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FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE bilingual edition, SignepongelSignsponge (1984), translated by Rich- ard Rand. The French text was subsequently published in France in 1988 (Paris: Seuil), incorporating slight changes. The extract that fol- lows—pp. 2.4-64 of the bilingual edition—has been revised by Richard Rand in the light of these changes. Quotations from Ponge have been translated by Rand; sources of the original French texts cited are listed at the end of the extract.
My object, my thing, that which is going to prescribe a rhetoric proper to this event, if it takes place, would be Francis Ponge. If I had asked, as at the outset of a conference or a course, what are we going to talk about? what is the subject today? the answer would have come very quickly: about Francis Ponge, or about the texts of Francis Ponge.
But will the question have been about whom or about what? We always pretend to know what a corpus is all about. When we put the texts of Francis Ponge on our program, we are assured, even if we dismiss the author's biography, of knowing at least what the link is, be it natural or contractual, between a given text, a given so-called author, and his name designated as proper. The academic conventions of literary biography presuppose at least one certainty—the one con- cerning the signature, the link between the text and the proper name of the person who retains the copyright. Literary biography begins • after the contract, if one may put it like this, after the event of signature.
All the philological fuss about apocryphal works is never bothered by the slightest doubt, on the contrary, it is set in movement by an absence of doubt as to the status (further on we shall have to say the statue) of a paraph.' They certainly ask whether or not it has taken place, this paraph, but as to the very strange structure of this place and this taking- place, the critic and the philologist (and various others), do not as such t. EN The French parafe means, most commonly, the initials one puts cm a legal document; it can also mean—as it does in English—a flourish added to a signature to guard against forgery. 346 elves a single question. They may wonder whether a certain ask then' s is indeed assignable to a certain author, but as regards piece ece event 0fA :
it ft i j i , g the signature, the abyssal machinery of this operation, the commerce between the said author and his proper name, in other words, w hether he signs when he signs, whether his proper name is truly his name and truly proper, before or after the signature, and how all this is affected by the logic of the unconscious, the structure of the language, the paradoxes of name and reference, of nomination and description, the links between common and proper names, names of things and personal names, the proper and the nonproper, no question is ever posed by any of the regional disciplines which are, as such, concerned with texts known as literary.' The Francis-Ponge-text (at the moment I can only designate it by means of a double hyphen) not only furnishes an example, but also opens up a science of these questions. Which it puts into practice and into the abyss. For me, Francis Ponge is someone first of all who has known that, in order to know what goes on in the name and the thing, one has to get busy with one's own, let oneself be occupied by it (he has said elsewhere, I no longer know exactly where, and the connection is not an accident, that he was never occupied with anything except death). Occupied with his name, he has taken account of his engage- ment as subject-writer-in-a-language, at work. He is always at work. With the supplementary trap or abyss effect he thad tild inside of, he has unceasingly explained, exhibited, turned what e out. And without effacing his name, he has nonetheless of thesignature, effaced m it by showing that the stony monuentalization of the name was a way of losing the name; I shall say, by way of anticipating a bit, a way of sponging his signature. And, of course, and this is the twist nside gn ature, vice versa. Thanks to the idiom, "the complete work of an author he ed says, a s He, to begin astth ililnign., Is the Reasons for Living Happily, "can in its turn he co signature gained or lost by becoming a thing? gin with (and what I assume, as 1 open it up at this point, . EN For a discussion of some of the issues pertaining to the event of the signature, 'et; Derrida's "Signature Event Context." 347 FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE by saying be from now on about my thing, is praise for the renow n that he has made for himself, and I designate him, just as he does the thing in The Third Person Singular, which was the first title for Oral Essay: "There," he says, "you have to take the thing in the singular; it is amusing because third person .. . singular at the same time . .
he, to begin with, engaged himself (1 insist on the gage that marks here the immemorial contract, the debt, the duty, the law, the trial aiming for acquittal, I do not speak of nonsuit); he has resolutely engaged himself (resolution is his obstinate watchword, we shall have to ask ourselves why); with resolution, then, with this unceasingly reaffirmed taste for the frank act, he is himself engaged, has engaged himsel and in the face of what and of whom if not of an instance represented by his proper nam engaged in his name, not to write anything, not to produce anything that he could not sign, he himself and no one else, anything that, from that point on, could not be absolutely proper to himself, reserved for himself alone, even if, by chance, and this was not in play at the outset, this should remain not much.
Slightly before "you have been remarked by F. Ponge" [in The Notebook of the Pine Forest]: "Bring out only that which I am the only one to say." And after having recited a whole poetical anthology on the Seine: "But certainly, also, songs of this sort are not, properly speaking, for us. We are not particularly marked out to recite them.
And so it does not interest us very much to recite them. Nor yoU to hear them from us." It is therefore in the abyss of the proper that we are going to try to recognize the impossible idiom of a signature.' He will have speculated as no one else on the proper, the proper way to write and the proper way to sign. No longer separating, within the proper, the two stems of propriety and property.' 3. TN Derrida uses two spellings of the French word for "abyss," chyme and abime• The former is the specifically heraldic term for the device whereby the image of a shield .. is represented on the surface of that shield. Mise en abyme, or "placement in abyss, designates the way in which the operations of reading and writing are represented in the text, and in advance, as it were, of any other possible reading. 4. EN The adjective propre can mean both "clean" and "own," giving rise to two . different nouns, propreti,"cleanliness, propriety" and proprióte, "ownership, ploper 5 Y- The English word "proper" includes both of these among its older senses, and will be used in this translation. 548 The only difference, after all, between the one and the other, is an ou t of which we can always make some dead wood. He has treated the I in every way, in every language, in upper case ("I (i), J (je), I (one): single, singularity.... Chaos of the matter of the I (one). 7 1 :
e .
'T sl h ille, i i s p ii s my likeness . . ." Uoca Serial); in lower case, taking it off in order to write, in the Pre, "a verdant verity";' playing with its frail or fresh erection in the Making of the Pre: "Difference between the liquid drop or accent (acute here) dot on the i and the virgule of the grass. Virgule, verge." "On the wet grass there is a dot of dew on the i," this grass, this herb, rising up here with this "something male" that he will have discerned in the opening of his Malherbe. If we had time to describe a ll the "woods" and "trees" in Ponge, we would see all the implications of dead wood (take it also as an order)' where he, the 1, is erected again; but we shall see, from among these trees, only the family tree, to which it is not a matter of reducing everything else. Here is just one, because it hears, like the proprietary aspect of the proper, an I in its center: "Pine (I would not be far from saying) is the elementary idea of tree. It is an 1, a stem, and the rest is of little importance. This is why it supplies—among its obligatory developments along the hori- zontal—so much dead wood." And so he loves the proper: what is proper to himself, proper to the other, proper, that is, to the always singular thing, which is proper in that it is not dirty, soiled, sickening, or disgusting. And he demands th e proper in all these states, but with an obstinacy so Obsessive that one has to suspect, in this agonistic insistence, some hand-to-hand conflict with the impossible, with something which, within the proper, withi n the very structure of the proper, is produced only by shifting into its opposite, by being set in abyss, by being inverted, contaminated, 5.
TN In French, pre means "prairie" or "meadow," but also the prefix "pre-." In the phras e une veritë qui soit verte, translated here as "a verdant verity," the word verte g r een") is the word vèrite ("truth") minus the letter 6. EN Virgule, vergette: literally, "comma, small cane (or penis)." ki „ t l 7 ,7 TN The French phrase Bois mort means "dead wood" but also "drink, dead man!" inks up, thematically, with the homophone pain/pin, - bread"/"pine."/ +49 FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE and divided. And one has to suspect that the grand affair of the signa- ture is to be found there. I am proceeding slowly. I do not want it to seem as if I were explaining him, still less as if I were explaining to him what it is, with him or of him, that is taking place here, as one of those professors o r metaphysicolicians that he particularly denounce complaining al so (but the case is too complicated for today) that too much has been said about hi would be tempted to do. He is right not to tolerate explication, and in effect he does not tolerate it ("There are moments when I feel altogether pricklish [defen- sively] at the idea of being explained; and other moments when this subsides, when I feel discouraged and inclined to let it happen..."). I do not dare to imagine the condition in which this colloquium will have taken or left him, but I believe that in fact he cannot be explained, having readied everything for this in various texts which explain them- selves very well, and in such a way that everything can be found there, in addition to that remainder which prevents an explanatory discourse from ever attaining saturation. What I am doing here, in the matters of explanation, professors, academic discourse, the academic figure par excellence who is the philosopher, and the philosopher par excellence known as Hegel, is to ask why, among all the reproaches addressed to them, we meet up with the following: Hegel (the philosopher) is not very proper, and after reading him you have to wash up, to wash your hands of him, you might even say. Repeated Pages from Proems: "II I prefer La Fontain the slightest fabl to Schopenhauer or Hegel, I certainly know why. "It seems to me: 1. less tiring, more fun; z. more proper, less dis- gusting.... The trick, then, would be to make only 'small writings' or `Sapates,' but ones that would hold, satisfy, and at the same time relax, cleanse after reading the grrand metaphysicolicians." Why, along with all their other shortcomings, would philosophers he unclean? In explaining this, I must also refuse to be the philosopher that, in 8. TN "Sapates" a kind of Christmas stocking found in southern France, and also, according to Littrê, a big gift disguised as a small one, as when a diamond is concealed within a lemon. The reference is to Ponge's poem "Preface to the Sapates." the things I say here, be they proper or improper. And to do this, I h a ve to have it out with the signature, with his, with mine, perhaps, and with other's, since one of the reasons (perhaps) that philosophers as such the o ea t little disgusting is that none of them, as philosophers (this b e ing a part of philosophy), will have known how to cut short, to stop (whence the " v olumeinseveraltominous" character of their work, there is only one Volume One by Ponge), or to cut, and thereby to shorten and to sign. In order to sign, one has to stop one's text, and no philosopher will have signed his text, resolutely and singularly, will have spoken in his own name, accepting all the risks involved in doing philosopher denies the idiom of his name, of his language, so of .
his circumstance, speaking in concepts and generalities that are Every necessarily improper.
Francis Ponge, for his part, would wish to sing the praises and fame only of those who sign. And twice even more so than once, causing us to suspect that you never get there on the first try, supposing that you ever get there at all.
From the outset, however, For a Malherbe is caught in an indeci- sio something that resoluteness will always want to resolv be- tween a certain effacing of the signature that will transform the text into a thing, as ought to b or into a legendary, proverbial, oracular inscriptio and a stubborn redoubling of the signature, it being my hypothesis here that these end up as somewhat the same, or do not, in any case, lend themselves to a simple distinction. "The silent world is our only homeland [hence a silent homeland, without language, with- out discourse, without family name, without a father, but then we were warned beforehand: "We who only get the word from the silent world, our only x y homeland, are not so stupid, and you can count on it, Gentle- l library."] The only homeland, moreover, never to proscribe anyone, as not to observe that we use it according to a particular exce pt perhaps our books end tip being put on the French shelf of the universal perhaps the poet who leaves it in search of other honors. one not, perhaps, proscribe oneself from it by signing only with one's name? This is an idea held by certain absolutist thinkers, t h e light of some appearances, I am thought to be, and above all I must m ake a scene in which I oblige him not to wash his hands any more of 35 0 3 5 I FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE who tend to proverbs, that is to say, to formulas so striking (so authori- tarian) and so evident, that they can do without the signature. But a poet of this sort no sooner calls upon something in the silent world (no, not no sooner! with great difficulty, in fact, and forcibly!) than h e produces an object-work that re-enters it, the silent world, that is; a work which, objectively, reinserts itself into that world. This is what justifies the indifference of ambiguity and self-evidence in poetic texts, their oracular character, shall we say." And so you must certainly sign, but it is as well also not to sign, to write things that, finally, are things, worthy of going without your signature. There is thus a good way of signing, a bad way of signing.
The bar does not pass between the signature and the absence of signa- ture, but through the signature. Which is therefore always overflowing. Before asking how this can be, I note that it may in part account for the ambiguity of his link with philosophers who do not sign, who have a way of signing without signing: ". . it seems to me that philosophy belongs to literature as one of its genres... And ... there are others that I prefer.. . . It remains the case that I have to remain a philosopher in petto, worthy, that i convinced though I am of philosophy's and the world's absurdit of pleasing my philosophy professors, so as to remain a good man of letters, and so give pleasure to you..." (Repeated Pages from Proems). And after naming the chaos which Malherbe, like the rest of us, had to pull himself out of, "let us add that he signed his name, and twice rather than once." The process of transforming a work into a thin mute, therefore, and silent when speaking, because dispensing with the signatur can only be brought about by inscribing the signature in the text, which amounts to signing twice in the process of not signing any more. We shall have to pass through this point once again.
To he more demonstrative, in the effusiveness of my praise, I shall now bring out the resoluteness with which he will have taken sides with the proper against the dirty, or rather against the soiled, the sullied, a distinction which reveals a whole story, one that takes time and decomposes itself: there is no dirty thing, only a soiled thing, a pro per thing which is made dirty. Which is moiled,' since impurity, as we s hall show, often comes about through liquid means, and so should b e absorbed by a cloth which is appropriate. Appropriating. The proper is 7 oiisled. That which is soiled is moiled.
This is the first meaning of proper, which then goes on to thicken with the other meaning (the proper of property), but thickens in a strange way, one which, to my way of thinking (an objection which I lack the time to develop), produces something entirely different from s emantic density, let alone this semantic materialism whose simplifica- tion he has endorsed everywhere too quickly. n g the p r a ises of that which would be proper. I will let you multiply the examples. Consider The Washing Machine," which, like all his objects, is, in addition or beforehand, a writing as well, one that is standing, stable, stabile, a stance on the page. The washing machine is "very impatiently written": "Should we not before- hand, howeve as well as we could as on its tripo have set up, in this way, trunconically, our washing machine in the middle of the page?" The operation or scene of writing that the washing machine turns into (though never reducing itself to this, and we shall see why) is a reappropriation.
And the fact that it renders linen, tissue, or cloth clean and proper is something that matters to us a great deal, not only in light of the affinity which we have so overused of late between text and tissue, to say nothing as yet of the sponge-towel," but also because the appropri- a ..rhe tion of linendraws us toward the underclothes of this kind of writing.
heap of ignoble tissue [I underline ignobl J. D.], the inner emotion, thi.• boiling washing machine is so conceived that, having been tilled with a 9-. o l EN The French se mouille means "gets wet"; Derrida exploits the rhyme of to w e rt.ry.ignation that it feels from this, when channelled to the t r to ruhtoesear/oer tic , " s t c o en :.et t , h " aa t ri fo d i s lo o w ://er, "to dirty." The English transitive verb "to moil" means h e l i ; e 0r , k 15-1 ; L da l:ei m e f I.
Servieste - ipcing e is translated as "sponge-towel" instead of the more correct m a k es uelise nor only a washing machine, but also a washerwoman, whence e o s r m th u e c c h obvious io t u hes r t ee a x s t o un r the s p Nlna sponge-towel.] n a g te e r -t p o a ss rt el o . I f this text, not reprinted 352 353 FROM SIGNSPONGE FR Oki SIGNSPONGE upper part of its being, falls back as rain on the heap of ignoble tiss turning its stomac more or less perpetuall it being a process tha should end up with a purification. "So here we are at the very heart of the mystery. The sun is settin on this Monday evening. Oh housewives! And you, near the end your study, how tired your backs arc! But after grinding away all da long like this (what is the demon that makes me talk this way?) loo l at what clean and proper arms you have, and pure hands, worn by th most moving toil!" And to telescope the erotic scene that brings the signer into the tex every time, and on the side of the washing machine, placing his hands "on your dear hips" (the housewife is a washer "releasing the spigot before untying the apron "of a blue just like the noble utensil's"), bu figuring also the signer hard at the work of reappropriation, and always from both sides (he, facing the washing machine, is the washing ma- chine that describes the washing machine, which, however, can do very nicely without him here, to telescope this erotic scene, is the rinsing process: ". . yes, we have to come back again to our object; once again we have to rinse our idea in clear water: "Certainly the linen, once it went into the washing machine, had already been cleaned, roughly. The machine did not conic into contact with filthiness as such, with snot, for example, dried out, filthy, and clinging to the handkerchiefs. "It is still a fact, however, that the machine experiences an idea or a diffuse feeling of filthiness about the things inside of itself, which, through emotions, boilings, and efforts, it manages to overcom in separating the tissue: so much so that, when rinsed in a catastrophe of fresh water, these will come to seem extremely white... "And here, in effect, is the miracle:
"A thousand white flags are suddenly unfurle attesting not to defeat, but to victor and are not just, perhaps, the sign of bodily propriety among the inhabitants of the neighborhood." The moment of rinsing, always in fresh water (I have underlined it), is decisive, by which I mean that it carries with it a decision, placed at the end of the text. As in Soap, at the end of the "intellectual toilet," after the "exhaustion of the subject." The Rinse fits into one page, the We have to finish up. Toiled skin, though very proper. We last: • • • have obtained what we wanted from the soap. And even a little more, may b e " [This is the little more that (than) the signature require a scoured paraph, such is the formula. And the word paraph is the same, n its as paragraph.] "A paragraph of fresh water. A rising a) of the body — origin, h ) of the soap..." Soap, that sort-of-stone-but that figures the subject, washing and washed, has to be rinsed as well: "Would it not he his entry into i i t to soc i e ty, then, his being put into company with some other (being or t hi ng ), with some object, finally, that might enable a person to conceive of his own personal identity, to disengage it from what it is not, to scour and to decarbonize it? To signify himself?" To signify oneself in the insignificant (outside meaning or concept), 'isn't this the same thing as signing? Somewhere he says that the insig- nificant is "hygienic." We will find this word useful later on.
The desire for the proper that necessarily fastens on to linen and freshness (but also, as always, onto the words linen and fresh) is always at work here (among its other under-determinations, I pass over, for the time being, the hidden, phonic, semantic and graphic thread in the word linen that joins the linen-pin (the clothespin) to the sponge-towel: it can wait'' at work here, in other words threatened, extended, and trembling in front of The Carnation: "At the end of the stem, out of an olive, of a supple nut of leaves, the marvelous luxury of linen comes unbuttoned.
"Carnations, these marvelous rags.
"How proper they are.
• . .
"Inhaling them, you feel a pleasure whose opposite would be a sneeze.
"Seeing them, the pleasure you feel when you see the panties, torn into lovely shreds," of a young girl taking care of her linen." Let us wait, patiently, between the legs of this "young girl" [file g F.
E v eN N I yT h n n e ,:
r r n r a aan p s e h:
ds k el sac an di p ret l re h e this thread in the later part of the text, not reprinted here_ a d.
b " elles dents, here translated literally, is usually employed 354 355 FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE jeune] (he does not tell us whether she is a virgin [jeune fille1), and try, in the meantime, to find some sponge-cloth there. Meanwhile, on the facing page (where there are some notes on the carnation that begi n by defining the engagement to write as "an affair of self-esteem, nothin g more"), from among some words classed and grouped in the dictionar y (his most beautiful object," made for sinking all illiterate scientisms into the greatest confusion), I notice that all the words beginning in ft, like freshness [fraicheur], describe a certain way of handling linen: "Frounce [Froissed: to rumple, to cause to assume irregular folds. (The origin is a noise.) "Frizz [Fraser] (a towel): to fold it in such a way as to form small curls. "Frig [Friper], in the sense of rumple, is confused with fespe, from fespa, which means rags and also fringe, a kind of plush. "Fringes [Franges]: etymology unknown..." This last word, with a so-called unknown genealogy, bears the closest resemblance to the given name of the signer, and the fringes signal, in their margins, as much on the side of fracture, fraction, or the fragment that you know to he cut, as on the side of frankness or franchise, which is just as good for cutting as for freeing and affranchising (liberating ; emancipating, stamping, paying off a debt). If he writes, as he says, "against the spoken word, the eloquent spoken word," he also writes, in the same gesture, against dirt. Dirt takes place, its place, first of all, closest to the body, as in dirty linen.
Whence The Practice of Literature: "And often after a conversation, after talking, I have the feeling of dirt, of insufficiency, of muddled things; even a conversation that has moved forward a hit, that has gone just a bit toward the bottom of things, and with intelligent people.
We say so many stupid things. . . . This is not proper. And often my taste for writing comes when I return to my house after a conversation in which I had the impression of taking old clothes, old shirts from one trunk and putting them into another, all this in the attic, you know, with lots of dust, lots of dirt, sweating a little and dirty, feeling uncoM - 14. EN Derrida has earlier coined the term objeu from the words objet ("object") and enjeu ("stake, in a bet"). 356 fortahle. I see a piece of white paper and I say: 'Maybe, with a little atte ntion, I can write something proper, something neat and clean.' Thi s , is it not, is often the reason, maybe one of the principal reasons, for writing. " The fragment from Proems with the very title Reasons for Writing says almost the same thing, but I want to take some tweezers from it which, like clothespins, describe very well the instruments with which he treats the French language when it is too dirty, so as to reappropriate it, or in other words refrancify it: "In all deference to the words themselves, given the habits they have contracted in so many foul mouths, it takes a certain courage to decide not only to write but even to speak. A pile of dirty rags, not to be picked up with tweezers; this is what they offer us for stirring, shaking, and moving from place to place. In the secret hope that we will fall silent. Well, let us take up the challenge, then!" To take up the challenge, resolutely, will consist in grabbing the tweezers and treating words between quotation marks, in the first place as a generalized citation of the French language. Even his signature, included within the text, will he held in quotation marks.
How can the signature be caught, by the signer, between quotation marks?
I am not pushing things too far when I compare quotation marks to tweezers. He has done it himself, and precisely around the word "proper" in the expression "proper name" "this is done in quotation marks, in other words with tweezers." dirt A o nd n dirt, about so he does not d otirrtt. It is his matter. maw ay i fro a md r i .
rt, he writes with dirt, against This is set down in The Augean Stables: " Alas, as a crowning horror, t) t ( u thee ss a an s i if Same sordidwere e o r r e very order speaks within our ve selves. . . It all happens with fres co painters who had only one single immense pot at their t d h i ce s ) p fm ( c )sal for soaking their brushes, in which, from the night of ages, everyone would have had to thin out their colors. . . . It is not a matter e ledaitti lsn -iing of the theA m ug a t n .a u n re p sta r b o le p s e , r b t u o t t c h )fem pa .
inting t hem in fresco To paint in fresco--in other words, with fresh charges yet again. directly kneads (he loves this word for all that it kneads) 357 the fresh, as its name indicates; it mixes color with the humid freshnes s of moiled paste, in the erases of earth and water. In this sense The P re will also give rise, among other things, to fresco. "It is not a matter of cleansing the Augean stables, but of painting them in fresco with the medium of the manure proper to them." Their proper manure. The word proper plays, expropriating itself and reappropriating itself to itself, right in the manure. It works right into the matter.
In the linen (of the body), its tissue, its text, proper envelops both propriety and property. Property: the idion of the thing which dictates, according to its muteness, in other words singularly, a description of itself or rather a writing of itself that would he idiomatic, appropriate to the thing and appropriated by the thing, to the signer and by the signer. This double appropriation of the idion is prescribed right here in the overture to The Carnation, a little before the ecstacy induced by the "propriety" of "linen": "to take up the challenge of things to language. . . . Is that poetry? . . . For me it is a need, an engagement, a rage, an affair of self-esteem, nothing more. . . . Once a thing has been give no matter how ordinary it may b I find that it always presents some truly particular qualities ... those are the ones that I try to draw out and disengage. "What interest is there in disengaging them? To cause the human mind to gain those qualities of which it is capable and which its routine alone prevents from appropriating to itself." I underline challenge, engagement, interest, and disengaging. (That this process promises to engage in the production of events, and even revolutions, along with the placement in abyss that will necessarily ensue, is something that we would have to put into collo- qu elsewhere, and in another ton with the Aneignung of Marx or the Ereignis [Ring, annular object, and Reigen des Ereignens, propri - ation as well as event] of the Heideggerian thing.' 5) Why is this wager impossible, and why does this impossibility make possible, cause to rise, to become erect and then extended, the signature FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE i 5. TN Marx refers to Aneignung (" appropriation") throughout Capital, and Hei ger to Ereignis ("event") throughout his later writings. 35 8 o f a Pon ge, granting it a stature both monumental and mortuary? What is the interest in this gage? What is the risk in this wager?
I h as t e n the answer a hit even at the cost of some disorder. H e has to acquit himself of an infinite debt. And we are, anyway, a l w ays fascinated, under the law of someone who will have known how e t otwi tw i st here ear e dlies e debt. . He is undebted." in the fact that an infinite debt is canceled by itself and is never effaced, which oddly amounts to the same thing. He, therefore, is undebted. With respect to what he calls the thing. The thing dictates its conditions, silent though it is, and being silent, does not enter into the contract. It is irresponsible, he alone being responsible from the outset toward the thing, which remains entirely other, indiffer- ent, never engaging itself. "To acknowledge the greatest right of the object, its imprescribable right, opposable to any poem... .. . The object is always more important, more interesting, more capable (full of rights): it has no duty toward me, it is I who am entirely duty-bound in its regard." (Banks of the Loire, or how to be beaten by the thing, regularly, without ever "sacrificing" it to "the putting in value of some verbal find," returning always to "the object itself, to whatever it has that is raw, different: different in particular from what I have already [up to this moment] written about it.") The law is all the more imperious, unlimited, insatiably hungry for sacrifice, in that it proceeds from something entirely other (the thing) which de itself, which d demands nothing, which does not even have a relationship to oes not exchange anything either with itself or with any ti person, and whic death, in shor is not a subject (anthropomor- phic or theomorphic, conscious or unconscious, neither a discourse nor even a form of writing in the current sense of the word). Demanding everythi ng and no ying, the thing puts the debtor (the one who would wish to sa y properly my thing) in a situation of absolute heteronomy and of Infinitel y unequal alliance. So that, to be acquitted, for him, or ('h 1 e 6.
w .r ithNoTh ut e p h h t r n a ) s e s 'endette ("he is indebted") can also be heard as lui sans dette 359 FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGF at least "to pick up the challenge," would not he to obey a verbal contract which has never been signed, but rather to do, he himself, ' signing, what is necessary so that, in the end, in the orgastic juhilatio of what he calls the truth, he could not only sign his text, imposing or 1 apposing his signature, but also, by transforming his text into a signs.
Lure, he could oblige the thing, oblige-it-to, yes, to do nothing less than sign itself, to signify itself (see the extraordinary Appendix V to Soap), to become a writing-signature, and so to contract with Francis Pong e the absolute idiom of a contract: one single countersigned signature, one single thing signing double. But this contract, of course, is really nothing of the sort: in a certain manner, nothing is exchanged in exchange for the signatures; and, on the other hand, since the event is idiomatic every single time, neither thing nor person is engaged beyond the momentary singularity of a certain coitus of signatures. And since the confusion of signatures only gains its value by causing the entirely- other to come into the event, this entirely-other remains, on both sides, outside the contract, indifferent, unconcerned. The countersignature lets it be (lets it live, as is said of the object of love in Proems). This is just as true for Ponge's side as it is for the side of the thing, whence.
this feeling, when we read him, of vital engagement and flippancy, as of someone who knows at once how to be here and how to he disen- gaged, who knows that he is disengaged. Whence this inimitable into- nation, serious and light at the same time, of a "take it or leave it," all and nothing, all or nothing, everything said and done.
The structure of the placement in abyss, such as he practices it, seems to me to repeat this scene every time: every time, but every time in necessarily idiomatic fashion, the "differential quality" affecting the very form of the signature, this latter remaining the other's. From this comes the infinite monumentalization of the signature, and also its dissipation without return, the signature no longer being tied to a single proper name, but to the atheological multiplicity of a new signature rerun:. What is singular about this tyrannical thou must of the thing 15 I exactly its singularity. The singularity of a command which is irreplace - able each time—its rarity—prevents it from becoming law. Or rather , 11 if you prefer, it is a law that is immediately transgressed (let us say, 36a more precisely, freed up [franchiel), the one who responds being placed, immediately, in a singular link with it, whereby he frees himself from the tyranny even as he experiences and approves it. And then the law w ill he freed up a second time when—we will get to this later on—the s i gne r will make the thing sign, will make it enter into a singular contract and transform the singular demand into law by means of the placement in abyss. The transgression that enfranchises and frees up will be the law of repetition in abyss.
And, properly, the step, the stop, of Ponge.' This reading hypothesis has two preliminary consequences. In the very first place, it is on the basis of his debt, and of the fact that he puts himself into debt without debt, that, at the very point where he seems to flare up against prescription (didactic, ethical, political, philosophical, etc.), his texts also engage, prescribe, oblige, and teach in the form of a lesson and a morality. See what he says about duty and difference in the Preface to the Making of the Pre. He assumes the duty and the need, therefore, to dictate a duty of some kind, according to "what it would, no doubt, be pretentious to call my ethic" (For a Malherbe). We must accept the fact, as he does, that he gives a lesson (ethical, political, rhetorical, poetical, etc.): riot in order to receive it, but in order to understand the basis on which—the formula, the ring (the debt undebts itself)—one can give and receive a lesson. Imperious, gentle, intractable. His lesson (his ethic, his politics, in other words his philosophy) is less interesting to me (I do not, in fact, always listen to it without murmuring) than the basis on which it is constituted, and which he expounds better than anyone, thereby showing—and we are too readily dubious about this—that the ethical instance is at work in the body of literature. Which is why, rather than listen to the lesson ht gives, I prefer to read it, as a lesson, in other words, on morals, and no longer of morals, on the genealogy of morals that he has drawn, as we shall see, from a morals of genealogy.
Second consequence: since the two (engaged-disengaged) entirely others are outside of the contract process, are inaccessible, and since we can never do anything other than let them be (he and the thing), 1 7. EN Le pas de Ponge: both the step and the negative, the "no," of Ponge. 361 FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE that which interests, or interests us, and engages us in reading, i s inevitably what happens in the middle, between them: the intermediar- ies (names and things), the witnesses, the intercessors, the events that go on between them, the interested parties. I return to this point by taking a step, a stop, backwards.
How is the proper double or double proper (propriety and idiomatic property, but also the double of the proper that is placed in abyss) produced in signature? We can, as a first and insufficient approach, distinguish three modal- ities of signature. The one that we call the signature in the proper sense represents the proper name, articulated in a language and readable as such: the act of someone not content to write his proper name (as if he were filling out an identity card), but engaged in authenticating (if possible) the fact that it is indeed he who writes: here is my name, I refer to myself, named as I am, and 1 do so, therefore, in my name. I, the undersigned, I affirm (yes, on my honor). The line between the autography of one's proper name and a signature poses (de facto and de jure, therefore) redoubtable problems, which 1 do not wish to evade, as is always being done (on the contrary, it is my question here), but which, for the moment, I pass over. it+ The second modality, a banal and confused metaphor for the first, is the set of idiomatic marks that a signer might leave by accident or intention in his product. These marks would have no essential link with the form of the proper name as articulated or read "in" a language.
But then the inclusion of the proper name "in" a language never happens as a matter of course. We sometimes call this the style, the inimitable idiom of a writer, sculptor, painter, or orator. Or of a musician, the only one who is incapable, as such, of inscribing his signature in the first sense, his nominal signature, that is, upon the work itself: the musician cannot sign within the text. He lacks the space to do so, and the spacing of a language (unless he overcodes his work on the basis of another semiotic system, one of musical notation, for example). This is also his opportunity. In keeping with this second sense, let us say that the work is signed Ponge or X without having to read the proper name.
'Thirdly, and it is more complicated here, we may designate as general 36z s ignature, or signature of the signature, the fold of the placement in abyss where, after the manner of the signature in the current sense, the work of writing designates, describes, and inscribes itself as act (action and archive), signs itself before the end by affording us the opportunity to read: I refer to myself, this is writing, I am a writing, this is writin which excludes nothing since, when the placement in abyss succeeds, and is thereby decomposed and produces an event, it is the other, the thing as other, that signs. This does not just happen in books, not only, but also in revolutions, or between the Sapates of Francis Ponge. These three modalities are, in principle, structurally distinct. But I want to show how Francis-Ponge (I put a hyphen between his first name and his last name and this is what constitutes his style, his paraph, or, if such a thing exists, his own particular operatio is able to fold all three into a single one, or in any case combine them in the same scene for the same drama and the same orgasm.
The law producing and prohibiting the signature (in the first mo- dality) of the proper name, is that, by not letting the signature fall outside the text any more, as an undersigned subscription, and by inserting it into the body of the text, you monumentalize, institute, and erect it into a thing or a stony object. But in doing so, you also lose the identity, the title of ownership over the text: you let it become a moment or a part of the text, as a thing or a common noun. The erection-tomb falls." Step, and stop, of man [pas d'homme]. Hence the signature has to remain and disappear at the same time, remai n in order to disappear, or disappear in order to remain. It has to do so, it is lacking,' this is what matters. It has to, it fails to, remain by disappearing, it has to have to disappear, it has to have yet to disappear, a simultaneous and double demand, a double and contradic- tory postulation, a double obligation, a double hind which I translated In Glas as the double band of the signature, the double hand, the double band(s), hence the double(s) band. There has to be a signature Ili. EN L'erection-tombe: both "the erection-tomb" and "the erection falls." '9. TN II taut means both "it is lacking" and "it has to, one must"; it is also a h omophone of it faux "it (is) faulty." (EN Sec Derrida's note on the earlier form of this Phras e Ci (aft; "Before the Law," note 19, above.) 363 so that it can remain-to-disappear. It is lacking, which is why there ha s to be one, but it is necessary that it be lacking, which is why there does not have to be one. It has to write that as you wish, such is the countersigned signa- ture, useless and indispensable, supplementary. Let us begin with a point of departure that is somewhat aleatory, though not any more so, perhaps, than a proper name; and which is, moreover, sufficiently motivated by the figure of the "geneanalogical" tree (Interviews of Francis Ponge with Philippe Sollers); let us begin with one of the oldest archives, with the tree from Reasons for Living Happily (1928-29). After appealing to the idion, and to the "unique circumstances" which, "at the same moment," create "the motive for making me seize my pencil" along with a "new tool on our bench" (wood on wood) for describing things "from their own point of view," so as to give "the impression of a new idiom" he explains the conditions under which, "J, "later on, the complete work of an author" may "be considered a thing , in its turn": "not only a rhetoric per poem" or "a manner per year or per work." The figure of the tree then imposes itself, as if by chance: ". . . like the successive rinds of a tree, detaching themselves at each period through the natural effort of the tree." Now the tree, whose elementary idea, as we recall, is one of pine wood, from which we make dead . wood (coffins and tables also), turns up again in 1941, in a letter announcing the rule of the counter-rule: ". . . every writer 'worthy of the name' must write against all writing that precedes him (must in the sense of is forced to, is obliged to notably against all existing rules." (What we have to remember here is Ponge against the rules, right up against the origin of rules). The letter continues: "But I favor one technique per poet, and even, at the limit, one technique per poem which its object would determine. "Thus, for The Pine Forest, if I may be permitted to put it so--is it not the pine tree that furnishes (during its lifetime) the most dead wood? .. . "The ultimate preciosity No doubt. But what can I do? having FROM S1GNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE • once imagined this kind of difficulty, honor requires us to confront it . (and then again, it's fun)." Fun is not an accessory value here. And once again, as if by chance an d for the sake of amusement, the Oral Essay, when speaking of the -duty of trees" (to make branches and leaves), and of "this tree which i s m y friend," inscribes on a leaf (of a tree, of course), the common noun that is closest, nearest to the proper given name of the author, except for a gender and an witch.' It is presented as a "small apologue," but we read an apologia as well: "Let us suppose that 1 had a friend (I have friends: I have them in literature, philosophy, politics, journal- ism). But let us suppose that this friend of mine is a tree. What is the duty of trees, the point about trees? It is to make branches, then leaves; this, of course, is their duty. Now then, this tree, who is my friend, thought that he had written on his leaves, on each of his leaves (in the language of trees, everyone knows what I mean), that he had written franchise on a leaf . »21 This is the first example, the last one being "neither executioner nor victim." Now the sequel to the apologue tells how, in brief, the tree becomes an executioner and a victim at one and the same time, signing itself and bleeding to death from the very moment that the woodcutter, after making off with one of its branches, turns it into a hatchet [hache] with which he then tries to cut down the tree. The eyes of the tree "fasten on to the axe held by the woodsma something the tree almost failed to remark the first tim and it recognizes, in the brand- new handle of this axe the wood of the branch that was removed in the first place." "Almost failed to remark..." The end of the apologue suggests that we should not "push meta- phors too far. It is one of their hazards that we can take them in all senses." zo. TN The French word for the letter h is hache, and the same word means "hatchet"; this pun becomes crucial later on.
z 1. TN In translating franchise I have retained the faux ami " franchise" in preference to its Proper meaning of "frankness." "Francis" plus an "h" plus the final "e" signaling the feminine gender in French produces franchise. FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE But we can stay here right next to what is nearest. For "it becomes tragic at the moment when our tree, not content with complaining, with saying: Tu quoque, fill mi, reaches the point where it thinks: Am I the wood, then, that hatchets [hackies] are made of? That, that's terrible." What comes back to cut the tree, and then to put it to death, is thus a part of the tree, a branch, a son, a handle, a piece detached from the tree which writes, which writes itself on itself, on its leaf, its first leaf, franchise. The tree itself, the signer, cuts itself, and the torn- off piece with which it cuts itself to death is also a hatchet, an aitch, a letter subtracted from the franchise written on the tree, what has to be cut away from this common noun so that the noun can become, or very nearly so, a proper given name. But the supplementary hatchet, the aitch, by making dead wood, confers a monumental stature on the apologetic tree.
The phallic character of the 1, of pine wood, the incisor of the cutting and resolute franchise, the sharpened decision of the hatchet or aitch that the tree allows to be turned against itsel all this is understood according to the male value, the cutting virility recognized in frankness and francity. If all this were not regularly put, so as to invert itself, in abyss, according to a necessary law which has indeed to be explained, we would see once again affirmed, with the greatest force, the desire for the proper joined with the most fully assumed phallocentrism.
After having, for example, as he often does, decomposed and ana:
lyzed the proper name of Malherbe into an adjective and a common noun (male/herb the splitting up, or the process of naturalization, transforming the name at once into a blazon or legendary rebus, as happens elsewhere with the names of Spada (this time, once again, the phallic sword)' - ; of Picasso ("This is also the reason why, at the outset of this text, I had to plant this name, and first of all its initial capital [also his own, as if by chance] like, on the tip of a pike [pique] [this time, a piece picked out from the pronounceable name is also the graphic and visible form of the initial], an oriflamme: that of the intellectual offensive" [here the whole wor not pronounced, and, as zz. I thought I read this in "For Marcel Spada" (preface to "At the Carrot Festival")• I do nut find it there. I must have heard Ponge talking about it. a lways, under-written, discreetly left to be guessed at, without insis- tence or had tast this whole word, assault, is a piece of Picasso,' and he recalls further on that this is the representation of a "pennant"]); of Braque, always on the fran!- attack for renown ("Bracket [Braquet] the range, to disengage yourself" very well, he associates, on the page of male/herb, the frank, the male, the resolute: "Pride. Resolution.
Its way of menacing, teasing, when women resist." And toward the end of the book: "The hard kernel of Francity. Enlightened patriotism.
"Poetry of the certainty. Articulation of the Yes. . . . Something magisterial. An unmistakable tone of superiority. Something male as well." The yes (affirmed, approved, signed), is associated with the inscription of his proper name, with the autographic signature, as at the end, for example, of the Braque. Let us not hasten to link this francity to its poorly enlightened national referent, since we ought at least to guide it through this detour of the proper forename which, for Malherbe and for Ponge, was also almost shared in common. An almost common given name if we compare Francois to Francis, "Eldest son of the great Logos ... Francois, in whom your presence bathes me on this beautiful day. .." But an altogether common proper given name, since it is twice relatinized on the pedestal, or the epitaph:
"Primus Franciscus Malherba" and "Franciscus Pontius/Nemausensis Poeta," according to the first publication of The Fig (Dried). To be frank, French, free, and disengaged is also to know how to cut, to transgress, to infringe the law or to cross [franchir] the line: he plays with this at the end of the Prose on the Name of Vulliamy ("If at last the step from voyance to your vuillance is one that only a poet could freely take [faire franchir], and since Francis at least makes you dare at last to take it, vuillingly take it in your turn, my friend").
Over the single instance of the given name, we have already seen, on the one hand, the double band of the signature stretched between the need to become a thing, the common name of a thing, or the name of a generality losing the idion in order to inscribe the colossal, and, on the other hand, the contrary demand for a pure idiomaticity, a capital 1 3. EN The French word assaut ("assault") is pronounced in the same way as the ending of "Picasso." 367 ;66 FROM SIGNSPONGE FROM SIGNSPONGE letter unsoiled by the common, the condition of the signature in the proper sense. The rebus signature, the metonymic or anagrammatic signature, these are the condition of possibility and impossibility. The double bind of a signature event. As if the thing (or the common name of the thing), ought to absorb the proper, to drink it and to retain it in order to keep it. But, in the same stroke, by keeping, drinking, and absorbing it, it is as if the thing (or its name) lost or soiled the proper name. French Sources L'atelier contemporain. Paris: Gallimard, 1977 Entretiens de Francis Ponge avec Philippe Sollers. Paris: Galli- mard/Seuil, 1970. (Interviews of Francis Ponge with Philippe Sollers) La fabrique du pre. Geneva: Skira, x971. (The Making of the Pre) Methodes. Paris: Gallimard (Collection Idees), 1971. Nouveau recueil. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Pieces. Paris: Gallimard (Collection Poesie), 1962. Pour un Malherbe. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. (For a Malherbe) Le savon. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. (Soap) Tome premier. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. (Volume One) This vol- ume includes Proemes (117-152). "Berges de la Loire." Tp, 255-58. (Banks of the Loire) "Braque ou la meditation-a-l'oeuvre." Ac, 183-317. (Braque) "Le carnet du hois de pins." Tp, 325-82. (The Notebook of the Pine Forest) - "Le pre." NR, zo o9; Fp, 2.0]-02.. (The Pre) 368 "Les ecuries d'Augias." Tp, 175 - 76. (The Augean Stables) "La figue (sêche)." P, 179 - 82. (The Fig /Dried/) "Joca Seria." Ac, 153-9o. (Joca Seria) "La lessiveuse." P, 72-76. (The Washing Machine) "L'millet." Tp, 289-304. (The Carnation) "La pratique de la litterature." M, 269 - 93. (The Practice of Literature) "Prefaces aux sapates." Tp, 126-27. (Prefaces to the Sapates) "Prose sur lc nom de Vulliamy." Ac, 78 - 79. (Prose on the Name of Vulliamy) "Raisons de vivre heureux." Tp, 188-90. (Reasons for Living Happily) -Tentative orale." M, 223-68. (Oral Essay) Ac Fp M NR P PM S Tp 369 FROM SHIBBQLETH I0 FROM SHIBBOLETH FOR PAUL CELAN s. Paul Celan's poems enact with peculiar intensity the paradox which lies at the heart of Derrida's sense of literature: each one is imbued with a quality of uniqueness, of here-and-nowness, while at the same time owing that quality to the cultural and linguistic crossroads that constitute it, and from which it speaks to us, in our equally singular and situated place and time. In this lecture Derrida focuses this dual quality by means of a number of motifs drawn from the poems, includ- ing the password shibboleth, circumcision, ash ("that remainder with- out remainder"), and the date. It is what Derrida calls "the enigma of the date" which figures most extensively in the portion of the text— approximately its first hal reprinted here. Paul Celan, who grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in Romania and survived the German occupation and the murder of his parents by the S.S., shows in his poetry and his comments on art a concern not only with the dates of European history but with the date as a phenomenon not reducible to the systems of history (or philosophy). Derrida discusses The Meridian, Celan's t 960 address on the occasion of the award of the Georg Biichner Prize (an address which, for Derrida, is as much a poem as a treatise), and some poems which name particular dates. But the significance of the date extends well beyond specific mentions and uses of it; it is a ter like "the signature" and "the proper name" which Derrida employs, in a complex strategy of re- application, for that characteristic of literature which renders it un- graspable by philosophy, making philosophy both possible and, In 37 0 terms of its own goals, impossible. For what philosophy attempts, in its most fundamental mission, is a writing without a date, a writing t h a t transcends the here-and-now of its coming-into-existence, and t h e heres-and-nows of the acts which confirm, extend, and renew that existence. ("Date" can he used, in English as in French, to refer to place as well as time.) But all writing is a dating (as it is a s igning), every text has a provenance, and the date, like the signature, exhibits the counter-logic of iterahility: serving to fix for the future a specific and unique time and place, it can do so only on the basis o f its readability, which is to say that it has to remain open to repetition and reinscription; its repeatability is a condition of its singularity, its effacement a condition of its legibility. Like literature in the question "What is literature?" the date pre-dates the "what is?" of philosophy. Later in the lecture, Derrida points out that "a formal poetics" is in the same situation as philosophy: in spite of their project of transcendence, "both presuppose the date, the mark incised in language, of a proper name or an idiomatic event" (Schibboleth, 89). It is in poetry such as Celan's that the functioning of the date is especially evident. In a passage not reprinted here Derrida writes:
Radicalizing and generalizing, we may say, without artifice, that poetic writing offers itself up, in its entirety, to dating. The Bremen address recalls this: a poem is en route from a place toward "something open" ("an approachable you"), and it makes its way "across" time, it is never "timeless." It is all cipher of singularity, offering its place and recalling it, offering and recalling its time at the risk of losing them in the holocaustic generality of recurrence and the readability of the concept, in the anniver- sary repetition of the unrepeatable. (Schibboleth, 87) The date implies, for Celan and for Derrida, the possibility of en- counter (including the encounter with the absolutely other), and of the anniversary, the gathering together of events across historical bound- aries; it is figured in circumcision, an act of incision in the body that happens only once, yet a "once" that is never pure; it is a kind of shibbo/eth a border-crossing test at which it is not enough to know (as philosoph y does) since one has to succeed in doing (and a doing that is bodily, not simply mental). Derrida generalizes the shibboleth t 4 "every insignificant, arbitrary mark" as it "becomes dis cnrninative, decisive, and divisive." It thus signifies the condition of language, the divisions between and within languages (translation 37 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIAOLETH. is another topic raised here); it also signifies an always possible abuse of language in a discriminatory politics. The poem as date, as shibboleth, both secret and open, commemorates that which i s destined to be forgotten; and the remainder of this lecture, violently excised here due to the exigencies of space, commemorates as it explores Celan's Jewishness, his rings, hours, words, circumcisions, ashes. Shibboleth was first given as a lecture at an international conference on the work of Celan at the University of Washington, Seattle, on October 14,1984. (Derrida dates the text carefully.) An English trans- lation by Joshua Wilner of the text as given at the Seattle conference was published in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Derrida subsequently published a revised and expanded version of the text as Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilee, 1986), stating in a prefatory note: "Despite certain revisions and some new developments, the plan of exposition, the rhythm, and the tone of the lecture have been preserved as far as possible." The extract that follows (comprising pp. 11-62. of the French volume) is taken from Wilner's hitherto unpublished translation of the revised text. (The full translation will IV he published in Word Traces, ed. Aris Fioretis [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press].) A long footnote on the work of Jean Greisch, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur has been omitted. Quota- tions from Celan are taken from Gesammelte W erke in fiinf Banden, ed. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert with the assistance of Rudolf &licher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983) (GW); and translations from Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1988) (P); Paul Celan: Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Wal- drop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986) (CP); 65 Poems: Paul Celan, trans. Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky (Dublin: Raven Arts, 1985) (65); and Speech-Grille, and Selected Poems, trans. Joachim. Neugroschel (New York: Dutton, 1971) (SG). Translations have occasionally bee r modified in the interest of a more exact articulation between Derrida' text and the passage he cites. Otherwise unidentified translations a r by Joshua Wilner. O ne time alone: circumcision takes place but once.
Such, at least, is the appearance we receive, and the tradition of the a ppearance, we do not say of the semblance.
We will have to circle around this appearance. Not so much in order to circumscribe or circumvent some truth of circumcisio that must b e given up for essential reasons. But rather to let ourselves be ap- proached by the resistance which "once" may offer thought. And it is a question of offering, and of that which such resistance gives one to think. As for resistance, this will be our theme as well, calling up the last war, all wars, clandestine activity, demarcation lines, discrimination, passports and passwords.
Before we ask ourselves what, if anything, is meant by "once," and the word time in "one time alone"; before interpreting, as philosophers or philosophers of language, as hermeneuts or poeticians, the meaning or truth of what one speaks of in English as "once," we should keep, no doubt, a long and thoughtful while to those linguistic borders where, as you know, only those who know how to pronounce shibboleth are granted passage and, indeed, life. "Once," "one time" nothing, one would think, could be easier to translate: une lois, einmal, una Volta. We will find ourselves returning more than once to the vicissitudes of latinity, to the Spanish vez, to the whole syntax of vicem, vice, vices, vicihus, vicissim, in vicem, vice versa, and even vicarius, to its turns, returns, replacements and supplantings, voltes and revolutions. For the moment, a single remark: the semantic registers of all these idioms do not immedi- ately translate each other; they appear heterogeneous. One speaks of 'time" in the English "one time," but not in "once," or einmal, or any of the French, Italian, or Spanish locutions. The Latin idioms resort rathe r to the figure of the turn or the volte, the turnabout. And yet, despite t his border, the crossing of ordinary translation takes place every day without the least uncertainty, each time that the semantics of the every- d aY imposes its conventions. Each time that it effaces the idiom.
If a circumcision takes place one time only this time is thus, at once, the carne time, the first and last time. This is the appearance- 371 373 • FROM SHIBBOLETH archaeology and eschatolog that we will have to circle around, as around the ring which it traces, carves out, or sets off. This ring or annulation is at once the seal of an alliance,' or wedding hand, the circling back on itself of an anniversary date, and the year's recurrence. am going to speak then about circumcision and the one-and-only time, in other words, of what comes to mark itself as the one-and-only time: what one sometimes calls a date. My main concern will not he to speak about the date so much as to listen to Celan speak about it. Better still, to watch as he gives himself over to the inscription of invisible, perhaps unreadable, dates: anniver- saries, rings, constellations, and repetitions of singular, unique, unre- peatable events: unwiederholbar, this is his word. How can one date what does not repeat if dating also calls for some form of recurrence, if it recalls in the readability of a repetition? But how date anything else than that which does not repeat? Having just named the unrepeatable (unwiederholbar) and marked the borders of translation, I am led to cite here the poem which Celan entitled, in French, "A la pointe aceree," 2 not because it has any direct connection with the surgery of circumcision, but because it seeks its way in the night along paths of questions "Nach / dem Unwieder- holbar," after the unrepeatable. I will limit myself at first to these small pebbles of white chalk on a board, a sort of non-writing in which the concretion of language hardens: Ungeschriebenes, zu Sprache verhiirtet (GW, I, z51) (Unwritten things, hardened into language ...) (P, 195) 1. TN Alliance denotes a broader range of meanings in French than in English , including marriage, wedding ring, and the Biblical covenant.
a. The title of the poem alludes to Baudelaire's "Confiteor de ('artiste": "et if nest pas de pointe plus aciree que cello de l'infini" ("and there is no point more piercing than that of the Infinite") (Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois [Paris: GaBilliard, 19751, 1, 2.78), as confirmed by Werner Hamacher's very beautiful text, "The Second of Inversion:
Movements of a Figure through Celan's Poetry" (Yale French Studies 6911985]7: "Celan reported in conversation that he borrowed this text's title from a note by Baudelaire , cited in Hofmannsthal's journal under the date June 2.9, 1917" (308). 374 FROM SHIBBOLETH Without writing, un - writing, the unwritten switches over to a ques- tion of reading on a board or tablet which you perhaps are. You are a board or a door: we will see much later how a word can address itself, indeed confide itself to a door, count on a door open to the other. Tar du davor einst, Tafel (Door you in front of it once, tablet) (And with this einst it is again a question of one time, one time alone) mit dem getiiteten Kreidestern drauf:
ihn hat nun ei lesendes Aug. (GW, 1, 251) (with the killed chalk star on it: that reading eye has now.) (P, 195 [translation modified]) We could have followed in this poem the ever discrete, discontinu- ous, cesuraed, elliptical circuitry of the hour (Waldstunde), or of the trace, and of the track of a wheel that turns on itself (Radspur). But here what I am after is the question which seeks its way after (nach) the unrepeatable, through beechmast (Buchecker). Which may also be read as hook corners or the sharp, gaping edges of a text: Wege dorthin Waldstunde an der blubbernde Radspur entlang.
Auf- gelesene kleine, klaffende Buchecker: schwarzliches Offen, von Fingergedanken befragt nach- 373 FROM SHIBBOLETH wonach?
Nach dem Unwiederholbaren, nach ihm, nach Blubbernde Wege dorthin.
Etwas, das gehn kann, grusslos wie Herzgewordenes, kommt. (GW, I, 2.51-52) (Ways to that place.
Forest hour alongside the spluttering wheeltrack.
Col- lected small, gaping beechnuts: blackish openness, asked of by fingerthoughts afte after what?
After the unrepeatable, after it, after everything.
Spluttering tracks to that place.
Something that can go, ungreeting as all that's become heart, is coming.) (P, 195 (translation modified]) Ways (Wege): something comes, which can go (Etwas, das gehn kann, . . . kommt). What is going, coming, going to come, going and coming? and becoming heart? What coming, what singular event is in question? What impossible repetition (Nach I dem Unwiederholbaren , nach / ihm)? How to "become heart"? Let us not, for the moment, invoke Pascal or Heidegge who in any case suspects the former of having yielded 376 FROM SfiatsoLErH too much to science and forgotten the original thinking of the heart.
Hearing me speak of the date and of circumcision, some might rush o n to the "circumcised heart" of the Scriptures. That would be moving too fast and along a path 0 .
fIlittle resistance. Celan's trenchant e llipsis requires more patience, it demands more discretion. Cesura is the law. It_gathers, however, in the discretion of the discontinuous, in the cutting in of the relation to the other or in the interruption of address, as address itself. It makes no sense, as you may well suppose, to dissociate in Celan's writings those on the subject of the date, which name the theme of the date, from the poetic traces of dating. To rely on the division between a theoretical, philosophical, hermeneutic, or even technopoetic discourse concerning the phenomenon of the date, on the one hand, and its poetic implementation,' on the other, is to no longer read him.
The example of The Meridian warns us against such a misconstruc- tion. It is, as they say, a "discourse": one pronounced on a given occasion and at a given dat that is, an address. Its date is that of the conferral of a prize (Rede anliisslich der Verleihung des Georg-Biich- ner-Preises, am 22. Oktober 1960 [GW, III, 187]). On October 21, 196o, this address deals, in its way, with art or more precisely with the memory of art, perhaps with art as a thing of the past, Hegel would have said, "art as we already know it," but as "also a problem, and, as we can see, one that is variable, tough, longlived, let us say, eternal" (GW, lll, 188 I CP, 38). The thing of the past: "Meine Damen und Herren! Die Kunst, das ist, Sie erinnern sich . . .," "Art, you will remember . . . " (GW, III, 187/CP, 37). The ironic attack of this first I s a e r ifi sentence seems to speak of a history gone by, but it does so in order to call on the memory of those who have read Buchner. Celan an- nounces that he is going to evoke several appearances of art, in particu- Woyzeck and Leonce und Lena: you remember. A thing from our past that comes back in memory, but also a problem for the future, b ari ut a w etern a a y l in vi problem, and above all a way toward poetry. Not poetry, view of poetry, one way only, one among others and not 3. 7 N Mise en oeuvre: that is, "setting-to-work," but also, in the idiom of this text, se tting - Iin)to-{the)-work." In subsequent occurrences, I have simply retained the French Phra se , 377 -I h e only one: singularity, solitude, secrecy of encounter. What as- s igns the only one to its date? For example: there was a zoth of January.
A date of this kind will have allowed of being written, alone, unique, ex empt from repetition. Yet this absolute property can he transcribed, ex ported, deported, expropriated, reappropriated, repeated in its titter s ingularity. Indeed, this has to he if the date is to expose itself, to risk l os ing itself in readability. This absolute property can enunciate, as its s i g n of individuation, something like the essence of the poem, the only one. Celan prefers to say, of "every poem," better still, of "each poem." "Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein `zo. Janner' ein- geschrieben bleiht?": "Perhaps we can say that each poem remains marked by its own 'zoth of January?' " (GW, Ill, 194 / CP, 47 [transla- tion modified]). Here is a generality: to the keeping of each poem, thus of every poem, the inscription of a date, of this date, for example a "zoth of January," is entrusted. But despite the generality of this law, the example remains irreplaceable. And what must remain, committed to the keeping, in other words to the truth of each poem, is the irreplaceable itself: the example offers its example only on condition that it holds for no other. But it offers its example in that very fact, and the only example possible, the one that it alone offers: the only one.
Today, on this day, at this date. And this marking of today tells us perhaps something of the essence of the poem today, for us now. Not the essence of poetic modernity or postmodernity, not the essence of an epoch or a period in some history of poetry, but what happens "today" "anew" to poetry, to poems, what happens to them at this date.
What happens to them at this date, is precisely the date, a certain experience of the date. One no doubt very ancient, dateless, but abs o lutely new at this date. And new because, for the first time, it here show s itself or is sought after "most plainly" ("am deutlichsten"). Clarity, distinction, sharpness, readability, this is what today would h e new. What thus becomes readable is not, it must be understood, the date itself, but only the poetic experience of the date, that which a date, this one, ordains in our relation to it, a certain poetic seeking. "Perhaps t he newness of poems written today is that they try most plainly to he 379 V FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH the shortest. "This would mean art is the distance poetry must cover, no less and no more. / I know that there are other, shorter, routes. But poetry, too, can be ahead. La poesie, dle aussi, bride nos etapes" (GW, III, 194 I CP, 44-45) • At this crossing of ways between art and poetry, in this place t o which poetry makes its way at times without even the patience of a path, lies the enigma of the date. It seems to resist every philosophical question and mode of ques- tioning, every objectification, every theoretico-hermeneutic themati- zation. L '• Celan shows this poetically: by a mise-en-oeuvre of the date. In this address itself. He begins by citing several dates: 1909, the date of a work devoted to Jakob Michael Lenz by a university lecturer in Mos- cow, M. N. Rosanov; then the night of May 2.3-2.4, 1792, a date itself cited, already mentioned in this work, the date of Lenz's death in Moscow. Then Celan mentions the date which appears this time on the first page of Biichner's Lenz, "the Lenz who 'on the zoth of January was walking through the mountains' " (GW, Ill, 194 / CP, 46). Who was walking through the mountains, on this date? He, Lenz, Celan insists, he and not the artist preoccupied by ques- tions of art. He, as an "I," "er ads ein !ch." This "I" who is not the artist obsessed by questions of art, those posed him by ar Celan does not rule out that it may be the poet; but in any case it is not the artist.
The singular turn of this syntagm, "he as an I," will support the whole logic of individuation, of that "sign of individuation" which each poem constitutes. The poem is "one person's language become shape" (gestaltgewordene Sprache eines Einzelnen) (GW, 111, 198 / CP, 49). Singularity but also solitude: the only one, the poem is alone ("einsam"). And from within the most intimate essence of its solitude, it is en route ("unterwegs"), "aspiring to a presence," following the French translation of Andre du Bouchee (und seinem innersten Weser: nach Gegenwart und Priisenz)(GW, III, 194 / CP, 46). Insofar as alone, the only one, the poem would keep itself then, perhaps, within the "secrecy of encounter." 4. Le meridiem in Strette (Paris: Mercure de France, 1971 ), 191. 378 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH mindful of this kind of date?" ( Vielleicht is das Neue an den Gedichten, die heute geschrieben werden, gerade dies: dass hier am deutlic - bste n versucht wird, solcher Daten eingedenk zu bleiben?) (GW, III, 196 / CP, 47).
This question concerning the date, this hypothesis ("Perhaps ... n) is dated by Celan; it relates today to every poem today, to what is new in each poetic work of our time, each of which, at this date, would share the singularity of dating (transitively), of remaining mindful of dates (Date?' eingedenk zu bleiben). The poetic today would perhaps be dated by an inscription of the date or at least a certain coming t o light, newly, of a poetic necessity which, for its part, does not date from today. Granted.
Bu the sentences which we have just heard are followed by three "Buts": three times "But." The first, the least energetic and the least oppositional, raises again the same questions concerning the traces of the other as I: how can some other irreplaceable and singular date, the date of the other, the date for the other, he deciphered, transcribed, or appropriated? How can I appropriate it for myself? Or rather, how can I transcribe myself into it? And how can the memory of such a date still dispose of a future? What dates to come do we prepare in such a transcription?
Here, then, is the first "But." The ellipsis of the sentence is more economical than I can convey and its gripping sobriety can only regii- ter, which is to say date itself, from within its idiom, a certain way of inhabiting and dealing with its idiom (signed: Celan from a certain place in the German language, which was his property alone). "But do ' we not all transcribe ourselves out of such dates? And to what dates to come do we ascribe ourselves?" (Aber schreiben wir uns nicht alle von solchen Daten her? Und welchen Daten schreiben wir uns zu?) • (GW, 111, 196 / CP, 47 [variant translation]) Here the second "But" is sounded, but only after a blank space, the mark of a very long silence, the time of a meditation through which the preceding question makes its way. It leaves the trace of an affirma - tion, over against which arises, at least to complicate it, a second affirmation. And its force of opposition reaches the point of exclama - tion: "Aber das Gedicht spricht ja! Fs bleibt seiner Daten e 3 8 0 abe es spricht. Gewiss, es spricht immer nur in seiner eigenen, aller- e i g ensten Sache." ("But the poem speaks! It is mindful of its dates, but it speaks. True, it speaks only on its own, its very own behalf") (GW, Ill, 196/CP, 48 [translation modified]).
What does this "but" mean? No doubt that despite the date, in spite of its memory rooted in the singularity of an event, the poem speaks; to all and in general, to the other first of all. The "hut" seems to carry t h e poem's utterance beyond its date: if the poem recalls a date, calls itself hack to its date, to the date when it writes or of which it writes, as of (depuis] which it is written, nevertheless it speaks! to all, to the other, to whoever does not share the experience or the knowledge of the singularity thus dated: as of [depuis] or from a given place, a given day, a given month, a given year. In the preceding phrase, the ambiguous force of von collects in itself in advance all of our paradoxes (Aber schreiben wir uns nicht alle von solchen Dater: her?): we write of the date, about certain dates, but also as of [depuis] certain dates, at [a] certain dates. But the English "at," like the French a, may be turned by the ambiguous force of its own idiom, toward a future of unknown destination, something which was not literally said by any given sentence of Celan's, but which doubtless corresponds to the general logic of this discourse, as made explicit in the sentence which follows, "Und welchen Daten schreiben wir uns zu?" To what dates do we ascribe ourselves, what dates do we appropriate, now, but also, in more ambiguous fashion, turned toward what dates to come do we write ourselves, do we transcribe ourselves? As if writing at a certain date meant not only writing on a given day, a --- ta given hour, but also writing to [a] the date, addressing oneself to it, committing oneself to the date as to the other, the date past as well as the promised date.
What is this "to" of "to come" 5 as date? Yet the poem speaks. Despite the date, even if it also speaks thanks to it, of it, as of it, to it, and speaks always of itself, "on its own, its very own behalf" (CP, 48), "in seiner eigenen, allereigensten Sache," in its own name, without ever compromising with the absolute singu- larit y , the inalienable property of that which convokes its. And yet, the I N venir ("the 'to come' "); cf. l'avenir ("the future"). 381 ingedenk• FROM SHIBBOLETH inalienable must speak of the other, and to the other, it must sp eak . The date provokes the poem, but the latter speaks! And it speaks of what provokes it, to the date which provokes it, thus convoked fr om the future of the same date, in other words from its recurrence at another date. How are we to understand the exclamation? Why this exclamatio n point after the "but" of what in no way would seem to be a rhetorical objection? One might find it surprising. I think that it confers the accent, it accentuates and marks the tone, of admiration, of astonish- ment in the face of poetic exclamation itself. The poet exclaim fac e d with the miracle which makes clamor, poetic acclamation, possible:
the poem speaks! and it speaks to the date of which it speaks! Instead of walling it up and reducing it to the silence of singularity, a date gives it its chance, its chance to speak to the other! If the poem is due its date, due to its date, owes itself to its date as its own inmost concern (Sache) or signature, if it owes itself to its secret, it speaks of this date only insofar as it acquits itself, so to speak, of a given dat of that date which was also a gif releasing itself from the date without denying it, and above all without disavowing it.
It absolves itself of it so that its utterance may resonate and proclaim beyond a singularity which might otherwise remain undecipherable, mute, and immured in its dat in the unrepeatable. One must, while preserving its memory, speak of the date which already speaks of itself: the date, by its mere occurrence, by the inscription of a sign as memorandum, will have broken the silence of pure singulari But to speak of it, one must also efface it, make it readable, audible,_intelligi le beyond the pyre si ngularity of which it speaks. Now the - beyond of absolute singularity, the chance of the poem's exclamation, is not the simple effacement of the date in a generality, but its effacement faced with another date, the one to which it speaks, the date of an other strangely wed or joined in the secrecy of an encounter, a chance secret, with the same date. I will offe by way of clarificatio some exam - ples in a moment.
What takes place in this experience of the date, experience itself? and of a date which must be effaced in order to be preserved, in order to preserve the commemoration of the event, that advent of the unique 381 FROM SHIBBOLETH in thrall to the poem which must exceed it and whi c h alone, by itself, ma y transport it, offer it up to understanding beyond the unreadability of its cipher? What takes place is perhaps what Celan calls a little further on "Geheimnis der Begegnung," "the secrecy of encounter" (GW, III, 194 / CP, 49 [translation modifiedn- Encounte in the word encounter two values meet without which there e c e , wo e would he no date: 6 "encounter" as it suggests the random occur- n chance meeting, the coincidence or conjuncture which comes tr to s eal one or more than one event once, at a given hour, on a given day, in a given month, in a given region; and "encounter" as it suggests an encounter with the other, the ineluctable singularity out of which and destined for which the poem speaks. In its otherness and its solitude (which is also that of the poem, "alone," "solitary"), it may inhabit the conjunction of one and the same date. This is what happens.
What happens, if something happens, is this; and this encounter, in an idiom, of all the meanings of encounter.
Bu a third time, a third "but" opens a new paragraph. It begins with a "But I think," it closes with a "today and here," and it is the signature of an "Aber ich denke" • . "heute and hier": But I thin and this will hardly surprise yo that the poem has always hoped, for this very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange—no, 1 can no longer use this word her on behalf of the othe who knows, perhaps of an altogether other. This "who knows" which I have reached is all 1 can add here, today, to the old hopes. (GW, Ill, 596 / CP, 48) The "altogether other" thus opens the thought of the poem to some thing or some concern (Sache: "in eines Anderen Sache . . . in eines ganz Anderen Sache") the otherness of which must not contradict but rather enter into alliance with, in expropriating, the "inmost concern" lust in question, that due to which the poem speaks at its date, as of .
6.
TN The distinction which Derrida develops in the following paragraph is clearer 4 1 French, since the French word for "encounter," rencontre, is also employed in the phra s e de rencontre, meaning "chance," "passing," "casual," etc. Thus, for example, tsecref d'une rencontre" is "the secrecy of an encounter"; "un secret de rencontre" 4 "a chance secret" (see the two previous paragraphs). 381 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH its date, and always in seiner eigenen, allereigensten Sache. Several singular events may conjoin, enter into alliance, concentrate in the same date, which thus becomes both the same and other, altogethe r other as the same, capable of speaking to the other of the other, to the one who cannot decipher one or another absolutely closed date, a tomb closed over the event which it marks. This gathered multiplicity Celan calls by a strong and charged name: concentration. A little further on he speaks of the poem's "attentiveness" (Aufmerksamkeit) to all that it encounters. This attentiveness would he rather a kind of concentration which remains mindful of "all our dates" (eine aller unserer Daten eingedenk bleihende Konzentration) (GW, III, 198 / CP, 5o). The word can become a terrible word for memory. But one can understand it at once in that register in which one speaks of the gathering of the soul, or of the heart, and of "spiritual concentration," as, for example, in the experience of prayer (and Celan cites Benjamin citing Malebranche in his essay on Kafka: "Attention is the natural prayer of the soul" [GW, III, 198 / CP, so]), and in that other sense in which concentration gathers around the same anamnesic center a multiplicity of dates, "all our dates" coming to conjoin or constellate in a single occurrence or a single place: in truth in a single poem, in the only one, in that poem which is each time, we have seen, alone, the only one, solitary and singular.
This perhaps is what goes on in the exemplary act of The Meridian. This discourse, this address, this speech act (Bede) is no not onl a treatise or a metadiscourse on the subject of the date, but rather the habitation, by a poem, of its own date, its poetic raise-en-oeuvre as well, making of a date which is the poet's own a date for the other, the date of the other, or, inversely, for the gift comes around like an anniversary, a step by which the poet ascribes or commits himself to the date of the other. In the unique ring of its constellation, one and the "same" date commemorates heterogeneous events, each suddenly neighboring the other, even as one knows that they remain, and must continue to remain, infinitely foreign. It is just this which is called the encounter, the encounter of the other, "the secrecy of encounter" and precisely here the Meridian is discovered. There was a zoth of January, that of Lenz who "on the zoth of January was walking 3 8 4 t hrough the mountains." And then at the same date, on another zoth of January, Celan encounters, he encounters the other and he encounters himself at the intersection of this date with itself, with itself as other, as the date of the other. And yet this takes place but once, and always anew, each time once alone, the each-time-once-alone constituting a ge neric law. One would have to resituate here the question of the t r anscendental schematism, of the imagination and of time, as a ques- t i o n of the dat of the once. And one would have to reread what Celan had said earlier about images:
Then what are images?
What has been, what can he perceived, again and again, and only here, only now. Hence the poem is the place where all tropes and metaphors want to he led ad absurdum. (GW, III, 199 I CP, 51) This radical ad absurdum, the impossibility of that which, each time once alone, has meaning only on condition of having no meaning, no ideal or general meaning, or which has meaning only so it can invoke, in order to betray it, the concept, law, or genre, is the pure poem. Now the pure poem does not exist, or rather, it is "what there isn't!" (das es nicht gibt!). To the question: of what do I speak when I speak not of poems but of the poem, Celan answers: "I speak of the poem which does not exist! / The absolute poe no, it certainly does not, cannot exist!" (GW, III, 199 I CP, 51 [translation modified]). But if the absolute poem does not take place, if there is none (es gibt nicht), there is the image, the each time once alone, the poetic of the date and the secrecy of encounter: the other-I, a loth of January which was also mine after having been that of Lenz. Here: Several years ago, I wrote a little quatrain: "Voices from the path through nettles: valley Come to us on your hands. Alone with your lamp Only your hand to read." And a year ago, I commemorated a missed encounter in the Engadine by putting a little story on paper where I had a man "like Lenz" walk through the mountains. 385 FROM SHIBBOLETH Both the one time and the other, 1 had transcribed myself from a "zoth of January," from my "zoth of January." I... encountered myself. (GW, Ill, 201 / CP, 52-53 'translation mod- ified]) I encountered myself—myself like the other, one zoth of January like the other, and like Lenz, like Lenz himself, "wie Lenz": the quota- tion marks around the expression set off, in the text, what is strange in the figure.
This "like" is also the signal of another appearance summoned within the same comparison. This man whom I described, wrote, signed, was just like Lenz, almost like Lenz himself, as Lenz. The wie almost has the force of an als. But at the same time, it is myself since in this figure of the other, as the other, it is myself whom I encountered at this date. The "like" is the co-signature of the date, the very figure or image, each time, of the other, "the one time and the other," one time like the other time (das eine wie das andere Mal). Such would be the anniversary turn of the date. In The Meridian, it is also the find, the encountering of the place of encounter, the discovery of the merid- ian itself:
I am also, since I am again at my point of departure, searching for my own place of origin.
I am looking for all of this with my imprecise, because nervous, finger on a map—a child's map, I must admit.
None of these places can he found. They do not exist. But I know where they ought to exist, especially now and... 1 find something else!
... I find something which consoles me a hit for having walked this impossible road in your presence, this road of the impossible.
I rind the connective which, like the poem, leads to encounters.
I rind something—like language—immaterial, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find... a meridian. (GW, III, zoz / CP, 54-55 [translation modified]) Almost the last word of the text, near the signature. What Celan finds or discovers all at once, invents if one may say so, more and less - than a fiction, is not only a meridian, the Meridian, but the word and A date would he the gnomon of these meridians.
Does one ever speak of a date? But does one ever speak without speaking of a date? Of it and as of it?
Whether one will or no, whether one knows it, acknowledges it or dissembles it, an utterance is always dated. What I am going to hazard concerning the ate in ge ThieFalning that which a generality may lay or gains?) , where the date is concerned, concerning the gnomon of Paul Celan,' will all be dated in its turn. Under certain conditions at least, what dating comes to is signing.
To inscribe a date, to enter it, is not simply to sign as of a given year, month, day, or hour (all words which haunt the whole of Celan's text), but also to sign from a given place. Certain poems are "dated" Zurich, Tiibingen, Todtnauberg, Paris, Jerusalem, Lyon, Tel Aviv, Vienna, Assisi, Cologne, Geneva, Brest, etc. At the beginning or at the end of a letter, the date consigns a "now" of the calendar or of the clock (" `alle Uhren and Kalender' ": second page of The Meridian [GW, 111, 1884 / CP, 38]), as well as the here, in their proper names, of the country, region, or house. It marks in this way, at the point of the gnomon, the provenance of what is given, or, in any case, sent; of what is, whether or not it arrives, destined. Addressing its date, what an address or discourse declares about the concept or meaning of the 7. TN The phrase an gnomon de Paul Celan resonates with au non: de Paul Celan - 111 the name of Paul Celan." FROM SHIBBOLETH t he image, the trope "meridian" which offers the example of the law, in its inexhaustible polytropy, and which binds (das Verbindende, both that which hinds and that which connects or acts as intermediary), which provokes in broad daylight, at noon, at midday, the encounter of the other in a single place, at a single point, that of the poem, of this poe m: ". .. in the here and now of the poem—and the poem has only this one, unique, momentary present—even in this immediacy and nearness, that which is addressed gives voice to what is most its own:
its time, the time of the other," (GW, 111, r98-99 / CP, 5o [translation modified]). II 86 387 FROM SHIBBOLETH date is not, by this fact, dated, in the sense in which one says of something that it dates in order to imply that it has aged or aged badly ; in speaking of a discourse as dated, our intention is not to disqualify or invalidate it, but rather to signify that it is, at the least, marked by its date, signed by it or re-marked in a singular manner. What is thus remarked is its point of departure, that to which it no doubt belong s but from which it departs in order to address itself to the other: a certain imparting.' e It is concerning this singular remarking that I am going to hazard in my turn some remark in memory of some missives dated from Paul Celan.
What is a date? Do we have the right to pose such a question, and in this form? The form of the question "what is" has a provenance. It has its place of origin and its language. It dates. That it is dated does not discredit it, but if we had the time, we could draw certain philosophical inferences from this fact, inferences indeed about the philosophical regime which this question governs.
Has anyone ever been concerned with the question "what is a date?" The "you" who is told "Nirgends I fragt es nach di ," nowhere is there any asking about you, nowhere any concern with you, is a date, of that we may be certain a priori. This you, which must be an I, like the er als eM Ich of a moment ago, always figures an irreplaceable singularity. Only another singularity, just as irreplaceable, can take its place without substituting for it. One addresses this you as one ad- dresses a date, the here and now of a commemorable provenance. As it reaches me, at least, the question "What is a date?" presupposes two things. First of all, the question "What is . . . ?" has a history or provenance; it is signed, engaged, or commanded by a place, a time, a language or a network of languages, in other words by a date in relation to whose essence this question's power is hence limited, its claim finite, and its very pertinence contestable. This fact is not unrelated to what our symposium calls "the philosophical implications" of Celan's work.
8. TN Partage in French signifies at once division, participation through sharing - ill what is divided, and the share apportioned. It will he translated in most cases by either "imparting" or "partaking." FROM SHIBB()I.ETH perhaps philosophy, as such, and insofar as it makes use of the question "What is . . . ?," has nothing essential to say about what hears Celan's d a te or about what Celan says or makes of the dat and which might i n its turn say something to us, perhaps, about philosophy.
On the other hand, and this is a second presupposition, in the inscription of a date, in the explicit and coded phenomenon of dating, what is dated must not he dated. The date: yes and no, Celan would s ay, as he does more than once. Sprich- Doch scheide das Nein nicht vom Ja.
Gib deinem Spruch auch den Sinn:
gib ihm den Schatten.
Gib ihm Schatten genug, gib ihm so viel, als du urn dich verteilt weisst zwischen Mittnacht und Mittag und Mittnacht. (GW, I, 135) (Spea Rut keep yes and no unsplit.
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.
Give it shade enough, give it as much as you know has been dealt out between midnight and midday and midnight.) (P, 991 Again the meridian. It is necessary that the mark which one calls a date he marked off, in a singular manner, detached from the very thing which it dates; and that in this de-marcation, this deportation, it becom e readable, that it become readable, precisely, as a date in wresting or exempting itself from itself, from its immediate adherence, from the here and now; in freeing itself from what it nonetheless remains, a date. It is necessary that the unrepeatable (das Unwieder- holbare) be repeated in it, effacing in itself the irreducible singularity which it denotes. It is necessary that in a certain manner it divide itself In repeating, and by the same stroke encipher or encrypt itself. Like hJi 388 389 FROM SHIBBOLETH phusis, a date likes to encrypt itself. It must efface itself in order to become readable, to render itself unreadable in its very readability. F or if it does not annul in itself the unique marking which connects it to an event without witness, without other witness, it remains intact but absolutely indecipherable. It is no longer even what it has to be, what it will have had to be, its essence and its destination, it no longer keeps its promise, that of a date. How, then, can that which is dated, while at the same time marking a date, not date? The question, whether one finds this hopeful or troubling, cannot be formulated in this way in all languages. It remains scarcely translatable. I insist on this because what a date, always bound up with some proper name, gives us to think, commemorate, or bless, as well as to cross in a possible-impossible translation, is, each time, an idiom. And if the idiomatic form of my question may appear un- translatable, this is because it plays on the double functioning of the verb "to date." In French or in English. Transitively: I date a poem.
Intransitively: a poem dates if it ages, if it has a history, and is of a certain age.
To ask "What is a date?" is not to wonder about the meaning of the word "date." Nor is it to inquire into an established or putative etymology, though this may not he without interest for us. It might, in fact, lead us to think about gifts and literality, and, in particular, the giving of the letter: data littera, the first words of a formula for indicat- ing the date. This would set us on the trace of the first word, of the initial or the opening of a letter, of the first letter of a lette but also of something given' or sent. The sense of the date as something given or sent will carry us beyond the question given in the form "what is?" A date is not something which is there, since it withdraws in order to appear, but if there is no absolute poem (Das absolute Gedich nein, das gibt es gewiss nicht, das kann es nicht geben!), says Celan, perhaps there are (es gibt) date even if they do not exist. I will associate for the moment, in a preliminary and disorderly way, 9. EN "Date" derives from the Latin data, "given," used in the formula indicating the time and place of a letter. FROM SW/MOUTH force of a signed commitment, of an obligation, a promise or an oath (sacrarnentum), In its essence, a signature is always dated and has value only by virtue of this. It dates and it has a date. And prior to being mentioned, the inscription of a date (here, now, this day, etc.) always entails a kind of signature: whoever inscribes the year, the day, the place, in short the present of a "here and now," attests thereby to his .or her own presence at the act of inscription. Celan dated all his poems. I am not thinking here, in the first placer of a kind of dating which one migh mistakenly, but convenientl call "external," that is, the mention of the date on which a poem was written. In its conventional form this mention lies in some ways outside the poem. One is certainly not entitled to push to its limit the distinction between this external notation of the date and a more essential incorpo- ration of the date within a poem wherein it forms a part, a poem itself.
In a certain way, as we will see, Celan's poetry tends to displace, indeed to efface, such a limit. But supposing we maintain for clarity of exposition the provisional hypothesis, we will concern ourselves first of all with a dating which is registered in the body of the poem, in one of its parts and under a form which accords with the traditional code (for example, "the r 3th of February"), and then with a nonconven- tional, noncalendrical form of dating, one which would merge entirely, without residue, with the general organization of the poetic text." In "Eden," that memorable reading of the poem from Schneepart, "Du liegst im grossen Gelausche" (GW, 11, 334), Szondi recalls that an indication of date accompanied its first publication: "Berlin 22./23. to. EN The second, "noncalendrical," form of dating is discussed in the section of the text not reprinted here.
d ie values of the given and the proper name (for a date functions like a proper name) with three other essential values.
r . That of the missive within the strict limits of the epistolary code. 2. The re-marking of place and time, at the point of the here and now. e---- 3. The signature: if the date is an initial, it may come at the letter's end and in all cases, whether at the beginning or the end, have the t FROM SHIBBOLETH 12. 1 9 6 7."" We know how Szondi turned to account these dates and his chance to have been the intimate witness of, and at times actor in, or party to, the experiences commemorated, displaced, and ciphered by the poem. We also know with what rigor and modesty he posed the problems of this situation, both with regard to the poem's genesis and with regard to the competence of its decipherers. Like him, we must take into account the following fact: as the intimate and lucid witness of all the chance happenings and all the necessities which intersected Celan's passing through Berlin at this date, Szondi was the only one able to bequeath us the irreplaceable passwords of access to the poem, a priceless shibboleth, a luminous, clamorous, swarm of notes, so many signs of gratitude for a deciphering and translation of the enigma. And yet, left to itself without witness, without the alerted complicity of a decipherer, without even the "external" knowledge of its date, a certain internal necessity of the poem would nonetheless speak to us, in the sense in which Celan says of the poem, "But it speaks!" beyond what appears to confine it within the dated singularity of an individual experience.
Szondi was the first to acknowledge this. He set this enigma before him with an admirable lucidity and prudence. How is one to give an account of this: concerning the circumstances in which the poem was written, or better, concerning those which it names, codes, disguises or dates in its own body, concerning the secrets of which it partakes, witnessing is at once indispensable, essential to the reading of the poem, to the partaking which it becomes in its turn, and finally supplementary, nonessential, merely the guaranty of an excess of intelligibility which • the poem can also forego. At once essential and inessential. This at once derives, this is my hypothesis, from the structure of the date. (I will not here give myself over to my own commemorations, I will not give over my dates. Permit me nevertheless to recall here that in my encounter with Paul Celan and in the friendship which subsequently bound us, such a short time before his death, Peter Szondi was always the mediator and witness, the common friend who presented us to one 1. TN Peter Szondi, Schriften, ed. Wolfgang Fietkau (Frankfurt am Main: SCihrkamp, 1978), 11, 390. 3 97- FROM SHIBBOLETH a nother in Paris, though we were already working there at the same i n stitution. And this took place a few months after a visit which I made to the University of Berlin, at Szondi's invitation, in July 1968, just a short time after the month of December 1967 of which I spoke a moment ago.) What does Szondi recall for us, from the outset of his reading? That Celan suppressed the poem's date for the first collection. It does not figure in the Ausgewahlte Gedichte edited by Reichert in 1970. 12 This conforms, according to Szondi, with Celan's customary practice: "The poems are dated in the manuscript, but not in the published versions" ("Eden," 391).
But the retraction of what we are calling the "external" date does not do away with the internal dating. And while the latter harbors in its turn, as I will try to show, a force of self-effacement, what is involved in that case is another structure, that.of_the inscription of the date itself.
We are going to be concerned then with the date as a cut or incision which the poem bears in its body like a memoajike attimes, several memories in one, the mark of a provenance, of a place and of a time. To speak of an incision or cut is to say that the poem is entered into, that it begins in the wounding of its date. If we had the time, we should patiently analyze the modalities of dating. There are many. In this typology, the most conventional form of dating, dating in the so-called literal or strict sense, involves marking a missive with coded signs. It entails reference to charts, and the utilization of systems of notation and spatio-temporal plottings said to be "objective": the calendar (year, month, day), the clock (the hours, whether or not they are name and how often will Celan have named them, here or there, but only to restore them to the night of their ciphered silence: "sie werden die Stunde nicht nennen," "They will not nam e the hour" [GW, I, T z5 / P, 91]), toponomy, and first of all the names of cities. These coded marks all share a common resource, but also a dramatic and fatally equivocal power. Assigning or consigning I z. IN Ausgetviihlte Gedichte, ed. Klaus Reichert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1 97o). 393 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH absolute singularity, they must mark themselves off simultaneously, a t one and the same time, and from themselves, by the possibility o f commemoration. In effect, they mark only insofar as their readability enunciates the possibility of a recurrence. Not the absolute recurrence of that which precisely cannot return: a birth or circumcision takes place but once, nothing could he more self-evident. But rather the spectral return of that which, unique in its occurrence, will never return. A date is a specter. But the spectral return of this impossibl e recurrence is marked in the date, it seals or specifies itself in the sort of anniversary ring secured by the code. For example by the calendar.
The anniversary ring inscribes the possibility of repetition, but also the circuit of return to the city whose name a date hears. The first inscrip- tion of a date signifies this possibility: that which cannot come hack will come back as such, not only in memory, like all remembrance, but also at the same date, at an in any case analogous date, for example each February 13... And each time, at the same date, what one com- memorates will be the date of that which could never come back. This latter will have signed and sealed the unique, the unrepeatable; but to do so, it will have had to offer itself for reading in a form sufficiently coded, readable, and decipherable for the indecipherable to appear in the analogy of the anniversary ring (February 13, 1961, is analogous to February 13, 1936), even if it appears as indecipherable. One is tempted to associate here all of Celan's rings with this alliance between the date and itself as other. There are ever so many and they are all unique. 1 will cite only one; it imposes itself here, since it seals in the same beeswa and the fingers themselves are of wa the alliance, the letter, the ciphered name, the hive of the hours, and the writing of what is not written: MIT BRIEF UND UHR Wachs, Ungeschriebnes zu siegeln, das deinen Namen erriet, das deinen Namen versch I ii sselt. 394 Kommst du nun, schwimmendes Licht?
Finger, wachsern auch sie durch fremde, schmerzende Ringe gezogen.
Fortgeschmolzen die Kuppen.
Kommst du, schwimmendes Licht?
Zeitleer die Waben der Uhr, brautlich das Immentausend, reisehereit.
Komm, schwimmendes Licht. (GW, 1, 154) (WITH LETTER AND CLOCK Wax To seal the unwritten that guessed your name, that enciphers your name.
Swimming light, will you come now?
Fingers, waxen too, drawn through strange, painful rings.
The tips melted away.
Swimming light, will you come?
Empty of time the honeycomb cells of the clock, bridal the thousand of bees, ready to leave.
Swimming light, come.) (P, 107) Clock and ring are quite close again in "Chymisch" (GW, 1, 227- 28 / P, 178 - 8i). A ring awakens on our finger, and the fingers are the ring itself, in "Es war Erde in ihnen" (GW, 1, it / P, 153). But above all, since a date is never without a letter to he deciphered, I think of the ring of the carrier-pigeon at the end of "La Contrescarpe." The carrier-pigeon transports, transfers, or translates a coded message, but this is not a metaphor. It departs at its date, that of its sending, and it 395 FROM SHIBBOLETH I.
ft 0 FROM SHIBBOLETH must return from the other place to the same one, that from which it came, completing a round trip. Now the question of the cipher is posed by Celan not only with regard to the message but also with regard to the ring itself, sign of belonging and alliance, and condition of return. The cipher of the seal, the imprint of the ring, counts, perhaps more than the content of the message. As with shibboleth, the meaning of the word matters less than, let us say, its signifying form once it becomes a pass- word, a mark of belonging, a manifestation of an alliance: Scherte die Brieftaube aus, war ihr Ring zu entziffern? (All das Gewalk um sie he es war lesbar.) Litt es der Schwarrn? Und verstand, and flog wie sie fortlieb? (GW, I, z8z) (Did the carrier pigeon sheer off, was its ring decipherable? (All that cloud around i it was readable.) Did the flock endure it? And understand, and fly as the other went on?) III Let us keep for the moment to those dates which we recognize through the language-grid of the calendar: the day, the month, and sometimes die year.
First case: a date relates to an event which, at least in appearance and outwardly, is distinct from the actual writing of the poem and the moment of its signing. The metonymy of the date (a date is always also a metonymy) designates part of an event or a sequence of events by way of recalling the whole. The mention "13th of February" forms a part of what happened on that day, only a part, but it stands for the whole in a given context. What happened on that day, in the first case which we are going to consider, is not, in appearance and outwardly, the advent of the poem.
The example then is that of the first line of "In eins" ("In One"). It begins with "Dreizehnter Feber," "Thirteenth of February." What is gathered and commemorated in the single time of this "In eins," at one poetic stroke? And is it a matter, moreover, of one commemoration? The "in one," "all at once," several times at once, seems to constellate in the uniqueness of a date. But this date, in being unique and the only one, all alone, the lone of its kin is it one? And what if there were more than one February 13? Not only because February 13 recurs, becoming each year its own revenant, but first of all because a multiplicity of events, dispersed (for example, on a political map of Europe) among diverse places, at different periods, in foreign idioms, may have conjoined at the heart of the same anniversary. A date gets carried away, transported; it takes off, takes itself of and thus effaces itself in its very readability. Effacement is not some- thing that befalls it like an accident; it affects neither its meaning nor its readability; it merges, on the contrary, with reading's very access to that which a date may still signify. But if readability effaces the date, the very thing which it offers for reading, this strange process will have begun with the very inscription of the date. The date must conceal within itself some stigma of singularity if it is to last longe and this lasting is the poe than that which it commemorates. This is its only chance of assuring its spectral return. Effacement or concealment, this annulment in this annulation of return belongs to the movement of dating. And so what must be commemorated, at once gathered together and repeated, is, at the same time, the date's annihilation, a kind of nothing, or ash. Ash awaits us. IN E INS Dreizehnter Feber. 1m Herzmund erwachtes Schibholeth. Mit dir, Peuple de Paris. No pasaran. (GW, I, 17o) (IN ONE Thirteenth of February. In the heart's mouth 196 397 FROM SHIBBOLETH an awakened shibboleth. With you, Peuple de Paris. No pasaran.) (P, zo6) Like the rest of the poem, and well in excess of what I could say concerning them, these first lines are evidently ciphered. Ciphered, in full evidence: in several senses and in several languages.
Ciphered, first of all, in that they include a cipher, the cipher of the number thirteen. This is one of those numbers where chance and necessity cross and in crossing are both at once consigned. Within its strictures a ligament binds together, in a manner at once significant and insignificant, fatality and its opposite: chance and coming-due, coincidence in the event, what fall well or il together. DIE ZAHLEN, im Bund mit der Bilder Verhangnis und Gegen- verhangnis. (GW, II, 17) (THE NUMBERS, bonded with the images' doom and their counter- doom.) (65, 49) Und Zahlen waren mitverwoben in das UnzAlbare. Eins und Tausend... (GW, 1, z8o) (And numbers were interwoven into the numberless. One and a thousand...) Even before the number thirteen, the "one" of the title, "IN EINS," announces the con-signing and co-signing of a multiple singularity.
From the title and the opening on, cipher, and then date, are incorpo- rated in the poem. They give access to the poem which they are, but a ciphered access.
These first lines are ciphered in another sense: more than others, they are untranslatable. I am not thinking here of all the poetic chal- FROM SHIBBOLETH lenges with which this great poet-translator confronts poet-translators.
No, I will limit myself to the aporia (to the barred passage, no pasarcin: this is what "aporia" means). What seems to bar the passage of transla- tion is the multiplicity of languages in a single poem, all at once. Four languages, like a series of proper names or signatures, like the face of a seal.
Like the title and the date, the first line is in German. But with the second line, a second language, an apparently Hebrew word, arises in the "heart's mouth": shibboleth. Dreizehnter Feber. Im Herzmund erwachtes Schibboleth. Mit dir, (Thirteenth of February. In the heart's mouth an awakened shibboleth. With you, ...) This second language could well be a first language, the language of the morning, the language of origin speaking of the heart, out of the heart and out of the East. "Language" in Hebrew is "lip," and does not Celan elsewhere (we will come to it) call words circumcised, as one speaks of the "circumcised heart"? Let this he for the moment.
Shibboleth, this word I have called Hebrew, is found, as you know, in a whole family of languages: Phoenician, Judaeo-Aramaic, Syriac. It is traversed by a multiplicity of meanings: river, stream, ear of grain, olive-twig. But beyond these meanings, it acquired the value of a password. It was used during or after war, at the crossing of a border under watch. The word mattered less for its meaning than for the way in which it was pronounced. The relation to the meaning or to the thing was suspended, neutralized, bracketed: the opposite, one could say, of a phenomenological epochè which preserves, first of all, the meaning. The Ephraimites had been defeated by the army of jephthah; in order to keep the soldiers from escaping across the river (shibboleth also means river, of course, but that is not necessarily the reason it was chosen), each person was required to say shibboleth. Now the Ephrairnites were known for their inability to pronounce correctly the sin of shibboleth, which became for them, in consequence, an 39 8 399 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH 1 "unpronounceable name"; they said sibboleth, and, at that invisible border between shi and si, betrayed themselves to the sentinel at th e risk of death. They betrayed their difference in rendering themselves indifferent to the diacritical difference between shi and si; they marked themselves as unable to re-mark a mark thus coded.
This happened at the border of the Jordan. We are at another border, another barred passage in the fourth language of the strophe:
no pasarein. February 1936: the electoral victory of the Frente Popular, the eve of civil war. No pasaran: la Pasionaria, the no to Franco, to the Phalange supported by Mussolini's troops and Hitler's Condor legion. Rallying cry and sign, clamor and banderoles during the siege of Madrid, three years later, no pasanin was a shibboleth for the Republican people, for their allies, for the International Brigades. What passed this cry, what passed despite it, was the Second World War, the war of extermination. A repetition of the first, certainly, but also of that dress rehearsal [repetition generale], its own future anterior, which was the Spanish Civil War. This is the dated structure of the dress rehearsal: everything happens as if the Second World War had already begun in February of 1936, in a slaughter at once civil and international, violating or reclosing the borders, leaving ever so many wounds in the body of a single countr grievous figure of a metonymy. Spanish is allotted to the central strophe, which transcribes, in short, a kind of Spanish shibboleth, a password, and not a word in passing, but a silent word transmitted like a symbolon or handclasp, a rallying sign, a sign of membership and political watchword. er sprach uns das Wort in die Hand, das wir hrauchten, es war Hirten-Spanisch, darin, im Eislicht des Kreuzers "Aurora" ..
(... into our hands he spoke the word that we needed, it was 4 00 shepherd-Spanish, and in it in icelight of the cruiser "Aurora" ...)" Amidst the German, the Hebrew, and the Spanish, in French, the People of Paris: ... Mit dir, Peuple de Paris. No pasartin. (. . . With you, Peuple de Paris. No pasardn.) It is not written in italics, no more than is shibboleth. The italics are reserved for "No pasarcin" and the last line, "Friede den Hiltten!," "Peace to the cottages!," the terrible irony of which must surely aim at someone.
The multiplicity of languages may concelebrate, all at once, at the same date, the poetic and political anniversary of singular events, spread like stars over the map of Europe, and henceforth conjoined by a secret affinity: the fall of Vienna and the fall of Madrid, for as we will see, Vienna and Madrid are associated in the same line by another poem, entitled "Schibboleth"; and still other memories of February, the beginnings of the October Revolution with the incidents tied not only to the cruiser Aurora and to Petrograd, both of which are named in the poem, but in fact to the Peter and Paul Fortress. It is the last stanza of "In eins" which recalls other - unforgettable" singularities, the Tuscan for example, which 1 will not here undertake to decipher. "Aurora": die Bruderhand, winkend mit der von den wortgrossen Augen genommenen Bind Petropolis, der 11. Martine Broda devotes "a long parenthesis" to this "shepherd-Spanish" in "BowelIles, caillous, schihholeths: un nom dans la main," m Dans la main de personne (Paris: Cerf, 1986), 95-105. 401 FROM SHIBBOLETH Unvergessenen Wanderstadt lag auch dir toskanisch zu Herten Friede den Hiitten!
(• • • "Aurora": the brotherly hand, waving with the blindfold removed from his word-wide eyes—Petropolis, the roving city of those unforgotten, was Tuscanly close to your heart also.
Peace to the cottages!) But already within the habitation of a single language, for example French, a discontinuous swarm of events may be commemorated all at once, at the same date, which consequently takes on the strange, coincident, unheinilich dimensions of a cryptic predestination. The date itself resembles a shibboleth. It gives ciphered access to this collocation, to this secret configuration of places for memory.
The series thus constellated becomes all the more ample and numer- ous as the date remains relatively indeterminate. If Celan does not specify the day (13), and says only "February," (Februar, this time and not Feber), as in the poem entitled "Schibboleth," the memory swells even further of demonstrations of the same kind, with the same political significance, which were able to bring the People of Paris, that is, the people of the left, together in the surge of a single impulse to proclaim, like the Republicans of Madrid, No pasarcin. One sole example: it is on the twelfth of February, 1934, after the failure of the attempt to form a Common Front of the Right, with Doriot, after the riot of February 6, that a huge march takes place which spontaneously re- groups the masses and the leadership of the parties of the left. This was the origin of the Popular Front. But if, in "In eins," Celan specifies the thirteenth of February (Drei- 41) zehnter Feber), one may think of February 13, 1962. 1 consign this hypothesis to those who may know something about or can testify to the so-called "external" date of the poem; I am unaware of it, but even should my hypothesis he factually false, it would still designate the 4 02 . FROM SHIBBOLETH power of those dates to come to which, Celan says, we write and ascribe ourselves. A date always remains a kind of hypothesis, the support for a, by definition, unlimited number of projections of mem- ory. The slightest indetermination (the day and the month without the year, for example) increases the chances, and the chances of a future anterior. The date is a future anterior, it gives the time one assigns to anniversaries to come. Thus, on February 13, 1962, Celan was in Paris.
Die Niemandsrose, the collection in which "In eins" appears, is not published until 1963. On the other hand, in moving from one poem to the other, from "Schibboleth," published eight years before, to "In eins," Celan specifies "Thirteenth of February" where the earlier poem said only "February." Thus something must have happened. February 13, 1962 is the day of the funeral for the Metro Charonne massacre victims, an anti-OAS demonstration at the end of the Algerian war.
Several hundred thousand Parisians, the People of Paris, are marching.
Two days after, the meetings begin which lead to the Evian accords.
These People of Paris are still the People of the Commune, the People with whom one must band together: with you, Peuple de Paris. In the same event, at the same date, national war and civil war, the end of one and the beginnin as the beginning of the other.
Like the date, shibboleth is marked several times, several times in one, "in eins," at once. A marked multiplicity but also a marking one. On the one hand, within the poem, it names, as is evident, the password or rallying cry, a right of access or sign of membership in all the political situations along the historical borders which are brought together in the poem's configuration. This visa, it will be said, is the shibboleth, it determines a theme, a meaning or a content. But on the other hand, as cryptic or numerical cipher, shibboleth also spells the anniversary date's singular power of gathering together.
The anniversary grants access to the date's memory, its future, but also to the poe itself. Shibboleth is the shibboleth for the right to the poem which calls itself a shibboleth, its own shibboleth at the very moment that it commemorates others. Shibboleth is its title, whether or not it appears in that place, as in one of the two poems. This does not mea two things.
On the one hand, this does not mean that the events commemorated 401 Atu 1101 it FROM SHIBBOLETH • FRO4 SHIBBOLETH in this fantastic constellation are nonpoetic events, suddenly transfig- ured by an incantation. No, I believe that for Celan the signifying conjunction of all these dramas and historical actors will have consti- tuted the dated signature, the dating of the poem. Nor does this mean, on the other hand, that possession of the shibboleth effaces the cipher, holds the key to the crypt, and guarantees transparency of meaning. The crypt remains, the shibboleth remains secret, the passage uncertain, and the poem only unveils this secret to confirm that there is something secret there, withdrawn, forever beyond the reach of any hermeneutic exhaustion. A non-hermetic secret, it remains, and the date with it, heterogeneous to all interpretative total- ization, eradicating the hermeneutic principle. There is no one meaning, from the moment that there is date and shibboleth, no longer a sole originary meaning. A shibboleth, the word shibboleth, if it is one, names, in the broadest extension of its generality or its usage, every insignificant arbitrary mark, for example the phonemic difference between shi and si, as that difference becomes discriminative, decisive and divisive. The difference has no meaning in and of itself, but it becomes what one must know how to recognize and above all to mark if one is to get on, to get over the border of a place or the threshold of a poem, to see oneself granted asylum or the legitimate habitation of a language. So as no longer to he an outlaw there. And to inhabit a language, one must already have a shibboleth at one's disposal: not simply understand the meaning of the word, not simply know this meaning or know how a word should be pronounced (the difference of h between shi and si: this the Ephraimites knew), but be able to say it as one ought, as one ought to be able to say it. It does not suffice to know the difference, one must be capable of it, one must be able to do it, or know how to do i and doing here means marking. It is this differential mark which it is not enough to know like a theorem which is the secret. A secret without secrecy. The right of alliance involves no hidden secret, no meaning concealed in a crypt. In the word, the difference between shi and si has no meaning. But 40 it is the ciphered mark which one must be able to partake of with the other, and this differential power must be inscribed in oneself, that is to say in one's body itself, just as much as in the body of one's own language, and the one to the same extent as the other. This inscription of difference in the body (for example by the phonatory ability to pronounce this or that) is nonetheless not natural, is in no way an innate organic faculty. Its very origin presupposes participation in a cultural and linguistic community, in a milieu of apprenticeship, in short, an alliance.
Shibboleth does not cipher something, it is not only a cipher, and the cipher of the poem; it is now, emerging from non-meaning where it keeps itself in reserve, the cipher of the cipher, the ciphered manifesta- tion of the cipher as such. And when a cipher manifests itself as what it is, that is to say, in encrypting itself, this is not in order to say to us:
I am a cipher. It may still conceal from us, without the slightest hidden intention, the secret which it shelters in its readability. It moves, touches, fascinates, or seduces us all the more. The ellipsis and cesura of discretion inhabit it, there is nothing it can do about it. This pass is a passion before becoming a calculated risk, prior to any strategy, any poetics of ciphering intended, as with Joyce, to keep the professors busy for generations. Even supposing that this exhausts Joyce's first and true desire, something I do not believe, nothing seems to me more foreign to Celan.
Multiplicity and migration of languages, certainly, and within lan- guage itself. Babel: named in "Hinausgekriint," after the "Ghetto- Rose" and that phallic figure knotted in the heart of the poem ("phal- lisch gebiindelt"), this is also its last word, both its address and its envoy. Und es steigt eine Erdc herauf, die unsre, diese.
Und wir schicken keinen der Unsern hinunter zu dir, Babel. (GW, 1, 172.) (And an earth rises up, ours, this one.
And we'll send 405 4 0 4 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH none of our people down to you, Babel.) (P, ill) Address and envoi of the poem, yes, but what seems to be said to Babel, addressed to it, is that nothing will be addressed to it. One will send it nothing, nothing from us, none of ours. Multiplicity and migration of languages, certainly, and within lan- guage. Your country, it says, migrates all over, like language. The country itself migrates and transports its borders. It displaces itself like those names and stones which one gives as a pledge, from hand to hand, and the hand is given too, and what gets detached, sundered, torn away, can gather itself together anew in the symbol, the pledge, the promise, the alliance, the imparted word, the migration of the imparted word. —was abriss, wächst wieder zusammen- da hast du sie, da nimm sic dir, da hast du alle beide, den Namen, den Namen, die Hand, die Hand da nimm sie dir vim Unterpfand, er nimmt auch das, and du hast wieder, was dein ist, was sein war, Windiniihlen stossen dir Luft in die Lunge (GW, 1, 184) (—what was severed joins up again— there you have it, so take it, there you have them both, the name, the name, the hand, the hand, so take them, keep them as a pledge, he takes it too, and you have again what is yours, what was his, windmills push air into your lungs ...) (P, 117) Chance and risk of the windmil language which holds as much of wind and of illusion as it draws from breath and spirit, from the 406 breathing bestowed. We will ndt recall all the coded trails of this immense poem ("Es ist alles anders..."), from Russi "the name of Osip" to Moravia, to the Prague cemetery ("the pebble from / the Moravian hollow / which your thought carried to Prague, / on to the grave, to the graves, into life") and "near Normandy-Niemen," the French squadron in war exile in Moscow, etc. Only this, which speaks of the emigration of the country itself, and of its name. Like language: wie heisst es, dein Land hinterm Berg, hinterm Jahr?
Ich weiss, wie es heisst.
• ..
es wandert iiberallhin , wie die Sprache, wirf sie wcg, wirf sic weg, dann hast du sie wieder, wie ihn, den Kieselstein aus der Mahrischen Senke, den dein Gedanke nach Prag trug (GW, I, 2.85) (What is it called, your country behind the mountain, behind the year?
I know what it's called.
It wanders off everywhere, like language, throw it away, throw it away, then you'll have it again, like that other thing, the pebble from the Moravian hollow which your thought carried to Prague . ..) (P, 119) Multiplicity and migration of languages, certainly, and within lan- guage itself, Babel within a single language. Shibboleth marks the multiplicity within language, insignificant difference as the condition of meaning. But by the same token, the insignificance of language, of the properly linguistic body: it can only take on meaning in relation to a Place. By place, I mean just as much the relation to a border, country, house, or threshold, as any site, any situation in general from within which, practically, pragmatically, alliances are formed, contracts, codes and conventions established which give meaning to the insignifi- 407 FROM SHIBBOLETH I. FROM 5imisoLErii cant, institute passwords, bend language to what exceeds it, make of it a moment of gesture and of step, secondarize or "reject" it in order to find it again.
Multiplicity within language, or rather heterogeneity. One should specify that untranslatability is connected not only with the difficult passage (no pasarcin), the aporia or impasse which would isolate one poetic language from another. Babel is also this possible impossible step," beyond hope of transaction, tied to the multiplicity of languages within the uniqueness of the poetic inscription: several times in one, several languages in a single poetic act. The uniqueness of the poem, itself yet another date and shibboleth, forges and seals, in a single idiom, in eins, the poetic event, a multiplicity of languages and of equally singular dates. "In eins": within the unity and within the uniqueness of this poem, the four languages are certainly not untrans- latable, neither among themselves nor into other languages. But what will always remain untranslatable into any other language whatsoever, is the marked difference of languages in the poem. We spoke of the doing which does not reduce to knowing, and of that being able to do the difference which is what marking conies to. This is what goes on and what comes about here. Everything seems, in principle, by right, translatable, except for the mark of the difference among the languages within the same poetic event. Let us consider for example the excellent French translation of "In eins." The German is translated into French, as is normal. Schibboleth and no pasard n are left untranslated, which respects the foreignness of these words in the principal medium, the German idiom of what one calls the original version. But in preserving, and how could one not, the French of this version in the translation, "Avec toi, I Peuple I de Paris," the translation must efface the very thing which it preserves, the foreign effect of the French (unitalicized) in the poem, and that which places it in configuration with all those ciphers, passwords, and shibboleths which date and sign the poem, "In eins," in the at once dissociated, rent, and adjoined, rejoined, rega- thered unity of its singularities. There is no remedy to which translation 1 4. TN In French, "ce pas impossible": i.e., both "this impossible step" and "this not impossible." 408 could have recourse here, none at least in the body of the poem. No one is to blame, moreover there is nothing to bring before the bar of translation. The shibboleth, here again, does not resist translation by reason of some inaccessibility of its meaning to transference, by reason of some semantic secret, but by virtue of that in it which forms the cut of a nonsignifying difference in the body of the written or oral mark, written in speech as a mark within a mark, an incision marking the very mark itself. On both sides of the historical, political, and linguistic border (a border is never natural), the meaning, the different meanings of the word shibboleth are known: river, ear of grain, olive twig. One even knows how it should be pronounced. But a single trial determines that some cannot while others can pronounce it with the heart's mouth.
The first will not pass, the others will pass the lin of the place, of the country, of the community, of what takes place in a language, in languages as poems. Every poem has its own language, it is one time alone its own language, even and especially if several languages are able to cross there. From this point of view, which may become a watch tower, the vigilance of a sentinel, one sees well: the value of the shibboleth may always, and tragically, be inverted. Tragically because the inversion sometimes overtakes the initiative of subjects, the good will of men, their mastery of language and of politics. Watchword or password in the struggle against oppression, exclusion, fascism, and racism, it may also corrupt its differential value, which is the condition of alliance and of the poem, making of it a discriminatory limit, the grillwork of policing, of normalization and of methodical subjugation. IV Inserted in the second line of "In eins," the word schibboleth forms the title of a longer and earlier poem, published in 1955 in the collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle. Shibboleth could also serve, by metonymy, as the title of the collection. It speaks in effect of the threshold, of the crossing of the threshold (Schwelle), of that which permits one to pass or to cross, to transfer from one threshold to another: to translate. One meets here in the earlier poem with more or less the same configu- ration of events, sealed by the same February anniversary, the linking 409 FROM SHIBBOLETH FROM SHIBBOLETH of the capitals of Vienna and Madrid substituted perhaps for the linking, in "In eins," of Paris, Madrid and Petropolis. No pasaran already figures in close conjunction with shibboleth. Again we are dealing, no doubt, with the memory of February t936 - 39, though this time neither the day ( r3), nor the year appear. Which leads one to think, given the seeming absence of references to France and the French language, that, in fact, another date is in question, this time, in the otherness of which other Februaries, and then a certain thirteenth of February, come together, overdetermining the Sprachgitter of the signature. The play of resemblances and differences, the shibboleth between the two poems, could occasion an interminable analysis. Apart from its presence as title, the word shibboleth almost directly precedes "February" and no pasaran, in a strophe which one might call open-hearted, opened here again through the heart, through the single word "heart" (in "In eins," it will also be "Im Herzmund," in the heart's mouth, in the first line): Herz:
gib dich auch hier zu erkennen, Kier, in der Mitte des Marktes.
Ruf's, das Schibholeth, hinaus in die Fremde der Heimat:
Februar. No pasaran. (GW, I, 131) (Heart:
make yourself known even here, here, in the midst of the market.
Call it out, the shibboleth, into the alien homeland strangeness:
February. No pasardn.) (SG, 73) Strangeness, estrangement in one's own home, not being at home, being called away from one's homeland or away from home in one's homeland, the "shall not" pass Ice pas du "ne pas"] which secures and threatens every border crossing in and out of oneself, this moment of the shibboleth is re-marked in the date in the month of and in the word February. The difference is hardly translatable: Februar in "Schibbo- leth," Feber ("Dreizehnter Feber") in "In eins," a shibboleth in Febru- ary perhaps leading back, through a play of archaism and Austrian, to some no doubt falsely attributed etymology of februarius as the mo- ment of fever, access, crisis, inflammation.' The two poems beckon to one another, kindred, complicitous, allies, but as different as is possible. They bear and do not bear the same date.
A shibboleth secures the passage from one to the other in the difference, within sameness, of the same date, between Februar and Feber. They speak, in the same language, two different languages. They partake of it.
We make use here of "partaking," as elsewhere "imparting," to render the ambiguities of the French partage,' a word which names difference, the line of demarcation, the parting of the waters, scission, cesura as well as participation, that which is divided because it is shared or held in common, imparted and partaken of.
Fascinated by a resemblance at once semantic and formal and which nonetheless has no linguistico-historical explanation, I will hazard a comparison between the imparted or partaken as shibboleth and as symbolon. In both cases of S-B-L, a pledge is transmitted to another, "er sprach / uns das Wort in die Hand" ("he spoke / the word in our hand"), a word or piece of a word, the complementary part of an object divided in two to seal an alliance, a tessera. This is the moment of engagement, of signing, of the pact or contract, of the promise, of the ring.'' r 5. Feher: Austrian dialect for Februar. fanner, occurring in other poems, goes back (like Renner) to the beginnings of Middle High German and remains in use up through the nineteenth century, and even today in Austria, and here and there in Switzerland and Alsace.
16, TN In the French, Derrida refers here to Jean-Luc Nancy's use of "partage" in partage des voix (Paris: Galilee, 1982.). Among its other meanings, "partage des voix" is the French idiom for a split, that is to say tied, vote.
17. It would have been appropriate to do it everywhere, but I choose to recall Freud's shibboleths here, at the moment of this allusion to the ring, for example the one symbolizing the alliance of the founders of psychoanalysis. Freud often used this word, shibboleth, to designate that which "distinguishes the followers of psychoanalysis from those who are opposed to it" (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey [London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-66], VII, zz6nz; Gesammelte Werke [Lon- don: Imago, 940-68], V, 1 z8nz) or "dreams, the shibboleth of psychoanalysis" (On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Standard Edition, XIV, 57; Gesammelte Werke, X, loz). Cf. also The Ego and the ld (Standard Edition. XIX, z 3; Gesammelte 4 10 411 FROM SHIBBOLETH The signature of the date plays a role here. Beyond the singular event which it marks and of which it would be the detachable proper name, capable of outliving and thus of calling, of recalling, the vanished as vanished, its very ash, it gathers together, like a title (titulus includes a sense of gathering), a more or less apparent and secret conjunction of singularities which partake of, and in the future will continue to partake of, the same date. There is no limit assignable to such a conjunction. It is determined by the future to which a fracture promises it. No testimony, no knowl- edge, not even Celan's, could by definition exhaust its deciphering.
First of all because there is no absolute witness for an external decoding. • Celan may always have imparted one more shibboleth: under cover of a word, a cipher, or a letter. Second, he would not have claimed himself to have totalized the possible and compossible meanings of a constellation. Finally and above all, the poem is destined to remain alone, it is destined for this from its first breath, alone with the van- ishing of the witnesses and the witnesses of witnesses. And of the poet.
The date is a witness, but one may very well bless it without knowing all of that for which and of those for whom it bears witness. It is always possible that there may no longer be any witness for this witness. We are going to slowly approach this affinity between a date, a name— and ash. The last words of "Aschenglorie": Niemand zeugt fur den Zeugen. (GW, II, 72.) (No one bears witness for the witness.) (SG, 141) Folded or refolded in the simplicity of the singular, a certain repeti- tion thus assures the minimal and "internal" readability of the poem, 4111 Werke, XIIL 239) and New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Standard Edition. XXII, 7; Gesammelte Werke, XV, 6). The motif of the shibboleth was discussed during - a seminar arranged around Wladimir Granoff, Marie Moscovici, Robert Pujol and jean- Michel Rey in conjunction with a symposium at Cerisy-la-Salle. Cf. Les fins de Lhomme (Paris: Galilee, 1981), 18c-89. FROM SHIBBOLETH even in the absence of a witness, of a signatory or of anyone who might have some knowledge concerning the historical reference of the poetic legacy. This in any case, is what is signified, if one can still speak in this way, by the word or title shibboleth. Not this or that meaning derived from its language of origin: river, ear of grain, olive-twig, or indeed the other meanings which it takes on in the poem. It signifies: there is shibboleth, there is something of a crypt, it remains incalcula- ble, it does not conceal a single determinate secret, a semantic content waiting for the one who holds a key behind the door. If there is indeed a door, it does not present itself in this way. If this crypt is symbolic, this does not in the last analysis derive from some tropic or rhetoric.
To be sure, the symbolic dimension never disappears, and at times it takes on thematic values. But what the poem marks, what enters and incises languages in the form of a date, is that there is partaking of the shibboleth, a partaking at once open and closed. The date (signature, moment, place, gathering of singular marks) always functions as a shibboleth. It shows that there is something not shown, that there is ciphered singularity: irreducible to any concept, to any knowledge, even to a history or tradition, he it of a religious kind. A ciphered singularity which gathers a multiplicity in eMs, and through whose grid a poem remains readable: "Aber das Gedicht spricht jar The poem speaks, even should none of its references be intelligible, no other than the Other, the one to whom it addresses itself and to whom it speaks in saying that it speaks to him. Even if it does not reach and leave its mark on, at least it calls to, the Other. Address takes place.
In a language, in the poetic writing of a language, there is nothing but shibboleth. Like the date, like a name, it permits anniversaries, alliances, returns, commemorations—even if there should he no trace, what one commonly calls a trace, the subsistent presence of a remain- der, even if there should be scarcely an ash of what we thus still date, celebrate, commemorate, or bless.
Seattle, October 14, 1984 • 452. 413 APHORISM COUNTERTIME II APHORISM COUNTERTIME "L'aphorisme a contretemps" came into being in 1986 when Der- rida was invited to write a piece on Romeo and Juliet for a production of the play in Paris by Daniel Mesguich, and its specificity is signaled by the irreducibly personal note with which it ends. Derrida has re- marked that although he probably would not have written about Ro- meo and Juliet had he not been asked to do so, he had been aware for a long time that Shakespeare's play represented something he wanted to discuss (see the Interview above). It is both a text which articulates certain problems that run through the entire history of Western culture, and one of that culture's most familiar and endlessly recirculated icons.
Derrida responds to, and connects, these twin features of the play by means of a focus on contretemps, a word which in French can mean both "mishap" and "syncopation," while the phrase a contretemps suggests both "inopportunely" and, in a musical sense, "out of time" or "in counter-time." For many more than have seen or read the play, the story of Romeo and Juliet has become a byword for love blighted by mischance and destroyed by unfortunate timing; and it is notable that Derrida focuses his attention on the scene that, more than any other, has become a cultural commonplace. Close attention to the verbal interchange in the balcony scene, and to the question of the name in particular, leads to an understanding of the force of contre- temps both in the play and in the institutional and intellectual context within which, and by means of which, we experience it. Derrida exam- ines the contradictory force of naming (in both literal and more general senses) as a cultural practice: in instituting and enforcing temporal and spatial homogeneity, it brings into being the possibility of the very accident including death as we understand i which it is designed to prevent. The names of Romeo and Juliet, Montague and Capulet, produce both the desire that drives the events of the play and the tragic mischances that thwart it. In their confounding of homogeneous time and place, therefore, countertime and mishap echo an absolute hetero- geneity which is "anterior" to times and happenings, and the various labels by which we try to order them. Love and hate are to be under- stood neither as arbitrary individual emotions nor as determined cul- tural products, but as powerful effects of chance built into the network of names and dates that make relations both possible and impossible.
(For a further discussion of the date which is closely related to this discussion of the name, see the extract from Shibboleth above; "Ulysses Gramophone" is also concerned with networks and accidents.) The traditional critical essay, too, is an attempt to produce a homoge- neous spatiotemporal continuum, and Derrida chooses in its stead an aphoristic form characterized by disjunction and heterogeneity. (The question of the aphoris which for Derrida is the question of the mark in genera is also raised aphoristically in "Fifty-Two Apho- risms.") The aphoristic voice is one which asserts and delimits, func- tioning like the name; and like the name, it is never far from contre- temps and death. Aphorisms and proper names are characterized by their capacity for surviving the deaths of those who employ them or are designated by them, and are therefore structured by the possibility of death; they thus exhibit in a particularly striking way the working of iterability that makes possible any utterance or recognizable act. So do plays, for they live on in the repetition of dramatic productions, each one affirming in a different way the uniqueness of the text they repeat, and each one repeating differently the play's staging of theatri- cality itself. Derrida's "Aphorism Countertime" is another such singu- lar staging of Shakespeare's play.
"L'aphorisme a contretemps" was first published in Romeo et Juliette (Paris: Papiers) in 1986, and collected in Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (519 - 33). This is its first appearance in English translation. The transla- tor, Nicholas Royle, would like to thank Geoffrey Bennington and James Raeside for all their invaluable criticisms and suggestions made in the course of his work on this translation. 4 1 4 4,5 APHORISM COUNTERTIME APHORISM COUNTERTIME I. Aphorism is the name. As its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks dissociation 2. (apo), it terminates, delimits, arrests (horiz45). It brings to an end by separating, it separates in order to en and to define [fint et definir].
3• An aphorism is a name but every name can take on the figure of aphorism.
An aphorism is exposure to contretemps.' It exposes discours 4. hands it over to contretemps. Literall because it is abandon- ing a word [une parole] to its letter. (Already this could he read as a series of aphorisms, the alea of an initial anachrony. In the beginning there was contretemps. In the beginning there is speed. Word and deed are overtaken. Aphorism outstrips.) To abandon speech [la parole], to entrust the secret to letter 5. this is the stratagem of the third party, the mediator, the Friar, the matchmaker who, without any other desire but the desire of others, organizes the contretemps. He counts on the letters without taking account of them: In the meantime, against thou shalt awake, Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift, And hither shall he come. (IV, i, 113-10' 6. Despite appearances, an aphorism never arrives by itself, it doesn't come all alone. It is part of a serial logic. As in Shake- speare's play, in the trompe-l'oeil depth of its paradigms, all the Romeo r. TN The word contretemps signifies, in English as well as French, "an inopportune occurrence; an untoward accident; an unexpected mishap or hitch" (OED), but in French it also refers to being - out of time" or "off-beat" in the musical sense, to a sense of "bad or wrong time," "counter-time." z. TN References to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are to the Arden text, ed. Brian Gibbons (New York: Methuen, 198o). 416 and Juliets that came before it, there will he several series of aphorisms here.
7. Romeo and Juliet, the heroes of contretemps in our mythology, the positive heroes. They missed each other, how they missed each other! Did they miss each other? But they also survived, both of them, survived one another, in their name, through a studied effect of contretemps: an unfortunate crossing, by chance, of temporal and aphoristic series.' 8. Aphoristically, one must say that Romeo and Juliet will have lived, and lived on, through aphorism. Romeo and Juliet owes everything to aphorism. Aphorism can, of course, turn out to be a device of rhetoric, a sly calculation aiming at the greatest authority, an economy or strategy of mastery which knows very well how to potentialize meaning ("See how I formalize, in so few words I always say more than would appear"). But before letting itself be manipulated in this way, aphorism hands us over, defenseless, to the very experience of contretemps. Before every calculation but also across it, beyond the calculable itself.
9.
The aphorism or discourse of dissociation: each sentence, each paragraph dedicates itself to separation, it shuts itself up, whether one likes it or not, in the solitude of its proper duration. Its encounter and its contact with the other are always given over to chance, to whatever may befall, good or ill. Nothing is absolutely assured, neither the linking nor the order. One aphorism in the series can come before or after the other, before and after the other, each can survive the othe and in the other series. Romeo and Juliet are aphorisms, in the first place in their name, which they are not (Juliet:
"Tis but thy name that is my enemy" . . . Romeo: "My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, / Because it is an enemy to thee. / Had I it TN Derrida's text works with several senses of the verb survivre: "to survive," "to survive beyond" or "survive through," "to live on," and so forth. For a fuller account of "living on" and the related double-notion of "death sentence" and "arrest of death" [Parr& de mort], see Derrida's "Living On/Borderlines." 417 APHORISM COUNTERTIMEI APHORISM COUNTERTIME written, I would tear the word" [II, n, 38, 55-57J), for there is no aphorism without language, without nomination, without appellation, without a letter, even to be torn up. 0. Each aphorism, like Romeo and Juliet, each aphoristic series has its particular duration. Its temporal logic prevents it from sharing all its time with another place of discourse, with another discourse, with the discourse of the other. Impossible synchronization.
I am speaking here of the discourse of time, of its marks, of its dates, of the course of time and of the essential digression which dislocates the time of desires and carries the step of those who love one another off course. But that is not sufficient to characterize our aphorism, it is not sufficient that there be language or mark, nor that there be dissociation, dislocation, anachrony, in order for aphorism to take place. It still must have a determined form, a certain mode. Which?
The bad aphorism, the bad of aphorism is sententious, but every apho- rism cuts and delimits by virtue of its sententious character: 4 it says the truth in the form of the last judgment, and this truth carries [pone] death.' The death sentence Warr& de mortJ, for Romeo and Juliet, is • a contretemps which condemns them to death, both of them, but also a contretemps which arrests death, suspends its corning, secures for both of them the delay necessary in order to witness and survive the other's death.
II. Aphorism: that which hands over every rendezvous to chance.
But desire does not lay itself open to aphorism by chance. There is no time for desire without aphorism. Desire has no place without aphorism. What Romeo and Juliet experience is the exemplary anach- rony, the essential impossibility of any absolute synchronization. But 4. TN The French phrase here is caractere de sentence, which can also mean "quality of judgment"; "sentence" carries the sense of "moral saying" as well as "judgment." 5. TN "Aphorism Countertime" contains—or carries—a certain play on the verb porter, corresponding in some ways to the English verb "to bear" ("to carry" as well as "to wear [clothes]"). Porter is the verb used to designate, for example, being called by, having, or bearing a name (porter le nom), as well as being in mourning (porter le deuill. Derrida treats the idea of the name as bearing death within it—and as being structurally conditioned to survive its bearer—in several of his works: among others, Signepongel Signsponge, "Otobiographics," and Memoires. 4 18 at the same tone they liv as we d this disorder of the series. Disjunction, dislocation, separation of places, deployment or spacing of a story because of aphoris would there be any theater without that? The survival of a theatrical work implies that, theatrically, it is saying something about theater itself, about its essential possibility.
And that it does so, theatrically, then, through the play of uniqueness and repetition, by giving rise every time to the chance of an absolutely singular event as it does to the untranslatable idiom of a proper name, to its fatality (the "enemy" that "I hate"), to the fatality of a date and of a rendezvous. Dates, timetables, property registers, place-names, all the codes that we cast like nets over time and spac in order to reduce or master differences, to arrest them, determine the these are also contretemps-traps. Intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to objective measurement, they produce misunderstanding, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires: in the same time. What is this time? There is no place for a question in aphorism.
i2. Romeo and Juliet, the conjunction of two desires which are aphoristic but held together, maintained in the dislocated now of a love or a promise. A promise in their name, but across and beyond their given name, the promise of another name, its request rather: "0 he some other name . " (II, ii, 42.). The and of this conjunction, the theater of this "and," has often been presented, represented as the scene of fortuitous contretemps, of aleatory anachrony: the failed ren- dezvous, the unfortunate accident, the letter which does not arrive at its destination, the time of the detour prolonged for a purloined letter,' the remedy which transforms itself into poison when the stratagem of a third party, a brother, Friar Laurence, proposes simultaneously the remedy and the letter ("And if thou dar'st, I'll give thee remedy. . . In 6. TN English in original. This is an allusion to Derrida's "Le facteur de la verite," a text concerned with Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter," and Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' " (the latter partly translated in Yale French .Studies 48 [1973]: 38-7z). "Aphorism Countertime" follows Shakespeare's text in focusing on the (tragic, comic, ironic, and above all necessary) possibility that a letter can always not reach its destination. 419 • 4 APHORISM COUNTERTIME APHORISM COUNTERTIME the meantime, against thou shalt awake, / Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift, / And hither shall he come ..." [IV, i, 76, 113- 15]). This representation is not false. But if this drama has thus been imprinted, superimprinted on the memory of Europe, text upon text, this is because the anachronous accident comes to illustrate an essential possibility. It confounds a philosophical logic which would like acci- dents to remain what they are, accidental. This logic, at the same time, throws out into the unthinkable an anachrony of structure, the absolute interruption of history as deployment of a temporality, of a single and organized temporality. What happens to Romeo and Juliet, and which remains in effect an accident whose aleatory and unforeseeable appear- ance cannot be effaced, at the crossing of several series and beyond common sense, can only be what it is, accidental, insofar as it has already happened, in essence, before it happens. The desire of Romeo and Juliet did not encounter the poison, the contretemps or the detour of the letter by chance. In order for this encounter to take place, there must already have been instituted a system of marks (names, hours, maps of places, dates and supposedly "objective" place-names) to thwart, as it were, the dispersion of interior and heterogeneous dura- tions, to frame, organize, put in order, render possible a rendezvous:
in other words to deny, while taking note of it, non-coincidence, the separation of monads, infinite distance, the disconnection of experi- ences, the multiplicity of worlds, everything that renders possible a contretemps or the irremediable detour of a letter. But the desire of Romeo and Juliet is born in the heart of this possibility. There would have been no love, the pledge would not have taken place, nor time, nor its theater, without discordance. The accidental contretemps comes to remark the essential contretemps. Which is as much as to say it is not accidental. It does not, for all that, have the signification of an essence or of a formal structure. This is not the abstract condition of possibility, a universal form of the relation to the other in general, a dialectic of desire or consciousnesses. Rather the singularity of an imminence whose "cutting point" spurs desire at its birt the very birth of desire. I love because the other is the other, because its time will never be mine. The living duration, the very presence of its love remains infinitely distant from mine, distant from itself in that which 4 2 - 0 stretches it toward mine and even in what one might want to describe as amorous euphoria, ecstatic communion, mystical intuition. l can love the other only in the passion of this aphorism. Which does not happen, does not come about like misfortune, had luck, or negativity. It has the form of the most loving affirmatio it is the chance of desire. And it not only cuts into the fabric of durations, it spaces.
Contretemps says something about topology or the visible; it opens theater.
13. Conversely, no contretemps, no aphorism without the promise of a now in common, without the pledge, the vow of synchrony, the desired sharing of a living present. In order that the sharing may he desired, must it not first be given, glimpsed, apprehended? But this sharing is just another name for aphorism.' 14. aphorism lives on, it lives much longer than its present and it lives longer than life. Death sentence [arr .
& de mort]. It gives and carries death, but in order to make a decision thus on a sentence [arra] of death, it suspends death, it stops it once more [i/ l'arrite encore]. There would not be any contretemps, nor any anachrony, if the 15. separation between monads only disjoined interiorities. Contre- temps is produced at the intersection between interior experience (the "phenomenology of internal time-consciousness" or space-conscious- ness) and its chronological or topographical marks, those which are said to be "objective," "in the world." There would not be any series otherwise, without the possibility of this marked spacing, with its social conventions and the history of its codes, with its fictions and its simulacra, with its dates. With so-called proper names.
7. EN Partage, the usual word for "sharing," also signifies "division"; see the extract from Shibboleth above, note 8. 8. TN The reference is to Husserl. See, for example, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, i9 6 4). See also Derrida's Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, 57, and chapter 5 ("Signs and the Blink of 311 Eye") of his Speech and Phenomena. 411 This aphoristic series crosses over another one. Because it traces, APHORISM COUNTERTIME APHORISM COUNTERTIME 16. The simulacrum raises the curtain, it reveals, thanks to the dissociation of series, the theater of the impossible: two people each outlive the other. The absolute certainty which rules over the duel (Romeo and Juliet is the mise-en-sane of all duels) is that one must die before the other. One of them must see the other die. To no matter whom, I must be able to say: since we are two, we know in an absolutely ineluctable way that one of us will die before the other. One of us will see the other die, one of us will live on, even if only for an instant. One of us, only one of us, will carry the death of the other—and the mourning. It is impossible that we should each survive the other. That's the duel, the axiomatic of every duel, the scene which is the most common and the least spoken of—or the most prohibited—concerning our relation to the other. Yet the impossible happen not in "objective reality," which has no say here, but in the experience of Romeo and Juliet. And under the law of the pledge, which commands every given word. They live in turn the death of the other, for a time, the contre- temps of their death. Both are in mourning—and both watch over the death of the other, attend to the death of the other. Double death sentence. Romeo dies before Juliet, whom he has seen dead. They both live, outlive the death of the other.
17. The impossible—this theater of double survival—also tells, like every aphorism, the truth. Right from the pledge which hinds together two desires, each is already in mourning for the other, entrusts death to the other as well: if you die before me, I will keep you, if I die before you, you will carry me in yourself, one will keep the other, will already have kept the other from the first declaration. This double interiorization would he possible neither in monadic interiority nor in the logic of "objective" time and space. It takes places nevertheless every time I love. Everything then begins with this survival. Each time that I love or each time that I hate, each time that a law engages me to the death of the other. And it is the same law, the same double law. A pledge which keeps (off) death can always invert itself.' 9. TN The French text reads: Un gage pent tonjours s'inverser qui garde de la mort• This double bind of what keeps off death and at the same time keeps it might be further elucidated by way of Derrida's Mëmoires, where for example he explores the notion that I S .
.
A given series of aphorisms crosses over into another one, the same under different names, under the name of the name. Romeo and Juliet love each other across their name, despite their name, they die on account of their name, they live on in their name. Since there is neither desire nor pledge nor sacred bond (sacramentum) without aphoristic separation, the greatest love springs from the greatest force of dissociation, here what opposes and divides the two families in their name. Romeo and Juliet bear these names. They bear them, support them even if they do not wish to assume them. From this name which separates them but which will at the same time have tightened their desire with all its aphoristic force, they would like to separate them- selves. But the most vibrant declaration of their love still calls for the name that it denounces. One might be tempted to distinguish here, another aphorism, between the proper forename and the family name which would only be a proper name in a general way or according to genealogical classification. One might be tempted to distinguish Romeo from Montague and Juliet from Capulet. Perhaps they are, both of them, tempted to do it. But they don't do it, and one should notice that in the denunciation of the name (Act II, scene ii), they also attack their forenames, or at least that of Romeo, which seems to form part of the family name. The forename still bears the name of the father, it recalls the law of genealogy. Romeo himself, the bearer of the name is not the name, it is Romeo, the name which he bears. And is it necessary to call the hearer by the name which he bears? She calls him by it in order to tell him: I love you, free us from your name, Romeo, don't bear it any longer, Romeo, the name of Romeo: JULIET.
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love And no longer he a Capulet. (II, ii, 33-36) She is speaking, here, in the night, and there is nothing to assure her that she is addressing Romeo himself, present in person. In order to "already you are in memory of your own death; and your friends as well, and all the others, both of your own death and already of their own through yours" (87n1). 4 22 . 423 • APHORISM COUNTERTIME ask Romeo to refuse his name, she can only, in his absence, address his name or his shadow. Romeo—himself--is in the shadow and he wonders if it is time to take her at her word or if he should wait a little.
Taking her at her word will mean committing himself to disowning his name, a little later on. For the moment, he decides to wait and to carry on listening: ROMEO [aside]. Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
JULIET.
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy: Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand nor foot Nor arm nor face nor any other part Belonging to a man. 0 be some other name.
What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.
ROMEO. I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I'll be new baptis'd:
Henceforth I never will be Romeo. JULIET.
What man art thou that thus bescreen'd in night So stumblest on my counsel?
ROMEO. By a name know not how to tell thee who I am:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I it written, I would rear the word. 4 2 -4 APHORISM CouNri:R - rimE JULIET.
My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words Of thy tongue's uttering, yet I know the sound, Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?
ROMEO.
Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike. (11, ii, 37-61) When she addresses Romeo in the night, when she asks him "0 19. Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? / Deny thy father and refuse thy name," she seems to be addressing him, himself, Romeo hearer of the name Romeo, the one who is not Romeo since he has been asked to disown his father and his name. She seems, then, to call him beyond his name. He is not present, she is not certain that he is there, himself, beyond his name, it is night and this night screens the lack of distinction between the name and the bearer of the name. It is in his name that she continues to call him, and that she calls on him not to call himself Romeo any longer, and that she asks him, Romeo, to renounce his name. But it is, whatever she may say or deny, he whom she loves. Who, him? Romeo. The one who calls himself Romeo, the bearer of the name, who calls himself Romeo although he is not only the one who bears this name and although he exists, without being visible or present in the night, outside his name.
2.0. Night. Everything that happens at night, for Romeo and Juliet, is decided rather in the penumbra, between night and day. The indecision between Romeo and the bearer of this name, between "Ro- meo," the name of Romeo and Romeo himself. Theater, we say, is visibility, the stage [la scene]. This drama belongs to the night because it stages what is not seen, the name; it stages what one calls because one cannot see or because one is not certain of seeing what one calls.
Theater of the name, theater of night. The name calls beyond presence, phenomenon, light, beyond the day, beyond the theater. It keep whence the mourning and surviva what is no longer present, the invisible: what from now on will no longer see the light of day. 4 2 9 i IL APHORISM COUNTERTIMF V APHORISM COUNTFRTIME 21. She wants the death of Romeo. She will have it. The death of his name (" 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy"), certainly, the death of "Romeo," but they will not be able to get free from their name, they know this without knowing it [sans le savoir]. She declares war on "Romeo," on his name, in his name, she will win this war only on the death of Romeo himself. Himself? Who? Romeo. But "Romeo" is not Romeo. Precisely. She wants the death of "Romeo." Romeo dies, • "Romeo" lives on. She keeps him dead in his name. Who? Juliet, Romeo.
22. Aphorism: separation in language and, in it, through the name which closes the horizon. Aphorism is at once necessary and impossible. Romeo is radically separated from his name. He, his living self, living and singular desire, he is not "Romeo," but the separation, the aphorism of the name remains impossible. He dies without his name but he dies also because he has not been able to set himself free from his name, or from his father, even less to renounce him, to respond to Juliet's request ("Deny thy father and refuse thy name"). When she says to him: my enemy is only your name, she does 23. not think "my" enemy. Juliet, herself, has nothing against the name of Romeo. It is the name which she bears (Juliet and Capulet) that finds itself at war with the name of Romeo. The war takes place between the names. And when she says it, she is not sure, in the night, that she is making contact with Romeo himself. She speaks to him, she supposes him to be distinct from his name since she addresses him in order to say to him: "You are yourself, not a Montague." But he is not there. At least she cannot be sure of his presence. It is within herself, deep down inside, that she is addressing him in the night, but still him in his name, and in the most exclamatory form of apostrophe: "0 Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" She does not say to him: why are you called Romeo, why do you bear this name (like an article of clothing, an ornament, a detachable sign)? She says to him: why are you Romeo? She knows it: detachable and dissociable, aphoristic though it be, his name is his essence:
Inseparable from his being. And in asking him to abandon his name, 42.
6 she is no doubt asking him to live at last, and to live his love (for in order to live oneself truly, it is necessary to elude the law of the name, the familial law made for survival and constantly recalling me to death), but she is just as much asking him to die, since his life is his name. He exists in his name: "wherefore art thou Romeo?" "0 Romeo, Romeo." Romeo is Romeo, and Romeo is not Romeo.
He is himself only in abandoning his name, he is himself only in his name. Romeo can (be) call(ed) himself only if he abandons his name, he calls himself only from his name. Sentence of death and of survival: twice rather than once. Speaking to the one she loves within herself and outside herself, 24. in the half-light, Juliet murmurs the most implacable analysis of the name. Of the name and the proper name. Implacable: she expresses the judgment, the death sentence [l'arret de mortj, the fatal truth of the name. Pitilessly she analyzes, element by element. What's Montague?
Nothing of yourself, you are yourself and not Montague, she tells him.
Not only does this name say nothing about you as a totality but it doesn't say anything, it doesn't even name a part of you, neither your hand, nor your foot, neither your arm, nor your face, nothing that is human! This analysis is implacable for it announces or denounces the inhumanity or the ahumanity of the name. A proper name does not name anything which is human, which belongs to a human body, a human spirit, an essence of man. And yet this relation to the inhuman only befalls man, for him, to him, in the name of man. He alone gives himself this inhuman name. And Romeo would not be what he is, a stranger to his name, without this name. Juliet, then, pursues her analysis: the names of things do not belong to the things any more than the names of men belong to men, and yet they are quite differently separable. The example of the rose, once more. A rose remains what it is without its name, Romeo is no longer what he is without his name.
But, for a while, Juliet makes out as if Romeo would lose nothing in losing his name: like the rose. But like a rose, she says to him in short, and without genealogy, "without why." (Supposing that the rose, all the roses of thought, of literature, of mysticism, this "formidable anthology," absent from every bouquet...) 42.7 APHORISM COUNTERTIME She does not tell him to lose all names, rather just to change 25. names: "0 be some other name." But that can mean two things: take another proper name (a human name, this inhuman thing which belongs only to man); or: take another kind of name, a name which is not that of a man, take the name of a thing then, a common name which, like the name of the rose, does not have that inhumanity which consists in affecting the very being of the one who bears it even though it names nothing of himself. And, after the colon, there is the question: 0 be some other name: What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title.' 26. The name would only be a "title," and the title is not the thing which it names, any more than a title of nobility participates in the very thing, the family, the work, to which it is said to belong.
Romeo and Juliet also remains th survivin title of an entire family of plays. We must apply what goes on in these plays also to the plays themselves, to their genealogy, their idiom, their singularity, their survival. Juliet offers Romeo an infinite deal, what is apparently the most 27. dissymmetrical of contracts: you can gain all without losing anything, it is just a matter of a name. In renouncing your name, you renounce nothing, nothing of you, of yourself, nor anything human.
In exchange, and without losing anything, you gain me, and not just a part of me, but the whole of myself: "Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself." He will have to. TN 1 have followed the text of Derrida's quotation here, thus preserving the colon at the end of the first line. The Arden version, already cited, gives a full stop. As Brian Gibbons points out (Arden, 12.9), there have been several variants and varying hypotheses regarding these lines of the play. Confusingly perhaps, Qz--.4 and F in fact give: he some other name / Belonging to a man." 4 2 .
8 APHORISM COUNTERTIME gained everything, he will have lost everything: name and life, and 28. The circle of all these names in 0: words, Romeo, rose, love. He has accepted the deal, he takes her at her word ("I take thee at thy word") at the moment where she proposes that he take her in her entirety ("Take all myself"). Play of idiom: in taking you at your word, in taking up the challenge, in agreeing to this incredible, priceless exchange, I take the whole of you. And in exchange for nothing, for a word, my name, which is nothing, nothing human, nothing of myself, or else nothing for mysei. 1 give nothing in raking you at your word, abandon nothing and take absolutely all of you. In truth, and they both know the truth of aphorism, he will lose everything. They will lose everything in this aporia, this double aporia of the proper name.
And for having agreed to exchange the proper name of Romeo for a common name: not that of rose, but of love. For Romeo does not renounce all of his name, only the name of his father, that is to say his proper name, if one can still say that: "I take thee at thy word. / Call me but love, and I'll be new baptis'd: / Henceforth 1 never will be Romeo." He simultaneously gains himself and loses himself not only in the common name, but also in the common law of love: Call me love. Call me your love.
The dissymmetry remains infinite. It also hangs on this: Romeo 29, does not make the same demand of her. He does not request that this woman who is secretly to be his wife renounce her name or disown her father. As if that were obvious and there was no call for any such rift [dechirement] (he will speak in a moment of tearing [dichirer] his name, the writing or the letter of his name, that is if he had written it himself, which is just what is in principle and originarily excluded). Paradox, irony, reversal of the common law? Or a repetition which on the contrary confirms the truth of this law? Usually, in our cultures, the husband keeps his name, that of his father, and the wife renounces hers. When the husband gives his name to his wife, it is not, as here, in order to lose it, or to change it, but to impose it by keeping it. Here it is she who asks him to renounce his father and to change 42.9 APHORISM COUNTERTIME his nam e . B ut this inversion confirms the law: the name of the father should be kept by the son, it is from him that there is some sense in tearing it away, and not at all from the daughter who has never been put in charge of it. The terrible lucidity of Juliet. She knows the two bonds of the law, the double bind, which ties a son to the name of his father. He can only live if he asserts himself in a singular fashion, without his inherited name. But the writing of this name, which he has not written himself ("Had I it written, I would tear the word"), constitutes him in his very being, without naming anything of him, and by denying it he can only wipe himself out. In sum, at the very most he can deny it, renounce it, he can neither efface it nor tear it up. He is therefore lost in any case and she knows it. And she knows it because she loves him and she loves him because she knows it. And she demands his death from him by demanding that he hold onto his life because she loves him, because she knows, and because she knows that death will not come to him by accident. He is doomed [vouel to death, and she with him, by the double law of the name.
30. There would he no contretemps without the double law of the name. The contretemps presupposes this inhuman, too human, inadequation which always dislocates a proper name. The secret mar- riage, the pledge (sacramentum), the double survival which it involves, its constitutive anachrony, all of this obeys the same law. This law, the law of contretemps, is double since it is divided; it carries aphorism within itself, as its truth. Aphorism is the law.
31- his father of his own accord. He cannot want to do so of his own accord, even though this emancipation is nevertheless being presented to him as the chance of at last being himself, beyond the nam the chance of at last living, for he carries the name as his death.
He could not want it himself, in himself, because he is not without his name. He can only desire it from the call of the other, in the name of the other. Moreover he only hates his name starting from the moment Juliet, as it were, demands it from him: APHORISM COUNTERTIME My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself Because it is an enemy to thee. Had I it written, I would tear the word. 32. When she thinks she recognizes him in the shadow, by moon- light, the drama of the name is consummated (Juliet: "My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words / Of thy tongue's uttering, yet I know the sound. / Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?" Romeo:
"Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike"). She recognizes him and calls him by his name (Are you not Romeo and a Montague?), she identifies him on the one hand by the timbre of his voice, that is to say by the words she hears without being able to see, and on the other hand at the moment when he has, obeying the injunction, renounced his name and his father. Survival and death are at work, in other words the moon. But this power of death which appears by moonlight is called Juliet, and the sun which she comes to figure all of a sudden carries life and death in the name of the father. She kills the moon. What does Romeo say at the opening of the scene (which is not a scene since the name destines it to invisibility, but which is a theater since its light is artificial and figurative)? "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun! / Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon, / Who is already sick and pale with grief . . . " (II, ii, 2 -5). 33• The lunar face of this shadow play, a certain coldness of Romeo and Juliet. Not all is of ice or glass, but the ice on it does not come only from death, from the marble to which everything seems doomed (the tomb, the monument, the grave, the flowers on the lady's grave), in this sepulchrally statuesque fate which entwines and sepa- rates these two lovers, starting from the fact of their names. No, the coldness which little by little takes over the body of the play and, as if in advance, cadaverizes it, is perhaps irony, the figure or rhetoric of irony, the contretemps of ironic consciousness. It always places itself disproportionately between finitude and infinitude, it makes use of inadequation, of aphorism, it analyzes and analyzes, it analyzes the law of misidentification, the implacable necessity, the machine of the Even if he wanted to, Romeo could not renounce his name and 4;0 431 APHORISM COUNTERTIME 41111 APHORISM COUNTERTIME 11111 proper name that obliges me to live through precisely that, in other opportunity to show what irony is, for example in Romeo and billet, words my name, of which l am dying. one is disappointed, for it is no longer a question of irony."" 34- truth which carries death, aphorism separates, and in the first place separates me from my name. I am not my name. One might as well say that I should be able to survive it. But firstly it is destined to survive me. In this way it announces my death. Non-coincidence and contretemps between my name and me, between the experience ac- cording to which I am named or hear myself named and my "living present." Rendezvous with my name. Untimely, had timing, at the wrong moment.
35. Changing names: the dance, the substitution, the masks, the simulacrum, the rendezvous with death. Untimely. Never on time.
36. Speaking ironically, that is to say in the rhetorical sense of the figure of irony: conveying the opposite of what one says. Here, the impossible then: 1) two lovers both outlive each other, each seeing the other die; z) the name constitutes them but without being anything of themselves, condemning them to be what, beneath the mask, they are not, to being merged with the mask; 3) the two are united by that which separates them, etc. And they state this clearly, they formalize it as even a philosopher would not have dared to do. A vein, through the sharp tip of this analysis, receives the distilled potion. It does not wait, it does not allow any time, not even that of the drama, it comes at once to turn to ice the heart of their pledges. This potion would be the true poison, the poisoned truth of this drama.
37. Irony of the aphorism. In the Aesthetics, Hegel pokes fun at those who, quick to heap praises on ironists, show themselves not even capable of analyzing the analytical irony of Romeo and Juliet. He has a go at Tieck: "But when one thinks one has found the perfect 38. Another series, which cuts across all the others: the name, the law, the genealogy, the double survival, the contretemps, in short the aphorism of Romeo and Juliet. Not of Romeo and of Juliet but of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's play of that title. It belongs to a series, to the still-living palimpsest, to the open theater of narratives which bear this name. It survives them, but they also survive thanks to it. Would such a double survival have been possible "without that title," as Juliet put it? And would the names of Matteo Bandello or Luigi da Porto survive without that of Shakespeare, who survived them?' And without the innumerable repetitions, each staked in its particular way, under the same name? Without the grafting of names?
And of other plays? "0 be some other name . .
39. The absolute aphorism: a proper name. Without genealogy, without the least copula. End of drama. Curtain. Tableau (The Two Lovers United in Death by Angelo dall'Oca Bianca). Tourism, December sun in Verona ("Verona by that name is known" [V, iii, 199]). A true sun, the other ("The sun for sorrow will not show his head" [V, iii, 305]). T.
TN See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 69. z. EN Bandello and da Porto were the authors of two of the many earlier versions of the Romeo and Juliet story. Irony of the proper name, as analyzed by Juliet. Sentence of 43 1 433 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DERRIDA'S WRITING WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE) The following is a telegraphically annotated list of texts by Derrida that engage with literary works and with the question of literature, augmented by other texts by Derrida referred to in the course of this book; it will thus serve as both a guide for further reading and a list of works cited. (It should be added that none of Derrida's writings can he said to be wholly irrelevant to the question of literature.) Wherever there is an English translation in existence, this is the text that is cited.
In the case of books first published in French, the date of the original publication is given after the title. Although the texts included in this volume are mentioned here, the bibliographical information provided in the headnotes is not duplicated. (A bibliography of Derrida's publi- cations from 1962. to 1990, compiled by Albert Leventure, appears in Textual Practice 5.1 [Spring 1994) "Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion." In Limited Inc, r i 6o. Alterites. With Pierre-Jean Labarriere, Francis Guihal, and Stanislas Breton. Paris: Editions Osiris, 1986. Includes transcripts of discus- sions on such topics as the other, undecidability, ethics, responsibil- ity, Necessity.
"Aphorism Countertime." Included in this volume.
"Before the Law." Included in this volume. 435 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY "Che cos'e la poesia?" In A Derrida Reader, 22.3-37. Derrida's re- sponse to the question "What is poetry?": the poem, the "poematic," learning by heart.
"Cheira." Poikilia: Etudes offertes a Jean-Pierre Vernant. Paris: EHESS, 1987. 265-96.
"Circonfession." Jacques Derrida. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. An exploration/explosion of the autobio- graphical mode. English translation in preparation.
"The Deaths of Roland Barthes." Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Hugh J. Silverman. New York: Routledge, 1988. 259-96. This tribute to Barthes includes some speculations on the question of reference which are highly relevant to Derrida's readings of literary texts.
"Declarations of Independence." New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 7-15. On the act of founding an institution. "Deconstruction and the Other." Dialogues with Contemporary Con- tinental Thinkers. Ed. Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. 105-16. Touches at several points on the importance of literature in Derrida's work.
"Deconstruction in America: An Interview." Critical Exchange 17 (Winter 1985): 1-33. Among other issues Derrida discusses the significance of literature for deconstruction. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. An invaluable anthology, covering a wide range of work, mostly in the form of excerpts. Includes "Che cos'e la poesia?" and "Letter to a Japanese Friend." "Difference." In Margins, 1-2.7, and Speech and Phenomena, 129- 60. An essay of major significance in Derrida's oeuvre; relevant to his work on literature and everything else.
Dissemination (1972). Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Athlone, 1981. Comprises "Outwork," "Plato's Pharmacy," "The Double Session," and "Dissemination." "Dissemination." In Dissemination, 287-366. A highly citational en- gagement with Nombres, an unorthodox "literary" text by Philippe Sollers.
"The Double Session." In Dissemination, 173-285. Mallarme and the question of literature; extract included in this volume ("The First Session").
Du droit a la philosophic.. Paris: Galilee, 1990. A substantial collection of pieces on the institutions of philosophy and the university. Trans- lation in progress, together with additional material, for Institutions of Philosophy.
The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (1982). Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Derrida's lecture on Nietzsche, "Otohiographies," is followed by two roundtable discus- sions-on autobiography and translation-to which he makes ex- tended contributions.
"Economimesis." Diacritics 11.z (Summer 1981): 3-25. A discussion of Kant's aesthetic theory, and its imbrication with economics.
"Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book." In Writing and Differ- ence, 64-78. On the writing of Jabes, especially the first volume of Le livre des questions. Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction (1962). Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Stony Brook: Nicolas Hays, 1978. "Ellipsis." In Writing and Difference, 294-300. Short piece on Jabes's Le retour au livre (the third volume of Le livre des questions). "Envois." In The Post Card, 1-256. An epistolary work ranging across, and exemplifying, a number of concerns with implications for litera- ture; Joyce, in particular, features occasionally by name and through- out by implication.
"Le facteur de la verite." In The Post Card, 411-96. A lengthy engage- ment with Lacan's discussion of a Poe story, "The Purloined Letter." (An earlier translation was entitled "The Purveyor of Truth.") Feu la cendre. Paris: Des Femmes, 1987. A "conversation" around the term cendre ("ash"), with several literary references (including Virginia Woolf). English translation in preparation.
"Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword." Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume. Ed. Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin. New York: Rizzolli; London: Academy Editions, 1989. 67-69. Aphorisms on architecture, prefaces, the work of the Interna- tional College of Philosophy-and on the aphorism.
"Forcener le subjectile." Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits. Paule Thevenin and Jacques Derrida. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. 55-108. On the drawings, and associated texts, of Artaud. English translation in preparation.
"Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,' " Cardozo Law Review II (1990): 919-1045. On Benjamin's "Critique of 1 436 437 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Violence"; includes an analysis of judgment that is highly relevant to literary criticism. "Geopsychanalyse 'and the rest of the world,' " In Psyche, 32.7-52.. English translation to appear in Negotiations. Glas (1974). Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. The right-hand column consti- tutes one of Derrida's most extended engagements with a literary oeuvre, that of Jean Genet (particularly Funeral Rights, Miracle of the Rose, Our Lady of the Flowers, and The Thief's Journal). Of Grammatology (1967). Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Writing and the sign, especially in texts by Saussure, Levi-Strauss, an predominantly- Rousseau. A chapte "... That Dangerous Supplement . . ." included in this volume.
"An Idea of Flaubert: 'Plato's Letter.' " MLN 99 (1984): 748-68. Flaubert's interest in, and relation to, philosophy. Institutions of Philosophy. Ed. Deborah Esch and Thomas Keenan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming. An ex- panded English version of Du droit a la philosophie. "An Interview with Derrida." Derrida and "Differance." Ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. 71-82.. Some comments on the importance of literature for Derrida, in an interview with Le nouvel observateur. "Interview with Jean LucNancy." Topoi 7 (1988) :
113-2.t. On the question of the "subject." Reprinted in Who Comes After the Sub- ject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991). "Languages and Institutions of Philosophy." Recherches simiotiques1 Semiotic Inquiry 4 (1984): 91-154. "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration." For Nelson Mandela. Ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili. New York: Seaver Books/Henry Holt, 1987.11-42..
"Letter to a Japanese Friend." Derrida and "Differance." Ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. t-5. Reprinted in A Derrida Reader, 2.70-76. A useful clarification of the term deconstruction. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Includes "Signature Event Context," "Limited Inc a b c . . . ," and "Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion." SELEC:TED BIBLIOCIRAI'FlY "Limited Inc a b c . " In Limited Inc, 2.9-11o. A response to John Searle's attack on "Signature Event Context." "Living On/Borderlines." Deconstruction and Criticism. Harold Bloom et al. New York: Continuum, 1979.75-176. Concerning Shelley's "The Triumph of Life" and Blanchoes The Madness of the Day and Death Sentence; and in a continuous footnote, the question of translation.
"Mallarme." Included in this volume.
Margin of Philosophy (1972.). Trans. Alan Bass. New York: Univer- sity of Chicago Press; Brighton: Harvester, 1982.. Includes "Tym- pan," "Differance," "White Mythology," "Qual Quelle," and "Sig- nature Event Context." Memoires d'aveugle: L'autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Reunion des musees nationaux, 199o. The catalogue of an exhibition of drawings at the Louvre, chosen and discussed by Derrida; the or- ganizing topic of blindness embraces a number of literary artists as well, including Milton, Marvell, Joyce, and Borges. English transla- tion in preparation.
Memoires: For Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
A range of topics of relevance to literature, including de Man's work in relation to Derrida's, the poetry of Hiilderlin, and deconstruction in America.
"Mochlns or The Conflict of the Faculties." Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Ed. Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming. On the question of academic responsibility and the place of philosophy in the university.
Negotiations: Writings. Ed. Thomas Keenan and Deborah Esch. Min- neapolis: Minnesota University Press, forthcoming. A collection of texts by Derrida on political questions.
"No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)." Diacritics 14.z (Summer 1984): 2.-31. Includes a re- markable discussion of the nuclear age as the "age of literature." "Ocelle comme pas un." Published as a preface to a fictional work by Jos Joliet, L'enfant au chien-assis. Paris: Galilee, I980. 9-43. - No English translation.
"Otohiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name." In The Ear of the Other, 1-38. The unfixable hound- 43 8 439 SELECTED BIBLIOORA PEIY 41, • "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils." Diacritics 13.3 (Fall 1983): 3-20. The role of reason in the function- ing of the university.
"Psyche: Invention of the Other." Extract included in this volume.
Psyche: Inventions de l'autre. Paris: Galilee, 1987. A large collection of pieces published over ten years, including "Psyche," "Aphorism Countertime," "Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreword," and several others that are relevant to the question of literature.
"Qual Quelle: Valery's Sources." In Margins, 273-306. The question of the "I" as source or origin, with special reference to Valery's Notebooks.
"Racism's Last Word." Critical Inquiry r (1985): 290-99. "The Retrait of Metaphor." Enclitic 2.2 (1978): 4-33. A postscript to ary of "life" and "works"; the role of the other in the meaning of a text.
"Outwork, prefacing." In Dissemination, 1-59. The question of the "book" and its limits; includes discussions of Lautreamont, Novatis, and Mallarme.
Parages. Paris: Galilee, 1986. Four texts on Blanchot's fictions, three of which have been translated separately ("Living On/Borderlines," "The Law of Genre," and "Title [to be specified]"). As yet untrans- lated is "Pas," which elaborates upon the viens (come) and the pas (step/no) in/of Blanchot. A translation of the volume is in prepa- ration. "La parole soufflee." In Writing and Difference, 169-95. Artaud's theater as both a fulfillment and a disruption of metaphysics.
"Plato's Pharmacy." In Dissemination, 61-171. Plato's attempt to discredit writing; constantly relevant to the question of literature, if not directly addressed to it.
"The Politics of Friendship," The Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 632-44. A discussion of some texts on friendship which has a bearing on the ethics of literary criticism.
Positions (1972). Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Athlone, 1981. Three interviews with Derrida, in which the question of literature is frequently broached. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980). Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Includes "Envois" and "Le facteur de la verite." SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY "White Mythology" and further discussion of metaphor, especially in Heidegger. Shibboleth: For Paul Celan. Extract included in this volume. "Signature Event Context." In Margins, 307-10, and Limited Inc, I- 23 (different translations). Also reprinted in A Derrida Reader, 82- i II. Though not specifically concerned with literature, this essay is one of the best introductions to deconstruction's relation to philoso- phy, and in particular to the operations of iterahility and the sig- nature. Signeponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. The writing of Francis Ponge; extract in- cluded in this volume.
"Some Questions and Responses." The Linguistics of Writing: Argu- ments between Language and Literature. Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. Manchester: Manches- ter University Press, 1987; New York: Routiedge, 1988. 252-64.
An interview on aspects of deconstruction and linguistics.
"Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms." The States of "Theory." Ed. David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 199o.
63-94. Theor or rather "theory" in America. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (1967). Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1978). Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. The question of style, the question of woman, in Nietzsche.
"Telepathy." Oxford Literary Review r o (1988): 3-41. Presented as an "accidentally" omitted portion of "Envois," this epistolary essay is concerned with the question of touching at a distance.
"The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation." In Writ- ing and Difference, 231-50. Artaud's theory of a "theater of cruelty" as marking the limits of mimesis and representation.
"The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan Montefiore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 34-50. Derrida's thesis defense; includes comments on the place of literature in his work.
"Title (to be specified)." Sub-stance 3r (1981): 5-22. On titles: Blan- chot's The Madness of the Day via Baudelaire and Ponge. 44 0 44 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 4 ■ "Des Tours de Babel." Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 165-207. The ques- tion of translation, particularly with reference to Benjamin.
The Truth in Painting (1978). Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Writings on painting (and on writings on painting). The discussion of framing in Kant's aesthetic theory-"Parergon" (15-147)-is particularly pertinent to considerations of literature.
"Two Words for Joyce." Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1984. 145-59. Both a general response to Joyce and a focused account of two "words" in Finnegans Wake. "Tympan." In Margins, ix-xxix; reprinted in A Derrida Reader, 148- 6 8. The question of the limit; discussed in counterpoint with a passage from Michel Leiris's Biffures. "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce." Included in this volume.
"White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." In Margins, zo7-71. Metaphor as philosophical, philosophy as metaphorical; the question of metaphor and mimesis. Not, however, a "literary" reading of philosophy, as the subtitle might suggest.
"Women in the Beehive: A Seminar." Men in Feminism. Ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. New York: Methuen, 1987. 189-203. An interview which raises questions of feminism, the law, and the gift.
Writing and Difference (1967). Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978. Includes "Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book," "La parole soufflae," "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," and "Ellipsis." INDEX OF NAMES Texts included in this collection are indicated by bold type; refer- ences to the introduction and headnotes are in italics. L'ecriture du desastre (The Writing of the Disaster) 246n La folie du jour (The Madness of the Day) 206-07, 221-22,1.31- 51., /87 Une scene primitive (A Primal Scene) 246 Bossuet, Jacques Benigne 339n Bouchardy, Francois Son Bouchet, Andre du 378 Babel, Tower of z57, z68, 405-08 Braque, Georges 367 Bach, Johann Sebastian 318 Broda, Martine 401 Bachelard, Gaston 153 - 54n, 1 75 Biichner, Georg 377-78 Bandello, Matteo 433 Budgen, Frank 2.95 Bataille, Georges 4n, 41, 51. 59, 93n, Burgelin, Pierre Son 151 Baudelaire, Charles 374n Beckett, Samuel 6o-62. Camus, Albert 34 Beissier, Fernand 148, 1 57 Candaux, Jean-Daniel 8on Benjamin, Walter 384 Carroll, David 13n, 2521 Bennington, Geoffrey r rn Celan, Paul 19, 41, 42., 6o, 6z, 6 7, 370- Berlin Jacques 2.66n 72, 373-413 The Meridian 370, 377-87 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand 51 Bible, The 67, zo3n, 217, 2.19, 2.47, Champtleury, Jules 156n 32.3, 374, 377 1_5, zo411 Chretien de Troyes Blanchot, Maurice 41, 42., 5t, 6z, 66, Cicero 311-14 71, 2.89 Cixous, Helene 59 L'arat de mort (Death Sentence) Clark, Timothy 25n 19, 2.33 Abel, Karl 173Abraham, Karl 88n Adorno, Theodor 2.73 Algeria 38-39 Algerian war 403 Apuleius 331 Aristotle 111, 1 16, 121, 126, 127, 139n Artaud, Antonin 4n, 41, 51, 59, 61, 66Austin, J. L. 300, 330 44z 443 INDEX OF NAMES INDEX OF NAMES Claude!, Paul 269n Culler, Jonathan r o Curtius, Ernst 166 Dante Alighieri 113o de Beauvoir, Simone 57 de Man, Paul 3 11 , 12-130, 5o, 51, 311, ;13 - 14, 318, 320-21, 325-27, 329- 3 2 Delacampagne, Christian 336nDerathe, Robert Son Derrida, Jacques-works by "Afterword" 16n, 240 Alterites 24n "Aphorism Countertime" i8, r9, 62., 69, 2 53r 4 1 4 -1 5, 4 16- 33 "Before the Law" ion, 23-14, 40, 181-82, 183-220 "Che cos'i la poesia?" 22, 65 "ChOra" 53 "Circonfessions" z6n"The Conflict of Faculties" 511 ..
That Dangerous Supplement . • ." 9, 1611, 24, 76-77, 78-109 "Deconstruction and the Other" zo "Deconstruction in America" 1, 26n "Differance" Sin Dissemination 8 "The Double Session" 51, 7z The Ear of the Other 5, z6n Edmund ! lusserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction 42.111 "Envois" r r, 170. 2.6n, 3ozn Feu la cendre 65 "Fifty-two Aphorisms" 4 is - "The First Session" 2, 6, 127-29, 129-80 "Force of Law" r8n, 2411 "Geopsychanalyse" 336n Glas 1 r, 71, 73, 289n, 363 Of Grammatology 8-9. 24n, 43, 7o, 78-109, 2.96n "An Interview with Derrida" 211 "Languages and Institutions of Philosophy" 157n "The Law of Genre" r5, 68, 182, 221-22, 223-252, 345 "Letter to a Japanese Friend" 2111 "Limited Inc a b c ..." 2-311, 64 "Laving On/13orderlines" r7, 19, "N 4 1:1 7 1.
n irme" r o-ir 1, 111-126 Min:tures 13n, 418n, 422n "No Apocalypse, Not Now" 2411 "Otobiographies" 418n Parages 6z, 22.1, 2Syn "Plato's Pharmacy" 139n, 296n "The Politics of Friendship" 511, 2on Positions 3n, 411, 25, 44, 49 The Post Card 56, 73, 75, 2 .94 "Psyche" 3n, 5, 13n, 19, 21, ;to- ". 3 11- 343 "Racism's 1.ast Word" ;;6n Shibboleth 14n. 19, 6z, 6 5, 345. 37 0 - 7 2 .
373 - 4 1 3.4 1 5 "Signature Event Context" 18, 6 4, Sig 3 n 4 s1;o:r 4 ge 713 211, (8. 8011, 289n, 344 - 4 6 , 346-69. 4 i Sn "Some Questions and Responses" 2711 "Some Statements and Truisms" Ion Speech and Phenomena 8, 421n "This Strange Institution Called Literature" 33-76 "Telepathy" 1711 "The Time of a Thesis" 1, 20, 33 "Des Tours de Babel" z57n The Truth in Painting 11 "Two Words for Joyce" 6z, 253, 257n, 292.n. 2.94, 3ozn "Ulysses Gramophone" 3n, r8, 21, 26n, 6z, 74, 253-56, 256-309, 34 1 n , 345, 415 "White Mythology" 7n "Women in the Beehive" 3ozn Descartes, Rene 53, 76, 143, 2.57, 31 1 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean 1 4 1 Diderot, Denis 139n Donzelot, Jacques 336n Dragonetti, Roger 18611, 10411, 2.14n Elijah 253-54, 2.77-78, 284-86, 288, . 289-90, 295 Eliot, George 59 444 Empidocle =41 Eros 332-33 Fabre, Jean Son Fenelon, Francois 339n Finley, M. I. 336n Fitch, Noel Riley 266n Flaubert, Gustave 4 1 Fliess, Wilhelm 192., 194 Foucault, Michel Son Frankfurt 273, 184 Frente Popular 400 Freud, Sigmund 9, 173n, 175, 190, 191-95, 197-99, 109, 2.88, 194n, 41in Gabler, Hans Walter 166n Gagnehin, Bernard Son, 93n Gasche, Rodolphe ion, 11, r3n, 1511, 21-220, 70-71, 318 Gautier, Thiophile 154-56, 167, 177 Gearhart, Suzanne /30, 318 Genet, Jean 66, 72., 289 Genette, Gerard 036, 22.8n G G ii d b e bo i n i s, Brian 269n Gilbert, Stuart 287 Giidel, Kurt 172.
Godzich, Wlad 13n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2.77 Gouhier, Henri Son Groethuysen, Bernard Son Guyon, Bernard Son Guyot, Charly Son Hamacher, Werner 374n Hartman, Geoffrey H. 11 Harvey, Irene E. II Heath, Stephen 170 Hegel, z8Aa l A esth e ti cs F 321, c3s34 .
1,3 7 2.
6, 116, 171, 173, 5-503,337 , 377 108, and idealism 143-44, 158 Phenomenology of Spirit 17 211, 262. Icidegger, Martin 51, 61, 81, 19o, 206, 2.-6, ;58, 376-77 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 190n and poetry 251I, 48 fern rind Zeit 2.73 and truth 141 Helena, Saint 338 Hobson, Marian ro6n Hoffman, E. T. A. 154n, 156n, 157, 173n Holton, Gerald 336n Homer 45, 1 33n, 196n, 281 Husserl, Edmund 8, 9, 44, 46, 174, 4.1111 Hyppolite, Jean 15811 !mai, Massaki z64 International Brigades 400 Jannequin, Clement 31811 Jordan 400 Joyce, James 41, 43, 5o, 51, 58-59, 60- 61, 67, 71, 253-56, 256, 309, 405 Finnegans Wake 253, 259, 2.68, 280-81, 184, 294, 3 0 5 Ulysses 22. 45, 74, 253-55, 1 5 8- 78, 280-309 Joyce, Nora 19; Joyce, Stephen James 17711 Kafka, Franz 6o, 67, 3 8 4 Before the Law 68, 18r-82, r 83- 220 The Problem of Our Laws zos, 2.17 The Trial 181, 201, 209, 2.13-214, 117-20 Kant, Immanuel 5n, 53, t yo, 191 n, 19311, 196-97, 209, 210, 2 .4 8 Kantorowicz, Ernst 214n Khomeini, Ayatollah 37 1.a Fontaine, Jean de 32.8, 331, 35o Lacan, Jacques 419n Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 2.27, 1 43 1.aforgue, Rene 103 l.assailly, Charles 154n Leavis, F. R. r 7n Lefort, Claude 336n Leihniz, G. W. 3 t t Lenz, Jakob Michael 378, 384-8 6 Lesseps, Ferdinand de t it Levi-Strauss, Claude 78 Levinas, Emmanuel 9 Llewelyn, John I In 445 F INDEX OF NAMES INDEX OF NAMES Logic, Port Royal 3z Loraux, Nicole 33611 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 16rn, 282 Timaeus 53 Poe, Edgar Allan 154n, 156n, 31911, 4 1 9 0 Shakespeare, William 4, 22, 6z-67, 145, z80, 302, 414 - 15, 456 - 33 Shelley, Percy Bysshe r9 69, Tieck, Ludwig 432 Tinrorerto 338 Tokyo 258-59, 261-64, 309 Pompey 2.08 Sailers, Philippe 4n Madrid 400, 401, 402., 410 Malehranche, Nicolas 384 Malherbe, Francois 352, 366-67 Mallarme, Stephane 4, 6, 9, 41, 4 1 , 7 1 , ro-8o, 271 "Mimique" 6, 114, 12.4,127-8, 1 3 1 , 1 34n, 1 35, 1 43 -80 , 2 54 "Mamma" (Mme de Warens) 9 2 - 94, 99, 102 p o w, Francis 50, 58 - 59, 66, 72, 289, 307n, 310. 320, 33 1 , 344, 346, 34 6- 69 "Fable" 310- 11 , 3 18- 34, 33 8, 34 0- 4 2 Popular Front 4oz.
Porto, Luigi da 433 Poulet, Georges Son Pound, Ezra st Sorrell, Martin pa Spada, Marcel 366 Spinoza, Baruch de 1760 Starobinski, Jean 78-79, 8on, ioon Staten, Henry tin Stein, Gertrude 59 Stelling-Michaud, Sven Son Stendhal 332 Steppe, Wolfhard z66n Ulmer, Gregory L. ro, I r Valery, Paul z6911, 3zz-33 Valvins 149 Vandier, Jacques 88n Verona 433 Vico, Giambattista, 67, z80 Vienna 401, 410 Marguerirte, Paul 146-47n, 1 49 - 54, 163, 167 Prague z r 8 Proust, Marcel 2690 Story of the Grail see Chretien de Troyes Warens, Madame de see "Mamma" Marguerirte, Victor 1 49 Psyche 331-33 Szondi, Peter 391 - 9; Weber, Samuel 3n Marx, Karl 358 Webster, John 154 Mauron, Charles 1540 Rabare, Jean-Michel z65 - 68 Talmud, The zr7, 2.59 Woolf, Virginia 59 Mesguich, Daniel 66, 4 1 4 Raymond, Marcel 8on, 930 Therese (Levasseur) 98-102 Wordsworth, William 33o-31 Montaigne, Michel de 183 Reichert, Klaus 268 Revue independante, La 145 - 46 Nancy, Jean-Luc 243, 411n Rilke, Rainer Maria 32.611 Narcissus 325, 3260 Rorty, Richard 12n Nerval, Gerard de 156n Rosanov, M. N. 378 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, z6n, 34, 37, 39, Sr, 287, 293, 326n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 9, 24, 37, 39, 4 1 , 76 - 77, 78-109, 3 2 5 Norris, Christopher ro, Confessions 34, 77, 78-79, 87, 89- I00 Oca Bianca, Angelo dal!' 433 Dialogues 87, 95-96 October Revolution 401 Discours sur Portgine de l'inegalite Osmont, Robert Son 88 Emile 78, 84, 91 - 93 Paris 393, 40 1 , 40 1 , 403, 410 Essay on the Origin of Languages Parmenides 1 34n 8, 76, 106 Pascal, Blaise 376 De Petat de nature 88n Paul, Saint 10311, 217, 219-20 Manuscrit de Paris 98 - 99 Petersen, Julius 251 La nouvelle Helmse 104 Petropolis 4 To Reveries of a Solitary 34, 87-88, 91 Picasso, Pablo 366-67 The Social Contract 104 Plato 9, 23, 67, 76, 111, 127, ,6o, r68, 175, 280 Rushdie, Saimaa 37 Russian Formalism 240 Cratylus 134n, 136n and idealism 3 43 Sand, George 59 Phaedrus 8 Sartre, Jean - Paul 34, 36, 41, 44, 4 8 Philebus 127, 11 9 - 39, 144, 1 77 Saussure, Ferdinand de 9 Republic 134n, 140, 17515 and rhetoric 126and the simulacrum 758, 17z, 178 Schelling, Friedrich 315 Scherer, Jacques 169 Schlanger, Judith 336n Sophist 131,534n Schlegel, Friedrich von 33o, 332 Theaetetus r3E - 32. Schopenhauer, Arthur 331, 35o • sollelr u! ale saloupraq pur uoupnponui a yp of saDuaJajau •sasayuand !!! u0eu2 0.1V StLI.M1 Fuou!ppe Zip `Jaya201 paxapui aie suual paiep) Apsop antra .asuas irpacis e ui ep!nau pasn luzumpai Jo Je!![ule; 'sum] ;o saauannoao lueDyn12!s aIoul a y App!nb puy o1 Iapeal ay mop 01 lied Ut pou2!sap si xapu! 51141 SDILIOI AO XACINII 61717 stris T*-11•£ `Li—S5€ 'i or uopuaitut pur 87—Lzi '97 Jo ithiNtssodun Er—zz u ur:)tiatuy„ °Pi 4.1851 '901 '9L 'Lzr — 57 '1 or 4 0 s fuL uotiDnitsuoaap tit 1 'Orr uo!spap 195 %Si '$'6l Iciap '0517'/7 — 97t. `usti , 'S- r-17/i7 '6z aweu pur 7517'176 'sit wstioydr pur 'ft '7717 4 655 'ITC L P—Pis - c `90-1707 'LSI '07-61i `L6-96 `18-08 `8L tpeap IT*. '614 'S z 't —got , 'trot --L 'r eLf '657 'L9 'it—zt , '61 airp Lz `5Z7 Iowa .5.grios11 aas wstaptip liz 'I oll '16 sisita go—Poi '887 `58z '01 sr LL sati„ /Cr 'PG '01-69 '19-99 '79-09 '75 'Or se 1/ca1 tileJal1l 01 asuodsai 1795 `095 '1755 '91-515 '6o5 '81 atntru2tstatuno .
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`ST' 'III '56'78.61 aauasqr SOIdOI 30 XREINI INDEX OF TOPICS INDEX OF TOPICS and literary criticism 10, lift , 54, 70, 72.
and mimesis 57 performed by literary text 471, 50, 61, ;26, 34 0 of phallogocentrism 57-60 and philosophy 8-1 /, 1 4. 53 and pleasure 55-57 of the university 283 "deconstructionism" (" deconstructionists") /on, 5t, 56 deferral 95-96, 102-o5 dehiscence 167, 176, 34 0 democracy 23, 37, 38 desire 22 , 4 0 , 47, 88, 176, 3 1 4, 337, 4 1 5 , 4 10-11 , 4 2 3 autobiographical 34-35 and hymen 161-62, :65 for presence 8i, 97, 108 dialectic (Aufbebung) 158, 163, 173-5, 2 4 0 , 3 08 , 4 20 difference 9, Ion, 7o - 71, 8i, Iozn, 174, 20 4 - 0 5, 2 .
11 , 2 7 1 , 34 111 , 343 and the law 182, 103, 105, 115 and supplementariry 24. go difference 98, 157, 161, 404-05, 407- 09 dirt 349, 35 2- 5 8 displacement 16, 143, 158, 163 disposition vs. invention 313-14, 318 dissemination 154, 169, 209, 245, 2 49 - 5 0 division (share, partaking, partage) 68- 6 9, 388, 4 0 4, 411, 411-13, 411 double band 363, 367 double scene 128, r75 double science 128, 13411, 1 59 0 , 1 75 edge see border education 84-86, 92.
ego 5n, 298, 299 empiricism 106-07 en abyme see raise - en - abyme encounter 244, 1 58 , 34 1 , 37 1 . 37 8- 79, 38z-87 encyclopedia 36, 43, 261 , 181 , 18 3, 1 9 1 , 2 94 entre see between envoi see sending e p i graph e pochs' 1 399; see also suspension essence 22, 84, 9 6 , 410, 42.6 of the law zo5-o6 of literature /6, 41, 44 - 49, 73, 113, 177, 187; see also "What is literature?" see also "What is?" ethics 24, z6, 54, 66, 361; see also mural law event 3n, 143, 159, 167n, 198-99, no, 434 li;e 1 ra 3, 7 9 t3e0x9' 316 73, 11 z, 295, 32.1 evil 84-86, 87, 95, 1340 excess (overflowing, debordement) 48, 62., c06, 115, 118, 335, 352 exemplarity 43, 66, 19o, 196, 227, 255, 379 existentialism 34 exorbitant, the ,o6-o8 exteriority (outside) 13, 22, 8o, 84, :02; see also inside vs. outside fable 199, 314, 319 - 23, 328 - 2.9, 33 1- 33, 339 - 40 falling out (coming due, echiance) 2.58, 341n, 398 family 39, 279-83, 316 feminine, the 206, 244-45, 247-49, 18 7, 2 95, 33 1 feminism 57-60 fiction (fictionality) 35, 36 - 40, 49, 7 1- 71, 163, 1 99, 2 34 vs. autobiography 325 and the law 182, 19o-91 finitude 81, 341n fold (phi) 115-16, 166, 2.35 FOOM01e 153 force 6, 17n, 298 form 48, 110-11, 114, 118; see also content vs. form frame 213, 2.37, 2 4 1 future 106, 138-39, 181 , 3 16 , 337, 343, 4 0 3 , 4 11 and democracy 38 and the other 5, 310. 343 vs. present and past 16z; see also anachrony gaze, the 46 gender 206-07, 21 4 0 , 243 - 44, 2.47, 2 49, 28 7 - 88 general text 16 general writing 9, 37, 133 generality (universality) vs. singularity (uniqueness) 15 - 19, 21, 26, 6z, 65, 75, 18r, 187, 2.10, 213, 334 genre r5, 68, 73, 221-22, 123-52. 318-19 ghost (specter) 145, 157, 308, 394, 396 gift 294, 302, 308, 384, 39 0 graft r8, 153-56, 433 grammar 30, 243, 265, 297, 300, 326, 333; see also syntax gramophony (gramophoning) 254, 267, 2.69, 2.76, 290, 199, 305, 308 guardian (guarding) 191, zoo, 2.04, zo6, 2.11, 114-15 hearing oneself speak (s'entendre - parley) 76 hearsay see oul - dire heart 376 - 77, 410 learning by zz hermeneutics r6, Liz, 2.17; see also interpretation hetero-eroticism 97-98 historicity 54, 63-64, t12., 197, 1 99 history 43, 54 - 55, 63-65, 191, 94 of literature 42, 5o, 56, 12.9-31, 1 39 hamoitisis see adaequatio homonymy r 17, 32I, 125, 183, 189 hymen 9, 114, 128, 131, 151, 158n, 160-69, 1720, 173-80, 2 43 - 45 with the law 2.09, 248 idea 43 - 44, 1 59, 160, 166, 313-14; see also materialism of the idea idealism 1 43 - 441 1 5 8 identity 76, 89, 12.5, 184-85, 188, 211- 345 illustration 136-37, 143, 160 image 82-83, 89, 91, 96-97, 135-38 imitation 163; 148, 15_ 59, 1 33 - 44, R 156-59, 6 see also mimesis impossibility (the impossible) 317 - 18, 34 1- 4 2 , 35 8 , 4 22 , 43 2 infrastructure arn, 70-71, zog inside vs. outside 68, 169, 3 11; see also institution 7 2- 74, 271, 339 - 4 0 James Joyce Foundation as 268, 279-80 literary criticism as 53 literature as 23-25, 3 6 - 3 8 , 4 1- 4 1 , 58, 72, 012,114-15 intelligible vs. sensible 3, 90 i i n nt t e e n n c ti i o on n a r ii r ry o. 111 interpretation 52, 217-w, 223-25; see also hermeneutics n nv v e a n g t i i magination atio j, 5 n 9 22.
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4114, 164-66, 171-73, 175, 32.5 uniqueness 35, 74, 316-17, 338, 37 0 , 397, 408, 4 1 5 , 4 1 9; see also generality vs. singularity; singularityuniversality see generality university 53, 280-83 unreadability 3n, 197, 211, 218, 390 unrepeatable, the (unwiederholbar) 374- 75, 382, 389, 394 unveiling see alitheia use see mention vs. use venir see coming vibration 271, 2.78, z8o, 305, 308 visibility 16o, 411, 4 1 5 voice 131-33, 138, 171-71, 2.76 "What is. • .?" I, z, 6, 220, 48, 11 7, 177, 296, 371, 388-89 "What is a date?" 388, 390 "What is literature?" z, 6 , 14, 24, 27, 36 - 37, 4 1, 4 8, 12 7, 177, 181, 371 white see blanc witness 361, 39 1 , 412-13 word 111,113-14,116-17,12.1 - 2.5, 1 73 - 75, 2 .97 - 9 8 , 33 1- 33, 4 16 work (oeuvre) 41-42, 67-68, 213, 32.5 writing 9, 17, 88n, 9o, 110, 114,119, 175-77, 2.
11 , 2,96 345, 353; see also general writing; speech and writing "yes" (oui) 21, 6z, 74, 2 54 - 55, 156-6o, 264-67, 270-79, 282-83, 285-91, 2.95-309, 367; see also affirmation; counter-signature. "yes" as yes-laughter (oin-rire) 2.91-95, 302, 304-08 456 ti
