Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space 9783964563637

Table of contents :
Table Of Contents
Preface: The Post of Post-Theory
Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times
Literary Theory in the Age of Post-Theory: The Permanent Transition
Post Apocalypse Now
The Other of Theory
Literary Theory in an Age of Post-Theory
'Unreduced Fortresses': The Lacanian Episteme behind the Lines of 'Post-Theory'
The "Post-" of the Subject? A Meditation on Identity, Community and Death in the "Age of Aids"
The (Black) Lady Vanishes: Postfeminism, Poststructuralism, and Theorizing in Narratives by Black Women
Historiography After Hay den White: The Contribution of Genre-Studies
Shamanism: Metaphors of the Body
Practicing Post-Theory
Authors of this volume

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Fernando de Toro (Ed.) Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space

TCCL - TEORIA Y CRITICA DE LA CULTURA Y LITERATURA INVESTIGACIONES DE LOS SIGNOS CULTURALES (SEMIOTICA-EPISTEMOLOGIA-INTERPRETACION) TKKL - THEORIE UND KRITIK DER KULTUR UND LITERATUR UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZU DEN KULTURELLEN ZEICHEN (SEMIOTIK-EPISTEMOLOGIE-INTERPRETATION) TCCL - THEORY AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE INVESTIGATIONS ON CULTURAL SIGNS (SEMIOTICS-EPISTEMOLOGY-INTERPRETATION)

Vol. 15

DIRECTORES:

Alfonso de Toro Centro de Investigación Iberoamericana Universidad de Leipzig Fernando de Toro The University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Canada

CONSEJO ASESOR: W. C. Booth (Chicago); E. Cros (Montpellier); L. Dällenbach (Ginebra); M. De Marinis (Macerata); U. Eco (Boloña); E. FischerLichte (Maguncia); G. Genette (París); D. Janik (Maguncia); D. Kadir (University Park); W. Krysinski (Montreal); K. Meyer-Minnemann (Hamburgo); P. Pavis (París); R. Posner (Berlín); R. Prada Oropeza (México); M. Riffaterre (Nueva York); Feo. Ruiz Ramón (Nashville); Th. A. Sebeok (Bloomington); C. Segre (Pavía); Tz. Todorov (París); J. Trabant (Berlín); M. Valdés (Toronto). CONSEJO EDITORIAL: J. Alazraki (Nueva York); F. Andacht (Montevideo); S. Anspach (Sào Paulo); G. Bellini (Milán); A. Echavarría (Puerto Rico); E. Forastieri-Braschi (Puerto Rico); E. Guerrero (Santiago); R. Ivelic (Santiago); A. Letelier (Venecia); W. D. Mignolo (Ann Arbor); D. Oelker (Concepción); E. D. Pittarello (Venecia); R. M. Ravera (Buenos Aires); N. Richard (Santiago); J. Romera Castillo (Madrid); N. Rosa (Rosario); J. Ruffinelli (Stanford); C. Ruta (Palermo); J. Villegas (Irvine).

Fernando de Toro (Ed.)

Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space

Vervuert • Iberoamericana • 1999

This book has been published with the assistance of the Faculty of Arts at Carleton University, Ottawa, and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Explorations on post-theory : toward a third space / Fernando de Toro (ed.). - Frankfurt am Main : Vervuert; Madrid : Iberoamericana, 1999 (Teoría y crítica de la cultura y literatura ; Vol. 15) ISBN 3 - 8 9 3 5 4 - 2 1 5 - 9 (Vervuert) ISBN 84-95107-32-5 (Iberoamericana)

© Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999 © Iberoamericana, Madrid 1999 Reservados todos los derechos Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico blanqueado sin cloro. Impreso en Alemania

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: The Post of Post-Theory

7

Fernando de Toro Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times

9

Patrick Imbert Literary Theory in the Age of Post-Theory: The Permanent Transition

25

Jacques M. Chevalier Post Apocalypse Now

37

Barry Rutland The Other of Theory

71

Mario J. Valdes Literary Theory in an Age of Post-Theory

85

Henry W. Sullivan 'Unreduced Fortresses': The Lacanian Episteme behind the Lines of 'Post-Theory'

95

Penelope Ironstone-Catterall The "Post-" of the Subject? A Meditation on Identity, Community and Death in the "Age of Aids"

113

Anne Koenen The (Black) Lady Vanishes: Postfeminism, Poststructuralism, and Theorizing in Narratives by Black Women

131

Mark Salber Phillips Historiography After Hay den White: The Contribution of Genre-Studies

145

Gabriel Weisz Shamanism: Metaphors of the Body

159

Craig DeQuetteville Practicing Post-Theory

175

Authors of this volume

185

THE POST OF POST-THEORY

The emergence of the Post in the second half of the XXth Century, and the Post of Post-Theory is a societal and cultural symptom: the signs of amazement of a society which is unable to name its very cultural practices. Post, then, inscribes and names what is present, here and now, but also what is absent and thus the Post of PostTheory. The Post of Post-Theory addresses radical epistemological changes, the shifting of traditional disciplinary boundaries, and what is more important, a different organization and delivery of knowledge. What the Post-Theoretical Condition entails is a radical questioning of how, today, we approach objects of knowledge. In fact, it is this probing of the what, the where, and the how of current "epistemologies", that the post-theoretical thinking begins, by questioning the ontological status of knowledge. Thus Post-Theory does not infer the end of theoretical thinking; much to the contrary, it marks the site of a new theoretical epistéme: nomadic, rhizomatic, cartographic. Perhaps the best way to characterize this episteme which we have named the Post-Theoretical condition, is by underlining what it introduces to the object and practice of knowledge: (a) the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries; (b) the simultaneous elaboration of theory from conflicting epistemologies, (c) the theoretical production from the margins; and (d) the search for a 'beyond', a third theoretical space. Fundamentally, the Post-Theoretical Condition unsettles the very status of knowledge, imploding the scientific cathexis and dissipating the former Aufklärung. Ultimately, it erases the border of disciplines, and it deconstructs their objects, by making it nomadic, cartographic, rhizomatic, ambivalent and undecidible: it presents/allows multiple entries, as the papers collected in this volume clearly show. And what caracterize these collected papers is precisely the heterogeneity of the theoretical gaze, springing from multiple epistemological sites. Thus heterogeneity, rhizomaticity and the site from where our gaze explores and probes the new realities, constitute the very activity of Post-Theory.

Fernando de Toro

9

Fernando de Toro University of Manitoba

EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THEORY: NEW TIMES The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those same structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of destruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. Of Grammatology. Jacques Derrida. The subject-position of the citizen of a recently decolonized "nation" is epistemically fractured. The so-called private individual and the public citizen in a decolonized nation can inhabit widely different epistemes violently at odds with each other, yet yoked together by way of the many everyday ruses of pouvoir-savoir. Outside in the Teaching Machine. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The wider significance of the postmodern condition lies in the awareness that the epistemological 'limits' of those ethnocentric ideas are also enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices — women, the colonized, minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities. The Location of Culture. Homi Bhabha.

ENDS AND BEGINNINGS... Something has happened. In the last two decades, before the end of this century, we have witnessed the emergence of the Post. This is a symptom of a society and a culture unable to name what is taking place in the very crux of its activity. The Post, then, comes to replace that which we know is there, but which we do not quite manage to signal. Thus, it is clear, I believe, for all of us, that indeed something has happened. The question, however, remains: what has happened? It is exactly in this questioning of the what where our current "epistemologies", our various practices to look at things, become complicated, and it is this what that we are currently, hesitantly, naming Post-Theory. A question immediately appears: what is Post-Theory} Some-

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thing it is not: the end of theoretical production or theoretical thinking. On the contrary we are at the very threshold, on the very liminal space of a new production, practice and thinking of theory. Western culture has entered a New Age, one which is still searching for its name. It is this new epistemological and cultural age that we are calling Post- Theory (1995).1 Perhaps the most important aspect to note here is that we have arrived at this posttheoretical 'condition', which is, in fact, the de-centering of dominant culture, via the Post-Modern condition. As Lyotard has indicated, Eurocentrism and the master narratives (1984: 31) have come to an end, and are being rapidly deconstructed from within, in the second half of the XXth century. The dismantling of the European cultural model and its central role as the sole producer of thought and knowledge has brought, not only Europe, but also its former colonies, to a crisis. The Post-Theoretical condition can be characterized by at least four central components: (a) the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries; (b) the simultaneous elaboration of theory from conflicting epistemologies; (c) the theoretical production from the margins; and (d) the search for a 'beyond', a third theoretical space.

1.

THE FALL(S)

Something else has happened. In the past two decades, it seems that the once universalizing and totalizing cultural paradigms (particularly structuralism), have collapsed. And, with them, the whole epistemological edifice, particularly the one based on the faith in science: the scientific cathexis has imploded, leaving nothing but phantasmatic traces of its former glory. The sacrosanct disciplinary walls are rapidly dissipating; not because the actual academic institutions have seen the light, the Aufklärung of a new beginning, but rather parla force de choses. The wall can no longer protect its territory, since it has been taken over and eaten away simultaneously from its borders and from its inside. The ism of logocentrism, eurocentrism, ethnocentrism has dropped, fallen, and its graphism has evaporated before an unavoidable avalanche of questions. The centre has fractured and this fracture has been produced from within, de-constructing it. Desedimentation has taken the form of an implosion, and with it all the certainties, including TRUTH, and the truth of the boundary have collapsed.

1

By 'Post-Theory' we understand a new way to conceptualize culture and its objects of knowledge. At the same time 'Post-Theory' entails a simultaneous convergence of theories emanating from diverse epistemological fields and disciplines with the goal to analyze given cultural objects from a plurality of perspectives. Thus, Post-Theory' also entails interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity [Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1990, 1993); Judith Butler (1990, 1993); Chris Weedon (1987); Slavoj Zizek (1992, 1993); Homi K. Bhabha (1994)], provide some of the best examples of what we call 'Posttheoretical' discursive practices.

EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THEORY

11

But in concrete terms: what is the meaning of The Walls have Fallen? It means that the specificity of the border and that of the discipline have been erased. This erasure is more than a simple metaphor, since the specificity was marked, inscribed by at least two key components: The delimitation of the object of study, and the construction of that object through a metalanguage [theoretical construction], and the tools of segmentation [method(s)]. These are the two basic components which have vanished. The object now «nomadic, cartographic, rhizomatic. It is here and there at the same time. This means, that the very same object is everywhere. It is no longer the "property" or "turf' of a discipline, but it belongs to all. However, a nomadic object entails a nomadic epistemology, a cartographic charting of multiple points of entry and exit. The Fall(s) in fact mean(s) something else: the specificity of the object and its methods also comprise its readings: We all worked in isolation, in our own chapels of knowledge, totally absent and, worse, completely unaware of the next chapel. If any awareness emerged, it was in the form of the Other. Some wander through the world totally perplexed by the hereticism of current practices, crying in desperation before what they consider iconoclastic; blasphemy in our midst, the end of the logos, a new graphie, and also a new episteme. This new reality, which some call interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, is, in fact, nothing of the sort, since the inter- and trans- both contain the -disciplinarity. This reality is Post-Theoretical, which in this context means a virtual epistemological space in constant transformation; an epistemological space which cannot entertain the very notion of discipline since this would entail a synchronic freeze, an articulation of sorts. It finally means, that knowledge has been pried open and now the site is unobstructed by the sclerotic thinking within the narrow and ever-limiting margins of disciplinarity. At long last we can finally think, and think with disrespect. But be careful, since this freedom is even more demanding and requires greater discipline. The unavoidable reality is that whether individuals and institutions like it or not, they will have to re-think and re-formulate their work in drastically new ways. Failure to do this will amount to either sudden death or self annihilation. This is also part of the Globalization; the end of a long-lasting academic practice which indeed produced many good things while it was capable and had room for change. Today, the scleroticism of academic institutions amounts to a crisis which announces either its end or a new beginning: change or die, precisely because the disciplinary boundaries bear no relation to what is taking place today in society. What is even more serious is the resistance of the institutions to think the new realities.

2. THOSE HERETIC EPISTEMOLOGIES Out of necessity, this is today's crisis. Furthermore, with the fracturing of logocentrism and eurocentrism, as has been unequivocally theorized by Foucault (1977, 1977a, 1988, 1990, 1990a), Derrida (1974, 1983, 1990), Lyotard (1984), Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), Baudrillard (1983), emerges the paramount urgency to think

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Culture from a radically different perspective, particularly when there are no longer unitary and homogeneous methods of theory production, since theory is articulated from what has been called the margins, the cultural peripheries, including the former colonies. It is in this de-centring where the ex-colonial discourses experience the radical transformation which is now termed Post-Colonialism, that is to say, when essentialism, dogmatism, and parochialism are being abandoned. It is here, again, where PostFeminism finds a new space. The 'Post' does not imply the end of the feminist or excolonial struggles, but the introduction of a new strategy and a new awareness: PostTheoretical. What once was considered unthinkable, is possible today. Long gone are the days of the totalitarism and dogmatism with the universalist overtones of Semiotics or structuralism, and also, European Humanism. Authors such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, 1990, 1993), Chris Weedon (1987), Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Laura Donaldson (1992), Hélène Cixous and Cathérine Clément (1993), and let us not forget, Edward Said (1978, 1993), Homi Bhabha (1994), Slavoj Zizek (1992, 1993), and others, have contributed to the creation of this new space called 'post-theory'. The epistemological space has been pried open, dissected, dismembered. Any object of knowledge may be looked at from many sites, from and through various gazes. The unitary conception of discipline, as well as a unitary, transcendental Subject, has given way to a desmembered nomadic subject's subjectivity, where the points of insertion are those of cartography and not of tracing. The very notion of conflicting epistemologies obeys to the former epistemological boundaries which marked our activity. It was unthinkable for a marxist to even consider deconstruction as another possibility to read cultural objects, and by the same token, a certain type of feminism did not allow itself to consider Lacan or Foucault as an alternative to deal with the subject. But this also marks a beginning, by recognizing that knowledge can not continue to be fragmented. It is precisely, the de-centring of the West that has made it possible to integrate within one simultaneous space apparently diverging epistemologies. What it has changed, at least at the epistemological level, that what becomes important and significative, is not so much what divergent theories say, but what we can do with them. It is not important, for instance, that Foucault was not concerned with women issues, what is relevant is how we can make use of his research in order to say radically different things. In his History of Sexuality at least one thing is meaningful: "The transformation of sex into discourse [...], the dissemination and reinforcement of heterogeneous sexualities" (1990: 61), and how this discourse, depending on the moment, will be utilized to regulate sexuality and medicalize it in order to police the sexuality of certain groups, such as women and gay. This discursive practice, in the XVIII and XIX centuries, legitimizes heterosexual monogamy, but on the other hand it served to scrutinize "the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex" (1990: 39). At the end of the day, the discourse of sexuality, then and now, is a discourse about power.

EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THEORY

13

In this same line of inquiry we may consider Lacan's constitution of the Subject, in the Imaginary Order and in the Symbolic Order, and interrogate the whole Lacanian edifice mounted on the Oedipus Complex and the Name-of-The-Father, since both seem to exclude women as Subject, even if we consider the conceptualization of the edifice as metaphoric (Irigaray 1985, 1985a). In fact, the very same conceptualization of an apparent exclusion may serve to unsettle the system on which the edifice had been mounted. Another way to look at the same problem is to relativize Truth, which our Western tradition seems to have grounded on the logos and presence, as Derrida has clearly demonstrated (Derrida 1974: 6-26). Every theory starts somewhere, and every theory hides this somewhere, and it is not different when we deal with Truth. W e are not implying that there is no truth, but that truth is constructed, and if we accept the constructiveness of truth then we can only conclude that Truth as such does not exist and only trues are manifested in various discursive articulations. Some have said that Derrida is not concerned with politics, that he is a-political and an-ethical. Perhaps. However, the fact of the matter is, that this relativization of truth becomes political when minority discourses, such as the feminist, ethnic, gay, etc., question the validity and legitimization of 'hegemonic' totalizing patriarchal discourses, which always try to pass as 'natural', grounded on the Truth of God, on the Bible, on the logos. Here the notion of differance also becomes political, since this grammatology is one of the methods to attack Western metaphysics of truth and the foundation of presence, and of the Dasein on which it is actually mounted. Derrida has stated that: A l l the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical ontotheology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought, within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or philosophical sense, in the sense of God's infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense. Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phone has never been broken (1974: 10-11).

Precisely authors such as Judith Butler radically question gender formations starting from Foucault and Lacan: mounted on them she carries out a scathing attack of how patriarchal societies have dealt with the question of gender and the inscription of the body: Butler uses Foucault's work in order to put her own inscription on gender and the body: By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form. Because this distinction operates as essential to the task of genealogy as he defines it, the distinction itself is precluded as an object of genealogical investigation (1990: 130).

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14 Regarding Lacan, she states:

By claiming that the Other that lacks the Phallus is the one who is the Phallus, Lacan clearly suggests that power is wielded by this feminine position of not-having, that the masculine subject who "has" the Phallus requires this Other to confirm and, hence, be the Phallus in its "extended" sense (1990: 44). To be the Phallus is to be signified by the paternal law, to be both its object and its instrument and, in structuralist terms, the "sign" and promise of its power (1990: 44). Hence, "being" the Phallus is always a "being for" a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that "being for" (1990: 45).

Today, some of these so called 'marginal' and 'peripherical' discourses find themselves in the theoretical avantgarde of the cultural field, and it is these discourses which are carrying out a theoretical thinking without precedent in the Western World. One of the central characteristics of this thought lays in the heterogeneity of the theoretical proposals, which is inscribed in one epistemological space, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, etc. Heterogeneity and rhizomaticity become the site from where our gaze explores and probes the new realities, but this time firmly secured and solidly inhabiting the structures of the centre.

3.

IN-HABITING THE

But something else has happened: an appropriation of the centre's logos, so that it can be deconstructed from within. Something was previously missed by the margins: the belief that the centre could be unsettled from outside. However, this has proven not to be the case, and it is the work and negotiation from within which have been made possible by the Post-Modern condition. For these reasons, we feel that the concrete space which Post-Modernism opens up (including deconstruction, feminism, post-colonialism, Lacanianism, etc.) is one which makes it possible for Post-Colonial counter-discourses to locate themselves inside and not outside the theory machine that placed them in the margins in the first place. This is exactly the change that differentiates the Post-Modern condition from Modernity. It is not the case then, of a new assimilation of the Eurocentric Subject and much less a strategy to obliterate difference in the uniformity of Sameness. It seems to be an error to posit Post-Modernism with regard to margins as a new Eurocentric, neo-imperialist conspiracy to finally eliminate the constitution of a Post-Colonial and feminine Subject in the face of its own re-centring from within the former Empire. This obsession with indigenous ethnicity is paradigmatically expressed by Nelly Richard, when she maintains that: However, just as it appears that for once Latin American periphery might have achieved the distinction of being postmodernist avant la Iettre, no sooner does it attain a synchronicity of forms with the international cultural discourses, than that very same

EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THEORY

15

postmodernism abolishes any privilege which such a position might offer. Postmodernism dismantles the distinction between centre and periphery, and in so doing nullifies its significance. There are many instances in postmodernist discourse aimed at convincing one of the obsolescence of the opposition centre/periphery, and of the inappropriateness of continuing to see ourselves as the victims of colonialism [...] (1993: 467-468).2

In regard to the question of centre and periphery, Alfonso de Toro, (as have several 'post-theorists'), indicates that these terms cannot continue to be taken in their binary structure but rather, they must be problematized if we are ever to move forward and construct that third space of the in-between. According to A. de Toro, The terms 'periphery' and 'centre' are neither static nor unilateral. Rather, their implications are diverse, and at least twofold: the periphery is understood as the periphery itself, just as the centre defines itself. The periphery is not always produced as a result of the centre, but, as a result of its deliberate imposition as the periphery, the opposite occurs for the centre. The periphery naturally detaches itself from the attitude of the centre, and the centre from the attitude of the periphery. This differentiation, based on reciprocal implications, would characterize the Post-Colonial condition as distinct from the Colonial condition, which produces a unilateral discourse (1995: 12).

2

Geraldine Finn holds a similar position to that of Nelly Richard when she observes that there is also a postmodern ploy with regard to woman: "process of production of postmodernism as a master discourse and discourse of mastery, whose mastery is accomplished through the active and systematic disappearance of women in general and feminism in particular from the framing of its terms and relevances and, correspondingly therefore from descriptions and debates of and about culture in as much as it is constituted as postmodern" (1993: 123). This is the same epistemological trap that a certain sector of essentialist feminist theory has fallen into; their universalist and imperialist notion of "Woman" has been completely rejected with respect to Post-Modernity, which is not to say that it cannot be strategically employed (Young 1990: 162; McClintock 1992: 86). Regarding the similarities between Post-Colonialism and feminism, Mohanty states: "[s]ome disconcerting similarities between the typically authorizing signature of such Western feminist writings on women in the Third World, and the authorizing signature of the project of humanism in general humanism as a Western ideological and political project which involves the necessary recuperation of the 'East' and 'Woman' as Others" (1984: 352). Young states that: "Mohanty argues, also privileges unquestioningly the values of Western feminism, while remaining unselfconscious about its own relation to the oppressive politiceconomic power structures that operate between the West and non-Western countries. Western feminist discourse, in short, can not only be ethnocentric, but in certain contexts can itself be shown to be a contemporary form of colonial discourse" (1990: 162). McClintock correctly points out the indifferentiation with respect to women in post-colonial countries: "Just as the singular category 'Woman' has been discredited as a bogus universal for feminism, incapable of distinguishing between the varied histories and imbalances in power among women, so the singular category 'post-colonial' may license too readily a panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of political nuance" (1992: 86).

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Today, for an ever increasing number of intellectuals working in the cultural field in the Third World, it is clear that both the old essentialist discourses and the totalizing/universalizing discourses which have been with us since at least the beginning of the XlXth century, are over. Post-Modernism has opened to the developing world in general, a space that is incumbent upon them to construct. Yet, it is also clear that this space cannot be constructed in a vacuum. It is paramount to get within the master discourses; not to emulate them in the servile manner or follow an ontic reality which is in fact noetic, as it has been the case in both colonialism and feminism, but to deconstruct them, and in their cracks inscribe a new and changing dynamic discursivity. The battles ahead are those of language, of competing discursivities and of positionalities. Today, there is a convergence between Post-Feminist and Post-Colonial discourses. And this convergence resides in the consciousness that it is not possible to continue speaking from the margins, since this position not only entails a self-marginalization, but also thwarts any attempt to deconstruct the centre. The latter can only be dismounted in its own terms, within its own concepts. Derrida has clearly theorized this question: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work (1974: 24).

It has also been learned that one cannot speak from outside of the patriarchal system, and that it is simply not possible to ignore the knowledge that has been produced in the hegemonic centres. The deconstruction of current hegemonic systems, as well as the new knowledge being generated from the margins, or rather, from different centres, is articulated in post-colonial and post-feminist theories.3 Thus, any substantial change in power relations will only be able to take place from inside. It is here where deconstruction becomes a political discourse. Again, what is important in Lacan, Derrida, or Foucault, is not so much whatthty say but what we can do with what they say. Chris Weedon in her brilliant study on feminism and post-structuralism, states: To dismiss all theory as an elitist attempt to tell women what their experience really means is not helpful, but it does serve as a reminder of the importance of making theory

3

By post-feminism we understand the feminism which begins working with "patriarchal" theory from approximately the mid 1980's. Perhaps the book that marks this change is Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) by Toril Moi. From that point onwards, we have a number of very important studies been elaborated from various feminist positions: Chris Weedon (1987), Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Diane Elam (1994), etc.

EXPLORATIONS ON POST-THEORY

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accessible and of the political importance of transforming the material conditions of knowledge production and women's access to knowledge (1987: 7). [...] Much French feminist writing, for example, which attacks traditional theory as a pillar of patriarchy and locates language as the site of political struggle, does so in the context of a psychoanalytic theory of meaning (1987: 9). [...] Theory itself is constantly in process, and the argument of this book is focused on the theories which at this moment seem to me to have the power to explain the patriarchal structures within which we live, and our position as women and men within them. The political aim is to change them. It is on this basis that a case will be made for post-structuralist theories of language, subjectivity and power (1987: 11).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha are perhaps the most prominent representatives of what I understand by Post-Theory'. For instance, for Spivak the discussion on periphery/centre is a false one since this binary structure functions within the parameters established by the centre (1990: 5). Her position regarding this binarism is clear: I am viewed by the Marxists as too comic, by feminists as too male-identified, by indigenous theorists as too committed to Western theory. I am uneasily pleased about this. One's vigilance is sharpened by the way one is perceived, but it does not involve defending oneself (1990: 69-70).

and she adds: One of the things I said was that one of my projects is not to allow myself to occupy the place of the marginal that you would like to see me in, because then that allows you to feel that you have an other to speak to (1990: 122).

Spivak's position does not imply accepting models of thought or the universalizing/essentializing feminism from the West which is in fact "white middle class American Women". It is here, like Kristeva (1982), where she refuses labelling, claiming intellectual freedom to pick and choose what she considers useful in order the negotiate and instill agency in the battle of discourses. Feminism, like Post-Colonialism arrived at a point where they were unable to resolve their respective contradictions within the epistemological grounding that they themselves had created. Thus, a whole range of epistemological components of feminism and colonial discourses entered into a crisis: notions such as gender, woman, periphery, ethnicity, heterosexuality, etc. This crisis is due partly to the reproduction of the binarism of the patriarchal system from which they strive to escape by constructing their own theory in a marginalized site. Now, new terms have entered the discussion, such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, Pansexuality (Fuss 1989, 1991; Dolan 1993), ethnic diaspora, multiculturality (Pratt 1992; Minh-ha 1989; Bhabha 1994).

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The past aversion towards Post-Modernism, from both feminism (Nicholson 1990) and post-colonialism, vanishes, when one realizes that it is under the umbrella term of Post-Modernism, that this emergent discourses, now called Post Theory, could emerge in the first place. 4 Judith Butler, in her seminal work, clearly set the course to follow: The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary and which, together constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities. The complexities of gender requires an interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary set of discourses in order to resist the domestication of gender studies or women studies within the academy and to radicalize the notion of feminist critique (1990: xi). And her criticism of 'main stream feminism' is swift: That form of feminism theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a "Third World" or even an "Orient" in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism (1990: 3). [...] Perhaps their is an opportunity at this juncture of cultural politics, a period that some would call "postfeminist", to reflect from within a feminist perspective on the injunction to construct a subject of feminism (1990: 5). [...] [i]t may be time to entertain a radical critique that seeks to free feminist theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding ground which is invariably contested by those identity positions or anti-identity positions that it invariably excludes (1990: 5). This position is not very different to that of Homi Bhabha when he states that: The postcolonial perspective - as it is being developed by cultural historians and literary theorists - departs from the traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment of 'dependency' theory. As a mode of analysis, it attempts to revise those nationalist or 'nativist' pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition. The postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation. It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres (1994: 173). And he adds: The time for 'assimilating' minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value has dramatically passed. The very language of cultural community needs to be rethought from a postcolonial perspective, in a move similar to the profound shift in the language of

4

In my estimation, it is also the post-modern condition which allowes the emergence of feminism as well as other 'minority' discourses from the 1960's forwards.

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sexuality, the self and cultural community effected by feminists in the 1970's and the gay community in the 1980's (1994: 175).

What has become sufficiently clear, then, is that to remain outside can only reproduce the binarism of the very system it is attempting to dismantle. Accordingly, we have one solution: inhabit the Centre, appropriate its discourses only to subvert them. This practice of "mounting" a discourse in order to deconstruct it, it is clearly in the work of most post-modernist theoreticians and of the so called fictional writers. Regarding theory, perhaps one of the best examples one can offer is the work of Jacques Derrida. In 'fiction' we have as many examples as in the theoretical field of this "mounting on" in the form of intertextuality. For instance, Foe by J.M. Coetzee. The text is inserted, weaved in the in-betweens of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee's story could not have been told without Defoe's intertext, and this bringing back of the XVIII British expansionism, in a minimalist way, is what makes possible not only the rereading of that past, but also our present: Coetzee inhabits Defoe's Crusoe. Inhabit does not only mean to appropriate all forms of knowledge, but also to decolonize our own discourses. We could safely say, regarding feminism, that one of the challenges ahead is to 'decolonize' feminism (Donaldson 1992: 2)5, and regarding the Third World discourses the task is to abandon their situation as ex-centric (Bhabha 1994: 177).

4. 'BEYOND' It seems that the central task is, then, to go beyond fossilized discursive positions, and accept the challenge generated, from the 'margins', by post-feminism and post-colonialism. I believe that this is absolutely imperative if one is to confront the complex problems that we face regarding the migratory and diasporic masses that are being displaced on the planet. Today, this change is irrefutable and unavoidable. We have to travel from one space to another, but the task is to be here/there at the same time. This is why we have to emphasize this epistemological convergence between post-feminism and post-colonialism, since it is here, I believe, where we may find the key for a deinscription of old cultural codes and a new possibility that will not be reduced to Us and Them.6 5

Donaldson states that: "Decolonizing Feminism attempts to counter feminism's imperialist tendency to dive deep and surface with a single hermeneutic truth by articulating reading practices that privilege horizontal relationships, not only within women's narrative texts but also gender identities themselves" (1992: 3).

6

Bhabha states regarding this matter: "[t]he postcolonial prerogative consisted in reinterpreting and rewriting the forms and effects of an 'older' colonial consciousness from the later experience of the cultural displacement that marks the more recent, post-war histories of the Western metropolis" (1995: 174).

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Homi Bhabha proposes the search for this new space, a beyond, 7 an in-between space. For Bhabha this space is performative, since: Being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an intervening space, as any dictionary will tell you. But to dwell 'in the beyond' is also, as I have shown, to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future, on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now (1994: 7).

To intervene in the present means, then, to interrupt the performance of the present (Bhabha 1994: 7), by exploiting the in-between spaces. I understand this space, as a liminal space, in its anthropological sense (Turner 1982: 24). That is, a transitory space, a space other, a third space that is not here/there, but both. This third space implies the inscription and possibility of voices which until now have been silenced or remained underground; it means the possibility to conceive science, culture, sexuality, society in a different manner; it means the possibility of new forms of representation, which do not have to pass by the binarism which still characterizes our culture; it means, also, to listen anew and, to other forms of knowledge, such as the shamanic practices in Mexico, or in Peru, or in Canada, it means to move beyond the Western canon. It is precisely this in-between performativity which I also understand by PostTheory. But something else has also happened: the boundaries between fiction and reality have fallen (Baudrillard 1983), between theory and practice. There is indeed a movement toward integration of both practices, where the very notion of writing has changed and the Sign has been placed under doubt (Derrida 1974: 1-73). The logos obliged us to separate theory and pratice on behalf of 'scientificity', shown in philosophy when negating the rhetoricity of language and the slippery texture of the signifier. Today writing is all we have, and any attempt to a pretended scientificity is doomed to a dramatic failure: we had failed, and now we have the possibility to think or at least to attempt to think beyond binarism. Again, it is Homi Bhabha who has clearly envisaged this possibility: [T]he language metaphor opens up a space where a theoretical disclosure is used to move beyond theory. A form of cultural experience and identity is envisaged in a theoretical description that does not set up a theory-practice polarity, nor does theory become 'prior' to the contingency of social 'experience' that is particularly important for envisaging emergent cultural identities (1994: 179).

7

Bhabha defines this space as follows: "'Beyond' signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary — the very act of going beyond— are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the 'present' which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced" (1994: 4).

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Post-Modernism, Post-Feminism, Post-Colonialism have all been transitory notions; notions in search of an inscription, an open search in the making, with no closure: it is not an already there, but a there to come, cartographic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, Jean. (1983). Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1993). Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". London; New York: Routledge. — . (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène/Catherine Clément. (1993). The Newly Bom Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. London; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles/Félix Guattari.(1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. -—. (1983). Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1990). Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. -—. (1983). Disseminations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -—. (1974). Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. De Toro, Alfonso. (1995). "Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges: The Periphery in the Centre; the Periphery as the Centre; the Centre of the Periphery", in: De Toro, F./A. De Toro (eds.): Borders and Margins: PostColonialism andPost-Modernism. (TKKL, Vol. 5). Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert. p. 11-43. Dolan, Jill. (1993). Presence and Desire. Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Donaldson, Laura E. (1992). Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender and EmpireBuilding. Chapell Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press. Elam, Diane. (1994). Feminism andDeconstruction. London; New York: Routledge. Finn, Geraldine. (1993). "Why are there no great women postmodernists?", in: Relocating Cultural Studies. Blundell, V./ J. Shephard/1. Taylor (eds.). London; New York: Routledge. p. 123-152. Foucault, Michel. (1990). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol I. New York: Random House. — . (1990a). The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure. Vol II. New York: Random House. — . (1988). The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self. Vol. III. New York: Random House.

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-—. (1988a). Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Trans. Alan Sheridan and others. New York: Routledge. —-. (1980). Power - Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 -1977. New York: Routledge. — . (1977). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fuss, Diana (ed.). (1991). Inside/Out. Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London; New York: Routledge. -—. (1989). Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. London; New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. (1985). Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. -—. (1985a). This Sex which Is NOT ONE. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca; New York: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1982). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McClintock, Anne. (1992). "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the term 'Postcolonialism'", in: Social Text, 10: 84-98. Minh-ha, Trinh. (1989). Woman, Native, Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (1984). "Under Western Eyes; Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses", in: Boundary 2, 12:3/13:1: 333-358. Moi, Toril. (1985). Sexual-Textual Politics. New York: Routledge. Nicholson, Linda J.(ed.). (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. London; New York: Routledge. Pratt, Mary Louise. (1992). Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London; New York: Routledge. Richard, Nelly. (1993). "Postmodernism and Periphery", in: Thomas Docherty (ed.). Postmodernism. A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 461-470. Said, Edward W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House. — . (1978). Orientalism. New York: Random House. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1993). Outside in the Teaching Machine. London; New York: Routledge. —-. (1990). The Post-Colonial Critic. Sarah Harsym (ed.). London; New York: Routledge. — . (1988). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London; New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

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Weedon, Chris. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Young, Robert. (1990). White Mythologies. London; New York: Routledge. Zizek, Slavoj. (1993). Tarrying with the Negative. Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press. — . (1992). Enjoy your Symptom. London; New York: Routledge.

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Patrick Imbert University of Ottawa

LITERARY THEORY IN THE AGE OF POST-THEORY: THE PERMANENT TRANSITION On ne veut pas savoir que l'humanité entière est fondée sur l'escamotage mythique de sa propre violence, toujours projetée sur de nouvelles victimes. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. René Girard.

INTRODUCTION Postmodernism does not mean after or against, it means retroaction, dislocation, dynamism. Post is rewriting; it is the conscience that there is a constant slippage of meaning opening interstices in any systematic effort to control production. Post is the capacity to go beyond the naivety of an epistemology trying to refer to stable entities, be they essences or a cartesian conception of the subject. Postmodernism, in a way, is the capacity to rewrite, so as to strategically invent the present in its temporary contemporaneity. In this temporariness and in these interstices, a freedom positioned far from master ideals but pragmatically oriented by an agreement on the rules of the game to the satisfaction of the many selves enacted by each individual, can operate. In this case, power struggles are not built around the preservation of an orthodoxy. They operate around the capacity to keep a form of leadership in a certain context. This is why Girard's theory of the mimesis of appropriation (1978) seems particularly fertile. His analysis emphasizing the fight for the control of the object is dynamic in that it is interested in the evolution of this relationship and in its corollary, the victimization process. Both elements power the relationships between individuals and societies organized around a series of untenable positions, all of them oriented by the desire to imitate a model and to destroy it, in order to wrench from it what it seems to display: the capacity not to be subjected to desire. But nobody escapes desire because everybody's identity is defined by a relationship to others.

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1. THE APPROPRIATION MIMESIS It is by using the example of two babies fighting for one toy, although another identical toy is at hand, that Girard demonstrates the manifestation of the desire to assert one's own symbolic and economic power. The mimesis of appropriation, however, leads to the breaking of fixed dominance patterns as illustrated in animal life (Laborit 1976) and it is the expression of a desire to assert one's individuality and freedom. But it also leads to a world where violence is grounded in a play of desires based upon mimesis. This violence is, however, controlled by the fact that the victim is seen as a locus from which new significations arise. The victim is sacred and allows the differentiation process to start again. This process is organised, canalised, made orthodox through rituals by religious institutions. The victim and its dead body is, therefore, at the root of culture. In a laicized world, the mimesis of appropriation is as operative as in a religious world. It rests on the victimization process which leads to the numerous wars and genocides committed in the name of "ideals" such as nationalism. After the production of dead bodies, however, the world can no longer be the same, particularly if the victims can gain enough symbolic and economic power to insist upon the fact that one has to deeply think over what has happened. Movies like Schindler's List or William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice axe, good examples of these developments. This thinking over what has happened because of the presence of a third element, in this case the discourse of those who have been lynched, leads to a redefinition of paradigms because the legitimacy of the discourses (Fascism or Nazism) and counter-discourses (Humanism; Camus 1954) which led to the explosion of the mimesis of appropriation is definitively stained. The appropriation mimesis determines the Platonic mimesis in many ways. Through the Platonic mimesis, one can assert that one has a direct access to truth, to the world of ideas or to reality. This alleged access represents a basis which allows the grounding of an argument into facts. Therefore, the person who can tell what reality is, controls the symbolic and often the economic world, because s/he is able to induce others to behave in a profitable way for him/her. These behaviors are usually controlled through the process of attribution (Imbert 1995) which defines a supposedly stable identity, a being. But the mimesis of appropriation manifests certain differences with Antiquity in a democratic, consumer oriented society. In this later case, inside a given society, the objects are so multiplied that the conflict is tamed. Rivalries are also mitigated by the division of power and of responsibilities, a situation which prevents the monopolization of decisions. In the postmodern era, the logic of networks is so prevalent that often one cannot speak of decisions but of micro-decisions which contribute to avoiding conflicts and to rendering the operating rules more efficient while decisions and discussions pertaining to principles are avoided. The multiplication of objects, be they material or symbolic, prevents the mimesis of appropriation from degenerating into a full scale rivalry which would lose sight of the object itself and become a pure conflict rooted in prestige. However, the presence of rivalry is strong

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and is emphasized by constantly reminding individuals that they are supposed to compete in order to produce more wealth. Moreover this competition is framed in the interior/exterior paradigm which pushes nations to compete against each other.

2. PUBLIC LANGUAGE/SPECIALIZED LANGUAGES AND POST-THEORY Among Indo-European languages (Sapir 1968; Whorf 1965), public language rests on a syntaxically based semantics deeply grounded in a conception of the world which still has strong links with a mythical, non scientific, world conception. This is well illustrated by clichés such as "the sun rises" or "sets", by standard expressions such as "I see a wave" (as if there was something static, like in cartoons, in a wave) or by dualistic processes. Public language (Bernstein 1971) rests on a syncretism of mythical elements, on dualistic a prioris pitting against each other man and environment, or man and man and is linked to a Platonic conception of the world and belief in stable entities. It is tainted by a monosemic conception of signification which is only jeopardized randomly by puns and jokes. This situation, which cannot be modified easily, was used by Bateson during the Second World War, when advising the goverment of the United States. He convinced it that dualistic oppositions provided the best framework for allowing the public to construct meaning from war news. This is why he told the goverment and the press to present the news in such a way that Americans would not be disturbed by the complexity of a three pole presentation, the Soviets, the Allies and the Axis countries (Germany, Italy and Japan). The media presented the situation with only two poles: the Allies (including the Soviets) against the Axis countries (Bateson 1972). In the Eighties, the public was provided with slogans like "Profits isn't a dirty word" (MacLeans-. March 22, 1982: 9) which tend to counter the antithetic discourse present in capitalist society, that of marxism and its epigone. It was coupled in Europe with "Il était temps qu'un capitaliste fasse une révolution" (It was high time that a capitalist did a revolution). This last sentence was printed on top of an image showing the works of Mao, Engels, Lenin, and Marx, and advertised Apple Computers (Géo\ October 1984: 33). Therefore, the public language used by the general public is taken as a target for the dissemination of a renewed liberal economism. But this liberal economism is still linked to a confrontational dualism opening up on a kind of monism, because the goal is to have the liberal economist ideology triumph through economic exchange and technology over other discourses linked to dictatorships of the left or of the right, but also over marginalized discourses. However, this new economist discourse is also linked to a new conception of the world and of social relationships common in specialized languages but not in public language. These conceptions were masterminded by multinational advertising agencies working together with multinational conglomerates. "There is nothing permanent

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except change" proclaimed Conoco (Business Week. October 23, 1978) under an image showing a gradual transformation of a block of coal into a drop of oil. Here, Heraclitus is directly contributing to the new era questioning the static a prioris at work in public language. This paradox is hinting at the fact that now, more and more, dynamism is the basis on which competition and creativity operate. It is complemented by another text like "Bechtel builds water" which tends to destroy a dualistic positivistic vision of the industrial world seen as imposing itself in opposition to nature. In this text, nature and industry cooperate for a better world. Power and softness are present here. But these paradoxes are communicated to the public accustomed to reading Business Week and already attuned to complex ideas and to business goals.The paradoxes are used to influence those aware of many central social goals among the cultivated public. They manifest the presence of the new specialized language paradigms penetrating the public language and they are used to counter the dualism which can influence thinkers and leaders cleft between two sets of paradigms. Specialists are themselves cleft, because they were all educated in a dualistic ideology generating a belief in stable dualistic paradigms. But they are able to operate on a dynamic epistemology at the level of their expertise. They are more and more operating at the level of a kind of post-theory connected with a pragmatism taking into account the lability of discourses. Post-theory leads to the conscience that there is a constant confrontation of discourses in the framework of the appropriation mimesis, for instance the discourse of those who analyze and the discourse which is analyzed. But by analyzing a discourse, by refering to another discourse allowing for some distanciation, one produces a new discourse by the sheer fact that, after the analysis, the a prioris of the analyzed discourse are now explicit. Therefore the confrontation of two discourses produces a third one which has as a consequence the fact that it is impossible to go back to the pseudo authenticity of the former analyzed discourse. Therefore, posttheory represents a dynamic coupling theory to a new discourse, and this new discourse to a different theory, which will create a distanciation producing another discourse and another theory. The procedures used to analyze a type of discourse are enriched by the analysis and will need to be modified in order to take into account the new knowledge brought about by the practice of the analytical process. This confrontation of discourses does not imply that one has to use a hard-core theoretical discourse to produce a third discourse. For instance, Monique Wittig (1992), by saying that lesbians are not women, is able to analyze the discourse of the norm and its paradigm, woman defined by man. Moreover, lesbians are able to get out of the paradigm norm-recognition by the norm in that they do not, like gay men, ask for a recognition by the norm. They are not only able to analyze conflictual discourses set in potentially locked paradigms, but they are also able to produce a new discourse from this analytical distanciation. This third discourse, breaking the dual relationships man/woman and norm/outside the norm, will then, by its sheer articulation, have a retroactive impact on the two conflictual discourses trying to reorganize the norm. These two discourses will have

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to rearticulate because of this third element. By this rearticulation and leading then to the necessary rearticulation of the lesbian discourse, a new dynamic discourse that breaks other paradigms will be produced as a third element. In this dynamic process, no discourse is locked in a repetitive conflict leading to the loss of sight of the object connected to a rivalry based solely on prestige. This loss of the object is at the root of violence and terror as is the case with monosemic dualistic discourses trying to impose the truth of the stable exterior they are refering to.

3. THEORY AND REFLEXIVITY Whole encompassing theories, as well as master narratives, go together in their endeavour to communicate and explain a certain state of culture and dissemination of information. It is particularly true of the Greimassian theory (1966), entirely built on the capacity to break apart narratives while asserting its universal domination by its conception of a generalized narrative structure. Slowly but surely, these all encompassing theories have receded and led to an acknowledgement that the paradigm interior/exterior applied to a hiérarchisation between language and metalanguage, should open to the realization that a metalanguage is only a particular type of a specialized language in the hands of a group of specialists dreaming of mastering a text and its context. A metalanguage is only a type of discourse. It is included, like any other discourse, in a broad ideology permeating it, usually without the acknowledgement of its users. Although thought of in the epistemology of the stable as a means to control a text and as a tool to be controlled by a subject able to decipher himself and a text, metalanguage represents a type of discourse confrontation trying to play on a relative distanciation controlled by a context where cleft and even fragmented personalities are the norm. But specialists always participate in and are partly moulded by public language, and distanciation is intimately linked to reflexivity. This reflexivity emphasizing the management of the collective perception of events (Vargish 1991) rather than events themselves, is problematized in the same way as the loss of the referent in many novels written by Borges: "En 1833, Carlyle observó que la historia universal es un infinito libro sagrado que todos los hombres escriben y leen y tratan de entender, y el que también los escribe." (Borges 1974: 669) (In 1833, Carlyle observed that universal history is an infinite and sacred book that all the human beings write, read and try to understand, and this book writes them also.) This conscience of the text producing a text, this type of a text in a text, leads to going beyond the conception of discourse as mimetic (Platonic mimesis) and to reflect on a mirror-like structure.

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4. POST-THEORY AND CONTINGENCY Hard core theories with their ultra-specialized vocabularies, often not well-defined or relating to similar ideas through the use of very different words without giving a clue to the laymen and even to specialists of the possible connections to be established between different words/concepts, are not very effective in the new POST world. One of their blind spots lies in their incapacity to reflect on their own productions (de Certeau 1987: 73) even if Barthes (1967) tried to reflect on this problem and Bourdieu (1988) on their linkage to institutional interests. One of the other blind spots is the fact that they were produced as universal systems supposed to be valid independently of any situation. One very problematic weakness of most structuralist theories and in particular that of their epigones, was their insisting upon coherence in semantic processes, although contradictions can permeate a text, and although the play of signifiers leads to a constantly deferred production of groups of signifieds, as Derrida (1981) demonstrated. Linked to this was the assumption that good faith was the basis of communication; it is still the basis of much research, even that dealing with speech acts (Austin 1962), although thinkers like Perelman (1988) take into account the position of the producer of a message as well as that of the receivers. This is one of the most dangerous assumptions ever produced for any theory intended to account for signification processes. First, because in a contingent world, nothing is identical to itself. Second, because everything is polysemic and can mean something else or be turned from the positive to the negative or viceversa. An example of this would be an old man remembering his youth and saying: "flesh is weak". By this, he would not hint at the conception of sin as exemplified in the Bible, but at the fact that he cannot have sex more than once a week. Third, because communication, independently of any proclaimed ethical or a-ethical position is, like any cultural process, part of a conflictual structure, the mimesis of appropriation, demanding constant strategic thinking. This produces texts which are disinformative, be they made of outright lies or of a mixture of partial informations, forgotten elements, unexplained contexts and interpretations based on past logics. It seems as if most theoreticians cannot tolerate that communication and signification are, from A to Z, dependent on this labile framework. This is probably due to the fact that most theoreticians were influenced by Platonic traditions, and that a kind of intellectual bureaucratized cowardice connected to institutional interests now represents a tolerable norm connected with the contemporary figure of the appropriation mimesis. This figure, and the metalanguages connected to it, hide the violence of the appropriation mimesis and particularly the epistemological violence of the Platonic-based metalanguages which are out of tune with the new problematic, but which can still serve particular and local elites calling for a strong emphasis on the need to regain a stability set among known limits. This leads to a type of "fanatically soft" institution, as is explained by Baudrillard (1990: 51). It is an institution which tries to build intellectually bureaucratized consensus avoiding any intellectually controversial (Imbert 1995a) ideas or challenging publications.

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Some theoreticians are no longer satisfied with this type of theory and metalanguage based on a prioris which do not take into consideration such important elements as the presence of a constantly changing context or the non-pertinence of the good faith postulate. This is why some of them (Leblanc 1992) decide to study texts which are supposed to resist theories: autobiographies. This genre is supposed to rest on a kind of uniqueness helped by a process of enunciation connected to a subject who is conceived as expressing him/herself in his/her uniqueness. The contradiction between the uniqueness of the autobiography and the metalanguage connected to a historic past might help uncover how the metalanguage avoids elucidating the institutional operation which creates it. However, this solution is flawed from the start because, if one can agree that the subject is a potential uniqueness in action, it is not transparent to himself (Rorty 1989) but a concentrate of institutional discourses kept operational in a chain of transmitted memories. Confronting a theory with such a text might help deepen the doubts about the virtues of a metalanguage, but it does not allow us to point out that metalanguages represent an enterprise in the hands of an orthodoxy trying to plug the gaps inherent in semiotic processes and therefore trying to assert a kind of legitimation in an epistemology still linked to stable entities.

5. POST-THEORY AND NARRATIVITY Starting with a point of view dealing with stable entities, practice becomes necessary. Particularly the practice of fiction as a means of pointing out that any type of discourse is part of a fictional world which finds its legitimation in a consensus which excludes others (Bezengon 1992). Perhaps this is why, twenty years after Lyotard (1976) spoke of the delegitimization of master narratives, simple narrative structures, used in literature, and applied to complex philosophical reflexions seem to allow people to gain insights into specialized knowledge and conceptual organisations. This is what Orwell discovered fifty years ago when he published Animal farm, a book written in such a way that it can be read by an adolescent as well as by a civil servant dealing with daily international problems. If master narratives based on the coherence of an objective history are now held in suspicion, pleasurable experiences resting on loose causal and temporal relationships are still efficient. However, most readers are looking for new relationships which are not necessarily causal, but they enjoy the pleasure provided by a fictional narrative based upon the structure of a novel because they deepen their knowledge by a ludism which has an impact on lies in its capacity to explore the different kinds of fictionalities at work in discourses. Symptomatic of this new situation is the fact that very complex books like those of Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum reach the status of international best-sellers. More than 15 millions copies of The Name of the Rose were sold. It is even more symptomatic that a book about the western history of philosophy like Jostein Garder's Sophie's World sold 7 millions copies in more than 100 countries. It is written like an epistolary novel, putting to the fore the dialogue between a young girl (public

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language) and a specialist able to disseminate his complex knowledge through simple sentences and interesting daily examples but without compromising the complexity of concepts and contexts. Their readers know that they enter fictional worlds, be it history, paradigmatic relationships or stories, and they like to experience these different levels of fictionality. This experience helps them to try to connect elements together which affect each other not because they are linked in a causal chain, but because they are set in a contingent relationship. These elements happen to be comparable because they are put in a context which is built by chance, by sheer occasion revealing similarities. These new relationships are, as in a multicultural relationship, becoming important. They tend to lead to a new balance of power geared to a common future originating in past elements which had or were thought to have nothing in common.

6. POST-THEORY AND NEW PARADIGMS A new culture is emerging and this is why a specialized public is interested in the questions pertaining to epistemology as they are framed by Eco or by Gaarder. This public needs and likes to play with paradigms; it needs and likes to be more acquainted with the different a prioris which tend to govern the production of texts, of ideas and of discourses. It wants to know more about stability and flux because in its specialization, it participates in the invention of a new sociability which creates a multiculture from a practice of mixing texts, images and kinesics. This culture is invented daily in real time. This capacity to be productive in real time globally allows for a constant retroaction far away from a culture based on the past. Consummtion while important is superseded by the pleasure of being a producter among all the specialists who are able to be producters. This capacity to produce new discourses, new connections and new ideas is in keeping with liberalism. It is disconnected from the past and open to metissage through the possibility of implementing new connections in a competitiveness escaping the epistemology of a closed narrativity always tending to point out a culprit which the group rejects. Most traditional narratives display a belief in the capacity to determine which characters are the good ones and which are the bad ones. And most important, they are able to do this through the elaboration of a plot and of a suspense which is organized around the presentation of a dead body. And if one postulates a murder, this is because there is a culprit who must be punished. This helps the community to reassert its capacity to produce master narratives explaining why the victim is guilty (Camus 1957). Traditional narrative is deeply engaged in the process analysed by Girard. Looking for a founding murder is the basis which allows the production of more dead bodies and to reaffirm the legitimacy of the community controlling the victimization process by asserting that it is able to say the truth and to judge who is the culprit and why a victim is guilty. In a postmodern narrative, like the ones created by Cortázar,

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Eco, García Márquez, Isabel Allende or Don Delillo, the open ended narrative connected with a narrator who is not omniscient only allows us to point out lie and to say that there were people who were alive and who now are dead and that a group, a system, a set of reference that denies this has to be changed through the production of demultiplied and manifold discourses open to difference. In this framework, theory is becoming increasingly inefficient because it was often based on text objects structured by the belief in a narrative stating, contrary to Girard, that the victim was guilty and that paradigms were definitively fixed. Theory, in the modalities we have known in the Seventies and in the Eighties, is becoming obsolete because it is superseded by a phenomenal increase in the capacity to invent the present through a multicoded playfulness. This playfulness is what matters because it is the expression of a desire to be productive and to project oneself in simultaneous fictions in order to be able to evaluate the fictionality of the dominant discourses controlling ones daily life. Difference in one's own selves connects with difference outside the selves. This dynamic is particularly noticeable in North America.

7. POST-THEORY AND AMERICA "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." Common Sense. Thomas Paine.

For a long time, North America searched for causal roots and legitimations in its European past and did not try to directly explore similarities of experience in its own space or on the whole American continent. Nowadays, however, similarities, sometimes set in a past which can be partially related causaly, are explored (Couillard/Imbert 1995). More culture related studies are also set into motion. It is in keeping with a world which is fast becoming a global market linked by a global network of satellites and computers creating new interests and relationships stemming from the contingent and the simultaneous: a desire for a new product, an interest in a place to visit which was broadcast in a particularly alluring image, a strong will to migrate in order to realize one's own potential, however determined by the desire of the new country to allow potential immigrants to settle within its borders, etc. For this new global melting pot to work without generating too many conflicts, one has to allow for a type of pragmatic relationship which is geared towards economic and cultural goals oriented towards the future. These cultural goals are pragmatic (Simpson 1993) and connected to daily lives like those of two engineers trying to create a new program for computers or like those of a group of Asian artists newly settled in Canada and organizing a multimedia show disseminating Asian culture. However, the Canadian context in which they set their performance transforms the Asian values they want to disseminate. It is so, first because, if they had stayed in their respective countries, they would never have cooperated; they would, on the contrary,

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probably have fought wars as the nationalistic countries they come from do, torn apart in declared or latent civil wars, would have induced them; second because in a multicultural context, they have to escape from violent appropriation mimesis reactions and try to seduce a public whose aesthetic and cultural values are far from their own. The obvious, for them, is mysterious or meaningless for most of the new public and it is by a pleasurable experience that they can give hints of their own values which are nonetheless already considerably modified by their cooperating and by their own endeavour to understand the values of their new public. In other words, as Stuart Mill said two centuries ago when he was referring to the French Revolution, one accomplishes more by suppressing internal passports (which the French Revolution did not) than by disseminating inflamatory theories. Again, performance and pragmaticism are seen as more efficient than theory. Post-theory is set in a multicultural and global world. It has to be oriented towards a way of fostering an understanding of specialized languages among an everyday larger group of educated people who want to pragmatically build their future in common, and who also want to explore both poles of relating with each other. They want to circulate from the margins to the centers in order to penetrate the centers and also integrate values from the centers into their temporarily marginal position and integrate themselves in the flux generated by new disseminated centers. This is more possible than ever because the influence of national boundaries constraining margins is less strong than in the past. Margins internationalized themselves fast during the last 30 years and even co-opted new marginal groups involved in defending their values worldwide through NGO's like Amnesty International or Greenpeace or through personal and international links weaving together, for instance, different lesbian organizations.

CONCLUSION Post-theory is part of a world of post-information leading to what Oliviero Toscani (1995) calls a post-human world. It is the world of the screen where information, while being transmitted in real time, is subjected to elaborate strategies of construction and reflexivity. In this context, the past is losing ground in front of the rereading of different pasts which now interfere with a future to be built together with multiple contexts opening up to different possible futures. POST is the era of risk taking. It is the period valorizing the risk of being another self because each individual has to use the resources of its possible multiple identities in order to communicate and to create with individuals coming from totally different backgrounds. Post-theory, in this case, can lead people to new similarities or dissimilarities and allow them to envisage creative contradictions in a world in which the reality principle is gone in its objective and historic form. Appropriation mimesis, in this world which standardizes technological products and which is homogeneized by the laws of science applied to technologies, is clearly

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linked to culture, to a social text which has to be efficiently reinvented, produced, deciphered, produced again through multiple significations generating new complex significations allowing for new forms of ideas. The main conflicts, hopefully pacific, will take place at this level, even more so in the future than now. This is why culture has to be redefined, not as a set of fragments drawn from the past to be put in the museum of one's community ghetto, but as a constant turmoil where people live many lives and where they are able to occupy and share different discursive positions while being able to point out to lie although it is impossible to hint at truth. The main lie is the one stemming from an institution, a group or an individual saying that truth can be said or reality defined.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allende, Isabel. (1985). The House of the Spirits. New York: Bantam. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Barthes, Roland. (1967). Système de la mode. Paris: Seuil. Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Baudrillard, Jean. (1990). La transparence du mal: essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. Paris: Galilée. Bernstein, Basil. (1971). Class, Codes and Control. London: Routledge and Paul Kegan. Bezençon, Hélène. (1992). Les confessions d'une mangeuse de lune. Vevey: L'Aire. Borges, Jorge Luis. (1974). Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emece. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1988). Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity. Camus, Albert. (1957). L'étranger. Paris: Livre de Poche. -—. ((1954). La peste. Paris: Gallimard. Certeau, Michel de. (1987). Histoire et psychanalyse: Entre science et fiction. Paris: Gallimard. Cortázar, Julio. (1975). Hopscotch. New York: Avon. Couillard, Marie/Patrick Imbert. (1995). Les discours du Nouveau-Monde au XlXè siècle au Canada français et en Amérique latine/Los discursos del Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XIX en el Canada francofono y en América latina. Ottawa: Legas. Delillo, Don. (1986). White Noise. Toronto: Penguin. Derrida, Jacques. (1981). Dissemination. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Eco, Umberto. (1988). Foucault's Pendulum. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. — . (1983). The Name of the Rose. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Gaarder, Jostein. (1995). Le monde de Sophie. Paris: Seuil. García Márquez, Gabriel. (1995). One hundred years of solitude. New York: Knopf. Girard, René. (1987). Things hidden since the Beginning of the World. London: Athlone.

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Greimas, Algirdas. (1966). Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse. Imbert, Patrick. (1995). "Le processus d'attribution", in: Couillard, Marie/Patrick Imbert (eds.). Les discours du Nouveau-Monde au XlXè siècle au Canada français et en Amérique latine. Ottawa: Legas. p. 43-60. — . (1995a) "L'artiste n'est ni un assisté social, ni un support de l'économisme", in: C. Bouchi (éd.). Bravo. Vanier, Ontario: Bravo, p. 14-23. Laborit, Henri. (1976). Éloge de la fuite. Paris: Folio. Leblanc, Julie. (1992). "Action ou interaction: l'énonciation littéraire", in: RS/SL XII: 3. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1976). La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. Orwell, George. (1946). Animal Farm. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Paine, Thomas. (1945). The complete Writings of Thomas Paine. New York: Citadel. Perelman, Chaïm. (1988). L'empire rhétorique. Paris: Vrin. Rorty, Richard. (1989). Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, Edward. (1968). Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Simpson, David. (1993). Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Smith, Adam. (1974). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Publishing Company. Styron, William. (1979). Sophie's Choice. New York: Random House. Toscani, Oliviero. (1995). La publicité est une charogne qui nous sourit. Paris: Hoëbeke. Whorf, Benjamin. (1965). Language, Thought and Reality. New York: Braziller. Wittig, Monique. (1992). The Straight Mind. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Jacques M. Chevalier

Carleton University, Ottawa

POST APOCALYPSE NOW As we approach the year 2000, many questions are asked about visions and prophecies of the future written in the heavens and in John's Book of Revelation as well. But signs of the future have never been created equally in the eyes of God. While prophecy has been the language of the Church and the saints, astrology has taken its inspiration primarily from the "pagan" world. More than anything else, the New Testament Apocalypse speaks to this grand battle between the Verb and the heavenly spheres. A close reading of John's visions of the End shows how Revelation makes it a point of undoing and dismantling the "heathenish" views of astrology and related principles of sidereal divination. In his dialogue with pagan astromythologies of Antiquity, John insists on downgrading the visible spheres of heaven to markers of time and signmanifestations, metaphors and messengers of invisible spirits dwelling above the vault of heaven. Much like Judaism, Christianity decrees that bodies of heaven must never be treated as divinities in their own right. Accordingly, Revelation is written in such ways as to coopt stars and planets into subserving the higher rule of Logos ~ a timeless, immaterial divinity sending signs of His Will to inhabitants of an Earth on the verge of being destroyed and renewed. In the modern era ancient visions of "signs of things to come", prophetic and astrological, have been supplanted by institutions of secular learning and the growth of modern academia. In lieu of concerning themselves with visions of the future (as in Antiquity and the Middle Ages), scholars interpreting the scriptures are now bent on pursuing signs of the origins of text and cultural context. Popular interest in divining the future through horoscopes has survived but only on the fringe of the "high cultural" achievements of science (astronomy), religion (Christianity), literature, and art. The discussion that follows explores these issues by looking at the fate of astrology and apocalyptic prophecy in Western history. It also discusses old and new conceptions of the sign process and what current fears and hopes of the billennium reveal about the End and what might be called the "Post Apocalypse Now" — the downfall of modernity and of all grand narratives of the Earth Renewed, narratives inspired by secular ideals of the French Revolution, liberal democracy, the forward march of science, the industrial revolution, the Affluent Society, socialism, and the Welfare State.

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1. SIGNS OF LOGOMACHY The story told here concerns the confrontation and downfall of two modes of storytelling in Western history: astrology and eschatology — and prophecy, or the cult of stars and the visions of Revelation. While both modes of discourse on time have profoundly marked Western history, they are now excluded from dominant concerns of the modern and postmodern world, reduced to pale reflections of the hegemonic signs they used to be. My intention is to bring both grand narratives back to life, if only through a postmodern dialogue with history. In a book dedicated to this topic (Chevalier 1997) I begin the journey with an overview of the longue durée history of astrology spanning from antiquity to the modern and postmodern era, with a view to understanding the gradual demise of sidereal divination in the West. The analysis shows the role that Christian notions of spirituality and prophetic revelation have played in downgrading the spheres of heaven, reducing star gods to mere signs and subaltern spirits dwelling in the visible heavens, below the immaterial Lord ruling from above. John's Revelation is read in that light, as a contrapuntal scheme launched against astrological time. In its own prophetic way, the New Testament Apocalypse is Christianity's response to cults that dare assimilate the divine (immaterial, atemporal) to the visible and the tangible — to celestial bodies and the motions of desire activating the cosmos and the wheels of time. In the Book of Revelation, Christian prophecy superimposes itself on the language of "pagan" divination, disassembling and recomposing it in such ways as to satisfy the higher rule of Logos. Like an old city, the book consists of several layers, and "down at the bottom is a pagan substratum" (Lawrence 1974: 60, see 194f.). In the ancient heavens lies the foundational material both used and ruined by John's apocalyptic edifice. The preceding remarks raise two basic questions. First, what relationship does John's detailed imageries entertain with ancient expressions of astro-mythology? Second, what do twentieth century scholars have to say about the New Testament Apocalypse, and how do their readings of Revelation betray a modern perspective on ancient teleological scripts (astrological, eschatological)? Both questions are answered against the background of two broader stories: the history of Western astrology, and the evolution of readings of Revelation spanning from late antiquity to the twentieth century (see Chevalier 1997: ch. 2, 3). The notion that astral lessons of cyclical time can be read into ancient mythologies dates back at least to late antiquity. In his Saturnalia, Macrobius claimed that Adonis stood for the sun. The Latin grammarian found confirmation of this in religious practices of the Assyrians and Phoenicians, including the sun-related cult of Venus. The goddess was said to mourn the sun that journeyed through the twelve zodiacal signs of the lower hemisphere, the realm of Proserpine. This was the time of the year when days got shorter, as if the sun had been carried off for a time by death. Venus mourned until Adonis rose back to life, an event occurring at springtime, when the sun had left the "circle of the earth".

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On Mount Lebanon there is a statue of Venus. Her head is veiled, her expression sad, her cheek beneath her veil is resting on her left hand; and it is believed that as one looks upon the statue it sheds tears. This statue not only represents the mourning goddess of whom we have been speaking but is also a symbol of the earth in winter; for at the time the earth is veiled in clouds, deprived of the companionship of the sun, and benumbed, its springs of water (which are, as it were, its eyes) flowing more freely and the fields meanwhile stripped of their finery — a sorry sight. But when the sun has come up from the lower parts of the earth and has crossed the boundary of the spring equinox, giving length to the day, then Venus is glad and fair to see, the fields are green with growing crops, the meadows with grass and trees with leaves. This is why our ancestors dedicated the month of April to Venus (Macrobius, quoted in Malina 1995: 143).

In the same interpretive vein, Macrobius claims that the story of the boar that killed Adonis signifies Has, winter season inflicting a wound on the sun, "for the boar is an unkempt and rude creature delighting in damp, muddy and frost covered places and feeding on the acorn, which is especially a winter fruit". Many ancient philosophers and theologians objected to this naturalistic interpretation of religious beliefs, treating divine personages as stand-ins for the heavenly spheres. Hippolytus (c. 160 - c. 235) was one of them. In his Refutation ofall Heresies, the Church Father makes it clear that scriptural characters can not be understood astrologically. He admonishes heretics who assert that Eve is Cassiopeia; that Logos is Perseus, "the winged axle that pierces both poles through the center of the earth, and turns the world around"; and that Adam is Cepheus or Hercules (Engonasis) guarding the head of the Dragon, in compliance with God's command. No concession is to be made to those who "endeavor to seduce the mind of those who give heed to their (tenets), drawing them only plausible words into the admission of whatever opinions they wish, (and) exhibiting a strange marvel, as if the assertions made by them were fixed among the stars'" (quoted in Malina 1995: 75; my emphasis). The polemic regarding the role of stars and planets in the scriptures continued throughout the ages and found its way into exegetic commentaries of the twentieth century. In 1914 Franz Boll offered an astrological reading of Revelation, using modern genealogical methods to cast light on what he thought to be the true literary sources and origins of John's prophetic imagery. Given his naturalistic approach and lack of exegetic expertise, Boll's work was soon discounted to be taken up by few students of Revelation (Gundel, Kroll, Festugiere). Freuendorfer's assessment of his work (published in 1929) raised some fundamental objections that sealed the fate of Boll's astrologism in the field of New Testament scholarship. Among other things Freuendorfer rejected the notion that John had direct access to Near Eastern texts and documents containing astrological lore, translating these motifs into prophetic visions of his own. More recently, Malina has attempted to resurrect the astrological hypothesis from a scholarly perspective. His contention is that John's work fits into a particular genre, an ancient literature that may be described as "astral prophecy". By this he means "those ancient narratives reporting the interaction of prophets and seers with starrelated, celestial personages and the outcomes of that interaction" (Malina 1995: 19,

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cf. 26, 30). This astronomic writing involves prophets reporting on their interaction with celestial entities and their impact upon regions of the earth. Astral visions commonly reported in the first century of our era were based on the widespread notion that sky beings controlled natural forces and human reality as well. Groups and persons believed they had access to those cosmic personages who controlled the socially unknown. And they gained this access either through the initiative of the celestial beings themselves (e.g., the appearance of a deity) or through human initiative (e.g., a person prepares for ecstasy). Hence by means of such access, one might, on behalf of a group or its central persons (e.g., the king), contact those controlling beings and, thanks to their help, enter their space by means of visions, sky trips, and the like, with a view to learning directives and obeying. Such access was part of the social role of prophets, seers, magicians, astrologers, and astronomers. At times such access agents simply observed events as they unfolded, while at other times they attempted to coerce such controlling beings to do their own bidding. In either case the information sought was not about some distant future but about the present and forthcoming events that would impact their lives. In other words, there was nothing "eschatological" about astral prophecy, at least not in any usual sense of the "study of the last things" (Malina 1995: 44f.). The implication of this approach is that vertical relations between humans and sky beings are projected on to relations in time; for instance, heaven denotes not merely distant spaces but also immediate future horizons. But if the short-term future is to be portrayed on a large scale, as the astral prophecy genre requires, then the prophet must combine vertical spatial interaction with recollections of the distant past, using themes of the First Creation to enlarge the battle stakes of contemporary religious politics. The tendency to assign cosmic scope to developments of the near future thus accounts for the prophet's focus on scenes of Genesis and the struggles of primordial times. Forces of the remote past explain current troubles, giving issues of the day a magnitude that equals the amplitude of forthcoming events (Malina 1995: 199, 266). According to Malina, celestial characters appearing in the New Testament Apocalypse are to be understood for what they were: sky beings encountered through visionary experiences. When John talks of Jesus the heavenly lamb or the seven stars in the right hand of the Lord, he must be taken literally. Through his vision, the prophet did see the Lamb of God ruling the cosmos from beyond the vault of the sky, and he did see a seven-starred constellation in the Lord's hand. But if this is the case, why is it that later readers of Revelation have had so much difficulty in understanding the literal meanings of John's narrative account? Malina's answer to this question is essentially twofold. First, our society no longer recognizes the validity of knowledge obtained through altered states of awareness, experiences considered quite normal in most cultures. Second, our Western world view no longer acknowledges the many life forms and visible spirits that used to dwell in the ancient heavens. Since we are ignorant of older notions of astro-mythology, we can hardly recognize "sky servants" in the literature that evokes them. If there are still many things that the Book of Revelation leaves unexplained, it is mostly because "the seer presumes all readers

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know about these items. This sort of authoring is called high context writing (...) The author supposes that his audience is quite well informed about everything to which he refers, such as the comets, the sky Altar or holy ones, and the like" (Malina 1995: 141, cf. 70, 75). The evidence marshaled by Malina in support of an astrological rendering of Revelation is impressive; the overall argument cannot be ignored. The author's insights into the Apocalypse are all the more commendable as there is little scholarly work that shows the close connections between the history of astronomy and the science of mythology, two disciplines that have taken separate roads since the early eighteenth century. To suggest that John was an astral prophet, a visionary who was exiled to Patmos because he practiced astral prophecy (Malina 1995: 259), is nonetheless untenable. Malina's thesis is problematic in several important ways. To begin with, Malina fails to reflect on the functions of John's metaphorical rhetoric. Readers are reminded that the prophet insists on treating heavenly imageries as tangible signs made "in the likeness of the appearances" of immaterial spirits. This precludes a literal reading of astralism into Revelation. The creatures appearing in Rev. 4 were like a lion, a bull, a man, and an eagle, which is to say that they were not what they seemed to be. Righteous souls that shine like stars in the firmament, as in Daniel 12.3, are not necessarily thought to exist as stars, as Malina suggests (Malina 1995: 131). Unlike identity attributions, metaphors have two interrelated effects: they establish a relationship of similarity between one thing and another, but they also maintain the distance required to distinguish the two things compared, thereby eschewing a relationship of full identity. While it is easy to recognize the first effect, which tends to be more explicit, the implications of the second are less obvious. In the case of Revelation, allegorical connections erected between spirits and stars are based on the principle of approximation, not of consubstantiation. While logocentrism can use astrological imageries to unfold its doctrine of history and spirituality, it cannot afford to be confused with astralism and the deification of visible rulers of heaven and the earth. The language of metaphor will permit a squaring of the circle — reconciling reverence for the stars with logocentrism — provided that the correspondences posited between spirits and stars be close enough to cause the desired impact, but never so close as to eliminate all "flickers of doubts" regarding the identities involved. From an exegetic perspective, the implications of the language of approximation is that a perfect match between one dominant mythology (logocentrism) and another subserving it (astralism) can never be firmly established. John's text is constructed in such ways as to leave room for various astrological interpretations. Effects of dialogical ambiguity and indeterminacy do not mean that literary comparative exercises should never be attempted. The point rather is that we should move the hermeneutic exercise beyond the simple quest for similarities and sources, to include questions about a text's sustained effort to distance itself from competing compositions and the precise formulations they deploy. Interpretive doubts caused by such a distance are to be explained, never to be dispelled.

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The Book of Revelation reflects an early Christian way of activating stellar motifs while losing track of contemporary sidereal cults. The erasure of astralism is all the more important as it allows the teachings of Logos to be elevated above the lessons of cyclical time. In other words, logocentrism requires that battles of the times (day vs. night, spring vs. autumn, Orion vs. Scorpion, etc.) be turned into a battle against time. Star signs regulating calendrical motions are still useful in as much as they can make a contribution to a prophetic apprehension of God's timeless order and supportive events of the end of time. The Verb demands that blurred reformulations of smallerscale engagements of one zodiacal sign or season against another be put to the service of a much larger-scale combat: the struggle of an atemporal God against all temporal rulers, be they stars governing the heavens or their kingly allies ruling on earth. Unless stars and kings keep the subordinate places appointed to them by their Creator, they will suffer the wrath of God and go to war amongst themselves. Stars will fight other stars, kings will defeat other kings, nations will destroy other nations. The end result is universal logomachy, by which I mean a religious dispute coinciding with a cosmic battle between signs in heaven, hence total chaos. This is what prevails before history but also at the end of time. A vivid description of this apocalyptic "star war" can be found in the Sibylline Oracles: The stars travailed in battle; God bade them fight. For over against the sun long flames were in strife, and the two-horned rush of the moon was changed. Lucifer fought, mounted on the back of Leo. Capricorn smote the ankle of the young Taurus, and Taurus deprived Capricorn of his day of return. Orion removed Libra so that it remained no more. Virgo changed the destiny of Gemini in Aries. The Pleiad no longer appeared and Draco rejected its belt. Pisces submerged themselves in the girdle of Leo. Cancer did not stand its ground, for it feared Orion. Scorpio got under its tail because of terrible Leo, and the dog star perished by the flame of the sun. The strength of the mighty star burned up Aquarius. Heaven itself was roused until it shook the fighters. In anger it cast them headlong to earth. Accordingly, stricken into the baths of ocean, they quickly kindled the whole earth. But the sky remained starless (Sibylline Oracles 5.512-31).

Seneca uses similar imagery to portray the triumph of a "formless chaos". The firstcentury Roman philosopher describes a scene where stars no longer guide the procession of the seasons and the years. The thrones of gods and constellations of the zodiac are thrown into the abyss. The Ram plunges into the Ocean, the Bull and the Scales drag the Twins and the fierce Scorpion down with them, the Virgin falls back to the earth she once abandoned, and the Wagon which was never bathed by the sea, shall be plunged beneath the all engulfing waves; the slippery Serpent which gliding like a river, separates the Bears shall fall and Icy Cynosura, the Lesser Bear, together with the Dragon vast, congealed with cold; and that slow moving driver of his wagon, Arctophylax, no longer fixed in place, shall fall (Thyestes 827-74).

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According to Malina (1995: 166ff., 171), this sky war theme known throughout ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world takes us back to the primordial times that preceded the beginnings of God's Creation. This is precisely the kind of astral material that inspired John's vision of a Second Creation, a new cosmos heralded by stars falling on earth and all hell let loose. The times foreseen by John are so chaotic as to be populated by monstrous creatures composed of limbs and parts taken from different animal species. This state of anatomical confusion is reminiscent of the mystical Scorpion-and-Dragon period described by Berossus of Babylon, third century B.C.E. (Malina 1995: 181). In a Judeo-Christian perspective, the star-war effects of logomachy preside over small-scale floods sent to punish sinful humans during normal world history or, what is more usual, the larger-scale floods of tribulations preceding or following the advent of Time. Readers will recall that the fallen angels — spirits who failed to keep time in heaven, had sexual commerce with the daughters of humans, taught them the secrets of the sky, and generated a race of monstrous giants - ended up playing havoc with the entire universe. But the chaos and diluvian sufferings they provoked were never meant to last. In Genesis, the Noahic Covenant put an end to the Flood. It offered a solid lunisolar pact that guaranteed the fixity of the eternal transients, hence the everlasting recurrence of days and nights and seasons of the year. Likewise, the New Jerusalem offered by John is essentially reassuring. It too gives the impression that the order of time will be unproblematic. Come the Second Creation, the motions of time will cause no problem in that they will be simply discontinued. They will give way to a timeless cosmos where the Light of God will be forever substituted for the luminaries of heaven (Rev. 21). A language that eliminates the embattlements of signs evolving in heaven is hard to imagine. Notwithstanding the reassurances of the solar pact and of the sunless and moonless Jerusalem, logocentrism has never been able to do away with logomachy. Visions of the endtime can hardly be expressed without resorting to the powerful imageries of seasons and signs of the equinoxes struggling in heaven. As in "pagan" mythology, cyclical tensions and altercations between signs of life and death written all over the sky provide a "most natural" screen against which rivalries of the Great Beyond can be projected and visualized. But "signs in dispute" derived from astrological lore provide more than useful calendrical metaphors to express visions of a world beyond history. Over and beyond their metaphorical implications, sign altercations — imageries that go into contradictory directions — can also serve to create the confusion required by God to subjugate and harness the powers of astrology in history. Provided that they be distorted and reproduced through monstrous formulations at best, astral bodies in movement constitute effective means to express the grandest battle of all: the historic war waged by Logos against cults devoted to nature and the heavenly rulers of time.

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TELOS, LOGOS, GENOS

2. 1.

Divination vs. Prophecy

Present-day horoscopy is a rejoinder to the West's subjugation of its own astrological past (Eliade 1976: 59). Albeit a weak plea, it is the diviner's answer to western schemes directed against the worldly, forward-looking languages of antiquity. Unlike cultural developments of the twentieth century, the mythical and the astrological traditions of the pre-Christian world converged on a tragic, future-oriented sense of time pervading the entire universe, affecting humans and their gods alike. Ancient Greece developed a mythology that was deeply concerned with the tragic and the erratic in life, epic stories of gods, demigods, messengers and heroes that experienced unexpected joys and sufferings comparable to the blessings and misfortunes of the people they protected, though on a larger scale. Humans and their legendary gods were subject to hordes of untimely events. Narrative beginnings and endings were constantly divined but were not predictable in the sense of following strict laws of Fate. Stoic philosophers of the Greco-Roman period saw stability and constancy in a universe ruled by laws of celestial "mathematics" (synonymous with astrology), yet the logic of the heavenly spheres did not preclude divinatory explorations and propitiatory manipulations of the future, towards fateful developments of their own choice. Nor did Stoicism preclude the idea of great floods and prophetic visions of chaos befalling the universe. Although Seneca and Lucan believed in the timeful logic of all things that come in due season, in accordance with the dictates of Fate, they also recognized the inevitability of world-scale catastrophes (ekpyrosis) that play havoc with the universe and result in long astronomical cycles and regenerations of the cosmos {palingenesis) (Ulansey 1989: 75f.). Judeo-Christianity also expressed faith in a grand narrative telos that offered promises and warnings of the future. Unlike "pagan" expressions of teleology, however, the language of prophecy proclaimed the end of time and the world as we know it. Opposed as they were to horoscopy and astromythology, apocalyptic seers reported visions of the imminent End and the hereafter, hence the Day of Judgment when martyrs would be redeemed and the earth destroyed and purged of all evil. This brings us to ancient embattlements of myths of the end, or the struggle of Judeo-Christian prophecy against astralism and sidereal divination. Anti-astrological schemes have a long history, dating back to the battle between "pagan" divination and Judeo-Christian prophecy and culminating in the demise of visionary thought in the age of reason and science. This essay deals with the latter struggle as it evolves through time, with an emphasis on the fate of astralism (defined as the worship of stars) and our worldly sense of telos — our capacity to project ourselves into insights of future times that do not escape the worldliness and cyclical motions of Being. My contention is that the first sentencing of astromythology is written all over the prophecies of Revelation, a script dedicated to visions of the endtime (Chevalier 1997). In John's visions, astral signs are reduced to subordinate spirits and mere metaphors, hence sign-

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manifestations of an otherworldly Spirit heralding the Day of Judgment. The New Testament Apocalypse downgrades the astral pantheon that once presided over the bodily motions of time and desire, turning star gods into time markers, metaphors, messages and "the hosts of heaven" (messengers, soldiers, saints, angels, etc.) subserving an immaterial Sign Maker dwelling in eternity. Astralism is disassembled into fragments of itself, retributive manifestations and poetic metaphors harnessed to the Lord dwelling beyond the visible spheres. John's use of prophetic rhetoric is a polemical response to pagan divination. The apocalyptic answer to astralism is developed chiefly through a host of deceitful parallels: using imageries made "in the likeness of the appearances" of the unspeakable star gods, harnessing their powers to the higher rule of the Lord. The implication of this argument is not thai an astrological code governs the language of Revelation, or that what John really meant had to do with astrological secrets and mysteries that enrich his message and beg to be decoded and deciphered (as in Exel 1986; Maunder 1923; Gleadow 1968; Fleming 1981; Jurist 1982; Moore 1981: 29; Malina 1995). Unlike other exegeses, my reading of the Apocalypse focuses on what the text insists on not saying, or what the prophet never actually says because it would be too incompatible with (and yet so close to) his vision of the future. The astrological underpinnings of Revelation converge on the notion of "influence" in its original sense: what the text could have said had not the prophet made every effort to contradict prevailing signs, preventing competing words and imageries from outruling his Verb. The influence of astrology on the scriptures points to plausible connections between texts and their immediate context. We must remember that even the Biblical writers were children of their time, and could therefore hardly avoid expressing their thoughts in terms of the recognized philosophy of their age (Hastings 1921: 54).

But more than a reconstruction of Revelation in its original context, the intertextuality of John's Verb speaks to a text forming part of a broader contest. I am alluding to a dispute between competing world views, a rivalry written into Revelation from the start, a sign battle conveyed with all the discretion needed to impose silence where lapses of memory are required. Paganism is not an everyday symbolic garment worn by Christianity to convey a radically new and much broader doctrine, as Rahner suggests (1963: 99, 109, 113, 131, 155). Nor is it a secret corpus hiding under the cloak of Revelation. Astralism is neither outside nor inside John's Apocalypse. More to the point, "heathenism" pervades Revelation by actively standing on its opposite side. Notwithstanding his "symbolic garment" imagery. Rahner (1963: 146) makes the same point when he sums up Christianity's settlement with paganism in the following terms: "the Church opposes, the Church dethrones, the Church consecrates and in the end the Church brings home." Religious symbolism is so malleable that it can both expatriate and repatriate contending imageries all at one stroke.

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My reading of Revelation attempts to shed new light on the eschatology and astrology as expressed through the Apocalypse, hence the sufferings and agony of the star cult in Christian prophetic thought. As we shall see, worldly finalities of cyclical time (telos I) are denounced, silenced and subsumed by visions of otherworldly ends geared to the End (telos 2)\ prophecy triumphs over divination, logocentrism over Sabaism. But my rendering of the Apocalypse speaks also to three other polemical schemes and apparent deaths inflicted upon ancient expressions of teleology: the anagogical, the sublunar-astrological {telos 3), and the genealogical (genos).

2. 2. Logos and Analogos The first death is of the spiritual, atemporal kind. It involves a search for the eternal lessons and principles embodied in signs of Logos, the scriptures and the heavens. Anagogical schemes and plots applied to Revelation have taken various forms ranging from the Augustinian hermeneutics prevalent in the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century emphasis upon timeless-symbolic principles, whether viewed from a formalstructural standpoint (as in Farrer 1949), a theological perspective (as in Lohmeyer 1926), or a Jungian approach. In these writings the contribution of Revelation to our knowledge of future events weighs little compared to what eschatology says about Christian principles or universal operations of symboling and the unconscious. Through an anagogical interpretation the Apocalypse exerts what is essentially an allegorical appeal, being deciphered with every detail so as to mean "something and something moral at that" (Lawrence 1974: 206f.). The early teachings of anagogy are closely associated with the accession of Christianity to power in Rome. As the Church achieved hegemony, threats of an immediate End were removed from the heavenly writ and confined to the distant future. Church Fathers recognized the worldliness of their own institutions, yet the rise and consolidation of Christendom in the West meant that great steps had been taken towards the reign of Christ on earth, or the realm of the Spirit made flesh. Given the triumph of God's people, theologians were not about to predict an imminent End. The world had been transformed as predicted, all in the light of the Lord. A period of quasi-eternal communion with the Almighty could be enjoyed without fear of an impending Day of Judgment, in anticipation of the Second Advent of Christ and his eternal reign on earth. Given the secular strength of Church institutions, the old apocalyptic tradition lost its appeal. The interpretive practice shifted from signs of telos to lessons of analogos. Visions of eschatology based on teleology (the notion that events have final causes) gave way to anagogy: an understanding of text and history viewed as analogical manifestations of the eternal Spirit. Teleological world views, astrological and eschatological alike, passed away. The teachings of St. Augustine made wishful predictions of future events either sinful and satanic, as in the case of sidereal divination, or allegorical and mystical, as in the case of Revelation.

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The Dark Ages thus moved further away from a time-bound conception of the cosmos, introducing a great schism between the timeless infinity of the heavens and the lower vagaries of human and natural history. In early Christian theology, while the upper world is ruled by a timeless Spirit, far below lies the realm of earthly time, a mundane reality made finite in three fundamental ways: through the toings and froings of cyclical time, the intervention of free will, and the final day of reckoning. The passing of time on earth is subject to the appointed motions of stars and planets, which involve regularity but also constant shifts between days, seasons and years. Human temporality is not for all that entirely predictable: events are fashioned by interventions of human will and divine retribution. History is all the more finite as humanity's days are numbered and will be brought to a final conclusion on the Day of Judgment, an ultimate "apocalypse" that belongs to the distant future.

2. 3. Sublunar astrology While expelled from religion and the realm of the Spirit, temporality continued to govern all worldly affairs. But what about the Church? Was it not also a subject of history, an institution vulnerable to the trials and tribulations of time? In hindsight, the Church could hardly escape its earthly condition, hence troubled times of its own and related battles and polemics regarding future outcomes. Minds of the Middle Ages critical of Church corruption produced grand scale presages and forebodings of future transformations of history and the universe. From the twelfth century onwards, astrological and prophetic belief systems dating back to antiquity were once again given free reign in a world ruled by hopes and fears of another global change. Following a few centuries of anagogical spiritualism, eschatology found its way back into medieval religion and politics. While still rejecting astral religion, the West witnessed a reinstatement of astrology defined as a practical, forward-looking science, a form of learning occupying a legitimate position within a vertical plotting of knowledges presided by theology and prophetic spirituality. A secularized, "sublunary" version of scientific astrology was reintroduced and made compatible with Church doctrine. Aristotelian philosophy allowed the science of stars to be applied to visible phenomena, without undermining spiritual knowledge attained through revelation. Correlatively, learned interpretations of the Apocalypse wandered away from the anagogical lessons of Augustinian theology, reverting to a teleological sense (telos 3) of history. Biblical scholars renewed their concern with future events, adopting a prophetic perspective supported by the astrological discourse sanctioned in Aristotelian metaphysics. In other words, medieval exegesis conveniently separated astrology from astralism, using the former as a scientific instrument to bolster the revival of Christianity's apocalyptic imagination.

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2. 4. Genos While astral divination and divine revelation were deeply committed to probing signs of future destiny, the distinction between the two thought systems was so critical to early Christian theology that few Church Fathers could admit to any "influence" of astralism on the visionary writings of John. Accordingly, early exegetic readings of the Apocalypse made no concessions to astromythology. Revelation had to be Ideologically, as a text that spoke to endtime events (without explicit reference to the laws of sidereal motions), or anagogically, as symbolic expressions of eternal morals and teachings of the Christian faith. Later on, the teachings of biblical anagogy gave way to a revival of astrology subsumed under principles of Christian theology and apocalyptic prophecy. As long as they were clearly dissociated from the idolatrous views of astralism, explicit sidereal imageries offered the language needed to announce the upheavals and transformations of medieval Church history. The End envisaged by prophets of the Middle Ages did come about, but mostly in the form of an end to older scenarios of the End. Notwithstanding their impact on medieval culture, astrology and eschatology could hardly survive the great transformations of postmedieval Europe. Despite many periods of social upheaval, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought a new sense of finality to the West, including a commitment to achieving ends of universal scope, those of Reason inspired by the ancients and harmonized with Christian principles of timeless spirituality, free will and the transience of human history. With this relatively optimistic rewriting of classical culture and history, notions of dramatic endings and a tragic End looming large in medieval minds were eroded beyond recognition. Evocations of John's Revelation continued to proliferate throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if only via poets and painters of the "apocalyptic sublime" inspired by the writings of Burke (Paley 1986). But the growth of secularism, humanism, science and the individual constituted new trends that sooner or later would undermine darker visions of the apocalyptic imagination. The consolidation of such trends during the modern era resulted in resolutely hopeful conceptions of human evolution, towards the liberation of humans from the servitudes of nature and society, hence the sufferings of poverty and social exploitation. The ideals of positivism, liberalism, nationalism and socialism conveyed visions of history that spoke the language of Utopia and heaven on earth, or prophecy with no sense of tragedy. Fears of death and the sufferings of history were disposed unobtrusively, never to play an essential role in the forward march of modernity. Utopian narratives — watered down versions of an older teleological imagination ~ were not meant to last either. With modernity the "whole great adventure of the human soul" is "cut off from the cosmos, cut off from Hades, cut off from the magnificence of the Star-mover. Petty little personal salvation, petty morality instead of cosmic splendour, we have lost the sun and the planets, and the Lord with the seven stars of the Bear in his right hand" (Lawrence 1974: 44f.). Time as we know it now has no End. In the words of Baudrillard, "we are already more or less disconnected

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from our history and thus also from its destination. That means, then, that time can slow as it nears its end and that the year 2000, in a certain way, will not take place" (quoted in Dellamora 1995: 8). Habermas (1987: 13) too suggests that our awareness of time is slowing down and losing energy. Ends have been multiplied ad infinitum, adjusted to the wants and anecdotes of billions of individuals and thousands of "peoples" (nations, states, ethnic groups, etc.) seeking the good life on earth, momentary endings far removed from the pangs of death and tragic developments of secular history. To make matters worse, dreams and hopes of the late twentieth century have exploded into signs of heteroglossic infinity. Promises of a new earth have given way to postmodern nihilism and a proliferation of particularistic movements, individual finalities and islands of history that make a mockery of all previous conceptions of a global telos. Visions of the collective future that were once written all over the skies, projected onto the cosmos, have become the lot of right-wing politicians such as Ronald Reagan and fundamentalists such as Hal Lindsey (whose book The Last Great Planet Earth sold 29 million copies from 1970 to 1990). Meanwhile centers of high learning have lost interest in signs of Revelation. "Where interpreting apocalyptic texts like Revelation once occupied the best minds of an era - St. Augustine, John Milton, Isaac Newton and Jonathan Edwards, among others — today it flourishes on a popular level distant from academic life" (Steinfels, quoted in Carpenter 1995: 108). Teleology has given way to genealogy. Intellectual developments of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Modernity put an end to the syncretism of worldly (astrological) and otherworldly (prophetic) foreknowledges characteristic of medieval thought. As a result, western minds are no longer driven to probe the future with knowledge and scripts inherited from the past, hence harnessing the hitherto to the hereafter, going back to the future as it were. No longer convinced by visions of telos, post-medieval intellectuals have chosen to march into the future via a scientific exploration of the origins and first principles of natural and human phenomena, going onwards to the past so to speak. Paradoxically, what Habermas says of Benjamin's consciousness of time applies to the whole of modernity, an age that twists its surface future-orientation "so far back around the axis of the now-time that it gets transposed into a yet more radical orientation toward the past. The anticipation of what is new in the future is realized only through remembering ('Eingedenken') a past that has been suppressed" (Habermas 1987: 12). With modernity the sky became the subject matter of astronomers concerned with past and present observations of the heavenly bodies, not with their influence on human affairs and related insights into future finalities. Likewise, the scriptures became objects of scientific exegesis — searching for all the past intentions and conventions that presided over the original text. Although speaking to eternal truths, John's vision of an imminent future became a revelation of the past, prophecies to be understood scientifically, against the background of early Christian history. Most scholarly interpretations of Revelation written in the modern era will therefore pay some attention to connections between ancient astromythologies and the prophetic

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imageries of John. This is done ncVwith a view to enhancing literal visions of the End with astrological predictions, as in the Middle Ages. Rather modern exegetes are inclined to argue that astromythology and other circumstances of John's visionary experiences must have exerted some meaningful influence on the writing of Revelation. Modern students of the scriptures will all subscribe to the notion that advances in biblical scholarship presuppose a scientific regression to the history of conventions and meanings, a well-documented retour aux sources. And yet serious difficulties lie in the concept of inherent forms and origins. In the genealogical perspective the subjectmatter of a text is treated in the same way as a subject or a material object, two constructs that share a common denominator: they point to a web of fixed attributes and origins that can be assigned to any person, text or thing, constituting each as a separate "identity" or group of "individuals", a class by itself. As in kinship analysis, each and every genealogy requires fixed points in time and can exist only by virtue of the distance that lies between webs of relations and lines of descent. While the genealogical approach transcends the unscientific limitations of former teleological traditions, it tends to leave a fundamental question unanswered: how do "individuals" relate to one another, forming broader systems of interaction (intertextual, intersubjective, intercausal) that are in constant motion and that constitute each "individuality", assigning it a place within a broader story, giving shape and meaning to the particular text, subject or object? Modern exegeses of Revelation are at pains to answer the latter question. The special status accorded to the genealogical method means that little attention is paid to evolving debates and polemical interchanges developed between "partly similar" texts and conflicting interpretive traditions. Differences in the successive writings and readings of Revelation are explored, and connections between the Christian Apocalypse and astromythological imageries of Chaldean and Greco-Roman origins are discussed. Yet great emphasis is placed on the originality of a primitive text that constitutes a new origin, the beginning of an authentically Christian Apocalypse motivated by divine influence. While informed by Jewish and non-Jewish sources, the text is said to depart radically from prior and contemporary variations on similar themes, making it worthy of an extensive genealogical investigation. Scholars will of course admit "pagan" parallels lurking behind the surface text, yet the inspiration of Revelation remains essentially non-pagan, transcending all outside motivations. Exegetic faith in acts of prophetic creativity — bringing the word into being from nothing (save inspiration from the Verb) — is to be preserved against external contamination, foreign influences in excess of what an authentic creation can tolerate. By contrast, the exegetic reconstruction of Revelation must remain absolutely faithful to the primitive script, the circumstances of its production and its inherent meanings and root forms. These two hermeneutic tactics, which consist in asserting maximum distance between Revelation and divination and in minimizing the distance between the Christian Apocalypse and its scholarly reconstruction, converge on the higher truth and enduring relevance of the Apocalypse. Paradoxically, all of this is achieved through a genealogical reading of a teleological text. Exegetes cannot go back

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to the genos of biblical mythology without escaping the narration of origins, hence a myth involving "the 'double meaning' of 'springing from': a shudder at being uprooted and a sigh of relief at escaping" (Habermas 1987: 164). Genealogy combines nostalgia with a resolution to escape teleologies of the past. Exegetes will insist on showing maximum loyalty to a primitive text that offers a fresh beginning, a script so original as to prove itself thoroughly disloyal to all kindred compositions and its own literary ancestry. Given these premises, little attention is paid to the symbolic schemes and machinations plotted by early Christianity against astralism. Likewise, the relationship between ancient teleological scripts and later genealogical interpretations is never understood for what it is: just another battle of schemes evolving across the centuries, a longue durée argument over visions of time. To sum up, the myth of genos constitutes the most recent charge against prophecy and divination. It involves an eminently modern attitude where signs and text are a pretext to revisit the historical circumstances, original meanings, formative conventions and root principles of the written word. In modern scholarship, signs of heaven have lost all prophetic value. To paraphrase Freud (1976: 783), they have in common with dream symbolism that they give us no foreknowledge of human destiny but rather knowledge of the past coupled with symptomatic reflections of what we wish our future to be. In my reading of Revelation (Chevalier 1997) I respond not only to John's prophetic response to astral divination but also to later exegetic responses to John, by which I mean the scholarly exegeses that speak to the origins, the spirit and the logic of the New Testament Apocalypse. In doing this I take issue with all discussions of astralism in Revelation that pay no attention to the intertextual schemes of language: that is, John himself who never names the gods he struggles to silence, and also exegetes who spiritualize John's Verb to the point of never grasping its historical embattlement with the language of divination. However, of all the responses to Revelation that call for a critical commentary, the genealogical ones are to be given priority, for they dominate the biblical scholarship of the twentieth century. All "genealogically-minded" scholars fall prey to a common temptation: isolating the original text from broader interchanges, ignoring its polemical exchanges with previous and contemporary "influences" (astralism) and with later interpretive polemics as well. Questions of external influences and interpretive debates are addressed, but never as essential ingredients of an interlocutory apocalypse. Just as an "original" Revelation ends up transcending its non-Christian influences, so too its scholarly interpretation ends up surpassing rival exegeses. "Truth" triumphs on both levels, theological and scientific, driven as it is into foreclosing the endless battles and shifts of words through time.

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3. THE SIGNUM TRICEPS My reading of prophecy's response to astrology is set against the background of a broader polemical triad: the claims and counterclaims of teleology, anagogy, and genealogy. Each interpretive mode has evolved differently throughout the centuries, becoming hegemonic in certain periods of history and serving secondary functions at other times. Notwithstanding these critical shifts in history, all three modes have always coexisted. Allegorical symbolism was an essential ingredient of John's prophetic rhetoric and has become a central issue in modern studies of the root forms of language. Genealogical concerns about past chronology and lines of descent (euhemerism) were part and parcel of early Christian prophetic texts and allegorical pronouncements of the medieval Church as well. Finally, foreknowledge of the future had its own role to play in Augustinian theology and continues to be a central preoccupation in modern expressions of popular culture. The complex interplay of the three interpretive modes outlined above goes as far back as antiquity. As Seznec (1953: 4) points out, the ancients developed different theories to make sense of their own mythology: "the myths are a more or less distorted account of historical facts, in which the characters are mere men who have been raised to the rank of the immortals; or they express the union or conflict of the elementary powers which constitute the universe, the gods being cosmic symbols; or they are merely the expression in fable of moral and philosophical ideas, in which case the gods are allegories." The author goes on to say that it was thanks to these interpretations, which integrate mythology "with world history, natural science, and morals, that the gods were to survive through the Middle Ages, preserved alike from oblivion and from the attacks of their enemies." To these imageries of the hitherto and the forever Hellenism and Christianity added signs of the hereafter, visions of the future conveyed through augury and heavenly mythology. The dialogue between anagogy, genealogy and teleology - signs of the forever, the hitherto, and the hereafter — is vividly illustrated by a baroque painting attributed to Titian (c. 1490-1576). This intriguing Renaissance painting throws light on the basic operations of narrative time, a key factor in the workings of symboling viewed as a complex signum triceps. The painting shows a six-faced monster comprising three male heads placed immediately above three animal heads. The composition brings together the fullface heads of a middle-aged man and a lion, the leftward profiles of an old man and a wolf, and the rightward profiles of a young man and a dog. The symbolism represents the principle of Prudence as portrayed in philosophical allegories of the Middle Ages, a multifaceted virtue combining Memoria, Intelligencia, and Praevidentia. The triple human head imagery points to a synthesis of the three ages of life and related memories of the past, insights into the present, and visions of the future. The triple animal facies is apparently older. It dates back to Macrobius' fifthcentury description of the three-headed statue of Serapis: "The lion, violent and sudden, expresses the present; the wolf, which drags away its victims, is the image of the past, robbing us of memories; the dog, fawning on its master, suggests to us the

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future, which ceaselessly beguiles us with hope" (Saturnalia, quoted in Seznec 1953: 120). The iconography points to the lower and darker side of knowledge of the past, the present and the future. It suggests a somber aspect to all manifestations of human wisdom; signs of logos, genos and telos are not without inherent negativity. When transposed to the terrain of language, the lion subjects the present to the rule of the Powerful viewed as the Eternal; the wolf cheats us out of memories that must be silenced and forgotten; and the dog converts visions of hope into fears and apprehensions of the future. Over and beyond the positive gains of Intelligence, Memory and Prescience, Macrobius' imagery evokes the arbitrary impositions of an eternal present that unavoidably combine with lapses of memory and fears of the future to produce all the losses and tensions inherent in the sign process. When applied to the history of exegeses of Revelation, the signum triceps concept has the advantage of being thoroughly dialogical, with the implication that it can transcend the limitations of competing renderings of the New Testament Apocalypse. By transcendence, however, is not meant supersedure. My reading of Revelation still owes much of its inspiration to previous biblical scholarship. Paradoxically, the debt that dialogism incurs towards genealogical, anagogical and teleological perspectives can never be fully canceled. To the genealogical tradition I owe my concern with reconstructing the older schemes of Christian prophecy directed against "pagan" astrology, using the modern canons of historical scholarship and scientific exegesis. Were it not for the linguistic expertise, encyclopedic contributions and formidable insights of comparative religious history and modern biblical scholarship, who could venture to tackle Revelation's interlocution with ancient astralism? As for the anagogical method, I owe it my curiosity with the "universal mind" - looking into the nature of language, operations of the sign process, and principles of human symboling. Wittingly or not, the signum triceps ends up making a contribution to anagogical reasoning: it too formulates a theory of the unconscious logic (narrative, dialogical) guiding all expressions of allegorical thought. But of all contributions to my conversation with divination and Revelation, it is my debt to the tradition furthest removed from Western scholarship, in its worldly astrological form (telos 1), that I owe the most. As in the astrological Weltanschauung, it is my contention that all acts of signification point to the logic-of-desire-in-motion, a process where signs are eminently physical and sensuous, just like the visible star gods that used to inhabit the wondrous skies of antiquity. Like the bodies of heaven, signs of language are inherently - logical and "mathematical", subject as they are to geometric arrangements of similarities and differences that constitute the orderly and variable constellations of language; - normative and moral, hence bent on elevating certain signs and destinies above others, in the manner of astrology's rank-ordering of the spheres ruling in heaven;

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- repressive and transgressive, applying force against competing signs that are kept alive through measures of cooptation, displacement and resistance; - harnessed to the emotive powers of time, to memories and repressions of the past that come together with expectations and apprehensions of the future to mark the anxieties of narrative time. Scheme analysis (Chevalier 1990, 1995; Chevalier/Buckles 1995: 278-84) is an attempt to bring all five aspects of the symbolic process into a dialogical theory of signification. The theory presupposes that we delve into the logic of similarities, oppositions and mediations that govern the text(s) at hand. Formal analyses of "signs of the intellect" are nonetheless limited. Structuralism neglects one of the most fundamental properties of the sign system defined as a code: the fact that some signs are given greater attention than others. For instance, the lamb versus scorpion imagery of Rev. 9 and 12 is heavily biased toward a zoological code servicing the battle of spirits, good and evil. The astrological indices of the lamb and the scorpion motifs are given less attention and are prevented from entering the surface text; they have a negative impact on the composition only by way of displacement. Some meanings are bracketed while others are brought to the fore. The interplay between the overt and the covert - between the explicit, the implicit, and the illicit — is part and parcel of the process of symboling. Beyond the plotting of sign relations forming logical schemes, dialogism must seek to unravel the devious "schemings" of language as well. My reading of the scriptures serves to illustrate a basic thesis: the code and the motions of desire are one and the same thing. By means of a dialogical method that goes beyond the strict logic of similarities and differences, each scene is disassembled as follows. First of all, readers are invited to probe the surface narrative for the dominant signs chosen in preference to all other meanings potentially invested in the same imagery. To use the same biblical example, the scorpion-tailed demons of Rev. 9 are assigned zoological "appearances" that preclude a literal reading of an astrological code into John's usage of the scorpion motif. The animal code is visibly preferred over the astral. By implication, signs forced out of the literal text form the underside of the narrative, an underground plot comprising all the unspeakable fears and latent anxieties subsumed in the visible text. John's commitment to the higher of Yahwism requires that the Sabaean code be reduced to silence; treating Scorpio as a member of the zodiacal pantheon is simply incompatible with the logocentric distinction between immaterial spirits and the bodies made visible on earth (animals, humans) or in heaven (stars). But a repressive ban cannot be placed on illicit indirections of the text without the narrative signifying "the unspeakable" if only in a roundabout way, hence by means of distortion. Like all displacements, John's zoological "misrepresentation" of the astrological idiom borders on transgression: a close reading of Rev. 9 shows how astral religion looms large in deeper layers of the text (Chevalier 1997). Slips of the Sabaean code are unavoidable. This is to say that signs of the ruling order contain transgressive measures of their own. Licit expressions of language are in the habit of

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subsuming illicit meanings under the dominant code, which is but a way of reinforcing the powers-that-be in the realm of speech. Efforts to reduce Sabaism to absolute silence are not enough; the law of Yahwism stands more to gain by actually turning stellar imagery to its own advantage, as John does in his vision of the end of time. Transgression is a powerful instrument of the Law. The passing of narrative time is another central feature of the secret pronouncements of astrology deployed in John's vision of the End. The zodiacal evocations of the scorpion-and-lamb imagery can serve to illustrate this point. As argued elsewhere (Chevalier 1997), demons in the train of equinoctial Scorpio entice readers of Revelation to place their hopes in the almighty Ram well before the actual appearance of the lamb slain at Easter, the season that marks the beginning of a new era and the end of cyclical time. Scenes of a moving script are often impatient. Words destined for the surface of a future scene are prefigured, albeit with discretion. Scorpion-tailed spirits of the Fifth Trumpet form the pre-text of the marriage supper of the paschal lamb celebrated at the end of Revelation. Their appearance gives the reader yet another pretext to invest hope in memories of the triumph of Aries at springtime. The scorpion and the lamb are both reminiscences of a heathenish past and shadows of the hereafter, ancient signs of divination lurking behind John's vision of the end of narrative time. The interpretive strategy outlined above will yield valuable insights provided that several methodological requirements be met. Briefly, the first measure of any plausible rendering of the schemings of language is one of interpretive scope. To what extent does the reading account for all the semiotic elements observable at the surface of a given composition and related connections? To this criterion should be added a solid measure of ethnohistorical research into independent sources of linguistic, cultural and ethnoscientific information that can be brought to bear on the imagery at hand. The act of reading is inevitably subject to some requirements of interpretive coherence and consistency as well: if one code is said to correlate with another (for example, astrology with zoological figures in Revelation), then the logic of each classification must be duly reconstructed and the correspondences explicated. The criterion of cultural extensibility should also be considered; that is, the extent to which semantic patterns from the symbolic material at hand can be expanded to a broader cultural environment. A semiotic deconstruction of the biblical scorpion motif becomes all the more interesting and plausible when situated against the background of cultural and political implications of Christianity's battle with astromythology. Finally, the interpretive practice lends itself to the act of predicting, a fundamental property of reading and of narrative language. Attentive interpreters have in common with competent readers that they can anticipate scenes of the past and the future through an in-depth, symptomatic comprehension of the narrative present: the better one's grasp of the immediate configuration, the greater one's sensitivity to potential and probable, shortterm and long-term shifts in compositional associations. The question of relevance should also be addressed: why the interpretive exercise in the first place? Is it merely for the sake of knowledge? Or is it undertaken in order

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to critique and alter well-established modes of interpretation and regimes of truth? Could the interpretive activity offer an alternative mode of reading to dominant habits of literary and cultural expression? Could there be more to the interpretive exercise than an accurate rendering of culture as the subject matter of semiotics, more than a "truthful" substitution of one discourse for another? Finally, the implication of an interpretive methodology that stresses the rule of logomachy — signs, words and schemes in dispute — is two-sided. On the one hand, texts that compete with one another are bound to display striking parallels that must be reconstructed through rigorous analysis, with a scholarly attitude towards the history of language, meanings and forms. Without these informed analyses of variations on similar themes, in our case the prophetic and the astrological, schematic interconnections between kindred compositions will add up to no more than an exercise in ventriloquism. Comparative analyses undertaken without rigor point to an interpreter's text written and developed by proxy (though possibly interesting on its own). Unscholarly approaches to the history of texts in battle can also be an invitation to the essentialistic lessons of psychomachy, hence spiritual commentaries on perennial conflicts of the soul, à la Prudentius (348 - c. 410). On the other hand, parallels established between competing scripts can never be so striking as to annul the critical distance that one text must maintain vis-à-vis its countertext. If too faithful to one another, two texts may be suspected of rehashing the same compositional stuff. Likewise, a masterful reading of a text or intertext should never be so faithful to its subject-matter as to add nothing to it. An interpretation worth writing and reading presupposes an exercise of mastery that points to a perspective of its own.

4. BEYOND POST-STRUCTURALISM The outline of sign theory presented above approaches the complex connection between signs as a fivefold "bar": that is, (a) a relational and fractional measure (homological, oppositional) dividing and binding one meaningful sign to another; (b) a place of judgment governed by a profession of faith and morality; (c) a place of confinement - a repressive mechanism bent on thwarting all forces of harmonic mediation; (d) a place of debauchery where the Law appears as an infraction of itself; and (e) a musical line of attentions shifting through the narrative score. The schemings of time, morality, repression and transgression in the code of language converge on the order-of-desirein-motion (Chevalier 1990: 36). But how do these various facets of symboling tally with other accounts of Revelation, astrology, and semiotics? While the first aspect (a) of the act of signification lends itself to a Levi-Straussian analysis of the encodings of Revelation (Calloud 1977; Prigent 1980), the second dimension (b) stresses the moral value system or Great Code (Frye 1981) embodied in a particular language, a focus that tends to be prevalent in modern biblical scholarship. When showing cognizance of the repressive functions of symboling (c), however, normative analyses of Revelation usually result in critical

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studies of "dominant ideologies" and "moral regimes" seen from a feminist (Fiorenza 1991; Carpenter 1995) or a Jungian perspective (Jung 1954). We shall see that Foucault's History of Sexuality applies a similar approach to the discussion of the "astrological regime of sex" in ancient Greece. Given his critical evaluation of psychoanalysis, Foucault nonetheless substitutes the "moral regime" concept for older notions of "repression." His reluctance to explore the dynamics of repression and transgression (d) in ancient texts happens to be shared by all exegetic readers of Revelation. Although they are not exercises in biblical scholarship, Jung's Answer to Job and Derrida's commentary on discourses of the apocalypse are notable exceptions to the latter rule. Albeit for different reasons, both theorists emphasize the indirections and deviations of the sign process in myths of the End. As for the last dimension of symboling (e), it is partly dealt with in "surface form" analyses of the cyclical, recapitulative or spiraling patterns of Revelation (Chevalier 1997). Notwithstanding these contributions to the study of John's narrative hermeneutics, a much deeper understanding of textual measures of pre- and postfiguration is still wanting, using a Ricoeurian approach to the "emplotment" and "distentions" of time built into the New Testament Apocalypse (Ricoeur 1984). More should be said about theoretical perspectives on astrology and the functions of language. Consider first the structural notion of the code. Our journey into the history of astrological and apocalyptic mythology presupposes knowledge of the complexities of variable codes, whether they be sidereal, calendrical, botanical, or zoological, to name just a few possible systems of classification. An exercise of this sort aims at unraveling not only the multiple correspondences that exist between these systems but also transformations that may be observed from one culture to another and their practical implications as well (agricultural, medical) (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 58; 1975: 216-41). This approach to symbolism is most helpful in that it pays more than lip service to the "sensible" ordering of signs in language. The insights of structural semiotics should not be underestimated. Having said this, there are other components of the astrological "code" that are equally important and that beg to be studied with tools other than analytic models of the unconscious. As suggested above, there is more to the intellect than a synchronic logic viewed from afar and with grammatical aloofness. According to Lévi-Strauss (1958: 415f.; 1975: 39, 80f.), the social sciences should emulate in the sense of paying attention to phenomena that are at a great distance from the observer, or the "outer space" that points to the inner unconscious. Also they should investigate the distances that lie between constellations of signs, hence the logical and transformational differences constructed within and between codes and cultures. Structural anthropology is thus the astronomy of the social sciences. Although intellectually appealing, this perspective on astronomy and semiotics is shortsighted. While it addresses the logical features of symboling and the interpretive practice, it neglects two critical issues, leaving them outside the bounds of science. First, albeit committed to an investigation of the unconscious, Lévi-Straussian intellectualism ignores the struggles of semiosis, oblivious as it is to the plotting of

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signs in dispute. Theories of "la pensée sauvage" bypass the battle stakes and discursive "schemings" that preside over all acts of language, whether they be religious imageries or pronouncements of the social and natural sciences. Even astronomy has a darker plot that keeps the discipline alive: the older astrological world view acts as a remote horizon that astronomers had to and still have to distance themselves from in order to create and practice their science. If anthropology is to concentrate on things that are far removed from sight, then the signs of astrology hiding in the "great beyond" of astronomical phenomena should be acknowledged and duly explored. Second, anthropology is caught into the world it observes and must therefore speak to the battle stakes of cultural history. This is to say that anthropologists can hardly understand the "distances" that lie between astrology, astronomy and religion with the same kind of intellectual detachment that astronomers will show towards the "outer space". Deeper insights into the issues that concern us require rather a hypermetropic sense of "vision": looking at all acts of tropology and sign interpretation (teleological, anagogical, genealogical) from afar but never with aloofness, hence indifference vis-à-vis the emotions and struggles of semiosis. As argued throughout this book, observers of the sign process can gain insight into the schemes and schemings of language on condition that they delve into the expectations and fears embedded in the plot, active anxieties

concealed from our immediate

sight. Secret concerns of the text are an

integral part of our subject matter and are at the root of science itself. Structuralism and astronomy are not immune to the darker motivations and motions of human discourse. Actually they share a similar impulse, one that haunts the Book of Revelation and Western metaphysics as well: a drive to comprehend the universe logocentrically, appealing to the Spirit, the Logic and the Order that transcend motions of the body, apprehensions of the subject, and the infinite events of human history. A study of the antiastrological struggles of Revelation aims at exposing the anxieties of logocentrism: it attempts to make sense of symboling, illustrating the "moving thoughts" and e-motive powers of signs of the apocalypse. As with Adorno (1957), Barthes (1957) and Morin (1981), Foucault goes beyond the formal canons of structuralism. He eschews a purely cognitive understanding of the logic of astrology, cognizant as he is of the role that the astral discourse once played in the construction and regulation of sexuality and the human subject. Broadly speaking, Foucault is careful to avoid the pitfalls of both structuralism and psychoanalysis. In his Histoire de la sexualité, the author stresses not so much the logical or repressive functions of discourse as the history of sexual aesthetics. The latter is viewed as a complex field of ethical practices and normative "codes" that undergo important transformations through time (Foucault 1984: 18, 36f.). The ancient discourse on seasons and stars is a case in point in that it forms an integral part of the genealogy of the modern "subject of desire" and the Western sense of "moral selfhood" (Foucault 1984: 10-2, 35). In his second volume, Foucault explains how astrology contributed to the development of a particular "art of living" or ascetic "souci de soi" applied to erotic pleasures. As in early Christian teachings, the discourse on sexuality prevailing among

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philosophers at the beginning of our era tended to downgrade passions of the body, placing them well below joys of the ethereal soul, never to be pursued as a full-fledged spiritual activity or an art for its own sake. However, sexual activity was never treated as the source of sin and the Fall, a carnal "condition" to be either renounced or endured because necessary and unavoidable. The "labor of love" was not turned into an expression of conjugal duty or self-sacrifice. Nor did philosophers promote hermeneutic confessions of the self, a struggle against sexual pathology, or a strict compliance with invariable norms of purity dictated by external authorities. Sex was rather a vital force that produced pleasures worthy of the human condition, provided of course that unbridled passions be avoided at all times. Carnal desires had to be mastered and channeled, enjoyed with caution, countenance, measure and good taste, hence know-how in the art of living. The exercise of self-mastery also entailed the preservation of a code of honor involving unequal statuses assigned to adult men, their younger male lovers and wives. When properly applied, these techniques of living and loving served as a stepping stone to loftier experiences of truth and beauty of the soul (Foucault 1984: 58-60, 66-7, 81, 98, 112, 155, 237, 262, 277). But how did wisdom of the stars help to achieve these ends? The answer lies in what might be called an astrological regime of food and sex. According to Foucault (1984: 102f., 105, 126-40), good health required a constant exercise of self-mastery based on principles of moderation, adaptation to variations in cyclical time, and a balanced combination of the ingredients of life. A healthy management of bodily needs presupposed that culinary and sexual pleasures be adjusted to variable times of the year (fixed by the equinoxes and the solstices), all of which were classified as either cold, hot, humid or dry. For instance, cold brought by the wintry fall of the Pleiades had to be compensated by things dry and warm, hence dry foodstuffs and more frequent sex (especially important for older men whose bodies tend to be colder). In other words, the satisfaction of sexual needs had to be pursued with a sense of measure, with an emphasis on calculations of seasons, temperatures and levels of moisture. The "good life" understood morally andhedonistically revolved around issues of proper admixture, correct frequency and judicious timing. Foucault's analysis goes beyond reconstructing the history of sexual pleasures and regulations. He does this without positing a biological libido universally repressed by moral consciousness. His genealogy also does away with contrast generalizations pitting the overmastering desires of pagan cultures against the strict morals of JudeoChristian thought (Foucault 1984: 74, 275). In his rejection of the Freudian repression thesis, however, Foucault tends to go too far, at the expense of his understanding of discursive regimes and the history of Western sexuality. Although briefly expounded, his view on the role of astrology can serve to illustrate some of the weaknesses of his genealogy. A central thesis developed in A Postmodern Revelation: Signs of Astrology and the Apocalypse (Chevalier 1997) is that in lieu of simply fading away from Christian discourse, astrology was recuperated through a conversion of star gods into markers of time, inferior spirits, metaphors and signs of the Lord. One implication of this tactical conversion process lies in the apocalyptic recuperation of the sexual and

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gendered symbolism pervading ancient visions of astromythology. While not an explicit objective in Revelation, the erotic effects of astral symbolism deployed in John's vision of the End — for instance, a divine woman possessed by the male sun — should not be underestimated (Chevalier 1990, 1995). The New Testament Apocalypse does not speak openly and systematically to issues of sexual ethics, yet the text is replete with thickly-textured imageries, anagogical lessons and convoluted morals of Eros subserving the higher ends of Logos. The powers of speech are not reducible to conscious regulations of discursive regimes, the historical variations of which can be understood through comparative analysis alone. Given the intertextual schemings of la parole, sign theorists should take care to distinguish between ethical codes of conduct and the broader processes of signification, the former being merely one facet of the latter. By focusing almost entirely on discursive practices, Foucault's analyses miss out on the more complex operations of moral speech, some of which thrive on the mighty works of logomachy and dialogical repression. Foucault's outline of the differences that lie between ancient Greek and Christian sexual ethics could have been strengthened had the author turned these dissimilarities into real disputes and struggles over signs of Eros. As with disputes over the rulings of Eros, ancient formulations of Logos are subject to the entanglements of competing imageries. The Stoic morals of astralism are clearly ruled out by John's Verb, yet the emotive powers (erotic, wrathful) of sidereal and calendrical codes are surreptitiously reintroduced into his teachings by way of metaphor. One idiom triumphs and grows by conquering alien words. Christian asceticism has much to gain from this metaphorical appropriation of "pagan" aesthethics: it can promote ethics of renunciation while promising the heavenly blessings and rewards of Sabaean morality. The calendrical imagery used by John to convey hymeneal hopes of the Church can serve to illustrate this point. Although not couched in a language of moral injunctions, the Eastertime wedding feast of the sunrobed woman and the morning star (the lamb, son of the Ram) and routine Sunday commemorations thereof speak eloquently to the calendrical timing of pleasures of the flesh conquered by the spirit. The entire world is destined to be renewed through a sublime marriage celebrated at the proper moment in time: the first spring day of heaven on earth. In lieu of fading out, astrological signs of Eros fade into the lofty visions of Logos. Discursive regimes do not exist independently of one another, nor can they be grasped in isolation from the prediscursive operations and historical embattlements of semiosis. Had these factors been taken into consideration (without falling back on reified notions of the sex-driven unconscious resisting the impositions of morality), Foucault could have avoided reintroducing an all-too-familiar thesis otherwise rejected in his own work: the notion that Christianity treats sexuality as inherently evil and sinful, a source of pathology to be confessed and eradicated by means of invariable laws and a pervasive/invasive moral-juridical code. A dialogical reading of Revelation's response to astralism shows another side of the Christian code: its ability to

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impose a particular law that speaks down to alternative morals while also harnessing the powers vested in pagan denials of a timeless, immaterial logos. Foucault (1984: 155) recognizes the role of calendrically-organized rituals in Christianity's effort to impose a highly-regulated economy of sexual activity. But nowhere does he reflect on the "pagan" (heliotropic) genealogy of such rituals, hence the interplay of code and countercode. Even where Christianity has risen to power, the sidereal imagination has never ceased to play a critical role. Albeit denounced and downgraded, the language of time and space governed by signs in heaven continues to operate both from inside and outside the teachings of Church theology. Siderealism remains internally active in the sense of offering a rich source of apparently innocent allegories and ritual metaphors that Christianity can profusely draw from. This symbolic material becomes particularly crucial when assigning concrete expressions to the means and consequences of virtuous conduct and sinful behavior (e.g., life in or out of an 'otherworldly' heaven). But astrology also has the capacity to act "from without", in contradiction (if only partial) with Church doctrine. This can be observed in modern horoscopy, a heterodox activity that provides mass media culture with a zodiacal and planetary regime of erotic attractions and daily activities charted in heaven. This is to say that the dominant regime never exists alone, so to speak. Rather it is constantly faced with forces of resistance that both reinforce and challenge the ruling order and the powers of language that be. Although not conceived as an exercise in biblical scholarship, Jung's Answer to Job seems to be the only analysis that approaches the astrological aspects of Revelation from a dialogical perspective, with a sensitivity to the tensions that pit against astralism and that are lavishly played out in John's visions of the end of time. Jung's answer, however, is not without major limitations (Chevalier 1997). Suffice it to say that while Foucault's analysis overemphasizes the historical boundaries of conscious ethical codes, Jung tends to extract unconscious archetypes from their linguistic and historical contexts, spreading them around the world. Frye's reading of Revelation falls somewhere between Jungian phenomenology and structuralism's pursuit of a non-referential Code. In Frye's works, the apocalypse embodies a tremendous emancipation of the imaginative mind, a radical departure from the descriptive, formal and archetypal phases of literary symbolism which tend to be constrained by the mimesis of nature. The New Testament Apocalypse marks the passage from the archetypal to the anagogical mode signification, a transition whereby nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate (Frye 1957: 119).

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John's apocalypse is the antitype of all representational modes of symboling in that it reveals nothing but its own forms. In lieu of uncovering or describing a reality that lies outside the text, it unravels powers of the human imagination, a faculty as infinite in its range as religion itself (Frye 1957: 125). The distance that Revelation takes vis-àvis the objective world implies a movement away from all systems of correspondence established between culture and nature, including the doctrine of the microcosm which portrays the human being as a miniature replica of the whole of reality. Given this rejection of naturalism, John's prophetic visions preclude a reversion to magical thought based on rituals of divination, older codes where the patterns of human destiny are mapped onto natural phenomena such as the motions of stars and planets evolving in the visible heavens. On this issue of astrology, Frye adds that he does not find any consistent astrological symbolism in the Bible, but there are many allusions to divination in it, many of them practiced in Israel, such as the mysterious "Urim and Thummim" on the high priest's costume in Exodus 28:30 and elsewhere (...) There are also such patterns of correspondence as the emphasis on sevens and twelves in the Book of Revelation. Perhaps they are prominent there because by the time this book was written, seven was the number of days in the week and of the planets, and twelve the number of months in the year and of signs of the Zodiac. Hence these numbers would suggest, more than others, a world where time and space have become the same thing. But correspondence does not seem to be the central thing that the Bible is saying about the relation between man and nature (Frye 1981: 75, my emphasis).

These comments lead Frye to discover in Revelation "the total meaning of the Scriptures", symbolizing as it does the end of the order of nature. The book heralds "the destruction of the way of seeing that order that keeps man confined to the world of time and history as we know them. This destruction is what the Scripture is intended to achieve" (Frye 1981: 136; see also 1962: 45, 144). Frye is conscious that the creative pole of Revelation is overshadowed by feelings of paranoia and also memories of the Fall and humanity's exile from the good world and life of plenty enjoyed in Eden. In the Book of Revelation, however, lies the promise of a new heaven and earth. More than any other sacred text, Revelation holds the key of human creativity and the powers of renewal and recreation. By "salvaging something with a human meaning out of the alienation of nature", the Bible can assist humanity in its journey towards the redemption of history (Frye 1981: 137-8). While echoing the structural and post-structural critique of referentiality and the metaphysics of representation, Frye's views also speak to issues of narrative desire, a theme neglected in Lévi-Straussian and Foucaultian discussions of the Code. His treatment of how nature and astrology relate to the apocalypse and how signs relate to each other is nonetheless problematical. Briefly, the notion that Revelation offers a loosely-structured, highly-creative language that transcends the limitations and strictures of nature poses various difficulties. For one thing, nature will not let itself be pitted against culture so easily: natural phenomena can hardly be grasped without constructions of the imaginative mind, be they astrological, zoological or botanical. Nor should the "codifications of nature" be viewed so strictly as to be incompatible

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with visions of poetic revelation. Codes are highly malleable and variable, subject as they are to all sorts of contradictory and mediatory effects that make a mockery of all dualism opposing logic and the human imagination. Finally, the lack of fit between natural and 'supranatural' codes in Revelation is more apparent than real. Correspondences are not always easily discerned. After all, the works of repression and distortion inherent in the sign process are such that "texts in battle" cannot be expected to spell out all the rules and codes embedded in the tactical imageries they deploy. Astrology in Revelation is a case in point. As Frye suggests, the prophet is bent on destroying the sidereal codification of nature and time. The point missed by Frye, however, is that John cannot kill the Sabaean beast without signifying two things, if only in a roundabout way: the actual corpus that is being dismantled, and the bits and pieces that can be rescued towards an astrological language servicing the order of Logos. In the spoils of this antiastrological war lie new minions of the Verb heralded as "the universal creative word which is all words" (Frye 1957: 125). The twelve stones imagery of Rev. 21 is a telling illustration of this co-optation strategy achieved through devious bricolage. As Frye (1962: 253, my emphasis) puts it, "John's vision of the New Jerusalem also sees it as constructed of twelve precious stones, but they no longer represent the Zodiac because they are the Zodiac. In the Apocalypse the stars are the stones of fire, and the sun is the Messiah who is the cornerstone of the city." Nature works and dies in harness, never in earnest. Like Frye, Derrida considers the apocalypse to be at the heart of all literary experience. He too makes an argument for the radical non-referentiality of language ("there is nothing outside the text"), but without emphasizing the redemptive forces of desire that will transfigure reality through writing. While Frye contemplates a Revelation without apocalyptic tragedy, Derrida dwells on an "endtime-withoutjudgment" (Boyarin 1995: 43) ~ an apocalypse that brings no final revelation. Derridean deconstructionism delves into "the element of death within the play of signification (in the broadest sense) that potentially can obliterate the real (Thanatosapocalypse)" (Robson 1995: 73). What is stressed here are not the infinite forms and redemptive core of symbolic activity, but rather the formlessness and endless decentering of the sign process. With Derrida, Frye's Blakean vision of a human mind dwelling in the Milky Way gives way to a figure who owes more to Beckett than to Blake: the nuclear space of hesitation, Derrida suggests, "occurs within a 'who knows?' without subject or knowledge," or, even more grimly and with a greater emphasis on finitude, apocalypse would be the "auto-destruction of the autos itself" — Frye's infinite man blowing himself to bits. This contemporary theoretical configuration of the exploding word may be rooted historically in a post-Hiroshima world, but the roots run deeper than that: it is consistent with the double-edged symbolism of biblical apocalyptic revelations, including the smashed tablets of Sinai, the deferred Kingdom of Israel in exile, or Christ as the crucified Logos. The revealed Word, it seems, is always the shattered Word (Robson 1995: 72).

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Robson's allusion to Hiroshima is evocative of the nuclear bomb and World War 2 but also Auschwitz and the "final solution" of fascism, all of which herald the end of grand narratives of the West — the end of "the Athenian 'beautiful death', the exchange of the finite for the infinite, of the eschaton for the telos-. the Die in order not to die" (Lyotard 1988: 100). With the forward march of the apocalyptic storm or "angel of history" that Benjamin (1976: 257-8) calls Progress, names of the dead no longer lend themselves to the writings of monumental history. Imageries of the apocalypse are central to the postmodern deconstruction of literature and the explosion of categories of history and the "real". According to Derrida (1984a), our era is characterized by the growth of the literary imagination and the "textual socius" that comes with it, a specularized society driven by the psychagogic rhetoric of nuclear war dissuasion and deterrence. Literature and apocalyptic signs and fears of the nuclear age have in common that they both thrive on speculative, fabulously textual events that have no referential reality. Both activities also rely on objective infrastructural conditions that are inherently self-destructive: a world system built around war efforts and the nuclear industry, and a stockpiling of original corpuses and archives arbitrarily assigned to authorial subjects. All of these conditions are self-destructive. The nuclear-age socius grows in the shadow of a totally devastating Event, an absolute endtime war that bears a unique name, the first and the last of its kind, a cataclysm that belongs to a class of its own. This rhetorical event is so absurd that it threatens to bring about a remainderless destruction that will annihilate all archives and the human habitat as well. Nuclear rhetoric points to an End that leaves no trace whatsoever, eschewing and effacing all motions of survival and related works of sublime representation. Given its allconsuming character, the nuclear apocalypse threatens to foreclose the monumental history of typological naming, symbolic mourning, and mnemonic idealization. Likewise, writing entails the epoche of absolute knowledge. Literature is a constant invitation to acts of interpretive deconstruction, interventions that end up decomposing and undermining the archival foundations of writing. Literature and the nuclear epoch are both apocalyptic in the sense of installing humanity in a selfdestructive condition of radical fictionality and precarious historicity. But even without deconstruction, writing is subject to a prolonged big bang effect that keeps scattering elements of signification in countless directions. Whatever the logical and intentional origins and ends of the script may be, the missile-like message of the missive can be counted on to never reach its final destination. Derrida refers to this chaotic dispersal effect as the wandering ways of la diff-errance. The structure of truth itself is inherently apocalyptic in that it always comes as a grand finale, passing a 'last' judgment on all other contending truths that are brought to an End (Derrida 1984a: 24). Truth is essentially eschatological as it is always the voice of the last human being, the one possessed with a light brighter than all other lights. This may be the voice that proclaims the death of God, the subject, or 'man' (substituted by the 'overman'). Alternatively, the voice may announce the end of Christian morality, Western metaphysics, philosophy, history, progress, class struggle, pa-

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triarchy, or literature (Derrida 1984a: 20-3). It could also choose to declare the end of astrology, heralding the triumph of a timeless Verb, as in John's apocalypse. My reading of the Book of Revelation has a postmodern apocalyptic tone in that it purports to uncover Has astrological derailment or delirium of Revelation. I am alluding to the parasitic indirections, intrusions and deviations of John's logocentric script, all of which converge on the "galactic under all the milky ways whose constellation" fascinates the Derridean imagination en passant (Derrida 1984a: 5). A pagan understanding of the New Testament Apocalypse thus points to the "phenomena of Verstimmung, of change of tone, of mixing of genres, of destinerrance, if I can say that, or of clandestination, so many signs of more or less bastard apocalyptic filiation" (1984a: 31). Derrida continues to say that we know that apocalyptic writings increased the moment State censorship was very strong in the Roman Empire, and precisely to catch the censorship unaware (...) we could perhaps think that the apocalyptic discourse can also get round censorship thanks to its genre, and its cryptic ruses. By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres, and codes, apocalyptic discourse can also, in dislocating [détraquant] destinations, dismantle the dominant contract or concordat. It is a challenge to the established receivability [recevabilité of messages and to the policing of destination, in short to the postal notice or the monopoly of posts (Derrida 1984a: 30).

The message of John received from messengers who bear witness to the testimony of Christ who speaks in the name of the Father entails a proliferation of sendings, voices and tones that are unevenly developed and variably unveiled. The text is all the more apocalyptic as one never knows who speaks or writes, let alone what is actually being said. In the final analysis, if "the apocalypse reveals, it is first of all the revelation of the apocalypse, the self-presentation of the apocalyptic structure of language (...): that is, of the divisible dispatch for which there is no self-presentation nor assured destination" (Derrida 1984a: 28). Like Derrida (1984a: 7), I am of the view that the end of time announced in Revelation has already taken place in John's writing, if only through the prophet's dismantling of sidereal measurements of time. Derrida also correctly suggests that the command forbidding to "seal the words of the inspiration of this volume" was a double bind injunction that John "could only disobey in order to obey" (Derrida 1984b: 32). After all, the command to silence astrology had to be sealed as soon as it was obeyed. My suggestion is that we reopen the latter seal, with a view to exploring the well-forgotten sources and traces of John's imagery, a disturbing genealogy that offers "postmodern counterweights to the emphasis on originality, presence, and universality in Christian revelation" (Boyarin 1995: 44). The contested site where Derrida and I must part company, however, has to do with the question of how many scattered voices a text can effectively mix and in what actual rank order, if any. In Writing and Difference (1978: 297), Derrida recognizes that the centering effects of language can not be reduced to idiosyncrasies of a Western metaphysical tradition struggling against the freedom and playfulness of signs. The

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desire for a center is rather a vital "function of play itself'. In Derrida's discussion of the apocalypse, however, the implications of the latter principle are not fully explored. Like most post-structuralist and postmodern theorists, Derrida tends to exaggerate the difference or differendihst lies between the works of centering and decentring, usually with the aim of privileging the polyphonic, heteroglossic digressions and transgressions of the sign process. While Derrida proposes an inversion of the habitual rank-ordering of centripetal and centrifugal motions of language, his understanding of writing and literature is still based upon a stratified arrangement of the forces at play in language. The postmodern priority assigned to polytonality over monotonality is yet another confirmation (self-contradictory) of the will to power that plays itself out in battlefields of the Word. Similar comments apply to the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. According to Bakhtin, "high and straightforward" genres such as tragedies, epics and the scriptures are so hierarchical, monotonic and authoritative that they permit no play, no sense of popular or individual freedom, no improvised heroes battling with inconclusive events of the narrative (Bakhtin 1981: 35-6, 55). Canonical texts make no concession to varying truths; they preclude a Galilean world of other-languagedness where dialogues and words are written "with a sideways glance"; and they do not invite compositions of parodic travesty and self-criticism (Bakhtin 1981: 46, 49, 55, 59-65). By contrast "active polyglossia and interillumination of languages" typifies heterodox writings ranging from the life-like novel to Cyprin feasts of the Middle Ages, a literature that feeds on the "speech life of peoples" and a cultural world-in-the-making (Bakhtin 1981: 17, 30-2, 70, 83). The problem with these contrast generalizations is that they underestimate the extent to which literary and cultural "interanimations" and "arguments between languages" are fundamental to all discursive practices, including the monotonic and authoritative. As Bakhtin remarks, "monoglossia is always in essence relative. After all, one's own language is never a single language: in it there are always survival of the past and a potential for other-languagedness that is more or less sharply perceived by the working literary and language consciousness." This is to say that "straightforward genres" are subject to "the long and twisted path of struggle for the unity of a literary language", a unity that is never fully gained (Bakhtin 1981: 66). John's apocalypse is replete with signs of dialogical clandestinations not because of a desire to challenge the dominant concordat, as a Derridean or Bakhtinian reading of the text would have it. The point of Revelation's astrological indirections lies elsewhere: in an attempt to subsume the hegemonic voice of astralism under another Covenant, the Lord's. Carefully-oriented transgressions and displacements of the apocalypse are essential to the rank-ordering of signs — raising the timeless Verb above minions of the order of time. Despite their subversive implications, the traps and tricks of Revelation are part and parcel of the well-aimed missives and missiles of Logos. Signs of desire covering the bodies of heavens must be allowed to wander beneath the surface text if they are to deviate from their temporal motions and be enslaved by the Eternal and the Everlasting. Without these erring codes, the West

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would have lacked the signs needed to speak of the end of time, the Fall, threats of idolatrous Chaos, sign-mediations of the Verb, the conquering ways of a non-erring Truth, and soon. Machiavelian craftiness and duplicity with the enemy are essential to the ancient "Head" or "Sum of Days" (Dan. 7. 9, 1 Enoch 46. If., 47. 3) whose apocalyptic rhetoric aims at counting and enslaving all days of the Sabaean foe. What I have just said about the essential indirections of the sign process applies to postmodern theories of apocalyptic diff-errance. Even when speaking many voices, they too must choose a center that brings some order into the world. An erratic and aleatory big bang that fails to offer a new beginning or fresh vision of the universe should be of little interest to all parties concerned, a matter of universal indifference. If this aleatory center is denied, then what is the purpose of deconstruction? Is it to proclaim the end of all myths of the end, critiquing false prophets who stand accused of denouncing other false prophets (Derrida 1984a: 28)? Is it to foster a post-Renaissance "world of free and democratized language," rejecting all sacred words and "the complex and multi-level hierarchy of discourses, forms, images, styles that used to permeate the entire system of official language and linguistic consciousness" (Bakhtin 1981: 71). When all is said and done, proponents of a postmodern apocalypse should "make up their minds" and choose between absolute silence, chaotic babbling, or a revelation of their own. As for this essay, the preference is clearly for the entitlements of a Postmodern Revelation, by which I mean a forward journey aimed at recovering the tragic, sensuous and desirous ways of logic — signs of the primitive mathematics and motions of desire (normative, repressive, transgressive) embedded in all words and the powers of speech. The latter preference implies that we be wary of the Kantian invitation to choose between: (a) a rational philosophy, savoir-vivre or wisdom of life inspired by scientific concepts universally accessible through the labor of pure reason (speculative or practical); or (b) an "eschatological mystagogy" — a "derailed" and "exalted" philosophy that conveys feelings of an enlightened and immediate contact with mysteries of the universe, an intuitive communication with oracular secrets possessed by overlords of knowledge alone. Derrida's (1984a) reading of Kant's battle against Platonic mystagogy revolves around the issue of mathematics, the key to astrology and the schemings of Revelation as well. Plato was of the opinion that apocalyptic visions and teophanic interpretations of geometric figures (echoing the Pythagorean mysticism of numbers) should not be revealed to the crowds. This implied an acceptance of the cryptopolitics of knowledge, the opposite of Kant's rational theology. Mystagogues of the modern era will thus cite Plato when resorting to the language of anagogy, poetry and literature to convey their presentiment of the sun and the goddess Isis hiding under a veil, seeking as they do the

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principles of reason and morality in the sensuous, the visible, and the beautiful. In doing so they assign a false tone of obscure aestheticism to the philosophical pursuit of the moral, the lawful, and the rational. In other words, and this is a trenchant motif for thought of the law or of the ethical today, Kant calls for placing the law above and beyond, not the person, but personification and the body, above and beyond as it were the sensible voice that speaks in us, the singular voice that speaks to us in private, the voice that could be said in his language to be "pathological" in opposition to the voice of reason. The law above the body, above this body found here to be represented by a veiled goddess (Derrida 1984b: 19; my emphasis).

The choice is therefore between ethics and aesthetics, the intellect and the affect, the conceptual and the physical, the abstract and the concrete, the orderly and the disorderly, the normative and the transgressive. We have come full circle, back on to home ground. This is the divided terrain that I wish to revisit and contest, with a view to dismantling the western bickerings of Logos and Eros.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. (1994). The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture. S. Crook (ed.). London; New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. M. Holquist (ed.). Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, Walter. (1976)."Theses on the Philosophy of History.", in: Illuminations. H. Arendt (ed.), Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Shocken: 253-64. Boyarin, Jonathan. (1995). "At Last, All the Goyin: Notes on a Greek Word Applied to Jews. ", in: Postmodem Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. R. Dellamora (ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 41-60. Calloud, J. et al. (1977). "L'Apocalypse de Jean. Propositions pour une analyse structurale.", in: Apocalypses et théologie de l'espérance. Association catholique française pour l'étude de la Bible, Congrès de Toulouse, 1975. Paris: Cerf: 5181. Carpenter, Mary W. (1995). "Representing Apocalypse: Sexual Politics and the Violence of Revelation.", in: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. R. Dellamora (ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 107-35. Chevalier, Jacques M. (1997). A Postmodern Revelation: Signs of Astrology and the Apocalypse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. — . (1995). "The Great Sign in the Book of Revelation - Le Chant du Signe.", in: Beyond Textuality: Asceticism and Violence in Anthropological Interpretation. Bibeau, Gilles/Ellen Corin (eds.). Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 11144.

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— . (1990). Semiotics, Romanticism and the Scriptures. Approaches to Semiotics 88. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. — / Daniel Buckles. (1995). A Land Without Gods: Process Theory, Maldevelopment and the Gulf Nahuas. London; Halifax: Zed and Fernwood. Dellamora, Richard. (1995). "Introduction.", in: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. R. Dellamora (ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 1-16. Derrida, Jacques. (1984). "No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)", in: Diacritics 14 (2)\ 20-31. — . (1984a). "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.", in: The Oxford Literary Review 6 (2)\ 3-37. — . (1978). Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1976). Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Exel, Jerry. (1986). Bible et astrologie. Paris: Atlantic. Farrer, Austin Marsden. (1949). A Rebirth of Images; the Making of St. John's Apocalypse. Boston: Beacon. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schuessler. (1991). Revelation: Vision of a Just World. Proclamation Commentaries. Minneapolis: Fortress. Fleming, Kenneth Charles. (1981). God's Voice in the Stars: Zodiac Signs and Bible Truth. New York: Neptune. Ford, J. M. (1975). Revelation. The Anchor Bible. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Foucault, Michel. (1984). Histoire de la sexualité 2: l'usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard. Freud, Sigmund. (1976). The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Penguin. Frye, Northrop. (1981). The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harvest/HJB. — . (1962). Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Boston: Beacon Press. -—. (1957). Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gleadow, Rupert. (1968). The Origin of the Zodiac. London: J. Cape. Habermas, Jürgen. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Hastings, James (ed.). (1921). "Sun, Moon, and Stars.", in: Encyclopxdia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. XII. Edinburgh: Clark, p. 48-103. Jung, C. G. (1954). Answer to Job. London: Routledge. Jurist, Michele D. (1982). "Astrology: Its History, Philosophy, and Relation to Religion, with Special Emphasis on the Early Hebrews and the Bible.", in: Journal of Religious Studies 10. 58-76. Lawrence, D . H . (1980). Apocalypse and the Writings of Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -—. (1974). Apocalypse. Intr. by R. Aldington. London: Seeker.

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Lerner, R. E. (1992). "The Medieval Return to the Thousand-Year Sabbath.", in: The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, Emmerson, R. K./B. McGinn (eds.). New York: Cornell University Press, p. 51-71. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1975). The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper. — . (1962). La pensée sauvage. Paris: Pion. — . (1958). Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Pion. Lohmeyer, Ernst. (1926). Die Offenbarung des Johannes, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, 16. Tübingen: Mohr. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malina, Bruce J. (1995). On the Genre and Message of Revelation: Star Visions and Sky Journeys. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson. Maunder, E. W. (1923). The Astronomy of the Bible. Chatham: Clement Brothers. Moore, Joan André. (1981). Astronomy in the Bible. Nashville: Abingdon. Morin, Edgar (dir.). (1981). La croyance astrologique moderne (diagnostic sociologique). Lausanne: L'Age d'homme. Paley, Morton D. (1986). The Apocalyptic Sublime. New Haven; London: Yale University Press. Prigent, P. (1980). "L'Apocalypse. Exegèse Historique et Analyse Structurale.", in: New Testament Studies 2&. 127-37. Rahner, Hugo. (1963). Greek Myths and Christian Mystery. London: Burns & Oates. Ricoeur, Paul. (1984). Time and Narrative, Vol. 1. Trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Robson, David. (1995). "Frye, Derrida, Pynchon, and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction.", in: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. R. Dellamora (ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 61-78. Seznec, Jean. (1953). The Survival of the Pagan Gods. New York: Pantheon. Ulansey, David. (1989). The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries; Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Barry Rutland Carleton University, Ottawa THE OTHER OF THEORY /Post-theory/ conjures a buzz of heterogeneous semantic possibilities: what comes after theory; the effects of theory; the beyond of theory; what is left once theory has been deducted or discounted. As a first constraint on the neologism's informational entropy — that is to say, its unrealized semantic potential - the element /theory/ must be defined. It goes without saying that, in a collection of essays such as this, /theory/ implies /postructuralism/, that body of concepts and practices which, in a shorthand way, are summed up in the names Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, without ignoring or underestimating the contributions of other thinkers. Theory in this sense includes not only the thought mediated by the writings of these authors, but thought consonant with that so mediated, and thought derived from those writings, both by way of the working out of implications and by way of contestation, but always within discursive parameters set out by those writings. Theory, then, is the set of parameters that governs - constrains and enables — the poststructuralist literary critical discourse. As with every discourse, there are parameters of obligation - what must be said in order to operate within the discourse — and corollary parameters of prohibition — what may not be said without violating the discourse, without risking a slide into some other discourse. I am not prepared to catalogue the parameters that govern theory — I have not identified them all nor have I thought through adequately those that I have identified. Some of them will arise in due course. Suffice it to say for the moment that post-theory may have something to do with these parameters — with our assumptions as to what is properly included within/excluded from theory and with the possibility of principled challenges to the parameters. In the meantime, let me return to this fortuitous word /post-theory/ which, to the best of my knowledge, originated as a facetious neologism on the part of a New York Times columnist commenting on the proliferation of the /post/ prefix. Picking up on my list of possible meanings: As "what comes after theory", /post/ implies both (i) further theorization or, alternatively, (ii) completion of the theorizing project, followed by whatever one does with it once it is completed (for example, empirical application, getting on with the critical job); it can also mean (iii) an exhaustion of theory's possibilities, that there is simply no further novelty to be squeezed from it, and concomitantly (iv), exhaustion from theory, intellectual lassitude, revulsion and rejection — perhaps because theory fails to enable us to say so much that we know needs to be said and constrains us to saying what we know is too little. In contrast to post-

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theory as exhaustion of and from theory, "the effects of theory", implies (i) what theory has affected, positively or negatively, but also (ii) something quite different, what theory enables to be effected. As "the beyond of theory", /post/ implies a further effort of theorization that transcends theory's current horizon. As "what is left once theory has been deducted or discounted", that is to say, the condition of literary studies once the ravages of theory have been assessed, it implies a work of reconstruction, which may include a return to questions that the constraining parameters of theory seem to forbid — questions of history, the subject, ethics, and intentionality. Arguably, post-theory is all of the above: working in reverse order, the posttheoretical condition may be regarded as demanding a certain reconstruction of the discipline of literary studies and its object of study but there can be no going back to the unproblematic notions of text and its relationships that obtained before theory irrupted upon the literary-critical scene. This necessitates a further effort of theorization; that is, the post-theoretical situation is not explainable by theory itself, but demands its own theoretical foundation - in other words, post-theory refers to the limits of theory and the surpassing of those limits. This further effort of theorization requires consideration of the effects of theory in terms of a problematic necessitating a theorizing response. What comes after theory, then, is not a matter of the application of a completed project nor of the exhaustion of possibilities. /Post/ implies a further effort of theorization, within, but perhaps also against, the parameters of theory. Posttheory is the other of theory, that which constitutes theory as its (largely unconscious) margin of abjection and at the same time its (largely invisible) potentiality for productive evolution. In this respect, post-theory refers to what theory enables to be effected that could not have been effected before theory and without theory ~ for the Other is always implicit in the Same: theory provides within itself an interior space of alterity that permits a going beyond of theory into new theoretical formations. Posttheory, then, is the exteriorizing of this interiority, the unfolding of the enfolded, achieved through foregrounding theory's backgrounded alterity. As Fernando de Toro observes in his contribution to this volume, post-theory does not signify the end of theoretical activity or a renunciation of theory - in the way, for example, that some anti-theoryists interpreted poststructuralism as the repudiation of structuralism by its erstwhile devotees. We may be exhausted with theory and theorizing but we cannot get out of it into a status quo ante paradise of stable received assumptions. Poststructuralism emerged from structuralism by way of deconstructive autocritique: 'structure' was found to be as questionable as the epiphenomena it was held to effect; 'structure' collapsed into 'process', the interminable process of signification - of différance, dialogic openness - that comes to the fore when the privileging of binarism is called into question. Does theory implicate - enfold - its productive other in the same way? To explicate ~ to ¿Mold - it would be to move into post-theory. The move from structuralism to poststructuralism exemplifies the general process whereby a novel theoretical configuration emerges from the implicit alterity of an established configuration. Such alterity is not a matter of a closed binary set. The

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antitheory crowd assumed that the recognition of the inadequacy or, in their terms, simple wrongness of structuralism should lead the erring back into one or another of their camps; for them, the other of structuralism (in the English-speaking world) was the Old Historicism or the New Criticism or F.R. Leavis or Northrop Frye or Hegelian Marxism or Christian Humanism or... Of course, the other of theory that was realized was none of these but something unpredictable from within closed binarist assumptions. Indeed, the relations of alterity among my list of pre-theoretical positions in itself indicate that alterities are always plural, a matter of potentialities for meaning, only some of which will be realized as discourse. The realization comes about as what I see as a fundamental cognitive process, which I term "troping". The kind of trope I am talking about is deeper that those of classical rhetoric, although not unrelated to Hayden White's "master tropes" of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (White 1978). I distinguish at least two major tropical actions capable of effecting realization of implicit cognitive potentiality and bringing about fundamental paradigm shifts in Thomas Kuhn's (1970) sense: the inversionary and the combinatory. The Copernican revolution in cosmology presents a model of inversionary troping. The impetus came from within the old geocentric system as the desire on Copernicus' part, shared with his contemporaries, to save what, with Renaissance neoPlatonism, had become the most valued parameter of that system, the circular motion of the heavenly bodies, the circle being the figure of perfection, all points equidistant from the centre: shift the centre from earth to sun and circularity is secured (Thagard 1992). Of course, the move did not save circularity; the problem of the orbits was resolved only when Kepler posited elliptical paths; but the effort to retain an essential feature of the Same led to a tropical move into a radical Other that all the efforts of brilliant late scholastics, like the old Jesuit scientist affectionately satirized by Umberto Eco in The Island of the Day Before (1995), Father Casper, could not obviate: Caspar catalogues the contemporary counterarguments to heliocentrism, all of which are soundly based in empirical observation. Something broadly similar to the Copernican revolution happened with structuralism when its disciples encountered the limitations of their theory with respect to the problem of structural transition: at that point, the binary logic which (on their reading) pervades the bible of the movement, Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1959), was displaced in an inversionary troping effected by unfolding the implications of Saussure's definition of a linguistic system as one of differences without positive terms (80) an alterity implicit to Saussurean structuralism which had, in effect, already been worked out in detail, if rather obscurely, by C.S. Peirce (1931) and in general by M.M. Bakhtin (1984) and V.N. Voloshinov (1986). Once into the poststructuralist territory that this tropical move produced, it was inevitable that theory should proceed quickly to its moment of postmodernity: as physics arrived at Heisenburg's principle of indeterminacy and mathematics at Godel's theorem of indemonstrability, so theory came to the homologous idea of undecidability. Each disciplinary field crossed the threshold from modernity to postmodernity, albeit the linguistic a generation or so later than the other two.

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What is the tropical relation of theory to post-theory? Fernando de Toro cites several writers publishing in English whose work, he argues, operates post-theoretically: Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Zizek, Chris Weedon. Perhaps the most striking feature these authors share is the freedom to deploy heterogenous theoretical apparatuses either in concert with one another or against one another, evincing the permeation of disciplinary boundaries and the mixing of epistemologies that de Toro sees as a salient feature of the post-theoretical situation. What we have here is experimentation in the combinatory mode. Now, it is theory itself which enables such iconoclasm with that idol of academe, the logic of identity or non-contradiction, the basis of closed binary thinking. To confine ourselves to the Big Three whose names stand in for theory as a whole: Lacan, working out of Freud, posits a psychoanalytic subject that is trapped in a gap of non-identity which a lifetime of dedication to pursuit of the Other/other(s) will never fill up; Foucault anatomized the Logic of the Same as the deployment of knowledge as/for power; and Derrida, of course, with his deconstructive practice - and he reminds us again and again that deconstruction is something one does - has provided us with a principled means of undoing the logico-rhetorical manoevres or what we can call "minor tropings" that establish and sustain identity. Indeed, it is arguable that the chief contribution of theory is this opening into the plurality of discursive otherness, rather than any particular insight into texts or subjectivity or anything else. Poststructuralist thought has moved us from the exclusionary logic of either/or to the inclusionary logic of both/and. In leading Western thought out of the binary trap, it completed for the human sciences the deconstructive troping of positivism that in the physical sciences was achieved with the emergence of relativity and quantum theory. What I mean by this is that the surpassing of positivistic structuralism — postivistic in its quest for an absolute universal semiotic knowledge — was similar to the relativity/quantum mechanical surpassing of classical or Newtonian theory: the surpassed theory remains valid as regional but no longer is held to totalize its phenomenal field. This paradigm shift was less drastic than that of the Copernican revolution in cosmology, which relegated the Ptolemaic system to the pages of intellectual history and postmodernist fiction, but it was certainly inversionary in that it displaced science from positivist apodicticity to postpositivist willingness to interrogate central dogma ~ for example, with Stuart Kauffman's bold inversionary displacement of classical Darwinian selectionism and its reliance on chance recombinations and mutations as the principal driving force behind species evolution with the principle of biochemical self-organization, whereby the evolutionary process selfselects within a range of constrained alterity (Kauffman 1993, 1995). Altogether, then, the epistemolgical mixing to which Fernando de Toro draws our attention is precisely the tropical action pertinent to the post-theoretical state in literary studies. Some of the results are monstrous and, like their counterparts in the biological sphere, mercifully incapable of reproduction; others, however, will prove to be the budding points of novel discourses, new knowledges, that will displace or subsume the old and familiar. The imperative of discursive evolution obliges us to combine and recombine the discursemes left to us by the authors of poststructuralism as surely as

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the imperative of biological evolution compels species to sexually combine and recombine constituants of their genetic pools to effect improvements in fitness (see Kauffman 1993, 1995) — until we arrive at a moment of the decisive inversion that will trope the whole system into a new relatively stable paradigm of knowledge. To return to the question of parameters: undecidability is one of the parameters of theory, that is, one must adhere to this notion as a necessary and integral law of the discourse. It imbricates with other parameters, that of anti-essentialist relationalism, for example. The post-Saussurean concept of language as an open system of signifiers that re/defer to one another in a proliferating network of relationality implies nonessentialism: every term derives its value from every other term, not only on the plane of synchronicity but also that of diachronicity; posterior meaning is as much in play as anterior, that is, in Bakhtinian terms, every utterance is framed and informed by that to which it is a response and the response that it anticipates and informs in turn (Voloshinov 1986). Meaning is a process rather than a product: no essence as arché founds and guarantees it, no essence as telos guides it to an ineluctable consummation. Essentialism, in contrast, is grounded in the substantiality and stability of the signified, that is, the mental concept. Presumption as to the substantiality of the signified founds idealism, the belief that concepts are prior to the inchoate flow of events which is "world", which language enables us to segment as signs and thus to understand, to communicate about, and to work with and within. The concept of language that grounds theory also entails the parameter of the historical contingency of textuality. texts as bounded utterances occur and can only occur at specific junctures of intertextual relationship, within contexts, that is, systems of semantic complexity constituting basins of attraction that constrain the otherwise open entropy of potential meaning. A corollary to relationalism cognate with textuality is theory's concept of the subject: the unitary autonomous subject of humanism and rationalism is displaced with the subject as a variable position in enunciation and a kaleidoscopic discursive construct, the site of textual realization that partakes of the contingency of textuality. The other to each of these parameters of theory is not its historical binary predecessor: post-theory does not constitute a return to essentialist thought or denial of textuality or resurrection of the autonomous originary subject. At this point I invoke as yet another parameter of theory a term I have been using freely and frequently, alterity. The category of alterity traverses poststructuralist thought as a modulating spectrum of meanings: with Lacan, the subject is precipitated and sustained in relation to the other; Foucault works the margins of otherness that effectuate relations of power-knowledge; Derrida's deconstruction is a practice that elicits the alterity of texts. Alterity is also central to the work of a precursor of poststructuralism, Mikhail Bakhtin, who in important respects continues to surpass theory and already ushers in post-theory (Rutland 1990). It is the heart of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, who has emerged as the ethicist of poststructuralism (and of postmodernity). As a parameter of theory, the sense of alterity itself alters — others — according to immediate context. For example, Lacan and Bakhtin may be regarded as dealing respectively in a pessimistic

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and an optimistic account of the role of the other in relation to the subject: the Lacanian subject, tramelled in misidentity with the other at the Mirror Stage, will persist in regarding the other as whole, complete, and masterful, over against the constitutive morcellization that forecloses for it the possibility of wholeness and mastery (Lacan 1977: 1-7); the Bakhtinian subject likewise attributes to the other a completeness, finishedness, or finalization that precludes alteration — otherwiseness - but, in contrast to the Lacanian subject, experiences itself as free and open, capable of realizing potential otherness in unfinalizable becoming (Bakhtin 1990). At one level, then — that of semantic divergence within the parameter of alterity — Bakhtin's and Lacan's theories of the subject are incommensurable; at another, however, they are complementary, the semantic tension conducing to dialogic revaluation of the parameter and consequent reconceptualization of the problem of subjectivity. /Alterity/ means otherwiseness, to make, do, or be otherwise, the state of being other to oneself or itself. From the one to the other, the Same to the Other: alterity calls attention to, and calls into question, the (hitherto) prevailing logic of the western metaphysical tradition, the Logic of the Same, the Law of Identity, that subsumes object-otherness in subject oneness/sameness and that undergirds binarism, where one term is privileged over the other as the One. Under the aegis of this logic, metaphysics has sought (in Bakhtinian terminology) to monologize, (in Derridean) to logocentrize all meaning, to reduce thought to the single perspective of the cognizing, objectifying Cartesian I/eye. Theory dismantles the metaphyics of identity by dissolving the ego-centre into the margin of observed phenomena, in an inversionary tropical action not unlike that effected by Copernicus. Is a troping of theory possible that, rather than succumbing to the logic of identity and delivering us back into pre-theory, would liberate us into posttheory? What is to be displaced? Precisely that, I suggest, which dislodged structuralist positivism: contingency of textuality ~ in this case, not textuality as the ever ongoing process of deferment along the path of differential signifiers, but a certain limit to textuality that has emerged in the very working of it in recent writing which, by this very practice, reaches the post-theoretical threshold. It is a matter of the relationship of text to world and of textuality as a process. At issue is the way theory has been worked to yield what is tantamount to a neoidealism wholly at variance with theory's governing parameters. By this I mean a tendency to argue that, because the sign is independent of reference, because language constructs the world as knowable through semiosic processes peculiar, as far as we know, to the human brain, that language is unqualifiedly performative within its own self-generated mise-en-scene, without responsibility to whatever it is that lies outside its system of differences. This tendency is at work, for example, in Judith Butler's writing on gender. In stating this I do not retract my earlier agreement with Fernando de Toro that Butler's work evinces the emergence of a post-theoretical situation; it does so, however, by taking theory to the ultimate stage of identity with itself in its attempt to mobilize textuality on behalf of a power/knowledge agenda. I am not objecting to Butler or any other practitioner of theory working in this way — an agenda is a site of contingency

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and that, after all, is what the game of discourse is about; I am working in terms of my own agenda in this paper, as will become clear in a few moments. It is rather that Butler's way of going about pushes the postulate of textuality to the limit, to the point where a major troping, one that would bring about, if not a revolutionary paradigm shift like that of the heliocentric hypothesis, then an adjustment with far-reaching effects for future research, a resetting of the value rather than the rejection of a key parameter. I stated earlier that essentialism is grounded in the substantiality and stability of signifieds and that this breeds idealism. Butler's work — and I don't think she is alone in this, thus her work is exemplary in a certain way of the present moment in theory constitutes a move within theory that tends to an idealism of the signifier, what I have referred to as neoidealism; and it is this neoidealism that brings theory to the threshold of post-theory. The instance that brought this to my attention is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and its sequel, Bodies That Matter (1993). Poststructuralism as textuality encounters an impasse when performativity theory reaches the point of arguing that textuality does not simply make knowledge of and working within and upon the world possible, but that it constitutes the world in its worldness, that it can alter — other ~ the world according to subjective will or whim. When the contingency of textuality is pushed to the point that the chain of signifiers that constructs knowledge of bodies, and bodies as knowledge, threatens to displace material bodies as events of world altogether, as it tends to in Butler, then we have neoidealism. At this point, alterity comes into play to resolve the impasse by driving theory beyond the limits of theory's parameters. Theory must confront world, not on world's terms - world has no terms other than a stubborn unmetaphysical Dasein — but by returning to its own pragmatic foundations. I will be specific by citing a recent article by Joan Copjec (1994) critical of Butler. Derrida stands out from the other founders of theory in one very important respect — he does not offer a theory, but a practice, deconstruction, albeit one grounded in and instantiating the poststructuralist theory of textuality. Now, deconstruction owes a (largely unacknowledged) debt to Lacan, but it enables Butler to work the Lacanian text - specifically, the apparent patriarchism of psychoanalysis — to deconstruct the compulsory heterosexuality (Butler's term) it would seem to imply, to yield a theory of gender performativity that accords with Judith Butler's agenda. Copjec in turn deploys Kant's antinomies of reason deconstructively against Butler's Gender Trouble to defend Lacan's theory of gender identity as the prediscursive, pre-performative given that founds discourse and textual performativity. Gender as identity grounded in a masculine or a feminine structure, as Lacan argues, is not an effect of discourse; it is the precondition of discourse and it can not be talked away or talked around. It is an irreducible fact of world, and with world we come to the limit and other of theory. The other of textuality is world. I acknowledge that in so arguing I run the risk of appearing to return to a pre-theoretical stage in terms of traditional notions of referentiality and so forth. Such is not the case, however: we do not, we can not, return to world, which we know only through theories, but must turn to those theories

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themselves. Post-theory involves them as a supplementary parameter which, like all supplements, is not an innocent add-on but a reconstitutive alteration or othering. Such othering of theory, it seems to me, is being effected currently by two concomitant intellectual trends in science: what can be called (i) the cognitive turn and (ii) the emergence tarn. The cognitive turn calls for the correlation of poststructuralist theory of text and subject with neuroscience and cybernetics. It is a pertinent step after the linguistic turn of structuralism that resulted in the concept of textuality because it works through the implications of textuality as process — a worldly process. This other of theory, in the sense of that to which theory leads because it is what theory always already presupposed implicitly in constituting itself out of structuralism, is cognitive science (CS). Currently CS is problematizing if not displacing epistemology. An empirically grounded understanding of how the brain functions as mind is in process of reconstituting philosophy, which is why philosophers have been so eager to hop on the CS bandwagon (Churchland 1996). Students of literature working in and with theory are in a better position, I maintain, to absorb the shock of the cognitive turn because they do not have the philosopher's investment in the metaphysical tradition. Indeed, when they have made the turn they will be able to combat the philosopher's bid to hijack CS. Students of literature are positioned by theory to contribute to CS because there is a structural relationship between CS's object of study and textuality. CS studies the substratial neural processes that generate the modalities of semiosis that are theory's object of study and which enable the reflections and speculations of the philosophers and the framing of metaphysical problems. Specifically, I believe that the theory of textuality with which we work can assist, indeed, to conduct Cognitive Science to the investigation of the tropical processing functions that generate textuality. At this point, text and world meet as neuronal events. We are not concerned with mental representations as reflections of material events that have a status independent of those representations, but with neural flows and configurations that are of the world that they make knowable and accessible as a neural virtual reality. The cognitive turn involves precisely a reconsideration of what it is that enables textuality in the first place, the neurological functions of the physical human brain, an organ that, like any other, has evolved, according to biological evolutionary theory, in a relation to its species environment, which is not the whole of world but only a pertinent niche, and which is not simply a matter of biophysical but also of semiotic relations or, to summarize with Jakob von Uexkiill's term, an Umwelt(Uexkull 1982). In other words, the brain is an aspect of world related and relative to other aspects of world. In this perspective, textuality is not freedom from constraint but a constraint in and of itself, an enabling constraint, and must be studied as such. Such a mode of study, then, returns us, not immediately to world, but to other bodies of theory that are not included when we speak of theory, those of the physical and life sciences — to the "emergence turn". The emergence or, rather, emergences in question are the biological from the physical and the cultural from the biological. An enormous theoretical effort

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carried out during the past three or four decades among physicists, chemists, biologists, and semoticians is tending to convergence in terms of a theory of semiosis that embraces all these disciplinary fields. To attempt a brief and necessarily sketchy summary: Ilya Prigogine (1983), the 1977 Nobel Lauriate in chemistry, theorized the "dissipative structure" that defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy, whereby energic systems run down to thermal equilibrium without gradients. Dissipative structures, characterized as constitutionally far from equilibrium, are local avoidances of the second law. They select and introject available energy from the immediate environment and eject degraded energy, maintaining a steady state at a higher gradient than that of the environment — a summary description of biological organisms, particularly when considered as ongoing species rather than individual phenotypes, and even more so when considered as the ever-evolving biosphere as a whole rather than species, which are liable to extinction. Prigogine's emendation of thermodynamic theory enabled the Chilean biochemists Humberto Manturano and Francisco Varela (1980) to propose autopoiesis, or self-organization among chemical components to bring about the emergence of life-forms from non-living matter. More recently, Stuart Kauffman (1993, 1995), as noted above, has theorized self-organization rather than Darwinian selection as the basis of such emergence and of biological evolution. It strikes me that the logically next step is to apply these models to cultural, which is to say, discursive evolution. Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic principle entails a dissymmetry of monologic closure with dialogic openness, the former nevertheless occurring within the latter. Actual utterances, ranging from remarks in spoken conversation to complex written texts to great discursive systems, are local realizations at various levels of open semantic potentiality achieved through the stability of relative closure within the bounds of genres. As a global ensemble, monologic configurations constitute the current state of a state space of infinite potentiality for meaning that is always in flux, somewhat as an arbitrarily defined ensemble of local vortices of a river constitutes the realized dynamism of the gradient flow. Kauffman presents a mathematical modelling of the partitioning of the biological evolutionary state space of enormous, statistically unrealizable potential for adaptive variation into subregions of high probability. He offers an analogy for modelling the realization of the dialogic state space of infinite semantic potentiality into pragmatic monologic partitionings, and thus a way of understanding cultural evolution as a semiosic process. Textuality, brought to a reductionist impasse by post-theoretical practices such as those of Judith Butler ~ that is, reduced to identity with itself - is thus released into its implicit other, a universal semiosis that traverses all orders of matter-energy and governs the emergence on one order from another ~ the biological from the physical, the cultural from the biological, and, on a level local to the cultural, discursive Otherness from the discursive Same. What the cognitive and emergence turns as available others to theory mean is that post-theory will be arduous — much more arduous than theory ever was. For, to return once more to Fernando de Toro's paper, it involves a more radical permeation of

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disciplinary boundaries and cross-breeding of epistemologies, an even more vigorous combinatory troping, than has been practised hitherto. The crossing of epistemologies enabled by theory is in itself a major troping of theory, one might say, the inaugural troping of the post-theoretical, that which permits the post-theoretical to emerge by way of movement out of itself into available otherness. Theory has arrived at its moment of critical alterity. When brilliant practitioners such as Judith Butler take theory to the absurdity of neoidealism, theory is well into the turn toward more comprehensive theories of world, for such neoidealism is a moment of menacing reversability that resolves, salvationally, to a threshold of entropic undecidability, the saddle-point of inversionary tropic flow toward new discursive attractors. Let me close by citing what seem to me to be a number of recent instances of the cognitive and/or emergence turns among practitioners of poststructuralist theory. The September 1996 number of the Canadian literary-critical journal Mosaic is devoted to multiculturalism under the general title "Idols of Otherness: The Rhetoric and Reality of Multiculturalism". Evelyn Hinz, the editor, provides what she calls "A 'Cognitive' Introduction". Hinz examines the binary metaphors that conceptualize multiculturalism as either a "mosaic" or a "melting pot", the first connoting an aesthetic, the second, a utilitarian model, and the discursive and policy entailments that flow from these tropes. Here we can observe the cognitive turn being taken by working theory's problematization of binarism. The same number of Mosaic includes an article by Dawn Morgan, "Andrew Suknaski's 'Wood Mountain Time' and the Chronotope of Multiculturalism", which deploys Bakhtin's concept (at once one of his most important and least theorized) to specify, in effect, a cognitive or, more precisely, a semiosic process that constructs Umweltout of the encounter of language and world through a reading of the work of a contemporary Canadian poet engaged with his world, the Saskatchewan town of Wood Mountain. Hinz's introduction and Morgan's essay demonstrate linguistic and textually based theory moving toward its otherness. My third example bears on both the cognitive and emergence turns. Student's enrolled in the 1996 annual summer School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College were required to take a supplementary course entitled "Literary Memes: Towards an Evolutionary Paradigm in Literary Theory", conducted by Jean Molino of the University of Lausanne. The course description reads: Modern evolutionary biology and neuroscience try to "put the mind back into Nature" (G. Edelman) and, with the mind, its products — culture, art and literature. This paradigm shift makes possible a new approach to literature, the only way to eschew the vagaries and aporias of contemporary theory. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" as the unit of cultural heredity analogous to the gene. The new research program of evolutionary literary theory has to solve the following problems: the nature of literary memes, their modes of development and their relation to current concepts and questions. It will be able to propound a new interpretation of literary genres, tradition and meaning.

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The reading list includes, in addition to the Dawkins text (1989) and Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), eight other works familiar to anyone who, like me, is concerned with the implications of recent advances in biological evolutionary and cognitive studies for the study of literature, such as Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1994) and Merlin Donald's Origins of the Modem Mind (1991) (personal communication, Colene Bentley, McGill University, who supplied me with the calendar from which I quote). Molino's course signals unequivocally an alteration in the content of theory, an index of change at work. A striking example of theory taking the Emergence Turn occurs in a paper delivered at a conference held in the autumn of 1995 at the University of Montreal by Wlad Godzich, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, entitled "Intelligence Emergent" (1995). I will summarize those aspects of the paper most immediately pertinent to my argument. Godzich posits three chronotopes - he employs the Bakhtinian term — three phases of cultural evolution that represent a process of emergence, in the way that the cultural itself has emerged from the biological which derived from the physical. As with these, Godzich's chronotopes, while emerging in successive order, coexist simultaneously — the later do not obliterate the earlier but recontextualize and resignify them: so plant and animal life alter the physical environment from which they draw nourishment, and human culture has certainly altered the physical and biological environment upon which it depends. Each cultural phase is characterized by a mode of cognition; each has a specific material basis in world in terms of space and time. The first is Earth: not the raw environment as such but the relation to the environment of so-called primitive peoples living directly from the land in hunter-gatherer and rudimentary agricultural economies, Earth as their Umwelt. The time of earth is prehistory, the very longue durée that cannot be gridded by the historian's periodizations. The cognitive mode of Earth is narrative, as with the myths of pre-literate societies, preserved and transmitted orally and the object of study of cultural anthropology. The second phase is territory, the earth gridded as property by maps and legal discourse. Its time is history, the histories of the nation states and empires that replaced or colonized the Earth of prehistory. The cognitive mode of Territory is the Sign, which functions through absence, and which results in writing, print, the book — the semiosphere as Umwelt. It is the object of study of the "traditional" humanities — philosophy, history, jurisprudence, criticism. The third phase is that into which humanity has been passing for over five hundred years and which is now approaching its apogee: Market. Market transcends both Earth and Territory, treating the one as resource and the other as a machinery, that is to say, the nation state, which represented the fulfilment of Territory, is, and always was for capitalism, an instrument, first for its consolidation at local levels and now, in subordination to transnationality, for capitalism's consolidation globally. The time of Market is Real Time, the time of electronic processing of information that has effectively abolished the frontiers of territory. The cognitive mode of Market is cybernetic calculability— statistics and stochastics. Market is the Umwelt of the Commodity.

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Godzich proposes a fourth chronotope currently in the making: intelligence. He turns for a metaphor to the scholastic doctrine of angelic intelligences descending hierarchically from the divine creator, informing the levels and gradations of the created order. Godzich wants to "bring back the angels," conceived as "supraindividual intelligence": the collective intelligence that has evolved in humanity as it has passed through the phases and which includes that of every phase. Godzich, not surprisingly, inverts the scholastic hierarchy and orders "from the bottom up". I interpret his paper as calling for, precisely, both the cognitive and emergence turns. In pointing out how physical and linguistic anthropology have been "evacuated", the one by genetics and the other by cognitive science, Godzich draws our attention to disciplines where the turns have been completed. This leading practitioner of theory successfully leads theory out of itself into its other in an evolutionary troping that avoids the trap of narcissistic neoidealism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, M.M. (1990). "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity", in: Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Michael Holquist/Vadim Liapunov (eds.). Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. — . (1984). Problems in Dostoievsky's Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. -—. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge. Churchland, Paul M. (1996). The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Copjec, Joan. (1994). "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason", in: Supposing the Subject. Joan Copjec (ed.). London; New York: Verso, p. 16-44. Eco, Umberto. (1995). The Island of the Day Before. New York: Harcourt Brace. Godzich, Wlad. (1995). "Intelligence Emergent". Paper delivered at conference/seminar October 19. Department of Comparative Literature. Université de Montréal. Hinz, Evelyn. (1996). "What is Multiculturalism? A 'Cognitive' Introduction", in: Idols of Otherness: The Rhetoric and Reality of Multiculturalism. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 29, 3 (September 1996): vixiii. Kauffman, Stuart A. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. -—. (1995). At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. (21970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lacan, Jacques. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London; New York: W.W. Norton. Manturano, Humberto R./Francisco J. Varela. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht; Boston: D. Reidel. Molino, Jean. (1996). Course Description, "Literary Memes: Towards an Evolutionary Paradigm in Literary Theory", in: Course Descriptions and Readings. School of Criticism and Theory 1996, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth, NH. Morgan, Dawn. (1996). "Andrew Suknaski's 'Wood Mountain Time' and the Chronotope of Multiculturalism", in: Idols of Otherness: The Rhetoric and Reality of Multiculturalism. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 29, 3 (September 1996): p. 35-51. Peirce, C.S. (1931). Collected Papers, 8 vols. Hartshorne, Charles/Paul Weiss (eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Prigogine, Ilya/Isabelle Stengers. (1983) Order out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books. Rutland, Barry. (1990). "Bakhtinian Categories and the Discourse of Postmodernism", in: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Epistemology of Discourse. Clive Thomson (ed.). Amsterdam: Rodopi. p. 123-136. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1966). Course in General Linguistics. Bally, C./A. Sechehaye with A. Riedlinger (eds.). Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGrawHill. Thagard, Paul. (1992). Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Uexkull, Jakob von. (1982). "The Theory of Meaning", in: SemioticaAl (1): 25-87. Voloshinov, V.N. (1986). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. White, Hayden. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Mario J. Valdes University of Toronto

LITERARY THEORY IN AN AGE OF POST-THEORY More than twenty years ago I wrote a critique of methods and pretensions and, especially, the foundational fallacies of literary theory as it was spreading throughout our universities. I did so from a philosophical position that was quite receptive to a number of the theoretical positions then being proposed. I am still arguing for inquiry and against dogma. The difference is that there are now legions of critics who have dismissed theory with the same unreflective rush with which it was embraced in the 1970's. I will restate my argument. The function of any theory is to explain, and to explain, is necessarily to explain something about something. Therefore there cannot be a logically consistent general theory of literary criticism. In fact I will go so far as to say that it is doubtful whether there can be a general theory of anything. There must first exist in the minds of the theory-makers some prima facie problem that calls for an explanation, or the process of explanation cannot begin. We do not usually consider that we need a theory on opening doors because we do not perceive that the activity of opening doors is a problem. However the meaning of complex texts does present a problem and, consequently, some degree of explanation would appear to be in order. But it is a major category error to think that a theory's scope can be determined by its subject matter, by what it is a theory about. Literature cannot define literary theory unless we consider literature to be a problem and not a recognized subject matter. Of course we all recognize that literature is both a problem and a subject matter and therein lies the confusion. In short, literary theory makes sense only if we consider literature to be a problem and not only the designation of a subject matter. My preliminary position therefore is that literary theory or, better said, the related modes of theory called literary theory, have their scope set by the problems recognized conjointly as literary problems to which each of them offers a solution. In other words, there are as many literary theories as there are literary problems that require explanation. More strictly, the scope of a theory is determined by the questions to which it provides answers. As long as we feel the need to explain problems related to that construct we call literature, there will be theory. What has passed from the scene is the pretension to a general theory of literature, one that does not explain a problem but rather offers a paradigm to solve all problems. In this sense we are in a period of post theory. Ironically, a general theory of literary criticism was the most unscientific basis of operation for a discipline that made claims of scientific validity. But, is there

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value in the more modest approach of literary theory as an explanatory construct for a perceived problem or a set of related problems? I will argue that there is insofar as a specific theory of literary criticism can provide a solution to specific problems arising out of the practices of critics or the claims made for criticism, and if well articulated it can lead to dialogue amongst theorists and critics and they just may understand what they have in common and where their differences lie. This would be no mean achievement. But I will also argue that differences will prevail since theoretical neutrality is just as chimerical as constructing a general theory. Nevertheless, modest as understanding differences may sound, we should not minimize the significance of being able to understand difference in theories of literary criticism. Therefore the dialogue among theoreticians to which I alluded before can be taken as a background against which personal solutions to personal predicaments in explanation can be formulated and a framework within which their features and some aspects of their comprehensiveness and adequacy can be assessed. Let us consider a specific problem: can poetry express philosophical concepts? Who has not at one time or another, thought about such ideas as freedom, truth, beauty, who we are, what sense, if any, we can make of the world we live in, or whether is is possible to fully know or love another. These subjects are primarily interpersonal topics taken up through the multiple forms of expression we live in and they are also the topics of philosophy and of poetry. Societies differ markedly in how closely they listen to their poets. In France and Russia for example poetry has great social importance. In the United States the commercial expansion of popular culture from the local to the international scene might keep some from hearing the poetry. But it is there and it is significant. In this paper I will draw from the poetry of Octavio Paz, a body of work that I have lived from earliest childhood - poetry that speaks of sixty years of this twentieth century. I shall also consider the writings of a number of twentieth century phisosophers. If philosophy and poetry is as central to life as I claim it is, then I must begin by explaining the differences between everyday discursive practices and those of poetry and philosophy. The scientist seeks clarity and expository rigour when writing about research; conversational language often lacks clarity and almost always has no expository rigour. The poet, who as a craftsman will exceed the scientist in the careful use of language, creates visions that are both personal and universal, but the greatest challenge for the poet is to create a vision of an idea such as freedom in a way that is not reductive to personal experience. Poetry must remain open for the reader or listener to engage in a shared experience. The poet works with the volatile aspect of language we call polysemy, a word not only has more than one meaning in the poetic text, it has multiple meanings that change with each new configuration of reading. The philosopher on the other hand seeks not to solve problems but to elucidate them in language that aspires to universality. Let us take up the word freedom. What is freedom? What does the word mean? Every speaker of every language known to me uses the word, but what do all these millions of speakers mean when they speak of freedom? Are there different uses of the

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word that are circumscribed by the period, the culture or merely the individual speaker, and what about the meaning of freedom for those who are born in slavery. Our time recognizes the political ideal of freedom as universal. The idea of freedom at its most basic level is perhaps that we have a voice in how we shall be governed. But freedom in poetry and especially in Paz's Libertad bajo palabra is more; it is above all a state of mind that is often thwarted by forces both external and internal. It is as powerful as it is fragile. The Roman stoic philosophers understood that freedom is a state of harmony, for it is clear that the moment the demand for freedom strives for the absolute in the human condition, it ceases to be freedom and becomes despotism. Whenever someone's idea of freedom is imposed on another, it violates the very nature of balance and harmony. Freedom, Octavio Paz (1973: 234-36) tells us, can be first approached by what it is not. It is not a general system establishing the individual's place in society, nor is it a philosophy of action although all philosophers concerned with political thought must address it. Freedom, Paz's poems say, is an act which is both irrevocable and instantaneous; it is above all the choice of selecting one possibility among others. The realization of freedom is the selection, without coercion, among open and real alternatives in our everyday activities of rational, emotional complex unities of taste, motives and inclinations. We cannot draw up a fixed idea of freedom because it is essentially the human exercise of options. Freedom is therefore an affirmation of what in each of us is unique and personal, something that is ours as deep as our own personal identity and therefore impossible to reduce to any generalization however thoughtful or brilliant. Each of us thinks of himself as a singular and unique creature with the result that someone else's idea of essential choices when imposed on us becomes tyranny. Octavio Paz reminds us that when the Bolsheviks dissolved the Russian constituent assembly in the name of liberty and freedom, Rosa Luxemburg, the courageous apostle of freedom told them: "Freedom of opinion is always the freedom of that person who does not think as we do". Freedom begins in the affirmation of my uniqueness and becomes, on reflection, the recognition of the other person's freedom, for that is the essential condition of my freedom. Robinson Crusoe was not really free on his island, even though there was no other will opposing him, and no one constrained him. His choices were not true alternatives, for in Defoe's great metaphor of human existence, Crusoe's acts were all taken in a social vacuum and were fundamental acts of survival. Solitary choices are acts of solitude in which we can survive because of our inner resources of will, courage and faith. To be cast into solitude, without the resources of our past freedom, is to be plunged into an empty isolation of primordial survival. It was precisely because Crusoe had no freedom that he sought to create a basic social group with Friday by speaking to him in English. In the long term, perhaps, they could have had a social unit, but Crusoe never advanced beyond the level of master and slave. To be free, a

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person must be involved with the freedom of others which means that the individual is free when she or he can choose her or his options within the web of human relations constituted by other's choices. Freedom should not be confused with democracy for freedom is a state of mind and democracy is a form of political organization. However, we must recognize that in the world of political action, the two ideas have become necessary complements to each other. Without freedom, democracy is just a name for mob rule and freedom in the world of political action without democracy is an illusion, for no person or group of persons can ever realize freedom for us. We must be able to exercise our own freedom in conjunction with others. Although we have said that political freedom without democracy is an illusion, can we not claim that personal freedom without recourse to others or the organization of the community is also illusory? There is a long tradition of commentators who look inwardly for freedom. It has been said many times that a prisoner under the most extreme physical constraint can retain his freedom to think as she or he chooses. But we must not lose sight of the obvious fact that the prisoner can do so because as a participant in a community he has experienced the world through language. To speak a language is to live in a culture and participate in a community sharing in values, symbols, customs, beliefs, visions, questions about the past, present and future and, of course, a sense of belonging and of exclusion for all those who do not live in the same language. We speak with our contemporaries, and we speak of the dead seeking to embody them in living memory, but we also speak for the unborn creating a legacy they have not chosen and often obliging them, when it is their turn to speak, to reject us and all that we have said and done for them. In summary we are free to speak but we are not free to make-up our own language. We can discover our heritage, but we must do so knowing that this is once again a legacy imposed on our successors. We expand our immediate experience when language is imbued with the power of the imagination. There is freedom to imagine the world, worlds unseen and worlds not yet made. As speakers of a language we speak of the presence of trees, cities, rivers, animals and the world we see as well as the world we imagine. As world makers we are free to speak with the animate and the inanimate, with the visible and invisible, but most of all we speak with ourselves. To speak is to have the freedom of the human imagination and to share the world with others. As part of the community of speakers we also have a bit-part in the continued development of the language. As writers and readers of language this participation magnifies beyond calculation. The hidden agenda to the question of freedom and the cultural imagination has been dominated for centuries by the debate between the poet, the individual creator of language, and the dictionary, the collective genius of the community of speakers. It is not that the aporia of human freedom is overworked; on the contrary, the question has been quite limited by an assumed dualism of the one and the many. For centuries the platonic sense of dialogism has been overwhelmed by the Aristotelan syllogism except in the writing of poets who have often and regularly broken out of the dualistic straight-jacket and it is in this tradition that philosophy and poetry come together.

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Phenomenologically the self is a web of relations, spun out by our speaking a language within a community. Human beings gain their identity only through their participation in a language-speaking community. But in order to participate fully in the community, we must first learn to think as free members of the community. The failure to do so is not an intellectual failure, but rather a moral one. Nietzsche measured spiritual courage by the individual's capacity to face the truth. Persons who face the truth, will have the moral courage to think for themselves as free members of society. But, can we ever be sure that we have found the truth and not some self-fulfilling prophecy? Paz responds with a poem: "Certainty"/ "Certeza"(1987: 66). If the white light of this lamp is real, and real the hand that writes, are the eyes that look at the writing real? From one word to the other what I say dissipates. I know that I am living between two parentheses.

Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real la mano que escribe ¿son reales Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo entre dos paréntesis.

The poem is, of course, a lyrical response to Descartes' meditations. In place of the foundational cogito ergo sum we have the awareness of the transitory nature of thought, reading and existence. The enunciating voice the poet has created in the poem, comes into existence between the parentheses the reader has opened through the reading experience. The subtle but powerful suggestion, that for some will later grow into phenomenological philosophy, is that there are no absolutes, there are only relationships that fail, and relationships that work. There is no one truth, nor is there any possible justification for a person or persons imposing their truth on others. The question to ponder is: What does the reader accept as true when there has been a conflict between the enunciated truth and the reader's own perception of truth on the issues at hand. There can be an intense opposition between the two; if we live open to the opinions of others this situation is not uncommon. For Paul Ricoeur the only truth worth holding onto is the truth that has emerged from the conflict of truths. If we do not expose our concept of truth to the purging power of difference of opinion, we will never be obliged to reflect on the implicit consequences our views have on the lives of others. Certainly one of the functions of reading is to reveal a dimension which was ignored, inhibited or obscured ~ the point of view of another. But I would not want to separate this activity from the transformative nature of reading; when a reader applies a text to himself, as in the case of literature, he recognizes himself in certain possibilities of existence, but at the same time he is transformed becoming other in the act of reading that is as important as is the recognition of the self. The aporia of beauty is another facet of life that is mediated by literature and philosophy. If we see the world through language, language as lived not language in the abstract sense of putting the code into use, when we speak we reach out from one

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person to the other. Poetry says that nothing can be beautiful in the isolation of a single mind, the world can be beautiful if it is shared. I again turn to the Mexican poet (1987: 66f.): Midway through a poem, a great emptiness Takes hold of me; images, ideas, words abandon me. There is no one at my side, not even those eyes which from behind my back read what I write. There is no front or back, the pen rebels, there is no beginning or end, there are no obstacles. The poem becomes an empty desert, what was said is not said, what has not been said can never be said towers, terraces in ruins, balconies, a sea of black salt a blind kingdom. A mitad del poema me sobrecoge siempre un gran desamparo, todo me abandona, no hay nadie a mi lado, ni siquiera esos ojos que desde atrás contemplan lo que escribo no hay atrás, ni adelante, la pluma se rebela, no hay comienzo ni fin, tampoco hay muro que saltar es una explanada desierta el poema, lo dicho no está dicho, lo no dicho es indecible torres, terrazas devastadas, babilonias, un mar de sal negra, un reino ciego. The poet suggests that this is the living hell of perpetual solitude. But, what is it that we can call beautiful? He responds: Near the gate a couple embrace she laughs and asks something her question rises and opens up above At this hour the sky does not have a single wrinkle, three leaves fall from a tree someone is whistling a tune a light goes on in the apartment across the street How strange and wondrous it is to be alive To walk among others with the obvious secret of being alive. Junto a la verja se abraza una pareja ella ríe y pregunta algo su pregunta sube y se abre en lo alto A esta hora el cielo no tiene una sola arruga, caen tres hojas de un árbol alguien silba en la esquina en la casa de enfrente se enciende una ventana ¡qué extraño es saberse vivo!

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LITERARY THEORY Caminar entre la gente con el secreto a voces de estar vivo.

And, in a final thrust in the poem (1987: 66f.), the lyric voice reaches its goal: Beauty does not weigh upon us, calm reflection, time and beauty are the same As light and water. La belleza no pesa reflejo sosegado tiempo y belleza son lo mismo luz y agua.

Paz has taken the flow of time and its veiled threat as the light that reflects in the water of beauty, but we can experience beauty when the self and the other touch each other. The calm reflection of time passing is possible if we can see beauty in the reflection of light on the surface of the water. Heidegger comes very close to Paz's metaphor of light and water as time and beauty: The meaning of art... does not seem to one to be tied to special social conditions... In any encounter with art, it is not the particular, but rather the total of the experienceable world, man's ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him, that is brought to experience. But this does not mean that the indeterminate anticipation of sense that makes a work significant for us can ever be fulfilled so completely that we could appropriate it as knowledge... This was what Hegel taught when in a profound statement he defined the beautiful in art as "the sensuous showing of the idea." (1975: 32-33)

For Paz, as for Heidegger, living is determined within speaking which is the human dialectic of willed action, this includes everything we do and think as willed action. The literary representation of willed action is a primary mediator that is a response and an overcoming of circumstances usually directed against the present or past acts of another or others. It is not that the representation of life is essentially conflictive although there is inevitable conflict in all willed action, but rather that human action as speech is always interpersonal action in which one's acts must fit into the community with respect to the acts of others. The poet, repeatedly, says the world did not begin with me, although I must remake my world anew each day as I speak it. First let us hear from Paz: Man's world is the daughter of death. We talk because we are mortal: words are not signs, they are years saying what they say...

La palabra del hombre es hija de la muerte. Hablamos porque somos mortales: las palabras no son signos, son años al decir, lo que dicen...

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MARIO J. VALDÉS they say time: they say us we are the names of time to talk is human

dicen tiempo: nos dicen somos nombres del tiempo conversar es humano

And when these words that define their speakers as human, are fashioned by the poet, what do they say? The poem's words are not given by us The poem gives us

Palabras del poema no las decimos nunca El poema nos dice

And finally how do these written words we call poetry constitute the human dialectic of living in language? One of Paz's remarkable short poems (1987: 244) expresses this idea beautifully: Writing poetry is La escritura poetica es learning to read aprender a leer writing's gap in writing el hueco de la escritura not the traces of what we were no huellas de lo que fuimos paths caminos toward what we are. hacia lo que somos.

I will quote briefly from a lecture given by Martin Heidegger on Feb. 14, 1951. The remarkable convergence of ideas between the German philosopher and Octavio Paz should become apparent even in this brief passage: Man speaks. We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams. We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly listening or speaking but are attending to some work or taking a rest. We are continually speaking in one way or another. We speak because speaking is natural to us... only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. Language speaks. Its speaking bids the difference to come which expropriates world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy. Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing... what is important is learning to live in the speaking of language. (Heidegger 1971: 189)

But let us not leave the issue with only philosophers from phenomenology. Consider Wittgenstein's view on these matters; he writes in the Philosophical Investigation: "the speaking of language is part of an activity or a form of life" (1968: 23). It would thus appear that both poets and philosophers can give related responses to similar questions. The problem now restated with more clarity is how can the extreme polysemy of poetry be compatible with the rigorous demonstrations of philosophy. The theory that follows attempts to answer this specific question as succinctly as possible. The concepts of explanations of meaning and of understanding are interrelated. Explanation ends when meaning has been conveyed and understanding is complete. But this never happens. Explanation is both analysis and description of

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the analysis but it always proceeds from a specific point of view and there is no limit to the number and variety of points of view. Another factor that makes the process never ending is that meaning and, therefore, interpretation remains indeterminate insofar as there is no way of being sure that the meaning intended by the sender of the message and the meaning received by the receiver are similar. And when we transpose this problem to writing and poetry, indeterminacy looms as inescapable. The concept of explanation must remain open or better yet part of a dialectic that is a continuous movement from explanation to understanding which opens up into another round of explanation and so on. The theory of interpretation we are proposing is that the poet and the philosopher explain their sense of the question from different points of view, but the understanding they attain can come together as long as we understand that they will often take that conjoint understanding and develop quite different explanations which may lead away from each other. We can describe this state of affairs as two horizontal lines which converge at a certain point, cross over and then move on, independently of each other. What interests us in this theory of converging lines is both the point of convergence and the onset of the new movement toward separate and independent lines of thought. It is quite clear that both the poet and the philosopher attempt to make sense of phenomena, one uses images and metaphor although not exclusively and the other uses argumentation and logic although metaphor and simile are also used by the philosopher. Now then, when the problem of incompatible paradigms emerges, critics set about interpreting the understanding that the poet and the philosopher offer us. Our concern as theoreticians is to account for the convergence of the two independent lines of explanation and the divergence that follows. At this crucial point in our exposition, it is necessary to review our inquiry: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

the function of philosophy is to explain; the function of poetry is to create; the convergence of explanation and creation is rare but when it does occur in either philosophy or poetry it is memorable; the function of theory is to provide a plausible explanation of the specific phenomenon we have just described; subsequent to convergence, divergence is required because the function of neither poetry or philosophy has changed.

Convergence is either random or predictable; if it is predictable a theoretical paradigm should be able to explain how and why it occurs. The theoretical proposition I am making is that the kernel ideas which have been developed independently by both philosophy and poetry were already contained in the prefigurative foundation of human language as a dwelling place. The human imagination develops the kernel ideas with an almost endless variety of methods both linguistic and material, but as long as the initial kernel idea remains in the line of expression, it stands to reason that at some

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point there will be a convergence of manifestation between separate and independent lines of expression coming forth from the same prefigurative source. Does this theory have a name and what kinship does it have to other theoretical propositions? It is a hermeneutic proposition and it is related to the philosophy of language we call phenomenological hermeneutics. As a theory of interpretation it is more than three hundred years old, but in its present formulation it stems from Hans Georg Gadamer's appropriation of Martin Heidegger's philosophy and my work on Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Heidegger, Martin. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. Paz, Octavio. (1987). The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz. 1957-1987. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions. — . (1973). The Bow and the Lyre. Trans. Ruth L. C. Sims. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ricoeur, Paul. (1986). Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1968). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.

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Henry W. Sullivan University of Missouri

'UNREDUCED FORTRESSES': THE LACANIAN EPISTEME BEHIND THE LINES OF 'POST-THEORY' The purpose of this essay is to propose some post-Lacanian extrapolations on the notions of neuter and nothing. What my two proposed post-Lacanian extrapolations have in common is what I would term their "positive neuterdom" and their "positive negativity". By this, I mean that the concepts of neither/nor, or a project of making distinctions among the void, nothing, and zero, might at first glance seem to be futile and theoretically nugatory: why talk seriously in positive terms about things that apparently do not significantly exist? Yet I hope to show that these concepts can be discussed not only in what we conventionally call positive terms, but also that the very definition or, rather, redefinition of neuter and nothing can lead to some important, tentative conclusions of a post-theoretical nature. I refer particularly to interconnecting aspects of human subjectivity, human sexuality, and the "anatomy of deity". Under this last rubric - the "anatomy of deity" - I wish to address the reasons for the twentieth-century survival of deity on a planetary, even fundamentalist scale. Although Nietzsche, in simpler and blunter terms, pronounced the Judaeo-Christian "God" of the European tradition to be "dead" in Thus spake Zarathustra (1883), his act of verbal deicide has not succeeded in stripping our contemporary world of the notion of deity1. I shall return to this matter towards the end of my paper. Before engaging all these issues in greater detail, however, I believe a preliminary word on the relation of Lacan's original teaching to our post-Modern ethos, or posttheory in general, is indispensable. As my title suggests, I hold that the original issues raised by Jacques Lacan ~ now — fifteen years after his death, have not necessarily been "reduced", or resolved and philosophically surpassed, by post-theory. The 1

There are numerous passages in Nietzsche's works which deal with the "death of God". The one I had in mind is from the Fourth Part, section 66, where Zarathustra "... was seeking the last pious man, a saint and an anchorite, who, alone in his forest, had not yet heard of what all the world knoweth at present." " What doth all the world know at present?" asked Zarathustra. "Perhaps that the old God no longer liveth, in whom all the world once believed?" "Thou sayest it," answered the old man sorrowfully. "And I served that old God until his last hour." (Nietzsche 1954: 288-89)

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military image in my title of a philosophically "unreduced fortress" is, of course, drawn from a nineteenth-century view of the later philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant, particularly the so-called "critical" phase of the three great treatises on pure reason (1781), practical reason (1788), and aesthetics (1790). Schopenhauer compared the skeptical problems raised by the exploitation of Kant at the hands of radical Idealists such as Fichte and their "theoretical egoism" to a fortress, left behind the lines of march and progress of philosophy, and still not captured or "reduced" by his successors in the discipline2. The Koenigsberg philosopher's problematics stood defiantly in place, the old Kantian questions marks still hanging in the air. I believe the same analogy holds good for the problematics raised by Lacan, particularly during the yearly Seminars he held in Paris from 1964 until the late seventies. In my view, these together constitute a unique episteme, as yet "unreduced" by subsequent thinkers. But this is not all. I also intend a double entendre by my use of the military expression "behind the lines of post-theory". In the degree to which post-theory can be identified with, or is generally influenced by, post-structuralism and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Lacan's theories are also "behind the lines" of this body of thought. As Lacan himself remarked late in life, Derrida had founded his reputation as a philosopher by extending to an extreme degree the so-called "High Structuralism" of Lacan's first phase of public teaching, dating back to the 1950's and early 1960's. Even conceding that the validity of the term "High Structuralism" is questionable if and when applied to Lacan, it is undeniable that the French psychoanalyst - from his personal friendship with Claude Lévi-Strauss (formed in the late 1940's); from his study of Saussure (1916); of Jakobson and Halle (English 1956; French 1963); the linguist Emile Benveniste (1966; 1966-74), and others — had come to scrutinize language in a fashion that no psychoanalyst had done before him. Lacan readily accepted Lévi-Strauss's inversion of Saussure's algorithm, now giving priority to the signifier over the signified in the division of the sign. Lacan then went on to expose the "founding duplicity" of the signifier, as well as the fundamental asymmetry between the movement of the signifying chain above the bar and the slippage (or glissement) of the signifieds moving beneath the bar (Lacan 1966: 660-63). There was not arbitrary, and albeit unbreakable union inherent in what Lacan chose to call the Saussurean algorithm, but rather a resistance inherent in signification (Evans 1996: 183-84). It is this asymmetry, or loosening of the signifier/signified relationship, which Derrida was to exploit in radical fashion, virtually disconnecting any meaningful relationship between the two. Some have compared Derrida's promotion of the arbitrariness-over-fixity of meaning to a kind of nihilism. In another place, and some-

2

For Schopenhauer, "theoretical egoism" was denying the reality of the external world. He says, in the First Book, section 19 of The World as Will and Representation:. "Therefore we ... shall regard this sceptical argument of theoretical egoism, which here confronts us, as a small frontier fortress. Admittedly the fortress is impregnable, but the garrison can never sally forth from it, and therefore we can pass it by and leave it in our rear without dangef (Schopenhauer 1969: 104; italics mine).

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what less pessimistically, I have termed Derrida's system a "dogmatic, neo-skeptic graphocentrism" (Sullivan 1992-93). What cannot be doubted either way, however, is that the Derridean move, in its portrayal of language as "a sprawling limitless web" (Eagleton 1983: 129) and Derrida's claimed status as "a champion of unboundedness" (Derrida 1984: 86), may, indeed, accurately be dubbed a "post-structuralism". This holds true even if the early Derrida never spoke of it. The term was first invented in the United States during the early 1970's, no one seems to know by whom, and only imported into French a decade and a half later as an anglicism. The very recent French coinage néo-structuralisme is an ironical and sparing concession to the twist that events have taken in the United States since the mid-1970's. So the philosophic descendants of Derrida in the post-theory era owe a debt to Lacan's innovations. In this sense, Lacan both stands behind their lines, while they for their part — have followed along a path marked out by lines that first Lacan, and then Derrida, had established. But, to return to my opening proposition, any such diachronic genealogy of theory does not suggest that Lacan's problematics have been properly challenged, absorbed, vindicated, refuted, or even understood at all. Lacan's strikingly original theories concerning the formation of the human subject; the implications of such formation of the subject through language and the signifier for the making of human sexuality; the relationship of both subjectivity and sexuality to the phenomenon of religious experience (what I more generally termed "deity"): all these remain "unreduced". It is also tempting to re-examine the sublime in this context, though I lack the space to do it here (Zizek 1988; Sullivan 1992). This "return to Lacan" can actually be accomplished in the context of post-theory. Post-theory may be defined as the name given to that moment or space in post-modern speculation in which all post-discourses are assigned an equal potential value for further theorizing. It could be regarded as an ecumenical think-tank that ignores all borders. What needs to be recuperated is the later Lacan of the 1970's and his gruelling engagement with the Real. When Derrida hijacked the early Lacan, poststructuralists and deconstructionists considered they had "done" Lacan or, in Schopenhauer's words "left him behind"3. As the main theoretical trend of the 1970's and 1980's, post-structuralism simply did not pay heed or listen to Lacan any more, just at the time when his thought was profoundly engaging with issues for which poststructuralism would find no solutions in its own terms. The ecumenical perspective of 3

Schopenhauer clearly did not attribute this skepticism to Kant himself, but he did regard Kant's work as being ignored and unassimilated a century after Kant had lived. In his Appendix entitled Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy, Schopenhauer wrote: "Only I may be allowed ... to regard Kant's works as still very new, whereas many at the present day look upon them as already antiquated. Indeed, they have discarded them as settled and done with, or, as they put it, have left them behind. Others, emboldened by this, ignore them altogether, and with brazen affrontery continue to philosophize about God and the soul on the assumptions of the old realistic dogmatism and its scholastic philosophy" (ibid., p. 416; italics mine). In my view, exactly the same analogy could be drawn today between Lacan's works and those poststructuralists who claim they "have left them behind".

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post-theory, aided by the recent work of the prolific Slavoj Zizek (1987; 1988; 1993) and of the clinician Bruce Fink (1995; 1996), can now permit this "return to Lacan". I should like, in the first part of this demonstration, to explore the notion of neuter in the context of Lacan's account of how human sexuality is constructed, notably from the Twentieth Seminar Encore. In order to do this, and to facilitate further demonstrations later on in my paper concerning the problematization of nothing, I will precede my discussion of neuter with a review of the key Lacanian distinctions among the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symptom. The interrelatedness of these four dimensions logically clarifies the way in which: 1) the physical body, 2) gender, 3) object choice (or "sexual partner orientation" [Young-Bruehl 1996, 9]), and 4) the specificity, even pathology, of a particular subject's unique sexuality are constructed — one out of the other — over an extended period of years. The Symbolic, perhaps the easiest of the four registers to grasp, is the order of synchronic language, human culture and exchange: exchange of words, objects, gifts, money, debts, contracts, pacts, badges, tokens, honors, etc. The Symbolic is neutral and athematic, even though it imposes a "weight" of obligation on human subjects by the very fact of its existence. A good example of this would be the global telephone system. The system is neutral, in the sense that it can be used to send good or evil messages at the will of the caller, or to transmit information plain and simple. But we feel obliged to respond to the telephone when it rings, even though we do not know the identity of the caller. Another example of athematic, Symbolic obligation would be the conventions imposed on drivers by the highway code. The Imaginary is the order of human, species-specific merger (originating in Lacan's mirror-stage between 6 to 18 months of age), during which the neonate takes on an identity ("image") from the primary caretaker (usually the mother). In the 1970's, Lacan called it the order of the body. The Imaginary is as much the register of "like and unlike" as of "like and dislike"; of love and hate, rivalry, grandiosity, narcissism, fantasy, and so on. But, although set down in childhood as part of the Oedipal drama, or what Freud termed the "family novel" (Familienroman) (Freud 1898; 1908; 1934-38; Laplanche/Pontalis 1967: 427), the Imaginary carries on over into adult life and continues to affect the way in which we interact with other people or relate to them, often at the level of an unconscious perception4. The Real is the hardest order to grasp, because it is ex defmitione radically ineffable, and one can never "say" it except in bits and pieces. The Real is, in one measure, the recalcitrance of created Nature to either Symbolic-order articulation, and/or Imaginary-order representation. In Lacan's words, it is "that which resists sym-

4

Freud's term Familienroman, strictly "family novel", was poorly translated as "family romance" by James Strachey's team in the Standard Edition, since the latter implies stronger "romantic" ties and familial eroticism than the more accurate sense of a novel as a building up of dramatics and story within the family. This is much clearer in the Spanish equivalent novela familiar (Laplanche/Pontalis 1967: 427). Freud first used the term in a letter addressed to Fliess of June 20, 1898.

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bolization absolutely" (Lacan 1988: 66); or, again, the Real is "the domain of whatever subsists outside symbolization" (Lacan 1966: 388). It is the realm of trauma. We try to articulate and represent the Real in language, but we fail, and our failures expose the Real of impasse. The universe as created Nature existed long before the advent of human beings or human language; human beings are entirely expendable at the cosmic level; and the universe would continue to exist Real and ineffable, if human beings were to disappear from the planet altogether. In another measure, the Real refers to the historical period of time past, before which no subject can conceive of his or her own universe or subjectivity in any way (Fink 1995 : 24-31). Yet again, it is the Real of the organism which decides when we die. Death belongs pre-eminently to the order of the Real (Ragland [-Sullivan] 1986: 183-95; 1995: 84-114). By that, I also mean an order of traumata and fixations that do not just disappear. The Symptom, or fourth order, is that area of psychic life where all three of the above-mentioned orders coincide. In Lacan's model of the Borromean knot (see diagram), it is the hatched or shaded area at the center of the intersecting rings which is simultaneously and always an effect of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real combined. Moreover, this symptomatic intersection is not generalizable, but necessarily peculiar to a given human subject and to no other: a concept which gives us a clue to the reasons behind what we loosely, or in quotidian psychological shorthand, call "individuality" or "personality" in the people we know well. It is not necessarily a derogatory term of pathology but, rather, a descriptive one.

LACAN'S THREE ORDERS THE BORROMEAN KNOT [THE

S

SYMB(

SYMPTOM]

1975

REAL

IMAGINARY THE REAL IMAGINARY SYMBOLIC

T H E SEX O F T H E O R G A N I S M -

THE GENDER IDENTITY OF THE SUBJECT THE EXCHANGE OF LOVE-DEFECTS IN H U M A N R E L A T I O N S H I P S

[ T H E S Y M P T O M , O R FOURTH O R D E R , IS T H E S P E C I F I C I T Y O F ONE PARTICULAR SUBJECTS UNIQUE SEXUALITY]

Fig. 1

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But how can we use these four Lacanian orders to account for the category of neutef! To try to isolate and solve the conundrum of neuter, I may begin by asking a peculiar question: why are there two sexes and three genders? Or, more precisely, why are there two biological sexes — male and female ~ among the differing animal species (including the human species); two gender identities — masculinity and femininity in human beings; and three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter — in all those Indo-European languages known to me? Where, in short, does this extra neuter come from? The four Lacanian orders clarify the construction of human sexuality in the following fashion: in the first place, the Real corresponds to the biological organism, or the male and female anatomical difference in animals (including human animals/mammals). The difference here is the empirical one of sex. In the second place, the Imaginary corresponds to gender identity, or the distinction between masculine and feminine. The application here is only to human subjects, or the human being (what Lacan termed un être sexué), not to animals. Third, the Symbolic corresponds to the exchange of men and women as object choices in their sexual relationships. The application here is to sexual partners of any kind: dating couples, engaged couples, lovers, spouses. The exchange in Symbolic object-choice operates equally and indifferently in either different-sex or same-sex combinations. Fourth, the Symptom corresponds to the specificity of one particular subject's unique sexuality: a one-and-only psychic fingerprint. Bisexuality could be regarded as symptomatic of a hesitation, or unresolved doubt about the nature of the desired object-choice in the Symbolic and the Imaginary. But none of the above explains the neuter category. This category has no model in either Nature or in human sexuality. There are, however, two nouns in English derived from the adjective, neuter, which illustrate very well the points we are trying to distinguish here. We may speak of: 1) neuterdom, which the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as "The state of being (sexually) neuter", and 2) neuterness, which is defined as "The fact of being (grammatically) neuter" (1993, 1911b). Both noun forms date from the late nineteenth century. In the first case, "neuterdom" is not the same thing as hermaphroditism, where both sexes exist in a single organism (for example, as in earth worms and many snails). It does not apply to hermaphroditism in humans, which is a congenitally freak occurence akin to Siamese twins. Nor is it the same thing as sex change during the life of the biological organism (for example, as in some species of fish). There is, therefore, no natural model for neither, ne uter in Latin, or neuter. In the second case, "neuterism" is an issue of language and grammar. All the languages with which I am familiar have three genders, not two sexes. Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin, Russian, and German have three clearly marked genders. Dutch apparently has two, common and neuter, but this is because common is simply a conflation of the masculine and feminine genders. The Romance languages also apparently have only two, masculine and

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feminine, but all the Romance languages possess neuter forms as well. In Spanish, we may talk of lo, esto, ello, eso, aquello, aquesto, or in French fa, le bon, le beau et le vrai, and so on. Where, then, does this third gender come from? I would offer my own, post-Lacanian answer to this question, since Lacan himself, to the best of my knowledge, never addressed the issue in either the Seminars or the Ecrits. I think we have to concentrate on the moments of transition between the Imaginary order and the Symbolic. As stated above, the basis of the Imaginary order derives from the formation of the ego in the mirror stage, and this ego is itself formed by the child's identifying with the counterpart or specular image (Evans 1996: 82). The mirror stage comes to an end at roughly 18 months of age. This moment is marked by the child's active and coherent use of language for the first time. It had lived in a "foreign-language" ethos for a year and a half, capable of cooing, baby babble, and sound production, but these capabilities had not, as yet, produced a speaking being. It is the signifier of separation from oneness with the mother which provides the foundation of the Symbolic order, and which the child is now able to reproduce intelligibly in its famous "first word". But, according to Lacan, this capture of the human child by the order of language — what might be termed its "sublation" (to paraphrase Hegel's Aufhebung) into the Symbolic — is not achieved without the traumas of alienation, separation, and the instilling of lack in the subject. While the little subject did have "being" in the Imaginary phase, it is now hoisted into the realm of "meaning" constituted by the great Other, such that he or she is now psychically split (Freud 1940)5. The newly speaking child is both a subject of being, as well as a subject of speech and meaning. Another way of stating this proposition is to say that the child has been "castrated" by the phallic signifier. In this castration of small children by language, no distinction is made between the sexes. Little boys and little girls learn to speak at the same age. The phallic signifier is the first, pure signifier of difference, but it operates indifferently with regard to the "castration" of eighteen-month-old boys and girls — in the terms of language-as-speech and the Symbolic which we are using here. This is another way of saying that, for purposes of the acquisition and first active use of language, the sex of the child becomes immaterial. It does not matter whether these children are either/or. Their destiny as speaking human subjects is the same: castration, alienation, separation, lack, loss, and the subsequent appearance of a new kind of desire in the form of lack-in-being. We may say, in terms of cultural non-differentiation, that the signifier has now produced a transitional tabula rasa in subjectivity. Boys and girls are neither/nor. They are neuter. And neuterdom, according to the standard definition given above, is "the

5

Just before he died in 1939, Freud wrote a paper on the splitting of the ego, or what he termed Ichspaltung. It was published posthumously in 1940. Freud did not, however, make the distinction between a subject of being and a subject of meaning. Lacan rendered Ichspaltung as le clivage du moi, and went on to develop the concept extensively, in the manner alluded to in the main text of this paper (Freud 1940: 1-182).

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state of being (sexually) neuter". Since we have posited that such a state is technically impossible in Nature or biology, neuterdom can only refer to a state of being which pertains to culture and language. It is an effect of the phallic signifier as the third term. I would even venture to say that neuterdom, or the "state" of being sexually neuter for purposes of culture, is a fact. One could compare this putative "fact" to a smoothfaced plinth of human and cultural non-differentiation between the sexes, a prior sine qua non for the constructing of gender in the more familiar senses of masculinity and femininity. The process of gendering that makes males masculine and females feminine has been much debated and studied over the last twenty-five years, and it still remains a burning question in the 1990's. It is significant, for example, that volume 1, number 1 of a new journal entitled Gender & Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal appeared as recently as January of this year (1996). But if this state (or even fact) of being sexually neuter really occurred for a brief period around the age of two, and if it was created by the signifier as the outcome of coherent language production, is it not possible to suggest that this state of neuterdom became preserved in language itself as grammatical neuterness? On this reckoning, neuterness in grammar would be a trace, or survival, of the experience in early life of learning to talk, a trace left prior to the Oedipal injunction to identify as either/or. Since, as we all know, the phenomenon of childhood amnesia ensures that the experiences of two or three years of age are primarily repressed and forgotten (Freud's Urverdrängung), the experience of neuter can only be stored in the unconscious and can never be retrieved. Secondary repression or supression of memories (Freud's Unterdrückung) occurs later, and these memories can sometimes be retrieved through psychoanalysis, working with dreams, or through hypnosis. But, I would submit, it is this primary repression which explains why neuter turns up as a marker for nouns, adjectives and even verbs in the original description of the world: the naming of things, and the way they are, or act. It is by this utterly forgotten operation, a psychic operation forgotten phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically, that the two sexes — culturally transformed by language — give rise to the familiar three genders of grammar: masculine, feminine, and neuter. How masculinity and femininity are actually constructed, once the neuter phase (that I am theoretically postulating here) has been surpassed, are topics which have been extensively studied and commented upon in the Lacanian critical literature (Mitchell 1971; 1974; 1984; Lacan 1975a; Mitchell/Rose 1983; André 1986; Brousse 1991; Fink 1991). I lack the space to review those questions here. If the discussion of neuter did not seem to promise very much, then surely a discussion of nothing promises next to nothing. But Jean-Paul Sartre took nothingness seriously enough in L'Etre et le néant (1943) and Heidegger took Nichtigkeit ("nothingness") very seriously indeed (Heidegger 1972; Steiner 1989/1991). Nevertheless, the author of the article on "Nothing" in the 1967 Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy (with its strong Anglo-American philosophical bias) made uproarious fun of the concept, treating its mere consideration by Continental thinkers with an ironical disdain. P. L. Heath begins his diatribe by stating: "Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet

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essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of mystic or existentalist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, or panic. Nobody seems to know how to deal with it (he would, of course), and plain persons generally are reported to have little difficulty in saying, seeing, hearing, and doing nothing. Philosophers, however, have never felt easy on the matter" (Heath 1967: vol. V, 524a, my remarks in parentheses). But I am presently engaged in a long-term project entitled The Anatomy of Deity: On God as the Transformation of Nothing. This is a kind of post-Christian, postLacanian work on theology, in which the ontological differences among the void, nothing, and zero are carefully explored. I hope to show that the Lacanian categories of Symbolic, Imaginary, Real, and Symptom can help us clarify these differences too (as in the case of neuter), and why the idea of nothing should, indeed, be taken seriously. Both Hegel and Nietzsche maintained that God was a creation of Man, not the reverse (as the Judaeo-Christian world had erroneously believed for centuries). But they did not explain how this creation of God by Man occurred in the first place, nor where the ontological origin of deity in general should be situated. It is to this problem that I should now like to turn. Let me begin by saying that, by deity, I do not refer to any particular God or gods, held by mythologies or various religions (in any era whatsoever) to have some real, objective existence. I refer to the phenomenon of deity in general, and its place in human history and pre-history. People or peoples differ in their interpretations of deity: 1) depending whether they are true believers in one particular God or other, 2) in some sect's differing account of the same God, or 3) atheists, deists, theists, agnostics, or persons simply ignorant and indifferent. But no one can dispute the existence of the world phenomenon of deity, on what we might call an anthropological or sociological scale. It is this deity that I am interested to "anatomize". I would advance the following hypothesis: deity is that moment of nothing in the evolution of human subjectivity, suspended between an inconceivable void and zero, which we subsequently choose to call God. Reformulating this hypothesis using the four Lacanian orders defined above, we may make the void an equivalence of the Real; nothing an equivalence of the Imaginary; zero an equivalence of the Symbolic; and God, or any particular god(s), an equivalence of the Symptom. When I say that deity is a moment in the evolution of human subjectivity, I literally mean that a time sequence is involved here. First, there is a void, then there is nothing, then there is zero. What a given subject does with this deity as transformation of nothing at the level of ideological Symptom (believing in Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, or any other shade of belief or unbelief) could be compared to the above-mentioned uniqueness of a given subject's sexuality as symptom: there are as many beliefs as there are believers (or tot homines quot sentential). It would perhaps be easiest to start with the transformation of the void into nothing. For the purposes of this paper, I am treating the void, nothingness, and nihility as synonyms. I offer no other synonym for nothing, but I do regard zero as the synonym of none, the number nought, nil, or the null set. A good way into this pro-

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blematic has been offered by the Lacanian analyst Colette Soler. In an anecdote from her Catholic schooldays, she relates: "I must have been about nine or ten years old when an old canon came up to me during an examination, with great pomp and ceremony, and asked me a banal question of catechism: 'What was there before God created the Earth?' What would you answer? For my part, I answered with the greatest self-assurance: nothing. Note that 'nothing' is nothing other than what remains when the signifier 'Earth' is barred. But my answer was not correct, to my astonishment and sanction. The answer was 'nothingness...' Nothingness is not nothing. It is the word which was invented to speak about the unthinkable pre-Symbolic void, which, compared with 'nothing' — the result of the elision of something — is a horse of a different color, though that in no way dispels the aporias of divine creation!" (Ragland [SullivanJ/Bracher 1990: 215). These aporias, or perplexing difficulties, of divine creation may be clarified somewhat by reference to a surprising source: the opening verses of Genesis. Unlike the Greeks, who could not conceive of hyle (the primordial matter of the universe) as not having existed for all time, the Hebrews imagined a void which could have been transformed by Yahweh in the moment of divine creation into the heaven and earth. As we read in Genesis 1: 2: "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." But I would submit that this account of creation in Genesis is really a remarkably accurate allegory of how the human subject comes to be, there where there was no human subject before. Moreover, this moment of creation is, in psychoanalytic terms, a reciprocal one: in that moment when the void becomes a nothing which is no longer nothingness, subjectivity gives rise to deity, but deity also gives rise to subjectivity. Or to quibble a little with Hegel, Man certainly created God, but — in terms of the evolution of subjectivity — God also created Man. One of the best, and most thorough studies of what Colette Soler's high-school anecdote termed "the unthinkable pre-Symbolic void" is the recent book by Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995). Fink is concerned to show, among other things, that any subject is the product of an unpredictable alien roll of the dice; that the void is that remote past before which one can even conceive of one's potential, contingent, future existence as a subject — the point at which all powers of self-conceptualization simple peter out. Fink also calls this the Real in one of its several manifestations. I can easily imagine myself as an embryo that will one day be born, grow up, and speak. I can even imagine a period before I was a foetus, as simply a project in my parents' discourse, or an unplanned "accident" . I could, at a stretch, imagine myself as a remote, contingent, futurible subject, potentially existing before my parents had even met each other. Or, at an ultimate stretch of the imagination, I could try to conceive the marginal statistical possibilities and probabilities of ever coming into existence by computing the contingency in my four grandparents' having had thus and so many children each, two of whom turned out to be my own father and mother. But beyond that, four generations back in history, I come up against the Real of a void which is inconceivable under any rubric. But,

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despite all this potentiality for other outcomes, let us grant that I actually am born. How do I become a subject? The human animal is created at conception and born nine months later. Before speech, the human animal is an upper primate and actually more helpless, physically, than other upper primates. The human subject is born when the void becomes nothing. This nothing will later be transformed into a zero by the phallic cut of the signifier. But when does the move from the void to nothing occur? Bruce Fink's book is advertised as follows: "Against the tide of post-structuralist thinkers who announce the 'death of the subject', Bruce Fink explores what is means to come into being as a subject, where impersonal forces once reigned, to subjectify the alien roll of the dice at the beginning of our universe, and to make the knotted web of our parents' procreative desires our own" (1995, jacket note). In his section entitled "Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real" (1995: 24-31), Fink repeats the familiar Lacanian contention that the letter kills the Real. He goes on: "The Real is, for example, an infant's body 'before' it comes under the sway of the Symbolic order, before it is subjected to toilet training and instructed in the ways of the world. In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers; pleasure is localized in certain zones, while other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social, behavioral norms" (1995 : 24). But why does Fink place this "before" in inverted commas? What has happened before the Real comes under the sway of the Symbolic order? What event has taken place after the void of the Real and before the advent of the castrating, pleasure-killing signifier? My answer, of course, is nothing. This may sound flippant, but is not meant to be. This nothing is the transitional phase from the primordial void to the Symbolic zero. As Ellie Ragland has written: "[B]efore a sense of identity begins to confer the unified shape of the moi during the mirror stage, the elemental structure of the subject has been diacritically woven in terms of heterogeneity. Underlying the mirror-stage drive toward fusion and homogeneity, we find the earliest experience of 'self in parts, fragments, and differences" (1986: 22). She goes on: "The primordial objects of Desire, which fill in the gap between perception and the infant's incoherent effort to process information from the outside world, are: the breast, excrement, the phallus (as Imaginary object), and the urinary flow. 'An unthinkable list if one adds as I do', Lacan said, 'the phoneme, the gaze, the voice - the nothing'" (Ragland [-Sullivan] 1986: 22). But these eight primordial objects of desire, or objetspetit a to use the Lacanian matheme, make sense and are not really "unthinkable" (Lacan) considered in the light of the pre-mirror stage from birth to about six months of age. Apart from the neonate's own organism as experienced in parts and fragments, and the part-object or -organism of the mother's breast, the infant is also surrounded by the language sounding in its world (Lacan's phoneme); a mother's or another's gaze which is not synonymous with looking; and her voice or another's voice. Lacan would say that both gaze and voice are libidinally charged for the growing baby. And that leaves the eighth object a in the list: the nothing (Ie rieri).

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One of the principal functions of the object a in very early life, and thereafter, is to stop up the gap in the Real, to hold the void at bay, gradually to exclude its incursion into psychic life, much as one would attempt to plug the bung-hole of a leaking barrel with any kind of stopper. As Lacan says, one of the objects that achieves this is nothing. All objects a, moreover, are causes and objects of desire. In this way, we can postulate that the void has become for the neonate a slightly humanized nothing, invested with desire. In theory, one might consider that this libidinized nothing could be cancelled or elided to bring us back to the void. But a characteristic of the evolution of the human subject is that its series of logical moments cannot be reversed. What's done is done. The void never goes away (as in the onset of apparently irrational anxiety attacks, for example), but it has been transformed at this stage into nothing: a nothing which has the weight of the unnamed Real. In the mirror stage proper, Lacan argues that the child suffers the symbiotic illusion of supposing that it and its mother form a single unity: a mother/infant dyad which is broken up by the divisive function of the Name-of-the-Father at the end of the mirror stage and the beginnings of coherent speech. As I have written elsewhere: "The Oedipal quality of three, the stuff of gender myth, is expressed by [this] Name-of-theFather, which alone gives meaning to the division of one into two by three, and so forms the fundamental triangle of Imaginary relations" (Sullivan 1996: 129). But the forced choice of learning to speak, to "come under the sway of the Symbolic order", in Fink's words, reveals the meaning of zero. It is what underlines the infant's former illusory oneness which, in the trauma of castration, division, alienation and separation by the signifier, has been exposed as a twoness. Our remarks on sexuality and deity may be summed up in the following diagram:

SEXUALITY

DEITY

The biological organism (Male & Female)

The (unthinkable) Void

IMAGINARY +

Gender identity (Masculine & Feminine)

Nothing (as object a)

SYMBOLIC +

Object choice (Sexual partner orientation)

Zero (0 + 1 = 1)

SYMPTOM

Specificity of subject's unique sexuality

God or god(s) Religious (un)beliefs

REAL +

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As we know from the identity property of addition in mathematics, all positive integers are the sum of themselves and zero. So, for example, the whole number 1 is really 0 + 1. The signifier has transformed the libidinized nothing of the pre-mirror stage and the illusory oneness (1) of the mirror stage, properly speaking, into 0 + 1. And, in this context, it is important to note that zero, as the cardinal number of the empty set, was unknown to Greek and Roman mathematicians. These early numeral systems unconsciously avoided the need for zero by adding 1 to the count as, for example, in computing dates. There is a vestige of this Roman practice in the French alternative for une semaine, where the etymological root is the Latin septem mane, naming the numeral seven, and the expression huitjours, naming the numeral eight. Later on, the Mayan civilization in Central America developed a system including the zero symbol, probably by the fourth century A.D. But Western mathematics had to wait longer for the Hindu-Arabic zero. This symbol, the last of the Hindu-Arabic numerals to come into use, appears in a Hindu mansucript of the seventh century A.D. It was finally transmitted to the West by the Arabian mathematician Al-Khowarizmi in his Hisab aljabr wa'lmugabalah, a treatise on algebra written around the year 825 A.D. This was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century by the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known to modern-day high-school students as Fibonacci. But if zero as a concept in the Symbolic order of mathematics has only been around in Western consciousness for seven hundred years (compared with the manythousand-year history and pre-history of human counting), it is scarcely surprising that it comes hard to conceptualize zero as being qualitatively different from nothing, and both of these as being qualitatively different from the void (or nothingness). But this is my argument. The void precedes nothing in the history of the human subject, and the void, covered over or stopped up by nothing, both precede zero. My main thesis proposes, then, that it is in this founding moment of nothing, a moment suspended before the void and zero, that the ontological entity of deity comes into being. It is a reciprocal moment. Without it, there can be no subject. The subject must be created by this deity. On the other hand, as Hegel and Nietzsche construed the issue (but in different terms), it is the infant subject that creates this deity. The difficulty that has dogged theology and philosophy for so long in the West can be clarified by psychoanalytic theory as Lacan has transmitted it to us, now, in our post-theory moment.

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-—. (1971). Women's Estate. Harmondsworth: Penguin. — / Jacqueline Rose (eds.). (1983). Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. New York: W. W. Norton. Muller, John P./William J. Richardson (eds.). (1988). The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. (1954). Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Thomas Common, in: The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: Random House, p. 3368. Norris, Christopher. (1982/1988). Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen. Ragland [-Sullivan], Ellie. (1995). Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan. New York: Routledge. — . (1989). "The Eternal Return of Jacques Lacan", in: Joseph P. Natoli (ed.). Literary Theory's Future(s). Urbana: University of Illinois Press: p. 33-81. -—. (1986). Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. — / Mark Bracher (eds.). (1990). Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York: Routledge. Regnault, François. (1985). Dieu est inconscient: études lacaniennes autour de saint Thomas d'Aquin. Paris: Navarin. Ricoeur, Paul. (1965). De l'interprétation: essai sur Freud. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Rose, Jacqueline. (1986). Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — . (1986). La Bataille de cent ans: histoire de la psychanalyse en France, II: 19251985. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Sarup, Madan. (21993). An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmoder nism. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. -—. (1992). Jacques Lacan. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1916/1966). Course in General Linguistics. Bally, C./A. Sechehaye (eds.). Trans. W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1969). The World as Will and Representation [1958], Trans. E. F. G. Payne. New York: Dover. Steiner, George. (21992). Heidegger. Fontana Modern Masters. London: Harper Collins. — . (1989/1991). Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? Boston; London: Faber and Faber. Strozier, Robert M. (1988). Saussure, Derrida, and the Metaphysics of Subjectivity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Sullivan, Henry W. (1996). Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes's Don Quixote, PartII. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. — . (1995). The Beatles With Lacan: Rock'n 'Roll as Requiem for the Modern Age. New York: Peter Lang. — . (1992-93). "What Derrida (Mis)Understood in Lacan: Dogmatic, Neo-Sceptic Graphocentrism", in: Journal of Hispanic Research (London) 1: 405-15. — . (1992). "Mimesis hystérias: What in the Audience is Moved when the Audience is Moved?", in: Juan Villegas (ed.). Re/Writing Theater Histories, Special issue of Gestos: Teoría y práctica del teatro hispánico 14: 45-57. Wright, Elizabeth. (1992). Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — . (1984). Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen. Wyschogrod, Edith/David Crownfield/Carl A. Raschke (eds.). (1989). Lacan and Theological Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. (1996). "Gender and Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Essay", in: Gender and Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1.1 (January): 7-18. Zizek, Slavoj. (1993). Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — . (1988). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. -—. (1987). "Why Lacan is not a 'Post-structuralist'", in: Newsletter of the Freudian Field 1-2: 31-39.

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Penelope Ironstone-Catterall

York University School of Social & Political Thought

THE "POST-" OF THE SUBJECT? A MEDITATION ON IDENTITY, COMMUNITY AND DEATH IN THE "AGE OF AIDS" What is a post-theoretical problem? What is at stake in a post-theoretical problematization and what is its (interdisciplinary) domain d'objet? What does Post-Theory give us to think about both the limits and trajectories of theory understood in terms of practice, of reading and of writing? How can the idea of the post-theoretical enable us to think in other ways and otherwise? These questions have framed my engagement with PostTheory, and are articulated throughout the paper that follows. As many of the concerns, issues and possibilities articulated in Fernando de Toro's (1997) 1 exposition on Post-Theory resonated with the research I had been doing on HIV, AIDS and epistemology, I decided to work through the implications of Post-Theory in the context of this work. As I will show, AIDS presents itself to us as an unruly object/subject of study, one that refuses what had been assumed to be tidy disciplinary boundaries, and, indeed, has led to the production of theories from the margins. 2 AIDS also challenges

1

See also in this volume Fernando de Toro's article Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times.

2

One of the theoretical productions from the margins that has been provoked by AIDS crisis and its troubling of politically in the post-facto of Stonewall, is what has come to be known as Queer Theory. David Halperin (1995: 62) writes of the category of "queerness" in the context of the work of Foucault in his Saint=Foucault, Toward a Gay Hagiography. "Unlike Gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, 'queer' does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relations to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. 'Queer', then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-àvis the normative — a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of her of his sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children... 'Queer', in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision

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us to think through conflicting epistemological spaces in that it troubles the assumption that the structures and dynamics of intelligibility through which the subject and object of AIDS might be rendered knowable are adequate to what they seek to contain. Not only does AIDS remind us of the grandiose claims of science in assuming it had produced the Magic Bullet, antibiotics, to programme the end of contagious diseases, but it also marks the end of belief in such a programme (Erni 1994). At least seventeen years3 into the AIDS epidemic, faith in science refuses to be restored, even with the recent development of protease inhibitors and the discovery of the efficacy of "drug cocktails" in AIDS treatment.4 And this loss of faith has implications that reach far beyond the realm of science or epidemiology. The AIDS crisis is a crisis that extends beyond the boundaries of medicine or the laboratory or even the body of the person with HIV or AIDS. The AIDS crisis affects each of us, the HIV-positive, HIVnegative, and those uncertain of their serostatus, and it does so in ways that can be startling, discomforting and downright alarming. It is in this way that AIDS renders indistinguishable the positions that people may claim either inside or outside the epidemic, and it does so by throwing into question, radically and precisely, the grounds on which the subject may claim such positions and think of themselves as known or knowable within them. This articulation of AIDS in the liminal space between the inside and the outside of the epidemic, between being a subject living with AIDS and a subject assuming itself to be outside of AIDS, between a "knowable" immunodeficiency and an assumed immunocompetence (Ronell 1983), is occasioned by the production of AIDS as a posttheoretical discursive phenomenon, one which is continually produced and produces subjects through modes of address. As Judith Butler (1997: 5) writes in Excitable Speech, "to be addressed is not merely to be recognized for what one already is, but a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviors, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community — for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire." 3

At the fourth international conference on AIDS held in Stockholm in 1988, Jonathan Mann, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), suggested that the history of the AIDS epidemic be divided into three periods: "the silent period (ca. 1970-1981), the initial discovery (1981-1985), and worldwide mobilization (1985-1988)" (Grmek 1990: 183). Of course, this history needs to be supplemented to consider what has happened in terms of treatment of AIDS since 1988 and to address social, political and epidemiological responses to continued HIV infection around the world.

4

As Michael Bressalier (1996: 40) wrote in his Master's Thesis entitled Problems of Response: AIDS and the Question of Origins in Medical Scientific Practice, the "drug cocktail" "might include antiretrovirals such as AZT, ddl, and ddC; PCP prophylaxes such as Bactrim or Septra, acyclovir for herpes, itraconazole for Candida (fungal) infections of the throat (thrush), esophagus and vagina, ganciclovir for Cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis ... antibiotics for Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC)... as well as a host of nonallopathic therapies such as various vitamins, supplements, immune system boosters, and herbal medicines."

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to have the very term conferred by which the recognition of existence becomes possible... One 'exists' not only by virtue of being recognized, but, in a prior sense, by being recognizable." In as much as the "body is alternately sustained and threatened through modes of address", the terms of recognition and self-recognition are "the linguistic conditions of survivable subjects" (Butler 1997: 5). In AIDS, the distinction between the survivable subject and the threatened subject is collapsed, as it were, in that the disease syndrome refuses to be contained by the postulation of "risk groups" and the demand of response to the address is not limited to those who are known or know themselves to be HIV-positive. To live in the "age of AIDS" is to live with AIDS not only because AIDS presents itself as a crisis in medical knowledge and the treatment of the body, nor because AIDS has come to be understood as a highly-charged socio-political phenomenon, but also because AIDS, as a condition of the body politic as well as of the individual body, marks the eruption of the Real into the social field and returns us, unremittingly, to the site of abjection upon which comprehending subjectivity is based (Dean 1993: 84). This subject as a response to the Real as abyss, as trauma, is the Symbolic subject that, in its mortification by the Other, discloses and refuses its indebtedness to this Other. And since AIDS is structured, radically and precisely, as the Real of the social field of contemporary society (Dean 1993: 85), it can be understood only through, and misrecognized in, its resistance to symbolization. In AIDS, as with the corpses it produces, there is the confrontation between death and life that shows what is "permanently thrust aside in order to live" (Kristeva 1982: 3). What is shown, to use the words of Sue Golding (1993: 28), is that "no one — and that includes you and me, both — gets out of here alive." As I write, people are dying from AIDS-related complications. Ironic word: "complications." For AIDS is complicated, not only in the medical sense, but also in the social and psychic senses. In this space, what comes to be known as "AIDS" bears many meanings. It traverses both time and space, the assumed relation between time that bears the name "history" and the presumed spatial integrity of the body and its boundaries. It calls to the fore the problematic commingling of bodies, ideas and desires in the movements of what has been called "sociability." And this problematization of sociability marks theorizations of AIDS as implicitly post-theoretical. Further, the narrative of AIDS, a communication in, by and through the metastases of disease as inherently communicable, portends the danger of confronting death as that which is radically unknowable, uncontainable, and yet contiguous with the constitution of subject as an object of knowledge. And no matter how one looks at it, the question of how AIDS may be rendered intelligible, how it is fashioned by various and sundry grids of intelligibility, how it marks an excess which cannot be thought or, better, which thought cannot tolerate, can only be referred back to this ever shifting-frame that is signified under the sign "complications". It is this complication, perhaps, that opens up discussions of AIDS to the necessary interventions provided by a posttheoretical perspective.

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In the highly contested space of liberation and transgression, there is a seemingly antithetical movement toward a new repression, and it is in the play between these two gestures that discourses surrounding AIDS have come to be produced and reproduced. In light of this colloquy of values, AIDS comes to be understood, not as a neutral medical category somehow freed from the workings of domination and subordination, but rather as "implicated in ideological operations that can work at cross-purposes to the explicit political agendas of those who attempt to deploy them against the dominant institutions of power" (Edelman 1994: 80). AIDS is not only a medical category, referring to a complex of illness, disease and disorder that confronts and transforms the HIV-positive body; AIDS has also come to signify and to focus a number of social and moral anxieties surrounding bodies, their interrelation, and what links them together in a human community. For, as Paula Treichler (1987: 269) so aptly states, "AIDS is a nexus where multiple meanings, stories and discourses intersect and overlap, reinforce and subvert each other." An "epidemic of signification"5 produces AIDS within a semantic space where meanings endlessly proliferate in such a way as to occlude the possibility of locating in them any referent. The complex of meaning that circulates around AIDS as a signifier calls into question, through this proliferation, any attempt to locate AIDS, to contain it, as a discursive phenomenon. Despite, or perhaps because of, this endless proliferation of discourse, the attempt to discuss the semiotic underpinnings of AIDS as it has been constructed within the cultural imaginary must address a number of attendant problems. Who is the subject of the utterance? Who is the subject that utters? To whom is the utterance addressed? Who recognizes him or herself in the utterance? And underlying these questions: Who or what is the subject of AIDS? In short, the problems which must be attended to are of the order of address in its numerous forms. And yet, this quest for the signified of AIDS, always already marked by its impossibility insofar as AIDS — a syndrome — has no referent of its own, is premised on the assumption that AIDS makes itself known, can be rendered knowable, by comprehending subjectivity. That which does not lend itself to such knowability, that remainder which cannot be thought and as such mastered by a subjectivity assumed to be fully apparent to itself, is, as it were, bracketed in the quest to contain AIDS as a pathology, a disease syndrome that offers

5

Lee Edelman, in his text Homographies, proposes that the proliferation of discourse surrounding AIDS should be called a "plague of discourse". However, with reference to Arthur Schafer's (1991: 2) discussion of the etymology of the word plague and its historical usage, I prefer to deploy Treichler's metaphor. For, embedded within the notion of the "plague," in Latin the plaga, is the notion of a collective calamity brought about by a stroke or wound. While it is arguable that AIDS constitutes such a collective calamity, it is not largely recognized as such. Rather, AIDS is still, unfortunately, understood as a disease of the Other in the forms of the gay man, the African, the hemophiliac, the Intravenous drug user, the infant, the female sexual partner of the bisexual (usually male), the Haitian, etc. While this understanding is highly problematic and delimits the disease within confines which it itself does not obey, it is significant to refer to the manner in which AIDS has been perceived and continues to be perceived in the cultural imaginary.

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itself to socio-political and medical discourse as a means of control. That is to say, what cannot be seen, said or imagined by comprehending subjectivity is relinquished, albeit not always consciously, in that, in its radical unknowability, it is not deemed to be pertinent. And this impertinence is underscored by a refusal of the possibility that, with AIDS, what is given over to intelligibility, to the frames through which comprehending subjectivity appears to itself as a knowability, is the inadequacy of frames of intelligibility proffered by the subject itself. In an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida (1991: 117) points to this problem of the subject in the "age of AIDS": "If we had been given more space, I would like to have spoken here about AIDS, an event that one could call historial in the epoch of subjectivity, if we still gave credence to historiality, to epochality, and to subjectivity." The event of AIDS calls forth an urgency, a desire to speak, to which Derrida, constrained by the space of the interview, never returns. The urgency of response is relegated here to the comment, en passant, that with AIDS something has happened to subjectivity. And Derrida poses this realization within a paradox. As Alexander Garcia Diittmann (1992: 105) writes: "How are we to understand this strange proposition? On the one hand, we no longer give credence to the concepts enumerated, and on the other hand, we still credit them with enough value to tell us something about what the appearance of AIDS gives us to think." The subject, Derrida's elusive statement implies, belongs to a mode of thought in which history and periodization are implicit. But this mode of thought is itself called into question, is now the subject of incredulity. With AIDS something has happened to subjectivity. What? How? Why? These questions, and the numerous questions they are bound to engender, are premised on the assumption of a coherence to subjectivity, of an Ego cogitans that, in its mastery and self-mastery, is able to think before, beyond and after itself. This paper offers itself to you as thematically constrained by the question of the "Post-" of the subject and what the subject of AIDS gives or does not give us to think regarding this question. In many senses, what follows is a meditation on the implications of "PostTheory" and on the problematic relation between subjectivity, identity, community and death in the time of AIDS. My aim is not to tackle the question that has been raised, almost obsessively, in the twentieth-century following the advent of the Death of God: Who or what comes after the subject? I have no pretense to being able to unravel, even in some small way, the complexities this question evokes. This question will, however, recur, implicity if not explicitly, in this paper as it marks the crisis of understanding that, invariably, viewing AIDS within a post-theoretical perspective veils and unveils for us. Whether conceived as a product of the ratio (the thinking subject), a linguistic construct (the subject of the utterance), or the product of a political positioning (the de jure subject, or citizen), the subject is nothing but a representation. It is only insofar as I represent myself to myself and to others that I become a subject. This schema of the subject as philosopheme, morpheme and ideologeme functions through a fundamental tautology: The subject appears, is made to appear, only on the condition that

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it, without recognizing itself as such, is Other than itself, is a product of that which is always already Outside. Subjectivity, as representation, does not mark the unfolding of an interiority, but consists of the unravelling of an exteriority with which it is always already identical. The subject is mediated by language and, as such, cannot be understood as or perceived to be an immediacy. As lack and excess, the subject appears, is made to appear, as though to foreclose from consciousness the fact that the "I", as autonomous and presumably congruous with itself, is a paradox. Excess, as both the unconscious and the Real which cannot be represented, is the marker of the Lacanian subject as the subject of desire. Both the Symbolic and the Imaginary emerge, at least in my reading, as a response (which cannot presume to answer) to the trauma of the Real. The Real (and the abyss of knowledge and selfknowledge that it stands in for) signals the limit of mastery and self-mastery. The Real is that which thought cannot tolerate, cannot assimilate into an intelligibility that does not throw into question, radically and precisely, subjectivity itself. In this way, the Real is marked by its necessary abjection. Abjection, the radical exclusion from thought of that which it cannot tolerate, draws the subject forward into a space where meaning collapses. "And yet," Kristeva (1982: 2) writes, "from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease to challenge its master." That "I abject myse/Avithin the same motion through which 'I' claim to establish myself (Kristeva 1982: 3) is unveiled in the disruption of identity, system and order that surfaces in the face of precisely that which must be refused in order for "life as it is" to sustain itself. The inaugural loss through which subjectivity is posited as a forgetting of forfeiture conceals the definitive loss under the sign of which being articulates itself: death. One does not have to stretch one's imagination to find in the semantic contents of AIDS death as a homology. That AIDS = DEATH is a commonplace assertion. But what does this assertion disclose to, and foreclose from, thought? What is at stake in thinking AIDS and death? Does the production of AIDS as prefigured by death give us anything to think with regard to the "epoch of subjectivity"? Numerous attempts to deal with these questions have focused on the ontological apprehension of death and have utilized Heideggerian concepts in the unravelling of it as a problematic. These approaches focus on death, as both the possibility and impossibility of being, and relate it to social responses to AIDS and to the numerous "social deaths" which it effects on a daily basis. For William Haver (1994: 7), for example, the Heideggerian distinction between "fear" and "dread" 6 becomes signifi6

In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) discusses dread of death, as opposed to a fear of death, as something that has happened or will happen to the Other, as the dread of that individual death which cannot be avoided. It is this dread which pushes Dasein to try to avoid the confrontation with the meaning of death. In the social sphere of the "they-self", Dasein turns to its everydayness in which death is interpreted in such a way as to convince us that death is not our own. In other words, the everydayness of Dasein hinges upon the tendency to avoid death. If death is only an actuality ("someone died"), then the possibility for confronting the finitude of the individual self is overlooked. Fear of death is, then, the fear of a definite object, of something that is actually there. Dread, on the other hand, refers to something that is

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cant in that fear is the social response that enables the movements of secondary victimization. The first victimization is the "material violence brought to bear on bodies" (Haver 1994: 7-8) in the form of either immediate or long-term effects of the opportunistic infections which characterize ARC and AIDS. The second victimization, the double-binding of the "victim", is "the discursive constitution of the 'victim' as the abject object of a proleptic work of mourning - in effect the expulsion of the 'victim' from the community of the living" (Haver 1994: 8). The link between "fear", as that which profoundly marks the Other, and the "social surpluses of abjection" that circumscribe the body of HIV/AIDS signals the movement of the social self toward containing in advance the attentions of the self in such a way as to distract it from the realization of death as that space where the meaning of individual being is manifest; It is a flight from the face of death. Supplementing the Heideggerian discussion, theorists such as Haver focus on Freudian or psychoanalytic notions in order to render the particular meanings of death connected to AIDS intelligible. Here, death is marked by a violent abjection that refuses the possibility of recuperating any meaning; and the questions that become significant to working through this abjection might be articlated as follows: Is mourning, like the flight from the face of death that marks the fear of the Other, to be understood as a pathological response to death? Can it be said that these social responses to AIDS in which the fact of death and its meaning are repressed are attempts at historicizing that which is beyond history? Are these social responses to AIDS, marked by a proleptic work of mourning wherein the dead are objectified through a movement of abjection, attempts at recuperating the subject and suspending or repressing consciousness of one's ownmost place under the sign of death? Haver (1994: 5) writes: At once a labor of abjection and objectification, the work of mourning historicizes the dead, and in historicizing the dead restores the ego to its propriety. T o relegate the dead to the past is to render the other abject, to expel the object from the realm of living — a double movement, therefore: both the constitution of a historical object (historicization) and the production of an essentially abject social surplus.

This rendering of the other abject in the effort to restore the ego to propriety in the work of mourning signifies precisely the impossibility of historicizing death and is, in the case of AIDS, also necessarily incapable of containing that which it seeks to suppress — for, effacing this historicization from the outset is the presence of AIDS

possible. I cannot fear my own death, only the actual death which appears to me in the name of the Other. And it is in this way that Dasein, "fleeing from the face of death", turns its attention away from realizing that it too will cease to be.

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as that Being-toward-death which is "'carried', shown and concealed"7 in such a way that it is shared by and moves between us in the here and now of intersubjectivity. Writing of the particular relationship between AIDS and death, Hervé Guibert (1991: 164-165) articulates the paradox of living under the sign of an immanent death: I was discovering something sleek and dazzling in its [AIDS'] hideousness, for though it was certainly an inexorable illness, it wasn't immediately catastrophic, it was an illness in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end, to discover life... AIDS, by setting an official limit to our life span — six years of seropositivity, plus two years with AZT in the best of cases, or a few months without — made us men who were fully conscious of our lives, and freed us from our ignorance.

Despite the social production of the surpluses of abjection, AIDS is not a disease that leads directly to death, but rather makes living into a practice which is fully circumscribed by its own possible erasure. Guibert's statement about the kind of selfconsciousness brought about by the "official limit" to the life span seems to echo Heidegger's explication of an authentic relation between Dasein and death. However, in Guibert's text, the "official limit", set in the futurity of the self's unravelling, prompts a series of aborted attempts to initiate the work of mourning the self. It reveals, in other words, the difficulties of cleaving to and passing beyond the self, of repressing death as an intolerable knowledge in the subjectifying and abjectifying movements of mourning. William Haver (1996: 22) discusses the "dissolution, disintegration and degradation unto death which is figured for us as AIDS" as that which leads us "inexorably to the impossibility of a historical phenomenological apprehension." The impossibility of historical apprehension, of placing AIDS within a historical and historicizing teleology, is, according to Haver's (1996: 4) argument, not only due to the fact that death is beyond history, but is also because What is called 'AIDS' is, for consciousness and for thought, a necessarily impossible object. As such, and in itself, AIDS is radically unthinkable, resisting objectification, interpretation, understanding, meaning and the aspiration to transcendental subjectivity absolutely; AIDS belongs to that to which every teratology, phenomenology or hermeneutic is necessarily and forever inadequate.

Not only is AIDS radically unthinkable, inadmissible as something given over to thought, but it is also the aporetical limit of historical consciousness and, as such, consciousness itself.

7

I thank Professor Hans-Georg Ruprecht for this phrase which was included in a letter he wrote to me during the earliest stages of this project. In many senses, the complexities this letter raised were integral to the ways in which I began to pose the problematic of the subject in the "age of AIDS".

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Haver (1996: 22), reading Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, defines mourning as "a process by which the dead are rendered radically other, a process simultaneously of dissociation and objectification whereby a certain that is recognized to be nothing more than an abject object — dead meat." This process of othering, of rendering the other as object, and of passing beyond that object through its abjection, marks the work of mourning as an act of historicization. And the work of historicization in mourning gives "historical meaning to death, and in historicizing the dead, occludes the traumatic insistence of the Real, that radical non-transcendence which is historicity" (Haver 1996: 23). This work of mourning, including the proleptic work of mourning which produces the so-called "AIDS victim", is made possible only on the condition that one does not, cannot, see one's ownmost death in the death of the other. That is to say, the completion of the work of mourning is, in this reading, premised on the impossibility of any narcissistic identification with the lost love-object. Such identification with the lost love-object, also known as incorporation, is manifest in what Freud called melancholia, a pathological response that preserves what is lost in the ego and leads to a kind of violence directed at the self as a form of punishment directed toward the other. While the term "melancholia" has fallen out of currency, it is possible to see how this term applies to social responses to the AIDS epidemic by those who are, or perceive themselves to be, HIV-negative. The experience of seronegativity within the gay community, however, differs vastly from those outside it for a number of reasons,8 some of which Douglas Crimp discusses in his article Mourning and Militancy. Writing of the work of mourning and of the ability to sever attachments to a loved one, Crimp (1989: 9) writes: This confrontation with reality is especially fraught for gay men mourning now, since our decision whether or not we will share this fate is so unsure. For people with AIDS, the HIV-infected, and those at significant risk whose sero-status is unknown to them, narcissistic satisfactions in still being alive today can persuade us, will undoubtedly persuade us in our unconscious, to relinquish our attachments. But how are we to

8

In his text In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS, Walt Odets discusses what he calls the "psychological epidemic" which coincides with the physical one. Based on observations made in his clinical practice in San Francisco, one of the North American cities most affected by HIV and AIDS, Odets (1995: 20) writes: "Men with no psychiatric history now often appear profoundly depressed, anxious, uncertain about their futures, or sexually dysfunctional; some, despite their uninfected condition, engage repeatedly in unprotected sex, and some, despite their uninfected condition, live in nearly every detail like a dying man — disoriented, piecemeal, and with no assumption of a future." Alongside these observations, Odets discusses what can only be called "survival guilt": the denial of loss and grief, anticipatory grief, multiple loss as an impediment to grieving, and the problematic relation between seropositive and seronegative people in the age of AIDS. Many of the psychological problems which Odets points out in this text may be said to relate to various impediments to the work of mourning, particularly, an identification with the object being mourned, and melancholia.

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Refusal to pass beyond the death of the other while still preserving this other in the form of memory-traces impedes the work of mourning, the movements of conscious and unconscious cleavage to and from the lost love-object. On a larger scale, this impediment to the work of mourning may function to delimit the frame of action, of fighting to remain alive in activism, through the destructive movements of melancholia. It is for this reason that Crimp writes in an effort to recuperate the work of mourning in the work of militancy. While aware of the possibility that militancy may be a means of dangerous denial ~ for example, the denial of the loss of particular loveobjects in order to provoke change, or the recuperation of lost ideals such as those proffered by sexual liberation, gay identity as a positivity in the post facto of Stonewall, or the idea of a benevolent science aimed at curing the ills of humanity as a whole — Crimp focuses on activism as a means of resistance to the violence of the psychic mechanisms through which inclusion in and/or exclusion from the social fold is made possible.9 This move toward activism takes on the negotiation of AIDS as a problem for which identity and its avowal or disavowal becomes primary in Lee Edelman's (1994: 96) work: "AIDS"... can be figured as a crisis in — and hence an opportunity for — the social shaping or articulation of subjectivities because, in part, the historical context within which "AIDS" in the West achieved its "identity" allowed it to be positioned as a syndrome distinctively engaging identity as an issue. In fact, I would argue that whatever the direction from which we approach the subject of "AIDS" as a subject of discourse is inseparable from the politics of "the subject" itself — inseparable from the ideological construction and the cultural fantasmatics of agency.

The "subject of 'AIDS'" calls into question the very foundations of a subjectivity presumed to find its anchors in notions of unity, autonomy and freedom, notions which also underpin "the ideological construction and the cultural fantasmatics of agency." That AIDS, known first as the "gay cancer" and subsequently as Gay Related Immune-Deficiency, or GRID, was first identified among gay men (Grmek 1990: 6-

9

Crimp (1989: 18) writes: "The fact that our militancy may be a means of dangerous denial in no way suggests that activism is unwarranted. There is no question but that we must fight the unspeakable violence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves. But if we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible reward through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society, then we may also be able to recognize — along with our rage — our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness."

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10)10, a group still finding its political bearings in the liberatory discourse of the postStonewall era, and that this "community" mobilized quickly to address the disease as a problem, enabled AIDS, according to Edelman, to become an identity-based issue rather than being acknowledged as a collective calamity, as well as a crisis of and in the epistemological and ontological grounds upon which any collectivity is based. 11 The discourse of the "death of the subject" calls to the fore the notion of agency as precisely that which cannot be recuperated in the AIDS narrative. As such, this contestation of agency becomes the site for numerous significant questions concerning

10

According to Mirko Grmek's (1990: 32) History of AIDS'. Much as with syphilis in other times, the earliest names of newly conceptualized disease were not appropriate. They were too restrictive: "Neopolitan disease" or "morbus Gallicus" (French disease) in the former example; "gay pneumonia", "GRID" (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), or "gay compromise syndrome" in the more recent case. For historians these names are interesting precisly to the extent that they reveal medical error and either national or moral prejudice. Further, speaking of the naming of the disease syndrome, Grmek (1990: 32) says: "Official use of the acronym [AIDS] began in the summer of 1982 and, owing to its use in the CDC reports, rapidly expanded thereafter." The acronym AIDS, referring first to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and later as an abbreviation of "Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome", was fashioned during a CDC meeting in Atlanta once the universality of the disease was recognized (Grmek 1990: 32).

11

Stepping back slightly from Edelman's assertion of collective calamity, one might well ask: can there be any acknowledgement of the collective calamity which occurs under the sign of AIDS? What is at stake in acknowledging the calamity as an event that brings terrible loss, lasting distress? In his novel Spontaneous Combustion, David Feinberg (1991: 15) writes of the experience of loss, of death, from the perspective of one who was unable notto acknowledge, at least in part, the calamity happening all around him: "In a way, I did not fully accept the constant tide of deaths. Maybe some things were beyond the powers of human comprehension, like quantum mechanics, love, infinity, and the process by which consciousness arises from matter. I had heard that it takes two years to complete the healing process and fully recover from the death of a close friend. Yet everyone was dying. There was no time left to cope. Were the two-year sentences of grief run concurrently or consecutively? Was there time off for good behavior?" "The constant tide of deaths" and the inability to integrate this information into comprehending subjectivity, articulated here by Feinberg's narrator, B. J. Rosenthal, demonstrates how pressing the work of mourning is when it must be undertaken not once but numerous times in quick succession. The problem of acceptance, of refusing to deny or disavow the loss of a loveobject, is a radical impossibility, not only because there is no time for the completion of the work of mourning, but also because, as a gay man who is seropositive, the death of the Other is, for Rosenthal, bound up with his own death, a thought which his thought cannot tolerate. That this is the case comes through clearly in the text Feinberg wrote before Spontaneous Combustion. In this earlier text, Eighty-Sixed, B. J. Rosenthal writes as though to mark the separation between pre-AIDS 1980 and post-AIDS 1986: "By the time you read this words, I may in all likelihood be dead" (Feinberg 1989: 152). Here the "death of the author" is prefigured, not only as an effect of discourse, but as the result of the "facticity" of a death which discourse cannot erase.

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not only the "rights" of the HIV-positive in liberal-democratic states, but also concerning the formation of the "subject of AIDS" as a locus for a politically expedient subjectivity. That is to say, if AIDS calls into question the grounds of subjectivity and any agency founded on this subjectivity, then how can AIDS be addressed within the confines of a traditional (historial, social and totalizing) politically? If AIDS is the discursive site which calls into question and makes slippage within notions of historicity, sociality, and totality significant, then how can AIDS become the site for political engagement? Here I am, to a certain degree, echoing an intervention made by William Haver (1994). For Haver (1994: 2-3), "epistemological lethargy" precludes contemplation of AIDS as a radical unintelligibility. But, he maintains, it must become the site for a provocation or intervention that includes an active meditation on historicity, sociality, and totality. Troubling these concepts as he does, Haver provokes what to me is a necessary response: if the traditional organizing principles of the political are contested sites, then what might the grounds be for a politicality that may engage with and around AIDS as an issue? The trauma of AIDS, the inability to integrate the information of AIDS into consciousness, necessitates contemplation of this question, particularly given that this trauma is grounded on the perception of helplessness that forecloses from thought the possibility of action in the face of that which is not manageable, controllable or containable by pre-existing social or political formations. In What Will Have Been Said About AIDS, Duttmann (1992: 101) says: It is not a matter of knowing whether or not the appearance of AIDS has put an end to an epoch, or of whether we can recognize in the rupture something that represents a chance to conceive a new responsibility and a new identity. Nor is it a question of inscribing oneself in a "quasi-experimental situation". It is a question, rather, of thinking what AIDS might signify for an existence without historical identity, for an existence which testifies to nothing and which has nothing to confess.

Moving away from an avowal of an identity in, by and through AIDS, or the drive to testify to the experience of the epidemic, to confess, is necessary for Duttmann (1992: 112) insofar as this movement will facilitate "a way of thinking which does not reabsorb its own excess, which does not sublate its own impertinence." This impertinence, tied to the refusal to posit an identity to AIDS and to the resistance to giving specific historical meaning to the disease, is endemic to the thought of AIDS for, as Duttmann speculates, this thought requires a certain refusal of intelligibility at the same time as it requires an intelligibility in which what is at stake in AIDS is acknowledged. To know everything and understand nothing: perhaps we can face AIDS only by refusing to decipher the "impertinence" manifested in [denial]..., that is to say, by refusing to interpret it as what it also is — a rejection, a degeneration, a symbolic struggle, a defense of public image, a real expression of fear, etc. An originarily impertinent existence, contaminated before any contamination, faces AIDS (which itself has no face) because it let itself be shaken by AIDS (Duttmann 1992: 103).

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Reading AIDS through Heidegger and Derrida, Düttmann discusses the perception of the appearance of AIDS not simply as the emergence of a new illness to be integrated into the cultural, political and medical imaginaries but also as "a rupture that precipitates an avowal or a testimony." What will have been said about AIDS, then, "is in large part dictated by the assumption (or rejection, even) of this rupture, a rupture with the idea of a modern medicine that has 'programmed the end of all diseases', a rupture — above all - with the self and the other" (Düttmann 1992: 97). Viewed as the measure of the times in which we live, AIDS presents itself to thought as that which calls into question the centrality of a comprehending subjectivity presumed to be fully apparent to itself. The refusal of the excesses that AIDS gives us to think is largely a refusal of the possibility that what is given over to thought is the impossibility of the subject to recuperate the event of AIDS by placing it within a constitutive teleology that might render it intelligible. The event of AIDS shakes the subject insofar as it unveils a disease of thought in which excesses that cannot be thought are thereby deemed to be impertinent. It is precisely the point at which what will have been said about AIDS eclipses what cannot be said - that which is impertinent — that Düttmann (1992: 112) sees as imperative to the thought of AIDS: "One might almost say: if thought wishes to fight AIDS, it requires the supplement of impertinence. But of what does the impertinence of thought consist when it strives to think AIDS and its consequences, and when it finds itself led to recognize itself in an impertinence that is its own impertinence?" AIDS draws to the foreground that repressed knowledge of death which bounds any life. And yet, it does not render this death knowable. Düttmann's (1992: 105) claim that "AIDS is always in the program" refers, not to a knowability of death, but to the ineluctable relation between living and dying and to that erasure which marks the subject's tenuous constitution. As Eve Sedgewick (1992: 198) writes, engagement with the "subject" of AIDS necessarily "falls... across the ontological crack between the living and the dead." 12 There is, in the construction of the subject, always already a remainder — that other ~ which cannot be thought, cannot be rendered intelligible, but cannot be forgotten. And it is this remainder, this other, this radical unintelligibility that a post-theoretical perspective enables us to begin to address, not in the effort to master it or facilitate its final exclusion from the work of thought, but to give rise to a cartographic thinking, a performance of thought as it encounters its limit. What remains in the wake of AIDS, and what it does or does not give us to think, is the imperative which "our passion for ignorance" forecloses: the imperative "to displace the subject ... to insist upon the dialogic of implication, not the problem of application" (Britzman 1995: 163). The dialogic of implication, which is first and foremost a practice of reading as a risking of the self, finds its ground in the contradictions, paradoxes and gaps through which meaning is exposed at its limit, "that queer space between what is taken as real and the afterthought of recognition" 12

This article, entitled White Glasses, was written by Sedgewick (1992) with the thought that it would be "an obituary for Michael Lynch", the then dying, now dead, Canadian AIDS activist.

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(Britzman 1995: 163). In that queer space, that space in the interesse between identity and its other, between the subject and that which it must exclude in order to posit itself, the theorization of difference, and of that which links us together in a human community, must begin without the "gathering grounds of subjection" (Britzman 1995: 164). Without the grounds of subjection and, I might add, abjection, then, how are we to undertake the work of living, the work of reading, the work of writing, the work of mourning? What is at stake in a practice of reading or writing in which what is at stake is the self? Elaborating on the implications of Post-Theory in critical cultural analysis involves a rethinking of what is at stake even as it calls into question the very means through which thought recognizes itself. A post-theoretical approach, first and foremost a practice of reading and writing as a risking of the self, must take on those questions which "our passion for ignorance" would foreclose from thought. This involves not only a critical reassessment of the grounds of thought through a revisiting of them in different, often ignored, contexts, but also entails an implication of the self in the practices of reading and writing this reassessment. It involves a recognition of the ways in which the thought of crisis and crisis itself can become a site of pedagogy. Crises produce conflicting epistemological paradigms that attempt to foreclose the affects of crisis and at the same time disclose the fractures, the various forms of subjection, the uneven ground on which any intelligibility is based. Poised in the interesse between epistemes that are at (sometimes violent) odds, theorizations of AIDS in critical cultural analysis offer us one possible entry into the work of problematization that Post-Theory gives us to think.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. (1973). Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. Benveniste, Emile. (1971). Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elisabeth Meek. Miami: University of Miami Press. Blanchot, Maurice. (1986). The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. (1991). "The Freudian Subject, From Politics to Ethics", in: Cadava, Eduardo/Peter Connor/Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.). Who Comes After the Subject?New York: Routledge. p. 61-78. Bressalier, Michael. (1996). "Problems of Response: AIDS and the Question of Origins" (Master's Thesis), in: Medical Scientific Practice. North York, Canada: York University: Faculty of Environmental Studies. Britzman, Deborah P. (1995). "Is There A Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight", in: Educational Theory 45(2): 151- 165. Butler, Judith. (1997). Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.

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Caruth, Cathy. (1995). "Trauma and Experience" in: Cathy Caruth (ed.). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 183-199. — / Thomas Keenan. (1991). '"The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over': A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky", in: American Imago, 48(4): 539-556. Crimp, Douglas. (1989). "Mourning and Militancy", in: October51: 3-18. Dean, Tim. (1993). "The Psychoanalysis of AIDS", in: October63\ 83-116. Derrida, Jacques. (1991). "'Eating Well', or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida", in: Cadava, Eduardo/Peter Connor/Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.). Who Comes Añer the Subject?New York: Routledge. p. 96-119. Düttmann, Alexander Garcia. (1992). "What Will Have Been Said About AIDS: Some Remarks in Disorder", in: Public7: 95-116. Edelman, Lee. (1994). Homographies. New York: Routledge. — . (1992). "The Mirror and the Tank: 'AIDS', Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Activism", in: Murphy, Timothy/Suzanne Poirer (eds.). Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language and Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 9-38. Farmer, Paul. (1992). AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkley: University of California Press. Feinberg, David B. (1994). Queer and Loathing. New York: Viking Books. — . (1991). Spontaneous Combustion. New York: Penguin Books. — . (1989). Eighty-Sixed. New York: Penguin Books. Felman, Shoshana. (1995). "Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching", in: Cathy Caruth (ed.). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 13-60. — . (1987). Jacques Lacan and the Adventure ofInsight. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. -—/ DoriLaub. (1992). Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (1984). "Politics, Polemics and Problematizations: An Interview", in: Paul Rabinow (ed.). The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 381-391. — . (1982). "The Subject and Power", in: Dreyfus, Hubert/Paul Rabinow (eds.). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 208-226. — . (1978). The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. — . (1977). Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. — . (1977a). "A Preface to Transgression", in: Donald F. Bouchard (ed.). Language, Counter-Memory Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 29-52. — . (1973). The Birth of the Clinic. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. — . (1972). "History, Discourse, Discontinuity", in: Salmagundi, 20: 225-248.

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Freud, Sigmund. (1984). "Mourning and Melancholia", in: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin Books, p. 245-266. — . (1984a). "The Unconscious", in: On Metapsychology: The Theory ofPsychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin Books, p. 159-222. — . (1984b). "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", in: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Penguin Books, p. 269338. — . (1968). "Thoughts For The Times On War and Death", in: Standard Edition. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, p. 275-300. — . (1961). Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Fuss, Diana. (1995). Identification Papers. New York: Routledge. Golding, Sue. (1993). "Pariah Bodies", in: Critical Quarterly, 36(1): 28-36. Grmek, Mirko. (1990). History of AIDS. Emergence and Origins of a Modem Pandemic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guibert, Hervé. (1991). To the friend who did not save my life. New York: High Risk Books. Halperin, David. (1995). Saint Foucault. Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haver, William. (1996). The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS. Stanford: Stanford University Press. — . (1994). "A World of Corpses: From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to AIDS", in: Positions, 2(1): 1-14. Heidegger, Martin. (1962). Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Kirp, David. (1994). "Love Among the Ruins", in: The Nation, July 18: 87-93. Kristeva, Julia. (1982). The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. — . (1977). Ecrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Lanzmann, Claude. (1995). "The Obscenity of Understanding", in: Cathy Caruth (ed.). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 200-220. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1991). Heidegger and "the jews". Trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. (1991). The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connors, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Nunokawa, Jeff. (1991). '"All the Sad Young Men': AIDS and the Work of Mourning, in: Diana Fuss (ed.). Inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories. New York: Routledge. p. 311-323. Odets, Walt. (1995). In the Shadow of the Epidemic. Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press. Patton, Cindy. (1994). Last Served? Gendering the HIV Pandemic. London: Taylor and Francis Ltd. Ronell, Avital. (1983). "Queens of the Night: Nietzsche's Antibodies", in: Genre, 16: 405-422. Schäfer, Arthur. (1991). "AIDS: The Social Dimension", in: Overall, Christine/William Zion (eds.). Perspectives on AIDS: Ethical and Social Issues. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, p. 1-12. Sedgewick Kosofsky, Eve. (1992). "White Glasses", in: The Yale Journal of Criticism, 5:3: 193-208. Silverman, Kaja. (1983). The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, Linda. (1993). Erotic Welfare. New York: Routledge. Treichler, Paula. (1987). "AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification", in: Cultural Studies, 1(3): 302-305. Zizek, Slavoj. (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom. New York: Routledge.

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THE (BLACK) LADY VANISHES: POSTFEMINISM, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, AND THEORIZING IN NARRATIVES BY BLACK WOMEN One of the catch phrases to identify the center of power in the US is "male, pale, and Yale", while the margin could be represented by Alice Walker's protagonist in The Color Purple: "black, poor, and a woman"1. One might expect that the alliances of postfeminist theory would lie with the margin rather than the center, but, as it turns out, postfeminism has been much more preoccupied with the theories of "male, pale, Yale" (read: Derrida) than those of women of color. What interests me is postfeminism at the intersection of poststructuralism, postmodernism and black feminist theory, especially with regard to issues and problems like difference and fragmentation, the deconstruction of the center, and the challenging of the old canon. Fernando de Toro's definition of posttheory as an opening of theory to the discourses of the margins situates my following reading of black women's literature as a way of theorizing (employing the theorizing in Toni Morrison's Beloved to read Henry James's The Turn of the Screw) as post-theoretical. In that analysis, another feature of posttheory - namely the modified appropriation of theories of the center by the "margin", necessarily modified to suit the context of the margin and to evade the blind spots of those theories — will be discussed in Morrison's revision of dominant discourses like psychoanalysis. Postfeminism, a term only rarely used in feminist writings, has come to signify quite different things, like the assumption that the most important goals of feminism have been achieved. This is certainly not my understanding of postfeminism; rather, I refer to those epistemological shifts in feminist theory that often seem to question the very roots of feminism. These shifts entail new insights into the meaning and dynamics of gendered relations, like the discursive construction of power, and the critical confrontation of the idea of universal values. With regard to literary criticism, the challenging of the center, the established canon of mostly white male Western writers, and of old ways of reading have been the most exciting consequence. Most importantly, postfeminism, diverging from earlier essentialist and monolithic concepts of "woman",

1

The exact phrasing in Alice Walker's novel is: "You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman, you nothing at all." (Walker 1982: 176).

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embraces the idea of gender as a performative rather than biological category, the deconstruction of the unified subject, and the concepts of difference/fragmentation (Nicholson 1990). These central and inextricably linked issues of postfeminism are the result of feminist theory confronting challenges from quite different sources: obviously, postfeminist theory owes much to the integration of postmodern and poststructuralist thoughts, but it is foremost — historically speaking ~ a product of the interventions of women of color into the feminist debate. These two areas of influence that profoundly impacted feminist theory have frequently seemed to be at odds: in a mostly unquestioned binary reflex, feminists have embraced poststructuralism as an adequate frame to theorize the interventions of women of color, creating an opposition between theory and practice in which the theories of women of color were suppressed and silenced or rejected as too "essentialist" or "naive"; for white feminists, as others pointed out, „in a world view that binarizes into theory and examples, or mind and body, the black woman equals the body or the example." (Homans 1994: 75; McDowell 1985: 156-175) Increasingly, posttheories and black feminist criticism were perceived as antithetical,2 with posttheories supposed to be more sophisticated and black feminist criticism trapped in an old-fashioned political essentialism.3 White postfeminism elevated the traditional center of "male, pale, and Yale" over the periphery of black and female, thus unwittingly duplicating a much-criticized hegemonic strategy of studying and canonizing white male master texts (in this case Lacan, Derrida, Foucault) while relegating the contributions of women of color to the margins (Homans 1994: 73-94; McDowell 1985: 156-175). One effect has been a tendency to depoliticize the crucial discussion of difference and decentering, a debate initiated by the insistence of women of color that feminism represents different subjects and their interests and that the unified subject "woman" was a racist fiction reflecting hegemonic interests. Under the influence of posttheories, however, that intervention was translated into a deconstruction of the subject and of identity, a move that has had anxiety-provoking consequences. If gender is a performative category and there is no longer a unified subject and if we can only speak of "the fiction of 'woman'" (Di Stefano 1990: 65), does this imply that we can no longer identify feminist issues and politics? What can feminist theory and politics look like if "woman" has disintegrated into "women" with contradictory locations, if the "non-innocence of the category 'woman'" (Haraway 1990: 199) exacts a critical revision of the politics of identification? Or, as Linda Nicholson, the editor of Feminism/Postmodernism, asks: "does not the adoption of 2

See for example Diana Fuss, who writes about "disturbing implications" of "the relative absence of feminist poststructuralism. With the exception of the recent work of Hazel Carby and Hortense Spillers, black feminist critics have been reluctant to renounce essentialist critical positions and humanist literary practices." (Fuss 1989: 94f.).

3

That would include an insistence on the authority of experience.

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postmodernism generally entail the destruction of feminism, since does not feminism itself depend on a relatively unified notion of the social subject 'women', a notion postmodernism would attack?" (Nicholson 1990: 7)4 Indeed, in some extreme writings the recognition of gender as performative has led to a near dissolution of the category "women"; Tania Modleski traces an argument in Representations that amounts to saying that "insofar as men are men, they are women. "(Modleski 1991: 11) Yet, as critics like Teresa de Lauretis have pointed out, the insight that gender is a representation does not preclude it having "concrete or real implications, both social and subject, for the material life of individuals."(De Lauretis 1987: 3) And accordingly: "although women as real historical beings cannot as yet be defined outside of discursive formations, their material existence is nonetheless certain" (De Lauretis 1984: 5), although the "'essence' of woman is, and has always been, more of a project than a description of existent reality."(Modleski 1991: 20) Some feminist and minority — critics also suspiciously wonder at the coincidence of the decentering of the subject at just the historical moment when previously marginalized and silenced groups are claiming to be subjects,5 and have just begun to "engage in the historical and political and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects." (Hartsock 1987: 204) One answer to this dilemma — the tension between minority discourses and posttheories — is to point out that in the context of post-methodologies, it does seem to be contradictory to take the insight into the disintegration of the subject as a new universal truth. This means in effect that when feminist and black theory are "learning the master's tongue", (Gates Jr. 1987: 26; Anzaldua/Moraga 1981: 99f.) they have to

4

One of the consequences is the question whether feminism can continue to use "the female experience" as a basis of its theories and politics "without reifying thereby one single definition of femaleness as the paradigmatic one", that is without reverting to essentialism. (Benhabib/Cornell 1987: 13).

5

Jane Flax is "deeply suspicious of the motives of those who counsel such a move at the moment when women have just begun to remember their selves and claim an agentic subjectivitity." (Di Stefano 1990: 75). "...the subject under fire from postmodernism may be a more specifically masculine self than postmodern theorists have been willing to admit." (Di Stefano 1990: 75). "... rather than getting rid of subjectivity or notions of the subject, we need to engage in the historical and political and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history. ... marginalized groups are far less likely to mistake themselves for the universal 'man.'" (Hartsock 1987: 204f). In the Introduction: Minority Discourse - What is to Be Done to an issue of Cultural Critique on The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, Mohamed and Lloyd claim (1987: 10): "the collective nature of all minority discourse also derives from the fact that minority individuals are always treated and forced to experience themselves generically. Coerced into a negative, generic subject position, the oppressed individual responds by transforming that position into a positive, collective one."

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check whether the theories of the center make sense to them. 6 With regard to the dissolution of the subject, several critics have pointed out that we have to historicize and situate these disintegrating subjectivities (Abel 1990; Spillers 1987), and it may well turn out that it means different things for white men than for black women who start from a position of fragmented subjectivity and of "generic" (Lloyd/Mohamed 1987: 10) rather than individual identity. Their dreams of becoming "whole"7 cannot be dismissed as the reactionary move it might constitute in the writings of a representative of hegemony, since "marginalized groups are far less likely to mistake themselves for the universal 'man'", (Hartsock 1987: 205) anyway. Nor should we mistake the crisis of the postmodern subject as universal; rather, it is the bourgeois white male subject whose illusion of authority, control and unity is deconstructed; minority groups — including women — have had little reason to nurture these humanist illusions of wholeness, and their non-identity "remains the sign of material damage" (Lloyd/ Mohamed 1987: 16).8 Consequently, their "relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, is structurally different", (Miller 1986: 109) and feminist critics distance themselves from universalizing theories of the subject: ... doesn't poststructuralism, where it simply denies the subject altogether, jettison the chance of challenging the ideology of the subject (as male, white, and middle-class) by developing alternative and different notions of subjectivity? ... The postmoderns have recognized this dilemma. They counter the modernist litany of the death of the subject by working toward new theories and practices of speaking, writing and acting subjects. 6

For example, literary strategies and thus necessarily literary theory are different, one example being the "double-voiced" quality of Black and women's literature (See Gates Jr. 1984, feminist criticism has made the same point for women's literary tradition), and a different function of literature and reading: "Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures. Misreading signs could be, and indeed often was, fatal. 'Reading', in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect of the 'literacy' training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition." (Gates Jr. 1984: 6). See for a similar argument Stepto (1979).

7

The term is Alice Walker's (O'Brien 1973: 192). See also the statement about the title character in Walker's first novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970): "He had survived. But to survive whole was what he wanted for Ruth."

8

See also Miller (1986: 106): "...the postmodernist decision that the Author is dead, and subjective agency along with him, does not necessarily work for women and prematurely forecloses the question of identity for them. Because women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin, institution, production, that men have had, women have not, I think, (collectively) felt burdened by much too Self, Ego, Cogito, etc. Because the female subject has juridically been excluded from the polis, and hence decentered, "disoriginated", deinstitutionalized etc., her relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, is structurally different." "The condition of dispersal and fragmentation that Barthes valorizes (and fetishizes) is not to be achieved but to be overcome." (109).

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... the discourse of subjectivity has been cut loose from its moorings in bourgeois individualism. (Huyssen 1990: 264)

Although poststructuralism and black feminist criticism seem to be at odds with regard to the subject, both aim at and rest on the deconstruction of the center and of the master texts, and on the redefinition of the center and the margins, recognizing "the regulation and exclusion of the marginal as essential to maintaining hegemonic structures." (McDowell 1985: 169) How then — given the at least partial overlappings of posttheorical and black feminist concerns — did postfeminism arrive at an impasse that repeats the oppressive maneuvers of the earlier feminism in excluding black women, this time by avoiding to seriously to confront their writings? African-American women have speculated that one reason may be a Eurocentric idea of what theory is supposed to look like, and that the specific forms of the theorizing of women of color are thus not easily recognizable as theories. Although theory could be broadly defined as "1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena ...; 2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact"9, our binary Western approach maintains a separation of theory from practice, of narratives from theoretical writings. Typically, a recent anthology of black feminist writings challenges in its introduction "these limited theoretical visions, and traditional western ways of theorybuilding" (James 1993: 4). Barbara Christian, in a deliberately polemical and provocative article titled "The Race for Theory", (1987: 51-64) points out that theorizing need not be exclusively understood as an elitist white male endeavour, that theorizing in a black female context has historically achieved forms that are hardly acknowledged as theorizing by the establishment, a theorizing based on the "multiplicity of experience" (60): For people of color have always theorized — but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative form ... My folk, in other words, have always been a race for theory... (52, emphasis added).

9

Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language; Culler gives another definition: "works that succeed in challenging or reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they ostensibly belong because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture offer novel and persuasive accounts of signification." (1988: 15). McDowell points to the historical development of the term: "Transferences: Black Feminist Thinking: The 'Practice' of 'Theory'" (1985: 205, note 9).

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What Christian finds in black literature (the transgression of the boundary between practical and theoretical criticism, 10 the subversion of the distinction between the abstract and the emotional 11 ), Gloria Anzaldua observes about Chicana literature as well: ... it is vital that we occupy theorizing space, that we not allow whitemen and women solely to occupy it. By bringing in our own approaches and methodologies, we transform that theorizing space. ... we need ... theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries — new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods... We need to give up the notion that there is a 'correct' way to write theory. ... In our literature, social issues such as race, class and sexual difference are intertwined with the narrative and poetic elements of a text, elements in which theory is embedded. In our mestizaje theories we create new categories for those of us left out or pushed out of the existing ones. (Anzaldua 1990: xviii and xxv, xxvi). Indeed, when we look at some literature that speaks from a marginalized position — and thus an epistemologically privileged position, 12 as far as a critique of dominant discourses is concerned — we discover that many theoretical insights were first articulated in the guise of stories. 13 Ana Castillo observes in Gloria Anzaldua's influential Borderlands/La Frontera that "vision originates in marginalization." (Castillo 1991: 171). Concluding that marginalization and "difference" allow and empower a critical perspective, Castillo joins Bell Hooks who equally celebrates marginality as a location of counter-hegemonic resistance, as the "site of radical possibility" (Hooks 1990: 149). Some critics even go so far as to claim that any

10

See as an example of this approach Bobo (1995: 25), who moves easily between theories of black women's history in more traditional historiography and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.

11

And thus returning us to the reading of literature. Barrett writes in Words and Things: "Barbara Christian, for example, clearly struck a nerve in pointing to the pursuit of theory for its own sake in literary study and the consequent neglect of reading texts of feeling as well as thought." (Barrett/Phillips 1992: 213).

12

See Tesfagiorgis (1993: 234/5), who quotes several black scholars and artists making just such a point: "some Black women artists observe that their 'outsider' status in Eurocentric discourses, with its critical distance from the mainstream, stimulates a greater sense of independence and creative freedom."

13

Quite frequently, narratives from the margins have challenged our ways of thinking much earlier than theories: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, enquires into the epistemologies created by race and gender and into attempts to silence the female voice; Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, exposes the discursive production of gender and the trappings of the concept of androgyny (theory only discovered androgyny in the early 1970s); novels like Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1976) and Heroes and Villains (1976) and Octavia Butler's Bloodchild (1985) subvert any essentialist notion of gender identity, refuse the illusion of an authentic self.

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"feminist text, but also any ethnic, minority, or Third World text, can be nothing but postmodern", (Sherzer 1991: 156) since these literatures challenge totalizing ethnocentric and androcentric master narratives and master discourses.14 Thus, for various reasons, my proposed answer to the guiding question of this conference, What comes after, what comes post theory?, is not necessarily a "resistance to theory",15 but a return to the reading of literature, an activity that seems to have been relegated to less importance — to the margins, so to speak ~ over the last years.16 Deconstructionism has raised some profound questions about — among other things - the act of reading and the composition of the canon, challenging a white male aesthetics of long standing. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that the project of revisioning the canon has been completed, and there is no turning back to the status quo ante. Nobody can pretend that the issues and irritations raised by deconstructionism and minority groups will disappear, and it would be hybris to assume that we have yet adequately met the challenge to re-think our literary tradition. It has become clear that we can no longer confine our reading to the "classics" — it is equally unproductive to just add new works, but teach them separately, leaving our understanding of the old masters intact. To demonstrate my understanding of a re-orientation with regard to the canon that takes the challenge of re-reading seriously and relies on the theorizing in black women's literature, I want to give a paradigmatic reading of two texts, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, published 1898, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, published 1987. These texts might initially appear to be arbitrarily paired, separated as they are by the authors' race, class, gender, and historical period. In the recent heated controversies about the composition of the canon, James and Morrison could actually have been chosen as representatives by the warring factions. In my comparative reading, I am not only interested in the surprising commonalities in The Turn of the Screw and Beloved, but especially in creating a creative dialogue between the two works, a dialogue guided by Morrison's theorizing. The shared features of the novels are grouped around familial constellations of maternal figures with children (maternal figures who kill children) and absent fatherfigures, and around the apparition of ghosts in the families, introducing the familiar fantastic subject of the haunted house.17 Both stories are set in the middle of the 19th-

14

In Spivak's words - "it is at those borders of discourse where metaphor and example seem arbitrarily chosen that ideology breaks through." (Spivak 1987: 125).

15

See Gates Jr. (1987: 27) and "Criticism in the Jungle" (Gates Jr. 1984) for an analysis of the „resistance to theory" in black culture.

16

Equally, Gates "urges to turn to various minority literary traditions to discover the implicit literary theories that are embedded therein." (Lloyd/Mohamed 1987: 11).

17

In white women's literature, the haunted house has been a site of gendered conflict; in Morrison's novel, the haunted house is a site of racial conflict.

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century, and although the family life of the slaves differs radically from the Victorian life represented by James, both family forms emerge as socially constructed; moreover, the racial and gendered subjects created in the families of these two different textual worlds fit corresponding socio-cultural interests. Morrison's use of the fantastic deconstructs naturalized versions of the (black) family;18 she draws our attention to the role of the masters, to hegemonic interests reflected in family structures. Using that perspective on the function of the ghost, my reading of The Turn of the Screw intends to tease out the social dimension of the fantastic in James's text. One of the central subjects in Morrison's novel is the black family that in Beloved consists mainly of grandmother, mother, and daughters. It has become nearly a cliche to label the African-American family as dysfunctional, especially when referring to the prevalence of female-headed households and the absence of fathers, and especially when that family is measured against a white middle-class ideal. Morrison disrupts the rhetorical strategies of explaining these phenomena; she joins neither those who blame the victims as incapable of assimilation to the white middle-class ideal, nor does she follow those who detect African mother-centered models in the prevalence of femaleheaded households. Rather, by using the ghost, she allows us to read the family as a sign of the interventions of slavery in her exploration of the black family that is set in the context of social and familial configurations which are complicated by gender and racism. Morrison condenses the intervention of white supremacy into the black family in the central scene that is at the core of the repressions and denials in the novel: Sethe, a pregnant slave who is still nursing her toddler, is forced down by two white slaveholders who proceed to — as Sethe puts it — "steal her milk": "they handled me like I was a cow." Sethe's husband, the father of her children, watches the scene from a hidden place, unable and powerless to protect his wife from this sexualized assault. The black man has been disavowed of any power by the white slave masters, he is robbed of paternal authority and reduced to a child-like position, an impotent spectator on the margins of this racial and sexual violence. As a consequence of his unbearable position, Sethe's husband goes mad, rendering him unable to join his wife and children in their escape to freedom. Sethe, unaware of his condition, misinterprets his failure to join them as desertion, causing her to reflect bitterly on the irreponsibility of black men. It is not difficult to decode this scene as a fundamental comment on the farreaching consequences of slavery on the black family: the vacant position of paternal authority is replaced by the white man who then further interferes in the black family: he appropriates the nurture of black women for white society (an appropriation that is

18

Rosemary Jackson's Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (1981: 4) has pointed out — by revising Freud's theory of "The Uncanny" (1919) — that the fantastic traces "the unsaid and the unseen of a culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over, and made 'absent'." One of the functions of the fantastic is "to point out or suggest the basis on which cultural order rests", and of course one "bases on which cultural order rests" is the family.

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then twisted into the stereotype of the black mammy), and disrupts the mother-child bond. These interventions, the text makes clear, serve the interests of white supremacy. In Beloved, the history of these interventions has been repressed by both whites ~ whose role is thus obscured — and by blacks — for whom memory of the traumatizing past is too painful. But repression is counteracted in signs that can be read and made to tell the history of slavery, the black family structure as a sign in the real, namely, and the ghost as a sign from the supernatural. Morrison's Beloved develops a historical and psychological theory of the Black family that traces the hegemonic interventions into the slave family, interventions that are hidden beneath silence and repression. The circular structure of Morrison's novel follows the protagonists' gradual confrontation of their past, and in that process, the ghost serves a crucial role as a sign signifying the return of the repressed; its appearance haunts the mother Sethe who refuses to remember how she killed her daughter rather than surrender her to slavery, and the black community that would rather not confront the unbearable past, prompting a re-memory and a reconstruction of history that goes against the grain of a whitened dominant historiography. The processes Morrison's novel explores are both individual and collective; the interpretation of the individual protagonist as a representative of his/her racial community is a general feature of black literature (like the slave narrative) that tends to anchor the individual's subjectivity in communal identity, a reaction against the hegemonic pressure on minority groups. The function of the ghost, the uncanny in Beloved, invites a revision of Freud's theory of the uncanny as the return of the individually repressed, a repression semantically linked to the family and the home (Freud calls it the familiar, in German "das Heimliche"). The insights we gain from Beloved generally call for a revision of psychoanalytic approaches and a historicizing that takes into account parameters like racist power. Any individualistic interpretation of Beloveds ghost as a manifestation of Sethe's neurosis would deny exactly those decisive categories of power that the text sees as constitutive in the formation of families and subjects: race and gender. That insight into the political dimension of the uncanny in turn alerts us to the discrete signs of power in James's text. While criticism of Beloved has invariably engaged in socio-cultural and historical readings, the criticism of The Turn of the Screw has ignored social dimensions, instead concentrating on epistemological concerns of the story and on individualistic psychological processes, for example explaining the ghosts as hallucinations of a neurotic governess. That individualistic approach is, as Morrison's text proposes, insufficient because it ignores the cultural dimension of the production of identity; by re-reading it through the lens of Beloved, we uncover the hegemonic and collective processes in The Turn of the Screw. In James's text as well, familial constellations and the figure(s) of the ghost(s) (again inseparably linked) point to social repression which in James's text is the oppression of (white middle-class) female sexuality in Victorianism. The subject of the family and of the repression of female sexuality

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emerges in an intricate interplay between coded signs that draw attention to themselves — namely the ghosts — and hidden signs ~ that is the master. In The Turn of the Screw, we have two competing versions of the family: the ghostly pair of the unwed lovers and the real pair of the master and the nameless governess who act as parents of the orphaned children. The family model that James places in reality actually embodies a Victorian ideal yet is but the shadow of the traditional family structure: neither the master who prefers to reside in far-away London nor the governess is the biological parent of the children. That family model incorporates Victorian features like separated spheres and extreme paternal authority (the "father" is the employer and master of the "mother"). Most significantly, it is a nuclear family that has been purged of all traces of sexuality and where a strict, gendered hierarchy regulates relationships. Instead of sexual relations, the governess is bound by a hierarchical working relationship to the master. She becomes the embodiment of a central (and self-contradictory) Victorian fantasy: the maternal as utterly asexual. This "real", idealized version of the family clashes with the ghostly couple of Miss Jessel and her lover, that is with the specter of the biological family with its connotations of procreation: and that (the sexualized mother and the family tainted by sexuality) is the uncanny on the horizon of James's Victorian culture. By decoding the ghosts not as a manifestation of either hysterical hallucinations or as epistemological comments on the nature of perception, but as a sign of the obscured mechanizations of Victorian culture, we see how in James's story as well, the family is a prime target of hegemonic intervention. It is in the family that gendered (and racialized) identities are constructed according to the structural interests of Victorian society, like for example the middle-class separation of spheres and a polarized construction of gender. Indeed, when we thus look at the two novels as statements on the workings of ideology via the family, we can also discover how 19th-century Anglo-American culture constructs femininity along racial lines: the sexualization and animalization of Morrison's black protagonists complements the de-sexualization of women like the governess in James's text. The sexualized abuse of Sethe that is at the core of Beloved s repressions is the other side of the coin of a gender ideology that constructs the sexually active white middle-class woman as ghostly — as when James describes the ghost of Miss Jessel as "the spectre of the most horrible of women", a "pale and ravenous demon", unnatural like a vampire. The "real" version of the family (that is master and governess) draws our attention to another aspect in The Turn of the Screw neglected by criticism: the master's role in the uncanny events. James's text, unlike Morrison's, works to obscure the master's role and interests; instead, it concentrates on the complicity of the governess whom the text establishes as the agent (instead as the victim) of oppression. That the master appears only on the margins of the story should not blind us to his power, however. His representative, the governess, is his tool in implementing his orders in the family, and frees him to move in the world outside, a world that is the domaine of men vis-à-vis the home as women's place. In James's as in Morrison's

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text, the master does not need to be bodily present: since his authority is social as well as individual, since social structures are permeated with his law and inscriptions of his desires, his implied presence suffices to dominate the protagonists. In both texts, white male domination shows fissures and ruptures, gives rise to the repressed, typically visible in the fantastic. What has been repressed are historical processes that reflect the interventions of white male power into die family, resulting in family formations that are then established as natural. Toni Morrison explores the creation of familial configurations in the African-American community that serve white supremacist and patriarchal interests; the gendered (and racialized) subjects created by these constellations are causally linked ~ on a socio-cultural level — to the gendered subjects described by James. There is a complementary relationship between the two texts: the sexual exploitation of black (or working-class) women helps the white patriarchal system to maintain a sexual double-standard; the marginalization of black men serves to establish white men as uncontested representatives of absolute authority. In both texts, the ghosts expose the family structures created to maintain the white man's rule as social and arbitrary, rather than as natural and inevitable. While the dialogue between the two texts uncovers these shared interests, there are significant differences as well, like the respective literary and cultural traditions of the ghost. While Morrison writes out of a tradition that has retained African ideas of a more fluid boundary between life and death, James writes in a post-Enlightenment tradition that has marginalized the non-rational. Morrison's novel is also an answer to the genre of slave narratives, a genre dominated by male authors; James's is placed in the tradition of the ghost story, a genre in which women writers have never been marginal. Another source of difference are the sharply polarized, but ultimately complimentary constructions of femininity: while white middle- and upper-class femininity of the 19th-century is desexualized in dominant discourses, black femininity is constructed as animal-like and sexual. These differences return me to my intentions in giving a comparative reading of James and Morrison: to demonstrate that we do get new insights into - or theories of - the constructions of gender-systems when we re-read via black women's narrative theorizing. Posttheories have challenged hegemonic and totalizing constructions of reality; Morrison's novel unmasks the workings of such a construction and shows us how to read James's text accordingly. Morrison's text, investigating the intersection of "race" and gender, points out the fissures in hegemonic ideology and makes us aware of the signs and traces of the workings of that ideology in James.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Elizabeth. (1990). "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions", in: Hirsch, Marianne/Evelyn Fox Keller (eds.). Conflicts in Feminism. London; New York: Routledge. p. 184-204. Anzaldua, Gloria (ed.). (1990). Making Face, Making Soul. San Francisco: Spinsters. — / Cherrie Moraga (eds.). (1981). This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press. Barrett, Michèle/Anne Phillips (eds.). (1992). Destabilizing Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benhabib, Seyla/Drucilla Cornell (eds.). (1987). Feminism as Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bobo, Jacqueline. (1995). Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press. Castillo, Ana. (1991). "Massacre of the Dreamers", in: Philomena Mariani (ed.). Critical Fictions. The Politics of Imaginative Writing. Seattle: Bay Press, p. 161176. Christian, Barbara. (1987). "The Race for Theory", in: Cultural Critique {The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse). No. 6/Spring 1987: 51-64. Culler, Jonathan. (1988). Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. De Lauretis, Teresa. (1987). Technologies of Gender. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. — . (ed.). (1986). Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. — . (1984). Alice Doesn't. Feminism Semiotics Cinema. London: Macmillan. Di Stefano, Christine. (1990). "Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism", in: Linda J. Nicholson (ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism. London; New York: Routledge. p. 63-82. Fuss, Diana. (1989). Essentially Speaking. Feminism, Nature & Difference. London; New York: Routledge. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. (1987). "Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic: or, It's All Greek to Me", in: Cultural Critique (The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse). No. 7/Fall 1987: 19-46. — . (1984). Black Literature and Literary Theory. London; New York: Methuen. Haraway, Donna. (1990). "A Manifesto for Cyborgs", in: Linda J. Nicholson (ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism. London; New York: Routledge. p. 190-233. Hartsock, Nancy. (1987). "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories", in: Cultural Critique (The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse). No. 7/Fall 1987: 187-206. Hirsch, Marianne/Evelyn Fox Keller (eds.). (1990). Conflicts in Feminism. London; New York: Routledge.

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Homans, Margaret. (1994). '"Women of Color' Writers and Feminist Theory", in: New Literary History. 25/1: 73-94. Hooks, Bell (ed.). (1990). Yearning, race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Huyssen, Andreas. (1990). "Mapping the Postmodern", in: Linda J. Nicholson (ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism. London; New York: Routledge. p. 234-277. Jackson, Rosemary. (1981). Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. James, Stanlie M./Abena P. A. Busia (eds.). (1993). Theorizing Black Feminism. The visionary pragmatism of black women. London; New York: Routledge. Lloyd, David/Jan Abdul Mohamed. (1987). "Introduction: Minority Discourse - What is to Be Done", in: Cultural Critique (The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse). No. 7/Fall 1987: 5-18. Mariani, Philomena (ed.). (1991). Critical Fictions. The Politics of Imaginative Writing. Seattle: Bay Press. McDowell, Deborah. (1985). The Changing Same. Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Miller, Nancy K. (1986). "Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader", in: Teresa De Lauretis (ed.). Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 102-120. Modleski, Tania. (1991). Feminism without Women. London; New York: Routledge. Nicholson, Linda J. (ed.). (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. London; New York: Routledge. O'Brien, John (ed.). (1973). Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Routledge. Sherzer, Dina. (1991). "Postmodernism and Feminism", in: Edmund M. Smyth (ed.). Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. London: B. T. Batesford. Smyth, Edmund M. (ed.). (1991). Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. London: B. T. Batsford. Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammarbook", in: Diacritics 17, No. 2 (Summer 1987). p. 65-81. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1988). In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics. London; New York: Routledge. Stepto, Robert B. (1979). From Behind the Veil. A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana et al.: University of Illinois Press. Tesfagiorgis, Freida High W. (1993). "Centering Black Women Artists", in: James, Stanlie M./Abena P. A. Busia (eds.). Theorizing Black Feminism. The visionary pragmatism of black women. London; New York: Routledge. p. 228-266. Walker, Alice. (1982). The Color Purple. London; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. — . (1970). The Third Life of Grange Copeland. London; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

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Mark Salber Phillips University of British Columbia Dept. of History

HISTORIOGRAPHY AFTER HAYDEN WHITE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF GENRE-STUDIES

For the student of historical writing, Hayden White's Metahistory offers a natural starting point for a discussion of "post theory". Twenty five years after its first publication, White's celebrated study remains the most ambitious theoretical work on the subject of the history and criticism of historiography (White 1975). There is little need, however, for another recapitulation of White's central arguments; his work is well-known to historians and students of literature alike, and I have already presented my own views of it elsewhere (Phillips 1994).1 In the present paper I will summarize my critique very briefly, giving particular emphasis to White's methods as they bear on his claim to offer a framework for writing the history of historical writing. The larger part of my discussion will be devoted to sketching an alternative approach that emphasizes the dynamics of genre. My hope is for a more flexible and more historical understanding of historiography that nonetheless resists a return to the un-systematic and largely biographical approach that prevailed before White presented his theoretical challenge. To give historical concreteness to my remarks and to avoid the emptiness that detached discussions of methodology often have, I must present my views in relation to the field of texts I know best, which is the historiography of Britain in the period encompassing the Scottish Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the early decades of the 19th-century. This means that, although there is some overlap with White's investigation, my remarks will be addressed in the main to a period a little earlier than his. I believe, however, that there are sufficient continuities both of substance and method that the shift of focus need not be a barrier to shared questions or approaches. Like White, I want to ground historiographical study in the literary character of historiographical texts, and in this sense, my paper continues the direction begun by him, or at least given powerful impetus by his work. Indeed, the acclaim that greeted Metahistory had less to do with the particulars of his "tropology" than with the power

1

A broad spectrum of views is canvassed in this double issue of the journal dedicated to reviewing White's work twenty five years after its publication.

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of his insistence that histories are first of all "verbal structures" and must therefore be open to literary analysis. In my view, however, the importance of this premise only makes it all the more necessary that problems of literary history and intellectual history be more adequately addressed than Metahistory, with its foundation in myth-criticism and structuralist poetics, is able to do. A very different approach is needed if we are to explore the history of the historical genres in ways that are both systematic and historical.

1. METAHISTORY AS LITERARY HISTORY From the perspective of historical theory, White's position is strongly "constructivist". That is, his view is unequivocally that history is something historians make, not find. Further, White identifies this history historians make with their written texts, thus shifting the grounds of discussion from history to histories. "In this theory", he states flatly in the Preface, "I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse."2 But White's reorientation of historical theory goes several steps further. Metahistory offers not only an elaborate structuralist program for analyzing historiographical texts; it also claims to be a history of historical consciousness in 19th-century Europe, as presented in analyses of the "deep structures" of a small number of "masterworks" both of history and philosophy. In a recent summary of the "new philosophy of history", Frank Ankersmitt writes that in White's work, historical theory lost its "abstract, aprioristic character" and became instead "a new and highly sophisticated form of historiography (i.e. the history of historical writing)." The results of White's own work and of his influence, says Ankersmitt (1995: 281), have been "a hitherto unparalleled deepening of our understanding the great historical texts, past and present." This admiring estimate makes it clear that one is not raising a secondary issue in questioning the adequacy of Metahistory as a history of historical writing. Ironically, however White's theorization of the literary character of historical texts built on prevailing modes of literary study that were themselves a-historical. Thus the impulses that fed the theoretical boldness of Metahistory also worked against its success when considered as a "history of historical writing". In practice, White's historiology proves to have much less to do with the "verbal structures" and "narrative prose discourses" that histories "most manifestly are" than his opening program indicates. Rather his focus is on the "poetic act" by which the historian "prefigures" the historical field. The accompanying emphasis on "deep structure" shifts attention from what is most manifest in historical narratives to what is often most hidden, even from the historian himself. For this reason White's

2

This definition is repeated - and completed - in the Introduction, where he adds, "that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them." (White 1975: 2).

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analysis turns to philosophers of history, arguing that there is no essential difference between the works of the great historians and their counterparts in philosophy. In fact, for White's purposes, the "deep structures" of historical thought are actually clearer in non-historiographical texts than in the histories themselves. 3 These seem odd grounds on which to write an account of historical writing claiming to be founded on a recognition that histories are verbal structures in the form of narrative prose discourses. What is more, this privileging of philosophy is accompanied by a real neglect of other arts and literatures, even those most resembling histories as "narrative prose discourses". In a history of the historical imagination in 19th-century Europe, practically no attention is given to the novel, to the Gothic revival in architecture, to history painting, to the influence of archeology or geology, or to many other topics of compelling interest.4 But perhaps this narrow horizon is not surprising in a study that makes such broad claims on the basis of a tiny canon of "masterworks". Intellectual historians working in other areas have long since recognized the methodological problems that come with defining traditions of thought in such elite terms — a recognition that has forced a change in historical methods that has been particularly notable (or particularly noisy) among historians of science and historians of political thought. At much the same time, though not always for the same reasons, the study of literature has been transformed by a variety of challenges to narrowlyconstrued canons. It would be ironic indeed if the methodological issues now so apparent in many other areas of historical study were to be left unaddressed for the history of historical writing itself. As we have seen, White founds his system on his recognition that histories are first of all narrative texts — that a history is "a verbal structure in the form of a 'narrative prose discourse'". He then narrows and simplifies his object of study by proclaiming his exclusive concern for "masterworks", a choice that must in itself, as I have already indicated, severely weaken any claim to present an adequate literary or intellectual history. In contrast, I propose to shift the focus away from the individual text to a concern with the set of characteristics that for 18th-century readers distinguished history as a genre — or, more precisely, a group of related genres. I would begin by recognizing that there was no single, unified genre called "history", though it often suited the purposes of writers to invoke one prestigious sub-genre as though it spoke for all. And since genres cannot be studied isochronically or in isolation, my real concern is the development of the broader system of genres in which all historiographical texts participate. In short, my interest is not (to quote White again) so much in the individual text as an "icon" of the past as in the ways in which

3

"What remains implicit in the historians is simply brought to the surface and systematically defended in the works of the great philosophers of history." (White 1975: xi).

4

On the narrowness of White's conception of historiographical practice, see Raphael Samuel's exasperated outburst (1994: 41-42).

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historical understanding structures and is in turn structured by an historically dynamic literary system. I do not mean to downplay the study of individual histories, which constitutes much of the pleasure as well as the interest of historiology. But in reading individual narratives I am especially interested in the articulating signals that guide the reader's responses and help to position the text in relation to the conventions of genre. Powerful works may, of course, revise or combine existing conventions or even initiate new sub-genres. But unlike White's "deep structures" which seem to enjoy a transhistorical life, genres are historical formations that mediate the communication of readers and writers. For this reason, the marks of genre, though certainly susceptible to complex interpretation, must lie within the grasp of the "ordinary" competent reader, as he or she was shaped by the literary conventions of the day. Genre study presumes a reader who is historically situated, a contrast to the phantom universal reader presupposed by grand taxonomies like those presented in Metahistory. In examining 18th-century histories, we need to think more particularly about the interests of contemporary readers as they read histories and other literatures. In effect, this means taking up a position alongside the writers themselves as they too engaged in the attempt to imagine the audiences for whose attention they competed. Here we will be helped by the notable self-consciousness with which 18th-century writings address their readers, a characteristic note of this moment in the development of print-culture. In the circumstances of an expanded reading public, writers were unable to take their relationship with readers for granted. As a result, 18th-century writers always appear a little uneasy or a little too sure. Hence the recurrent invocation of readers through various forms of address in advertisements, prefaces, and textual interruptions; hence, too, the recurring apologies for venturing into publication (especially, of course, for women, but also for gentlemen), the convention of anonymous publication, or the continued importance of dedications, though with new meanings. Much of this apparent anxiety disappeared in the following century, or became bad manners to display, presumably because both sides were more used to the idea that writers were engaged in a commerce of ideas with unkown others, that there is a market for words and that ideas have become property. Examining the authorial gestures that mark the various genres will not give us a picture of the responses of actual readers, for which evidence must be sought elsewhere. But it will point to what we might call the historically-specific ideal reader. Such a figure, albeit still an ideal type, has to be grounded in the reading habits of his or her own time — and it matters a good deal that the accessibility of history to female readership became a point of issue in just this period. It is important, too, not to imagine this reader in a too restrictive literary context. History's audience did not confine itself to reading histories only: for this reason, I am particularly interested in understanding how the cluster of genres most closely associated with historiography was constituted in the 18th-century and how it changed over time to admit new genres or to acknowledge the power of other, competitive literatures.

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Genre, of course, is not a self-contained system. It is a way of mediating and ordering experience, literary and extra-literary. An investigation of 18th-century historical writing must obviously ask what subjects 18th-century readers and writers considered appropriate to historical representation, and it must be alert to changes in the focus of historical interests. Conversely, signals of tension and competition within the family of historiographical and para-historiographical genres can be an important clue to the ways in which historical experience was understood, and especially to the tensions that arose when new areas of experience were being annexed to the traditional competences of historical narrative. In the end, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the study of 18th-century historical writing, is what it reveals about how an ancient literary "kind" — almost as ancient and venerable as epic — subtly and often silently transformed itself to remain relevant to the needs and interests of ever-new audiences. This competition for audience stands as the point of connection between the formalist concerns of genre-study and its interest in exploring broader social frameworks. In short, the 18th-century writer's need to imagine and create a readership links the various forms of historical representation to a wider system of genres that is ultimately social as well as literary. It would be a mistake, however, to think of the relationship between social meanings and formalist experimentation in unidirectional terms. Much of my investigation is devoted to suggesting ways in which the formal repertory of historical memory responded to new images of the social world, but it is important to stress that the genres of historical writing were not simply receiving an imprint of a problem articulated elsewhere. Rather, historical writers must be understood as actively engaged in reformulating the social questions that complicated their own formal activity.

2. HISTORY AND GENRE: OUTLINES OF AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH British historiography in the 18th-century has generally been studied in terms of a narrow canon of great authors: Hume and Gibbon, principally, but with occasional expansions to include Robertson or Ferguson. With few exceptions, the questions at issue have come either from the history of political thought or the history of scholarship, and the approach has largely been biographical. Much valuable work has been done along these lines and new research will continue to contribute to our appreciation of the period. Even so, it should be clear that there is room for an alternative approach that brings a wider range of literature and a different set of questions into view. The general considerations I have raised in relation to White's work suggest the outlines of such a revision, while avoiding the taxonomic rigidités of Metahistory.

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2. 1. Continuities Historians and students of other literatures often take the view that the period around 1790 marks a sharp break in the history and literature of western Europe. There are solid grounds, however, for assuming a vantage point that permits us to discern enduring features in literatures so often divided into separate chronologies. A prime reason for beginning with an assumption of continuity is the extent to which modern views of 18th-century historical writing still play out impulses of criticism that sprang up in the minds of the successor generations. To a surprising extent, we have continued to see 18th-century historical concerns through 19th-century eyes, often uncritically accepting the criticisms of early 19th-century writers, without taking note of their need to distance themselves from their fathers and grandfathers. Some of the thinnest passages in Collingwood's Idea of History, for example, as well as in White's Metahistory, can be cited as evidence of this kind of prejudice - one which can only be corrected if we hold both 18th- and 19th-century writings at the same critical distance.5 A related advantage of the longer view is the opportunity it affords to examine the assumption of continuity itself. If continuities are to be found across this long and eventful period, these must have been continually reinscribed as well as subtly reshaped. In fact, one of the prime tasks that challenges a more historical understanding of historiography is an investigation of the processes of reassertion and adaptation that enabled (and still enable) historians simultaneously to claim the prestige of an ancient art and the authority of a modern discipline. Key to the way in which lines of continuity are asserted and controlled is canonformation, a process that has been little studied for historiography. It is evident, 5

Collingwood writes: "A truly historical view of human history, sees everything in that history as having its own raison d'être and coming into existence in order to serve the needs of the men whose minds have corporately created it... Thus the historical outlook of the Enlightenment was not genuinely historical; in its main motive it was polemical and anti-historical." (1946: 77). Collingwood's willingness to pronounce on what "a truly historical view" consists of is, of course, in flat contradiction to his own principle of historical sympathy. White's view of the 18th-century is quite similar, a reflection perhaps of his own roots in idealist philosophy of history: "The skeptical form which rationalism took in its reflection on its own time was bound to inspire a purely Ironic attitude with respect to the past when used as the principle of historical reflection. The mode in which all the great historical works of the age were cast is that of Irony, with the result that they all tend towards the form of Satire, the supreme achievement of the literary sensibility of that age. When Hume turned from philosophy to history, because he felt that philosophy had been rendered uninteresting by the skeptical conclusions to which he had been driven, he brought to his study of history the same skeptical sensibility. He found it increasingly difficult, however, to sustain his interest in a process which displayed to him only the eternal return of the same folly in many different forms. He viewed the historical record as little more than the record of human folly, which led him finally to become as bored with history as he had become with philosophy." (1975: 55).

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however, that 18th-century Britain not only saw a continuing revaluation of ancient authors, but the establishment of a modern historical canon. In the first part of the 18th-century it is common to find reference to England's weakness in historical writing, but by the later decades of the century, a rapidly formed consensus declared that Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon had removed this stigma. We need not only to take account of the fact of this fairly rapid reversal, but should also explore the grounds which first created this unease and later produced the growing confidence that Britain now possessed a modern historical literature that had outstripped its French and Italian rivals. At a lower level of literary achievement, we also need to understand better the impact of university teaching in both history and rhetoric, and more broadly how a growing pedagogical literature ~ much of it directed at specific sub-audiences, such as youth or women ~ intersected with other genres of historical writing.

2. 2.

Refraining and intellectual history

The evidence of change in intellectual history is notoriously difficult to pin down, yet without a view of how the movement of ideas takes place, we have little chance of establishing a coherent story. Faced with the baffling combinations of persistence and movement that constitute the real challenge of intellectual history, we need more differentiated conceptions of change than those we usually work with - especially the ideas of "origins" and "inventions" that are still the intellectual historian's stock in trade. As a metaphor for change, invention assumes the autonomy of the statement and hence a world of positive knowledge. It is better, I believe, to begin with a figure that takes the situatedness of understanding as its point of departure. For this reason, I prefer to think in terms of "reframing" rather than invention. The idea of reframing suggests that statements identical in form may bear very different weights or meanings, depending on the context of questioning. For this reason, I would argue that the primary way in which the movement of ideas takes place is not through formulations of ideas that are demonstrably novel, but through a repositioning that responds to changing contexts and needs. Reconfigurations of this kind may well be the result of the need to accommodate new discoveries (for example, the expanded geographical and ethnographical knowledge of the 18th-century), but at a more profound level they are also a reflection of the hermeneutics of historical interpretation as it shapes our conversation with history and tradition. In the process, familiar but subordinated notions may acquire a new centrality, thereby taking on new meaning and seriousness in relation to other concerns. Equally, older ideas may slip to the side, though without in any real sense disappearing. This has frequently been the fate of prestigious literary genres, for example, as they are relegated within the literary system to places of prestige that no longer hold responsibility.

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2. 3. Competing frameworks of historical understanding Simply put, the questions I want to raise concern the ways in which historical writing was reframed in the 18th-century. No easy answer is possible since what is involved are shifts in the underlying conception of the object of historical study, as well as important changes in modes of representation and tools of analysis. As I have already indicated, I believe, too, that an adequate response also requires detailed discussion in relation to all of the various genres of historical narrative, not simply one or two historiographical literatures which enjoyed the highest prestige. I have time here only to sketch in a very preliminary way some broad redirections of historical understanding in this period. What resulted was far from a wholly new practice, and many continuities with inherited models of narrative were tenaciously kept up. Even so, it is clear that for history to remain part of the literary system of 18th-century modernity, it had to cope with a number of critical challenges. The impact of these challenges can be traced across the whole spectrum of historical genres, but they are often registered most distinctly in the "minor" genres. That is, it is frequently on the margins of formal historiography, not at its more prestigious and conservative center, that we find some of the clearest clues to the tensions operating throughout the cluster ~ a point which has important implications for method. The most easily identifiable reason for the 18th-century's reframing of historical narrative comes from the prominence of commerce in modern life. This was a subject entirely excluded from classical definitions of politics and history. As Hume wrote in the Essays, even the Italians, who pioneered the modern study of politics, had barely taken trade into account, though it has since become a preeminent concern for all governments (Hume 1987: 88-89). Nor was this a casual exclusion; classical historiography, as well as its early-modern humanist revival, was predicated on a sharply drawn separation between public and private concerns. Commerce, which we now see as helping to create a mediating third sphere - the realm which, following Hannah Arendt, I will call the sphere of the social — had no place in historical narrative because it had no legitimate place in public life. Despite the continued prestige of classical literary models, this exclusion of commerce — and the sharp division of public and private on which it was built — could not survive the conditions of writing in a modern commercial nation. At stake was the self-recognition of a society keenly aware of how much it owed to the power of commerce. Inherited traditions of historical narrative needed to be reshaped so that a commercial empire (and especially its commercially-minded governing classes) could examine and celebrate its own historical experience. The only alternative was that some of the central functions of historical narrative be taken over by other genres. The need to accommodate historical narrative to a modern nation's sense of the power of commerce only gives us the beginnings, however, of the 18th-century's groping towards a new definition of its historical interests. As is so often the case, it is easiest to say what was lost: gone, certainly, was the old restriction of history to statecraft and military manoeuvre ~ and with it the clarity and linearity of classical

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ideals of narrative. In its place stood a much wider, but less easily defined set of concerns for which contemporaries did not really have a name, though "philosophical history" was a useful term for designating the literary form that did its best to encompass all the parts of this expanded subject. As the philosophical histories of Hume, Robertson and others attest, the "matter" that history now needed to "imitate" ~ to adopt the terms of Aristotle's Poetics — had enlarged itself enormously. It incorporated not only commerce and navigation, but the history of literature, of the arts and sciences, of manners and customs, even of opinion and sentiment. It needed to consider the experiences of women as well as of men, of "rude nations" living without the institution of property, as well as of those of commercial societies. But this diversity of subject matter was only a part of the problem; a further challenge was added by the belief that history at its fullest should be able to describe the underlying connectedness of all of these different aspects of life in the past, each of which was coming to possess a literature of its own. The simple, but fundamental point is that in light of this enlargement of the boundaries of the historical, it was hard to continue to think of history as exclusively concerned with the narrative of political action. The consequence was not, of course, a loss of interest in politics as such, which continued to occupy a large place in most forms of historical writing, especially in its most prestigious genres. But Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Ferguson and others made it clear that the possibilities of political action were shaped in a hundred ways by the often invisible movements of economy, custom, or opinion. Considered in relationship to the social framework argued for by these writers, politics as it had been conceived by classical histories — the narrative of the public deeds of public men — could no longer be thought of as an autonomous field of activity. To an alert 18th-century reader, its traditional terms were no longer fully intelligible. This realization stands behind the repeated complaint that Greek and Roman historians did not concern themselves with much that modern readers would like to know about the conditions of life in the ancient world. Of course the eloquence of classical narratives was still much admired, and this admiration continued to be linked to the notion that history serves as a literature of moral instruction. But the humanist conviction that this ethical content also amounted to an effective political analysis could hardly stand up when history could no longer define its terms as exclusively concerned with either males or public actions. Indeed, as a definition of history's subject-matter, "action" itself would need to give way to a more inclusive category — a point to which I will return shortly.

2. 4.

Society and sentiment: the 18th-century's discourse of the social

The argument for examining the reframing of historical practice in the 18th-century can now be given a clearer focus. The reconfiguration I wish to explore is bound up with what I would like to call the 18th-century's discourse of the social. In using this rather

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awkward designation, I am following Hannah Arendt's lead in using "social" as a short-hand to identify the characteristically modern interpénétration of private and public life, giving new meanings to both; at the same time, by "discourse" I mean to indicate something wider, if less easily located than a term like "the Scottish enquiry," though Hume, Smith, and their contemporaries certainly played a central part in this reconfiguration. It is important, however, to avoid the impression that these philosophers were the discoverers of a brave new world that was then imposed, fully formed, upon historical writing and other literatures. Equally, it is crucial to understand the literary environment in which history was written so as not to isolate it from disciplines like political economy or from contemporary developments in biography or the novel. The discourse of the social incorporates two dimensions of enquiry, which might be thought of (in a very schematic way) as the societal and the sentimental. On the one hand, social study was directed to the material and moral life of humankind; on the other, to the play of the passions and sentiments in the individual mind. In the final analysis, however, what most fully characterizes the social understanding of this period is its reliance on the reciprocities linking the societal and the sentimental as two complementary kinds of knowledge — the belief that human beings are naturally led by their passions to form communities, and, conversely, that the way to understand society is to picture it as a place shaped by the meeting of experiencing and sociable minds. These reciprocities encouraged the conjectural historian to speculate on the sentiments of the ancient Britons from his reading of contemporary missionaries, just as they led the "philosophical" traveller to intersperse his notes on foreign places with observations on manners and the lessons of history. A key unifying element was the pervasive 18th-century interest in manners. The phrase "manners and customs" is ubiquitous in widely different genres, where it bridges questions of individual conduct and the remote customs of distant peoples. And, crucially, the language of manners not only brought the hitherto excluded experiences of women into history, but it also made both men and women creatures of custom and habit. These and other reciprocities mean that the literatures most adapted to exploring inward and affective experience - biography, the novel, and various forms of lyric most obviously, but also conduct literature, pedagogy, and even rhetoric must also be read as part of the formation of this larger social discourse. For the student of historical writing, the broad range of this discourse and the reciprocities that hold it together are especially important because of the strategic place the historical genres hold between so many didactic and narrative literatures, "low" as well as "high". This means that in considering the evolution of historiography we need to break the habit of consulting only "serious" works of philosophy and politics and search more widely through the literary system. Clues to the reframing of historiographical practice lie in all the surrounding genres and disciplines (Burrow 1981: 4). No one will have trouble identifying the ways in which the displacement of political action in 18th-century historical writing brought societal questions to the fore; the inwardness of history, however, may raise more doubts. The answer to this skepticism

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lies in the suggestion made earlier that the reframing of historical understanding meant that historical writing would need to grapple with representing something wider, but less easily defined than action. Poetry, Aristotle says, is the imitation of action, but when we undertake the biography of a poet (as scores of 18th-century biographers admitted) there is very little in the way of "action" to recount. Nonethless, one of the achievements of 18th-century literature was to find ways to make compelling reading of lives lived in thought and private conversation. (Boswell's Life of Johnson is the preeminent example.) As a result, the emerging genre of literary history became a prime vehicle for those who wanted to evoke the textures of life in another age. But the problems of literary history were not unique in this respect: ancient tribes, women at all stages of history, and most men in private life also lacked the capacity to act in the traditional sense. Nonetheless, the new frameworks of social discourse demanded that their experiences somehow be included in a more comprehensive form of historical memory. In this reorientation from action to experience lay some of the most interesting challenges to history's narrative ressources.

2. 5.

History and genre

It was not very long ago that genre-study was generally understood as an attempt to discover distinct and enduring formal characteristics beneath the fluctuations of literary history. More recently, however, these assumptions about the unity and fixity of genres have been discarded in favor of approaches emphasizing precisely the opposite qualities of instability, mixture, and historical specificity. Reconsidered in this light, genre-study emerges as a prime avenue for exploring historical change and one that lends itself particularly to the idea of "reframing" that I outlined earlier. Summarizing the changed emphasis in genre-study from fixity to historicity, Alastair Fowler writes that, "if we describe the genres in fuller detail, we find ourselves coming to grips with local and temporary groupings, perpetually contending with historical alterations in them. For they everywhere change, combine, regroup, or form what seem to be new alignments altogether." He goes on to say that the instability of genres may upset our aspiration to build systems. "But it is just the activity that genre's communicative function should have led us to expect. If literary meaning works by departing from generic forms, successions of meanings over a long period are bound to change them extensively." (Fowler 1982: 45-6). This emphasis on the communicative functions of genre is helpful because it makes it clear that we are not dealing with something either arbitrary or passive, a purely conventional structure confined to a separated world of purely literary usage. On the contrary, genre is a key part of the capacity literature gives us for questioning and ordering the world. Genre, to put it in the terms already used, is a key element of literary framing. As such, genres, like other communicative frameworks, must necessarily remain open to reframing, if they are to stay in active use.

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Thus the communicative function of genre leads us to their historicity; it also points to a recognition that what is communicated by genre is simultaneously something about the world and about the literary system itself. Because of this element of reflexiveness, generic self-definition necessarily involves contrasts and hierarchies that establish the place of a particular genre in the wider literary system. Without such contrasts, in fact, readers would have no way of understanding the terms that mark an individual "kind". Since genre is by nature a contrastive category it follows that individual genres cannot really be examined on their own. But contrast is only a part of the picture. This same logic of contrast and competition leads to the frequency with which genres combine and recombine, which is a further element in their historicity. The results of this contrastive and combinatory dynamic may be the formation of new genres or something more individual and temporary. The outcome obviously depends on the responses of readers, a central consideration for any investigation of genre. In fact, everything I have said about genre could be restated in terms of the activity of readers — their competence to recognize the markers of genre, their ability to adapt to new demands, their understanding of a wider literary system, the sense of status or even membership that comes from constituting oneself as an audience to a given literature. From the writer's point of view, then, much of what is at stake in working within an existing genre or attempting to move beyond it can be seen as selection or creation of an audience. Among the many directions that genre-study can take us, let me by way of conclusion suggest just one set of possibilities. As I have indicated, the inherently contrastive character of genre means that what a genre is or does will generally be set off against other complementary or competing literatures. It is easy to pass over the gestures that mark the terms of this differentiation. These signals are often expressed in highly conventional language, which leaves the whole business of genre-markers looking thoughtless and trivial. If read with attention, however, these markers of generic difference are potentially a rich source for understanding how the various genres of historical writing were received and how they related to the literary system taken as a whole. An important feature of 18th-century descriptions of history is the emphasis they place on its gravity and decorum. This definition is as much social as it is formal; that is, it concerns the rank and gender of presumed historical readers and implicitly contrasts them with the audiences for lesser narrative "kinds" such as biography or "romance". By the same token, writers working in these contrastive genres find history a prime referent for their own efforts to secure an audience. For a whole range of literatures, in fact, history serves as a kind of counter-genre, a necessary foil for their emergence. Hence the need to examine the whole cluster, which, I would argue, should be an important part of any literary history of historiography in this period. The signals given off in this game of maneouvre can tell us a great deal about the reciprocities and pressures shaping the historical genres. These signals must not be read literally, however, a mistake students of literature too often make. 20th-century critics have often rushed in to perpetuate the image of history that suited the genre strategies

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of the 18th-century novelist — endorsing the view of history as a simple, immobile, pompous monument against which to celebrate the agile and democratic genre of the novel. We need to be better readers of Jane Austen, for example, when in Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland confesses she cannot bear to read history, "real solemn history": "The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all." This passage has been treated as an encapsulation of Jane Austen's view of history, but that it clearly is not (Phillips 1997). Rather it is a lovingly ironic characterization of a girl who still lacks the maturity and education of her companions, the history-reading Tilneys. The deftness of Austen's irony is all her own, but the amount of information that she could convey by so quick a device speaks to the fact that the history/novel contrast was part of the understanding of the literary hierarchy that every novel-reader possessed. Catherine Morland's reading habits may not say much about Austen's personal views of history, nor about the "deep structures" of the historical imagination. But the reading habits of young women, fictional or real, do tell us a good deal that we might want to understand about how both histories and novels were seen in Austen's time. By extension, they point to questions that need to be considered across a broad spectrum of mimetic and instructive genres before we can understand what history — "real solemn history" ~ meant to British readers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ankersmitt, Frank/Hans Kellner (eds.). (1995). A New Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burrow, John. (1981). A Liberal Descent; Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collingwood, R.C. (1946). Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowler, Alastair. (1982). Kinds of Literature. An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, David. (1987). Essays Moral and Political. Indianapolis: Liberty Press. Phillips, Mark Salber. (1994). "Historiography and Genre; A More Modest Proposal", in: Storia della storiografia/Histoire de l'historiographie, v. 24: 48-63. — . (1997). '"If Mrs. Mure be not sorry for poor King Charles'; History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader", in: History Workshop Journal 43\ 111-131. Samuel, Raphael. (1994). Theatres of Memory. London: Verso. White, Hay den. (1975). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Gabriel Weisz Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

SHAMANISM: METAPHORS OF THE BODY To begin with, I would like to state my position in regard to post-theory. When theory abandons a rationality engaged in different modes of domination, then one is hopeful that theory has acquired mobility. Encountering Bakhtinian dialogism, we will engage in that constant interaction between meanings and ways in which they affect each other. This is how we introduce the 'dialogization' of theory. In the Bakhtinian sense, this process relativizes and takes away the privileges of language, and within our scope it relativizes and takes away the privileges of theory. We are going to imagine a analytical dramatization in which some theoretical issues are exchanged. The dramatic form conveys a certain atmosphere and awareness of human conflict. Furthermore, drama adds a sensorial dimension - or body — which is usually absent in theory.

1. DIALOGIZATION OF THEORY We are in a no man's/ women's land like Jarry's Nowhere or that place which is in permanent interrogation; it is that nowhere which is everywhere. A site where subjects become characters and therefore mirages. Two men, two women, a woman and a man, or whoever you choose, are talking to each other. A: "Any reading procedure has to be restricted in order to prevent the hemorrhaging of meaning so common in free interpretations." B: "When you try limiting reception you impose an imaginary order. Because of the way in which language operates within theory, you cannot impose a restriction on meaning." A: "Agreed, but some kind of regulation must be established over indiscriminate migration of intellectual trends." B: "It seems to me that your lot is afraid of alien ideas invading your pretty and well nourished mental nations. Petty provinces of personal property." A: "Can we doubt that in order to question the meanings of the text there is a legitimate, reasonable and true discourse?" B: "The problem with such opinions is based on the illusion that some day the 'Prince of all Theories' will finally clean the field sowing truth and reason so that you can ultimately own the only possible meaning. Actually, those truths derive from a

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consensual terrorism where the inquisitors become self appointed guardians of truth. They defend old paradigms of reality, science and objectivity as if these were not determined by a whole structure of ideological values." A: "How can you say such a thing? If we want to avoid total theoretical annihilation, objective reality must prevail." B: "I must confess that I am not a partisan of conceptual creeds, and what you have just expressed seems to belong to those religions." A: "Do you belong to those who want the death of truth, reason and the withdrawal of critical positions?" B: "I prefer to admit the schism of our intellectual construction, than to suffer from nostalgia." A: "Dealing with solid reality is better than suffering from a nostalgic return to reality. I know the phrase." B: Rather than insist over all embracing definitions of reality, one could think about the emergence of 'selfreal' worlds, that is, those that harbor their own system or their own fictional construct of reality." A: "It is better to regard theoretical communities that defend their issues, based on a shared vocabulary and competence." B: "These communities can quickly turn into intellectual mafias. It strikes me that it is necessary to avoid closed circles in which a terminology is captured, and to expose ourselves to what 'others' feel and do, often holding very different ways of understanding from what the community identifies with the 'we/ours' pronouns of the personal." A: "I am prepared to admit that certain theories have fallen into an incestuous trap hindering any withdrawal from the fascination of their own reflections." B: "In a critique of thought we no longer distinguish valid from invalid, but rather expand ideas into strangeness and otherness. This entails a search of paradox and to avert the restrictions of systems and methods. Or else, to encourage the dismantlement of intellectual objects."

2. EPISTEMICAL FRACTURE OF MATHEMATICS Some researchers have placed poststructuralism in the synchronistic usage of the 1970's, together with postmodernism, postcriticism and desconstruction (Baross 1993). However, a conceptual heritage comes forth with the collapse of that giant system Principia Mathematica created by Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead. Principia Mathematica was an attempt to define proofs as demonstrations operating within the fixed systems of propositions.

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Then came along Kurt Godel with his Incompleteness theoremGodel projected an introspective epistemology onto mathematics pushing "mathematical reasoning in exploring mathematical reasoning itself' (Hofstadter 1980: 17). Godel's I.T behaved as a viral system able to undermine the foundations of Principia Mathematics. His theorem revealed the weaknesses of the axiomatic system proposed by Principia Mathematica, giving a definite blow to such illusions as a consistency or completeness stating: "that no axiomatic system whatsoever could produce all number-theoretical truths, unless it were an inconsistent system!" (Godel, quoted by Hofstadter, 24). Godel's theorem is a good example of theory disrupting a system by questioning its consistency. Post-theory is part of a project that also questions and deconstructs the consistency of old theoretical structures. A relation between deconstruction and I.T can be examined in regard to theory. Old theoretical structures seek a reduction of conceptual entities to essential and simple products. Deconstruction is much like a disease inasmuch as it "takes place {a lieu), and that it does so whenever there 'is' something (ou ily a quelque chose)" (Critchley 1993: 22). Godel's I.T proved that no matter how powerful a formal system appeared to be it was far from being perfect. He taught mathematicians that there were mathematical facts that transcended theoremhood. This is what came to be known as the incompleteness of any given formal system. Deconstruction and the I.T operate a deconstruction within reductive devices of philosophical, ideological, literary and mathematical formal systems. The 'incompleteness' of a system unveils a whole gamut of differences, it is open ended and supports many avenues of continuation.

3. BREAKDOWN OF INSULAR THEORY New theoretical statements want to get rid from the repression imposed by totalitarian definitions of what theory "ought to be". A political argument to forward liminal theory — such that is able to travel across conceptual borders ~ takes upon itself the task to confront theoretical terrorism. A system that insists on silencing other theories — which cannot be legitimated — but have as much right to exist as canonical theories. Liminal theory suggests a precarious mental body, subject to multiple redescriptions. This is a theory in permanent predicament, one implying anarchistic attitudes toward the theoretical Goliath of authoritarian rule. Theoretical terrorism aims to suppress differences and spits out this statement: "You can defend theoretical truth [again that word] only if you compose theory in my way." All terrorisms lead to the delimitation of a territory. Thus insular theory is born, betrothed to a politics of the subject, where identity gains political and territorial specialization. Political specialization connotes the compression of people suchwise

1

I will be referring to this theorem as "I.T"

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they operate in a particular power site. An option is made possible by a politics of uncertainty. Which, instead of centering on the subject of power struggles for repeated negotiations. In such manner, theory stands as an open topic of negotiation between different intellectual offers, in spite of the mandatory premises of theoretical terrorism. Insular theory is upheld by stable rules and subjects; a community that refuses to acknowledge its own living diversity. Not willing to cater to binarism, but rather to differences, liminal theory adopts indétermination, since it entails a web of possible beings in theory and not theory as Being. Liminal theory in its uncertain path opens up to a communication with its otherness, as well as other manifestations of alterity, thus renouncing to the unambiguous territory of determination. Insular theory reduces differences to self-sameness, because it fears strangers. In liminal theory there is no visible ending inasmuch as movement happens in the field of differences. Dissidents within insular territory covet to flood and overflow all bordering devices. Outside and inside, that which includes or excludes, stand as symptomatic conceptual mechanisms exposed to the theoretical corpus of insularity. A good deal of repressive criterion is bolstered by ideas that a group in power considers appropriate and correct. Power personified as a political party, or else, the kind of power associated to authoritarian academia. A theoretical discourse that has a nostalgia for a virtual body. A yearning for unity, simplicity and communication in the perfect text. Some tangible object can be discussed without uncomfortable ambiguity. We are bordering the frontiers of academic estheticism or elegance imposing and possessing "a priori criteria of the beautiful, which designate some works and a public at a stroke and forever" (Lyotard 1993: 41). Along with that, we turn estheticism and elegance into theory. There is an academic mentality that is a limitation to liberty and curtails the free expression of ideas. Unfortunately we absorb this behavior in our academic alter ego. We must be aware of the conformations of an internal police, censuring everything before we get the chance to express our thoughts. Pulverizing and decentering theory makes it easier to assimilate, subsequently we propose hybrid ideational objects lacking the possibility of grounding subject images. An urgent testimony of the times we are living in makes it clear that we are under a State's terrorism, akin to theoretical terrorism. Both systems exert repression and persecution tactics.

4. INSULARITY, BORDERS AND RITUAL Insular theory leads to an intricate issue on borders. I will advocate a more positive approach from the past few pages. Groupe Mu devotes a section to the study of borders, where the problem is to distinguish between the border and a space in which the statement is inscribed (Groupe Mu 1992).

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Tibetan Buddhist iconography represents the cosmic wheel of life or transmigration. Inside of Shrinmo's body, the demoness of death, we find three circles. Animals at the center breed those human passions that lead people to unreality. The ring beyond houses spirits and humans. The outermost ring depicts birth, old age, death and rebirth. We contemplate different levels of captive meanings. The iconography reveals that each ring confines a set of mythical statements and consequences for human beings. The border acts as an indicator for a set of ideas. In this iconography we also find particular aspects of the psyche. Mandalas in tantric art have to be internalized by each meditatist, thus having access to knowledge. One might think that each mandala is part of a metaphorical body. In other words, these figures yield a magical space for the body issued by meditative techniques. The metaphorical body conveys a magical reconstruction of the body. In short, not only the drawing captures meanings, but also the meditatist's body, through the mandala he or she internalizes knowledge. To transcend the border the meditatist has to become aware of the illusory nature of the senses. Each circle has to be crossed in order to enter another stage of knowledge. Borders constitute semic and cognitive frontiers, but at the same time the inscription of a map is displayed to launch the psyche into an internal journey. Borders that occupy bordered space bring forth the properties of the border. The whole process unleashes an external and internal mediation, remaining a paradox where there is no real inside or outside. In the mandala this paradox of the border guides to an awareness of the illusory nature of the senses.

5. SHAMANISM AND OTHERNESS The aim of this project is to acquire some insight into post-modern theory and to detect diverse actions of the logos to suppress difference. From a position of political mobility we consider a lieu for anti-theory. This word signals an oppositional strategy before academic theoretical terrorism. Theoretical terrorism is the imposition of methodological narratives that intend to silence and suppress the existence of theoretical discourses not fully assimilated to the dictatorship of the center. Anti-theory regards all theoretical thought as incomplete and admits its own 'inconsistency'. My main field of interest is shamanism. The study of shamanic texts, understood within the frame of a philosophy of difference, forces theoretical thinking into a symbiosis with "otherness". In this realm an implicit writer finds herself or himself in a space of knowledge where alien narratives of "otherness" saturate the mind. We contemplate culture as a text, construed by a certain body of theories that deny difference. Under the light of new theories (post-theories) we expect a drastic change in the writing and reading behaviors that constitute the cultural text. That which incorporates difference instead of denying it. Once Derrida defined deconstruction "not as an enclosure in nothingness but an openness towards the other" (Derrida, quoted by Critchley 1993: 28).

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Deconstruction gives voice to certain elements that have been forgotten by certain theories. A particular concern with post-theory takes place in a theory of difference. However, difference will abandon the space destined to philosophies of the center and become exposed to difference in the texture of shamanic lore. The text of difference in shamanism is sometimes produced by sacred drugs, by meditation; or else by a number of procedures deliberately devised to alter the textual constitution of the body. This textual constitution is what, in my current research, is termed as the metaphorical body. A metaphorical body derives from a body/text construction elicited by a semiotic process. In this process the symbolic form of a magical entity participates in the composition of an organic entity. Shamanism as an embodiment of 'otherness' and 'difference' deconstructs those features of the culture/text that pretend to assemble a hermeneutic device to interpret its structure. Shamans have often been described as 'others' unable to assume their role as subjects. This trend of imagining the 'other' turns people into characters in a totalizing narrative. A phenomenon that reveals a political maneuvering of the episteme designed to impose a dominant ideology over particular subjects (an issue amply discussed in post-colonialist literature). In this paper shamanism will sometimes be located as that particular object of the episteme. My goal is to work with certain theoretical issues, raised by post-theory, in order to explore a largely excluded body of knowledge found in shamanic lore. Logocentrism identifies truth with presence or logos. Culture as a text, in this case an ethnographic document, usually defines 'otherness' as an object merely understood through the cultural devices of its own 'presence' or 'logos'. An oppositional reading views the shamanic text (not as a specular object) as an aggroupment of symbolic enigmas that suggest alternative expressions of knowledge, or an 'otherness' of knowledge deconstructing our assumptions on what knowledge "ought to be". Post-theory fractures that which obstructs conceptual fluidity, a mental substance mostly integrated by pre-existing habits of thought. By the term 'post' we understand a certain theoretical scheme able to disrupt the hidden clusters of enlightened metanarratives. Presence and logos are those conceptual clusters circulating in metanarratives. With Emmanuel Levinas the ethical relation of 'otherness' is outlined by 'illeity', that which binds the 'il' from across the 'toi'. By questioning 'illeity' we seek an ethical intercourse. In this sense our project traces the 'illeity' and difference of the shamanic other than oneself.

6. WHITE MYTHOLOGY I borrow Derrida's heading to define what is limpid, white and harbors literal meanings. In white mythology language is cleansed from its figurative load. However, I will be touching upon acts of cultural appropriation and the imposition of a new and more "proper" meaning. These particularities characterize cleansing strategies that are forced upon conquered individuals.

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Opening the Derridean model we find in white mythology a set of conceptual devices that diagnose the actual state of affairs in canonical theory. More to the point, white mythology becomes a metaphysical construct employed during the colonization of diverse ethnic groups to emplace "new meanings". Weighing these facts from white mythology we return to the issue of insularity, since white mythology contributes to generate the self-same margins that philosophical discourse tries desperately but in a pointless effort to preserve. I open this section with a short quote from Sahagun, the Spanish missionary: "That god named Huitzilopochtli was another Hercules, one who was very robust, of great force and bellicosity, great destroyer of towns and a people killer" (Sahagun 1979: 31). Sahagun's style manages to arrogate the Greek explanatory metaphor to redefine the Prehispanic god. He engages in cleansing nahuatl mythology — cryptic and remote for the Spanish reader — and subsequently imports the classical Greek discourse, closer to the taste and competence of his readers. Fray Geronimo de Mendieta renders how a group of children murder a priest. The priest dressed as Ometochtli — the god of wine — was chasing people in a market. A group of students from the monastery, demanded to know why the man was dressed in that manner. They were told that the priest was god Ometochtli. The children stated that the man was no god but instead was a devil who lied and deceived, after which they killed him (Mendieta 1971). I shall not dwell any longer in this lengthy description, but I would like to underline the way in which the priest is described as a liar and deceiver, when actually he was representing his own religion. We witness the imposition of a white mythology, instrumental in the devaluation of a metaphorical body and the substitution of it by the imagery and ideology of Christian evangelization. The figurative language of a culture is displaced by the figurative language of the conquerors. Derrida proclaims: "Metaphysics -[a] white mythology that clusters and deliberates occidental culture: The white man taking his own mythology, the Indo-European one, his logos, that is the mythos of his idiom, like the universal form of what he wants to call Reason" (Derrida 1972: 254). In Sahagun's and Mendieta's texts the Christian logos is self appointed as universal Reason. The mythos of the conquerors imposes universal Reason over the religions that will be displaced by the "only true religion". Evangelization assumed a metaphorical process in the quest for affinities through similitudes. Derrida has also stated that "according to the elliptical silogism of mimesis, the pleasure of knowledge is fashioned by the absence (...) of the object" (1972: 286). Mimesis conveys knowledge through absence. That side of knowledge linked to anagnorisis or recognition. Where "the Subject of consciousness finds comfort of Identity and self-sameness ..."(Docherty 1993: 16). Although Docherty aludes to the avantgarde, it seems quite an apt rendering of the figure of the colonizer. Anagnorisis is configured by a certain sameness. Insularity in this sense struggles for its own Identity. The other culture is permanently reduced to a recognizable entity, because it has been deprived of its

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differences. The narcissistic strategies of evangelization consist in undertaking everything to appropriate the other culture, so that it ceases to signify more than what self-sameness demands. Logos is the kind of metaphorical knowledge that depends on mimesis and anagnorisis. The strategy of Platonic mimesis is viewed by Derrida as that which "produces a thing's double..."(Derrida 1981: 187). Mimesis goes side by side with the problem of reality and authenticity and the imitation of the logos. The introduction of shamanism, does not obey to a mere whim, though it does not mean that a certain kind of violence has not been exerted by its thematic presentation. Shamanism propitiates the insertion of a foreign body into theoretical thinking to encourage an abrogation of the law. An abrogation of theoretical rationalism. From another angle, shamanism has many links to metaphorical thinking. In the spirit of conceptual violence, even of plunder we are going to push white mythology to an alien place. Shamanism invades what was only prescribed for philosophy. Many of the statements made by Derrida on metaphysics and philosophical metaphors describe what I would like to call the metaphysics of theory. A deconstruction of theory is then very much called for. Shamanism, under my reading, borders a theory of the body, a complement to liminality between concepts and a practice of corporal knowledge. The violence and invasion, mentioned before, has the deliberate purpose to introduce a whole constellation of "invisible human groups", that don't appear under the limelight of great reflections. In this sense Derridean cogitations run dangerously near to those other grand metanarratives, that have always defined philosophical discourse. The body needs an imaginal field, more urgently so if we are to consider the saturation of prescriptive rationalization. That rationalization stems from Enlightment. A project that was headed toward the "human emancipation from myth, superstition and enthralled enchantment to mysterious powers and forces of nature through the progressive operations of a critical reason" (Docherty 1993: 5). Enlightment, carried out in dogmatic fashion that "cleansing", clearly reminiscent of the legacy left by white mythology. This time it was the turn taken by the magical body of "the savages", often attacked and despised by the missionary's discourse. Reason conquers the centre, its own centre, with an ambition to create a normative behavior. The trace left by Enlightment is the basis for insular theory. An intercommunication between deterritorialization of white mythology and Enlightment can be traced as a "demarcation between the 'advanced' and the 'undeveloped'; and in this distinction the advanced feels itself to be legitimized in its activities of mastering, controlling, dominating and colonizing what it stigmatizes as the underdeveloped" (Docherty 1993: 18). Contemporary Enlightment displays the arguments of development to legitimate a deadly trend of academic colonization. We are currently living an age of new "savages" equally exposed to ethnic cleansing. Insularity establishes a political and theoretical narrativization obsessed, not only by its own frontiers and entombment, but also with the proliferation of entrenchments and walls to marginalize, dominate and persecute its enemies.

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This aggressive behavior of insularity has its closer referent in the conformation of the polis. A city governed by the likes of Agamemnon, King of Men. The Greek concept of the polis was subjected to the relationship between people and governments. The acropolis was that fortified building which housed the king. A place occupied by the essence of power as a direct growth of the polis-. The polis is that immured space with rational borders and frontiers that are to be protected against a barbarian invasion. The immured city is a suffocating space because it blocks circulation and exchange, it inhabits a domain of rigid borders. The politics of the polis is that of invasions and hatred against all those who do not resemble the people within.

7. ETHNOGRAPHIC METANARRATIVES AND ETHNIC DECLENSIONS According to George Devereux's definition of ethnopsychiatry, culture has to be confronted to the conceptual pair of 'normality/abnormality'. He also argues that "shamans are less in contact with reality than normal people" (Devereux 1977: 16). Furthermore, Devereux assumes "that the psychological disorder of the shaman is in as much 'useful' to his tribe (...) his madness is dedicated to others, in as much as his madness allows a psychological equilibrium" (28). Our first remark is that normality and abnormality are definitions of behavior that by no means become universal truths. What can be normal for certain cultures is abnormal for others. Normality and abnormality , in this context, belong to a cultural identity that has been codified by the strategic discourse of psychoanalysis. Let us take the statement that "shamans are less in contact with reality than normal people." In the meta-narrative of psychoanalysis "the recognition of the real environment by the child, the growing awareness of its demands and the need to accommodate them" (Reber 1985, sv. reality) is what the reality principle is about. Contact with reality is also conceptualized as: "Perceiving and assessing the environment in ways coordinate with one's social and cultural schemes and values" (Reber 1985). To which one could respond, that shamans have uncovered a special kind of reality, perfectly in tune to their cultural milieu. Obviously Devereux is not aware of the differences between realities. Assuming reality as culture/text we are not justified to impose the meta-narrative of reality as if it were the only legitimate way of characterizing the real. Lastly, what the author identifies with a psychological disorder of the shaman, can equally be taken as a modification of a psychological behavior. The manner in which sacred behavior is read as madness by ethnopsychiatry, can be understood as a ludic strategy by means of which the shaman plays with different extremes of his or her personality. A case in point is the ludic nature found in the Winnebago's shamanic story of the Trickster. The Winnebagos belong to the Siouan culture. These tribes lived in the state of Iowa and in south-eastern Nebraska. Wakdjunkaga is the Winnebago term for Trickster, a word that means the tricky one.

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Among the many anecdotes of this strange magical hero we will focus on the story of how Trickster got his head caught in an elk's skull. Trickster's curiosity is awakened by what he takes for someone beating a drum and people shouting. As he walks to the place where the noise is coming from he only finds an elk's skull. Discovering the skull full of flies and noticing that the flies are enjoying themselves he decides to join the fun. The flies instruct him to enter through the neck, but since he is unable to do so he is told he must deliver the following formula: "Neck, become large". Accordingly the hole expands, Trickster is able to slip his head in, the flies go away, the hole contracts, and our friend finds his head caught in the elk's skull. A woman comes along to fetch some water and finds Trickster. He convinces the woman to return to her village so that somebody can bring an axe. He explains that whoever strikes his head and splits it open will find within invaluable medicinal things. A man arrives with an axe, strikes and splits open the skull and finds Trickster bursting into laughter. However, what only seems like a hoax turns out to be a magical object from which effective medicinal instruments can be elaborated. Engendering from uncertainty Trickster is associated to tricks and cheating as well as satirizing and ridiculing the Winnebago culture. Trickster seems to deconstruct the established order, since he is known as a breaker of taboos (Radin 1976). Somehow Trickster represents an oppositional narrative that opens a door to the diversity of humor; an outlet to voice an emotional conduct sanctioned by the taboo system. Trickster illustrates differance, thus it defers presence, not only by adopting an alien personality, but by rendering futile an uncritical homage to a cult figure. If he is unable to become a figure of power over others, he is a figure that empowers through humor. A word of caution at this point, is that nothing that I have written can be used as an interpretation of the Winnebago culture, I am only using my liberty as a reader, this goes for any other culture/text. Derrida has pointed out that "It is because of differance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called present element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself..."(Derrida 1991: 65). Considering that Trickster pretends to be a sacred spirit, while addressing the woman, and then is discovered as "only the Trickster" his presence is related to something other than itself. He becomes a paradoxical and ambiguous being impossible to be fixed by a definite meaning or presence.

8. METAPHORICAL BODY Shamans enter trance states in order to visit the underworld, sometimes they are helped by drums or by sacred drugs. Under trance they cure people and visit the spirits. Shamans undergo diverse physiological changes where they are deprived or exposed to a super abundance of sensorial stimuli. These physiological alterations can be used

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as physical aids to abandon the body and then take off into different shamanic flights. Our culture honors the body as the locus of presence, can we then understand how a state of différance is invoked by abandoning the body in a state of altered consciousness? There are other ways of deferring presence. In shamanic rituals presence is deferred by changing the text of the body and wearing animal or insect masks. A winged mask worn by a Bobo butterfly rain dancer from the Upper Volta, is believed to bring on the rainfall. This deferral of presence is related to the concept of a metaphorical body. Masks and animal costumes are means to metaphorize the body in order that the shaman assumes an animal power other than herself or himself. A useful reminder, as we mention a metaphorical body, is to regard this tropological operation as one which Derrida defined as "la dissémination du métaphorique... " (Derrida 1972: 320). This dissemination entails a loss of meaning. Dissemination is the media in which binary oppositions fall. The text of dissemination is such that we cannot speak of an inside or outside of the body; a real or unreal. Derrida's use of the term "Dissemination" comes from the novel Numbers by Philippe Solers. The text of the novel is deployed as a dismembered body of "quotations, parenthesis, dashes, figures, and Chinese characters..." (Johnson 1981: xxix). That description also fits the metaphorical body of the shaman, since s/he undergoes a dissemination of his or her magical anatomy. In Indonesia the shaman must also allow his body to be torn to pieces before he can serve the spirits. The Dayak of Borneo has his head severed from his body during initiation. Then the brain is removed from the skull, washed, and reinserted, so that the future shaman will have a clear and undisturbed mind: "During the actual ceremony, a coconut is smashed above the initiate" (Kolweit 1988: 98). Thus the magical dismembering is performed.

9. MAIN ARTIFICERS OF THE ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE One of the most important ethnoarchitects of our times is Claude Lévi-Strauss. He cooked up an epistemology that merged linguistics, mathematics and ethnology. This system was based on the application of binary analytics. Lévi-Strauss' methodology was closely related to Troubetzkoy's procedures on structural analysis. I only mention one of his premises: "structural inquiry investigates unconscious infrastructures of phenomena - not their observable or conscious layers..." (Troubetzkoy, quoted by Leitch 1983: 17). Lévi -Strauss found in structuralism a system to investigate unconscious rules and structures. "I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact" (Lévi-Strauss, quoted by Leitch 1983: 19). We are introduced to an author of a cultural text, who takes upon himself the task of interpreting those unconscious elements that the "savages" are unable to grasp. "Oh dear!" On top of it all, women don't seem to enter the

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intellectual parameters of mythical thinking since it is only men that are allowed to think in myths. In another work Lévi-Strauss features as the main architect of the thinking subject: Certainly the properties to which the savage mind has access are not the same as those which have commanded the attention of scientists. The physical world is approached from opposite ends in the two cases: one is supremely concrete, the other supremely abstract; one proceeds from the angle of sensible qualities and the other from that of formal properties. (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 269).

Derrida noticed, while raising the issue of structuralism and Lévi-Strauss that "the episteme has an absolute demand, the absolute demand of tracing back to the origin, to the center, to the foundation, to the beginning etc." (Derrida 1967: 420). Ethnopsychiatry and ethnological structuralism are joined by the same project: to create an episteme that will be used to dislodge otherness in order to impose its own presence. An episteme of a rigidly binary logic of "all or nothing" evokes a conceptual void that ignores the possibility of uncertainty. Ethnopsychiatry and ethnological structuralism fall into meta-narrative frames. Binary distinctions such as normal/abnormal in the first and supremely concrete/supremely abstract in the second indulge in a closed system of classification and appropriation. The idea of a "savage mind" leads to an ideological prejudice, a blind spot where theory falls pray to conceptual terrorism. Anti-theory, in this territory is an oppositional narrative, aiming to deconstruct the architecture of enlightened precepts.

10. ILLEITY AS THE SOLUTION Somebody once told me that writing about shamanism was a dangerous endeavor because one could impose personal interpretations. To such a statement I retorted that any act of communication is violent. That sort of violence alters the "absolute demand" of closed identities. Writers weave themselves into a construction of imaginai selves. These imaginai selves are far from rooting down in a presence because they dissolve before the violent imaginations of the other. Shamanic narratives introduce the possibility of presenting the unpresented. After the metaphorical rebirth some Arctic Siberian shamans may choose to change their sex, then they dress and adopt a female demeanor. This shattering of sexual difference can be read as an inner representation of otherness in order to shed the constraints imposed by sameness. The self can be released from its conceptual, physical and psychic prisons in order to imagine and experience alternative ways of being. A brief quotation from Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément confirms the role played by those who abandon the axiomatic proposition of an absolute self. "Madmen, harlequins, tumblers, jugglers, carnies, mad-mothers, those excluded from society, are thus promoted to function as prophets, all the better prefiguring their group's future

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because they are banished from it for being from the past" (Cixous/Clement 1991: 25). To the list I would add Shamans, because they share with those people mentioned above the magical or exotic — from the Greek exotikos, foreign, alien, exo or outside - undecidebility of their position. The idea of an alteration of the axial position of self is to propitiate an internal ecology of difference. What seems crucial for this to happen is to become acquainted with multiple projects of being in which the self is left unfinished. For this to ensue one might have to learn to deconstruct institutional power centers that are created both inside and outside of the person. However, one must beware of creating a glorification of difference. Throwing a critical look at antiethnology, Baudrillard warns against a resurrection of differences, and more importantly, an abolition infront of the object (cf. Baudrillard 1981). Jean Baudrillard differentiates simulation from representation. Because representation stems from an equality between sign and reality. Simulation comes from an inversion of the Utopian principle of equivalence, negating the sign as value, and positioning the sign as a reversion and death of all reference. While describing the phases undergone by the image he recognizes that: -

it is the reflection of a deep reality it masks and denaturalizes a deep reality it masks the absence of a deep reality it has no reference to any reality: being her own pure simulacrum.

Commenting on the third, where the image plays at being an appearance, she belongs to the order of sortileges (cf. Baudrillard 1981). The shamanic shattering of sexual difference becomes, in this context, a strategy of simulation because a deep female reality within the male is: reflected, denaturalized, masking its absence, and becomes her own simulacrum. The prophetic nature of simulation is depicted in that sort of reading of the sortilegium — sors, lot and legere, to read — where shamanic divination would stem from the reading of the enigmatic other. The text of sexual binarism as well as the real and unreal are demolished by the secret power of simulation. A novel reading based on the substitution of subject and culture would have to search that trace on the face of the other which is that of the 'il'. For Levinas the enigma of that which is in the 'otherwise than Being' is pronounced by a masculine 'il\ to describe this enigma he coined the term 'Illeity'. However, 'illeity' is subjected to a meta-narrative of masculine presence, one that denies the female referent of 'Elle'. For this reason Derrida's deconstructive answer to Levinas introduced the text of 'Elle' and thus interrupted the discourse of a monological voice. Recalling how the episteme of binarism falls pray to conceptual terrorism one wonders if there is an alternative reading. Levinas opposes an order of presence and phenomenality (from the Greek phaino, to bring to light), in which entities are cleared and comprehended in their Being, to an order of the enigma (from ainigma, a dark saying or riddle), which attempts to set forth that which escapes comprehension or thematization: 'the otherwise than Being' (Critchley 1993: 114).

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Unfortunately Lévinas' enigma is caught in the sameness of a masculine logos. By violencing to the neologism of 'illeity' and creating a hybrid 'elleilleity' we place the reading of the shamanic text in lieu of the enigma, because it escapes comprehension or thematization. The shamanic text thrusts readers into that darkness where enigmas and riddles reside. Back we go again to the Incompleteness Theorem where the shamanic text within this text remains unfinished.

11. FICTIONALIZING THEORY All in all post-theory deals in tensional past and future modes. One of post-theory's Juno's heads looks at the great meta-narratives, while the other head is occupied plotting out the strategies of rupture, dislocation and Assuring of the theoretical fabric. Post-theory has a bicameral mind, processing information that travels from one head to the other. Fernando de Toro has spoken about an epistemic fracture. "The so-called private individual and the public citizen in a decolonized nation can inhabit widely different epistemes violently at odds with each other,..." (De Toro 1995: 9). The shamanic irruption into insular theoretical speculation produces just that sort of violence. We are entering a beyond and the in-between space of Homi Bhabha. What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities. The regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, 'opening out', remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference. A bit further down Homi Bhabha asserts that: "difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between ..."(Bhabha 1994: 219). If we exchange cultural identities for theoretical identities, we have still another trope for 'borders', margins and dynamic transformations of insularity. Those nostalgic notions of closure, so dear to an insular trend are left behind, the "liminal" and the "post" are nearer to the realms of make-believe. A fictional dimension is now open where correlations occur with otherness. A place where imaginal selves are exchanged and fixed identities shattered. Let us respond to a dialogization of theory to Jarry's "nowhere" land, a virtual place for permanent paradox and transformation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baross, Zsuzsa. (1993). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory. Irena R. Makaryk (ed.). Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press. Baudrillard, Jean. (1981). Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène/Catherine Clément. (1991). The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis; Oxford: University of Minnesota Press.

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Critchley, Simon. (1993). The Ethics ofDeconstruction: Derrida and Lévinas. Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques. (1991). A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Peggy Kamuf (ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. -—. (1981). Dissemination. Trad. Barbara Johnson. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. -—. (1972). Marges de la Philosophie. Paris: Minuit. — . (1967). L'écriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil. De Toro, Fernando. (1995). "Explorations on Post-Theory: New Times". Cf. p. 9-23 of this volume. Devereux, Georges. (1977). Essais d'ethnopsychiatriegénérale. Paris: Gallimard. Docherty, Thomas. (1993). Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Groupe Mü. (1992). Traité du signe visuel: Pour une rhétorique de l'image. Paris: Seuil. Hofstadter, Douglas. (1980). Godei, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage. Johnson, Barbara. (1981). Dissemination by Jacques Derrida. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Kalweit, Holger. (1988). Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman. Boston; London: Shambhala. Leitch, Vincent. (1983). Deconstructive Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1969). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1993). "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?", in: Docherty, Thomas (ed.). Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Mendieta, Fr. Geronimo. (1971). Historia eclesiástica indiana. México: Porrúa. Radin, Paul. (1976). The Trickster. A Study in American Indian Mythology. New York: Schoken. Reber, Arthur. (1985). Dictionary of Psychology. Sv. reality. London; New York: Penguin. Sahagún, Fr. Bernardino. (1979). Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España. Col. Sépan Cuantos. México: Porrúa.

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Craig DeQuetteville Carleton University, Ottawa

PRACTICING POST-THEORY In deciding on a title for this paper, it seemed presumptuous at first to call it "Practicing Post-Theory". I felt it was somewhat justified, though, in so far as one dictionary definition of "to practice" is "to do something repeatedly or customarily either for instruction, profit, or amusement", all three of which apply here. As for the "post-theory" part of the title, I also had certain misgivings about whether we can call what we do a practise. A search for "post-theory" on the Internet fulfilled the abovementioned condition of amusement. One serious discussion of the term, however, did prove instructive. In a conference paper posted in February of 1996, Bruce Robbins from Rutgers University, New Jersey, writes a response to an article that had just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Learning, entitled Scholars Mark the Beginning of the Age of 'Post-Theory, which asks "whether literary criticism has become too unliterary." In answering in the affirmative, it argues for the retreat of literary criticism from theory and politics. Robbins criticizes this version of 'post-theory', and provides thereby a defense of the kind of 'post-theory' I think we have come to adopt here. He writes: I'm referring, first and most obviously, to students, both undergraduate and graduate, who are one immediate public of criticism, the pool from which its potential recruits will or will not emerge. Many of these students have strong feelings about the projects of cultural studies, theory, politics. Their libidinal energies have been engaged by the work of people who are present here today, along with that of charismatic names like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford, and so on. They have been "turned on" by what these people do or invite us to do with literature, and also by what they do and invite us to do with cultural fields and issues that are not literature, but that matter a great deal to our culture all the same — texts that have swum into our ken both because of the spilling over of literariness into other domains, like Orientalism and AIDS discourse, and because newly represented groups have found their concerns represented in such domains. Whether or not they are members of a minority, these students almost certainly have some libidinal investment in the project of democratizing cultural representation — a project which in no way contradicts an extremely selective quest for objects, past and present, that are worthy of the highest reverence (Robbins 1996).

To profit from my own libidinal investment in literature, I continue to commit myself to speaking of literature as if it were the Other of theory, to discovering what possi-

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bilities there are for literature to read theory, for literature to interrogate the literary tropes and metaphors inscribed in theory. I would like to offer one such line of questioning in regards to the use of a set of metaphors operating in the works of Derrida. The starting point for my inquiry was an essay by Derrida called Denials: How to A void Speaking in a book edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser entitled Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (Budick 1989). Here, the word "unsayable" generally becomes a metaphor for negativity that is also synonymous with the ineffable, the unnamable and the unspeakable. Derrida's essay led me to other works by him in search of metaphors related to the unsayable. Though it is a trademark of his writing strategy to use terms that resist explication, Derrida's use of one metaphor in particular, the unnamable, becomes problematic when read over the course of his works and through works of literature such as Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, Thomas Bernhard's Der Untergeher, and J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. The "unnamable" makes its first appearance in Derrida's early writings on deconstruction. A fairly recent essay by Robert Begam called Splitting the Differance: Beckett, Derrida and The Unnamable draws several examples of Derrida's use of the unnamable from Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy, and Points. Begam's thesis is that the unnamable is synonymous with 'differance' and that Beckett's novel, The Unnamable, is therefore narrating 'differance'. To underscore Derrida's use of the term in this context, I've taken two examples from Margins of Philosophy. .. .differance has no name in our language. But we "already know" that if it is unnamable [innommable], it is not provisionally so, not because our language has not yet found or received this name, or because we would have to seek it in another language... It is rather because there is no name for it at all... (Derrida 1986: 26, in Begam 1992: 373). This unnamable (cet innommable) is the play which makes possible nominal effects, the relatively unitary and atomic structures that are called names, the chains of substitutions of names in which, for example, the nominal effect 'differance' is itself enmeshed, carried off, reinscribed... (Derrida 1986: 26-7, in: Begam 1992: 374).

The appearance of the unnamable in works by Derrida after Begam's essay seem to be consistent with Derrida's earlier uses of the term. In Denials: How to Avoid Speaking (Dénégations: comment ne pas parler), Derrida paraphrases his definition of 'differance' from Margins of Philosophy, only now it is to analyse the "more or less tenable analogy "(Derrida 1992: 74) between 'differance' and the nameless God of negative theology: ...this, which is called X (for example, text, writing, the trace, differance, the hymen, the supplement, the pharmakon, the parergon, etc.) " i s " neither this nor that, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither positive nor negative, neither inside nor outside, neither inferior nor superior, active nor passive, neither present nor absent, not even neutral, not

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even subject to a dialectic with a third moment, without any possible sublation ("Aufhebung"). Despite appearances, then, this X is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the structure of predicative discourse. It "is" not and does not say what "is". It is written completely otherwise.

Where Derrida denies the analogy between this God and 'differance', is in the insistence by the proponents of negative theology that God is a "hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being)" (Derrida 1992: 74). In another related essay, Post-scriptum, Derrida again discusses the implications of negative theology for Being, though now the unnamable is no longer used in connection with 'differance'. This time he is concentrating on the topological means available in the poetry of Angelus Silesius for naming God apophatically — that is, naming God's attributes by denying them. When speaking specifically of space as a metaphor for God, Derrida tries to answer the question posed by Mark Taylor, " What is the Ort of the Wort ?" (Derrida 1993: 60). His response at first suggests the possibility of a referent beyond naming contained in the event of speaking God's name: The event remains at once in and on language, then, within and at the surface (a surface open, exposed, immediately overflowed, outside of itself), in and on the mouth, on the tip [bout] of the tongue, as is said in English and French, or on the edge of the lips passed over by words that carry themselves toward God. They are carried by a movement of ference (transference, reference, differance) toward God. They name God, speak of him, speak him, speak to him, let him speak in them, let themselves be carried by him, make (themselves) a reference to just what the name supposes to name beyond itself, the namable beyond the name, the unnamable namable (Derrida 1992: 302).

But then, in an pre- post-scriptum to Post-scriptum, in a part of this paragraph omitted from the English and inserted in the French Sauf le nom, Derrida qualifies his statement by calling this trace of an unnamable namable referent the Other instead of God: As if it were necessary at the same time to save the name and to save everything rather than the name, except the name, as if it were necessary to lose the name in order to save that which carries the name, or toward that which carries itself in the path of the name. But to lose the name is not for it to be lost in itself, to destroy it or to injure it. On the contrary, it is simply to respect it: as a name. In other words, to pronounce that which comes to pass over it toward the other, which it names and which it carries. To pronounce it without pronouncing it. To forget it while calling it, while re-calling it, which comes back to calling or re-calling the other... (Derrida 1993: 61).'

1

My translation of the following text: "Comme s'il fallait a la fois sauver le nom et tout sauver hors le nom, sauf le nom, comme s'il fallait perdre le nom pour sauver ce qui porte le nom, ou ce vers quoi l'on se porte au travers du nom. Mais perdre le nom, ce n'est pas s'en perdre a lui, le détruire ou le blesser. Au contraire, c'est tout simplement le respecter: comme nom. C'est-a-dire le prononcer, ce qui revient a le traverser vers l'autre, qu'il nomme et qui le porte.

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By calling or re-calling the Other, as God or otherwise, by respecting the unnamable namable as a name, and above all by pronouncing it without pronouncing it, it seems that Derrida is advertantly or inadvertantly including a dimension to the space of the 'word' that involves the responsibility to speak or not to speak what has always already been named. The ambiguity inherent in any discussion of the unsayable, or ineffable, is partly a result of the meanings the ineffable has acquired ~ while in Latin it is that which cannot be uttered, the ineffable has also come to mean that which cannot be put into words, or named. This secondary association corresponds, though, to the unnamable in so far as the unnamable is that which cannot be named, the signified that can have no signifier, the unsignifiable. That the unnamable agrees with Derrida's concept of 'differance' is uncontested. But for Begam the unnamable is "by definition whatever resists nominalization, a noun {norri) which denies its own power to name, a noun which negates itself' (Begam 1992: 374). To my mind, however, this resistance to nominalization, the denial of the power to name, signifies the unnamed, or the nameless, that discourse which can or could be named, but is yet to be named or rather yet to be spoken, because the unnamable names itself, it is always already named, always already its own name. In other words, there is no unnamable, just as there is nothing outside the text. One cannot say what the unnamable is, rather one can only say what it is not, even if to say it neither affirms nor denies its own power to name. Given this definition of the unnamable, can Beckett's novel still be understood as narrating "differance"? The most compelling reason for arguing that it can, comes from Beckett's use of the unnamable as the name of a text in which this name does not appear. Where most critics reading Beckett's work deconstructively, including Begam, call either the narrator or the narrated of the text the unnamable, this is a literal reading of the metaphor. To refer to the narrator as the unnamable is to miss the point of the paradox, for the unnamable "is" not, it is neither/nor. The narrator never refers to himself as the unnamable, nor does he refer to others as such. There is, then, no unnamable in the text. It is precisely this paradoxical lack that generates the text, the desire to narrate. It is the reason why the narrator continuously creates other characters whom he names, but who may also be naming him. To find a way out of this doublebind, to know who his namer is, would be to achieve "real silence" for Beckett's narrator. But as long as he must speak about himself to find out who his namer is, a more appropriate name for him would be the unsilenceable. Though absent from the narrative, the unnamable is, however, the title of the text, the name given to it by its author, Beckett. So what differentiates here the title from the text, the naming author from the naming narrator? Again, the unnamable is neither Beckett nor the narrator. Beckett is the author of the text who gives it its title and does not let his narrator speak the name of the unnamable. But like any narrator, Beckett is also in search of the origin of the name. He can no more tell whether the voice of Le prononcer sans le prononcer. L'oublier en l'appelant, en (se) le rappelant, ce qui revient a appeler ou se rappeler l'autre..."

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his creations create or are created by his own voice than his narrator can tell whether he is one of the creations he has named, such as Mahood or Worm. In a moment of wishful thinking, the narrator believes he has found the unnamable by referring to his opposite self in the third person singular: ...there I am the absentee again, it's his turn again now, he who neither speaks nor listens, who has neither body nor soul, it's something else he has, he must have something, he must be somewhere, he is made of silence, there's a pretty analysis, he's in the silence, he's the one to be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the one to speak, but he can't speak, then I could stop, I'd be he, I'd be the silence, I'd be back in the silence, we'd be reunited, his story the story to be told, but he has no story, he hasn't been in story, it's not certain, he's in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable... (Beckett 1955: 413).

Hence, the unnamable can only be defined apophatically, by speaking about what it is not, in a deconstructive operation similar to Derrida's denial that deconstruction is a form of negative theology. Where this dichotomy between the unnamable and the ineffable, or unspeakable, becomes problematic for Derrida is through a sentence appearing in Racism's Last Word {Le Dernier Mot du racisme). Written in 1983 as part of a catalogue for the exhibition Art contre/against Apartheid, Racism's Last Word is Derrida's deconstruction of the word, apartheid, and its referents. The artistic and literary works of this exhibition were to become part of an itinerant museum that would eventually be presented to the government of South Africa when apartheid had been abolished. In the introduction to this essay, Derrida writes: Apartheid - may that remain the name from now on, the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many. May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the memory of man. A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this exhibition. A t once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and takes a chance with time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager. Without counting on any present moment, it offers only a foresight in painting, very close to silence, and the rearview vision of a future for which apartheid will be the name of something finally abolished. Confined and abandoned then to this silence of memory, the name will resonate all by itself, reduced to the state of a term in disuse. The thing it names today will no longer be. But hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of the unnamable? (Derrida 1985: 291).

Derrida goes on in the article to assert that apartheid represents the culmination of a set of discourses based on binary categories originating in European thought. These categories cannot be abolished for now and any discourse that attempts to abolish them risks being drawn into the order of law and transgression, which is itself based on the very categories that one is attempting to dispell. In Against Postmodernism, Alex Calinicos criticizes Derrida's position, stating that for Derrida the "unnamable is the alternative to apartheid" and that, therefore, all "resistance to apartheid must remain inarticulate" (Calinicos 1989: 78). Calinicos

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dismisses the essay for being a set of "windy banalities" (Calinicos 1989: 79) and echoes the critics of the Far-Left who maintain that Derrida's political opinions do not rise above "a fairly commonplace left liberalism"(Calinicos 1989: 79). This seems to be a response based on a programmatic misreading of Derrida's use of the unnamable. I would suggest that what is implied by this unnamable is that apartheid is the archival record of the unspeakable. To examine this claim, it is first necessary to go back and re-differentiate the unspeakable from the unnamable. The unspeakable does not refer to an incapacity to put something into words, but rather to the incapacity to put something into speech. The unspeakable bears the traces of pression (pressure, impression, expression, repression, suppression, oppression), thereby implicating itself in its own chain of moral, ethical and political signifiers. It hints at the play of power and resistance grounded in violations of and violence to the laws of probability. It also raises the question, alluded to earlier, of the responsibility for speaking or not speaking. A literary example of the difference between the unnamable and the unspeakable offers itself in Thomas Bernhard's novel, Der Untergeher. The title of this work is a neologism that resists translation without being untranslatable. In English, I've decided to render it this time as The Goer Under. The German, untergehen, is a verb whose primary use is in the phrase, the sun goes down, but it can also mean, to flounder, to drown, to decline, to ruin one's self, as with alcohol, or to die; it can also be used passively, as in a voice that is drowned out by other noise. All of these connotations apply to the character of Wertheimer who bears this name, the goer under, as an epithet. Wertheimer, Glenn Gould and the narrator are all concert pianists who meet while attending a master class taught by Vladimir Horowitz in Salzburg. It is Gould who calls Wertheimer the goer under. The narrator recalls this event as one of the possible causes of Wertheimer's suicide. Unlike the narrator, who abandons his career as a pianist on hearing Gould play the Goldberg Variations, Wertheimer takes up a mediocre career on the concert circuit. Eventually, he too stops playing and sells his piano. Wertheimer has always lived with his sister whom he has oppressed with guilt into sacrificing her life to serve his career. When she finally leaves him to get married, Wertheimer commits suicide, ostensibly as an act of revenge. For the narrator, though, it is the culmination of a process that was begun by Gould having called Wertheimer the goer under at their very first encounter: Glenn Gould hit Wertheimer dead on with his goer under, I thought to myself, not because Wertheimer was hearing this word for the first time, but because Wertheimer, without even knowing this word, goer under, had long been familiar with the concept, goer under, but which Glenn Gould had spoken in a decisive moment, I thought. We say one word and annihilate a person, without the person annihilated by us being aware of the fact at the moment we said the annihilating word (Bernhard 1983: 218). 2

2

My translation of the following: "...Glenn hat Wertheimer mit seinem Untergeher tödlich getroffen, dachte ich, nicht weil Wertheimer, ohne dieses Wort Untergeher zu kennen, mit dem

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Gould's act of naming, of neologising, of pronouncing upon Wertheimer bears a negating effect that contains the trace of a responsibility for having been spoken at that moment. Is Gould responsible for calling Wertheimer the goer under and saying it to his face or is Wertheimer responsible for being a goer under, for knowing it, but for not speaking it to himself ? It is not because it is a neologism that Gould's speech act affects Wertheimer. It is the speaking of the neologism that over-determines Wertheimer's subjectivity. Gould does not name the unnamable with his neologism, for there is no unnamable — neologisms are simply traces of words always already spoken, forgotten, and recalled in an alien context, an alien time: ... such dead-end people like Wertheimer, who were seen through right away by Glenn Gould as goers under and dead-end people, and who was the first to be called a goer under by Glenn Gould, in that careless but thoroughly open Canadian-American way in which Glenn Gould expressed himself so fully unabashedly, and which the others also thought, but had never expressed, because this careless and open way wasn't their way, I said to myself; that, sure, they had always seen the goer under in Wertheimer, but they had never had the nerve to call him the goer under (Bernhard 1983: 209-210).3

Gould is able to express what has been resisted, or suppressed by the polite society of Wertheimer's European peers, by the authority of a discourse based on hierarchical binaries of respect and disrespect for the authority of genius. As the narrator ponders whether or not Wertheimer would have killed himself had Gould never spoken this name, the probabilities weigh in favor of Wertheimer otherwise ending his life with the delusions of grandeur that made him cause suffering to others. The narrator himself is able by the end of his monologue to start writing his long over-due book on Gould, because he can include Wertheimer's story as an exemplum of the responsibilities of speaking incumbent even on an artist as authoritative as Gould.

Begriff Untergeher längst vertraut gewesen war, Glenn Gould aber in einem entscheidenden Augenblick das Wort Untergeher ausgesprochen hat, dachte ich. Wir sagen ein Wort und vernichten einen Menschen, ohne dass dieser von uns vernichtete Mensch in dem Augenblick, in welchem wir das ihn vernichtende Wort aussprechen, von dieser tödlichen Tatsache Kenntnis hat, dachte ich." 3

My translation of the following: "...solchen Sackgassenmenschen wie Wertheimer, der von Glenn Gould schon im ersten Augenblick als solcher Sackgassenmensch und Untergeher durchschaut war und auch von Glenn Gould als erster als Untergeher bezeichnet worden ist auf diese rücksichtslose, aber durch und durch offene kanadisch-amerikanische Weise, dass Glenn Gould völlig ungeniert ausgesprochen hat, was die Anderen auch dachten, aber niemals ausgesprochen haben, weil ihnen diese rücksichtslose und offene, aber doch heilsame amerikanisch-kanadische Art nicht eigen ist, sagte ich mir, dass sie alle zwar schon immer in Wertheimer den Untergeher gesehen, sich aber nicht getraut haben, ihn auch als Untergeher zu bezeichnen..."

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In another literary example of the unspeakable, one closer in context to Derrick's essay on Apartheid, J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K\s a textual simulator of the unspeakable circumstances of Apartheid in South Africa. Coetzee describes the peregrinations of Michael K through a countryside scarred by civil war. On the way, Michael and his mother must pass illegally through roadblocks set up to control the movement of the population. The hard-ships experienced as a result of this leads to Michael's mother dying before they reach their destination. Michael continues, however, travelling across a landscape covered in the English, Afrikaans and Bantu names of South Africa, a landscape also replete with the unspeakable signs of Apartheid. What is lacking in Coetzee's description is any mention of race, of the skin color of his characters, of the binary system of racial discrimination imposed on, or by, the people Michael meets on the way. Coetzee's description of the travel restrictions provides an example of this lack: Crossing the city on his way to work, K rubbed shoulders every day with the army of the homeless and destitute who in the last years had taken over the streets of the central district, begging or theiving or waiting in lines at the relief agencies or simply sitting in the corridors of public buildings to keep warm, finding shelter by night in the gutted warehouses around the docks or the blocks and blocks of derelict premises above Bree Street where police never ventured a foot. During the year before the authorities had finally imposed controls on personal movement, Greater Cape Town had been flooded with people from the countryside looking for work of any kind (Coetzee 1983: 13-14).

Were it not for the name of the city, this could just as well be a description of Postwar Berlin. What makes the ellipsis a sign of the unspeakable, is the knowledge most readers would have that in Apartheid-era South African Whites were free from the travel restrictions that applied to Blacks and Coloureds. Michael's face does bear the physical sign of an inferiority caused by the "disfigurement" (Coetzee 1983: 4) of his harelip, which leads to his oppression by the authorites. The speech impediment this gives Michael eventually becomes the means by which he resists his oppressors. And so through the elliptical treatment of Apartheid as experienced by Michael K, Coetzee's novel avoids censorship and the unspeakable gets spoken. Thus, in the case of the Apartheid that was in force when Coetzee published The Life and Times of Michael K, the unspeakable is that which by dint of its being unspeakable had to be spoken. This need not always be the case, as the unspeakable may also be that which is better left unspoken for the time being, as in Bernhard's Der Untergeher. This notion of the unspeakable, then, appears in Derrida's works, without being spoken, is evidenced by his critique of Apartheid in Racism's Last Word. In choosing the unnamable as a metaphor for the unspeakable, however, Derrida priveleges the onto-theological over the ethical. Where the unnamable is the absolute impossibility outside the text that gives rise to "differance", the unspeakable represents the choices to be made between engaging in or disengaging from discourses of hegemony and resistance. Beckett demonstrates in The Unnamable that the search for

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silence beyond the paradox of the unnamable and beyond the responsibility of the unspeakable is as impossible as it is necessary. And so, having practiced a bit of post-theory, I hope I have been able to show some of the possibilities available for using literature to read theory, to poke and prod if need be at the metaphors used by theory. The literary text theorizes itself and when held against the literariness of theory offers perhaps new possibilities for writing, while making us more acutely aware of the vagaries of reading. For practitioners of literary criticism to adopt a position whereby 'post-theory' is the withdrawal from theory is to practise the unspeakable in such a way that suppresses the literary text's theorizing of itself. It is also to deny the libidinal investment that readers and students have in exploring the onto-political possibilities for change that literature offers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckett, Samuel. (1955). Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Groove Press. Begam, Robert. (1992). "Splitting the Differance: Beckett, Derrida and the Un namable", in: Modem Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4/92. p. 373-374. Bernhard, Thomas. (1983). Der Untergeher. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Calinicos, Alex. (1989). Against Post-Modernism: A Marxist Critique. Oxford: Polity Press. Coetzee, J.M. (1983). Life and Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin. Derrida, Jacques. (1993). Sauf le nom. Paris: Galilée. — . (1992). "Post-scriptum", in: Coward, Harold/Toby Foshay (eds.). Derrida and Negative Theology. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 302. -—. (1989). "Denials: How to Avoid Speaking", in: Budick, Sanford/Wolfgang Iser (eds.). Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Trans. Alan Bass. New York: Columbia University Press. -—. (1987). "Dénégations: Comment ne pas parler", in: Psyché: Inventions de l'autre. Paris: Galilée, p. 74. — . (1985). "Racism's Last Word", in: Critical Inquiry 12. (Autumn 1985). Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 291. -—. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robbins, Bruce. (1996). "Literature, Localism and Love", in: E-zine SURFACES. Vol. 4, p. 14-15. (http://elias.ens.fr/Surfaces/vol4/Robbins.html).

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AUTHORS OF THIS VOLUME Jacques M. Chevalier is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa. Publications by Prof. Chevalier cover fields ranging from Latin American Anthropology to semiotics and biblical studies. His most recent books include A Postmodem Revelation: Signs of Astrology and the Apocalypse (1997), A Land without Gods: Process Theory and the Mexican Nahuas, and Semiotics, Romanticism, and the Sciptures (1990). Currently working on a book addressing the interface between semiotics, neuropsychology, and postmodern philosophy. Craig DeQuetteville did his M.A. in English (1987) at Carleton. Then he lived in Baden-Baden, Germany, where he worked teaching Business English, as a translator and as a partner in an Import-Export firm until 1995. He is presently working on a dissertation comparing the works of Samuel Beckett and Elias Canetti. Craig DeQuetteville has presented papers on Lawrence Durrell, Samuel Beckett and Pope Joan. Fernando de Toro, Full Professor of Literary Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity in the Department of English at the University of Manitoba, where presently he is the Dean of Graduate Studies. From 1985 until 1998 he was Professor in the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University, where he was also the Director of the Centre for Research on Comparative Literature Studies. He is also Director of a collective project on the history of Latin American theatre (funded by SSHRCC since 1984). Former President (1988-1992) of the Instituto Internacional de Teoría y Crítica del Teatro Latinoamericano, he is currently Honourary President, after founding and directing (1988-1992) the international theatre journal La Escena Latinoamericana. His numerous publications include translations, as well as articles on Latin American theatre, anthropology and semiotics of theatre, and Post-Modernity. He has published several books, including a bibliography on Hispanoamerican theatre and theatre semiotics. Some of his publications are Brecht en el teatro latinoamericano (1984 and 1987), Theatre semiotics (1995) and Borders and Margins: Post-Modemism and PostColonialism (1995). In Print, Intersecciones: Ensayos sobre teatro (1999). He is currently preparing a book on post-modern, post-colonial and post-feminist fiction and theory. Patrick Imbert is Full Professor at the University of Ottawa. He has published four books: Sémiotique et description balsacienne (1978), Roman québécois contemporain et clichés (1983), L'Objectivité de la presse (1989), Le reél la porte (Short stories, 1997). He was the editor of a special issue of Carrefour pertaining to Mensonge et désinformation and co-editor (with Marie Couillard) of Les discours du Nouveau Monde au XIXe siècle au Canada français et en Amérique Latine/Los discursos del Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XIX en el Canadá francófono y en América latina. He also

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participated in the elaboration of The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Ed. I. Makaryk). Penelope Ironstone-Catterall is a doctoral candidate in the School of Social And Political Thought at York University, Toronto, where she also teaches Cultural Sociology in the Dept. of Sociology. Her dissertation, entitled Crisis, Trauma, and Testimony: The Work of Mourning in the 'Age ofAIDS', deals with the social, cultural, political, and ethical implications of epidemics. Specializing in contemporary continental social, political, and literary theory, the philosophy of medicine, and psychoanalysis, her current research also involves literary testimony to the traumas of the Holocaust. Anne Koenen is Full Professor of American Studies (Literature) at Leipzig University, Germany, and vice-president of the German Association for American Studies. Fields of research include African-American, Women's, and fantastic literature. Currently working on a survey of African-American women's Literature, and on Thomas R. Dixon's rhetorical use of miscegenation. Mark Salber Phillips is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Francesco Guicciardini; the historian's craft (1977), Marco Parenti. A Life in Medici Florence (1987) and a forthcoming book on historical writing and the Scottish Enlightenment, entitled Society and Sentiment; genres of History in Britain, 1740-1840. Barry Rutland teaches in the Dept. of English and the School of Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University. He is director of the Centre for Textual Analysis, Discourse, and Culture (TADAC), a group dedicated to research in semiotics. He is currently involved in an international project on the emergent nature of semiosis from prebiological levels of information. Henry W. Sullivan teaches in the Dept. of Romance Languages. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, Prof. Sullivan has held Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His fields of specialization are the Classical Spanish Drama of the Golden Age, Golden Age prose, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in its relation to poetics and post-Christian theology. He is currently completing a study entitled The Anatomy of Deity: On God as the Transformation of Nothing. He has received a Senior NEH Fellowship (1998-99) to research the project The Rise of Anglo-American Hispanism: The Trials of Cervantes and Calderon in the Forging of a Discipline, 1612-2000. Mario J. Valdes, Northern Telecom Professor of Iberoamerican Studies at the University of Toronto, is past president of the Modern Language Association. Among his recent publications are Reflection and Imagination: A Ricoeur Reader on Literary Theory and Criticism (1991), Worldmaking: A Study of the Truth-Claim in Literature

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(1992), La Interpretación abierta: Introducción a la hermenéutica literaria contemporánea (1995), Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense: Studies on Cinema, Literature and Cultural History (1998). His present research consists of the direction of the Oxford History of Latin American Literature. Gabriel Weisz is Full Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His fields of specialization are Literature, Anthropology, Feminism and Theatre. In comparative Literature he has focused on postmodernism, postcolonialism and most of the poststructuralist theoreticians. He is currently working on the differences and links between literature and anthropology.

TCCL-TEORÍA Y CRÍTICA DE LA CULTURA Y LITERATURA TCCL - THEORY AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE 1. Edmond Cros: Ideosemas y Morfogénesis del Texto. Literatura española e hispanoamericana. Frankfurt/M. 1992 2. Karl Alfred Bliiher/Alfonso de Toro (eds.): Jorge Luis Borges. Variaciones interpretativas sobre sus procedimientos literarios y bases epistemológicas. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 21995 3. Alfonso de Toro: Los laberintos del tiempo. Temporalidad y narración como estrategia textual y lectora en la novela contemporánea (G. García Márquez, M. Vargas Llosa, J. Rulfo, A. Robbe-Grillet). Frankfurt/M. 1992 4. Daniel Castillo Durante: Ernesto Sàbato. La littérature et les abattoirs de la modernité. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1995 5. Fernando de Toro/Alfonso de Toro (eds.): Borders and Margins. PostColonialism and Post-Modernism. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1995 6. Alton Kim Robertson: The Grotesque Interface. Deformity, Dissolution. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1996

Debasement,

7. Jacques Joset: Historias cruzadas de novelas hispanoamericanas. Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1995 8. Eckhard Höfner/Konrad Schoell (Hrsg.): Erzählte Welt. Studien zur Narrativik in Frankreich, Spanien und Lateinamerika. Festschrift für Leo Pollmann. Frankfurt/M. 1996 9. Edna Aizenberg: Borges, el tejedor del Aleph. Del hebraísmo al poscolonialismo, Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1997 10. Jacques M. Cevalier: A Postmodern Revelation: Signs ofAstrology Apocalypse. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1997

and the

11. Alfonso de Toro (ed.): Postmodernidad y Postcolonialidad. Breves reflexiones sobre Latinoamérica. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1997 12. Wladimir Krysinski: La novela en sus modernidades. A favor y en contra de Bajtin. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1998 13. Leo Pollmann: La separación de los estilos. Para una historia de la conciencia literaria argentina. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1998 14. Patrick Imbert: The Permanent Transition. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1998 15. Fernando de Toro (Ed.): Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space. Frankfurt/M./Madrid 1999 Iberoamericana de Libros y Ediciones, S.L. c/Amor de Dios, 1 E - 28014 Madrid Tel.: (+34) 91-429 35 22 Fax: (+34) 91-429 53 97 E-mail: [email protected] http://www.readysoft.es/iberoamericanalibros

Vervuert Verlagsgesellschaft Wielandstr. 40 D - 60318 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: (+49) 69-597 46 17 Fax: (+49) 69-597 87 43 E-mail: [email protected] http://www.readysoft.es/iberoamericanalibros