the language of the excuse, the one of the "inexcusable" (inexcusabilis), the other of "excusing himself," they inscribe their utterances in the thickness of an immense Christian, and first of all Paulinian, archive, in a palimpsest of quotations and quasi quotations, which, moreover, Augustine ex- hibits as such, notably in his borrowings from the Epistle to the Romans (I, ii, 20).
9. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," 185.
10. Paul de Man, "Kant and Schiller," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warmin-
ski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133.
11. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
12. Derrida is exploiting here, as he has often done, the opposite meanings of
the homonymic expressions: plus de, no more, and plus de, more. --Trans.
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13.
It would be necessary, of course, to mobilize other readings de Man under- took around the motifs of the materiality of inscription and effacement (cf. "Shelley Disfigured," where it is a question of the materiality of inscription; and "Auto- biography as Defacement," both in The Rhetoric of Romanticism).
14. On arbitrariness and gratuitousness, see Allegories of Reading, 357.
15. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 89; "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's 'U? ber das Marionettentheater,'" in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
16. Derrida is exploiting the homonymic possibilities of soie (silk), soi (self), and the expression en soi (in itself). --Trans.
17. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 274.
18. See Derrida, Adieu a` Emmanuel Le? vinas (Paris: Galile? e, 1997).
19. The term non-coupable, in addition to the meaning being adduced here,
commonly signifies: not guilty. --Trans.
20. When this lecture was delivered, I did not know, I confess, that Ortwin
de Graef had already pointed out what he calls in quotation marks "the 'mistake' in de Man's translation," or again "de Man's erratic anacoluthonic translation" ("Silence to Be Observed: A Trial for Paul de Man's Inexcusable Confessions," Yale Journal of Criticism 3: 2 [1990]: 214-15; also in Postmodern Studies 2 [1989]). I thank Erin Ferris for having brought this publication to my attention.
21. "The mutilation seems to be incurable and the prothesis [sic] only serves to mark this fact more strongly" (295-96).
22. The paragraph from the Geneva manuscript is not included in the transla- tion of the Confessions. --Trans.
23. Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1988).
24. Geoffrey Bennington, "Aberrations: De Man (and) the Machine," in Legisla- tions: The Politics of Deconstruction (London and New York: Verso, 1994).
25. These two common expressions, which use the same construction as "je m'excusai sur," mean "I took my revenge on . . . ," "I took it out on the first thing that presented itself. "--Trans.
26. Jacques Derrida, Me? moires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 143. 27. "We must, in other words, disarticulate, mutilate the body in a way that is much closer to Kleist than to Winckelmann . . . material disarticulation not only of nature but of the body. . . . To the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dis- memberment of language, as meaning-producing tropes are replaced by the frag- mentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters. In Kleist's text, one would isolate the dis-
semination of the word Fall . . . " (Aesthetic Ideology, 88-89).
28. In "Avances," preface to Serge Margel, Le Tombeau du dieu artisan (Paris:
Minuit, 1995).
29. "An Interview with Paul de Man," in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 118.
Contributors
judith butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection; and Excitable Speech, as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminist theory, and queer theory. Her most recent work on Antigone and the politics of kinship, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, is forthcoming.
t. j. clark is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-51; Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution; The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers; and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.
barbara cohen is senior editor and director of HumaniTech,
a center for the application of technology to humanities research and teaching at the University of California, Irvine. She previously taught French and art and has written several articles on the dynamics of art education in the public schools.
tom cohen is the author of Anti-Mimesis (from Plato to Hitchcock) and Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin,
361
362 Contributors
de Man, and Bakhtin. He is currently completing Re-Marking Hitchcock, editing The Cambridge Companion to Derrida, and coediting a volume titled Technicity, "Life," the Animal. He is cur- rently chair of the English department at the University of Albany, SUNY.
jacques derrida is director of studies of the E? cole des Hautes E? tudes in France and professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published numerous books, including Memoirs for Paul de Man, Specters of Marx, Politics of Friendship, Monolingualism of the Other, and Archive Fever.
barbara johnson teaches at Harvard University in the depart- ments of English and comparative literature, where she holds the title of Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society. She is author of The Critical Difference; A World of Difference; The Wake of Deconstruction; and The Feminist Difference. She has edited sever- al volumes and is the translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination.
ernesto laclau is professor of political theory and director of the doctoral program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He is author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (with Chantal Mouffe); New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time; and Emancipation(s).
j. hillis miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He previously taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities. He is the author of many books and articles on literature and literary theory, most recently Reading Narrative and Black Holes.
arkady plotnitsky is professor of English and the director of
the theory and cultural studies program at Purdue University. He has written extensively on English and European romanticism, critical theory, continental philosophy, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His books include In the Shadow of Hegel; Complementarity: Antiepistemology after Bohr and Derrida; a co- edited volume (with Barbara H. Smith), Mathematics, Science, and
Postclassical Theory; and a forthcoming study, The Invisible and the Unknowable: Modern Science and Nonclassical Thought.
laurence a. rickels, professor of German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of The Vampire Lectures (Minnesota, 1999); The Case of California; and Aberrations of Mourning; and editor of Acting Out in Groups (Minnesota, 1999). His three-volume study Nazi Psychoanalysis
is forthcoming (Minnesota). He also works as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles.
michael sprinker was a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review. His books include Imagining Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust.
andrzej warminski is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Readings in Interpreta- tion: Ho? lderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minnesota, 1987) and editor of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology (Minnesota, 1996). His Material Inscriptions is forthcoming.
Contributors 363
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Index
Compiled by Geoffrey Manaugh, University of Chicago
Entries in boldface notate texts writ- ten by author indexed.
Abraham, Karl, 158, 171
Abram, David, 150 n. 27
Adorno, Theodor, 153-54, 156-57 Althusser, Louis, xviii, 32-33, 35- 45,
46 n. 7, 46 n. 8, 46-47 n. 12, 47 n. 16, 47-48 n. 18, 48 n. 19, 189, 202 n. 8, 204 n. 9
Aristotle, 37-38, 237
Augustine, Saint, 285-91, 310, 322,
359 n. 8
Austin, J. L. , xxiv n. 14, 14, 25,
283-84, 301-2, 307, 308, 312, 325, 327-29, 337
Badt, Kurt, 97
Bander, Peter, 159, 161
Bataille, Georges, 54, 86 n. 8 Baudelaire, Charles, xxiii n. 4, 6-11,
205, 207, 208-14, 224 n. 4 Benjamin, Walter, ix-x, xiv, xxiii n. 3, xxiii n. 4, xxiii n. 6, 115, 117-19, 120, 121, 122-26, 128, 129, 131, 133, 138, 146 n. 9, 147-48 n. 17,
148 n. 18, 148 n. 23, 149 n. 26, 151 n. 31, 153-54, 156-57, 165,
167-68, 201-2 n. 5, 271, 273
n. 7
Bennington, Geoffrey, 344 Berkeley, George, 186
Blake, William, xviii, 76
Blanchot, Maurice, 54, 243, 301-2 Bloch, Robert, 168
Bohr, Niels, 55-62, 69, 75, 86 n. 9,
86-87 n. 10, 87 n. 13, 87-88 n. 19 Booth, Wayne, 201-2 n. 5
Brecht, Bertolt, 38, 43-45, 47 n. 16,
48 n. 20
Burroughs, William S. , xii Butler, Judith, xx, 46-47 n. 12,
254 -74
Cadava, Eduardo, 123
Cage, John, 47 n. 13
Cavell, Stanley, 152 n. 38
Ce? zanne, Paul, xviii, 49, 58, 72, 77,
88 n. 24, 93-112
Clark, T. J. , xvii, xviii, 49, 72, 93-113 Cle? ment, Catherine, 172-73
Cohen, Barbara, xx-xxv
Cohen, Tom, vii-xv, xv-xvi, xvii,
xix, 114-52, 280, 285
Collins, George, 146 n. 4 Cremonini, Leonardo, 39-40, 42-43
365
366 Index
Deleuze, Gilles, 85 n. 1, 145 n. 4, 308-9
Derrida, Jacques, viii, xvi-xvii, xx-xxi, 25, 30 n. 8, 30 n. 10, 30 n. 13, 46-47 n. 12, 50, 54, 58-59, 68, 83, 85 n. 1, 86 n. 4, 86 n. 8, 88 n. 24, 123, 133, 149 n. 25, 153, 190, 197, 201 n. 3, 204
n. 12, 204 n. 15, 212, 224 n. 5, 258-59, 277-360
Descartes, Rene? , xx, 255, 258-68, 271-72, 272 n. 2, 272 n. 3, 272-73 n. 4, 273 n. 5
Dickinson, Emily, 111 Diderot, Denis, 82
Eagleton, Terry, 32 Einstein, Albert, 55, 80
Fehrenbacher, Douglas, 219 Felman, Shoshana, 225 n. 17
Fiore, Edith, 176-77 n. 13 Fontanier, Pierre, 238-39, 252 n. 11 Foucault, Michel, 255-56 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 254 Freccero, Carla, xxi, 283
Freud, Sigmund, 37-38, 154, 156, 158-59, 165, 170, 177 n. 16, 177 n. 17, 212
Fry, Roger, 105-7, 109-10
Galilei, Galileo, 65, 87 n. 14, 87 n. 17
Gasche? , Rodolphe, 47 n. 14, 47 n. 15, 47-48 n. 18, 53-54, 79, 85 n. 1, 86 n. 6
Genette, Ge? rard, 204 n. 11, 237, 243, 252 n. 8, 252 n. 14
Geuss, Raymond, 193, 198, 199-200 Godard, Jean-Luc, 45, 145 n. 4 Goddard, Robert H. , 162
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 37 Graef, Ortwin de, 360 n. 20
Gramsci, Antonio, xvii, xix, 234, 239, 243
Greenberg, Clement, 105, 112-13 n. 13
Guattari, Fe? lix, 85 n. 1
Hegel, G. W. F. , x, xxiii n. 7, xxiv n. 12, xxiv n. 13, 3, 31 n. 23, 38-39, 54, 77, 100, 102, 123, 145 n. 4, 148 n. 21, 151 n. 34, 186-87, 193, 195-97, 198, 199, 201 n. 5, 333
Heidegger, Martin, 4, 123, 308 Heisenberg, Werner, 61, 69
Hillis Miller, J.
