Re-reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and Its Hospitalities 0739177257, 9780739177259

Table of contents :
Contents
About This Book
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mourning’s Number • Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer
I: Mournings
1. Absolute Mourning: It Is Jacques You Mourn For • J. Hillis Miller
2. Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas, and the Third • Derek Attridge
II: Hospitalities
3. The Disjointed City: Materializing Mourning and Forgiveness in the Reconstruction of Beirut • Jonathan Hall
4. The Haunting of (un)Burial: Mourning the “Unknown” in Whitman’s America • Lindsay Tuggle
5. Elegizing John Wordsworth: Commemoration and Lyric • J. Mark Smith
6. City of Ghosts: Mourning and Justice in The Sixth Sense • Warwick Mules
7. Deconstruction and Democracy in the Neoliberal Turn • Stefan Mattessich
8. Cryptonymic Secretion: On the Kind-ness of Strangers • Laurie Johnson
9. Hospitality to Trauma: Ethics after Auschwitz • Shannon Burns
10. ●: Hospitality and Its Discontents (As Such) • Tony Thwaites
Bibliography
Index
Contributors

Citation preview

Re-reading Derrida

Re-reading Derrida Perspectives on Mourning and Its Hospitalities Edited by Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN Cloth: 978-0-7391-7725-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents About This book Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Mourning’s Number Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer

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I: Mournings 1. Absolute Mourning: It Is Jacques You Mourn For J. Hillis Miller 2. Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas, and the Third Derek Attridge

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II: Hospitalities 3. The Disjointed City: Materializing Mourning and Forgiveness in the Reconstruction of Beirut Jonathan Hall 4. The Haunting of (un)Burial: Mourning the “Unknown” in Whitman’s America Lindsay Tuggle 5. Elegizing John Wordsworth: Commemoration and Lyric J. Mark Smith 6. City of Ghosts: Mourning and Justice in The Sixth Sense Warwick Mules 7. Deconstruction and Democracy in the Neoliberal Turn Stefan Mattessich 8. Cryptonymic Secretion: On the Kind-ness of Strangers Laurie Johnson 9. Hospitality to Trauma: Ethics after Auschwitz Shannon Burns 10. ●: Hospitality and Its Discontents (As Such) Tony Thwaites Bibliography Index About the Contributors

43 61 75 91 103 117 131 141 159 167 171

About This Book Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer

This book had its beginnings in a conference we convened at the University of Queensland in 2007, which set out to explore the two terms of the title, particularly through the work of Jacques Derrida. Its two keynote speakers were J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, whose addresses head the book. Rather than put the conference papers together into a loosely thematic collection, we decided to push the process a bit further: to use the very form of the book as a way of exploring the thematics of hospitality, and the ways in which disciplines open themselves to one another, extending lines of flight across those archipelagos. We chose papers that in their original form, as delivered at the conference, seemed to us also to say something about this. We then asked the authors of those papers to rework them extensively according to two rules of the game: Every paper other than the two keynotes was to address, in a substantial way, at least one of those keynotes and its arguments. Every paper other than the keynotes was also to address, in a substantial way, at least two of the other papers and their arguments. We distributed papers, and waited eagerly for what we would get back. We had, of course, to give the whole thing a thorough final edit: as we had expected, in several cases the chapter that X addressed was no longer quite the chapter X had read, and in some cases had been changed by its own author’s reading of X. What we hope we have generated with this is a complex and shifting web of interrelations among the papers. Each is anchored by the keynotes, whose principal concerns thus become refracted through a number of other contexts, interests, and disciplinary areas. In travelling out beyond their initial considerations according to the rules, each of the papers finds itself the host of others, hosted by others, in a mutual exchange. Engagements recur, each time refracted, developed and questioned under the pressures of the specific and changing conjunctures.

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About this book

The result is, we believe, unique in its collaborative cross-referencing. From its initial engagement with Miller’s and Attridge’s work on Derrida and mourning, it moves across a wide variety of interests—poetry, the novel, film, the politics of the memorial, neoliberalism, trauma, and psychoanalysis. The chapters are cumulative and interlocking, but not necessarily sequential or thematic in their grouping. They need not be read in the present order, and indeed, whichever way we might have ordered them, a given chapter would always stand to refer to another later in the book. Put them together, and what this book seeks to show is not that a certain general body of theoretical work can be applied in all sorts of areas (which would be no more than obvious, and of little interest), but that from the outset, theoretical work itself takes on its meaning only in its grappling with the specific, the singular, even the unique: chaque fois unique. Miller’s and Attridge’s essays, after all, have at their heart the loss of a friend. T.T. and J.S.

Acknowledgments The 2007 conference out of which this book grew was made possible with the support of the School of English, Media Studies and Art History, and the Faculty of Arts, at the University of Queensland. The Brooks Fellowship brought Derek Attridge to us, and strategic funding from the vice-chancellor helped bring us Hillis Miller. Our thanks go to all those colleagues and postgraduates who helped us with the running of the conference: Adam Atkinson, Kirsty Brash, Adam Cholinski, Abi Dennis, Philippa Haly-Summerfield, Yen Ying Lai, Natalie Owen-Jones, Morgan Pulver, Marian Redmond, Lesa Scholl, Chris Tiffin, Mary Trabucco, Andrew Williamson, and Timothy Wong. Thanks also go to Angela Smyth, who helped us in the early stages of the editing. A version of Hillis Miller’s “Absolute Mourning” has been published in his For Derrida (Bronx, NY: Fordham UP, 2009). A version of Derek Attridge’s “Posthumous Infidelity” has appeared in his Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010). Both are reproduced here by kind permission.

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Introduction: Mourning’s Number Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer

There is something strange about the number of mourning. What one mourns is of course always something singular, irreplaceable: the friend whose like will not be seen again. Nothing else will fill that gap, for filling it in would be a clear infidelity to the friend one mourns. Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Mourning is the process of being true to the friend by living with that gap. The space of fidelity, of the friend, is empty. In life, one is always in willing debt to the friend. The friend may, of course, call in the debt and ask for something in the name of friendship; but that, of course, does not cancel the debt but renew it, and its mutuality. Or if it does cancel the debt, that’s the moment we realize with a shock that the friendship has now gone. There is no way out of the debt that would not also be a way out of the friendship: every move the friend makes to pay back or disclaim or refuse that debt is either the end of friendship or its renewal by escalation. It is tempting to say that with the death of the friend, the debt becomes infinite and forever unpayable, but that is not quite right: friendship itself is from the outset based on the possibility of an indefinite escalation, and all of its routines are with the purpose of avoiding any settlement of accounts. Death means that there is no longer any possibility of the friend’s response, so the responsibility for that response, for that continuing escalation and non-settlement of accounts that the friend so willingly performed, now passes to the one who mourns. The debt remains infinite. Mourning is this process of internalizing the debt, where what one takes on, within oneself, is not the memorialized and essential nature of the person (whatever that might be—who could know it?), but the sheer and empty overbidding, and the responsibility for it, as response. Zero and infinity, 0 and ∞. The one falls into the other, becomes the starting place for the other. If the friend one mourns is singular, this is in something like the mathematical sense of a singularity, a point where the value of a function zooms out to infinity. Singular is different from single: what the singular involves is not a unity but an infinity, an endless wager or set of guarantees and 1

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promises on what is to come. The singular has, irreducibly and as one of its dimensions, the nature of a speech act. It calls for a response. The singular thus has nothing to do with the individual: in its very uniqueness, it divides the individual, makes the individual many, installs at its heart an incessant exchange of call and response. If the object of one’s mourning is always singular, what number can we give that mourning? The vagaries of English grammar catch it nicely: that act of mourning is grammatically neither quite singular nor plural. Neither the singular indefinite article, a mourning, nor the plural, mournings, quite work in English. Mourning’s number is instead collective, shared beyond count, repeating itself in a strange hospitality. It is telling, then, that both Miller and Attridge should quite independently have chosen to work on a repeating phrase as a way into interrogating these links of mourning and hospitality. For Miller, it is the phrase “absolute mourning” that runs like a “red thread” throughout Derrida’s book on his own friend, Jean-Luc Nancy. For Attridge, it is a set of variations on the phrase “Levinas would not say it this way,” which runs like a refrain through Derrida’s elegy for Levinas. Both of them are phrases whose meaning is not at all obvious. What is an absolute mourning? What does it mean to attach Levinas’s imprimatur to something and note that Levinas wouldn’t have said it this way? Each essay will carefully unpack these questions, paying meticulous attention to the arguments in which those phrases are embedded, and to the contexts and micro-movements of its development: Miller and Attridge are, as always, superb close readers. But the starting point for both of them is that, before we might know anything of what these respective phrases might mean, we can draw much from the bare fact that they repeat. Freud, after all, reminds us that the very act of repetition is itself telling, as if no single saying will ever be enough. Repetition might be the site of an anxiety. By this, we do not mean that what Miller and Attridge are doing is finding a flaw in Derrida’s argument, some moment at which it tries to patch itself up hoping the gap won’t be noticed. On the contrary, what they are doing is, precisely, seeing how Derrida’s argument works, and in ways that are themselves profoundly Derridean. Derrida’s method of reading is, after all, to find those parts of a text at which what it does is strictly and demonstrably part of what it says and yet escapes it in all sorts of ways. This is not a flaw in the text, but its fertility, the way in which it opens up to a future, to a history. It is, as deconstruction so often attests, an attempt to be faithful to its text in order to take it somewhere else, a way of drawing different conclusions in order to be faithful. That the text would not say it this way is something like deconstruction in a phrase. We could say—and again, neither Miller nor Attridge will put it in quite these terms—that these points are symptomatic, in the Lacanian sense: they are those moments where sign and signified meaning give way to the underpinning and generative economy of the signifier. These two germinal essays, then, focus on repeated phrases in Derrida’s work, and focus on them in a highly Derridean fashion while drawing other conclusions than Derrida’s from his very argument. Their overall question, after all, is nothing less than How does one repeat Derrida? How does one remain

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true to the absent friend when, as Attridge points out quoting Derrida’s own naming of the problem, one is faced with the impossible choice between only quoting the other or avoiding all quotation, betraying the dead one by offering nothing oneself or by making the dead one disappear again behind one’s own words. “We are left then with having to do and not do both at once, with having to correct one infidelity by the other” (The Work of Mourning 24). (Attridge 24, below) The moment of choice is an impossible one, but it sets a complex temporality in motion. Miller describes the thread of that phrase “absolute mourning” as “extremely compressed and enigmatic” (9, below), leaving all sorts of things in suspense to reveal themselves at a later date, in a text that is peppered with its own repeated phrases along the lines of “just what is . . .?” (13) and “whatever that may be” (11): The series, one might say, is like one of those films that returns again and again to the same scene, in this case a scene of mourning, until finally the viewer is able to figure out what was going on in it, but “invisibly,” the first time she saw it. (9) The seriality is retrospective, its metonyms only gradually revealing themselves as what will have already clustered around that absent center. Miller’s (and Derrida’s) move is to say that this seriality and retrospectivity are precisely what is involved in what we can call, for want of a better term, soul, or heart itself as the name for that absent center. Psyche ist ausgedehnt, says a late note of Freud’s that Nancy, Derrida, and Miller all cite, weiss nichts davon. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it. If The text would not say it in this way is deconstruction in a nutshell, is not Freud’s phrase in turn the late, belated kernel of psychoanalysis? The unconscious psyche is precisely the extension of such a string of metonyms which name only indirectly and catachrestically. What it does not know is not what is hidden from display, buried somewhere deep out of sight, but is precisely what is displayed in full sight, and unknown because its extension (elsewhere, into the future, what that future will say about what that past will have been) is in principle incalculable. One thing we have to say about psyche, then—this unconscious, this soul or heart—is that it does not exist. This is not to say that it is just some metaphysical illusion we had best do without, but to mark that it is the name for an absence: and not just the absence of something that would be present somewhere else just out of reach, but an absolute absence, absence itself. This absoluteness, this insistence, means that while we have to say that psyche does not exist, we have to say just as forcefully that there is psyche. Absence is not something that has existence, but there is absence. Perhaps we can put that there is most succinctly as a double negative: we are not without psyche or soul, where soul resides in

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that hairsbreadth of difference in which the doubled negative refuses to fold seamlessly into the positive: psyche as not not. This not not is precisely a description of metonymy. A metonym for a term is not that term, but that single negative is not enough: if it were, anything would be metonymic for everything else. A metonym is also not not that term, not just not it, without ever quite being it. This is what Derrida talks of as the “substitution of nonsubstitutables” (qtd 15)—or, to be precise, it is not not that, because it belongs itself in the same string of nonsubstitutable substitutions. So psyche is a name for this metonymics. Like the cogito for Descartes, it is not this content or that content, any possible one of which could have been placed there by the malin génie in order to deceive me, but an empty and ultimately unthinkable “I think” without attributes. At the heart of the “I” there is only my profound absence, my death. What can it be that “I think about . . . all the time,” even beyond the grasp of the malin génie’s wiles, if not that death? All of my thinking turns about that absolute absence, not in the thematic sense (as if it were merely the topic on which I think), but in a structural sense: there is no thought that is not that chain of catachreses. Psyche is not the heart’s fullness or the “real self” of pop psychology, but the empty set of symbolic logic, that set of all elements that are not equivalent to themselves. This is why it can only be mourned, and mourned absolutely. What one mourns for, one’s own death, is not some future event in which what is now present will disappear from the world, but psyche’s absolute absence, now and at every moment, all the time. And if psyche is this necessarily endless extension out into metonymy and prosthesis that is absolute mourning, it is thus equally necessarily an endless hospitality, opening out onto all sorts of other things that are not not where it began. The moment of hospitality is when the hearth is no longer not the guest’s, but transformed into not not the guest’s (which, as any guest knows, does not mean the guest’s). Levinas, then, says Derrida (says Attridge) does not quite say it this way. It is not that this is what Levinas says, or that it is not what he says, but that it is not not what he says. It is in that hairsbreadth that the knots of hospitality are tied.

I Jonathan Hall’s chapter takes us to Beirut and the legacies of civil war, as manifested in public spaces that, in three very different ways, seek to memorialize. Hall argues that the public space of mourning is only too readily “used to the lament of the vulnerability of one’s own community at the hands of murderous others, and so it is all too quickly co-opted by political and juridical measures that are fundamentally violent” (45–46, below). Nevertheless, he argues, such spaces cannot be entirely saturated by such a politics, retaining within them the necessary possibilities of other hospitalities. What would, or could, a public space of forgiveness look like? How would it work, as an “ungrounding” of politics that is predicated on and can never forget politics? What other possibilities might it tentatively open up?

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Lindsay Tuggle follows this with an examination of some aspects of the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. Like Hall, she is engaged with the question of public memorialization, but she focuses that through two different lenses. Walt Whitman’s mourning for the unknown Civil War dead in Leaves of Grass is a repeated questioning of how one is to memorialize those who remain phantasmatic: unknown and unaccounted for. This is the occasion for a conjunction with Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic work on the phantom, that “memory . . . buried without a legal burial place” (Abraham and Torok, qtd. 63, below). What they call a crypt is a defensive formation that operates a more radical refusal than the failed mourning Freud saw behind the depressive states of melancholia. Tuggle asks whether we can see the crypt not just as a subjective structure, but at work in much of the energy of public memorialization, with its “madness of an amnesiac fidelity, of a forgetful hypermnesia” (Derrida, Memoires 66; qtd. 71, below). The chapter concludes with an examination of the rather different and Whitmanian mourning that is suggested by a New Orleans site-specific art installation, Jana Napoli’s Floodwall. Drawing on Wordsworth’s elegies for his brother John, who was drowned at sea, Mark Smith’s chapter develops the previous investigation of the “memoryplace” into an argument about the basic structures of address that are embodied in the lyric. “No lyric,” he argues, “is ever the exclusive record of a lone, punctual subjectivity, but is rather a script for speaking that travels across the bodies and psyches of generations” (85, below). To take up the poem to speak it is to affirm a willingness to repeat that matches and itself repeats the essential movement of mourning. The third to whom the poem swerves is not the ostensible addressee or a generalized posterity, but the one who takes up its speech. For the Walter Benjamin of “Critique of Violence,” justice is ineradicable. It returns, even in the very places where the rule of law fails to see the injustices it produces in justice’s very name, and even if only as a ghost. Warwick Mules’s chapter turns to this spectrality of justice, and the mourning that responds to its injunctions. M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Sixth Sense is, however, not just an example whose content is this ghostly justice. As Mules argues, the very technics of film act out that Levinasian intervention of the “third,” which shifts the question of response and responsibility from the ethical, the face-to-face, and the personal, into a more genuinely political and mediated dimension. Stefan Mattessich’s chapter examines the framework of these questions of hospitality and mourning in the context of geopolitics since 9/11. Beginning with Derrida’s commentary in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason and moving through a number of salient issues that have structured the earlier chapters, Mattessich finds himself asking, with Alain Badiou, “whether or not there is any such thing as an ethico-politics of mourning that would be more than a dissimulated politics of violence, insisting in the very practices of deconstruction” (110, below). The point of rupture here is in what Derrida, after Aristotle, calls the meros that is the scintillation between the individual as the unit of democratic calculation and as lost in this swarming and statistical mass.

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For Mattessich, this is not just the “in yourself in myself” of a touching, but an impasse that describes quite precisely the forms of a specifically neoliberalist power, to be dislodged only by the sort of formal and actantial break Badiou characterizes as event. Laurie Johnson also takes up Abraham and Torok, whose work Derrida both responds to and takes a critical swerve from. If, as Miller began by quoting him, Derrida claimed that “I think about nothing but death” (9, below), then Abraham and Torok “truck no such fascination with death, and indeed seem at times to be seeking to deny death any such currency” (118, below). Abraham and Torok were both Hungarian Jews who escaped the Holocaust; in their work, however, this meets with a complete and deep silence. Johnson suggests that their central contribution to psychoanalytic literature—the idea of the crypt, that enclave in the ego in which a lost object can be preserved and preclude mourning— describes precisely the structure of their own writing. Can, he asks, a crypt be shared as a transgenerational structure, much like the phantom they discuss elsewhere? If so, what are the implications of this for commentary on their work, and indeed for commentary in general? How then is one to respond to such a limit event as the Holocaust? Shannon Burns sees trauma as an ineradicable possibility that cannot be separated from those moments at which, for example, the work of mourning raises other possibilities than the affirmation of political community in its present forms. Trauma is the risk hospitality must run in order to be hospitality, the all-butunimaginable failure without which there can be no break with what Mattessich calls “the poetics of pathos and passivity” (113, below). The relation to the other, Jacques Lacan insists, is essentially sexed, and for Lacan there is notoriously no sexual relation. “Sexual difference” would thus be another name in the list of catachreses for “heart” that Miller sees at the heart of thought. It is precisely this absence of the sexual relation—of a given, necessary, and natural relationship between men and women—that means that all actual sexual relations are necessarily the improvisations of a never-ending hospitality and its responsibilities. It is also why, Tony Thwaites argues, James Joyce’s Ulysses is a comedy. Sexual difference is played out in Ulysses not only thematically but structurally, across the very strange gap between its final two chapters, one of which is Bloom’s, the other Molly’s. As the concluding chapter, in its own concluding section it also seeks to tie further knots in a number of the threads that have emerged in the weave of this book.

I: Mournings

Chapter One Absolute Mourning: It Is Jacques You Mourn For J. Hillis Miller

I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don’t go by without the imminence of the thing being there. I never stop analyzing the phenomenon of “survival” as the structure of surviving, it’s really the only thing that interests me, but precisely insofar as I do not believe that one lives on post mortem. And at bottom it is what commands everything— what I do, what I am, what I write, what I say. (Derrida and Ferraris, Taste 88)

What in the world could “absolute mourning” be? The term, along with just the word “mourning,” appears and disappears, at irregular, arhythmic, intervals in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, like a red thread woven into a complex tapestry. Let me try to follow that thread as best I can. The reappearances of references to mourning or absolute mourning are not just repetitions. The earlier surfacings of the red thread are extremely compressed and enigmatic, like tips of an iceberg, to mix metaphors. What, for example, is “exappropriation”? What does mourning have to do with prosthesis and “ecotechnicity”? Just what is “ecotechnicity” anyway? The string of references to mourning gradually elucidates the system of figures or concepts, figure-concepts, circling around what Derrida calls “absolute mourning.” The series, one might say, is like one of those films that returns again and again to the same scene, in this case a scene of mourning, until finally the viewer is able to figure out what was going on in it, but “invisibly,” the first time she saw it. The word “mourning” appears first in On Touching in the early sequence about Nancy’s essay, “Psyché.” “Mourning” is deuil in French, as in English “dole” and “doleful.” The Indo-European root was del-, meaning “to split, carve, cut,” as when we say, “I am cut up by his death.” Derrida’s pages are an exuberant commentary on Nancy’s exuberant little essay on Freud’s enigmatic late aphorism, Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nichts davon (Psyche is extended, 9

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knows nothing about it). The story from late antiquity of Cupid and Psyche is taken as an allegory of the soul, since “psyche,” after all, means “soul.” At one point Derrida imagines an amusing scene in which all the philosophers from Aristotle (author of Peri psuchēs, De Anima, On the Soul), all the way down through Kant, Hegel, and Maine de Biran, to Husserl, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, are standing anxiously around Psyche’s bedside like consulting doctors, or like participants in an academic conference on “The Soul.” More likely today the conference would be on “The Body,” but in the end this would come to the same thing. I shall show why. These learned persons are trying to decide whether Psyche is asleep or dead. She must be one or the other because she is “extended,” both in the sense that she is stretched out in inanimate motionlessness, exposed to their voyeuristic looking, in repetition of Cupid’s, and in the sense that, at the allegorical level of meaning, the soul, the psyche, is divided into separate parts that are not connected. The parts of the soul are, in Nancy’s phrase, partes extra partes, parts outside of parts. That is why the soul knows nothing about it. The soul is in a state of unknowing, weiss nichts davon. One part doesn’t know what the other parts are doing, thinking, or feeling. That means Psyche must be unconscious or dead. In fact she is dead, about to be entombed: “Nancy’s Psyche sees herself treated as a dead woman” (Touching 19). The soul is always already dead. That is why those learned doctorphilosophers are in mourning. They are in mourning, Derrida says, because Psyche, the soul, is an absence, a black hole, something that cannot be named directly. She, it, can only be named in perpetually displacing, sideways moving, metonymies, what Derrida calls “a combinatory play closing up around a vacant center” (16): They [the learned philosophers, no doubt all male] are there subject to her. They now hold onto her subject. They hold a session, a council, a conference on the subject of her. Just as they take up the places around this locus where nothing takes place but place, that is, extension, one can also sense that they take the place of—but of whom? Of what? What does this metonymy announce? For whom and for what is it in mourning, if every metonymy remains a sign of mourning? (Metonymies are in mourning, at least, for a proper sense or name. . . .) (17)

Mourning, as Derrida here defines it, is grief for an absence that cannot be incorporated, much less introjected. It is just total loss, absence, lack of a proper sense or name, here figured (but is it really a figure?) in Psyche’s extended body, asleep or dead. We are always in mourning for the absent or dead. It is the human condition. To be human is to be in mourning, or, rather, mourning is melancholic, since you can never get over it, put aside your black crape. To be human is to be perpetually in mourning for one’s own death: “I think about it all the time.” Mourning returns on the next page, in confirmation of what I have just said: In any case, it was time to start with a tableau of mourning, not mourning for someone, male or female, some determined living being, some singularity or other, but mourning life itself, and what in life is the very living thing, the

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living spring, the breath of life. Psyche is also a common proper name, designating the principle of life, breath, the soul, the animation of the animal. (18)

I have said that an academic conference on “The Soul” would be the same as an academic conference on “The Body,” of which there are so many these days. That is confirmed by a compressed passage on the next page that introduces Derrida’s enigmatic versions of prosthesis, technicity, and autoimmunity, in their interlaced complexity. After having said that Nancy’s Psyche sees herself (sees herself? I thought she was asleep or dead.) as a dead woman, Derrida goes on to say that this would have “some consequences” for our current discourses about “the body” (Leib), whether as “body proper” or as “flesh.” What would those consequences be? Derrida’s answer is to say that: The principle or drive to expropriation introduced there [he means in “the body,” such as Psyche’s extended body (JHM)] forthwith by death, the other or time, is certainly hard to tolerate, but, as we shall see, it’s less resistant to thought than what complicates an incarnation even more, which is to say, the prosthesis, the metonymic substitute, the autoimmune process, and technical survival. (19)

Derrida goes on immediately after this, in a separate paragraph, to add yet more terms to this metonymic series. “The technē of bodies, ecotechnics, and the intrusion of L’intrus are, for example, among the names that Nancy bestows on these” (19). “These” refers to “the prosthesis, the metonymic substitute,” etc., in the previous sentence. L’intrus is a book by Nancy that is, in part at least, about the “intrusion” into his body of the transplanted heart of another person, a person now dead, naturally. This sequence says a mouthful, as we say, since it brings in so many new, and, in the immediate context, somewhat inscrutable, terms. Just what does the passage mean? “The living body,” Derrida is saying, is not a self-enclosed unity. It is always already inhabited by death. Death installs within the body a drive to “expropriation,” by which Derrida means that the body is never a “body proper,” but is put beside itself, or outside itself, or made improper, “expropriated.” The body is taken possession of or is hollowed out, by death, the other, or time. Why just these three terms? Are they equivalents, or just sideways metonymies? All three are metonymies or catachreses for the unnamable something, in combinatory play closing up around a vacant center. Death, as Paul de Man said, is a name for a linguistic predicament (de Man 81). Nobody ever saw death face to face, or touched it. The other is similar to death in its absence, according to Derrida’s formula that tout autre est tout autre, every other is wholly other. Temporality, as later passages on mourning in On Touching make clear—in its pseudo-Heideggerian going forward into the future in order to come back to the past, with never a present present as such—is one phenomenological form the experience of the “vacant center” takes. To say, “I think about death all the time, every moment of every day,” is to define the moment-to-moment sequence of

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times for a given consciousness as a thinking about what eludes thinking, namely death. That’s “hard to tolerate,” says Derrida, but even more resistant to thought is the way incarnation, by which I suppose Derrida means the inhabitation of the body by a soul, is “complicated” by “the prosthesis, the metonymic substitute, the autoimmune process, and technical survival.” To this series of metonymic displacements Derrida then adds some of Nancy’s “names” for this absent center: “the technē of bodies, ecotechnics, and the intrusion of L’intrus.” All these words describe the way the body may be supplemented by prosthetic limbs, or transplanted hearts, in a way revealing that it is always expropriated by something foreign to it. The conjoined body and soul can survive “technically,” as in a heart transplant, but this means that it was always a survivor, since its body parts are replaceable. We just happen to have the heart that we do happen to have, plugged into our body. The body is always a technical apparatus, hence the term “ecotechnics.” There is no “the” body in the sense of an organic whole, Nancy says, and Derrida repeats this assertion after him. How many organs would have to be replaced before the “soul” would be different? One evidence for “technical survival” is the autoimmune process that Derrida takes in the late essay “Faith and Knowledge” as a powerful figure for the auto-destructive drive of any community, society, or nation (80). At the level of “literal” incarnation, however, the autoimmune process defines not just the immune system’s tendency to “reject” transplanted organs as foreign invaders, but, more disturbingly, the immune system’s unhappy propensity, in certain cases, to reject its own organs as foreign invaders, in an ecotechnical disaster. The warriors of the immune system are not clever enough to tell the difference between the body’s “own” or “proper” organs and foreign organs transplanted into the body. This is perhaps because, in the end, they are in some ways similar. That may be because the body is always a technical apparatus and always lives on through “technical survival.” Some scientists think that certain cancers, such as the pancreatic cancer that killed Derrida, are autoimmune disorders. What all these metonymic displacements have to do with mourning is not yet entirely clear. I agree, however, that one resists the line of thinking Derrida calls “ecotechnics.” It’s pretty weird. We learn from the serio-comic erotico-philosophic scene of all those doctors consulting about Psyche that mourning has something to do with the impossibility of naming the psyche. The psyche is an absence from the word go. It is a place where nothing takes place but place. Therefore, what mourning mourns for is not some particular dead person, but “life itself,” that is, the principle of life and animation that “psyche” names. This proposition is reaffirmed in a slightly later page in On Touching: Where the taking-place of the event doesn’t find its place—a gaping locus, indeed, a mouth—except in replacement; where it doesn’t find room except in replacement—isn’t that the trace of metonymy or the technical prosthesis, and the place for the phantasm as well, that is to say, the ghostly revenant (phantasma), at the heart of (self-)feeling? The revenant, between life and death, dictates an impossible mourning, an endless mourning—life itself.

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Barely visible scene of this mourning: it pertains to a spacing that is irreducible or even heterogeneous in relation to an “extensio” from which, however, one should not dissociate it. (Touching 35)

A technical prosthesis, this passage affirms, is a kind of metonymy. (I would rather say “catachresis,” a word Derrida does not use here.) A technical prosthesis is a sideways displacement or replacement for something that is not there to be given a literal or proper name. That something is a gaping locus, a mouth, a void, around which the learned doctors gather when they inspect Psyche. The sexual innuendo is surely intended. It is no accident that Psyche is a woman. Metonymies and technical prostheses, moreover, are revenants, ghosts hovering between life and death, undecidably. Metonymies and prostheses are like phantasms both in the sense that they are like specters and in the sense that they are like phantasmata, fictions, imaginary images, signs without an identifiable referent. These phantasms “dictate” an impossible mourning, in an irresistible command. We have no choice in the matter. This mourning is impossible because we can never have done with it or get over it, as is supposed to happen in “normal” mourning for the death of a friend or a relative. For Derrida, life itself is mourning. To live is to be in mourning, to mourn for life itself, for my own life. It is Jacques Jacques mourns for. We mourn for Psyche/psyche because she/it is gone, inaccessible in her/its extension, partes extra partes. A footnote to the passage just cited is a sort of technical prosthesis, as footnotes in general are. This footnote is probably a metonymy/prosthesis/ phantasm added later. It supplements or glosses, in a spectral voice from outside, the formulation in the passage proper about “a spacing that is irreducible or even heterogeneous in relation to an ‘extensio’ from which, however, one should not dissociate it.” Derrida in the footnote says the spacing he has in mind is not wholly compatible (it is associated and not associated) with Descartes’ extensio or even with Freud’s Ausdehnung, as when Freud says Psyche is extended (ausgedehnt). What Derrida means by spacing, he says, is to be identified with what he has called, notoriously, différance as a feature of the trace. It is closer to Heidegger’s Gespanntheit, a tension or stretching out “which is as spatial as it is temporal. Gespanntheit exists ‘before’ the opposition space/time” (Touching 321). Is Derrida’s “impossible mourning” in this passage the same as “absolute mourning”? The latter phrase has not yet appeared. The next place where the red thread I am following appears again on the surface of the immense tapestry of words that makes up Le toucher does not even yet use the term “absolute mourning.” It speaks rather of “pre-originary mourning,” whatever that may be. Prior to what origin? And is “pre-originary” (pré-originaire in the French [Le toucher 218]) to be taken as just a neutral temporal location prior to the origin, or is pre-originary mourning somehow performatively necessary as a preliminary to whatever it is that originates at some point after pre-originary mourning? The passage must be read in detail and put in its context. The context is Derrida’s put-down of Merleau-Ponty in

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comparison to Husserl on the question of my access to the interiority of the other person. Derrida has been showing that Merleau-Ponty completely warps Husserl. Though Merleau-Ponty claims to be following Husserl literally, even putting in German words and phrases from Husserl to support that illusion, nevertheless, says Derrida, he “puts the shoe on the wrong foot, literally, turning upside down short of completely misreading, the sense of Husserl’s text” (Touching 190). (What, I ask in passing here, justifies calling this mistake in reading a literal putting of the shoe on the wrong foot? What shoe? What foot?) Merleau-Ponty claims that when I touch another person’s hand, it is just like touching my own hand. According to Merleau-Ponty, Derrida says, “The reason why I have evidence of the other man’s being-there when I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand” (190). I have immediate perception of the other’s “being there,” of his or her Dasein. “We have here neither comparison, nor analogy, nor projection or ‘introjection’ (ohne Introjektion)” (190), says Merleau-Ponty. This immediate intuition of the other person is, says Derrida, just what Husserl never allows, even though what he is forced to testify to goes against the basic phenomenological principle of immediate intuition. “Husserl, on the other hand, in the name of phenemonology, and phenomenological faithfulness, prefers to betray phenomenology (the intuitionism of his principle of principles) rather than transform indirect appresentation into direct presentation, which it may never be—which would reappropriate the alterity of the alter ego within ‘my Ego’s’ own properness” (192). For Husserl my access to the other is always, always, “present for me indirectly and by way of analogical ‘introjection,’ which is to say, appresented” (191). An unbridgeable abyss always intervenes between my subjectivity and the other person’s subjectivity. “It is necessary to watch over the other’s alterity: it will always remain inaccessible to an originally presentive intuition, an immediate and direct presentation of the here” (191). Paradoxically, Derrida holds, this inaccessibility is what makes it possible for me to “make contact” with the other as other. “Let us be quite clear that without this unbridgeable abyss, there would be no handshake, nor blow or caress, nor, in general, any experience of the other’s body as such” (191). Moreover, as Derrida has already argued in the discussion of Heidegger in “Tangent II” of On Touching, I do not even have direct contact with myself: I was earlier tempted to extend rather than reduce the field of appresentation and to recognize its irreducible gap even in the said touching-touched of my “own proper” hand, my own body proper as a human ego. . . . Even between me and me, if I may put it this way, between my body and my body, there is no such “original” contemporaneity, this “confusion” between the other’s body and mine, that Merleau-Ponty believes he can recognize there, while pretending he is following Husserl. (192–93)

If I can only ever have indirect, analogical appresentation of the interiority of the other person, I also cannot, against all appearances, even get “in contact” with myself, as when my right hand touches my left hand. Derrida grants that in saying this he is “strictly . . . neither Husserlian nor Merleau-Pontyian” (193).

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Here time as syncope, syncopation, non-coincidence, différance (though Derrida does not use that word here) enters the formulation: I do know or feel that there is another here, and, since this is our theme, the other here of a touching-touched (which is to say others who themselves are also put at a distance from themselves, up to and including in the presentation of their present, by the timing of their experience and the simple gap, the syncopated non-coincidence of their self-relation), but this other “here” presents itself as that which will never be mine: this non-mine-ness is part of the sense of this presentation, which, like my own, itself suffers already from the “same” expropriation. No substitution is possible, and the more surprising logic of the substitution, wherever it is necessarily at work, presupposes the substitution of nonsubstitutables, of unique and other ones, of uniquely others. (191–92)

Since substitution is another name for “metonymy,” this intransigent formulation disqualifies the apparent relation of substitutability among those strings of terms cited early that circle in combinatorial sequence around an absent center. The powerful formulations about pre-originary mourning follow immediately on the put-down of Merleau-Ponty I have been citing. These formulations are grounded on the double assertion of an irreducible gap between me and the other and between me and myself. “If I have often spoken of preoriginary mourning on this subject,” says Derrida, “and tied this motif to that of exappropriation, it has been in order to mark that interiorization, in this mourning before death, and even introjection, which we often take for granted in normal mourning, cannot and must not be achieved. Mourning as im-possible mourning—and moreover, ahuman, more than human, prehuman, different from the human ‘in’ the human of humanualism” (192). “Humanualism” (humainisme in French) is Derrida’s term for the ideology of the Western philosophical tradition that assumes in one way or another that having and using hands is distinctively human. An example is Merleau-Ponty’s expression of confidence in a direct intersubjectivity that he falsely ascribes to Husserl by saying that when I shake hands with another person it is as if I were shaking hands with myself, touching one hand with the other hand. For Derrida, as for Husserl, on the contrary, such a making contact by touching hands never happens, however many hands I may shake and however reassuring touching my left hand with my right hand to be sure “I am here” may be. This play on “human” and “hand” in “humanualism” is clearer in the French, which presents a series of words in which the French word for “human,” humain, contains within itself the French word for “hand,” main: “Et d’ailleurs an-humain, plus qu’humain, pré-humain, autre que l’humain ‘dans’ l’humain de l’humainisme” (Le toucher 218). Humainisme is a portmanteau word. It combines the French word for “humanism” (humanisme) with the French word for “hand” (main). I never make direct contact with the other, and I never even make direct contact with myself, as the Western tradition of “humanualism” falsely assumes.

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Mourning, for example in Freud’s famous little essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” always presupposes the interiorization or introjection of the other. I take the other into myself and thereby work through the loss of a loved one. That loved one was, until he or she died, directly accessible and present to me, as present as me to myself. For Derrida, as a result of the “unbridgeable abysses” between me and the other and between me and myself that I have just sketched out, this common-sense Freudian paradigm is wrong. Interiorization of the dead other in introjection cannot and should not take place. In its place Derrida puts pre-originary mourning, which is more like Freud’s melancholy. This melancholic mourning has always already begun and can never end until my physical death. This mourning/melancholy, as Freud says about melancholy in general, always involves not introjection, which can be lived through and beyond, but the permanent incorporation of the other as a phantom, a dead-alive other, within myself. The non-availability of the other and of myself means both the other and myself are in a sense always already dead, like Psyche in Nancy’s tableau. I am always already in an impossible mourning for the death of the other and for my own death. “It is Jacques you mourn for,” one might say to Derrida, to echo the last line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: to a young child.”1 Derrida pretends to mourn for a Nancy who did not even die when he had his heart transplant operation. That prosthesis embodied Nancy’s death, his exappropriation. It actualized “in the flesh” his syncopated distance from himself. Or rather, both Jacques and Jean-Luc as subjectivities that may have direct intuition of themselves and of other human beings are post-originary phantasms grounded in what ungrounds them, the pre-originary ahuman, the more than human, the prehuman, the something different from the human in the human of humanualism. These terms, the ahuman, the more than human, and the prehuman, seem to be yet more non-metonymical metonymies, or catachreses, for that vacant place at the center whose inaccessibility leads to a pre-originary mourning that is “before death.” It is before death in the sense, as I understand it, that it is the universal death before the mourning-originating death of any particular person. Pre-originary mourning is mourning for the death that inhabits me, unreachably, at every moment of my always already posthumous “life”: “I think about it all the time.” The red thread of mourning reappears once more in an extraordinary several pages explicating Nancy’s strange locution se toucher toi (Touching 288 ff). The context is a commentary on the last words of Nancy’s Corpus. “A body,” says Nancy, is an image offered to other bodies, a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body: colors, local shadows, fragments, moles, areolas, half-moons [lunules], fingernails, body hair, tendons, skulls, ribs, pelvises, bellies, meatuses, froths, tears, teeth, foams, clefts, blocks, tongues, sweats, liquids [liqueurs], veins, pains, and joys, and me, and you. (cited in Derrida, Touching 288–89)

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What Derrida is saying touching Nancy is hard to touch or lay hands on. It is hard to think and say. These pages are, to some degree, about Nancy’s heart transplant, what Nancy, as I have said, calls l’intrus, the intruder. The transplant meant that Nancy had within his own body part of the body of another, another person now dead, but resurrected, at least the other’s heart, to go on beating in Nancy’s chest. Derrida at one point asks whether it was a man’s heart or a woman’s. What difference would that make? The phrase se toucher toi, however, names not only Nancy’s relation to that strange heart beating in his breast, but also anyone’s relation to another person by way of their bodies. This is an essentially sexual or sexed relation. “These offerings,” says Derrida, in commentary on Nancy, “anything and everything whatsoever being offered, bodies, pieces of a body not in pieces or shards, this world, these shared-out worlds do nothing but feign empirical accumulation. Apparently, it is a headlong contagious abandoned thrust, a general contamination, and yet everything remains exactly calculated” (289). A footnote connects this passage to autoimmunity, to AIDS, and to anti-autoimmunization drugs, such as are necessary to keep the body from rejecting a transplanted organ—for example, the heart of another. This is another surfacing of prosthesis and ecotechnicity as themes that are such important features of Derrida’s thinking concerning mourning. It is only because I can, apparently, self-touch that I can, apparently, touch you, as Derrida says. But the toi in se toucher toi, “touching myself touching you,” breaks the narcissistic circuit of self-touching, I relating directly to me. At the same time this toi destroys, by way of the detour through prosthetic technicity, any hope of immediacy, any hope of self-presence. “I” is always inhabited by a prosthetic “you.” As Derrida observes elsewhere in On Touching, this circuit of pre-originary mourning, leading from death to death and hanging at every minute over the abyss of death, is like the sequence for Novalis from the first kiss to suicide. The first kiss is, for Novalis, the beginning of philosophy, while suicide, for Novalis, is the only proper conclusion to philosophical reflection (292). The first kiss breaks narcissistic isolation and leads to proper philosophic dialectical thinking. Suicide closes dialectic in a final synthesis. The pages leading up to the first appearance of the phrase “absolute mourning” are an extreme version of Derrida’s characteristic Blanchotian formulations about a possible that is at the same time impossible. Since selftouching is death, only the openness to the other keeps me alive, holds off death. This is expressed in a paragraph in which Derrida says “this other heart selftouches you only to be exposed to death” (289). Derrida beseeches the other to keep him from, and, at the same time, in, death: “You are/is also my death. You, you keep it for me, you keep me from it always a little, from death. Keep me from it still a little longer, if you please, just a little longer, keep me from it as much as possible, as well as possible, as long as possible” (289). “Absolute mourning” now appears at last as the key term in the paragraph that just follows this plea:

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The reader will see how these sentences are all questions, making them in effect, like “rhetorical questions” in general, performative demands asking for the reader’s assent. Derrida demands from the reader a “yes,” a “yea verily.” The reader will also see that all the terms associated with mourning in earlier passages in On Touching here converge, or encircle, or are held in uneasy combinatory displacement around an absent center: the prosthetic, ecotechnicity, expropriation, temporalizing spaces, partes extra partes, and so on. The absent center, death, is here figured in Nancy’s prosthetic heart, the heart of another that beats in his breast. That heart is both accessible and inaccessible to him, in an experience of expropriation or, more properly, exappropriation, appropriation and expropriation at once. The transplanted alien heart is the place where Nancy keeps his most intimate memories (as when I say, “I shall keep it in my heart”), but he keeps them “in yourself in myself.” That heart is intimate to me, part of me, but at the same time something that is absolutely beyond me, impossible to reach or know. This heart of the other is a kind of capacious reservoir of singular otherness within me that at the same time exceeds the inside. That heart is something I can never see or touch, “greater than my heart in my heart.” These formulations are like a strange version or perversion of Augustine’s appeal to God as more interior and more intimate to me than myself. The difference from Augustine is that this part of myself that infinitely exceeds me while being at the same time the most intimate part is, in Derrida’s version, wholly impersonal, wholly other, and wholly inaccessible, as inaccessible as the other’s subjectivity is for me, in Husserl’s or in Derrida’s thought. Augustine’s conversion, on the contrary, when he hears God command, tolle, lege, take up and read, leads to the hope of Heaven. Derrida’s recognition that tout autre est tout autre, as he puts it in Donner la mort, “every other is wholly other” (Gift of Death 68 et seq.), when reformulated here as my inability to reach the other within myself, leads to what he calls “absolute mourning.” This mourning is “absolute” in the sense that it is absolutely general and universal. It is identified with life itself (Touching 50). This mourning is “untied” (the etymological meaning of “absolute”), unmoored from any particular death in an endless mournful or melancholic or doleful drifting like that of the Flying Dutchman or like that of Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, though without even those references to the “hereafter” that Kafka

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makes. The Hunter Gracchus has died without having quite died. He is dead and, as he says, “in a sense I’m alive at the same time.” His death barge drifts perpetually back and forth on the staircase that leads up to “the hereafter”: “My death barge went off course, a wrong turn of the tiller, the momentary inattentiveness of the boatman. . . . On this infinitely wide and open stairway [the one leading up to the hereafter] I drift, now toward the top, now toward the bottom, now to the right, now to the left, always in motion. . . . My barge has no tiller, it is driven by the wind that blows in the nethermost regions of death” (Kafka 111, 112). The last appearance of my red thread confirms the reading I have been making of what Derrida means by “absolute mourning.” Once more the formulations are made by way of reflections about that inaccessible “heart’s heart,” and once more Derrida’s reflections are made in the guise of glosses on phrases from Nancy: What can this “selfsame itself” [même, Nancy’s phrase: JHM] mean to say about the heart’s heart? The proper, the essence of the heart, of the sovereign heart, of the heart by itself, of the heart with itself nearest to itself [avec soimême au plus près de soi-même] (ipse, ipsemet, metipse, meisme, même)? Nancy knows that the selfsame heart itself, in every possible sense of the self and the same, is the place where the selfsame itself exappropriates itself [le même lui-même s’exapproprie], at the same instant when I am invisibly touched by the other, without any possible reappropriation, which is what I earlier termed absolute mourning—but also the locus of possible transplants [du greffon possible], possibly from another “sex.” It is quite possible, as I have heard it said, that women’s hearts lend themselves better to transplantations and have a better survival rate. (Derrida, Touching 305; Le toucher 342)

Absolute mourning, the reader can see, is a consequence of a double division, the division of the selfsame, of me, ipse, meisme, etc., within “myself” as selfsame, and of me from you, in the double “exappropriation” that Derrida, in a characteristic taking with one hand what he gives with the other, calls simultaneously a “touching” by the other, and at the same time a splitting which makes that touching “invisible,” therefore impossible to be taken possession of, to be reappropriated. Mourning, for Derrida, is not just sorrow for the death of another, though that may trigger an act of mourning. Mourning is an absolute condition of human existence. What Derrida calls “absolute mourning” is generated by my perpetual “enisled” isolation, my inability to touch the other or be touched by him or her. I am in perpetual mourning for the impossibility of “appropriating” the other or myself, making the other my “property,” properly mine, or appropriating myself in an act of self-possession, as in the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum. This means that the other is already dead, from my perspective (and I have no other perspective). That in turn means that I am already dead, enclosed in the coffin of my windowless monad. Derrida, in A Taste for the Secret, borrows Leibniz’s figure of the windowless monad to define his own sense of the human situation (Derrida and Ferraris 70–71). This is quite different

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from Nancy’s idea of an aboriginal partage, which is a sharing as well as a shearing, a cleaving in both senses, a parting of the ways and a taking part. For Derrida no sharing or taking part as such exists. The admirably rigorous passage I have just cited says this, by way of the figure of the heart, with Nancy’s transplanted heart in mind and with allusion to passages in Nancy’s work, in this case from The Experience of Freedom. The paragraph makes an odd shift at the end to what seems a different key or register, that is, the question of whether the heart Nancy received in his heart transplant was possibly that of a woman. The idea is dramatic enough, since we assume that sexual difference permeates the whole body. The idea of a male body with a woman’s heart seems somehow scandalous. Women’s hearts are indeed different from men’s hearts. They tend to beat slower, for one thing, and to be stronger for the sake of childbearing. This may explain why they survive better when transplanted. The “materiality” of an actual heart transplant, however, seems to have little to do with all Derrida’s language about “the heart’s heart” and “absolute mourning.” Derrida, however, presupposes a breakdown of the distinction between the “material body” and the body as the incarnation of what he calls a “quasi-transcendence.” This is the situation in which I am “invisibly touched by the other, without any possible reappropriation, which I earlier termed absolute mourning.” Nancy’s experience, which Derrida can only guess at, of having the heart of another person (now dead, but in a sense still living) beating in his own breast, perhaps a woman’s heart, is not a figure for absolute mourning. It is absolute mourning, self-same, ipse, the thing itself. Each of us has always been in a state of perpetual mourning, in the end mourning for our own death. “I think about it all the time.” It is Jacques Jacques mourns for. I claim to have provided a reading of what Derrida means by “absolute mourning,” deuil absolu, as it is generated by the combinatory displacements of those various non-metonymical metonymies—prosthesis, death, expropriation, ecotechnics, temporalisation, and so on—around a vacant place. Does this exposition help at all to understand what Derrida meant by saying that the death of another is chaque fois unique, wholly different each time, and yet at the same time la fin du monde, the end of the world, the whole world, not just the unique world of that other who has died? 2 If I myself am my relation to the other in that strange relation Derrida, following Nancy, calls se toucher toi, touching myself touching you, that relation is maintained at one and the same time to all the others, including all animals and all divine beings (that’s what he says!), in an immense system of exappropriations, relations without relation, that forms a whole, the world in fact. The death of one other in that immense system obviously means the end of the world in the sense that its systematic wholeness depends on the co-presence of all the unique others that constituted it. The “world” is the product of their collective “worlding,” to use an English neologism modeled on Heidegger’s Welten. Heidegger defines human beings as weltbilden, world-building, though he denies that animals are world-building. For Derrida (and me), contra Heidegger, dogs and cats and ants, as well as whatever divinities there be, are also world-building. When one world-builder vanishes, says Derrida, the whole “world” vanishes too, to be reconstituted

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anew, but as different. The world is re-created, instantly, by those who are left, the survivors. The survivors’ work of world-building (and we are all survivors) is augmented by all the new-borns that are constantly appearing and contributing their part to the continuous creation of the world. One must never forget, however, that for Derrida, this world-system is constructed over absence. It is also not an organic unity, but dispersed in a partes extra partes, parts outside of parts. The world, for Derrida, is a system that is not a system. It is a system that is not systematic. It is hollowed out in all directions by the impossibility to touch or know any one of those others, though each, in an enormous multitude, is “in yourself in myself.” Each, however, is veiled from me by that “sensible but invisible and untouchable place” that comes between us, as well as between me and myself, one metonymic name for which is “death.”

Notes 1. That line is “It is Margaret you mourn for,” l.15 (Hopkins 89). The protagonist of Hopkins’s poem has been “gríeving/Over Goldengrove unleaving” (ll. 1–2), that is, mourning the fall of autumn leaves. It is sheer senseless accident, if such a thing exists, that the young girl in Hopkins’s poem happens to have the English version of Derrida’s widow’s name. Her given name is Marguerite. 2. The title of the French version of Derrida’s essays in memory of dead friends or colleagues is Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde.

Chapter Two Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas, and the Third Derek Attridge

Who is the third who walks always beside you? T. S. Eliot

I begin with a quotation: All of Derrida’s thought, from the beginning to the end, was a meditation on death, a meditation that diverted, disconcerted, and displaced everything in philosophy, from Plato to Hegel to Heidegger, that was also, and first of all, concerned with death.

A misquotation, in fact: this sentence was written not about Derrida but by Derrida about Emmanuel Levinas; however, it is perhaps truer of the writer than of his subject.1 It comes near the close of Derrida’s posthumous tribute to Levinas, “Le mot d’accueil”—translated as “A Word of Welcome” but also suggesting “the word ‘welcome’”—which makes up the larger part of Adieu, the volume published in France two years after Levinas’s death in 1995 (Adieu à Lévinas 206; Adieu to Levinas 120). As early as La voix et le phénomène (Speech and Phenomena) in 1967 Derrida was arguing that “[t]he possibility of the sign is this relationship with death” (54); and he continued in various ways to assert the structural implication of death in any textual entity whose operation depends on its inbuilt ability to survive beyond the mortal existence of its producer or addressee. In a related argument, his account of friendship puts at the center of the relationship between friends the knowledge that one will die before the other. He can thus write of “the mourning that follows death but also the mourning that is prepared and that we expect from the very beginning to follow upon the death of those we love” (Work of Mourning 147). This repeated invocation of death is only one example of Derrida’s continuous project of demonstrating the constitutive function of that which is habitually excluded as

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the simple “outside,” but it represents one of the most original deployments of that argument.2 Death was not only a structural principle for Derrida, however: he was profoundly affected by the deaths of those close to him, and his writing bears many traces of both his grief and his attempts to conceptualize the experience of loss. While the fact that one friend must survive another is not, for most of us, a lived part of friendship, I suspect that for Derrida it was an actual, felt element of his relationships; parting was always colored by the possibility of not meeting again. Some of Derrida’s most telling works were written in response to the loss of friends, in a complex weave of tribute and meditation, eulogy and philosophy. The death of Paul de Man occasioned a substantial work, Mémoires; the imminent death of his mother was a major topic of “Circumfession”; and several of his texts on the deaths of friends are collected in The Work of Mourning, published three years before his own death in 2004. The tribute to Levinas is another instance. Time and again in writing after the loss of a friend, Derrida emphasizes the impossibility of mourning, the necessary infidelity it entails.3 In fact, he identifies two infidelities between which, impossibly, we have to choose. Thus in Mémoires he writes: Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorise within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other in his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism? (6)

Similarly, in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” he finds that in responding to the death of a friend one is faced with the impossible choice between only quoting the other or avoiding all quotation, betraying the dead one by offering nothing oneself or by making the dead one disappear again behind one’s own words. “We are left then with having to do and not do both at once, with having to correct one infidelity by the other” (Work of Mourning 24). The challenge of writing a funeral oration or a tribute to a dead friend is only an extreme instance of the challenge of doing justice to the other, including the challenge of doing justice to the author, whether alive or dead, of a text one is reading. Derrida’s strong emphasis on the notion of responsibility in his later work owes a great deal to Levinas, who understood ethics as a matter of absolute responsibility to a singular other—a responsibility whose impossibility does not diminish its exigency. There is therefore a double difficulty in attempting to do justice to Levinas’s work on responsibility to the other—or, for that matter, in attempting to do justice to Derrida’s writings on the same topic: one is subject to the very imperative that one is trying to give an account of. The difficulty of doing justice to Levinas’s thought was something Derrida had faced early in his career; his long essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” first published in 1964 when Derrida was 34, was at once generous in drawing attention to the importance of Levinas’s work and exacting

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in its critique of some of that work’s central claims and methods. His later essay, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” which first appeared in 1980, again demonstrated his fidelity to Levinas through infidelity, by means of a careful and respectful questioning of the older writer’s mode of argumentation and his privileging of the masculine. In a transcribed discussion of 1986, Derrida explains that his hesitation about using the word “ethics” arises from its genealogy, aligning himself with Heidegger’s critique of ethics, and poses a question to Levinas: although you are clearly using the word in a different sense from that which it derives from its history, what is the legitimacy of using words extracted from their historical determinations? (Derrida and Labarrière, Altérités 70–71). (This is a replay of one of his major worries in “Violence and Metaphysics”: is it possible to write against the tradition of Western philosophy in the language of Western philosophy?) Yet in the same discussion he says, “Before a thought like that of Levinas, I never have an objection. I am ready to subscribe to everything he says” (74). As this last comment suggests, there is traceable a warming toward Levinas over the course of Derrida’s career; in place of the severe analysis of “Violence and Metaphysics” one finds an increasing sense of indebtedness to the other man’s work. The brilliant account of ethics in The Gift of Death (first published in 1992) owes a great deal to Levinas, even though Derrida is still using the term “ethics” in a Kierkegaardian vein to refer to a universal category challenged by singular responsibilities. In 2000, five years after Levinas’s death, he published Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (translated as On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy) and devoted a long discussion to Levinas’s passages on eros and the caress in which the tone is more accommodating, and Levinas’s masculinism, although clearly still a problem for Derrida, is considered more sympathetically. And the year before his own death, Derrida gave an interview on Levinas to Le Magazine Littéraire, in which the cordial tone is very evident (“Derrida avec Levinas”). The interviewer, Alain David, who knew Levinas, begins by noting the closeness between the two philosophers—Levinas, apparently, was often heard to say, “But what does Derrida think of it?” Although most of the interview is taken up with Derrida’s account of the philosophical and cultural differences between himself and Levinas, there is an insistence throughout on the importance of the latter’s work. Thus after summarizing his objection to Levinas’s use of a Graeco-Hegelian discourse at the very moment that he is subjecting that discourse to a radical critique (the old worry), he adds that he has made this objection “without ever frontally opposing Levinas’s ‘project’, the necessity of which I have always believed in” (32). The other disagreements have to do, once more, with gender, with Levinas’s treatment of animality, and with the question of politics. There is also a strong defense of the difficulty and riskiness of Levinas’s endeavor, in contrast to what Derrida perceives as the merely fashionable employment of phrases like “respect for the Other” or even the word “ethics” itself—which he sees as too often providing an alibi to facilitate the neutralization of questions of politics and justice. One may surmise, then, that when Derrida was invited to give an oration at Levinas’s funeral (two days after his death), and a year later to contribute to a

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conference with the title “Homage to Emmanuel Levinas,” he found this a peculiarly difficult task. The oration, published as “Adieu” in the volume of the same name, continues the sequence of eulogies for dead friends, each one singular, but each one bearing the traces of personal as well as public loss. It is, of course, wholly affirmative in its dealings with Levinas’s thought. Here’s a representative sample: Each time I read or reread Emmanuel Levinas, I am overwhelmed with gratitude and admiration, overwhelmed by this necessity, which is not a constraint but a very gentle force that obligates, and obligates us not to bend or curve otherwise the space of thought in its respect for the other, but to yield to this other, heteronymous curvature that relates us to the completely other. (9– 10)

For the lecture the following year, however, Derrida is speaking from within a different genre: “A Word of Welcome,” from the same volume, is a reading of Levinas that engages with some of the most problematic aspects of his writing. It is still part of an event of homage, however; Derrida is still feeling the obligation not to curve the space of Levinas’s thought in its respect for the other. How does he do justice to the complexity of Levinas’s work, to his own disagreements with Levinas, to what remains troubling in his legacy, while remaining faithful to the dead man’s—the dead friend’s—achievement? Although this text has been the subject of some brilliant readings, notably by Geoffrey Bennington, Hent de Vries, and Michael Naas, its complexity as a text of mourning has not been fully explored. The first thing I want to note is a repeated formula, with very little variation, in Derrida’s discourse: here are the examples that occur in the space of a dozen pages: Levinas would probably not say it in this way, but could it not be argued that . . . (Adieu 23) Levinas does not say this, or he does not say it in this way, but I would like to approach him today by way of this non-way . . . (25) Levinas does not say it in exactly this way, but . . . (32) Though Levinas never puts it in these terms . . . (33) . . . even if Levinas never puts it this way (34).

One could add to this list the openings of a couple of sentences in the discussion of Levinas in On Touching: I am tempted to say, in a language that is no longer Levinas’s but does not necessarily betray him either . . . (78) Levinas does not say it in this way, to be sure . . . (79).

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What exactly is going on here? If Derrida has a disagreement with Levinas, why does not he not come out with it, as he has not hesitated to do before? The offered logic of this recurrent rhetorical move is that Derrida is only making explicit what Levinas would undoubtedly have agreed with even if he never actually said it, and that the difference between them is thus merely a matter of phrasing and not one of substance. We need to look closely at the readings that these phrases introduce if we want to ascertain how far this is actually the case. Derrida’s lecture is, as the title suggests, a discussion of the theme of hospitality in Levinas’s work. “Although the word is neither frequently used nor emphasised within it,” states Derrida, “Totality and Infinity bequeaths to us an immense treatise of hospitality” (Adieu 21). Hospitality, of course, is a significant topic in Derrida’s own later work, so in saying this he is celebrating the closeness of Levinas’s thought to his own. The ethical relation, for Levinas, involves an unconditional welcoming of the other; and Derrida here offers an unconditional welcome to Levinas’s thought on this topic. Things get a little more complicated when Derrida responds to Levinas’s welcoming of the thought of Descartes—one of the few philosophers in the Western tradition Levinas keeps coming back to as an admired precursor. It’s really only one moment in Descartes that Levinas repeatedly fastens on: the claim that the human subject possesses an idea of infinity—which, for Descartes, was evidence for the existence of God, as the only possible source of such an idea. Levinas translates this moment in Descartes into his own language: “But to possess the idea of infinity is to have already welcomed the Other.” It is this, argues Levinas, that saves Descartes from the infinite negation of the sceptic: affirmation comes not from within, but from outside. “It is not I,” notes Levinas, “it is the other that can say yes” (Totality and Infinity 93). Derrida’s manner of reading Levinas is not very different from Levinas’s manner of reading Descartes. He quotes this last sentence, commenting that “[o]ne should no doubt extend without limit the consequences of what Levinas asserts” “Adieu” 23) (a statement which implies an ethical duty to extend the Levinasian insights as far as they can be taken—the French is “On devrait . . .” [Adieu à Lévinas 52]). He then adds in a parenthesis (and this is the first time he uses the phrase I have singled out): If one were to pursue these consequences with the necessary temerity and rigor, they would perhaps lead to another way of thinking the responsible decision. Levinas would probably not say it this way, but could it not be argued that, without exonerating myself in the least, decision and responsibility are always of the other? (23)

Here Derrida articulates a favorite argument of his own, derived partly from Carl Schmitt: if a decision is truly a decision, and not a calculation, it must be a decision of the other, or of myself as other. Levinas’s appropriation of Descartes is in turn appropriated by Derrida to claim that their thought runs along the same tracks—although there is nothing in Levinas about decision as decision of the other. Derrida has indeed pursued the consequences of Levinas’s thinking with temerity, though one might question the rigor of this gesture.

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Levinas’s extrapolation from the doubting Descartes, “It is the other that can say yes” (23), then provides an occasion for Derrida to develop his argument about the priority of the other over the self, presenting the paradox that he has dwelt on before, notably in his reading of the many “yes’s” in Joyce’s Ulysses. “There is no first yes, the yes is already a response”: the call “is first only in order to await the response that makes it come.” “Despite all the tragic objections that this harsh law might seem to justify,” Derrida continues, “the necessity remains, as imperturbable as death” (24). This is indeed not how Levinas would say it, since he represents the demand of the other as coming from wholly outside. (One could relate this difference to the ancient quarrel in Christian theology, notably between Augustine and Pelagius, about the operation of grace.) Derrida is obviously aware that he is overstepping the bounds of faithful interpretation, and the paragraph is followed by the second occurrence of the phrase we’re tracking: “Levinas does not say this, or he does not say it in this way, but I would like to approach him today by way of this non-way” (25). Note the caution here: Derrida first admits that Levinas does not say this (“Lévinas ne dit pas cela”) and only as a second possibility are we allowed to think that the difference is merely one of wording (“il ne le dit pas ainsi” [Adieu à Levinas 54]). Derrida soon moves on to the most important potential area of disagreement: the relation of ethics to politics. Crucial to this question is the notion of “the third,” le tiers. The idea of thirdness or the third appears repeatedly in Levinas’s work, and a scrupulous analysis of it has to take careful account of the way it is used in different ways at different times. In “The I and Totality,” first published in 1954, he uses the terms “third man” and “third party” in a discussion of what he calls “the moral conditions for thought” (Entre Nous 17); but although there are intimations of the arguments to come in his major works, the discourse is not one that maps easily on to the later writing. Totality and Infinity (published in 1961, and still probably Levinas’s most influential book) does not develop the idea of the third at any length, but in a short passage entitled “The Other and the Others” (212–14) he makes the striking assertion that “The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other. . . . It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.” The ethical response—what Levinas calls here “the prophetic word”—is “an irreducible movement of a discourse which by essence is aroused by the epiphany of the face inasmuch as it attests the presence of the third party, the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me” (213). It’s a remarkable way to move from the ethical—in Levinas’s sense, as the singular relation of the self and the other—to the political, but it leaves a number of questions unanswered about politics in any practical sense. How, in answering my obligation to the singular other, do I simultaneously act justly with regard to the whole of humanity? We should also note that the concept of justice presented in Totality and Infinity is implicit in the relation with the singular other, and does not involve the third:

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Justice consists in recognizing in the Other my master. Equality among persons means nothing of itself; it has an economic meaning and presupposes money, and already rests on justice—which, when well-ordered, begins with the Other. Justice is the recognition of his privilege qua Other and his mastery, is access to the Other outside of rhetoric. . . . (72)

If there is an association between the third party and justice, it is that both are inseparable from the face-to-face of the ethical relation. In Otherwise Than Being (1974), Levinas’s major rewriting of the arguments of Totality and Infinity, partly in response to Derrida’s critique, he reintroduces the idea of the third, but with a significantly different role and importance. Now we hear, not of the third as looking at us through the eyes of the other, as part and parcel of the ethical relation, but rather of the third as a complication of the face-to-face rapport. “The other stands in a relationship with the third party,” writes Levinas, “for whom I cannot entirely answer, even if I alone answer, before any question, for my neighbor” (Otherwise 157). Because the other for whom I am responsible is responsible for other others, the simple intimacy of the ethical relation is breached; and one name Levinas gives to the domain that we enter when we start to take the other others into account is justice. In “A Word of Welcome” Derrida cites a passage from a text from 1984, “Peace and Proximity,” in which Levinas gives a clear account of the relation between the third in this new sense and justice: Doubtless, responsibility for the other human being is, in its immediacy, anterior to every question. But how does responsibility obligate if a third party troubles this exteriority of two where my subjection of the subject is subjection to the neighbor? The third party is other than the neighbor but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other, and not simply their fellow. What am I to do? What have they already done to one another? Who passes before the other in my responsibility? What, then, are the other and the third party with respect to one another? Birth of the question. (32) The first question in the interhuman is the question of justice. Henceforth it is necessary to know, to become consciousness. Comparison is superimposed onto my relation with the unique and the incomparable, and, in view of equity and equality, a weighing, a thinking, a calculation, the comparison of incomparables, and, consequently, the neutrality—presence or representation— of being, the thematization and the visibility of the face. (Levinas, cited in Adieu 32)4

The passage goes on to list various aspects of the interhuman world introduced by the third, ending with “the political structure of society, subject to laws and thereby to institutions.” There is a distinct shift in Levinas’s understanding of justice from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise Than Being. Justice no longer names an aspect of the face-to-face encounter, but is introduced by the superimposition of the third and everything that follows in its train. (While the ethical encounter is “anterior,” it is “troubled” by the third party.) Levinas himself acknowledges the shift in a

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1975 interview: when asked about the two different accounts of justice in his work, he says, “It is not easy to speak of the way in which things were written fifteen years ago . . .” and asserts his revised position, “The word ‘justice’ applies much more to the relationship with the third party than to the relationship with the other” (Levinas, Of God 82).5 Derrida, however, conflates these different stages of Levinas’s thought, and the result is, inevitably, some bafflement. Referring in “A Word of Welcome” to the same interview, he states: “The question of the third was not only present, as we see, but developed in Totality and Infinity.6 One is thus a bit surprised by the concession Levinas seems to make to one of his interlocutors during an interview. On the question of the third and justice, he seems to admit that Totality and Infinity did not adequately treat these themes” (143 n62). A similar failure to acknowledge the shift in Levinas’s thinking occurs in relation to his use of the term “discourse” in Totality and Infinity to refer to the rapport between the I and the Other. Levinas refers to “Discourse, which in turn has presented itself as justice, in the uprightness of the welcome made to the face” (82). Derrida cites this, as evidence of the link between justice and welcome, then in a note cites another statement from Totality and Infinity, set in italics by Levinas: “We call justice this face to face approach, in discourse,”7 adding that Levinas here “seems to define justice before the emergence [surgissement] of the third” and asking “But is there any place here for this before?” (136 n14). What Derrida is doing is superimposing the language of Otherwise Than Being on to statements in the earlier book; as we have seen, at that stage of Levinas’s thinking the third does not arrive to trouble the face-to-face and introduce justice: both are implicit in the face-to-face. But neither the third nor justice can be identified with the same terms in the later book. Derrida’s somewhat puzzled question—another marker of the distance he feels from Levinas even as he tries to make the other’s thought his own—is surely out of place itself, since the before is his own, not Levinas’s. What doesn’t change in Levinas’s thinking is the primacy of the encounter with the other; the whole force of his account of ethics as “first philosophy” rests on the priority of the face-to-face to any consideration of the wider concerns of politics or justice. The language in which he describes the relation between the two and the third repeatedly implies a primary-secondary relationship, and the language is often that of temporal succession, as we have already seen in the passage from “Peace and Proximity.” In a typical statement in Otherwise Than Being, Levinas states: “The responsibility for the other is an immediacy antecedent to questions, it is proximity. It is troubled and becomes a problem when a third party enters” (157). Here are some further examples from the interviews collected by Jill Robbins in Is It Righteous to Be?, arranged by date (my emphases): 1983: “But it is always starting from the face, from the responsibility for the other, that justice appears, calling in turn for judgment and comparison. . . . At a certain moment, there is a necessity for a ‘weighing,’ a comparison, a thinking.” (166)

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1986: “. . . the initial for-the-other which is contested by the appearing of a third, fourth, fifth human being” (51); “In the face of the other, I hear my responsibility for him. . . . But along comes a third party: new responsibility” (51–2); “When the third appears, the other’s singularity is placed in question” (133); “I pass from the relation in which I am obligated and responsible to a relation where I ask myself who is the first. I pose the question of justice. . . . My search for justice supposes precisely this new relation in which every excess of generosity that I should have in regard to the other is submitted to justice.” (214) 1990: “One steps out of the register of charity between individuals to enter the political.” (194)

These examples could be multiplied from many of Levinas’s works. However, in spite of the language he uses, it would be a mistake to think that Levinas has in mind an empirical sequence, whereby I first of all acknowledge my responsibility for the singular other and then have to face the existence of other others. As he says in Otherwise Than Being: “It is not that the entry of a third party would be an empirical fact, and that my responsibility for the other finds itself constrained to a calculus by the ‘force of things’” (158). It is not even a logical sequence, as logic belongs to the order of the third. The primacy of the relation to the other lies in the fact that the ethical subject owes its existence to the relation to the other, and the relation to the third is of necessity, therefore, secondary. John Llewelyn gives a good account: The ethical as Levinas would have us understand it is de-ontological, disontological, ent-ontologisch. It is prior to all structures of being-with. It is prior to all structures, whether these be the categories of Greek philosophy, of Kant, of Hegel, or Husserl, or the structures of structuralism and of linguistic or economic exchange—prior to all system, to symmetry, to correlation, to the will, to freedom and to the opposition of activity and passivity. It is the superlation of passivity. Because it is prior to the third person. (137)

Levinas at times counters the impression given by his rhetoric of an empirical, temporal sequence by emphasizing that the third’s claims are already pressing when the primary ethical relation is established. Thus in Otherwise Than Being we find, after the sentence just quoted: In the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me. . . . The other is from the first the brother of all the other men. The neighbor that obsesses me is already a face, both comparable and incomparable, a unique face and in relationship with faces, which are visible in the concern for justice. (158)

And, somewhat misleadingly given his change of vocabulary, he adds a footnote referring back to the section in Totality and Infinity on “The Other and the Others.” In a 1983 interview he states: “Justice itself is born of charity. They can seem alien when they are presented as successive stages; in reality, they are

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inseparable and simultaneous, unless one is on a desert island, without humanity, without a third” (Is It Righteous to Be? 168–69). The terms he uses in the 1975 interview are even closer to Totality and Infinity: “In the relationship with another I am always in relation with the third party. . . . In the very appearance of the other the third already regards me” (82)—though he twice in this paragraph uses the phrase “from this moment on” in referring to the force of the third. The difficulty Levinas faces, and that is apparent in these apparent contradictions, is that he wishes to avoid compromising the primacy of the ethical relation with the singular other, but at the same time to avoid relegating the third and justice to a merely subsidiary role.8 One of the terms Levinas invents in his attempt to describe the relation of the I to the other—and to distinguish his own thought from the closely related thought of Martin Buber—is illeity.9 The relation to the other is not an I–you relationship but an I–it (or I–he relationship, if we are to sustain Levinas’s masculinist discourse), even though it has some of the attributes of an I–you relation. In “The Trace of the Other” from 1963, in a passage repeated in Humanism of the Other, he explains the difficult notion of the face as a signifying trace by introducing the term “illeity” as an indicator of its thirdperson status. “Beyond being is a third person who is not defined by the Oneself, by ipseity. . . . The beyond whence comes the face is in the third person” (Humanism 40–41). He returns to the term in Otherwise Than Being: Illeity lies outside the “thou” and the thematization of objects. A neologism formed with il (he) or ille, it indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me. To be sure, we have to indicate the element in which this concerning occurs. If the relationship with illeity were a relationship of consciousness, “he” would indicate a theme, as the “thou” in Buber’s I–thou relation does, probably. (12–13)10

Illeity is also associated in a number of places with God, the ultimate other. Levinas never identifies illeity and the grammatical third person it implies with the third who interrupts the face-to-face relation and introduces the questions of justice and politics; indeed, they are clearly opposed, the second challenging and complicating the direct ethical command of the first. Yet commentators are often tempted to make this identification; Howard Caygill, for instance, in his penetrating book Levinas and the Political, says of the “third person” referred to in “The Trace of the Other” that it is: precisely the “third” that earlier in Totality and Infinity, and also later in Otherwise than Being, represented the order of justice and the state, namely the reduction of alterity. . . . Levinas here proposes a thought of the “third” that is beyond, not below, the opposition of ipseity and alterity, and gives it the name “illeity.” (146)

Derrida, too, seems to collapse the terms. “The illeity of the third is thus nothing less, for Levinas, than the beginning of justice” (Adieu 29), which may be true of the justice of Totality and Infinity—justice as implicit in the face of

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the other—but it’s clearly not that earlier concept of justice that Derrida is working with here, since he associates it with the law. Surprisingly he goes on in the same paragraph to cite a sentence of Levinas’s that makes it abundantly clear that the similarity between the third person of illeity and the third that introduces justice, law, and politics is only a verbal one: “Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,” writes Derrida, “speaks of this [he now quotes Levinas] ‘illeity, in the third person, but according to a “thirdness” that is different from that of the third man, from that of the third interrupting the face to face of the welcome of the other man—interrupting the proximity or approach of the neighbor—from that of the third man with whom justice begins’” (29). In spite of this clarification, Derrida continues as if Levinas’s two kinds of thirdness—that which characterizes the other to whom I am obligated and that which interrupts the one-to-one relation with the other—were the same. What Derrida wants from Levinas is a combination of his later account of justice as law, calculation, politics, rights, and so on (very different, incidentally, from his own account of justice in a text like “The Force of Law”)—with his earlier account of the third—as immediately implicit in the face to face. “Illeity” offers the latter, and so is conflated with the third of the later Levinas.11 Thus Derrida can say, “The third does not wait; its illeity calls from as early as the epiphany of the face in the face to face” (32). His awareness that he is departing from Levinas is perhaps the reason for his insistence on this point; much later in the work, he returns to it: It is right endlessly to insist on this: even if the experience of the third, the origin of justice and of the question as a putting into question, is defined as the interruption of the face to face [which is how Levinas defines it in his later work], it is not an intrusion that comes second. The experience of the third is ineluctable from the very first moment, and ineluctable in the face. (110)

And, of course, to justify this interpretation, he cites Totality and Infinity. At one point he does reflect the difference between Totality and Infinity’s conception of the third and that of Otherwise Than Being, but sees them as coexisting alternatives: “Once again, ‘illeity,’ the emergence of the question, of the third, and of justice [again the misconstrual of ‘illeity’], designates sometimes the interruption of the face to face [Levinas’s later view], sometimes the very transcendence of the face in the face to face [his earlier view]” (60). Derrida’s next move, as he explains why the arrival of the third has to be immediate, is extremely interesting, but is even more creative as an interpretation of a text he is committed to honoring: “For the absence of the third would threaten with violence the purity of ethics in the absolute immediacy of the face to face with the unique” (32). Let us pause to unpack this: for Derrida, Levinas’s face-to-face, the foundation of his ethical thought, would be a violent relation if it occurred without the intervention of the third, its purity threatened by the very absence of that which must compromise it. What does Levinas himself say? In a passage Derrida has quoted, he says, “In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced” (Totality 51). And this is a recurrent theme. In Totality and Infinity Levinas tells us that “[t]he face in which

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the other—the absolutely other—presents himself does not negate the same, does not do violence to it. . . . This presentation is pre-eminently non-violence, for instead of offending my freedom it calls it to responsibility and founds it. . . . It is peace” (203). It is certainly the case that in developing the notion of “substitution” in his later work Levinas draws on language with implications of violence: the self in substituting for the other is taken hostage, experiences trauma, persecution, obsession. But if this is violence, it is the violence that constitutes the ethical self: “The word I,” as he Is It Righteous to Be Is It Righteous to Be puts it in Otherwise than Being, “means Here I am, answering for everything and for everyone” (114). If there is a violence that poses a threat to ethics in Levinas’s view, it is the violence brought onto the scene by the arrival of the third, the imperative of justice. Derrida himself detects the accents of Job in what he calls Levinas’s “appeal not to justice but against it” (30). Levinas elsewhere calls the necessity of taking the third into consideration “First violence, violence of judgment, transformation of faces into objective and plastic forms,” and observes that “there is a certain measure of violence necessary starting from justice” (Is It Righteous to Be? 115–16, 167). Justice, which “brings this being delivered over unto the neighbor under a measure,” “is already the first violence” (Is It Righteous to Be? 136). No wonder Derrida, in claiming that the face-to-face itself is a violent encounter, adds yet another version of our phrase: “Levinas does not say it in exactly this way” (32). A number of questions follow in which Derrida asks us to consider why Levinas feels the need to say that justice, the emergence of the third, is necessary. (By using the form of the question he finds another way of introducing a measure of tentativeness into the argumentation): “Is he not trying to take into account this hypothesis of a violence in the pure and immediate ethics of the face to face? A violence potentially unleashed in the experience of the neighbor and of absolute unicity?” And he concludes: “The third would thus protect against the vertigo of ethical violence itself” (33). Derrida thus doubles the violence in the Levinasian ethical encounter, and he is well aware of what he is doing: “It is true that the protecting or mediating third, in its juridico-political role, violates in its turn, at least potentially, the purity of the ethical desire devoted to the unique. Whence the terrible ineluctability of a double constraint” (33). For Derrida, the advent of the other in its absolute singularity would be a violent assault, but this is prevented by the simultaneous and necessary emergence of the third—this, too, being a violent entry. For Derrida, it is always a question of the lesser violence.12 Having sketched this rather forbidding picture, Derrida retreats once more behind one of his wary qualifications: “Though Levinas never puts it in these terms, I will risk pointing out the necessity of this double bind in what follows from the axioms established or recalled by Levinas” (33). The risk is, no doubt, the risk of being accused of misrepresenting the dead other, of posthumous infidelity. A French word for betrayal is parjure, which carries a more generalized meaning than its English equivalent, and this is what Derrida detects in the necessary arrival of the third: justice betrays ethics, betrays what Levinas

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calls the “uprightness of the face to face.”13 “An intolerable scandal,” Derrida calls it, but once more qualifies the assurance of his own reading: “even if Levinas never puts it this way, justice commits perjury as easily as it breathes” (34). This is the last time we find the verbal formula I’ve been highlighting, but the inventive interpretation continues. I’ll just mention one moment that is particularly revealing. In “At This Very Moment in this Work Here I Am” Derrida had taken Levinas to task for his handling of gender difference. Now he cites one of Levinas’s most notorious passages, in which “the welcoming one par excellence” is named as “the feminine being.” But before this, we read: More than one reading could be given of the few lines I am about to cite. It would be necessary to linger awhile in their vicinity. One approach would be to acknowledge, so as then to question, as I once did in a text to which I do not wish to return here [this, of course, is “At This Very Moment in this Work Here I Am”], the traditional and androcentric attribution of certain characteristics to woman (private interiority, political domesticity, intimacy of a sociality that Levinas refers to as a “society without language,” etc.). But another reading of these lines might be attempted, one that would not oppose in a polemical or dialectical fashion either this first reading or this interpretation of Levinas. (43)

He then proceeds to develop this “other approach,” which, he claims, not only “would no longer raise concerns about a classical androcentrism,” but “might even, on the contrary, make of this text a sort of feminist manifesto” (44). (We see here an instance of the increasingly welcoming approach to Levinas that I mentioned earlier, a process that was understandably accelerated with Levinas’s death.) I will not attempt to judge here whether Derrida succeeds in rescuing Levinas, or whether he simply lands himself in the same predicament (he asserts, in his own voice, that the “welcoming par excellence is feminine,” 45). What interests me is the rhetoric of this semi-recantation: Derrida claims to keep open the two possible interpretations, while leaving us in no doubt that he now prefers the more generous one. Unquestionably, then, Derrida, in his homage to Levinas, is being unfaithful to him; an infidelity clearly signaled, at the same time as it is disguised, in his rhetoric.14 He has, if you like, allowed the third, the necessary betrayal, to intervene in the pure one-to-one relation between himself and the thought of his dead friend—or rather, to adopt Derrida’s own view of the matter, the third that is always already implicit in the one-to-one is necessarily complicating the directness of the relation. How might we describe this third? One way of putting it would be to say that it is just Derrida’s awareness of the necessity of the third, of the fact that there is no simple, pure reading that would do absolute and final justice to Levinas’s thought, however much we might want to honor his memory, since that thought itself is always mediated by a third, by language, by systems of signification, by difference and deferral.15 (This is one reason why, for Derrida, mourning is never complete.) Levinas’s words can only be read in context, and that context, as Derrida has often shown, is unsaturable, infinitely

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open. In being faithful to Levinas, in doing justice to his words, Derrida is necessarily being unfaithful, doing an injustice. But we could also say that it is Derrida’s awareness of the third in Levinas’s more specific sense that produces the pressure on his homage to his friend—his recognition that questions of justice and politics, of the other of the other, can’t be kept out of the ethical relation. He therefore carries forward Levinas’s insight in Totality and Infinity—“The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other”— to combine it with the argument in Otherwise Than Being that the introduction of the third institutes questions of justice and politics. This is why in “A Word of Welcome” he stresses, more than once, that “the third arrives without waiting” (29, 32, 33). He is still stressing it in the late interview I mentioned earlier: after noting the risks Levinas took in his thought, he comments: The greatest risk presents itself with the question of the third, in particular, of the other of the other, which precedes as much as it interrupts [here’s the Derridean spin] the face-to-face of the visages and which, in the “wholly other,” reintroduces, must reintroduce (it’s also a duty) the same, comparison, reason, universal intelligibility, the institution of law (what Levinas often calls “justice”), Greek philosophical discourse, etc. (“Derrida avec Levinas” 33)

For Derrida, we are never simply in a one-to-one relation with the other: we are constantly subject to multiple ethical demands, and in answering to one of these we necessarily fail to answer to all the others—an argument he presents with almost comic force in The Gift of Death.16 In the interview he summarizes his dependence on and departure from Levinas in this work: “Tout autre est tout autre,” I once responded to Levinas, in a formula that is scarcely translatable [“Every other is wholly other” gives some of the meaning], perhaps perverse and the stakes of which can’t be mastered. It brings together both the fidelity and the resistance possible in responding to the Levinasian discourse. (“Derrida avec Levinas” 33)

Moreover, in the most striking departure from Levinas’s thinking, if the other could present itself to the I without any mediation, this would mean, for Derrida, an experience of pure violence: the third protects us “against the vertigo of ethical violence itself” (Adieu 33). Had Levinas still been alive when Derrida embarked on this response to his thought, he might have presented his reinterpretation as a critique, as he did in his earlier pieces. Levinas would have been free to rebut the criticisms, or to adjust his thinking—both of which he did in response to Derrida’s earlier critiques. In his funeral oration Derrida reminds his auditors of a text by Levinas entitled “Death and Time,” in which Levinas often defines death as “nonresponse” (5). He continues: “Death: not, first of all, annihilation, non-being or nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivor of the ‘without response’” (6). “A Word of Welcome,” it seems to me, is written in the shadow of that “without response”: Levinas will not answer, will not correct, will not show that his words mean something more than or different from what they have been

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taken to mean. So, in a sense, Derrida takes up that responsibility, showing that a certain reading of Levinas can move his thought in a direction which he may not have foreseen but which enriches and deepens it.17 It’s perhaps not too strained to cite Derrida’s own comments on the inheritance of a tradition as exemplified by Nelson Mandela: You can recognize an authentic inheritor in the one who conserves and reproduces, but also in the one who respects the logic of the legacy enough to turn it upon occasion against those who claim to be its guardians, enough to reveal, despite and against the usurpers, what has never yet been seen in the inheritance: enough to give birth, by the unheard-of act of a reflection, to what had never seen the light of day. (Derrida and Tlili 17)

This is what it means to be hospitable to the other’s thought, to welcome it in the fullest sense: both to allow one’s own thinking to be transformed by it, as Derrida’s certainly was by Levinas’s, and also to treat it as still growing, still in the process of fulfilling its potential. The risk, of course, is that this kind of reading may turn out to be an appropriation in the worst sense, a misreading that twists the original to suit the predilections of the reader; but this is a risk that has to be run.18 Were Derrida still alive, I might have presented my reading of his reading of Levinas in a more critical spirit; I can’t tell. But Derrida cannot respond, cannot elaborate or revise, and it seems to me that to do justice to his text one has to follow his example and read it for more than just the literal and logical arguments it presents. One has a responsibility to be hospitable to it in the complex fashion I’ve just described. There’s no doubt that my own understanding of writing, of meaning, of ethics has been transformed by Derrida’s work, as has that of many others; but it’s important that we do not treat that work as an inert body never growing or changing. If mourning is interminable, I would like to think that it’s not because it stays frozen in melancholia, but because the memory of the other, and that includes the surviving words of the other, continues to develop and adapt to new contexts. Derrida’s conviction that the third arrives without waiting and thus forestalls the violence of the other signals both his fidelity to his dead friend’s thought and is itself a mark of the third complicating that relation, his willingness to let it be remade by his own inventiveness—though Derrida, of course, does not put it in this way.

Notes 1. In a conversation with Gianni Vattimo in 1995, Derrida commented: “I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don’t go by without the imminence of the thing being there. I never stop analyzing the phenomenon of ‘surviving’ as the structure of surviving, it’s really the only thing that interests me, but precisely

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insofar as I do not believe that one lives on post mortem” (Derrida and Ferraris 88). See Miller 1, above. 2. For a lucid account of the role of the “constitutive outside” in Derrida’s thinking, see Staten 15–19 and passim. 3. An excellent discussion of Derrida’s accounts of the infidelity of mourning is given by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in their Introduction to The Work of Mourning. It is from this Introduction that I have taken the phrase by Proust that forms my title. 4. Basic Philosophical Writings, 168. Part of this passage is repeated from Otherwise Than Being (157). 5. In a 1986 interview, he similarly distances himself from his earlier conflation of ethics and justice: “In Totality and Infinity I used the word ‘justice’ for ethics, for the relationship between two people. I spoke of ‘justice,’ although now ‘justice’ is for me something which is a calculation, which is knowledge, and which supposes politics; it is inseparable from the political. It is something which I distinguish from ethics, which is primary (Levinas, “Paradox” 171). 6. This is hardly true: the section of the book dealing with the third extends to twoand-a-half pages only. 7. The translation of Totality and Infinity has “conversation,” but the original is “discours” and the translator of “A Word of Welcome” gives this as “discourse.” 8. Robert Bernasconi, in an essay comparing Levinas’s and Derrida’s conceptions of justice, acknowledges the difficulty of squaring Levinas’s different statements about the third. Levinas’s account of justice in Totality and Infinity is called “anomalous” within the context of his work (61), and the irreconcilability of the demands of ethics and justice termed an “aporia amounting to a contradiction . . . at the heart of Levinas’s thought” (65). De Vries also calls this “an ambiguity or, rather, aporia” (313). Simon Critchley, by contrast, attempts to articulate a consistent position, though his own account betrays a similar tension: the third “has always already entered into the ethical relation, troubling and doubling it into a political discourse,” yet the third party “introduces a limit to responsibility” and “In justice, I am no longer myself in relation to an other for whom I am infinitely responsible, but I can feel myself to be an other like the others” (231, my italics). 9. See, for example, The Humanism of the Other, 40–41; Basic Philosophical Writings, 119 (where the distancing from Buber is clear); Otherwise Than Being, 12–13, 147–50. 10. In Totalité et infini Levinas uses personal pronouns differently, suggesting that the other is not intimate but at a respectful distance: “L’interlocuteur n’est pas un Toi, il est un Vous” (104). The English translation cannot capture this distinction: “The interlocutor is not a Thou, he is a You” (101). 11. This conflation is also evident in Derrida’s note 15: “Totality and Infinity already welcomes, with such words, the ‘ineluctable’ occurrence of the third as ‘language’ and as ‘justice’” (136). 12. See Richard Beardsworth, passim, on the importance of this comparative judgement. 13. Totality and Infinity, 202, cited by Derrida in “A Word of Welcome” 34. 14. Bennington gives an excellent account of Derrida’s deconstructive ethics as a radicalization of Levinas’s thought, using a variety of phrases to describe Derrida’s proceeding: “Reading beyond the obvious intention of Levinas’s text” (40); “pushes the text read beyond its own explicit claims” (40); “through and beyond Levinas’s (41); “explicitly extending (and thereby also, respectfully, contesting) Levinas” (44). Similarly, de Vries begins a sentence on Derrida’s account of the immediacy of the third with

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“Pushing his interpretation far beyond commentary . . .” and adds, “This would be the logic, the argument . . . at work in Levinas’s text; without ever being acknowledged, thematized or formalized as such” (323). 15. In conversation with Maurizio Ferraris, Derrida adumbrates two conceptions of the third in its most general operation: “The third term can be taken as the mediator that permits synthesis, reconciliation, participation; in which case that which is neither this nor that permits the synthesis of this and that. But this function is not limited to the form it has taken in Hegelian dialectic, and the third of neither-this-nor-that and this-and-that can indeed also be interpreted as that whose absolute heterogeneity resists all integration, participation and system, thus designating the place where the system does not close. It is, at the same time, the place where the system constitutes itself” (Derrida and Ferraris 5). 16. I have discussed the apparently extreme examples of ethical choice given in The Gift of Death in “The Art of the Impossible?” and “On Mount Moriah.” Levinas gives a remarkable foretaste of Derrida’s argument in a 1986 interview: “For example, when we sit down at the table in the morning and drink coffee, we kill an Ethiopian who doesn’t have coffee” (“The Paradox of Morality” 173). 17. De Vries describes the relation between the thought of Levinas and that of Derrida as follows: “These thinkers’ writings can be translated almost completely into one another, to the point of becoming almost interchangeable. While this resemblance is remarkable, on second reading they take different directions as well. . . . Their congruity is not that of an overlapping minimal consensus but an intersection that is a chiasmic crossing, and instantaneous substitution of one for the other at an indeterminate point of in-difference, albeit one from which all that matters will take its departure” (Religion and Violence 310). 18. Jane Gallop, in an essay on Adieu, comments on Derrida’s play with underlining and emphasis in his quotations from Levinas: “When we quote a text, we are engaged in an act of hospitality, of taking in/lodging (héberger) someone else’s words. When we underline a text, we are taking possession of it, writing on it. Derrida’s hesitation about underlining, his self-consciousness about it, both recognizes that taking possession and resists it with a sense of the words as not his to do with as he likes. The play of underlining, the tense play of rendering it suspect while still doing it, allows us to see Derrida reading, and to see reading as a tension between the will to comprehend/use/possess and the recognition that the text does not belong to us. His selfconsciousness makes us aware that reading involves a self and an other—that reading must recognize, negotiate, and respect the space between them” (23–24).

II: Hospitalities

Chapter Three The Disjointed City: Materializing Mourning and Forgiveness in the Reconstruction of Beirut Jonathan Hall

The scarified surface of Beirut shows everywhere the marks of sectarian violence. Pock-marked walls, shelled-out buildings, and broken concrete, often covered with posters of slain politicians, are signs of the tumult Lebanon has experienced in its struggle to become the secular, pluralist, democratic republic named by its constitution in 1926. Central Beirut, the area most damaged by the 1975–1990 war, has been under reconstruction for the past decade, and as this reconstruction continues, it offers itself as a site for reflection on the projects and projections of cities. That etymological link between project as a noun and project as a verb seems felicitous as the former evokes the actual built objects of the city (originally a walled project), while the latter evokes a hoped-for, boundless cosmopolis, opening up the question of how a city overcomes the violence of boundaries, the very violence that brought it into being. Can a polis be built without such violence? Is there a politics that will exceed the city walls, both internal and external, breaking open the assertions of sovereignty that lie behind their construction? In his essay On Cosmopolitanism, Jacques Derrida wonders whether there are options for an international law on asylum that lie between repatriation and naturalization. What kind of city of refuge would be neither boundless nor walled? Could the City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law? For let us not hesitate to declare our ultimate ambition, what gives meaning to our project: our plea is for what we have decided to call the “city of refuge”. This is not to suggest that we ought to restore an essentially classical concept of the city by giving it new attributes and powers; neither would it simply be a matter of endowing the old subject we call “the city” with new predicates. No, we are dreaming of another concept, of another set of rights for the city, of another 43

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Hall politics of the city. I am aware that this might appear utopian for a thousand reasons, but at the same time, as modest as it is, what we have already begun to do proves that something of this sort can, from now on, function—and this disjointed process cannot be dissociated from the turbulence which affects, over the lengthy duration of a process, the axioms of international law. (8)

Derrida’s hoped-for “cities of refuge” are both radically discontinuous with the cities we know, while also emerging out of “what we have already begun to do.” What is this new politics of the city? What is the “disjointed process” by which it comes about? The “disjointed process” might be viewed as a politics that is subject to certain disruptions, the kind of disruptions that Derrida performs by introducing quasi-transcendental ethical concepts that demand to be thought in unconditional or infinite terms, such as hospitality, mourning, and forgiveness, even as they must take place in some concrete form. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose opposes such talk of impossibility, infinity, and transcendent or messianic interruptions. She opens up the question through a reading of Poussin’s painting, Gathering the Ashes of Phocion, in which Phocion’s wife is seen outside the walls of Athens gathering the ashes of her husband who had been unjustly condemned to death and then refused burial within the city. Rose’s reading refuses to draw a distinction between the violent politics of the rational, bounded order, represented by Athens, and “the pathos of redeeming love,” a “new ethics of unbounded community,” represented by Phocion’s wife in this instance, but also more broadly, Rose claims, by Jerusalem. For Rose, thinkers such as Benjamin, Levinas, and Derrida give too much away in testing the limits of political rationality and positing some sort of ethics beyond its indeterminable limits. She reads the act of gathering the ashes as an act that is continuous with the politico-juridical procedures of the city, rather than radically separate: “This act is not solely one of infinite love: it is a finite act of political justice” (25). It is this question of the relation of finite politics to infinite ethical demands that I will be focusing on in this exploration of the reconstruction of the center of Beirut. Unlike Phocion’s wife who gathers his outlawed ashes outside the city walls, I will be taking a walk through the central area of Beirut, taking a close look at three public spaces for what they may tell us of what lies inside and outside of political space. Rose’s distinction between Jerusalem and Athens will be complicated by traces of Beirut’s mixed ancestry in these public spaces. The first, Place de l’Étoile, more popularly known by its Arabic translation Sahat alNejmeh, was designed and built in the 1920s during the French mandate, badly damaged during the 1975–1990 war, and then restored in the late 1990s. The second, Martyrs’ Square, has been a city square since Ottoman times, but having served as the front line during the war, it was largely razed to the ground, leaving only two buildings and the martyrs’ monument. Even as it awaits its reconstruction, it has played a crucial role as a political gathering place during the turmoil that has gripped Lebanon since early 2005. The third, the Garden of Forgiveness, is a project not yet underway, to landscape a garden within some Roman ruins that have been uncovered by the work of post-war reconstruction.

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Using Derrida’s thought to read the surface of central Beirut, I hope to explore how the infinite ethical demands of hospitality, mourning, and forgiveness emerge within the finite conditions of political space. Subjecting my reading of Beirut to the aporia that such questions open up will be a way of insisting on exceeding the city limits, of finding ourselves in a situation where our ethical responsibilities cannot be fulfilled by the technical application of political knowhow (On Cosmopolitanism 53). And conversely, subjecting my reading of Derrida to the materiality of the city will put pressure on such infinite ethical demands, which, Derrida admits, are always “in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency” (23). As such it will form a response to the concerns of leftist critics such as Vincent Leitch that Derrida’s politics “lacks materialist grip” (Leitch 21). The point of insisting on the spectral materiality of the city is to insist that the polis lacks self-identity, and that it is constituted by its own failure to materialize itself, which is to say, if we imagine the city as a prosthetic political device, that it is a mechanism that fails to materialize its own ideals. Mourning and forgiveness will figure as forms of hospitality that are not merely procedures for normalizing a political community, but as forms of hospitality that are themselves out of joint, constituted spectral, disjointed forms of identification, and as such they never hit home. At the heart of the city lies a series of displacements, places of displacement, sites of mourning, forgiveness, and ultimately of a “democracy to come” that operate across a frontier between ethics and politics, but a frontier that cannot guarantee their separation. In “Hostipitality,” Derrida comments on the impossibility of radically separating ethics and politics since the third is always already present, dispossessing the singularities engaged in the face-toface encounter of their singularity, not least through a language that is never our own—an impossible hospitality. Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; deconstruction is hospitality to the other, to the other than oneself, the other than “its other,” to an other who is beyond any “its other.” We have undergone such a test or ordeal a thousand times when, for example (to remain close to Levinas for a little longer), we saw that the border between the ethical and the political is no longer insured, that the third [le tiers], who is the birth of justice and finally of the state, already announces himself in the duel of the face-to-face and the face, and therefore disjoints it, dis-orients it, “destin-errs” it; that the beyond the state (the condition of ethics) had to produce itself in the state—and that all the topological invaginations, which made the outside produce an enclave in the inside of the inside, were affecting the order of discourse, were producing deconstructive ruptures in the discourse and the construction of concepts. (64)

In the first section of this essay mourning will be construed as a potentially public, political act, while forgiveness will be viewed as more resistant to being publicly materialized. When mourning happens in public space, it is used to lament the vulnerability of one’s own community at the hands of murderous others, and so it is all too quickly co-opted by political and juridical measures

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that are fundamentally violent. However, even such acts of public mourning experience interruptions and are unable to constitute themselves as properly political. In the second section of the essay I will argue that this is all the more the case with forgiveness.

The Hospitality of Mourning in Public Space That the hospitality of the city is inextricably caught up with violence is a theme that is woven into the fabric of central Beirut. Through pagan and Christian empires, through Islamic dynasties and Crusader invasions, through colonial and postcolonial rule, the city has shown hospitality to religions, soldiers, refugees, political activists, terrorists, artists, missionaries, militia, peace-keepers, global corporations, foreign powers, and has come to understand the violence of such hospitality. After rival militias turned central Beirut into ghostly modern-day ruins over the course of the 1975–1990 war, the work of post-war reconstruction, particularly the reconstruction of public space, has foregrounded the hospitality of mourning, which, for all its seemingly pacific language, by no means escapes an economy of violence. For Derrida, even in the most cosmopolitan scene in which the city turns hospitality into the rule of law, violence remains within this hospitality as its enabling condition: the refugee is in need of protection, and the host in his sovereign power is able to offer it (“Hostipitality” 400, 408). In this section I will explore two public spaces, the first of which has undergone reconstruction, and the second of which awaits reconstruction. Sahat al-Nejmeh, which is the public space in front of Parliament House, is part of a modern urban project built over the ruins of ancient and medieval Beirut, while Martyrs’ Square is another modern public space built on the “commons” that lay just outside the ancient walls of the city (Figure 3.1). Metonymically at least, these modern, cosmopolitan public spaces do signify protection from prejudicial familial or tribal violence, as they are spaces within which hospitality is the rule of law, as in Derrida’s reading of Kant (On Cosmopolitanism 22). Sovereignty, however—and I have in mind here Carl Schmitt’s conception of a sovereignty that can declare the exception to the law—is very much at stake in their reconstruction, as a private real estate company, Solidere, set up by an arguably unconstitutional act of parliament, is responsible for the work.1 Solidere’s public self-conception is that it is “not just a real estate company, but . . . a city-making institution” (Chamaa), whose task is “the constitution or reconstitution of the public domain” (“Project”). For its critics, however, the company represents a derogation of the national interest, and this criticism has been at its sharpest in complaints that Solidere represents a confusion of public and private, has unfairly expropriated land from its owners, has destroyed the fabric of pre-war Beirut, and has sought to erase public memory of the war. To view the public spaces of central Beirut then in terms of the hospitality of mourning is to raise fraught questions over who is the host and who the guest, as well as over the extent to which the work of mourning is subject to economic

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and political forces. I want to suggest, however, that even the reconstructed public spaces of the city offer hospitality to mourning, and that, along the lines of Burns’s argument (138, below), this is inescapably a hospitality to trauma, which perpetually disables the work of public mourning whose success would be marked by the secure constitution of the political community. As Miller suggests in “Absolute Mourning” (10, above), it would be haunted by an absolute mourning that would ensure the failure of any attempt to construct a community by metonymical extension. The area on which Solidere first focused its work of reconstruction is an area that itself has a fraught history of ownership, as it is the area in which the old Arab city, with its narrow streets and souks, itself a patchwork of Roman, Crusader, and Mamluk appropriations and reappropriations, gave way to first Ottoman and then French projects of modernization (Hanssen 56–57). In the 1920s the center of the city was radically reshaped by an urban master plan of the French-mandate government, giving the center of the city its current street pattern, which was then preserved by Solidere during post-war reconstruction. The modern symmetry of a star-shaped street pattern radiates from a central square, Sahat al-Nejmeh, duplicating Place de l’Étoile in Paris. In the middle of the square is a clock tower; on one side is Parliament House. A modern, secular, rational spatio-temporal order was being imposed on the urban fabric of Beirut. From there power would be projected outward to the then newly created nationstate of Lebanon. In this sense, the radial symmetry of Sahat al-Nejmeh, at the center of which sits the parliament of a representative democracy, seems to enact Derrida’s claim in Rogues that “democratic space” is desired and named via the geometric figure of the circle, “a rotation toward the self” that becomes a matter “of sovereign self-determination, of the autonomy of the self, of the ipse, namely of the oneself that gives itself its own law, of autofinality, autotely, self-relation as being in view of the self, beginning by the self with the end of self in view” (10–11). For Derrida, however, this circular act of self-gathering necessarily remains incomplete and inadequate to itself. By means of a series of etymological links between ensemble, semblance, simultaneity, simulation, and assimilation, he suggests that democracy remains dependent on performative and tele-technical projections that both enable and disable the movement of gathering. In “Deconstruction and Democracy in the Neoliberal Turn,” Stefan Mattessich points to the state of exception and the dynamic of exceptionalism by which democracy simulates self-sovereignty. Mattessich sees in the spectrality of sovereignty and autonomy not only the self-delusion of liberal democracy, but also the chance of radical participatory democracy (111, below). Democracy’s constitutive lack of self-identity inoculates it against attempts at foreclosure; for Derrida, “it is not certain that ‘democracy’ is a political concept through and through” (Rogues 39), so it exceeds the operations of political techne. In a concrete manifestation of this thesis the grand project of the star-shaped street pattern was never completed. Two streets to the southeast and east were projected but never built—two ghost-limbs of the projected political power of the mandate authorities. To the east and southeast of Nejmeh lie the Greek

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Orthodox, the Greek Catholic, and the Maronite cathedrals, religious sites that resisted the attempt to impose a rational, secular order. With these two missing streets, the center of the city is haunted by the projected Paris that it never became, as well as by the Roman, Arab, and Ottoman cities it once was. But we need to take this even further since the spectral structure of the city is evidently not only a matter of a temporal disjointedness; it is also a consequence of the structural failure of a democratic community to appropriate itself—an inadequacy to itself that opens out into infinite mourning. In tracing Derrida’s phrase “absolute mourning” through the pages of On Touching, Miller concludes that the phrase refers to a form of isolation so radical that one cannot even ascribe it simply to the self: “I am in perpetual mourning for the impossibility of ‘appropriating’ the other or myself, making the other my ‘property,’ properly mine, or appropriating myself in an act of self-possession” (19, above). While Miller is writing about the self, and the network of spacings within which it is caught, I suggest that we can scale this up to become an image of the city, reflecting the kind of geometric spacing that Derrida says enables a certain encircling of a democratic space as sovereign. What interests me in Miller’s argument is his pursuit of “Derrida’s enigmatic versions of prosthesis, technicity, and autoimmunity, in their interlaced complexity” (11, above), and his ultimate claim that “‘absolute mourning’ . . . is generated by the combinatory displacements of those various non-metonymical metonymies—prosthesis, death, expropriation, ecotechnics, temporalization, and so on—around a vacant place” (20, above). The city, then, would be just one particularly developed accretion of this “immense system of exappropriations, relations without relation” (20, above), making the heart of the city prosthetic. If the city is such a system of spectral extension, of spacings, of non-metonymical metonymies around a vacant place, then, following Miller’s argument, the city might be seen as materializing “absolute mourning,” a “system that is non-systematic,” which is “hollowed out in all directions by the impossibility to touch or know any one of those others, though each, in an enormous multitude, is ‘in yourself in myself’” (20, above). In “The Haunting of (un)Burial” (61–73, below), Lindsay Tuggle’s discussion of the famously metonymical poet Walt Whitman and the Ground Zero memorial also pursues this idea of vacant space around which community becomes unavowable, yet around which it must form. Tuggle discusses both Whitman’s post-war poetry and the Ground Zero memorial in terms of the “unburied and unknown” (62, below), which I would suggest is a hyperbolic form of metonymy, whereby the part representing the whole has no material existence, a “non-metonymical metonymy,” which is at once material and immaterial. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida gives a reading of Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the political is dependent on “a concrete, concretely determined enemy” by pointing to the spectrality that must haunt such a concrete politics: “But there is the specter, lodged within the political itself; the antithesis of the political dwells within and politicizes the political” (138). The key point here is to not leave politics to its own devices. Recognizing the way in which politics is animated by something outside of itself is significant for a number of related

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reasons: (1) this originary heterogeneity defies the conception of the political as a simple horizontal plane on which potentially everything can touch everything else; (2) it enables the recognition of foreclosures by which politics constitutes itself as proper to itself, and also enables the ethical work of preventing such foreclosures; (3) it recognizes that politics may actually gain much of its power from elements that are not properly political—as in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, elements such as friendship that are the beginning of the political before the political (200). In The Ethics of Deconstruction, Simon Critchley refers to this as “the re-inscription of the transcendence of the political . . . where the transcendence of the political is, it could be said, the alterity of an absence” (217). Keeping in mind this spectral heart of the city, and the impossibility of constructing thoroughly metonymical foundations for the polis, I want to turn now to Martyrs’ Square, a large public space that was originally the commons area just outside the walls of the ancient city, and which was transformed into a public square during the modernization of Beirut through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By contrast with the churches and mosques in central Beirut that may be seen to obstruct the operations of cosmopolitan political power by disrupting the rational reorganization of the city, Martyrs’ Square, as sociologist Samir Khalaf argues, offers itself as an open space on which cosmopolitan energies may be given free play, a non-sectarian, meeting place between ghettoized communities (17). Martyrs’ Square is so named for the proindependence activists who were publicly executed there by the Ottomans in 1915 and 1916. The martyrs were executed just a few years before the inception of the nation-state of Lebanon, so their status as national martyrs is retroactively ascribed, and whether they spoke as anti-Ottoman activists for the selfdetermination of Mt Lebanon, Syria, or all Arab people, is not entirely clear.2 The use of mourning to found the political community as a nation-state is then dependent on a spectral form of identification that disjoins the metonymical fantasy of gathering all the constituent parts within a bounded space. The failure of democratic self-appropriation, which I suggest haunts the square as a political space founded on mourning, is perhaps best evident in the history of the monuments that have been placed in the square. The first monument, installed in 1930, figured a Muslim woman and a Christian woman facing each other and holding out their hands toward one another, seemingly in an act of mourning, perhaps over dead male relatives, a joint mourning that is also a gesture of forgiveness. The current monument, which was installed in the square in 1960, is much more triumphalist and overtly political, commemorating the martyrs’ struggle for independence as the birth of a nation founded on classical democratic virtues. The historically complex particularities of Lebanon are disregarded by the statue as it is a classical depiction of citizenship, representing virtues such as freedom, wisdom, courage, and hope—universalized values promulgated by the cosmopolitan elite as crucial for dissolving sectarian tensions and founding a modern nation-state. The scene captured by the statue is of violence, or triumph through sacrifice, and even finally of transcendence

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(Figure 3.2). Two men, portrayed naturalistically, but wearing nondescript tunics, lie prostrate and pleading on the ground. They appear to represent the martyrs, suffering and appealing to be heard. Above them stand a man and a woman, in more classical poses, symbolizing a more abstract set of ideas to do with the classical citizen: freedom, equality, wisdom, truth, and hope. This is a different order of transcendence to the ethics of alterity that Critchley, following Derrida, argues must interrupt the political scene. The transcendent ideas represented by the statue operate as ideals to be realized, albeit forever imperfectly, through technical politico-judicial procedures. Although the perfectibility of such procedures is vitally important, the problem with this view, to which I will return, lies in that gap between the ideal and the real. In its rapid transformation of mourning into political triumph, the statue passes quickly over the gap between the constitutional ideals of the nation and the violence of its history. Throughout the 1975–1990 war, the statue sat in the middle of the public square, which became a theater of civil conflict and was totally devastated. The figures that make up the central statue’s expression of noble citizenship were ripped through with bullets, and the standing man lost an arm (Figure 3.3). During restoration work it was decided to preserve these wounds, making the mutilated statue Beirut’s only intentional, official public commemoration of the war. The violent history of the square is only barely legible as the square is overwritten by the work of reconstruction that will, in the words of Solidere, “restor[e] life to this vital part of the country, traditionally a meeting place for all and the focus of economic and cultural activity (“Project Overview”). The pathos of the statue’s situation in the middle of political conflict has been perpetuated recently by the many political gatherings, many of them events of mourning, that have been held in the square since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on 14 February 2005. Draped with flags and political streamers, and clambered over by protestors and mourners, the statue has continued to hold the torch aloft, as though blind to the violence and division endemic in the nation’s politics. And yet the square holds out the hope of political integration. On 14 March 2005, when almost a quarter of the nation gathered in the square and its surrounding area and called for Syrian withdrawal in response to the assassination of Hariri, mourning became mass protest, which in turn became a plebiscite, resulting in intolerable pressure on Syria to release its grip (Figure 3.4). Martyrs’ Square itself has continually been the site of such transformations of mourning into political maneuvering. In many of the mass gatherings hosted by the square since early 2005, numbers have been a crucial matter of conjecture. On 1 December 2006 almost a quarter of the nation gathered once again, this time to protest against the “March 14” governing coalition. Constituent power has been at stake in many of these gatherings largely because of a widespread feeling that the current electoral system and the various arms of governmental power are fundamentally flawed. If the democratic fantasy is of a polity that is fully present and not subject to the vagaries of being re-presented, then gathering a large proportion of the population in a public space leads toward fantasies of realizing such a selfidentical polity. For this reason, I want to question whether a politics of

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mourning and the work of reconstruction can really get us away from the political calculations that are essential to a politics of violence.3 If we are to imagine, following Derrida, “another politics of the city” (On Cosmopolitanism 8), then I think that we will need paradoxically to account for the incalculable. The original martyrs’ monument of 1930 brought into the political arena such an alternative, incalculable politics, but in such a way that it cut across the attempt to constitute political space, generating an intolerable discontinuity between the public and the private. This monument, which now sits in the garden of the Sursock Museum in Beirut, is a sculpture by Youssef Hoyeck, in which two women, one Muslim and one Christian, face one another, their eyes down or closed, and their hands held out, palms down, toward each other, almost touching, seemingly in a unifying act of public mourning (Figures 3.5–3.7). Beneath their hands is a single funerary urn, and carved onto the plinth beneath the urn, but now worn off, was the national symbol of the cedar. The women’s joint act of mourning was evidently meant to consecrate the unity of the nation. Division is transformed into unity; death is transformed into the organic life of the cedar, and by metonymic transfer, the organic life of the nation. The various identities and positions of the anti-Ottoman activists are appropriated into a national project in this gesture of mourning. In mourning the death of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Derrida agonizes over how, now that his friend is gone, it is so easy for him to betray the separation on which their friendship depended, “giving in to an indecent way of saying ‘we,’ or worse, ‘me’” (Work of Mourning 225). In remembering what brought them together and kept them together as friends, Derrida hesitates characteristically, concerned that the use of “we” threatens to trample on both the secrecy of his friend’s otherness and the act of faith by which it is possible for them to be together. There is something of this “indecent way of saying ‘we,’” in the original martyrs’ monument as it transmutes difference into unity, yet the figuration of the two women exceeds the crude aesthetics of public, nationalist appropriation. Their identical poses are reflective, and perhaps even prayerful, echoing the saintliness of the church-commissioned sculptures for which Hoyeck was well known. Their unnatural poses reflect a wider tendency to abstraction in their figuration, giving an otherworldly serenity to the monument. Yet the veil on the face of one of the women materializes the religious differences out of which Lebanon has struggled to form itself. The figures of the women need to bear obvious sectarian markings in order to represent the transcendence of sectarian division, paradoxically enshrining sectarianism in the process of trying to overcome it. The figures of the women thus prevaricate about forming such a “we,” evoking the tension that worries Derrida between being together and being separate. Each of them, with her head bowed and her eyes closed, mourns in private, despite the public display. They are not public citizens; they are private mothers, wives, daughters, who are mourning the public deaths of their male relatives. Further emphasizing the privacy of the women is their elliptical relation to one another; they do not finally traverse the space between each

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other, not quite touching. The veil pushes this even further, reminding us that they each represent their religious community, but in representing it they actually represent its separateness, its inaccessibility, its private secrecy. In the privacy and separateness of the women’s mourning, the sculpture stops short of fully interiorizing the remains of the martyrs into the body politic. Some part of mourning remains irredeemably private, confessional, and beyond the reach of any form of public work or exchange. Even as the women stretch out toward one another, suggesting that singularity can be overcome, the monument returns us to the singularity of identity and the singularity of each relation. The monument, then, seems to recognize something of the face-to-face scene of forgiveness that does not simply dissolve history into atemporal universals, a scene of forgiveness that Derrida describes as “at once singular and on the way to universalization” (On Cosmopolitanism 28). When it was installed in the center of pluralist, cosmopolitan Beirut, it offered a scene of hospitality and forgiveness, even and especially as it reinscribed the strangeness of Christian and Muslim to one another, as well as keeping alive the memory of violence. In “Hostipitality” Derrida tells a Jewish joke that evokes the impossibility of the scene of forgiveness in which a refusal to forget is a condition of forgiveness: Two Jews, longtime enemies, meet at the synagogue, on the Day of Atonement [le jour du Grand Pardon]. One says to the other [as a gesture, therefore, of forgiveness—J.D.]: “I wish for you what you wish for me.” The other immediately retorts: “Already you’re starting again?” (381)

Derrida calls this an “absolute story of the unsolvable, vertiginous depth of the bottomlessness [sans-fond], irresistible whirlpool that carries forgiveness, the gift, the re-giving, the re-dealing of forgiveness, to the abyss of impossibility” (381). He suggests that although forgiveness is impossible, since it must unconditionally forgive the unforgivable, an unconscious forgiveness might seep into such face-to-face encounters as this between two enemies who now speak to one another: “perhaps a kind of forgiveness filters unconsciously through this compassion, supposing that an unconscious forgiveness were not nonsense” (382). Something about such a possibility of unconscious, undeclared, and therefore truly secret, forgiveness is preferable for Derrida to the sovereignty, or unilateralism, of the statement “I forgive you” (386). Unlike the current monument, which figures the free and equal citizen as guaranteed by the constitution, this monument figures an encounter that cannot be guaranteed, in which something remains secret and inaccessible. Where the current statue insists that the work of mourning has a clear goal—that is, to build the nation— for the former statue, the mourning of the women seems endless, opening out into infinity. This scene of face-to-face encounter then has the boundlessness of the ethical demand, and so it is unsurprising that the original monument no longer has a place in the square. However, in the light of this argument that the infinite demand of ethics is radically discontinuous with political space, it is interesting that Solidere have agreed to create a public garden in the center of the

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city devoted to forgiveness. I turn now to examining the public materialization of forgiveness within that garden.

Forgiveness: The Garden within the City Is the scene of forgiveness a personal face-to-face, or does it call for institutional mediation? (And language, the words themselves, are here a first mediating institution.) (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism 42)

In between Sahat al-Nejmeh and Martyrs’ Square are some excavated Roman ruins, among which a public garden will be landscaped that will be called the Garden of Forgiveness (Figure 3.8). It is a large area that is contiguous with three cathedrals and two mosques, as well as being surrounded by shops, restaurants, and cafés. The name is an obvious reference to the 1975–1990 war, but the garden is quite distinctly not a war memorial. The garden will bear no reference to the war, so forgiveness will remain a highly abstract idea. This is understandable since materializing any memory of the war in a public monument has so far been impossible in Lebanon, with the exception of the preservation of the wounded statue. The war is largely absent from the public sphere as there is no public consensus over the events of the war; attempts to write history textbooks that would cover the period of the war have failed for this reason. So the Garden of Forgiveness will not refer to anything; it will not name people or events that are forgiven or to be forgiven. (To do so anyhow would be a peculiarly provocative form of forgiveness: as Derrida argues in “Literature in Secret,” forgiveness imputes guilt even as it exculpates, and thus does not render its recipient innocent [Gift of Death 137].) Ironically then, in its very transcendence of historical events the Garden of Forgiveness is politically strategic. The garden’s creator, Alexandra Asseily, argues that material efforts to bring together segregated communities, through education, economic development, and social welfare, “need to be consolidated by forgiveness, which transcends painful memories and grievances and redirects this energy into genuine venues for peaceful and creative coexistence” (1). Forgiveness, in her account, is transcendent, and so of a different order to social, political, and economic strategies, yet it remains continuous with them in this process of consolidation. The account of the garden given by the chairman of Solidere, Nasser Chamaa, similarly turns on the question of how we might construe the relation between materiality and immateriality. In doing so he creates a series of figures to explain how the materiality of the garden connects to the immateriality of forgiveness. He speaks in metonymic, and therefore material terms, in explaining that the garden would literally be a space of reconciliation, “truly the city’s meeting point and common ground for all.” But he also speaks more

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metaphorically of how the material space would “embody” or “carry” immaterial ideas, though he combines that with metonymical relations to religion through its contiguity with religious sites, and synecdochic relations to the nation: “I believe the garden, with the ideas it embodies, the vision that it carries, its location among several places of worship, its design reflecting Lebanon’s varied landscape and numerous historical layers, will go further than any other public space in accomplishing these most important goals” (n.p.). Clearly the garden is intended to materialize forgiveness in the hope of having a therapeutic, normalizing effect on the social and political life of Lebanon, making it continuous with secular, political space in which citizens are supposed to meet in horizontal encounters. Is the garden, then, more like a strategic gesture of amnesty in the hope of reconciliation than a gesture of forgiveness? 4 Does the garden merely provide the simulacrum of forgiveness that Derrida suggests has proliferated through the international community since World War II through the discourses of human rights and crimes against humanity (On Cosmopolitanism 29)? Can forgiveness be the founding principle of such public space? Should we even desire public, phenomenal gestures of forgiveness? Or is there something private, even secret, about forgiveness? Complicating these questions further is that the Garden is the project of a private real estate company, appropriating forgiveness for the sake of the public. For Derrida, forgiveness has inescapable vertical dimensions. He is interested by the proliferation of the language of forgiveness throughout international politics precisely because he sees forgiveness as irreconcilable with politico-juridical strategies such as investigation, amnesty, acquittal, and so on. Forgiveness must forgive the unforgivable, so it must be limitless and unconditional, while politico-juridical strategies are precisely about setting limits and conditions. So forgiveness arrives as something “heterogeneous to the order of politics” (On Cosmopolitanism 39). Yet forgiveness is also indissociable from such strategies. Forgiveness must take place, in which case we can only encounter it within finitude, within the particular. There are necessary limits such as the need to share a linguistic account of events (48–49). But if even the minimal social dimension of a shared language makes unconditional forgiveness no longer possible, then public space will certainly be unable to represent forgiveness, precisely because it is public and continuous with the space of politics. An economical, unconditional forgiveness, for Derrida, should be an interruption of historical temporality (32); the “time of forgiveness escapes the judicial process” (43). The normalizing impulse within narratives of justification and reconciliation makes them always conditional and always in the service of particular interests. And yet he insists that conditions are necessary for forgiveness to take place, “to become effective, concrete, historic” (45). So although Derrida writes against forgiveness as a strategic calculation, or “a therapy of reconciliation” (41), and that it should have nothing to do with “judicial justice, with law” (43), he does make a claim for some kind of continuity between forgiveness and juridico-political procedures. He goes on to write that forgiveness gives meaning to such procedures (45). Later he writes that it can “orient” and “inspire” (51), and again later that “[i]t can induce

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processes of transformation—political, juridical, but in truth without limit” (53). If we are tempted to see shades of Platonic idealism in this quasi-transcendental concept that seems to guide political and juridical processes, then Derrida immediately returns to insolubility, incommensurability, and excess in describing how the ethics of forgiveness might “exceed all institution, all power, all juridico-political authority” (53–54). Unconditional forgiveness, for Derrida, is not an ideal awaiting realization; rather it arrives as an interruption. In Rogues Derrida challenges Kantian regulative ideals on three counts: (1) they suggest an impossible utopian horizon, whereas, for Derrida, the im-possible is real and present; (2) they suggest principles determined in advance that can be put into action as a matter of knowledge and calculation; and (3) they demand acceptance of Kant’s entire architecture of thought, including the “as if,” which, more broadly, means that they demand to be accepted as universalizable, while bracketing off potential challenges (Rogues 84–85). The Kantian regulative ideal, for Derrida, publishes a law that defies “democracy to come,” the necessity of invention in response to singularities. What politics is then possible? A politics that recognizes its own spectral disjointedness, the presence of the anti-political specter within itself. In this sense, Derrida argues, democracy is not a political concept through and through: “A democracy must be public and phenomenal through and through, something of the Enlightenment. But since it must also recognize, in the name of democracy, the right to the secret, things again get complicated” (65). So we are left with political reconciliation and forgiveness as irreconcilable yet indissociable. But because they are indissociable, it would seem petty to insist that there is no such thing as political forgiveness and the garden should really be called the Garden of Reconciliation. Such a claim would at the very least ignore the performative dimensions of the name, strangely insisting that the garden must mean exactly what it says. Of course the garden fails to publicly materialize forgiveness, but perhaps it is a failure that might nonetheless performatively give meaning, orient, inspire, and transform, and in so doing exceed current political conditions and exigencies. At the same time it is impossible for this garden, which lies within a city that is being contested and reconfigured by massive political and economic forces, and which is sanctioned by those forces for strategic reasons, to be continuous with Derrida’s hope for the impossibility of “a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty” (59). There is no better reminder of this mutual coiling of forgiveness and power in the taking place of forgiveness than the fact that the site for the Garden is available only because of demolition and development decisions taken by Solidere, which removed the jumble of houses and streets that once filled the site. Further, in razing the buildings, Roman ruins were uncovered, and it is into this ancient imperial city, once home to a university of law, that the Garden of Forgiveness will be landscaped. Martyrs’ Square, I argued earlier, is a space in which mourning has a clear political function, with a view to the production of citizenship—the end of mourning. Indeed, I suggested that neither endless mourning nor the arrival of

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the unconditional in the form of forgiveness could be officially and publicly accommodated in the square. By the same logic, in its invocation of forgiveness and its refusal to memorialize the 1975–1990 war, does the Garden of Forgiveness serve as a public interdiction against mourning? Is it a strategy to bring an end to mourning by not giving it a place? To the extent that it does this, it encrypts the war as a public secret that no longer needs to be discussed, and of which there will be no remains to mourn. How different it would be if the garden were set in the actual ruins of the war, rather than in Roman ruins. But an interdiction against mourning does not of course bring it to an end. As Derrida points out, when Oedipus is buried in a foreign land, Antigone is left without remains and without a tomb, “without a localizable and circumscribed place of mourning”: “Without a fixed place, without a determinable topos, mourning is not allowed” (Of Hospitality 111). But even in such cases where mourning is not allowed, the mourning of mourning takes place—the absolute mourning in which, as Miller points out, even touch becomes aporetic (14, above). Far from disabling democracy, this spacing brings it about. To criticize the Garden of Forgiveness for not memorializing the war is to commit the error of believing that the public sphere must eradicate secrecy, thus bringing about reconciliation. In Rogues, Derrida develops a long argument about the complexities and difficulties of democracy, proposing that if justice and law are heterogeneous (though indissociable), then perhaps justice is not, as Heidegger would have it, “gathering, adjoining, and harmony”: “I proposed aligning justice with disjointure, with being out of joint, with the interruption of relation, with unbinding, with the infinite secret of the other. All this can indeed seem to threaten a community-oriented or communitarian concept of democratic justice” (88). But democracy must preserve the right to secrecy: . . . is it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone (Wechsel der Töne), to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And, thus, to a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpublic remains an indecidable limit. (91–92)

In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose rejects recourse to anything outside the modern political space, which she represents synecdochally as Athens. For her, to hope for anything from outside is to hope for an unmediated, messianic moment; the hope of Jerusalem as opposed to the rationality of Athens (20–22). However, as Benjamin sought to demonstrate in “Critique of Violence,” if the law is founded and preserved by violence then we have a distinct problem when it comes to determining the boundaries of the law, of deciding where the walls of Athens lie. In the famously troubling ending to the essay, Benjamin is not content with leaving the negotiation of such a boundary to endless dialectic. That, he seems to think, would leave in place the process of means-ends calculation and justification. He does not simply want to embrace a dialectic between Athens and Jerusalem, between political procedures and

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ethical responsibility, or between law and justice. He wants to posit a justice that lies radically outside any dialectical system of justification (247–48). This is a strong repudiation of closure that is repeated by Derrida’s undeconstructable justice, which is dissociated from the law. Rose confidently declares where the boundaries of Athens lie and argues for remaining within the rationality of its procedures as the application of foundational principles (such as achieving justice through the application of a just law), but Derrida and Benjamin know of no such city. The very foundations of the city, for Derrida, cannot be constituted rationally all the way down, and its limits cannot be guaranteed. The city, then, is an impossible attempt to materialize infinity; as a project, however, it is saved from total absurdity and paradox by its own spectrality, its own disjointedness. It may have limits, but it is not strictly delimited. Derrida’s spectrality troubles the solidity of Athens that Rose’s argument depends upon. Surely Athens was always already a spectral city, in the way that I hope to have briefly demonstrated Beirut has its specters, which prevent the possibility of identifying a self-identical polity. To what extent are there specters of Athens in Jerusalem, and specters of Jerusalem in Athens?5 When Derrida acknowledges, in “The Force of Law,” that deconstruction has both Greek and Judaic ancestry, he also claims that it may be partly “without filiation,” that “something else runs in its veins” (56). Is this “something else” crucial to the “new politics of the city” that he hopes for in “On Cosmopolitanism”? If it is “without filiation,” where does it come from? It may sound suspiciously like a virgin birth. But for Derrida this is to insist that it does not come from either the inside or the outside. Since its emergence is incalculable, or unconditional, it cannot be accounted for from within the system. In the case of forgiveness, it is irreconcilable to the politicojuridical system, but also indissociable from it. These dislocations, aporias, and paradoxes are not meant to suggest that the rationality and the rule of law are to be dismissed. They suggest, as Derrida does of the discourse of human rights and crimes against humanity, that the achievements of modern political systems are immense and fragile at the same time (On Cosmopolitanism 30). A key reason for their fragility is that our abstractions such as the human are not built up simply out of an accumulation of equally substitutable units that operate like bricks. Rather than create such an imagined, totalizing continuity between the abstract and the concrete, such that parts can be isolated, equivalences drawn, and the whole accounted for, Derrida emphasizes paradoxes and irreconcilabilities, complicating any movement between the abstract and the concrete, between theory and practice. For this reason, the continuity I have tried to establish between Derrida’s thought and the space of the city, between the abstract and the concrete, is inimical to Derridean aporia and paradox. Translating Derrida’s thought into material space is one of those many moves that are necessary but impossible. Impossibility here does not mean the mere absence of possibility; it is rather Derrida’s notion of impossibility as “the chance of the possible” (“A Certain Impossible” 236), an impossibility that inoculates politics against the deadening forces of technical procedure. For Derrida, although “a certain essence of politeia [is] absolute

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phenomenality,” to insist on treating political space as a limitless uncovering of phenomenal truth creates the danger of “totalitarianism with a democratic face” (“History” 93). Werner Hamacher notes this disjunction in discussing the inescapability and impossibility of establishing equivalences as it emerges in Kant’s idea of the dignity of self-valuation, of a self that is able to give itself its singularity and its universality: This “giving” [Gebung] is a “dignity”—and thus a giving of singularity and of universality, not singularity and universality themselves as given. As the giving of the universal it is never universal; as the giving of the singular it is never itself singular; it is presingular and preuniversal. Its autonomy defines itself and defines every self as heterautonomous. It commands singularity and universality and thus erects a double command that is doubly contradictory: that it is necessary to count, compare, and represent in terms of equivalents; and, at the same time, that is impermissible to count, or to measure by equivalents, or to compare. That the uncountable be counted, and that the countable be uncountable, countless, dis-counted. These relatively abstract considerations—and they are also considerations regarding the structure of abstraction and idealization, as well as the structure of empiricization and socialization—have no immediate political consequences, but delimit the space in which political questions both theoretical and practical may be posed regarding the form of democracy, the parameters of a complex and even aporetic mediacy: the field, on the one hand, of counting in political space and, on the other, this political space as one of the uncertainty of counting. (311)

The space of the city, then, the space in which we encounter politico-juridical process, must be recognized as a disjointed space that is simultaneously political and incalculable. Daring to speak more concretely, if we imagine that we are going to overcome violence with democracy, then it will not be just a matter of counting. Indeed, what may be required for the arrival of democracy is a disruption to politics that would revive a politics that breaks away from the technocratic globalization of democracy—invention in response to singularity, rather than application of a pre-existing form. Writing about the necessity of moving from ethics to politics in the thought of Derrida and Levinas, Critchley views the ethical demand as the condition of possibility for a politics that is nonfoundational yet nonarbitrary, meaning that “political invention” is required, though not any old invention will do: In my view, Levinasian ethics is not ethics for its own sake, [it is] ethics for the sake of politics. Better stated perhaps, ethics is the metapolitical disturbance of politics for the sake of politics, that is, for the sake of a politics that does not close over in itself, becoming what Levinas would call totality, becoming a whole. Following Levinas’s logic, when politics is left to itself without the disturbance of ethics it risks becoming tyrannical. (“Five Problems” 182)

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Of course, we cannot leave the responsibility for such an ethical disturbance of politics in the hands of real estate developers, city planners, and politicians. Public spaces of the city only bear any meaning in the moment of actual encounter, the moment in which political calculation is bound to fail as the otherness of the other demands the infinite, unconditional act, at which point we have Derrida’s “topological invaginations” (Acts of Religion 364) of the ethical into the political and vice versa. While it is too calculated to be a genuine interruption of political space, the Garden of Forgiveness will give Beirut a public space that at least names this failure of political calculation, a public space that names the ungrounding of politics without denying the necessity of politics.

Notes 1. Granting a private company the power of expropriation may contravene the constitutional right to private property. 2. Robert Fisk describes discovering a published version of the final speeches they were allowed to make from the gallows in which it seems, unsurprisingly, the martyrs spoke on behalf of different communities. 3. Two essays are particularly seminal for this thought: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” and Derrida’s “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority.’” 4. A general amnesty, with a few exceptions, was in fact part of the Ta’if Accord, which brought an end to the fifteen years of civil conflict in 1990. 5. In The Ethics of Deconstruction, Critchley argues for opening up a route between Athens and Jerusalem, quoting Levinas on the necessity of both “in order to suppress violence” (240).

Figure 3.1. Aerial view of Beirut city center: on the left is the partially symmetrical street pattern radiating from Sahat al-Nejmeh; in the center are the cross-shaped Greek Catholic, Orthodox, and Maronite Cathedrals that prevented the completion of the Place de l’Etoile plan; at the bottom, the dome of the Al-Amin Mosque sits beside the Maronite Cathedral; between these religious buildings lie the excavated Roman ruins, uncovered by post-war demolition, within which the Garden of Forgiveness will be landscaped; the white roof of Hariri’s burial place is adjacent to the unrestored area of Martyrs’ Square on the right. Source: © 2012 Google © 2013 DigitalGlobe, GeoEye

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Figure 3.2. The Martyrs’ Square monument. Source: © 2007 Jonathan Hall

Figure 3.3. Bullet holes riddle the statue, and the man has lost part of his left arm. Source: © 2007 Jonathan Hall

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Figure 3.4. Plastic cladding on the burial place of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri adjacent to Martyrs’ Square: a photo of Hariri is superimposed onto a photo of the massive anti-Syrian gathering in the Square on March 14, 2005, which was organized to protest his death. Source: © 2009 Jonathan Hall

Figure 3.5.

The original Martyrs’ Square monument.

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Figure 3.6. Source: © 2007 Jonathan Hall

Figure 3.7.

The downcast faces of the two women

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Figure 3.8. The Roman ruins in the foreground are to become the Garden of Forgiveness, overlooked by the Al-Amin Mosque and St Georges Maronite Cathedral. Source: © 2007 Jonathan Hall

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Chapter Four The Haunting of (un)Burial: Mourning the “Unknown” in Whitman’s America Lindsay Tuggle

The “unknown” is not the negative limit of a knowledge. This non-knowledge is the element of friendship or hospitality for the transcendence of the stranger, the infinite distance of the other. (Derrida, The Work of Mourning 205)

Throughout its fluctuating editions, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a memorial text. It repeatedly constructs haunting as an act of hospitality, issuing an open invitation to the beloved dead to occupy the book, and initiating what Jacques Derrida describes as “the return of the ghost as text, or the text as ghost” (Mémoires 122). By conceiving the book as an open-ended invocation and invitation to the dead, Whitman allows his text to function as a collected work of mourning: ongoing, impossible, infinite. In the preface to the “Second Annex—Good-Bye My Fancy” of the 1891– 92 edition, Whitman describes the significance of the Civil War to his lifelong project: [T]hose hot, sad, wrenching times . . . the wounded, suffering, dying—the exhausted, sweating summers, marches, battles, carnage—those trenches hurriedly heap’d by the corpse-thousands, mainly unknown—Will the America of the future—will this vast rich Union ever realize what itself cost, back there after all?—those hecatombs of battle-deaths—Those times of which, O far-off reader, this whole book is indeed finally but a reminiscent memorial from thence by me to you? (Leaves [1891] 452)

The war became pivotal to the evolution of Leaves of Grass. Whitman arranged the book into six significantly different editions during his lifetime, from the first edition in 1855 to the final “deathbed edition” published in 1891 (dated 61

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1891–92), and refigured the pre-war editions as strange prefaces, foreshadowing and anticipating the final conflict: “the whole book, indeed, revolves around that four years’ war” (Prose Works 469). Irrevocably altered by his experiences of wounded and dying soldiers in camps and hospitals, Whitman sought to incorporate the war and its casualties into his book, and into his own body: “My book and the war are one, / Merged into its spirit I and mine” (Leaves [1891] 6). In 1865, he published two volumes of war poetry, Drum Taps and Sequel to Drum Taps, which were annexed to Leaves of Grass in 1867. He incorporated his war verse into the larger work, just as he wished the earth to absorb “my young men’s bodies” and “their precious precious blood” (“Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” Leaves [1891] 418). Leaves of Grass in its entirety began to function as a monument and memorial, enacting symbolic burial rituals for the “unburied and unknown” war dead (Specimen 583). Throughout Whitman’s war memoranda, individual soldiers are often described as “specimens,” hinting at his role as war spectator and voyeur, his interest in science and pseudosciences such as phrenology, and his insatiable desire to collect the “unworldly” essences of the soldiers he attended (Memoranda 48). Rescuing the soldiers from their value as war commodities, he captures them as fetishized desire-objects within the interior phantasmagoria of the book, which thus, as Derrida writes, “comes to occupy the place of the dead, of the body-cadaver . . . [T]his image of the corpse is replaced or displaced, its place is taken by the book” (Work of Mourning 175, 177). As the specimen bodies are entombed within the changing incarnations of the text, Leaves of Grass itself becomes a vehicle for specimencollection, and an object of desire as well as a work of mourning: hence Whitman’s endless revisions and expansionist rhetoric, his attempts to render “every place as a burial place” (“Of Him I Love Day and Night,” Leaves [1891] 374). In this, the text continually reiterates the unrecuperable loss of the casualties of war, becoming itself a wandering ghost that eludes burial, while we as war spectators remain powerless to assuage the suffering that is its consequence. It is the knowledge of this powerlessness, I would argue, that makes all the difference. Like Whitman, Jacques Derrida invites us to consider a hospitality not only to the dead, but also beyond death, in the promise of renewal and return: a hospitality of haunting. We need to go further and think of hospitality toward death. There is no hospitality without memory. A memory that does not recall the dead person and mortality would be no memory. What kind of hospitality would not be ready to offer itself to the dead one, to the revenant? (qtd. in Dufourmantelle 144)

Hospitality thus involves a mnemonic function: as Anne Dufourmantelle writes in her “Invitation” to Derrida’s Of Hospitality: “The hostis responds to hospitality in the way that the ghost recalls himself to the living, not letting them forget . . .” (4). But what of the mourning for strangers, for the anonymous dead? What is the function of hospitality and remembrance toward the dead when there is no recollection, when the other is unknown? “The dead one who visits you is

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the ghost” (Derrida, qtd. in Dufourmantelle 144): haunting as visitation, the ghost as guest, the haunted as host. The unknown ghost, the ghost of the stranger, would thus be an “absolute arrivant”: He surprises the host . . . enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity . . . [T]he absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity . . . I call it simply the arrivant, and not someone or something that arrives, a subject, a person, an individual, or a living thing. (Derrida, Aporias 34)

This absolute arrivant, the ghost without name or identity, calls into question mourning as grieving for an individual. The arrivant demands recognition of what J. Hillis Miller describes as “the impossibility of naming the psyche. . . . Therefore, what mourning mourns for is not some particular dead person, but ‘life itself,’ that is, the principle of life and animation that ‘psyche’ names” (12, above). The mourning of strangers occasions the absolute dissolution of the fantasy that mourning is a process specific to an individual death. In its insistent anonymity, the mourning of the arrivant is thus what Derrida calls “preoriginary mourning” (Touching 192) and which Miller describes as “mourning for the death that inhabits me, unreachably, at every moment of my always already posthumous ‘life’” (16, above). It is an absolute mourning in the sense that it involves “the inability to reach the other within myself” (18, above), and the recognition of the strangeness of one’s own interiority.1 Placing Whitman’s Civil War writings on death, location, and memorial alongside analysis of contemporary memorial sites at Ground Zero and New Orleans, this essay explores the act of mourning strangers and the anxiety that resonates around the unburied dead—that phantom Abraham and Torok describe as “a memory . . . buried without a legal burial place” (Shell 141). Through an exploration of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, alongside the work of Miller and Johnson in this volume, I propose an understanding of the ghost-guest as stranger and arrivant, the haunted-host as one who bears witness to a blank tomb, who is asked to mourn without the specificity of identity or location.

The Phantasmatic Corpse: The 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass Throughout Leaves of Grass, Whitman conceptualizes burial as the literal embodiment of hospitality, the absorption of the guest-ghost into the surrounding landscape, eventually into one’s own body. The first edition of 1855

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figures mourning as celebrating and consuming otherness, absorbing the stranger who is dead beneath. The transcendent quality of Whitman’s conception of corporeal decay as the conduit for incorporation into the ecstatic landscape evokes burial as proof of love. Through meditative contemplation on the transformative function of decay and regeneration, the bodies of Whitman’s fetishized dead are “filter[ed]” and dispersed throughout the landscape: “And as to you corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, / I smell the white roses sweetscented and growing” (Leaves [1855] 710, 708). The hospitality of the land is central to a mourning that is now both panoramic and interior. The earth invites the dead, the process of decomposition is rendered phantasmal. The grass of Whitman’s very title becomes an organic, regenerative memorial, “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” (666). In comparison with the post-war editions, the 1855 edition is a far more localized work, offering a meditation on what is immediately beneath; what Maria Torok calls “the fantasy of the exquisite corpse” (Abraham and Torok, Shell 118, 120–123)2 is recaptured precisely through its existence as “compost” (“This Compost” [1891] 309–311). The organic processes of decomposition and regeneration allow a kind of vicarious revival: Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps, And here you are the mothers’ laps. ... I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if there was it led forward to life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared. (Leaves [1855] 666)3

Whitman represents the corpse as love-object in what Abraham and Torok will call a fantasy of incorporation, “introducing all or part of a love object or a thing into one’s own body” (126), as if this were merely “changes of garments” (Leaves [1855] 692) for the loved object. In the final passage, Whitman promises to linger, just nearby, to haunt: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

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You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop some where waiting for you [.] (Leaves [1855] 710)

This is an inversion of hospitality: the guest patiently anticipates the arrival of the host. Whitman’s textual haunting is intensely corporeal. The ghost inhabits the body of the living other, filtering the blood, giving health: there is a kind of parasitic narcissism in this fantasy. Even as it nourishes the host, “the phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other” (Abraham and Torok 175). During the Civil War, Whitman would come to abandon, partially and at least for a while, this narcissistic fascination with his own specter. As he mingled with dying soldiers during his hospital visitations, Whitman gave much of himself in the exchange. At seventy, he confessed to Horace Traubel that although his years of hospital work had ravaged his own health, “What did I get for it? Well—I got the boys . . . thousands of them: they were, they are, they will be mine. I gave myself for them: myself: I got the boys: then I got Leaves of Grass. . . . I only gave myself: I got the boys, I got the Leaves” (Traubel, v.3: 581–82; qtd. in Katz 162). These dead soldier “boys” are buried within his book, allowing his poems to function as “Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death” (“Scented Herbage of my Breast,” Leaves [1891] 97).

Haunting as Invitation: Shrouding Whitman’s Phantom Soldiers Whitman first encountered the war camp scene in December 1862, when he travelled to Falmouth, Virginia, in search of his brother, George, who had been listed as a casualty. He found George alive and suffering only a superficially wounded cheek, but his experience at the camp entirely altered his perception of the war. Upon returning to Washington in January 1863, he proclaimed himself the “Soldier’s Missionary,” and began regular hospital visits for the rest of the war (Coviello xx). In ever-present notebooks he recorded his daily ministrations along with lists of soldiers’ names, ranks and regiments, the nature of their wounds, addresses of family members, and details of gifts distributed or requested (Morris 104). From the moment he entered the war scene, these soldier boys were embedded in his texts. The following archival fragment

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demonstrates his entrancement with the spectacle of war casualties. It is dated 1863, and a fragment of a letter of recommendation on the underside of the paper suggests that it was written only weeks or at most months after Whitman commenced his visitations: Would you not like to see for yourself, Dear reader, some special ones of the cases among the hundreds I have met? Enter with me this long ward, look down its rows of cots, with their occupants stretching away each side. With the wide open aisle in the middle. Every one of these cots has its history—every case is a tragic poem, an epic, a romance, a pensive and absorbing book, if it were only written. (“My Visits” n.p.)

While the war shattered Whitman’s vision of a cohesive Union (for a time, at least), its soldiers embodied his “Calamus” fantasy of “the manly love of comrades” (“For You O Democracy,” Leaves [1891] 101). Whitman’s presence in war camps and hospitals offered yet another outlet for “manly affection” (“Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” Leaves [1891] 265): the bedside companion, the “Wound-Dresser” (“The Wound-Dresser” Leaves [1891] 259). Whitman described his hospital work as “miracles for myself” (Traubel, v.1:332; qtd. in Loving 262), bringing him into contact with “specimens of unworldliness, disinterestedness and animal purity and heroism” (Memoranda 48.). Yet he remained forever haunted by intimate scenes of sickness and death. As Luke Mancuso observes, “traces of ghostliness linger in his Civil War poetry,” a “recognition of the ghostly wounds that will always haunt the Union” when “the entire land [is] saturated [with the] impalpable ashes” of the dead (“Civil War” 291). Now that the “infinite dead” have exhausted nature’s hospitality, Whitman’s anxiety is that of the host, commanding his guests not to forget (Specimen 627). Specimen Days, a collection of memoranda that concentrate extensively on the war, demonstrates the melancholic anxiety he felt concerning the unburied war dead:4 The dead in this war—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south . . . [T]he varieties of the strayed dead (the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill’d in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown’d—15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities . . .)—and blackest of all and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial pits . . . the infinite dead—the entire land saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d and shall be so forever. . . . And everywhere among these countless graves . . . we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown. (In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot—but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?) (Specimen 627–28, emphases in original)

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There is an unnamable dread in this relationship with the phantasmatic corpse. With the war, decay becomes overwhelming rather than regenerative; the Civil War burial pits represent the incapacity of nature to accommodate so many guests, whose rejected bodies “floated down the rivers” (Specimen 627–28). Whitman’s obsessive concern with the Unknown status of the dead led to a transition within Leaves of Grass, from meditation on spiritual and natural phenomena in the editions between 1855 and 1860, to the later editions’ anxiety before the dead. Instead of “translating the hints” about “dead young men” (Leaves [1855] 666), Whitman’s post-war poems enact fantasy burials. In “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” (1881) the poet ventriloquizes the “Mother of All,” commanding the earth to absorb the dead: Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my sons, lose not an atom, And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood, And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable, And you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths, And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s blood trickling redden’d And you trees down to your roots bequeath to all future trees My dead absorb or South or North—my young men’s bodies absorb, and their precious precious blood. (Leaves [1891] 418)5

Unlike the earlier meditation on what is beneath the earth, now that Mother figure engages in a sweeping visualization of the entire landscape, an incessant widening of the poetic gaze into an infinite mourning for the “unburied and unknown” (Specimen 583). Whitman’s post-war poems abandon their earthiness, their fascination with burial and decay, and become increasingly spectral. Reconstructing his relationship with the phantasmatic corpse, Whitman discards corporeality altogether, his own and that of his loved specimens. The fusion of burial, spectrality, and manly love is examined in the figure of the wandering undead beloved in “Of Him I Love Day and Night”: Of him I love day and night I dream’d I heard he was dead, And I dream’d I went where they had buried him I love, but he was not in that place, And I dream’d I wander’d searching among the burial-places to find him, And I found that every place was a burial place; ... And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with them, And if memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere, even in the room where I eat or sleep I should be satisfied.

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When “every place was a burial place” for those unfound dead “render’d to powder and pour’d in the sea” rather than absorbed into the slow decay of the grave, the poet can be satisfied even though every beloved corpse is the phantom that Abraham and Torok describe as “without a legal burial place” (Shell 140– 41). In “O Living Always, Always Dying,” the poet desires to “disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at where I cast them, / To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind” (Leaves [1891] 378). In this disengagement from the tangible and the local, every place becomes a haunted place. The love-object is no longer the fecund, erotic corpse, but the ethereal phantom. Communion with the dead is no longer a meditation on “natural oneness,” but an invocation of all the beloved dead, even those “at the bottom of the sea” (Specimen 627). In “Ashes of Soldiers” (1881), Whitman again conjures the resurrection of his beloved dead as phantoms, and invites the return of the lost phantasmal object whose company he seeks eternally. The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive, I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers. Faces so pale with wondrous eyes, very dear, gather closer yet, Draw close but speak not. Phantoms of countless lost, Invisible to the rest henceforth become my companions, Follow me ever—desert me not while I live. (Leaves [1891] 412)7

In this avatar, Whitman’s phantom addresses us from “an incineration all the more sublime for having no tomb—emblazoned spirit, glorious beyond the tomb and its sepulchral inscriptions” (Derrida, Mémoires 26). The invocation of the phantom, bodiless and tombless, becomes Whitman’s new way of burying the unknown dead within Leaves of Grass, in a ritualized, textual mourning: Perfume therefore my chant, O love, immortal love, Give me to bathe the memories of all dead soldiers, Shroud them, embalm them, cover them all over with tender pride. (“Ashes of Soldiers,” Leaves [1891] 412)

Now it is the poem that enacts the hospitality of ritualized burial, enveloping, shrouding, and embalming the corpse, with the poet-host inviting his ghosts to walk with him in what Shannon Burns, in this volume, calls a “hospitality to trauma.” Shrouded in and by the text, the phantom soldiers are not consumed but invoked in the prosopopeia of their constant companionship, always and already beside him.

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Reflecting Absence: (En)Closing the Dead at Ground Zero and New Orleans Within the current climate of ecological and humanitarian crises, and in the wake of an extraordinary literalization of “an endless war . . . both infinite and unconfined, a war that can never be internalized nor externalized” (Derrida, Mémoires 177), the trauma posed would seem to exceed the absorptive capacity of the mind and the earth, in an infinite mourning for the stranger. Wherever every place is a burial place, “there is no manifest grave, no visible and phenomenal tomb, only an . . . ungrave” (Of Hospitality 113). Cultural sites of memorial, those ungraves for the unnamed and unburied dead, are attempts at reconciling and localizing the placelessness of mourning, as if “without a fixed place, without a determinable topos, mourning is not allowed” (Of Hospitality 111). Ungraves such as the Civil War monuments Whitman describes, as well as contemporary sites such as Ground Zero and the Katrina monument in New Orleans, function as locations for a strange, collective haunting—places outside the enveloping hospitality of ritualized burial and yet, it is tempting to say, deeply encrypted within cultural memory. To this end, I suggest that Abraham and Torok’s phantom, as Laurie Johnson describes it (e.g., 117, below), may not only be transgenerational but a broader mechanism of national and cultural memory—and particularly where the virtualization of the media ensures that traumatic events now become subject to indefinite and widespread repetition. For Abraham and Torok, as Johnson says, the crypt is “an enclave within the ego due to an inability to mourn a lost object.” Because the “cryptophoric subject lacks a capacity to work through the trauma of the lost-object,” the ego “incorporates the object-loss in place of the object itself.” This subject is then rendered mute in relation to the lost object: to speak of it would “result in the shattering of the illusion and of the ego with it.” Thus, the telling silences that orbit the crypt can eventually betray it, through what Johnson terms “cryptonymic secretions” (119, below). Unlike the unending mourning of Leaves of Grass, the memorials at Ground Zero and New Orleans are, and for differing reasons, sites of a failed incorporation, where the foreign body is not lodged within the subject, but encased and encrypted forever in its foreignness, entirely other but also entirely inaccessible (Abraham and Torok, Shell 174). Such hyper-memorializing insists on the absolute significance of the event, or fixates on the event itself rather than the lost object. If incorporation proper produces the crypt as a gap within the psyche, where the lost object is to be kept alive, hyper-memorialization produces a place outside the subject where the lost object is kept dead, and externalized.

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The memorial designs for Ground Zero and New Orleans offer compelling examples of the architecture of this anxiety. At Ground Zero, the anxiety of placelessness is captured in the naming of the site, “Reflecting Absence,” which consists of two voids that occupy the footprints of the twin towers. The names of the dead surround a pool of water at the bottom of each footprint. 8 Both sites will house the remains of the unknown dead. The Katrina memorial includes a mausoleum to house the remains of “unidentified and identified but unclaimed” dead (qtd. in Tuggle, “Encrypting Katrina” 1). At “Reflecting Absence,” “the room for unidentified remains . . . is situated at bedrock at the north tower footprint” in the form of “a large stone vessel” (Arad and Walker n.p.) These memorial sites inhabit inherently political spaces; their specters are not only the ghosts of the departed. As Karen Engle argues: “Producing their own hauntology, the dead towers operate as an absent presence whose mere existence as such explains the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the nation’s domestic policies of surveillance and deportation” (75). The proposed Katrina memorial also rests on politically haunted ground, offering a place to house the bodies that were ignored by governments and bystanders alike, that lay uncovered in the streets and exposed to citizens, media, and audiences. In the words of concept designer Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, the memorial “incorporates both the curves of the hurricane and the meditative quality of a labyrinth” (qtd. in Tuggle, “Encrypting Katrina” 1). The design implicitly memorializes entrapment; the hurricane-shaped labyrinth concretizes the aftermath of Katrina, from which there was for many no escape or return. Several of the bodies to be housed within the memorial are identified but unclaimed, making the point that many families of the Katrina diaspora lack the means to return and bury their dead. These memorial ungraves are sites of inverted incorporation, enclosing the dead in “infinite exteriority” (Derrida, Mémoires 104). Unlike Whitman’s resolution of unburied anxiety—the invitation to phantoms to remain within his body and his book—the memorial site attempts to fix the phantom forever in the instant of death. It has no interest in ongoing discourse. In its preoccupation with containing and categorizing the dead, it disrupts their alterity, disturbing the processes of mourning and invocation through its obsession with the location of death. The memorial sites at Ground Zero and New Orleans involve a turning away from, and silencing of, ghosts; they refuse the hospitality of mourning as openness to trauma, as Burns says (131–39, below) through their reverence for the spectacle of public memorial. What does it mean to house the unknown, unclaimed, or unidentifiable dead, not in graves, or even tombs, but in monuments and memorials, to name them incessantly, to fix them permanently in the present instant of public mourning? To recall Whitman’s earlier question regarding Civil War Monuments: “[W]hat visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?” (Specimen 627–28). Consider Laurie Johnson’s reading of “cryptonymic secretions” and the hospitality of listening to the phantom: “The dead must be allowed to speak, and the living must hear them” (125, below).9 In the crypt, loss itself is incorporated, rather than the mourned object. The crypt is a “defensive formation” that

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silences “words that represent (and therefore admit to) the loss of the object. For the cryptophoric subject, then, allowing the dead to speak will be terribly injurious, for it will be an admission that the dead are in fact dead” (126, below). In the inverted incorporations of the hyper-monument, the event itself is memorialized and the dead are externalized. In their fixation on (en)closure, these sites eclipse the act of mourning in the spectacle of the event. To the extent that mourning is an invitation to the revenant (the ghost, the one who returns), they fail to mourn, but instead turn away from the ghost through their focus on burial as containment and enclosure, and deny the revenant the opportunity to return, or to speak. In their fixation on the categorization of the dead, memorials can be interpreted as arising, paradoxically, from a cultural fear of amnesia. The memorial offers a promise: to name, and to remember. Yet, as Derrida argues, a promise cannot be kept, only renewed: “A promise has meaning and gravity only with the death of the other. When the friend is no longer there, the promise is still not tenable, it will not have been made, but as a trace of the future it can still be renewed” (Mémoires 150). As a promise the memorial offers a fixation on renewal (healing) that ironically remains static and permanent, a refusal of amnesia through “the madness of an amnesiac fidelity, of a forgetful hypermnesia” (66). Above all, the memorial site attempts to localize and categorize the identity of the unknown and, if this is not possible, to encase it, symbolically or literally, within the finality of a tomb. In this sense, both sites attempt the act of an inverse and public encrypting, the externalized commemoration of an exclusion. In these instances, the excluded objects are the absent, dispersed bodies—those fragments indistinguishable from the dust and debris that was removed from Ground Zero and disposed of at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (Sturken 312–17), and those that at New Orleans went undiscovered, or were abandoned. As Henry A. Giroux writes, “Cadavers have a way of insinuating themselves on consciousness, demanding answers to questions that aren’t often asked” (174). In New Orleans, what is to be encrypted is perhaps also the knowledge of the unburied bodies, those that drifted away or came to rest on street corners and sidewalks, in the visibility of their death and abandonment. The function of these sites as crypts is to encase, enclose, and contain the exclusion of these absent, unfound bodies, the countless corpses that “floated down the rivers” (Whitman, Specimen 627) or were reduced to the very dust breathed by survivors. They elicit an uncanny inversion of, and even defense against, the incorporation-in-dispersal where “every place is a burial place” (“And if the corpse of any one I love, . . . be duly render’d to powder and pour’d in the sea, I shall be satisfied” (Leaves [1891] 374), and seek to gather up and inter the unknown and unlocatable dead, to give a finality to the process of mourning them.

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Is it possible to commemorate otherwise, to paradoxically embody that dispersal? Jana Napoli’s site-specific art installation, Floodwall, is composed of more than seven hundred household drawers salvaged from street-side debris following Hurricane Katrina. Wandering the vacant streets of her drowned city, Napoli instinctively began collecting and cataloguing discarded drawers. “I wanted to take this intimate and homely detritus out of this sodden world” (“Statement” n.p.). The drawers now form part of an interactive cultural art project. Having written on the back of each drawer the address at which it was found, Napoli seeks surviving drawer owners via her website, where the drawers are categorized by postcode. She has also collected survivors’ stories, which are accessible on her website and form an integral part of every installation, where the disembodied voices of surviving drawer owners speak to the viewers, telling their stories and those of their ghosts. Floodwall has three varying incarnations: the vertical or “wall configuration,” which stands as a “monument of immeasurable loss”; the horizontal or “tombstone” configuration, which functions as “a memorial and sentinel of the past”; and the “enclosed or room” configuration, which “envelops the spectator in . . . the unutterable loneliness of deep mourning” (Floodwall n.p.). In January 2007, Floodwall was exhibited on the Liberty Street Bridge of the World Financial Center in New York, juxtaposing the intimate remnants of post-Katrina New Orleans with the backdrop view of the raw excavation of Ground Zero. Beneath the drawers, signs placed at intervals silently repeated the words of known surviving drawer owners. The drawers stood, in Napoli’s words, “like empty luggage without their passengers and flowing like a levee broken in places” (“Statement” n.p.). Standing upright, empty of their contents, Napoli’s drawers are uncanny reminders of the tombs of New Orleans’s cemeteries. In contrast to the memorial sites, Floodwall is not a public crypt, but symbol and signifier of the nameless and tombless, and thus “all the more sublime,” phantom (Derrida, Mémoires 26). The light glints off the veneer fronts and you think of a graveyard of marble slabs with only a few words to explain the wonder of flesh. Something says, look on, Visitor, for once we were full of life like you. Then you notice the space between the drawers. This is a useless wall you think. It cannot hold anything back. . . . Terror creeps in. . . . Ghosts pass through the gaps in the drawers and coldly pass through bystanders. Ghosts looking for the city of New Orleans and for the treasures these drawers once contained. (Park, n.p.)

Floodwall’s empty drawers are the phantom limb felt most acutely in its absence. Paradoxically, they embody that vacant center at the heart of absolute mourning (Miller 16, above). To inhabit this vacant center, to take on that “impossible mourning, in an irresistible command” that the revenant dictates, would be to become a ghost oneself (Miller 13, above; Derrida, On Touching 35). What Floodwall captures in its bearing witness, its listening, is mourning’s tension between the turning

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away of survival and the embrace of death. The empty drawers invite the viewer to cross the threshold between “I live” and “Other dies”—to imagine one’s own belongings in the drawer, one’s own body in the tomb. It is to glimpse the vacant interiority of the other, and one’s own. The drawers thus also invite New Orleans’s ghosts to inhabit the blank spaces of their deafening absence. The drawers remain empty in fidelity to the arrivant, and in their startling hollowness we glimpse a mourning that is absolute, both infinite and impossible.

Notes 1. My thinking on this point has been influenced by Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). 2. The term “exquisite corpse” was appropriated by Torok from Andre Breton’s surrealist word game. 3. From the first poem, untitled in the 1855 edition, finally titled “Song of Myself” in 1881. See Moon’s editorial notes for full publication history. 4. A similar version of this passage was originally published in Memoranda during the War (1875–76). 5. First appeared in Drum Taps (1865) then in the Drum Taps supplement to Leaves of Grass (1867), it was then moved to the “Ashes of Soldiers” cluster in Passage to India (1871) with revisions, and finally included in the “Songs of Parting” cluster, with revisions, in Leaves [1881]. See Moon’s editorial notes for full publication history. 6. An earlier, partial, version appeared in the “Calamus” cluster (1860). See Moon’s editorial notes for full publication history. 7. First published as “Hymn of Dead Soldiers” in Drum Taps (1865), the poem was transferred into Passage to India (1871), with revisions. It was revised again and moved to the “Songs of Parting” cluster in the 1881 edition. See Moon’s editorial notes for full publication history. 8. Recently, “security concerns” have called for the redesign of this aspect, prohibiting visitors from journeying into the voids (Rochon n.p.). 9. As Johnson notes, “In this extreme case, Abraham and Torok seem to suggest that the dead must in fact be silenced for the benefit of those still living” (126, below). Thus, in this sense, my argument utilizes their theory, but departs from their prescription.

Chapter Five Elegizing John Wordsworth: Commemoration and Lyric J. Mark Smith

. . . I think on thee My Brother, and on all which thou hast lost. Wordsworth, “When first I journeyed hither” It need scarcely be said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven. Wordsworth, “Essay Upon Epitaphs (I)”

I William Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior” was once a popular, much anthologized poem in the English-speaking world, but it fell out of favor, with didactic and imperial poetry in general, long before the mid-twentieth century, with the result that only a couple of times in my life have I encountered in use the phrase that must once have been intoned by school-masters and echoed half-mockingly by their charges. The “Happy Warrior” . . . fixes good on good alone, and owes To virtue every triumph that he knows: . . . Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpast. (33–34, 75–76)1

“Character of the Happy Warrior” exemplifies not so much William Wordsworth’s as Samuel Johnson’s understanding of what an epitaph should do, namely tell about someone’s character. The happy warrior, whose character the poem commemorates, is generally taken to be Horatio Nelson—“conspicuous object in a Nation’s eye” (66)—and the poem to allude to the circumstances of his death (21 October 1805) in the Battle of Trafalgar. It was, however, written between December 1805 and January 1806, less than a year after the death (5–6 75

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February 1805) of John Wordsworth, and certain lines seem to refer to the beloved younger brother of William and Dorothy, a man fated rather to be counted among those “left unthought-of in obscurity” (67). Throughout the nineteenth century, Nelson belonged to the select group of Englishmen whose names could be expected to travel through time without an epitaph. “The bare name of such men,” Johnson wrote, in his essay on epitaphs [1740], “answers every purpose of a long inscription.” Few can aspire to such a place in collective memory, however, and as Johnson put it, “if men raised to reputation by accident or caprice, have nothing but their names engraved on their tombs, there is danger lest, in a few years, the inscription require an interpreter” (131). Johnson thought that lives distinguished by “private virtue”—i.e. those of the good but obscure—make the best subject for an epitaph: “virtue exerted in the same circumstances in which the bulk of mankind are placed, and which, therefore, may admit of many imitators” (135). Wordsworth’s poem has a similar focus upon “private,” or at least self-sufficient, virtue. The happy warrior is one Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth For ever, and to noble deeds give birth, Or He must go to dust without his fame, And leave a dead unprofitable name, Finds comfort in himself and in his cause. (77–81)

If the happy warrior faces death free of self-doubt, the poet at least is of two minds about the eternal value of virtue kept hidden from all possible imitators. Nelson, should we suppose, gained an undying fame; John Wordsworth left a “dead unprofitable name.” In fact, over time, on the question of a poem’s responsibility to him or her who once bore a name, the surviving brother left his readers a rather more complex legacy. The abradings of time, through Wordsworth’s middle years, did not touch Nelson’s fame—but they did alter the author’s own understanding of the identity, if not the character, of his happy warrior. Six years after the poem’s publication, information came to light in Southey’s 1813 Life of Nelson about arbitrary and extra-legal executions of Italian Jacobins that Nelson had ordered carried out following a 1799 campaign against the French-supported republic in Naples. These actions were enough, in Wordsworth’s opinion, to have compromised Nelson’s character. Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick in 1843, “I have not been able to connect [Nelson’s] name with the poem as I could wish” (qtd. in Rudman 177). And so Wordsworth tilted back to what must have been his earliest conception and interpretation of the poem: that it told about the qualities evinced in particular by his brother John during the terrible night in February 1805 when the Earl of Abergavenny sank off the coast of southern England. The character of such a man is that of one . . . who, though thus endued as with a sense And faculty for storm and turbulence,

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Is yet a Soul whose master bias leans To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes. (57–60)

The ultimate aim of John Wordsworth’s East India company voyagings—finally as captain of a ship on the potentially very profitable Bengal–China route—had been to raise enough money to be able to retire to the Lakes with his brother and sister. John was the sort of man, his brother believed, who was above all disposed to those “home-felt pleasures” and “gentle scenes.” The lines here imply that a faculty for storm and turbulence is grounded in a very different “master bias”; but in two of the elegiac poems William wrote for his brother in 1805, he represents John’s character as simply meek and gentle, and leaves the paradox, or antithesis, be. If his family had ever had an epitaph engraved for John (they did not), the words “meek” and “gentle” may well have appeared in it. Wordsworth’s argument in the first “Essay Upon Epitaphs” (1810) is partly a continuation of the polemic in his 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads against the stylistic misjudgments of his predecessors. 2 He assumes, with Johnson, that the epitaph has a moral function. But he disapproves, for instance, of epitaphs organized by antithesis, or in which the deceased is personified and speaks in his or her own voice. He lauds plain speech, and sincerity. These stylistic quibbles—so they might seem—are grounded in a momentous philosophical difference. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, quoted Pope in observing that the lack of variety in funereal inscriptions might well be accounted for by the fact that “the greater part of mankind have no character at all.” He meant they “have little that distinguishes them from others equally good or bad, and therefore nothing can be said of them which may not be applied with equal propriety to a thousand more.”3 Wordsworth quoted, and then responded in the strongest terms, to the first part of this remark, which he thought unbecoming of a serious thinker: “The objects of admiration in human nature are not scanty, but abundant: and every man has a character of his own, to the eye that has skill to perceive it” (Prose II 56). The difference between these views—most people have no character at all versus every man has a distinct character of his own— can hardly be overstated. Johnson’s conviction is pre-Romantic; Wordsworth’s indignation makes him a modern preoccupied not only with an ethics of authenticity, but with the writer’s responsibility vis-à-vis the representation of other lives.4 Hence the way in which William wrote about his brother John in the poems of 1805. William was caught in a bind of sorts. Though we may not much admire it in him, or in the poems touched by it, he was a moralist; he believed in the reality of “character” in Johnson’s sense. Moreover, in the aftermath of John’s death he took comfort from the proof given by various Earl of Abergavenny survivors of his brother’s (good) character. On the other hand, it was Wordsworth’s conviction that every person, good, bad, or morally neutral, has “a character.” Theorists of our own moment tend to avoid the problems associated with the word character—and all that it suggests

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in its history about designation and legibility—by writing instead of “singularity.” Wordsworth did not shy away from “character,” but acknowledged repeatedly that a person’s “character” can never be simply transferred into the characters of inscription or recollection. He noted, for instance, the way that people’s recollections of the recently dead tend to mist over (“as a tree through a tender haze or a luminous mist” [Prose II 58]), or to go through, in Charles Lamb’s words, a “refinement.” 5 And he faced outright one of the skeptical objections of modern times: that the epitaph, the funereal representation, can never be a “faithful image” of the departed one’s character: Shall we say, then, that this is not truth, not a faithful image; and that, accordingly, the purposes of commemoration cannot be answered?—It is truth, and of the highest order . . . it is truth hallowed by love—the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living. (Prose II 58)

Few today are likely to be persuaded by the excessive vehemence or the grotesque abstraction of this metaphor. It is hard to see that so much is at stake in an epitaph. If it is elegy we are talking about, however, might we not even now find in ourselves resistance to the thought that in lyric “the purposes of commemoration cannot be answered”?

II “I only looked for pain and grief,” composed between May and July 1805, is a lyric of ten ten-line verses rooted in the ballad stanza. The speaker tells of revisiting the place, a pass in the Lakeland hills between Grasmere and Patterdale, where William and his sister had bidden John farewell five years earlier.6 The parting, the recollection of that parting, the retrospective transformation of the meaning of that parting, and the revisiting of the “Partingplace” (line 84) are all taken up in this poem. The seventh stanza recounts how a living man may in a moment be reduced to a proper name. It is not primarily the agency of the murderous ocean Wordsworth refers to here, though that is of course implied. It is rather the utterance that brings the news—a sentence or sentences containing the words “Sea, Ship, drowned, shipwreck”; and nestled within those the “single word” drowned—that for the one who hears the news cannot be taken back, or turned away, or got behind. These lines convey a dreadful immediacy, or something very close to immediacy: “all vanished in a single word.” So Wordsworth evokes the phenomenological reality of it. In real time, word of the sinking of the Earl of Abergavenny took six days to reach the family of the poet in Grasmere. All vanished in a single word, A breath, a sound, and scarcely heard. Sea, Ship, drowned, shipwreck—so it came,

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The meek, the brave, the good was gone; He who had been our living John Was nothing but a name. (65–70)

It is, of course, not in the nature of names to be singular. The English, at this time at any rate, had no aversion to the repetition of a small pool of Christian names. William, in his own generation and the ones immediately before and after, had no fewer than eight male relatives named John Wordsworth (including his older cousin, who had been the previous captain of the Earl of Abergavenny). One might take an austere philosophical comfort, with Derrida, in saying that name and man had in advance parted ways.7 But no one who speaks this verse, with its rhyme of “John” and “gone,” can entirely avoid or abstract William’s horror at the transformation of “living” name to nothing but name. “That was indeed a parting!” begins the eighth stanza (line 71), and one supposes it refers to the arrival of the news of John’s death; but then, with that information absorbed, one cannot help but take it to refer back to the parting at the pass to Patterdale. What is invested in naming it a “Parting-place”? The speaker points to it as a “precious Spot”—and while it is of course not one of those places of intense childhood experience that we have come to know of as spots of time, it is certainly an example of what Geoffrey Hartman has called a Wordsworthian “memory-place.”8 William thought that his return to the spot might help him move through his “pain and grief” at John’s death. The “I” of the poem declares that in this place he has “found relief” (line 4). Whether we are to take it as general proof, or only individual testimony, the speaker is sure that “to pains / Like these, there comes a mild release” (lines 77–78). Something of note in “I only looked for pain and grief” is its concluding allusion to a monument stone: Well, well, if ever verse of mine Have power to make his merits known, Then let a monumental Stone Stand here—a sacred Shrine; And to the few who come this way, Traveller or Shepherd, let it say, Long as these mighty rocks endure, Oh do not Thou too fondly brood, Although deserving of all good, On any earthly hope, however pure! (91–100)

Various commonplaces associated with “the monumental” run interference with any reader’s response. The first is the Horatian–Shakespearean, best known by various formulations in the latter’s sonnets (including “Your monument shall be my gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, / And tongues to be your being shall rehearse . . .” [Sonnet 81]). Shakespeare seems to have had a pre-moral conception of the monument: that is, I discern none of those eighteenth-century concerns with character in it. Nor is there a hint of

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Wordsworth’s materialist-philosophical stickling about a monument being substrate to an epitaph. The verse itself is the Horatian–Shakespearean monument. A secondary—Ozymandian—commonplace associated with “the monumental” limits its reference to the generalized stone relicts doomed to be outlived by immortal verse. Neither Horatian–Shakespearean nor Ozymandian monument is quite right in the Wordsworthian context. Where anything like a monument—a ruin, say— appears in his poetry, it belongs first and foremost to memory-place. A memoryplace can never be considered apart from a particular person’s psyche. A poem, however, as a species of archive, can be. (In Derrida’s words, “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority” [Archive Fever 11].) Sooner or later a Wordsworthian monument stands forth as substrate, as the stuff of rocks and “permanent things.” Without the psyche that first set it in a memory-place, that is, monument reverts to substrate. The five-year-old Wordsworth came across the name of a murderer preserved in “characters inscribed / On the green sod . . .”—a “monumental writing . . . engraven / In times long past, and still from year to year / By superstition of the neighborhood / The grass . . . cleared away . . . / The letters . . . all fresh and visible” (1805 Prelude; XI, lines 295– 302). It was a monument kept up by the locals, Wordsworth says, but the poem’s text passes over, hence erases, the name itself. As for the concluding verse of “I only looked for pain and grief,” its mood is too provisional, barely even optative, for it to assert monumentality in the Horatian–Shakespearean sense. The speaker is all too aware of what a poet can and cannot achieve; even if his verse should have the power to make the dead man’s merits known, even if it should have the longevity of “mighty rocks,” soon enough that spot in the Grasmere–Patterdale pass would have ceased to be a memory-place. Could a poet be more cautious about the limits of lyric deployed in service of commemoration? Turning now to “Michael,” written in 1800, before Wordsworth began thinking essayistically about character in relation to epitaphic commemoration, what should we make of the sheep-fold the old man works at and then abandons? Is Michael’s broken sheep-fold a monument? If it is, it has not been written upon; it does not carry an epitaph. Anyone travelling by, the narrator supposes, would see only substrate: Nor should I have made mention of this Dell But for one object which you might pass by, Might see and notice not. Beside the brook There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones! (14–17)

In a similar way, one might pass by another person and not notice he had a character. Nevertheless, that straggling heap of stones has the “exteriority” of archive; the people of the valley, including the narrator, see it and recall the story of the old man and his son.

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Again, in Hartman’s terms, the sheep-fold in its dell is a memory-place—in this instance, the memory-place of a community of people rather than of a lone person. Still, one could not confuse such a memory-place with a Derridean archive, lacking as it does both “place of consignation” and “technique of repetition.” It is the poem at last that turns memory-place into archive. The poem, moreover, writes an epitaph to the life of the shepherd Michael, a man whom many might have thought had “no character at all.” The poem, then, though it is not “engraven” in that substrate, makes a monument of a heap of stones. (That the physical monument or its exact location may never be found seems not to matter here; epitaphs from the classical period have survived the physical disintegration of the monuments upon which they were first carved. 9) In this poem, what one might be inclined to point to as monumental resides not precisely in the stones (the substrate) nor in the poem itself, but in the condition of signs themselves. As the narrative of the poem makes explicit, the building of the sheep-fold stands as a promise—“a covenant / ’Twill be between us” [424–45]—between father and son. The father makes a ritual of it by asking the son to lay the first rock, a corner-stone. The placement of the stone is a sign; the still-to-be-built sheep-fold is, for the two men, a place of consignation. The boy’s laying of that stone, and the father’s continued work on the fold in his son’s absence, are both—to hold the term within J. L. Austin’s original range of application—performative gestures. The ruined sheep-fold, though, is the shell of a failed performative. It is an emblem of the “counter-spirit” of language. Precisely because signs are open to the non-signifying and the non-binding, they are vulnerable to that force or drive “unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve,” as the third “Essay on Epitaphs” has it (Prose II 85). It is mindless repetition that Wordsworth is thinking of: the failure of witnessing, in which language reveals its own drive toward oblivion even before any physical destruction of the archive. Both the performative gesture of man and son, and the poem—“Michael”—archive of that (fictional) transaction, are vulnerable to what Derrida has called the “archiviolithic” tendency of the death drive.10 In a sense of the word, then, that pulls it back into an Ozymandian valence, the poem’s very exposure makes it monumental. The odd pitch of the final verse of “I only looked for pain and grief” can be attributed to the way that the speaker calls up the Horatian–Shakespearean sense of the monumental (“Your monument shall be my gentle verse . . .” etc.) with a tentativeness that does not promise much, while that half-hearted promise is linked in the same breath to a wish for the other, stony sort of monument. This wish he expresses as fiat: “let a monumental stone / Stand here . . .” (lines 93–94). But fiat or not, there is nothing performative about the conclusion to the poem. The inscription he formulates for this imaginary monument is a memento mori, not an epitaph as Wordsworth will later define that term, since it makes no attempt to represent John’s character. Perhaps this monument, in its lack of representational ambition, makes itself less vulnerable to language’s “counter-spirit”?

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Where the poem does more work is in the attention it devotes to the things of the memory-place, things that designate associations not exactly private though perhaps secret, the psyche having found and retained meaning in proximities and connections between itself, the lost one, and the local contours and saliences of this earthly substrate. As in the other three or four elegiac poems he wrote for his brother, William never provides, beyond generalizations, anything like a novelistic image of John himself—his focus is instead on things associated in some way with John, or more precisely, with the neighborhood of his own connectedness to him. There is a similar metonymic drift in a number of Wordsworth’s bestknown poems: the wall, single sheep, and hawthorn on the bluff above the crossroads in The Prelude; the wooden bowl at the spring next to Margaret’s ruined cottage; thorn and pond and hill of moss in “The Thorn.” These secret crossings of meaning are no more enduring than the life of the one who keeps faith with them. Translated into verse they become archives, certainly; but this transformation means precisely that they pass beyond the jurisdiction of individual memorial or recollection. A fragment from one of Wordsworth’s notebooks of 1798–1799 sets, however unfixedly, the word “memorial” against “monument”: . . . oftentimes I had burst forth In verse which with a strong and random light Touching an object in its prominent parts Created a memorial which to me Was all sufficient, and, to my own mind Recalling the whole picture, seemed to speak An universal language. Scattering thus In passion many a desultory sound, I deemed that I had adequately cloathed Meanings at which I had hardly hinted, thoughts And forms of which I scarcely had produced A monument and arbitrary sign. (Prelude 163; my italics)

As Armytage in “The Ruined Cottage” puts it, reflecting on the grown-over walls of Margaret’s former abode: . . . we die, my Friend, Nor we alone, but that which each man loved And prized in his peculiar nook of earth Dies with him or is changed, and very soon Even of the good is no memorial left. (68–72)

Even if it were possible to find some way of archiving the particularities of memory-place, that which made it a “memorial” would not survive the translation. Wordsworth’s perfunctory effort in the 1805 “To the Daisy” to imagine his brother as a genius of the shore, a version of Lycidas (“The Birds shall sing, and Ocean make / A mournful murmur for his sake . . .” [53–54]) involves an

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acceptance of the erasure of nearly all the distinguishing marks of his brother’s character, other than to note that he was silent, meek, gentle, sweet, and (in William and Dorothy’s opinion) intrinsically unsuited to the sailor’s life. So far as the speaker acknowledges the singularity of this man’s life, it is by alluding instead to that which he “loved / and prized in his peculiar nook of earth . . .” This one idiosyncratic love—for the daisy—did not die with John but “is changed” because he communicated it to a brother who shared that love. Wordsworth was loyal to the eighteenth-century discourse of morality and character, but had in view at the same time a modern sense of responsibility to singular being, and of the absolute limitations of representation. Moral discourse deals in propositional statement, not suggestion or intimation, since it aims, as Wordsworth puts it, to “make [its object’s] merits [or its ‘fate’] known” (“I only looked for pain and grief,” line 92). It commemorates character. So: John Wordsworth was brave, meek, and good (“I only looked for pain and grief”). Or: He satisfied all claims of duty, and was, in the hour of crisis as well as for six weeks after his death, unforced by wind or wave to quit the ship for which he died (“To the Daisy”). We can only adjudicate the success or failure of such representations by historical criteria. Eighteenth-century thinking about monuments and epitaphs could never have conceived of a form that aimed to do justice to the singularity of a life. Post-Romantic thinking cannot think of a form that would represent such singularity without traducing it. There was more than self-satisfaction or hard-heartedness in William’s 1845 reply by letter to a cousin who had informed him that the stone that had been laid on John’s grave in the church where he was buried was no longer there, and that the grave was now unmarked. “I should be somewhat more desirous of this being done [i.e., a new stone or plaque being placed],” he wrote, “if my own poems had not widely spread the knowledge of my poor Brother’s fate” (qtd. in Barker 329). Wordsworth’s phrasing is reminiscent of what he used in “I only looked for pain and grief . . .”—only here it is much more confident. Any tentativeness about the commemorative power of lyric is gone. Either that, or— if we think back to the “memorial”/“monument” distinction Wordsworth had drawn as a young man—by this late moment in his life he had resigned himself to the power of the arbitrary sign to lay waste to what it commemorates, for signification to suffer dissolution and derangement. That is why in the 1845 letter he seems proprietorial and cavalier. In responsibility to the maritime churchyard where his brother’s body lay, William comported himself like the Self whose figure Derrida sketches in his exposition of Abraham and Torok’s cryptonymy: “The Self: a cemetery guard . . . [who] uses all his knowledge of the grounds to turn visitors away” (“Fors” xxxv). Certainly, Wordsworth’s psyche had grounds extending into all manner of places, some of which he made no claims to oversee: . . . I do not doubt That in this later time, when storm and rain Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day

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The “spots of time” in the Prelude have often been read as figures of psychic continuity, but one or two of them—particularly the account of the wait at the crossroads in the days before his father’s death at the Christmas holidays—tell of discontinuity, self-division, of an otherness within but simultaneously exterior to the self. “Everything works against trauma in Wordsworth. . . .”11 Suppose that Hartman had said “in the Wordsworths”? I am thinking of the bond of William (b. 1770), Dorothy (b. 1771) and John (b. 1772), who became especially close in the time following their mother’s (1778) and then father’s (1783) deaths.12 We know that William’s word-rivers flowed through all things but his parents’ deaths. When John, “the silent poet,” died, it would have magnified the catastrophe for Dorothy and William if John’s silence had been, in Abraham and Torok’s term, a “crypt” built out of one or both of those parents’ deaths, and brother and sister had had some unutterable share in it. Derrida wrote of the Wolf Man: “He will die with or through the crypt within him” (“Fors” xlv). John must have seemed to go through a silence of that sort. Laurie Johnson muses about what it could even mean to share a crypt, to share an unutterable woe (below, 117). Most likely everything about the Wordsworth siblings indeed worked against trauma or crypt. There is, though, the little-known poem “When first I journeyed hither” [1800–1804] in which William reconstructs the spot of time associated with his father’s death. A sunlit version of the sheep and wall and hawthorn configuration, this fir-grove spot, through which the pacing John had once “found . . . an easy line / Along a natural opening” (56–59) becomes a memorial of the absent young mariner. It is already strange, of course, that the poem “murmurs with a sea-like sound” (111), that it portends John’s death, but stranger still how it re-imagines weakly—by another displacement or prosthesis—the originally displaced scene, and then sets the “indistinguishable sympathies” of older and younger brother to “mingling” there (114–15).

III Any sequence of elegiac stanzas is a lyric; that is, a peculiar sort of archive. It is not a “memorial” (the secret crossing of loss and place), since a technique of repetition belongs to it. And though it shares some of the qualities of an epitaph, as Wordsworth implies in the 1845 letter to his cousin, a lyric poem answers the purposes of commemoration only in the most limited sense.13 If the singularity of a life can never be captured in a poem, then lyric will never serve the post-Romantic purposes of commemoration. What is lyric good for then? And of what value is the concept of the singular life to anyone thinking about lyric poems? What is the basis of my unshakable conviction that certain lyric poems—or more precisely, the speaking of them, and so their iterability, the possibility of their instantiation—can be of value to those who mourn, or

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have mourned, or are yet to mourn? The value of the lyric poem in our time has to do with the dreadful and unavoidable intimacy of iterability and mindless repetition, of—in Derrida’s formulation—archive and death-drive. The modern soul or self or psyche understands itself to be unique, hence inaccessible to characterization, hence destined to be covered in night. The term elegy misleads us. No lyric is ever the exclusive record of the experience of a lone, punctual subjectivity, but is rather a script for speaking that travels across the bodies and psyches of generations. Lyric of any sort becomes much more plausible in our own cultural moment if we understand that its power of “mild release” is in essence the power of iterability, which is related as well to the iterability of individual words, and so to change across historical and personal time. (“Elegy,” however many hundreds of millions of iterations ago, once referred to a Roman meter, not a sub-genre of lyric.) Read in a post-Romantic light, every lyric announces a double fate. Whoever speaks it acknowledges failure, in that at best the representations of the poet leave an archive, register, or memorandum—in Derrida’s unlovely phrase, a “mnemotechnical supplement” (Archive Fever 11)—of love. Perhaps, in the poems of a Wordsworthian culture, the lyric will often be an archive of memoryplace, another creature of love. And whoever takes up the poem to speak it avows as well, through the consignations and differentiations available to love, a willingness to repeat. A contemporary reader of an elegiac lyric cannot without self-distortion simply echo the “I” of Shakespeare’s sonnet 123, who outright defies the power of time: “No, time, thou shalt not boast that I do change . . . Thy registers and thee I both defy” (1, 9). The denial of all need for hypomnēma, of all archives and their fixities, of their characterizations, of all need to preserve a record of love looks more like an embrace of the inhuman than of transcendent love. A commitment both to singularity and to being numerous makes the monumental poem (in the Horatian–Shakespearean sense) an impossibility for post-Romantic poet and reader.14 Singular “character” cannot be represented by the poem; only in the body and mind of each reader can it, for a time, give its inflections to a spoken instantiation of the poem. The perpetuation of lyric speech always involves a sort of over-reading, as an overlay of reader upon reader, instantiation upon instantiation. Mourning, more complex than grief or pain, names a predicament of representation and repetition, of memory and fidelity. We who speakingly or unspeakingly mourn our losses—the Kind, as Wordsworth puts it in his closing to the Peele Castle elegy—are beings of both body and mind: psyches. There is indeed a genetic and generic sameness about us (we are countable, subjectable, subsumable). But each is, has become, different, singular, other. Speech and every mode of representation, as we know, belong to collectivity and technicity. But lyric, because of the complexity of its interface between text and speech and psyche, between that which mindlessly repeats and that which is lost without trace, is as a form particularly hospitable to the antinomies of mourning.

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It is not coincidental that the work of mourning and forgiveness in the modern city also resists any commemoration that might be seen as finished or complete. As Werner Hamacher points out, all political theorizings concerning “a society of respect for others” must build on the Kantian groundwork: “Autonomy and, with it, dignity are for Kant the irreducible minimal determination of man as a social being universal in his respective singularity” (311). Hamacher points to the inescapable circle, paradox, or aporia in this conception: “The imperative of autonomy is . . . by no means the fact that a self has its own law, but the stipulation that, in order to be a self, it must first give itself as something not yet given: that it must give itself as another and give the other along with itself” (310). This imperative Hamacher calls autonomization, and he insists, without diminishing the difficult implications of it for politics, that the “sole principle of [modern] democracy” can only be “active respect for the autonomization of all others” (319). Without this active respect for a never finished process, democracies live off such limited historical accomplishments as the slow reforms that brought about universal enfranchisement. Without this active respect, democracies move sooner or later toward a politics of coercion, toward a generalized application of certain accountings and characterizations of virtue: happy warrior, grateful citizen, and so on. Jonathan Hall describes two memorial statues in Beirut. One, commemorating the struggle for independence, he calls a “classical depiction of citizenship” that represents the “universalized values” considered essential for “founding a modern nation-state” (49, above). The second—recently displaced by the former—represents two women, of different ethnicities, “facing each other, and holding out their hands toward one another” (49, above). Its iconography, Hall writes, suggests that “the work of mourning . . . seems endless, opening out into infinity” (52, above). In a city scarred by war, the second statue expresses, as Hamacher puts it, an active respect for the autonomization of others, so a hope for the future of the city (311). Eighteenth-century discussion about whether most men have “a character,” and thus are entitled to certain forms of representation, in life and in death, was not unrelated to the demand for universal enfranchisement (recall Thomas Gray’s reflections on the poor, unlettered dead of a country churchyard, the “mute, inglorious Milton[s]” but also the fanatic Cromwells). It is clear that Wordsworth’s thinking about commemoration, which follows in this tradition, looks ahead to debates about the aspirations and aporetics of modern democracy. I would argue, though, that his conception of the epitaph in the end bows to certain impasses of representation in a way that lyric need not. The reader who takes up a lyric poem in speech, instantiates it, inhabits it for a time. But it too inhabits him, or her. Derrida, in his preface to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word as in the late essay on Nancy, circles around figures— hidden places in the psyche, prostheses or grafts in “the heart of an organ” (xiii)—that are bound up, Miller suggests, with a metaphysics of enislement (19, above). Miller takes us through Derrida’s exposition of “indirect appresentation” (14, above) showing again why Husserl’s radical analysis was a point of beginning for deconstruction. In lyric—in certain Celan poems that he read

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repeatedly (Sovereignties in Question)—Derrida found a literary form as rigorous as “indirect appresentation.” Between the one speaking the poem and the “I,” and between the one speaking the poem and the unreachable “you,” lies an “unbridgeable abyss”: but also, as most basic possibility, se toucher toi. Hamacher’s “active respect” for the autonomization of others is politically corollary to the phenomenonology of “indirect appresentation,” since both instance what we might call Derrida’s ethical imperative: “to watch over the other’s alterity” (qtd. in 14, above).

IV A lyric makes it possible for someone speaking the poem to attest to the way that the difference of singular loss works through speech. To give a famous example: She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh! The difference to me. (“Song,” 9–12)

All the last line does—it’s a matter of the way meter and rhythm pull against each other—is make you aware of the texture of “difference” in your mouth. It’s an ordinary word; here it feels a little strange. Or consider these simple, seemingly transparent lines (again from “I only looked for pain and grief”). It takes a certain focus of address, and awareness of context, to speak them with emotional plausibility: That was indeed a parting! oh, Glad am I, glad that it is past; For there were some on whom it cast Unutterable woe. (71–74)

One must (as I read it) fetch out deed from indeed, and the first it; and not lay too much of a stress on “I” in the second line. Then there is “unutterable,” which threatens to collapse its line into something less than six syllables. Any fully articulated uttering of the word will be an affirmation of sorts. That is all the quatrain asks; but it delivers as much as any lyric can. The quatrain, unlike comparable lines in “Elegiac Stanzas,” carries no claims, purchased by “retroactive falsification,” about earlier states (Levinson 110). 15 What it says about parting can be left unuttered, but not in that way ever eluded. The first parting is given meaning by the second parting: in deed it was a parting (we had not expected it to be the final one). “I” am glad—not that he has departed this life—but that the pain and grief of the second parting is past. That one: pointed to by the indicator “that.” But the second parting (of name and living man) makes the first one also the parting.

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No elegy is indeed a poem of parting until the one speaking it has undergone a similar parting, and the whole pitch and register of the iteration is changed. Glad—relatively—that it is past; glad to be speaking the poem, even as it points back to the parting; glad—relatively—not to be sunk in unutterable woe, as Dorothy was for a time. In “Elegiac Stanzas,” we find something other than a juggernaut of represented subjectivity16; and in the minor elegies for John too something other than a private expression of loss. Interpretive accretions aside, any lyric is primarily an artifact that extends hospitality to the speaker who utters it, who pronounces its words, who differentially sounds the sequences of syllables in its sentences in order to give it this particular instantiation in speech. In turn, the lyric allows the contemporary speaker—you or I or whoever next takes it up to speak—to acknowledge his or her finitude with respect to language and representation and communicability. The following lines from “I only looked for pain and grief” picture the mourner’s fidelity freed from the stringencies of representation, but open to the always incrementally different possibilities of lyric instantiation: Here did we stop, and here looked round While each into himself descends For that last thought of parting Friends That is not to be found. (41–44)

The “thought of parting friends” runs both ways, since the genitive is both objective and subjective: whatever has been forgotten or lost, or was never to be found—friends in one another’s mind’s eye, friends’ thoughts communicated or not—there is a reciprocity in the parting, and an affirmation. The private disaster of the “parting . . . indeed” folds back into itself this “last thought.” To leave that thought be, to allow the parting of lived moment and recollected sign, to let it go without letting go one’s fidelity to it, involves an affirmation of the possibility of newness in repetition. It is an affirmation potentially to be taken on by anyone who speaks this lyric; and to return to my opening paragraphs, any such instantiation of the poem’s speech carries a value truer to the post-Romantic moment than, say, the politically unconscious driftings through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of certain phrases from “Character of the Happy Warrior,” whose character most men were said to lack, though it was hoped that collectively they might somehow rise to it through imitation. That poem, like any other, is rooted in its own iterability, in the technique of repetition belonging to it. Iterability, the incrementalities of alteration, variation through repetition: these are lyric principles that answer the purposes not of men and less-than-men rising into prescribed and universally celebrated character, but of numerousness and of numerous discourses crossed by the vapour-cloud traces of singularity. An “elegiac stanza” is a room through which the finitude of any speaker may momentarily pass. It may well also serve, as briefly, the purposes of commemoration: “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn” (“Elegiac

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Stanzas,” 60). Absolutely singular loss, absorbed so easily otherwise as one more drop in the sea of human mortality, asserts itself most strongly not as autobiographical testimony but as words repeatable, utterable, by whoever takes up these lines, addressed no longer to . . . Beaumont, Friend! Who would have been the Friend, If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore . . . (“Elegiac Stanzas,” lines 41–42)

but always swerving instead toward the third who is the future of the poem. 17 It is the way of lyric to offer unanticipated hospitalities to speakers, to contexts unforeseen, and to thoughts of friends unpredictably returning.

Notes 1. All citations and line numbers from Wordsworth’s poetry other than The Prelude are from William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000. 2. The first “Essay Upon Epitaphs” was printed in Feb., 1810, in Coleridge’s periodical The Friend, and then appended to Wordsworth’s long poem The Excursion when it was published in 1814. The second and third Essays on Epitaphs were not published until 1876. 3. Lives, iii. 263–64. Cited in Owen and Smyser’s edition of Wordsworth’s prose, vol. II, 103. 4. The “ethics of authenticity” is Charles Taylor’s phrase. 5. Alethea Hayter notices the phrase in a letter of condolence. John’s death, Lamb wrote to William, “always occurs to my mind with something like a feeling of reproach, as if we ought to have been nearer acquainted, and as if there had been some incivility shown him by us, or something short of that respect which we now feel; but it is always a feeling, when people die, and I should not foolishly offer a piece of refinement, instead of sympathy, if I knew any other way of making you feel how little like indifferent his loss has been to us” (qtd. in Hayter 169–70). 6. Dorothy wrote in her Journal, 29 Sep. 1800: “John left us. Wm. and I parted with him in sight of Ulswater” (qtd. in Gill 715). 7. The name is already an empty marker, and hence “races toward death even more quickly than we do, we who naively believe that we bear it. It is in advance the name of a dead person” (The Work of Mourning 130). 8. In a 1994 interview with Cathy Caruth, Hartman spoke about how the memoryplace is both a spot discernible within but also constitutive of “a temporal consciousness” (310): “That is, the reflective moment is introduced in all its dimensions. And there is recovery. For the recovery to be effective, salutary, it has to be associated with place . . . So the recovery, the retrieval process, insofar as it can be called healing or therapeutic, involves the notion of place, the image of a power place” (The Wordsworthian Enlightenment 310). 9. The European literary “inscription” tradition was premised upon the entirely plausible fiction of text surviving the monument upon which it was engraven. See Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry.”

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10. Derrida on Freud’s death drive: “This three-named drive is mute. It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own . . . it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnēmē or anamnēsis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnēmē or to anamnēsis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum” (Archive Fever 10–11). 11. “A gentle shock of mild surprise” became Hartman’s formulation for understanding how, as he put it in the interview with Caruth, “everything works against trauma in Wordsworth, yet the basis of the trauma is there” (304). 12. Eldest brother Richard and youngest brother Christopher were outliers in the family romance. 13. Miller argues that all poems, since they survive their authors, are “epitaphic” (The Linguistic Moment 108–13). 14. The phrase, of course, is George Oppen’s. See his poem “Of Being Numerous” [1968]. 15. According to Hayter, William and Dorothy did have a brief meeting with John in London in 1802. Arguably, then, there may be a mild “retroactive falsification” in this poem too. 16. “Juggernaut of subjectivity” is Levinson’s term (115). 17. For a discussion of the third who is the future of the poem, see my “Apostrophe, or the Lyric Art of Turning Away.”

Chapter Six City of Ghosts: Mourning and Justice in The Sixth Sense Warwick Mules

I Attridge’s “Posthumous Infidelity” and Miller’s “Absolute Mourning” both respond to Jacques Derrida’s writings on death as the finitude of thought—its end point—which, paradoxically, is also the starting point from which thought must proceed in attempting to think otherness. In Miller’s reading of Derrida’s own reading of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this otherness is the finitude of the body “expropriated” by death: the body is always already outside itself in mourning its own immanent death. This ecstasis of the body is its finite being in the face of absolute otherness, experienced in terms of an impossible contact with the other as a “phantasm” or “ghostly revenant between life and death [which] dictates an impossible mourning” (Derrida, Touching 35; qtd. in Miller 12, above). This other haunts the self and demands the just response of a nonjudicial attestation that can see what is revealed in this event of the other as ghost. The self is called to respond justly, in the justice of a non-judicial attestation that can see what is revealed in this event of the other as ghost. For Derrida, justice is not simply a question of juridical authority (the capacity to decide through the application of laws), but something beyond law itself—in the experience of an impossible “there is,” revealed when justice, as the rule of law, is exposed to its own aporia in what Benjamin has called mystical violence: “there where, even if it does not exist, if it is not present, not yet or never, there is justice” (Derrida, “Force of Law” 243). There is this impossible justice even when justice itself, as the rule of law, fails to see the very thing it produces as unjust. Justice comes in the response to the otherness that the rule of law excludes and cannot see. What justice as the rule of law fails to see is what is seen in the not-seeing: the phantasm of the other returning to haunt the self in the very event of justice itself. Justice comes at this place, where the ghost appears in the failure of justice to account for its own blindness

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to what it excludes: the injustices of the past as a responsibility that is yet to be discharged. Attridge discusses Derrida’s concern for death in terms of his relation with Levinas, both as a friend and as a critical reader of Levinas’s work. In Attridge’s reading, Derrida’s finite thinking refuses to go along with Levinas’s attempts to transcend finitude in an epiphanous revelation of the face of the other as absolute. Invoking Levinas’s troublesome appearance of the “third” other as a necessary extension of the self–other relation, Derrida exposes the uncertainty in Levinas’s attempt to ground philosophical thought in the primacy of the self’s relation to the other, opening thought to otherness as ineluctable finitude, or death. The question of justice—the “doing justice to the other” (Attridge 24, above) or living up to the relation with the other—cannot be answered by presuming the otherness of the other as absolutely outside the self (in the epiphanous revelation of the face of the other), but only in terms of the otherness of the other in the finite self as an ecstatic excess. Mourning—the lament for the lost other—is thus a condition of life itself in its finite being toward death. Here, I want to respond to Attridge and Miller by examining the work of mourning as it plays itself out in Hollywood film melodrama. I read The Sixth Sense as an allegory of the work of mourning, as a reflection on the film’s impossible task of producing absent presence, or mediated otherness in the form of images. Film melodrama constitutes a certain kind of being-possible of the human, involving a desire to restore the world to justice through nostalgia for a state of being now felt to be lost (Gledhill 21). Film melodrama is a work of mourning because it makes the viewer feel the sense of what it presents as lost otherness, as a desire for its restoration to full, living presence. The Sixth Sense allegorizes this desire as a ghost story: an ecstasis of the body as image of deathly otherness as a ghost.

II In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Derrida writes of “a mourning [that] responds to the injunction of a justice which, beyond right or law, rises up in the very respect owed to whoever is not, no longer or not yet, living, presently living” (97). I will explore the work of mourning as “the injunction of a justice” in The Sixth Sense. In this film Philadelphia is a city of ghosts: dead others whose lives have been violently taken through criminal acts that remain unseen and unpunished. Their presence suspends any proper relation between the living and the dead, and demands that the living bear witness to their unlawful deaths. In doing this, the film reveals the work of mourning to be an impossible task: one that can succeed only by failing. That is to say, mourning—the libidinal attachment to a lost object—can succeed only when the object in its lostness (in its absence) is made present to the mourner. Mourning thus reveals a space of undecidability between presence and absence, in which the mourner’s subjectivity is suspended as in a dream, and the lost object returns as a ghost, or an image, a phantasm on a screen.

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As Miller indicates in his reading of Derrida’s On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, insofar as it inhabits the “living body” as its indispensable prosthesis, the work of technics also announces its death: “‘The living body,’ Derrida is saying, is not a self-enclosed unity. It is always already inhabited by death” (Miller 12, above). Death is finitude: the finiteness of life in its relation to death, as distinct from the infinity of life lived in the unity of self-presence. To think the finitude of life as life-in-relation-to-death, is to think the fact of its being in the face of absolute otherness, in the possibility that it might not be. This is not simply to meditate on the doleful condition of life, but to reflect on what gets done—the prosthetic work of technics in carrying death in its very mediation of life. What is this work? Prosthesis means that I touch you as other, but only insofar as this touching is rendered impossible by the very fact of mediation itself, in the gap opened up between presence and absence as the absolute condition of the possibility of life in its relation to death—in its finite possibility. As Miller points out, “Paradoxically, Derrida holds, this inaccessibility [impossibility] is what makes it possible for me to ‘make contact’ with the other as other” (14, above). Technics constitutes a mourning over the loss of the very contact that it makes possible. Derrida calls this “absolute mourning” to distinguish it from the kind of mourning that Freud discusses in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Absolute mourning is not tied to an individual mourner’s introjection (“taking in” the dead other to keep it alive in oneself), but is a condition that is “general and universal . . . identified with life itself” (18, above). We can now begin to see the way film melodrama is bound up in the exigencies of justice whereby dead or absent others are made present to an audience, bearing witness to their plight or situation. Technics is an intervention of the “third,” to use Levinas’s term (Attridge 29 passim, above), in which the responsibility to the other is transferred from the primacy of a face-to-face encounter in the experience of the personal to a dissemination of this relation in mediated experience. This shifts ethical responsibility into the realm of the political, so that the relation with the other is no longer confined to the personal, but becomes a matter of how the other is dealt with in terms of justice in the broadest sense, in the sense of the polis and the political relation more generally. The ethical question of responsibility to the other is thus diffracted into a thematics manifested in various texts and narratives as a way of re-enacting the primary relation with otherness as a cultural practice. And indeed, as Attridge’s reading of Derrida’s deconstruction of Levinas points out, the intervention of the third is not something that comes after the primacy of the relation to the other; rather “the arrival of the third has to be immediate” (Attridge 33), necessitating an openness at the very heart of the relation with otherness as the advent of the that there is, and demanding a response as a call for justice.

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As the intervention of the third, mediation is immediate. What it mediates is immediacy, a chiasmic presentation of presence as absence. Technological mediation—the mediating of presence—is itself a medium inhabited by figures, neither living nor dead, but ghosts or revenants as the otherness of the impossible life made possible through mediation. These ghosts return from elsewhere under the condition of mourning—they initiate a mourning for lost presence in their plight as “in-between.” By revealing themselves, they make affective another (sixth?) sense concerning their absolute alterity, as a kind of insight that reflects on the mediation itself, making it account for what it reveals: the death of the living body in mediation. The insight that occurs is a response to the revelation—a making responsible of the one to whom the revelation occurs as a bearing witness. As Derrida has suggested, to bear witness concerns the question of justice: to take responsibility for injustice as an inheritance that must be set right today, in the very fact of bearing witness (Specters 88–92). To bear witness is to be just in a way that not bearing witness is to be unjust, to be blind to injustice. The ethical task is to bear witness to the plight of the other revealed in the mediation as a condition of its technē, its capacity to be present before us as a truth of some kind.

III The Sixth Sense begins with an invocation of justice. Malcolm Crow, a successful child psychologist, and his wife, Anna, are at home celebrating an award granted to him by the city of Philadelphia for his services to the health of children. Malcolm epitomizes the just man, who works for the good of others and is esteemed for doing so. Justice here is a certain sharing or parceling out in which one’s own good is measured in terms of the good done to others. At this very moment in which Malcolm’s justness is formally recognized, a disgruntled former patient, Vincent Grey, breaks in, accuses Malcolm of failing him, and shoots him in the stomach. From its opening scene, the film enacts the problem of justice: “one cannot speak directly about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say ‘this is just,’ and even less ‘I am just,’ without immediately betraying justice” (Derrida, “Force of Law” 237). Once the arrival of justice is announced, the law becomes closed to the otherness to which justice is due. Thus the just Malcolm is shot by someone accusing him of an injustice, which is, in effect, a return of the event that leads to Malcolm’s current status as just, but now revealed to be a failure to respond to the plight of the other—in other words, as the film later reveals, a failure to be just. Having set up the framework of an injustice that needs to be put right, the film proceeds to unravel the events that will eventually lead to the restoration of justice and the instauration of Malcolm as a just man. The sense of justice restored fits the particular genre to which the film owes allegiance. In The Sixth Sense, thematic, character, and technical elements common to many Hollywood films serve to make the fact of an injustice palpable to the audience; to make the audience feel the event as affectively real.1 Film melodrama thus bears an

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ameliorative function in that it expresses the event of justice; it bears witness to the fact of an injustice that demands a response that the film then delivers. The Sixth Sense is no different and indeed is exemplary in this regard. Furthermore, it also shows the event of justice within the framework of the law of the father in which injustice can only be put right so long as it confirms patriarchal authority and the normalization of male fatherly presence. However, The Sixth Sense also does something else. It reveals the event of justice as an excess or resistance to the law of the father in terms of its own impossibility: its inability to close the aporia between presence and absence in the film’s own image structure. The film’s task is one of mourning over its own lost object: the full living presence of the body for which the image acts as a substitute, played out in terms of a ghost story. The theme of mourning in the film is not immediately apparent, and only appears later, once it becomes clear that Malcolm died in the attack. The key point here is that Malcolm is a ghost but unaware of it, thinking himself to be a living human. This truth starts to dawn on the viewer well into the film, when Malcolm enters the bedroom to find his wife asleep in front of a television set playing a video of their wedding day. Far from having rejected him—as earlier scenes had seemed to suggest—his wife has in fact been mourning his loss by playing and replaying the video. The film here enacts the structure of misrecognition (a typical effect of melodrama) by first withholding and then revealing knowledge of a character’s true condition, thereby triggering a cathartic reversal of sentiment. The work of mourning, it now becomes clear, has saturated the entire film. The film mourns its own lost object: Malcolm becomes an elegiac expression of loss that reveals a twilight world hovering between presence and absence. Neither a living human nor a ghost, but something inbetween, he becomes an impossible figure2 of filmic presence, suspended between absence and presence in the singular event of filmic appearing. The problem of the film is not simply to make the fact of injustice reveal itself, but to make the bearer of justice (the hero) realize his outsider status (as ghost), thereby empowering him with special faculties to right injustice from outside the law.3 As long as Malcolm misrecognizes his own death, the fact of the injustice cannot be shown. Malcolm cannot see the unjust events, because he responds to them as problems to be solved by the law (that is, by the discourse of clinical psychology). To enable him to see the events, the film must repeat his initial failure to see and hear the fact of the injustice; it must bear witness to the fact of the injustices, and this time not misread or misrecognize them as symptoms of psychosis subject to the law. Thus, the scene of Malcolm’s shooting is followed by another scene set some months later, where he observes a child, Cole Sear, seemingly suffering from a psychotic illness in which he imagines he sees ghosts.4 It quickly becomes apparent to the

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viewer, however, that Cole Sear is in fact a seer, and that his apparent psychotic hallucinations are manifestations of the victims of unredressed murders who demand that he bear witness so justice may be achieved. These manifestations are denied Malcolm, who treats Cole’s condition as though it were a psychological problem (a problem of the subject) to be dealt with by scientific rationality. The realization that what the ghosts want is to be listened to comes to Malcolm in a revelation. Puzzled by inconsistencies in his clinical notes, he digs out an old tape of his interviews with his attacker, Vincent Grey. He listens to the interview with the child Vincent, and on turning the volume up hears faintly in the background another voice imploring Vincent to take heed of his plight. Malcolm realizes that Vincent too is a seer, and that in failing either to hear what he heard or to believe him, he failed to render justice. This is the injustice lying at the heart of his own status as a just man. Now able to advise Cole to listen to what the ghosts want, Malcolm atones for his earlier failure. This equates with an acceptance of an obligation to the other, to bear witness to the other’s otherness, as opposed to absorbing the otherness of the other into the law of the same, so nullifying the crime that has made the other appear in the mode of a ghost seeking justice. The revelation that Malcolm himself is a ghost follows from this realization: that the otherness of the other entails a responsibility that is ignored at one’s ethical peril. The risk is in thinking that justice lies in the rule of law, and the closure of experience to the otherness of the other. As a just man, Malcolm remains closed to otherness, continually misrecognizing the otherness of the other in terms of the same. The other is thus closed to him until he realizes his own status as other. In order to show this, the film dissolves Malcolm’s subjectivity, because while Malcolm continues to believe himself to be a living human and hence subject to the law, he cannot respond to the other in its otherness; he is bound, as it were, to recognize the other as a symptom of the self-same. By dissolving Malcolm’s subjectivity, the film not only solves the problem of seeing ghosts but also plunges its own status as a filmic representation into crisis by collapsing the framework upon which the boundaries that separate the living world of humans and ghosts are kept apart, thereby revealing, as if for the first time, the disjunctive relation between presence and absence upon which this particular film, and film in general, is based. Because he is a ghost, Malcolm has no living continuity between the past and the present, so that his appearance at the beginning of any given scene is each time for the first time. For instance, in the scene immediately following his shooting, we see him watching from across the street as Cole leaves his home. We are given no indication of how Malcolm comes to be where he is, and assume this elision will be filled in at a later point. Malcolm’s appearance in each scene is characterized by such disjunctures in time and place, accentuated by his lack of contact with those around him (he speaks to and touches no one except Cole). This is a case of a reflection at the level of the film’s expressive function, embodied in the character’s ontological status as part of the structure of

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the film. The character’s appearance does not simply move the story along; it carries with it a reflection on the status of the film itself as a specific kind of story-telling device.5 The film begins again each time Malcolm appears, but in such a way that an illusion of continuity is maintained. The Sixth Sense is, in fact, an allegory of its own self-expression, and exemplifies the disjunctive structure of film in general. Malcolm is not only a ghost but is also a figuration produced by the film’s structural capacities, which is to say a figure whose status is profoundly bound up in both the solving of the mystery and in its unraveling as a specific filmic event. The structural crisis of the film occurs when the contradictions between what Malcolm can and can’t do (contradictions that are in fact spread throughout the film from its very beginnings) become apparent to him. Malcolm suddenly realizes his mourning wife cannot hear the words he speaks and, in a series of flashbacks, his ghost-condition is confirmed to him when he recalls other incidents when his presence to her and others has gone unnoticed. The film unravels itself at this point. In the earlier scenes, ghost and living human were present within the same filmic space, producing a seemingly coherent yet ambiguously elegiac world of mutual non-presence. However, at this concluding stage, the coherence of this world comes unstuck, releasing a disjunctive effect in which the intercalation between the ghost world and the human world becomes apparent. In flashback, we see for the second time Malcolm’s wounded body and his wife rushing to him. This time, however, the seriousness of the injury is displayed to the camera, and the inevitability of his death is clear. The flashback is composed of interspersed images from the initial time frame when Malcolm was alive, and images from the now revealed ghost time that have triggered the dissolution of Malcolm’s subjectivity. In effect, Malcolm now dies for the first time. We might say that The Sixth Sense is an experiment in the temporal possibilities of film in which the past and the present are brought together, not historically, not in terms of the past as seen from the present but rather as two objectively defined modes of being whose mutually exclusive realities are juxtaposed in a dramatic enactment of what Benjamin, in his “Critique of Violence,” terms mythic violence. He distinguishes between mythic violence as law-instituting, and law-conserving violence. Both forms are dialectically related in the historical enactment of justice and the rule of law.6 Mythic violence is that which is enacted on the body as if for the first time. It is originary in the sense that it reminds us constantly of the claim that the law has over the body before all laws and before all rights. The human subject (as subject to the law) is free only insofar as this claim is recognized and accounted for. To forget this claim is to arrogate to oneself a freedom that one does not have and to claim rights and powers that cannot be sustained. We see this enacted in the stories forever

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circulating in popular culture that constantly remind us of the authority of law through mythic violence, especially through the poetic justice meted out to those who commit crimes in ways that seem to defy the laws of civil society. The violence enacted on Malcolm’s body is an example of mythical violence in which the law’s claims over the body must be a spectacle for all. When Malcolm clutches at his wound in these final scenes, he sees the spilt blood oozing out of the exit wound, blood he (and the viewer) didn’t see in the opening sequence when the bullet appeared to have gone straight through with minimum damage. The oozing blood we now see is cruor which Lyotard has defined as “the blood that flows” in the expiation of a crime (180), through which Malcolm pays the penalty for having failed his client. The bloodless operations of the law that produce bio life (life controlled by discourse; the kind of life that Malcolm as a child psychologist is trained to see and deal with) are replaced by those of a more originary law in which the body is cut open in order to show the cruor as evidence of an expiation for an originary crime. The crime and the expiation are re-enacted on the body as the perpetual becoming of originary being. At this point, Malcolm realizes that he is a ghost and takes leave of his sleeping wife with a gentle gesture, confirming the film’s message that redemption lies in the realization of one’s fate in the possibility of justice to come, beyond all law. This is not a justice based on the rule of law, but a justice in which we bear witness to the event of injustice, thereby exposing life to what Derrida has described as the “terrifying moments [in which] the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures [are exposed] as uninterpretable or undecipherable” (“Force of Law” 269). Their injustice is resolved not so much by any rule of law, but because they have been seen and felt by others. Their presence triggers an obligation to respond which overrides the law, inaugurating a new epoch of justice. However, in the film, no new epoch arrives. Rather, what emerges is the restoration of the father-figure: the ghost Malcolm as entirely other. Unlike the living Malcolm at the beginning of the film, the ghost Malcolm is truly just in the sense that he knows his status as other, and hence recognizes the otherness of the other as part of being-with (the condition of all ghosts). Malcolm’s leavetaking is in effect an attempt by the film to transcend its own aporia, by eclipsing the exposure of the fact of injustice with a sentimental passing from one state to another within the logic of misrecognition typical of film melodrama. The justice to come fails to arrive, but is replaced by the restoration of the fatherfigure whose destiny as a free subject has always been the film’s focus. In “The Disjointed City,” Jonathan Hall describes two statues erected in response to the sectarian violence and civil war that has plunged Beirut into ruin. One of these depicts two classical figures: a naked male warrior and a torchbearing female goddess which, as Hall suggests, represents a political response that attempts to transcend violence by imposing a shared vision of ideal unity. This statue replaced one of two women, one Christian and one Muslim, facing each other in a gesture of mutual forgiveness, indicating an ethical response to sectarian violence based on personal responsibility to the other (41–52, above). We can see something of this substitution of a political for an ethical solution in

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The Sixth Sense in that the problem of justice requiring a singular response to the demand of the violated other is exposed in the performance of the film itself—in the characters’ specific responses and self-realizations—up to a point. Beyond that, in the final analysis, this demand is resolved through a transcendental gesture that imposes the idealized father-figure as the film’s ultimate goal, as if the violence had no other purpose than to serve the apotheosis of the father into absolute otherness. This difference between a transcendent and an immanent relation to the other is not a choice that one has in deciding for politics or ethics (for a universal solution in the law of the polis or for a solution in the singular response to the face-to-face relation with the other). Rather, it is a matter of the that which emerges in the aporia between them—in the appearance of a figuration of otherness that, in its very impossibility (impossible because otherness must be either transcended or left to be in immanence)—as that which announces the very possibility of a justice to come. The aporia exposed here is similar to the one exposed by Derrida in the name of democracy as a universal political system that guarantees the freedom of individuals as singular beings and at the same time requires equality of all as a necessity of law (Rogues 24). As Stefan Mattessich points out, Derrida exposes the aporia between the universal and the singular enacted in this double gesture of meros: democracy “does not exist and maybe cannot exist except in the name of a promise or a future always already opened to its own negation” (104, below). Thus democracy is always inhabited by the ghost of the excluded other, and in its very constitution cannot coincide with itself. We should be quite clear about this: this is not a case of seeking out a fatal flaw that would deny democracy its capacity to enact its values; rather, it seeks, in the very ground of democracy itself, in its specific enactment in each case, a particular affirmation of the principles of democracy, but in a way unrecognizable (impossible) in terms of either the singular well-being of the individual or the general good applied equally to all. This fact of democracy is unnamable and incalculable, a fact of the there that democracy is in its advent. Democracy is (becomes) a response to the excluded other as the thing that returns ineluctably in that which democracy is in its singular occurrence. The return of the other is not a negation of democracy but a condition of its possibility, its affirmation on other terms.

IV The Sixth Sense might be termed an apocalyptic melodrama, in which the showing of the crime is sufficient for us to feel the force of the law, in its most original sense, as a law without signification. Giorgio Agamben has made this

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kind of paradox quite clear in Homo Sacer, with the status of the exception: “The exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it” (22). The exception “shows its own significance and in this way suspends its own meaning.” One cannot escape this law, because it is written on our bodies at birth, and is that which makes us responsible beings in our freedom to think and act. This is not a responsibility to ourselves as self-reflecting subjects, but, as Levinas has argued (17), a responsibility to the other, first and foremost, in our very being, always opened to the other as part of the event of modernity in its historical deconstruction. This response cannot take place purely in ethical terms, in the immediacy of a face-to-face relation with the other. But neither can it take place in political terms alone, in the mediated relation with the other as the intervention and spread of the third party. Rather, it must take place (we have no choice) in the taking place of the mediation of the ethical relation itself, in the political relation inhabited as it is by the immediacy of the other as phantasmic presence. As a city inhabited by ghosts, the Philadelphia imagined in The Sixth Sense is not a city in mourning but a city called to responsibility—to respond on behalf of the dead who are still yet present in their apparition as ghosts. What do these ghosts really want? Not recognition. They do not want their rights restored to them as subject-citizens. Rather their presence is always in the mode of an absolute alterity, something that overflows and nullifies the desire to hold the object in its gaze and to recognize it as one of us. What they want is the event of their passing made apparent, to pass this eventness on as an inheritance to the living so that it can be restored as originary. The Sixth Sense is thus messianic in that it “affirms the coming of an event” (Derrida, Specters 7). This event is its own unraveling as a unified filmic project where the exception—those abandoned by the law—cannot be seen by being seen, by being seen as ghosts. That is to say, their invisibility as excluded others is rendered visible, but in the mode of invisibility.7 The task it sets itself, then, is the impossible one “of making the virtual state of exception real” (Agamben 57). Like K in Kafka’s The Trial or Joseph K in The Castle, Malcolm is tasked with realizing his own state of exception—in this case as ghost. In so doing, the film exposes itself to its own impossibility, of opening itself out to a future that is not its own, to a future to come (which the film fails to make appear). This future is not, however, in the future, which has already passed away with Malcolm’s transcendence into full fatherly ghost-figure status. Rather it exists in the each time of the singularity of the event which is the film in its expressive moment— the that that appears in the very singularity of its performance. It is this moment, which is not a moment in itself but a moment for another time that needs to be accessed, unraveled, and redirected, for the work of deconstruction to take effect, and for the work of mourning, otherwise trapped within the introspection of subject formation, to be released as a response to the otherness of the other that it invokes.

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Notes 1. Melodrama has been described as a theatrical mode “designed to arouse . . . intense emotional involvement” and as a “field of force” (Lang 7). 2. In “Force of Law” Derrida writes: “All exemplary figures of the violence of the law are singular metonymies, namely figures without limit, unfettered possibilities of transposition and figures without figures” (278). 3. This is a common theme in Hollywood film, for instance in Westerns, where the hero must act outside the law to right wrongs (e.g., Shane). Such heroes are exceptional; that is, their justice is derived from their state of exception, rendering them divine. 4. Although not his biological father, Malcolm takes that role, thus enacting the logic of the return and restoration of the missing father common to many Hollywood films. 5. Walter Benjamin describes this kind of character in terms of a gestic function, where a character is reduced to bodily gestures and expressions, which he identifies in the work of Franz Kafka (“Franz Kafka” 801). For Benjamin, the reduction of characters to this function coincides with a certain self-consciousness inaugurated in modern mediated contexts, and specifically in acting in front of a camera to an absent audience: the actor “senses an inexplicable void, stemming from the fact that his body has lost its substance, that he has been volatilized” (“The Work of Art” 112). 6. Benjamin wants to break the cycle of violence initiated by this dialectical movement between law-conserving and law-instituting violence with what he terms “divine violence” or a violence enacted from an absolutely outside position. In “Force of Law,” Derrida re-designates this third type of violence as “mystique,” or the moments within the structure of experience that cannot be resolved into the dialectical play between conserving and instituting violence (35). Derrida’s answer is to make violence a positive moment in the disjuncture between law-conserving and law-instituting violence which, in effect, is a deconstruction of the law itself. Thus, for Derrida, justice is not outside the law, but the violence necessary to undo the law in its closure to otherness. 7. “The specter is first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible, but the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood” (Derrida, Echographies 115, emphasis added).

Chapter Seven Deconstruction and Democracy in the Neoliberal Turn Stefan Mattessich

In his 2002 book Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Derrida frames the post-9/11 geopolitical situation by noting “the only regimes that do not fashion themselves to be democratic . . . are statutorily linked to the Muslim faith or creed” (29). Even if this is not true in every instance—Derrida leaves this possibility open— the word “Islam” clearly signifies in public discourse the other of a democracy distinguished variously as Western, modern, universal, human or humane, the space of politics, of justice, of law, and so forth. As Derrida demonstrates in his analysis of democracy’s peculiarly empty semantic form, the complication in this binary opposition appears with the understanding that democracy is itself also the name for a certain relation to the other, a certain claim to or on otherness and difference. This relation or claim is inscribed in the commitment to tolerance, to freedom of expression, to cosmopolitanism, to self-critical culture generally. Democracy, we might say, is a kind of border opened to its other, a breach in its own delimitation or definition. It is not only a concept that does not coincide with itself: it is a concept of non-coincidence, non-self-identity, a concept that calls its own concept into question. What its breached or open border implies is that the problem for it of “Islam” is also one of the difference between two kinds of otherness. Islam is the name for the other of the other that democracy includes in its own self-critical account. It is the name of what this account cannot tolerate or quite simply represses in order to stabilize and legitimate itself. Just what is at stake in this “double exclusion”—this way we have of including otherness only in order to exclude it on another level? We Westerners need the other of our otherness—whether it be “Islam” or another double—in order to be properly self-critical, to be reflexive, maybe even to think at all about what we are, or who we are, and not only in the terms of identity that academics have grown so accustomed to questioning, but in the crisis of identity that we play out precisely when we bracket identity as a problem or try to coincide with our own non-coincidence: that is, when we try to be tolerant of other people or 103

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affirm our own pluralism. It is the way our democratic values are drawn into the legitimation strategies of generalized war on terror and for security that constitutes what is new in the current situation we face: that our very “way of life” is made to hang in the balance of patently undemocratic forms of violence, indeed to become, in its totality, itself a form of violence. Today this violence derives from a neoliberal integration of the state— particularly in the United States—with the functions and spaces of a global capitalist system. Based on specific policies and laws put in place beginning roughly in the early 1980s and geared to immunize the financial sector of the economy from state regulation while, at the same time, reformulating the role of the state as protector of the markets in which this sector pursues its interests, neoliberalism proceeds more and more transparently from the assumption that democracy itself is an anachronism in the new dispensation. Consequently, the tendency has been to insulate financial elites from any sort of democratic accountability, and to do this with the support of both technocratic and political classes.1 Accompanying this development has been a legitimation strategy that exploits the ambivalences of social and national identity in people to procure the consent it needs. As patently anti-democratic as the neoliberal agendas have been, then, they appear and are sustained in the polity as equivalent to democratic practice, even its apotheosis, and success on this front has thrown the very commitment to such practice into crisis. The present essay wonders if democracy today has any meaning at all as more than, in effect, the self-negating matrix of its own virtualization. Plato worried about this in The Republic when he suggested that tyranny arises out of democracy in the same way that democracy arises out of oligarchy, and “the avidity of democracy for that which is its definition and criterion of good [is] the thing which dissolves it” (Republic VIII.562 a, c). Derrida analyses it in the rogue, the outlaw, the roué, as a figure (indeed Plato’s figure) for the demos as non-coincident with itself. His reading, I think, takes on still more pertinence the more obviously a neoliberal state consolidates itself in our midst, since this figure additionally describes the self-understanding of that state today, as it perverts the rule of law in the name of its market rationality and refigures its functions in terms of an explicitly biopolitical security. My example of a democratic commitment newly challenged by the turn to neoliberal policy and belief will be deconstruction itself, since to my mind it has afforded the best critical tools we have for grasping the contradictions of democratic life and speech from within its logocentric forms, as an argument for a democracy that does not exist and maybe cannot exist except in the name of a promise or a future always already opened to its own negation. This openness begins with the acknowledgment of a necessary implication of the subject—you and me—in the violence of those logocentric forms on psychological, social, political, and historical levels. Such a necessary implication invests all deconstructive aporias and paradoxes—the impossible possibilities, the unconditional conditions, the immeasurable measures—with an ethical weight. We discover what we are in what we are not, and by taking (infinite) responsibility for the other that impinges on our singularity. As such,

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deconstruction takes its place as one more self-critical operation of or in democratic space, subject to the logic of double exclusion it also tries to name. It needs this space (for all its volatility) as a supposition of its rhetorical force. Derrida suggests as much, again in Rogues, when he writes, “Democracy opens . . . the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone . . . to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature. . . . And, thus, to a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpublic remains an indecidable limit” (92). The importance of the “right” at issue here becomes clear if we imagine it taken away. In such an extreme, and even when democratic space discloses rather what Derrida calls a “spacing” (38) modeled on the differential sign system, deconstruction risks becoming inaudible or illegible—secret or private, if not privatized—to a degree that collapses the ethico-political claim it carries. Those “change[s] of tone” lose their spectral dimension, suggesting in their lack of resonance another order of complicity in the legitimation of strategies of power—and one we might not be comfortable to admit. This complicity might be even more inescapable in the early twenty-first century when we see the absence of a deconstructive right at the heart of democratic space, in the strange positivity of empty speech that characterizes neoliberal polities, especially in the United States. The stringing out or stripping of language into a total nomination prompts a critic like Slavoj Žižek to turn against democracy as anything more than a symptom of the larger geopolitical forces of financial oligarchy: “What prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism.” Democracy is the “thing,” the “hard kernel of today’s global capitalist universe,” from which it follows that “trust in the democratic substance of [in particular] honest Americans to break up [its] conspiracy” can only be misplaced (Parallax 320). Alain Badiou takes this critique further when he descries a contemporary “fetishism of democracy” of which deconstructive practice is only one instance.2 This fetishism falls prey to an “ethical ideology” rooted in a Kantian notion of radical evil, in whose antinomies it produces the pathos of the vulnerable subject and its right to be free from coercion or offense “in respect of life” (Ethics 9). Notwithstanding Derrida’s numerous deconstructions of this subject (in its autoimmunity or its ecotechnicity, for instance), it remains determined by a radical evil the priority of which runs through the metaphorics of repetition, return, and haunting. This determination tends to stake the ethical claim of deconstructive practice in what Badiou characterizes as “rights to non-evil” (9)—understood not as the predicate of a substantial person so much as the prerequisite for the processes by which the person is contingently formed in social engagement with the other, or the Other (or the Third). This normative subject of deconstruction is situated in a poetics of passivity, passion, exposure, and its freedom of personality, which is resolved at the undecidable limits of its non-self-identity and in its open-ended relation to an unconditioned future, consequently boils down to a human right. For Badiou (and for Žižek), in the current era of deeply compromised human rights discourse, this is a weak form

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of political commitment, especially where it concerns the other of the otherness we need to be democratic subjects.3

The Ethico-Politics of Mourning I sketch out here a possible limit of the deconstructive operation only to emphasize in the latter’s self-critical character the risk or danger it needs to solicit for the sake of its own salience as an ethics and a politics, or an ethicopolitics. When Derek Attridge attends to Derrida’s misreading of Levinas’s evolving conception of the Third (23–39, above), or when J. Hillis Miller rehearses with a gently skeptical tone Derrida’s conception of “absolute mourning” in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (9–21, above), they adhere to the ethical demand of deconstructive reading to make a necessary implication show in the grain of an always partial, if not prejudicial, discourse. This attention to the instabilities of a text must always turn back upon the declarative or the constative, maybe even especially when the text seeks to establish the method of this turn, or this betrayal. The question of its ethico-political value as a method is thus tied to its double status as a mode of democratic practice that at the same time abjures itself as such. Jonathan Hall touches on this in his account of Beirut as an urban space of mourning where the antinomies of deconstructive sensibility overlay contradictions that react inimically back upon the presuppositions of that same sensibility (43–59, above). There, he remarks on Derrida’s need for sovereignty, which gives an ambiguous counterweight to his “hope for the impossibility [of] a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty” (Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism 59; see also 45, 55, above). The figure of impossible hope or of a non-sovereign sovereignty functions as a limit beyond which the deconstructive operation cannot go; it further implies this limit is general because of the historical complexities that overdetermine our current era, exemplified for Hall in Beirut. What remains is aporetic assertion, in Hall’s conclusion a “recognition” of the city “as a disjointed space that is simultaneously political and incalculable” (58, above). What makes this more than a simple description, of course, depends on the ethico-political value we give such a recognition, and this, I would like to suggest, depends in turn on the trope of a necessary implication tested as far as the possibility that it has little such value at all. We sense this unsettling side of deconstructive reading in Warwick Mules’s interpretation of the film The Sixth Sense as an allegory of a mourning that is always “an impossible task: one that can succeed only by failing” (92, above). The film’s protagonist, Malcolm Crow, a child psychologist whose social sanction is tied to his superior insight into other people’s inner lives, has to learn about this insight and this sanction, and what the ethical position implied in the impossible task tells us of the law and justice: that they preclude an open relation to the “other’s otherness” in the very claim made on it. To see this violation of the ethical in the name of a certain ethics as his own, Malcolm has to understand

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his status as a ghost, a dead man in the story and a new kind of hermeneutic subject in the allegory. Mules tells us that this understanding is, finally, subsumed in the genre requirements of melodrama under the sign of a restored authority—Malcolm becomes by the end a figure of the law dialectically returned to itself at a register of representation and knowledge. This register is keyed to the film itself, at the level of expression, although interestingly complicated for Mules in the question of what the many other ghosts who haunt the filmic space “really want.” His answer—that they want neither recognition nor rights nor citizenship in a political or social space so much as the “eventness” of an absolute mourning—assigns to The Sixth Sense the desire for, and the sense of, a deconstructive ethics (100, above). What keeps the latter from being a determined mode, however—once again its impossibility— suggests a different answer to Mules’s same question: that the ghosts want precisely what Malcolm wants, the law and its foreclosure of the other in an instituted justice. They too are misrecognizing their own status as dead, in other words, and this misrecognition suggests the resistance to openness in the relation to the other that constitutively affects the ethical categories, which in turn tremble in the forms both of art and reading. The upshot here is that the political dimension of deconstruction is carried in our own implication in its impossible possibility when we posit the ethical as a determined mode that always “fails.” The stakes of this failure have to be felt at the level of expression, or rather in what we are doing as writers and readers, which in turn raises another question: what feels the resistance to ethics itself? Badiou’s response to deconstruction is that even before any question of identity, the very idea of the human being presupposes the exposure to the other and the responsibility that makes this exposure a matter of “respect” (Ethics 24). For the deconstructive operation to yield this (im)properly ethical relation, then, it may very well need a critique as firm as Badiou’s to serve as a kind of memento mori. Miller suggests as much by cueing his account of “absolute mourning” in On Touching to matters of life and death, to the body in its “structure of surviving” (as his epigraph has it, naming a veritable obsession in Derrida’s corpus, “the only thing that interests me” and that “I think about all the time”: 9, above). In this light, Miller construes the state of mourning as a “human condition,” a nature that invests the body and consciousness as its absolute ground. “To be human,” he writes, “is to be perpetually in mourning for one’s own death,” thinking (about) it all the time (10, above). This formulation, of course, presupposes no substance of the self that persists in or through mourning; there is no body proper, only a body expropriated by death, the other, time. Mourning as an absolute state is thus more akin to a melancholic incorporation of the absent other and, at the same time, an incapacity to mourn. Derrida further weaves into this incapacity a technical supplementarity, so that the nature at issue in absolute mourning is prosthetic rather than organic. The subject in its “humanity” is a creature of its encounter with the symbolic order it inhabits in an implicated or even physically “implicate” fashion. It follows for Miller that in its structure of what Derrida calls “technical survival” (Derrida, Touching 197; qtd. in 11, above) the human can be grasped

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only as a kind of catachresis, which he further links to the logic of metonymy. Subjects live in “a sideways displacement or replacement for something that is not there to be given a literal or proper name” and as such resemble “phantasms both in the sense that they are like specters and in the sense that they are like phantasmata, fictions, imaginary images, signs without an identifiable referent” (13, above). This semiosis of their implication is necessary for both Derrida and Miller insofar as it “dictates” or “commands” (Derrida, cited in Miller [from Touching] 12, [from Taste ] 9, above) a failure to mourn, or, as we see as well with Mules, an “impossible mourning” that “we can never have done with.” Thus Miller concludes, “For Derrida, life itself is mourning . . . for life itself, for my own life” (13, above). This does not entail simply that the self-presence of the bare or animal life be bracketed from the deconstructive operation, but also that this animal life remains a stake of its bracketing; it is there as absent, in a spectral materiality associated, once again, with an irreducible and heterogeneous “spacing” of extension and place. Miller’s scepticism about the deeper ethical imperative in this way of thinking he analyses in Derrida’s work comes through when he notices an equivocal sliding of language between the exigencies of grammatical form and the negation that necessarily deforms it. Hence, in Derrida’s account of Nancy’s Psyche as the figure of this disaggregated extension (and correlatively of the subject determined in the swerve around its own emptied referent), Miller wonders how Psyche can “see” herself as always already dead or “asleep” (11, above), and more broadly how the absence she stands for can be lived out as such. The paradox is aggravated into a contradiction, indeed a catachresis in the more explicit sense of a “monstrous” juxtaposition of opposites; their impossible (or fictive, even mythic) relation is understood as both internal and external antagonism or “ex-appropriation.” The question becomes what exactly makes the affirmation of this monstrosity ethical, or more centrally for Miller I think, what happens when Derrida himself becomes the object of mourning, and deconstruction itself implied in its own movement of erasure—hence the irony of his title “It Is Jacques You [or we] Mourn For.”

Deconstruction and Antiphilosophy What is at issue here in originary mourning is the status of a radical evil—or, indeed, of a primordial death drive that holds the person in a condition of bare or animal life, and which, as an object of concern, becomes in turn the normative basis of a deconstructive ethico-politics, and whether or not the human is placed sous rature. The accent on finitude, eminently Kantian and proper to the Copernican turn in thought, persists in Derrida. We find it, for example, in The Politics of Friendship, where he analyses Aristotle’s phrase, “O my friend, there is no friend,” and the dialectic that is the mutual presupposition and reliance of self and other, friend and enemy. “Without the possibility of radical evil,” he writes, “of perjury, of absolute crime, there is no responsibility, no freedom, no decision” (219). Derrida is reflecting here on the negation that determines

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symbolic exchange for the Western philosophical tradition, and hence reads “radical evil” as this tradition’s projection of the threat that reinforces its own ethical substance. Nevertheless, as he sees it, ambivalence continues to underlie any alternative mode of relation or thought, and the risk of determination and violence it necessarily entails keeps him within the orbit of a dialecticized subjectivity, albeit in a mode of deconstructive caution. In another discussion, this time centered on the concept of spirit as it persists through Heidegger’s corpus despite its disavowal, Derrida associates this inside-out relation explicitly with the notion of spectrality: “Metaphysics always returns, I mean in the sense of a revenant [ghost], and Geist is the most fatal figure of this revenance [returning, haunting]. Of the double that can never be separated from the single” (Of Spirit 40). The fatality of this link between the double and the single, the many and the one, brings us back to the “structure of survival” in its distinctly repetitive and compulsory character. The death drive as a simulation of homeostatic arrest in the life process, a living death, functions both to stabilize and justify a concept of the human. Derrida specifies in this dual function a logic of autoimmune response that sustains a sacrificial or self-sacrificial violence in automatic or immediate structures of feeling. In “Faith and Knowledge” he analyses the disavowal of this violence in the moral terms handed down by Kant, which he sees sedimented with theological belief and thus exemplified in religious discourse: respect of life in the discourses of religion as such concerns “human life” only in so far as it bears witness, in some manner, to the infinite transcendence of that which is worth more than it. . . . The price of human life . . . as the absolute price, the price of what ought to inspire respect . . . is priceless. It corresponds to what Kant called the dignity (Würdigkeit) of the end in itself, of the rational finite being, of absolute value beyond all comparative market price (Marktpreis). (87)

The “rational finite being,” as an “end in itself,” becomes the figure for that which is more than value, priceless, and indeed, as Derrida goes on to underscore, “worth more than life” (87). What is sacred, in other words, is the autonomous person, with its freedoms, its prerogatives, its properties, and its proprieties intact. But this person remains a precondition of its deconstruction, just as deconstruction remains subject to its own autoimmune deficiency. It is this that prompts Badiou, in a spirit of what he calls “antiphilosophy,” to move off the negative ground of a death drive and break the link between the one and the many, positing instead the priority of a “pure multiplicity” that bears only on nondecomposable elements. There is only the infinite regress of “multiples of multiples of multiples . . . without end,” he maintains, and so “not one but nothing. And nothing is only the multiple of nothing” (Badiou, “Ours Is Not a Terrible Situation”). The negativity of this formulation is not recuperable in a dialectic, and Badiou underscores this point for us by affirming its strictly inane or “indifferent” character, stripping the drama of sublation not only of its

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significance but its intensity (except, maybe, as comedy or farce). The individual is less an assumption for Badiou than the subject he considers properly ethical or political is a consequence of an eventality that destabilizes the logocentric structure of being, which is to say the fear of death that holds us in a survival to which alone we seem able to give a meaning and a value. For Badiou, truth is not commanded by the thought of this fear, even in mourning the life that is always already absent or dead. When he asserts, as he does in his book on Saint Paul, that “true universality is devoid of a center” (Saint Paul 19) he means that the non-referential absence at the core of an “absolute mourning” turns even against itself.

The Hatred of Democracy The question for Badiou then becomes one of whether or not there is any such thing as an ethico-politics of mourning that would be more than a dissimulated politics of violence, insisting in the very practices of deconstruction. For every aporia to push toward equivocation is to redouble political quiescence by staking an ethical claim in the passive or pathetic human life that power mandates, and its “savage inertia” (Saint Paul 7). Indeed all that would remain is a survival elevated into a right that is inextricably linked to the power that asserts it. At the very least, this possibility gives the self-critical dimension of the deconstructive operation its maximum risk and, I would argue, its true ethico-political stakes. Today these stakes and this risk have grown clearer and more urgent. Neoliberal capitalism, which is based on the unregulated accumulation of wealth and the global security needed to maintain it in the hands of the few, exploits the ambivalences of democratic sovereignty to manufacture consent, and configures the citizen as an object of regulatory control. Indeed Derrida’s account of these ambivalences has the additional virtue of grasping the logic of denial, disavowal, or euphemism that invests this consensus with a particularly hallucinatory force, even if that same logic also governs the account as well, as it must. It thus specifies that negativity in the anti-democratic neoliberal turn which is constitutive of democracy itself. In Rogues, Derrida cues this analysis to the Greek word meros, “turn,” en merei or kata meros, “by turn,” “each in turn” (23–24). For the Aristotle of the Politics, this names the rhythm of democratic life: the alternation of leaders or parties in power, for instance, but more pertinently the oscillation or, when this movement is accelerated, the scintillation that governs not only politics but the experience of subjectivity qua its dialectic “return to self” or “self-sameness.” This is why Derrida also seizes on a second meaning of the word meros: not only “turn” but “part” or “share.” For both Aristotle and Plato, this constitutes the minimal unit of a democratic calculation based on equality of number. Derrida turns this part into a particle, into the punctum of identity grasped as a quantitative “one” that is simultaneously more than one (that is, a member of a class or set) and “no longer one” or not identical to itself—the French plus d’un, of course, can mean both at once (77). The sovereign subject of a democratic

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polity coheres around this singular point: the cusp, the aleph, where plus becomes minus, in an oscillation so rapid it scintillates. Meros is for Derrida also a supplement, or trace, a quasi-transcendental “thing” that lies both outside and before the subject, outside and before the political space, the politeia, in which the subject’s power or capacity is secured but also virtualized. In this space we are both singular beings and one among many, autonomous and also anonymous, lost in a statistical mass. We might recognize in this version of non-self-identity Badiou’s indifferent “nothing,” and indeed democratic culture is for him so constrained by the simultaneous particularism and abstract calculation of capitalist exchange that “no truth can be sustained through [its] homogeneous expansion” (Saint Paul 11). An effective politics, it follows, would have to move in another order altogether.4 But if Derrida moves always in this order, stopping short of the transformative break Badiou more boldly proposes, he does so with a sharp eye on the fetishism of our own undoing or ek-stasis inside a consensus predicated on a constitutively empty sovereignty. Indeed he sees this fetishism precisely in the self-assertion of our transformative breaks, in constituting acts haunted by their own duplicity and caught in democracy’s double exclusion. Derrida subsumes these acts in a logic of exceptionalism and of politics in a “state of exception” or juridical nomos whose principle is anomos, outside and before itself, both external stimulus and internal ground, threat and cause, or objectcause. Hence, in the discourse on the state of exception more generally, the law or rule is expressed in its own suspension, and in the subject of law (or right) as the spontaneous feeling of a potency to be actualized rather than as an external constraint or prohibition. Badiou’s sense of a radical break from the logocentric structures of capitalist society overlaps these paradoxes, and the question directed at a deconstructive ethico-politics might thus apply to him as well: is his evental subject of truth not also caught up in the exceptionalism of an empty sovereignty? Does it not work as a theory of decision for the same particularist or identitarian micropolitics that he aligns under the laws of capitalist equivalence and exchange? The question is even more pressing, at least in the United States, since recent events have seen this same micropolitics, and the figure of an anomic law at its heart, converted into a conservative populism aggravating the self-sacrificial dynamic of the autonomous citizen into a value and an end, while supporting a neoliberal agenda for the state that consists of generalizing its police functions to all those who obstruct the free flow of capital (the real motive, or desire, behind the American declaration of a “war on terror”). Today’s politics of resentment has its own sense of a radical break with democratic norms.5 Indeed it taps what Jacques Rancière calls a “hatred of democracy” that rationalizes the need for an unaccountable class of political or technocratic “experts” dedicated to the management of populations deemed incapable of governing themselves.6 It is a commonplace to say that the citizen’s political freedoms under democracy are merely illusory, but that is not enough to contest this technocratic class and its prerogatives, as it informs their own legitimation strategy. Both critique and contestation turn strangely back upon

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themselves. The question for Badiou might indeed be, in just what way is his truth-event not an account of the neoliberal agenda that Margaret Thatcher, for instance, so chillingly revealed with the remark, “Economics is the method, but the object is to change the soul” (qtd. in Harvey 23). Given how radical this change has been, at any rate, a deconstructive method of self-implication might be the only means we have left for understanding its deeply transformative effects in social and political space. The move of deconstruction, of course, is always to generalize its ground in the death drive and to discover the latter’s unacknowledged effect or trace in every discourse and position. And it is just this ground that Badiou moves away from when he posits a “true” subject of politics, in order to distinguish it all the more forcefully from the liberal democratic individual in its endless adjustment to the needs of capital. Is there, he seems to ask, any such thing as a death drive? Or is it another fiction of our self-assertion and hence another form of disavowal, a way of not knowing what we know, or knowing what we pretend not to know? If the living person is already presupposed in the death drive, is deconstruction any more than a rationale for this person’s human rights? 7 But Badiou’s figure of the indifferent “nothing” is also not as dogmatic in his antiphilosophy as it might seem. Indeed, the infinitude of the truth-event that he prefers for his singular subject over the finitude of the individual qua particular ego, for all that it indicates a derogation of facticity to the level of a generic condition, also entails the impersonality or even interchangeability of the subject that results from it. His logic is distinctly egalitarian in this sense. As he puts it in Saint Paul, the subject is “nothing but beginning” (59) and without any metaphysical substance or support. Consequently, it is “like an anonymous variable, a ‘someone’ devoid of predicative traits,” “supernumerary” (63), akin to “refuse” or waste (56). These details (drawn from his portrait of the subjective disposition he affirms in the figure of Paul and, behind him, of Christ) suggest less a “new creature” (although he does qualify his subject in just this way) than a changed relation to the (non-)significance of death, which is to say an apprehension of the death drive’s illusory (if not fictive) nature as a “thought of the flesh” more than a “biological fact” (70), no matter how embodied its phantasmata may be for the living person. The world of the everyday thus turns out to be a concrete abstraction, an objective or geometric cosmos. What happens to us when this cosmos is made to pivot on its “real point” or zero degree, throwing its rational structures into “deadlock” (46), is what Badiou calls “subjectivation.” This experience is a “declaration,” but of the “voiceless” and the unnamable. It engenders a practice of willfully mad or nonsensical speech— what Badiou, citing Paul, calls a “folly,” geared to scramble logocentric discourses of knowledge and totality, law and exception. As such, he qualifies the experience of truth as a kind of “weakness,” “abasement” or destitution (56) of the subject in the eyes of the world, which it has to embrace for its truth-event in order for this to be a genuine rupture. These terms suggest that Badiou’s “truth” is immanent in “flesh” and entails what he calls a “materialism of grace,” a universalism tied to the contingency of the event and so always factitious, indeed always vanishing because independent of any prescribed project, result,

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or change-of-tone trait. If it weren’t, then, paradoxically enough, it would be prescriptive or normative, a mode or a thing, and the objective world it seeks to re-shape would in effect be the only truth, along with the dialecticized thought of death (or negation) that holds it together. The nuance here is that although his subject makes this distinction because it doesn’t also externalize this death, Badiou himself does at times do so in his design for the truth-event, which is emphatically “illegal and a-cosmic” (46) or, in a word, anti-dialectical. But his theory asks us to balance this assertion against a reading of the law as the generator (negatively through its prohibitions) of the death drive, which is to say of a desire that seeks its own elimination in fantasies of transgression. This equivocal relation of transgression that the law enjoins on us is precisely what Badiou’s subject repudiates, along with its status as subject of the law. This repudiation is less a transgression than a divestment, less a being-towards-death than an inability to die. In terms more resonant for Badiou, it is a capacity for the infinite.

The Indifferent Children of the Earth The necessarily self-implicating turn back upon what is affirmed or asserted as a mode might thus come through in its true register of risk when the implied identification is not with the victim but, on the contrary, with the victimizer whose exposure is the rationale for his or her sacrificial and self-sacrificial survival. Badiou, at any rate, finds this violence in ethical ideology when, as he writes in Ethics, the Holocaust became the negative exemplar of a radical evil used as moral justification of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, the first Gulf War, and the NATO bombing of Serbia (62–63). The same legitimation strategy, it is clear, has also applied from the beginning of the Iraq occupation, and specifically with the interests of Israel in regard to its Arab neighbors in mind and on both humanitarian and democratic grounds. This is why, for Badiou, political subjectivity breaks with the poetics of pathos and passivity in the response to the other; I would also suggest this break could provide another dimension to Burns’s account of trauma (131–39, below). But neither is it exactly an externalization of this poetics, for the performative risk it runs is present in the very vacillation of that account. Trauma, like absolute mourning, may be a “human condition,” in other words, but it is also never coincident with itself, and this non-coincidence is an index of the subject’s susceptibility to change and becoming, in its failures to be properly human or ethical, or even to know what that might be in any prescriptive fashion. As Burns says, such failures are both inevitable and necessary insofar as they evoke what he calls, again in his discussion of Lyotard, the “slightness” of death when it no longer bears the meaning of its dialectical sublation (137, below). Badiou might refer the same slightness to the indifference of death for a truth that lies elsewhere, and Derrida might refer it to its internal différance for a truth that is only ever haunted by its metaphysical determinations. Either way, the emphasis lies on the same bare or minimal sense of existence in the late-modern world.

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This sense, then, is the bridge between deconstruction and antiphilosophy. It spans a history at whose two ends, we might say, stand those indifferent children of the earth: Rosencranz and Guildenstern on the one hand, and their distant progeny Vladimir and Estragon on the other. The life this history implies is characterized by equivalence, substitution, randomness, forgetting, helplessness before inscrutable forces, and living death; its protagonist is the individual whose autonomy is “worth dying for” and, by extension, worth killing for too. Without taking this history into account, we might say, there is no understanding the claims made for this individual in the present, bound as it is to the law in fantasies of transgression, in states of exception that prove the anomic rule. There is also no understanding the current neoliberal securitization of this individual’s interests, its rights and its freedoms, or the cunning legitimation strategy that consists of foregrounding its capacity for suffering and for bearing witness—hence the liquidation of its democratic character can proceed in its name, as a matter of its human rights. Synchronous with the individual’s selfsacrificial dynamic, that is, this liquidation of democracy appears as the conclusion of a tendency or as the outward expression of an inner drive, and the equivocal commitment to democracy is reduced to the moral sentiment of individual belief. In this context, the subject differs from the individual only by internalizing this difference, which is to say by grasping its own individuality as a problem— indeed as the anti-democratic problem of our time. It follows that even in the classically liberal sense current in constitutional or parliamentary states, democracy is still a name for what resists or breaks with the neoliberal hegemony. And it is so not only as a promise to come but also as a ground, what has to be there as a guarantee of Derrida’s right to a “change of tone,” since without such a right there would be no effective auto-deconstruction of the death-driven individual we always already are. To say the same thing in a different key: in the very weakness Badiou ascribes to it, democracy continues to be the condition for a tactical “folly” required to break up the ontological structures of a public sphere that is little more today than an echo chamber for arbitrary and unaccountable power, and for more of us who, more than ever before, should know better.

Notes 1. For a lucid account of the de-democratization process in the United States, and its consequences around the world, via economic financialization and generalized war, see Kevin Phillips’s Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. For a more international account, see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 2. See, for example, Badiou’s Polemics, in which a section is called “The ‘Democratic’ Fetish and Racism” (75). The phrase resonates with his long-standing criticism of “capitalo-parliamentarism” and concurrent strains of intellectual skepticism, relativist anthropology, and “linguistic sophistry legitimating the right to cultural

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difference against any universalist pretention on the part of truths” (Being and Event vii). In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, he associates the latter “sophistry” with a “hermeneutic tradition” dominating the human sciences and committed to a “victimist conception of man” (6). Less polemically, in another public conversation with Simon Critchley in New York (“Ours Is Not a Terrible Situation”), Badiou characterizes his own work as “a new constructive way for philosophical concepts and something like a reconstruction—against deconstruction—of the classical field of philosophy itself.” 3. Badiou, again in “Ours Is Not a Terrible Situation,” speaks of a “restrained” or “moderate” politics as the counterpart to a philosophical culture he situates in a postHeideggerian or deconstructive concern with ethics, although he frames it within a broader closure of received political modes. “All our [political] names are exhausted, and without strength,” he declares. “Democracy, class struggle, revolution and so on are beautiful names but they are today in a sort of state of weakness.” 4. Badiou calls this other order one of “immanent infinity” or “universalizable singularity.” In capitalist society, he writes, Everything that circulates falls under the unity of a count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in this way can circulate. Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere. . . . Free circulation of what lets itself be counted, yes, and above all of capital, which is the count of the count. Free circulation of that uncountable infinity constituted by a singular human life, never! For capitalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration for any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinite of existence as it is to the evental becoming of truths. (Saint Paul 10)

5. A few pop cultural examples: Lenny Kravitz singing “American Woman” on an aircraft carrier, for instance; the “warrior troubadour” British soft-rock sensation James Blunt; ex-Navy SEAL Vin Diesel domesticated into a nanny and disciplining the home in the movie The Pacifier; Lee Ermey on cable TV reprising his drill sergeant role in Full Metal Jacket, only this time as comedy; former Secretary of State Condi Rice screaming at her dinner companion in Washington one evening, “The world’s a mess, and somebody’s got to clean it up!”; those soldiers, men and women, holding leashes or setting dogs on hooded Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, committing crimes against humanity with the heedless enthusiasm of fraternity hazers. One might add the entire strategy of the McCain presidential campaign in 2008, particularly his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, which more than any recent tactic of Republican politics, reveals a diabolical understanding of the empty sovereignty it is manipulating for its own gain. 6. See Rancière’s book Hatred of Democracy for his account of this dynamic in contemporary political and cultural discourse. 7. Badiou concedes as much, along with its insignificant self-evidence, in still another exchange with Simon Critchley, recorded in the documentary Democracy and Disappointment (directed by Aaron Levy, 2007).

Chapter Eight Cryptonymic Secretion: On the Kind-ness of Strangers Laurie Johnson

The crux of the problem for explanations of collective phenomena in terms of psychological processes seems to me to be this: if we wish to avoid the charge that we only use such terms in a vague metaphorical sense, we must be able to explain precisely the mechanism by which the psychology of an individual can come to be shared with others. Lindsay Tuggle illustrates the reach of this problem while exploring the issue of mourning for strangers, exemplified in contemporary memorial sites at New Orleans (after Hurricane Katrina) and at Ground Zero in New York (after September 11, 2001). Tuggle explains that “ungraves” such as the Civil War monuments described by Walt Whitman and these contemporary memorials function as sites for a collective haunting resulting from a failed incorporation in which a “lost object is kept dead, and externalized” (69, above). This explanation draws on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, which I shall be unpacking in more detail. It will become clear that this idea that a failed incorporation can produce an externalized site that functions to keep a lost object dead seems to me a wholly plausible—not to mention quite brilliant—extension of the theory of incorporation. Yet what interests me in the present essay is the need to take the explanation still further, to understand how it is possible that something like a phantom or a dead lost object—indeed, perhaps even the failure of incorporation itself—can be said to be truly shared by two or more people. What I propose is that the work of Abraham and Torok can be used not only as the source of a set of concepts that enable us to answer such a question; we might also see their work as the product of just such a sharing. If we proceed along this pathway toward an examination of the precise mechanism by which psychical phenomena (such as those that result from mourning) can be said to be shared, do we force ourselves to forget another crucial set of claims made alongside those by Abraham and Torok on the work of mourning? I use the word “alongside” here deliberately to point out that the writings of Jacques Derrida on mourning can be read as having been informed 117

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by those of Abraham and Torok, but certainly not as part of a collaborative or shared approach. Much of Derrida’s own work on mourning and haunting is indebted to the work of these two authors, with whom he developed a close friendship. As I have argued elsewhere, though, his relationship to that debt and the way in which these topics are represented in his own work acquire an air of secrecy and discomfiture from 1975, when Abraham died. This was before many of Abraham’s most compelling theories could be published, although Derrida himself had already alluded to many of these theories in cryptic fashion in Glas and elsewhere (L. Johnson, “Tracing” n.p.). Yet I do not wish to suggest simply that Derrida echoes or borrows from Abraham and Torok, or that the two bodies of writing could be said to amount to the same thing. On the contrary, after the figure of death begins to gain greater currency in Derrida’s writing during the mid-1970s, his fascination with this figure leads him along a very different pathway. As J. Hillis Miller notes at the beginning of “Absolute Mourning,” Derrida admits late in life to be obsessed with death: “At bottom it is what commands everything—what I do, what I am, what I write, what I say” (qtd. in Miller 9, above). As we shall see, the works of Abraham and Torok truck no such fascination with death, and indeed seem at times to be seeking to deny death any such currency. This is not to suggest, further, that Derrida’s writings on death come to oppose the theories of Abraham and Torok. I use the word “alongside” to suggest a kind of parallel relation: imagine that Derrida walks along one path with death at his side, and Abraham and Torok walk along an adjacent path, heading in the same direction, but turning a blind eye to death. Of course, I will beg the reader’s indulgence at the outset for pursuing what may seem rather a cryptic set of observations. The substance behind them will become clearer in due course. I make these comments now, though, because there is in Derrida’s work on mourning a seemingly contradictory set of claims that must be taken into account. Miller’s pursuit of the “red thread” that runs through On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy brings this contradiction into sharp relief: in a movement from mourning toward “absolute mourning,” and in thinking about death “all the time,” Derrida is compelled to view mourning as “an absolute condition of human existence” toward which we conclude that for Derrida “no sharing or taking part as such exists” (19, above; see also Smith 86, above, and Thwaites 154, below). Such a conclusion is of course at odds with our goal of explaining how a process of mourning can produce sharing, yet I will only reiterate the point that I do not see Derrida’s position, and any position at which we shall arrive by way of the work of Abraham and Torok, as being directly opposed. Along this pathway, toward an explanation of shared individual psychical phenomena, I am going to suggest that we shall never in fact be all that far from being in agreement with Derrida—and Miller on Derrida—as well. With this question of the “red thread” of absolute mourning held in abeyance, although only on the provision of its eventual return, we can pursue the path toward Abraham and Torok and what I will propose as the possibility of a shared crypt. During the 1960s and 1970s, prior to Abraham’s death, the pair radically revised Freud’s topography of the psyche, introducing the trope of the

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“crypt” to describe an enclave within the ego due to inability to mourn a lost object. The concept is elaborated in greatest detail in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, Abraham and Torok’s re-reading of Freud’s analysis of the dream of the wolves, recounted to him by the Russian patient Sergei Pankeiev in 1910. They argue not that Freud’s analysis is wrong, merely that it failed to take into account the presence of a crypt within the psychic topography of the Wolf Man. In The Wolf Man’s Burden, I speculated on the conditions enabling Freud to fail to see this crypt. Of interest to me here, however, are the conditions that would favour a theory of the crypt being formed some six decades after the fact, by Abraham and Torok, in their institutional context—both are trained as “disciples” or inheritors of the Freudian legacy—in which the assertion that Freud “failed” to identify such a key component of the topography of the mind would normally seem anathema. We can begin by looking more closely at what process is being described by the theory of the crypt. Abraham and Torok describe it as the result of failure to mourn the loss of a psychically significant object, most likely in the earliest stages of libidinal development. The cryptophoric subject lacks a capacity to work through the trauma of the lost-object, so the ego incorporates the objectloss in place of the object itself, creating an illusion of ego integrity. This means the cryptophoric subject can never speak of the lost object or the traumatic event occasioning its loss, for to do so would result in the shattering of the illusion and of the ego with it. The crypt operates in this way like a blind spot within the ego, filtering away any words, phrases, representations, or actions that might give away the secret locked in the crypt. Abraham and Torok developed the method they call “cryptonymy” to unravel the chains of dis-associations in Pankeiev’s account of the wolf dream (at least as it is recounted to us by Freud). Instead of the primal scene identified by Freud, they uncover a simple scene of fairly innocent peek-and-touch involving Pankeiev’s sister Anna and rendered traumatic by the reaction of the Father. The scene involved the need to suppress the truth at all costs, and becomes transformed into a scene of object-loss much later, when the sister dies. The method proposed by Abraham and Torok, as much as the answers it produced for them, is compelling. Cryptonymy works as a method because it assumes that the answers it seeks have been concealed rather than obliterated, and that concealing reveals itself by the manner of the gaps that it produces on the surface. This is the process referred to in my title as cryptonymic secretion, wherein the term “secretion” refers both to the process of concealment and to the separation and excretion of internal matter. The crypt continually gives itself away by being paradoxically conspicuous in its failure to provide evidence of its existence. It secretes itself in an enclave that refuses to admit to an exterior realm, yet its blockages produce a language that manifests on the surface, thereby revealing to the outside world the gaps that inhere within. Cryptonymy works, therefore, principally as a reading method, contributing to what Nicholas Rand calls “a theory of readability . . . demonstrating the feasibility of interpretation in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstructions” (16). Such a theory of readability always begins, of course, with the assumption that a text

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contains obstructions of this kind. The question we might ask is, therefore, whence this assumption or, more directly, on what grounds did Abraham and Torok themselves first presume that the texts they encountered would require a method of reading capable of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to reading that would be present-yet-concealed within these texts? To begin to address this question, let us start with some background data. Both of Hungarian-Jewish origins, Abraham and Torok emigrated to France on either side of the Second World War, and both lost their family to the Hungarian genocide. They met in Paris in 1950, gained memberships of the Société Psychanalytique soon after and commenced clinical practice as psychoanalysts in 1956. Over the next twenty years, they collaborated on a number of essays (half of which are contained in translation in The Shell and the Kernel) and together produced one magnum opus, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups (translated as The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy). The collaboration ended with Abraham’s unexpected death, as I have noted, prior to the publication of this major work. The pair did not fit easily into the puzzle of psychoanalytical schools in the 1950s, in part because of their apprehensions about the clinical value of organized structuralist activity. They cultivated an ignorance of Lacan’s teachings—his work is mentioned nowhere in their writings—and they did include statements against the systemic character of Kleinian investigation in some of their essays. Accordingly, therefore, they never pieced together a coherent body of theories that could be considered an “approach” or that could be mobilized against the more dominant schools of psychoanalytical thought. They committed themselves to interrogating received knowledge in light of evidence gained in the immediate analytical situation and critical practice. Rand notes in his introduction to The Shell and the Kernel that their writings were guided by a philosophy that all received theories should be “abandoned or revamped if inconsistent with the actual life experience of patients or the facts of a text” (1). There is a sense in Abraham and Torok’s writings that no singular program is at work behind their words, and Rand admits their essays “expend little rhetorical energy in promoting the novelty of an idea or explaining how an approach departs from standard modes of thinking” (7). Yet if there is a thread that holds their work together, it is to be found in what Elisabeth Roudinesco has called their “idiosyncratic reading of Freud’s discovery” (599). In addition to revising the structure of Freud’s topography, Abraham and Torok’s idiosyncratic reading included a description of the “anasemic” quality of psychoanalytic language (a capacity to make reference to that which pre-exists the referential capacity of language itself), revision of the distinction between mourning and melancholia (the former being characterized by successful introjection and the latter associated with the fantasy of incorporation), and, as we have seen, the development of a theory of transgenerational phantoms (silences or gaps in language that are passed on from one generation to the next). These revisionary ideas were not so much a rejection of the Freudian corpus as a reorientation of some of Freud’s core concepts, in order to create a match between the

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knowledge handed on by the founder of psychoanalysis and the experiences of those Abraham and Torok treated in the clinic.1 Given that the experience of the analysand is so crucial to their idiosyncratic reading of Freud, a gap seems to open up in Abraham and Torok’s work when we observe that the experience of the analyst is noticeable by its absence. Unlike Freud, they remained reluctant throughout their career to use their own experience as the basis for any theoretical claims. For any reader of The Interpretation of Dreams or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, for example, it is easy to recall the often explicit and otherwise sometimes only thinly veiled autobiographical references. In the writings of Abraham and Torok we find instead an insistence only that these revisions of psychoanalysis emerge logically from clinical observation. It is interesting, then, that their writings are also largely devoid of any detailed information from clinical notes to add weight to their claims. Contra their insistence (and that of Rand and others) that clinical evidence is key to the formation of their ideas, this further gap would seem to suggest that there must be good reason why Abraham and Torok remained reluctant to include detailed case histories or autobiographical materials in support of their arguments. Indeed, a significant fact that can be gleaned from independent sources is that much of their clinical work was in fact devoted to treating Holocaust survivors and refugees from the genocide (Burkhart). Here, then, we encounter a most telling absence, the order of which might suggest a “cryptonymic secretion”: both Abraham and Torok and a large number of their patients were Holocaust survivors, yet this fact is not given to us in the writings as one of the predominant “experiences” according to which they fashion revisions of psychoanalysis. The significance of this autobiographical detail has not been lost on some of the more recent commentaries on their work, although the link between their personal histories and their work remains relatively unexamined. Maria Yassa notes, regarding the fact that both had lives touched by personal loss from the Holocaust, “It is not surprising that the phenomenon of trauma and its repercussions in the human psyche came to occupy a central place in their production” (2). She goes on to cite Fabio Landa, their co-worker and colleague, as pointing out that “post-holocaust psychoanalysis was called upon for an answer, a theoretical adaptation to a human reality more horrifying than any nightmare” (2). Yet this is as far as any mention of the Holocaust goes in Yassa’s article, which thereafter explores each of the major sets of ideas developed by Abraham and Torok, while repeating their silence on the relationship between these ideas and either the treatment of Holocaust survivors or their own need to have worked through such traumatic material. Similarly, Colin Davis makes a clear connection in Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead between the personal histories of Abraham and Torok and the emphasis in their work on the role played by the dead in the lives of the living. Yet Davis’s most sustained discussion of the Holocaust is in a chapter devoted to the testimony of Auschwitz-survivor Charles Delbo, and his principal focus in relation to the work of Abraham and Torok is in establishing clear distinctions between their work on haunting and

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Derrida’s: Davis concludes that the biggest difference between these two strands of “hauntology” is in the status of the secret. The secrets of Abraham and Torok’s lying phantoms are unspeakable in the restricted sense of being a subject of shame and prohibition. . . . For Derrida the ghost and its secrets are unspeakable in a quite different sense. Abraham and Torok seek to return the ghost to the order of knowledge; Derrida wants to avoid any such restoration and to encounter what is strange, unheard, other, about the ghost. (13)

Even Elisabeth Roudinesco’s remarkable Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, to which any researcher into the lives of Abraham and Torok is much indebted, seems to mention the fact that both escaped the Holocaust only in passing and as merely a precursor to a detailed history of their intellectual pursuits rather than as being somehow related (598). This perception of the disconnection of their past histories from their intellectual lives seems to me to have been fuelled in the first instance by the writings of those who, like Derrida and Rand, were closest to them. Derrida’s introduction to Cryptonymie focuses so intently on the pros and cons—the fors and againsts, shall we say—of the analysis of “this crypt” that it has no room for committing to print the personal histories of the analysts. As I have argued in “Tracing Calculation [Calque Calcul]: Between Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Derrida,” and as noted above, Derrida’s introduction was most likely to have been written in direct relation to questions of secrecy that plagued him as a result of Abraham’s untimely death. In similar fashion, Rand’s introduction to The Shell and the Kernel provides a brief biographical statement, but the fact of any personal loss in the European genocide is elided altogether by the simple observation that the authors “emigrated separately from Hungary to France in the late 1930s and 1940s respectively” (1–2). It seems then that amongst those who were close to Abraham and Torok, the elision of reference to the Holocaust or their personal losses is repeated in tacit agreement when discussing their intellectual endeavors, as if the separation of the two must be maintained, indeed, even by way of refusal to mention the earlier material in any direct manner. Among those who come late to their work, or of those who look upon it with a detached eye, the personal losses sustained are observed with a view to historical accuracy but any connection to the later material remains unexplored save for a brief, perfunctory note. In some degree, then, we may wonder if the uptake by other scholars of Abraham and Torok’s “theory of readability” has come to resemble the manner of its initial formation. This is to say that a subsequent generation of scholars is replicating the very silence that both Abraham and Torok and their closest colleagues introduced into their work by failing to re-examine the role played in shaping their theoretical formulations by the fact that both were Holocaust survivors. The specter of the Holocaust thus perhaps haunts the theory of transgenerational phantoms, in the form of a phantom within the passage of a language (and its theory of language transmission) from one generation of scholars to another. Such an observation possesses an elegant simplicity that

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would make it tempting to leave anything further unsaid, but I contend that formulations of this kind, while elegant, lack explanatory adequacy: dare we say that the observation makes up with sufficient elegance what it otherwise lacks in elegant sufficiency. Nevertheless, by dint of metaphorical force, observations such as these may point in the right direction toward a more sufficient set of explanations. Suppose we begin rather than end with this observation that there could be said to be a transgenerational phantom lurking within the theory of the transgenerational phantom and its transmission. The next step would be to ask what that entails throughout the full historical reach of such a process. As it is described in a number of essays within The Shell and the Kernel, the phantom manifests principally as “an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant” (Rand 16), which means that the phantom exists as such only on the recent side of the history of transmission; that is, on the side of the descendant. There is no firm requirement within the theory of the phantom that the phantom exists as an unconscious blockage for the progenitor. This may prompt us to note that there is no direct continuity between the theory of the crypt and the theory of the transgenerational phantom. A crypt may indeed lead to a phantom, but the latter can also be formed as a result of any other form of secrecy in the transmission of a familial discourse from one generation to the next. Thus, we would be compelled to pull up short of any suggestion that the failure by subsequent generations of scholars to examine the role of the Holocaust in shaping Abraham and Torok’s theories is of the order of a crypt that is handed down through generations of scholars. This is a crucial point within the context of the current argument: the theory of the transgenerational phantom is not a theory of how one individual psychological state is transmitted to or shared with another; rather, it is a theory of how an individual (as a descendant) fails to achieve full psychical integrity as a result of non-disclosure of knowledge by another party (the progenitor). This would be to say that the theory of the transgenerational phantom remains a theory of individual psychology, rather than of a transmitted psychological phenomenon. Yet suppose we imagine that the initial gap is produced by way of a crypt in the psyche of the progenitor: would this be transmitted to the descendant in the form of a secondary crypt? No. The result would surely be the same in the descendant as if the gaps in the language of the progenitor were the result of conscious nondisclosure. At this point, we must surely find ourselves hamstrung by pursuing a pathway toward shared psychical phenomena with the aid of Abraham and Torok, since we find that their own work can be used to refute the idea that the transgenerational phantom is ever a shared phenomenon in the sense that , for example, has interpreted it. Yet we must be clear: while there is no sharing as such from progenitor to descendant, where there is more than one descendant, we must be open to the prospect that for any of these descendants the structural gap opened up by the gaps in the language of a progenitor could be shared. In the case of our immediate example here—of the absence of their personal lives from the theoretical writings of Abraham and Torok, as well as from writings about their theories by subsequent scholars—we could perhaps say that there is

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indeed a phantom introduced into the writings about their theories by the absence of this material in their own theoretical writings. This leads us in two possible directions, then: we can confirm that something like a shared structural gap exists in the writings of scholars about Abraham and Torok, but this gap was not shared with, or transferred across to, these subsequent generations of scholars by Abraham and Torok themselves; so we may wish to map this structural gap shared by scholars on the more recent side of history, or we may go back to Abraham and Torok themselves to begin looking anew. We shall pursue the latter, but first a brief word on the former (which will, inter alia, bring us to where we want to be). It is in the work of Derrida that we first find such a gap present in writings about Abraham and Torok. Abraham and Torok never wrote about themselves, and so we cannot imagine that their work begins the tradition of writings about Abraham and Torok. It is important, while we settle our minds on Derrida momentarily once more, to recall that in his writings about others he would constantly bring the problems of writing about others into question. Derek Attridge’s essay in this volume provides a powerful reminder of the constitutive role that Derrida’s writing about another can have in relation to the writings of that other: “In a sense, Derrida takes up that responsibility, showing that a certain reading of Levinas can move his thought in a direction which he may not have foreseen but which enriches and deepens it” (36, above). Attridge cites Hent de Vries to confirm that the writings of Derrida and Levinas seemed at times to be “almost interchangeable” given the degree of overlap in their thought, although de Vries is quick to qualify the claim, adding that such contiguity is not “that of an overlapping minimal consensus but an intersection that is a chiasmic crossing” (De Vries 310; qtd. in n17, 39, above). I have made similar observations in an essay on Derrida and Levinas as well, mapping what I consider to be the untimely “correspondence” in their theoretical writings about the work of each other, that is, an exchange that is never wholly responsive to the other by virtue of being out of time with the writings of the other, even as it directs itself always toward this other (Johnson, “R.S.V.P.”). Where Attridge extends such ideas is in the observation that to be hospitable to the other’s thought, one must welcome it “in the fullest sense: both to allow one’s own thinking to be transformed by it, as Derrida’s certainly was by Levinas’s, and also to treat it as still growing” (37, above). This is to say that writing about another’s writings must be at once both correspondent with the thought it presents and an extension or continuation of the transformation of that same thought. Attridge invites us to consider his reading of Derrida in this same mode, and I suggest that Miller’s reading of Derrida reading Nancy follows much the same contours. I also suggest that Derrida’s reading of Abraham and Torok, which began the short tradition of writings about Abraham and Torok’s writings with which we concern ourselves here, does the same. This last point brings me to the crux of this brief detour, by which I will explain why it has in fact been no detour at all. What Attridge’s reading of Derrida’s reading of Levinas shows us is that what we might on the one hand conceive as a correspondence is also, on the other hand, always out of time.

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Where we speak of a “generation of scholars,” as we have here, we run the risk of conflating an ongoing process of writings coming after writings into what de Vries called this overlapping minimal consensus. As I demonstrated in “R.S.V.P.” a correspondence is rendered untimely precisely by the simultaneous release of two statements: this nullifies the capacity for response. Thus, where we might otherwise presume to be able to identify a sharing of a structural gap within the writings of a “generation of scholars” we nevertheless must be able to recognize within this generation a subsequent set of transgenerational relations. If it is indeed to Derrida rather than to Abraham and Torok that we can attribute the origin of the structural gap we have identified, then we must also locate Derrida now in the role of progenitor and all others as descendants, and we must continue to do that wherever it can be imagined that this gap is passed on to the next writer by a previous writing. The point is that where a gap can be seen to be reproduced, it emerges perhaps in the double bind of the posthumous fidelity of which Attridge writes, and not simply as a “sharing” per se. We might counter this claim with an observation that when we are talking of a generation of scholars, we are not dealing with a need for posthumous fidelity, and that Attridge is really only talking about fidelity to a writer who has predeceased the writing of another who comes after. Yet this is hardly an argument that inheres in any of the writings with which we are dealing, since it is something of a commonplace to presume that when we talk of a writing that comes after, we are always talking, in effect, of death. We return, then, to Abraham and Torok. Rather than continue to search for a mechanism for sharing in the proliferation of writings that come after writings, I want to suggest that their work provides a more viable locus for the possibility of the sharing of phenomena since it is a writing that carries two signatures, as the mark of a shared writing. Yet their writing contains this gap bearing all the hallmarks of what they would call a crypt. It conceals their crucial secret, yet it also reveals by concealing: no mention is made of the Holocaust or of the personal lives of the authors; the lives of their patients are given as a crucial point of reference for the formulation of these theories; by looking awry, we learn that the Holocaust is a significant event for both the authors and their patients. We must therefore be prepared to accept that this work, being shared, carries the trace of a crypt that is shared. Our task must now be to determine if such a thing is indeed possible. I will begin this last part of this essay by recalling what for Abraham and Torok might be received wisdom on Holocaust survivors. In psychoanalytic terms, those who survived would be prone to what William G. Niederland called the “Survivor Syndrome,” which includes intense feelings of guilt and a sense of being burdened with the responsibility for the deaths of others (313). In such cases, it is suggested that testimonial evidence is crucial in helping survivors to overcome significant memory loss relating to detachment from one’s past; that is, to create a tangible link to the family no longer present.2 The dead must be allowed to speak, and the living must hear them. Shannon Burns observes that, as hospitality to trauma, testimony contributes to a dual work of mourning: “it remains faithful to the humanity that

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is dead and thereby holds out for, and invites, the humanity to come” (138, below). Abraham and Torok do not mention Survivor Syndrome specifically; neither do they even defer to Freud’s own work on the “guilt of the survivor” in his observations on the formation of the super-ego in The Ego and the Id and Civilization and Its Discontents. Instead, Abraham and Torok focus on the role of failed mourning in generating obstacles to language. The essay in which they elaborate these ideas in detail—“Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation”—is clearly addressed to Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” in the elaboration of its principal terms, though it never mentions that essay by name or quotes from it. For Abraham and Torok, incorporation is viewed as primary in the formation of the crypt: in incorporation, the body of the thing lost is taken into my own body, which is to say that my ego absorbs the thing whole, as if it is now and always was a part of me, the result being that I become indissociable from it. The loss is erased because the thing is made perpetually whole and fully present within me. A crypt is a defensive formation that protects the incorporated object, stopping words that represent (and therefore admit to) the loss of the object. For the cryptophoric subject, then, allowing the dead to speak will be terribly injurious, for it will be an admission that the dead are in fact dead. In this extreme case, Abraham and Torok seem to suggest that the dead must in fact be silenced for the benefit of those still living. Furthermore, their theory of transgenerational phantoms suggests that the dead thereafter remain silenced, in perpetuity, for the good of the offspring of survivors. Blissful ignorance begets blissful ignorance, and so on. The theory of the crypt would therefore seem to be opposed to testimony, to bearing witness to, and, we may presume pace Burns, to the hospitality to trauma that invites the humanity to come. Can it be possible that a clinical practice arising from the theory of the crypt is designed to replicate the very silence that is perpetuated in their writing? The answer would seem to be, yes, but if we can track how their theoretical writing represents a positive step forward for its authors, then we may also gain some insight into how an analytical practice tied to this writing aids the analysand. We might argue, for example, that silence need not be considered as a lack or gap that must be overcome or filled. I will refer here to the work of sociologist and critical psychologist Erika Apfelbaum, who has for decades been exploring the condition of displaced persons. Apfelbaum argues that in cases of “uprootedness”—in which a community’s link to its own past is ruptured due to large-scale violence—the need for legacy becomes paramount at the level of both collective identity and individual self-expression (which, she contends, are one and the same thing). The need for legacy refers to the idea that in such cases of uprootedness, the community’s cultural compass can thereafter no longer point anywhere but to the moment of uprooting, as any attempt to restore the legacy of past generations ultimately leads back to the time and place of rupture. Furthermore, for the uprooted community, there is no point of connection in the new environment—new language, new culture, new regime, new routines and practices, etc.—that can fill the void. What the community comes to share is

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no longer a legacy, but just this very need for legacy. What they share, in other words, is lack, and this is what enables them to regroup around a familial arrangement. Now, at the risk of erring on the side of brevity, we might map these ideas onto the story, as it were, of Abraham and Torok. Both were stranded in France after the war, each without family, and each newly immersed in a foreign culture, and each with no link to the past. When we consider the young Abraham, alone and devoid of context, it is reductive, I think, to define his specific situation in terms of generalizations such as “the Jewish experience” or “uprooted communities” writ large. It is when he meets Torok, also alone and devoid of context, that he is able in some way to connect with another with whom he might see himself sharing a need for legacy, and he represented the same for her. Abraham and Torok must in this way have provided for each other a point of connection. Their shared experience of being uprooted is thus shared in retrospect, and the sense they have of sharing dislocation must be projected onto the past in order for them to be able to experience it as shared here and now. It is this that enables them to agree to identify with each other as kindred, to regroup as a familial unit. We may suspect that the need for legacy is held in abeyance as a condition in the individual alongside failed mourning, as part and parcel of the same broad procedure of deferral: holding off the working through of loss. The reason I suggest that these conditions must be held in abeyance alongside each other is their mutually exclusive status with respect to the other: the need for legacy is a refusal to maintain a link to the past; failed mourning, or incorporation, is the insistence that the past is always present herein. While these conditions remain suspended in this way, the individual is held in a kind of limbo, neither mourning nor melancholic. The need for legacy gains primacy when it is activated in the field of social relations, such as in the formation of a family unit. The union of Abraham and Torok thus enables each of them to achieve entry into the social field, but it comes at the expense of any chance of successful mourning. This is what I mean by the “kind-ness” in the title of this essay: a necessary willingness in adopting a relation in kind with another to give oneself over wholly to the other in a reciprocal surrendering. The splitting of the ego identified by Freud as the key to the formation of the superego is here recast as a splitting off of the ego from itself altogether. In place of the superego there is only the familial unit, which in this instance is reducible to the level of the couple. In place of the id, moreover, there is now the creation of a pseudo-cryptic enclave within the confines of a shared language. What do I mean by this? When a need for legacy gains primacy, it must also occasion the completion of the process of failed mourning. Unable to be held in abeyance any longer, the failure of mourning is experienced simultaneously by both parties to the union, but it can no longer be viable for either party in terms that are specific to individual personal loss. In order for a need for legacy to function, loss must be displaced onto a more general term, which in this instance would seem to be the Holocaust. In this sense, the need for legacy will occasion a rupture within the language of the union, very much like the rupture that a crypt introduces into the language of the cryptophoric subject. I suggest that in

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entering into the institution of psychoanalysis, Abraham and Torok found an outlet for expression that could enable them to displace this traumatic past even as they sought to identify and help others like them: the essays that they wrote in the 1960s and 1970s need to be viewed in the context of French philosophical and theoretical psychoanalytical writing, the principal exponents of which include Derrida and Lacan. (They openly despised the celebrity status of the latter, who wrote a scathing attack on their major work soon after its release. Within the psychoanalytic field, then, Abraham and Torok’s writings could address the need for legacy, writing back to Freud the Father within an extended family of new scholarship, even as this same writing reveals-by-concealing a shared traumatic history—the sharing of which was nevertheless the result of a displacement enabling the kind-ness of two strangers to be played out. Thus, we cannot conclude without qualification that the work of Abraham and Torok bears witness to a shared crypt in the truest sense of what that term might convey; that is, if we define the crypt precisely in the terms identified by the authors themselves. Yet we have seen that this writing does bear witness, via a form of secretion, to a traumatic past that is concealed behind the appearance of being double, since two signatures, two proper names, and apparently no single individual history, frame the collaborative theoretical text. It would thus seem to make sense that we could refer to a shared crypt in the collaborative mind-set to which Abraham and Torok’s writings give expression, yet we must only ever engage such a concept provisionally. Nevertheless, the value of such a term is that it enables us to give an account of the way in which the collaborative enterprise makes very specific demands on the collaborators even as it holds out for them—but ultimately displaces and confounds—promise of working through past traumas. If a shared crypt exists in any phenomenal sense, then it is only in the form of the cryptonymic secretion through which it gives itself away, but it may also be the case that it is only in the writing that such a structure can be said to exist at all, as a consequence of writing undertaken by a couple who represent a unity entered into out of kind-ness, a need for legacy. As we reach the end of this pathway, we may now ask if we were ever that far from a pathway with Derrida. We have seen that Derrida looms large in any case along this same pathway, as a participant in the theoretical enterprise that offered for Abraham and Torok a locus in which their need for legacy could play itself out, and as a progenitor of sorts in the transmission of a gap that opens up around the silence regarding their personal histories. Yet we can go further. notes in closing that each death is ultimately also the end of a world since each world is a product of a collective “worlding” that depends on “the co-presence of all the unique others” constituting it. The work of the survivor (“and we are all survivors,” Miller adds) is also thus one of “world-building,” although for Derrida this world is always “hollowed out in all directions” by the impossibility of touching, which he aligns with absolute mourning—the red thread traced through Derrida’s work (20, above). We are all survivors, yet since no sharing or taking part exists, we cannot share our survival; we cannot take part in being survivors. Again, do we find that such statements are altogether incompatible with the sharing mechanism we located in (and through) the work of Abraham

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and Torok? Put simply, and in closing, no. The mistake we may make is if we assume that the word “survivor” pertains in this sense to Abraham and Torok. In the formation of a need for legacy and, I suggest, a shared crypt, there is no survival that may take place as a precondition for world-building. They survived, this is true, yet they identified as such only through the vehicle of a relationship forged as a way of relocating the loss into a here and now of the need for legacy: in this sense, they are survivors only to the extent that in their relationship they postpone survival. They are not opposed to the impossibility of sharing in the path on which they elect to travel together in what may well be termed an overlapping minimal consensus—though it denies the at least two implied in the terms “overlapping” and “consensus”—since their theories would seem to back up this impossibility at the level of the transmission of secrets. In what their writing represents, however, we see that Abraham and Torok could be said to have formed a truly sharing relationship, neither being wholly other, since they were constituted anew in a need for legacy, trusting, shall we say, in the kind-ness of at least one stranger.

Notes 1. It is worth noting that some of Torok’s most ardent admirers are willing to paint her work as a rejection of the Freudian corpus in favor of a revisionary psychological model (see, for example, Burkhart). 2. For more theoretical investigations into psychoanalytic uses of testimony, see, for example, Langer, Holocaust Testimonies; Felman and Laub, Testimony; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz; or LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma.

Chapter Nine Hospitality to Trauma: Ethics after Auschwitz Shannon Burns

Much of the work on trauma theory in the humanities shows trauma as more than a pathology to be healed. Cathy Caruth’s preface to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, for example, argues that to the extent that trauma is aligned with truth and the recognition of realities, healing is to give up on this truth: Psychic trauma involves intense personal suffering, but it also involves the recognition of realities that most of us have not begun to face. . . . To cure oneself . . . seems to many survivors to simply be the giving-up of an important reality, or the dilution of a special truth into the reassuring terms of therapy. (vii)

It is telling that Caruth chooses the word “survivors,” rather than “witnesses” or “victims” of trauma. Survival as forgetting would be a type of giving-up that is injurious to mourning and ethical experience: because it abandons the absent or the dead, it is inhospitable. Against this, there is what Levinas calls survival as responsibility. As Derrida notes in his tribute Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas: The relation to the other is deference. Such separation signifies the very thing that Levinas re-names “metaphysics”: ethics or first philosophy, as opposed to ontology. Because it opens itself to—so as to welcome—the irruption of the idea of the infinity in the finite, this metaphysics is an experience of hospitality. (46)

Such a metaphysics opens to the experience of trauma.

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The Life of Specimens: After Auschwitz For Adorno, we are not yet, or no longer, human: life is dominated by instrumental reason, social administration and the triumph of exchange value. After Auschwitz, the possibility of being human “has shrunk to that of averting catastrophe in spite of everything” (Negative Dialectics 323). This is what Adorno calls paralysis, a dependence on the continuation of the social realities of modern life that is quite unlike the paralysis with which trauma studies are concerned. For Adorno, the traumatic event is a constant feature of social and political existence in the world as it stands, albeit with varying modes of intensity. After Auschwitz, everything is beyond the realms of human experience, since the human is dead. Mourning this death becomes essential to any mode of thinking that seeks to retain a fidelity to the human.1 This “after Auschwitz” is not to be read as because of Auschwitz, but as in light of Auschwitz. It refers to what Auschwitz reveals rather than to what it causes, except to the extent that Auschwitz causes this revealing. In “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” Michael Rothberg describes Adorno’s idea of “living today” with great clarity: The triumph of exchange value, another name for identity in Adorno’s work, prepared the way for mass murder by rendering human life indifferent and therefore expendable. The two words of the phrase “after Auschwitz” are thus equivocal: they mark the limits of an era, but one which was already on its way and which remains today; and they locate a crisis, but only in order to extend its effects well beyond its original space of experience. (59)

So we are in and of Auschwitz, before and after the historical event. This is what Auschwitz reveals. We live inside its widened walls, in its world of exchange value and identity-centeredness. The light of Auschwitz exposes this, and this exposure is a trauma in itself. Trauma is announced in philosophy. Like theology, philosophy has all along occurred in the light of trauma, which is precisely process and representation originating in the response to unmediated encountering. This response-as-origin is, in Derrida’s terms, a “movement without movement” (Adieu 23)—and from here we might draw a way of reading the well-documented stasis resulting from trauma. Beyond trauma, we find what Levinas calls the face, that encounter with the other alongside and before the emergence of the third, justice, language, and all of the practical effects of thinking (see Attridge, above, 28). The face is the thinking outside of and before the work of thinking. Let us suggest that a thinking that retains a fidelity to this encounter is bound to be traumatic, in that it responds to the humanity to come against which we recognize the horror of living today. That is, for Adorno the experience of humanity refers to a humanity whose absence was and is finally revealed in the light of Auschwitz. As such it is a type of spectral humanity—the haunting and haunted face of the other, to be welcomed in a spectral hospitality:

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It is necessary to welcome the other in his alterity, without waiting, and thus not to pause to recognise his real predicates. It is thus necessary, beyond all perception, to receive the other while running the risk, a risk that is always troubling, strangely troubling, like the stranger (unheimlich), of a hospitality offered to the guest as ghost or Geist or Gast. There would be no hospitality without the chance of spectrality. But spectrality is not nothing; it exceeds, and thus deconstructs, all ontological oppositions, being and nothingness, life and death—and it also gives. It can give [donner], give order(s) [ordonner] and give pardon [pardonner], and it can also not do so, like God beyond essence. God without being, God uncontaminated by being—is this not the most rigorous definition of the Face of the Wholly Other? (Adieu 111–12)

Wholly other, the face is signification beyond being. It gives without needing to—and the very apprehension of it constitutes a gift that might be, and therefore always is, traumatically, withdrawn. Apprehension fails because the prehensile compulsion to touch and grasp is scorned. For Derrida, the face is pure ethical possibility. It necessitates response and action, but gives no guarantee to or foundation for any possible response or action whatsoever.2 “What, then,” asks Levinas, “are the other and the third with respect to one another?” This “birth of the question” (qtd. in Adieu 32) is also the birth of responsibility, as Derrida glosses: The ineluctability of the third is the law of the question. The question of a question, as addressed to the other and from the other, the other of the other, the question of a question that is surely not first (it comes after the yes to the other and the yes of the other) though nothing precedes it. No thing, and especially no one. (31)

For Levinas and Derrida, the subject must respond in light of the question (the third). Without this response, which is utterly without foundation, there can be no true responsibility, and therefore no truly ethical response. All that would be left is prescribed action and thought.

Pure Ethics: Response and Responsibility What could such a “pure ethics” be, then, particularly in relation to praxis? In Levinas, Derrida argues, the third provides for the possibility of the work of philosophy. In indicating “the move out of immediacy” and from hospitality to the face of the other, it defines “the passage from ethical responsibility to juridical, political—and philosophical—responsibility” (Adieu 31). For Derrida, “this move out of purely ethical responsibility, this interruption of ethical

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immediacy, is itself immediate” (32). If it were absent, that absence “would threaten with violence the purity of ethics in the absolute immediacy of the face to face with the unique” (32). The purity of ethics, then, relies upon the mediation of the third as an obstruction of violence. As Attridge points out, this is not quite the same as Levinas’s argument (36, above). Nevertheless, it is clear that when he refers to “pure ethics,” Derrida means an ethics that has been simultaneously protected and restricted in its potentiality by the third. Such an ethics is protected against “the vertigo of ethical violence itself”—yet it also commits violence in the very act of protecting. This is because “ethics could be doubly exposed to such violence: exposed to undergo it but also to exercise it. Alternatively or simultaneously.” It is a deeply problematic protection: “It is true that the protecting or mediating third, in its juridico-political role, violates in its turn, at least potentially, the purity of the ethical desire devoted to the unique. Whence the terrible ineluctability of a double constraint” (33). Levinas’s pure ethics (of devotion) is precisely this new and necessarily already compromised purity. Derrida’s move is thus not so much to misread Levinas as to consider and elaborate upon one aspect of his ethics more than the other, and to bring out a tension that is already in Levinas’s work. He affirms Levinas’s insistence on the need for protection against exposure and, like Levinas, gives it no extended justification other than the need to be truly responsible in the face of the question. The closest we come to such a justification is in Derrida’s summary of Levinas’s assertion of the necessity of a politics (114–15). For each of them, the advocacy of an ethics to protect ethics is an act of responsibility that is posited as a first ethics—and one that is significantly different from the ethics of devotion to the Other that it seeks to protect and restrain. In Adieu, Derrida characterizes this second “first ethics” or purity of ethics as an infidelity or perjury (33), and suggests that it occurs in two stages: first of all, in the Face and the response it demands, and then in the responsibility that is essential to justice, the law, and the practice of philosophy. At first glance, responsibility would seem to be dependent upon response, less pure than response. But this is not the case: the necessity of responding to the other has itself no justification other than responsibility, the bare decision to respond. This equal “purity” applies despite responsibility’s perjurious origination. So Levinas’s ethics is doubled, fractured from within. Each of its two movements relies upon, and is therefore a part of, the other, and they share an equal burden of purity. If one is to affirm pure ethics, one must do so responsibly—that is, on one’s own, in the face of the question, with nothing to guide the way and always confronted with the great silence that Derrida refers to as the death-like non-response (116–17). Pure ethics requires a decision that has to be constantly affirmed as such without recourse to any sort of justifiable fidelity.

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The Life of Specimens (Revisited) For Adorno, the post-Auschwitz literary master is Samuel Beckett: “Beckett has given us the only fitting reaction to the situation of the concentration camps. . . . What is, he says, is like a concentration camp” (Negative Dialectics 37, emphasis added). In Minima Moralia, Adorno writes: “We shudder at the brutalisation of life, but . . . we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless. . . . There is no way out of entanglement” (27). Every number is accounted for; in living, every specimen sacrifices scores of others who might have lived in their place. (For Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, this is what it is to be saved.) There is no chance to be human in this world, as it stands, and Adorno’s work mourns this fact inconsolably: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (Minima Moralia 39). For Derrida, too, there is no way out of this entanglement: I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably. (The Gift of Death 69)

That “‘society’ puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts for only a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children” is “the sacrifice of others to avoid being sacrificed oneself” (86). For Derrida, this sacrifice is fundamental to any administered or organized society. Survival is precisely this raising of the knife, the first principle from which society generates its modalities—which are all thus modalities of putting to death. This is also and unavoidably the modality of the work of ethics: responsibility, in its origination as perjury. Life today is survival, as both forgetting and putting to death. For Adorno, after Auschwitz only a cold repression, a severe capacity for abstraction, could possibly allow anyone to go on living. But this capacity (which might now be defined as thinking and acting beyond trauma, or beyond hospitality to the other) is itself precisely responsible for making the Shoah possible, as a terrible and continuous accumulation of brutality. In light of this, says Adorno, “[a] new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” (Negative Dialectics 365). This preventive imperative is different from the rationality of survival: nonresponse, fortification. For Adorno, it is constitutive of any mode of thinking

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that has not descended into barbarism, and represents the parallel opening of what Levinas calls “ethics as first philosophy” (“Ethics” 85).3 Standing before and at the heart of experience, justice, politics, and language, it is the replacement heart that Miller speaks of—the absence of your own heart that is the presence of the trace of an absent unknown other, the traumatic intrusion hollowed out and possessed by death, just as Miller himself is in saying this possessed by Derrida’s voice and its spectral prosthesis (5–6, 17, above). That Auschwitz will not happen again is the ethical imperative that now comes before philosophy and creates philosophy anew. It equates precisely to arranging one’s thoughts against survival as first principle. Yet it may be the case, says Adorno, that the only manner in which one could possibly go on is to embrace survival, as forgetting and fortifying-against. This embrace would be to put survival above the awareness of whatever horrific suffering might threaten it, which is to say above the recognition of survival as a natural first principle. Auschwitz reveals its own logic to be at the heart of the instincts and modalities of Western society and culture, and its exemplar is the subject seeking full apprehension of itself. It is at the heart of our psychic and ontological compulsions, and this revelation is a continuously traumatic event. Society and culture can be fully protected against this trauma only by embracing the root of its horrors. The survival principle makes us turn away, not respond or be hospitable. Survival’s protection against trauma is a renunciation of hospitality and mourning. We must look away. In the camp, says Giorgio Agamben, no one, guards or survivors, wanted to gaze on “the person who in camp jargon was called ‘The Muslim,’ der Muselmann—a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic” (Homo Sacer 185). The Muselmann “is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognises himself in his disfigured face” (Remnants 52). For Agamben, the Muselmann represents “bare life,” and the declaration that bare life is all that is left for humanity. This is an unbearable declaration from which we are compelled to turn away, but we must bear it in order to put an end to Auschwitz and to live ethically. Only in the face of this burden can a response occur and ethical responsibility become possible.

Responsibility as Death So, where do we go from here? How can we go on without dying, without becoming an abstraction ourselves, without becoming inhuman? For JeanFrançois Lyotard, the “writing of survival is itself gripped by the shame of not having succumbed, by the shame of being able to still bear witness and by the sadness engendered by daring to speak. It is what survives of thought despite itself when philosophical life has become impossible, when there is no longer a beautiful death to hope for” (44). Like Adorno in the section of Negative Dialectics called “Dying Today,” Lyotard recognizes that survival incorporates the death of death. When humans are specimens, as Auschwitz makes them,

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death itself is dead. When we mourn after Auschwitz, we do not just mourn the dead, we mourn death itself: the death of death, the trembling in the face of death that is dead, the slightness of death. To survive is to live in shame because it is to have avoided death at the cost of the lives of others. When Derrida considers Levinas’s notion of “‘extreme uprightness of the face of the neighbor’ as the ‘uprightness of an exposure to death, without defense’” (qtd. in Adieu 3), he refers to this risk that the subject takes alongside the emergence of the third: The welcome determines the “receiving,” the receptivity of receiving as the ethical relation. . . . [For Levinas,] “To approach the Other in discourse is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I.” (Adieu 25; emphasis in the original)

Such a hospitality “beyond the capacity of the I” fragments identity, and thus necessarily risks trauma. Is this Derrida or Levinas? Is it what Derrida takes from Levinas, or what he receives from him? In this hospitality of thought to thought, one interrupts the other, and this “interruption of the self by the self, if such a thing is possible, can or must be taken up by thought: this is ethical discourse—and it is also, as the limit of thematization, hospitality. Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?” (Adieu 51).4 Even if traumatized in the act of hospitality, then, our responsibility is not to shy away from hospitality by fortifying against it. Levinas goes further. This is subjectivity itself: “The subjectivity of a subject is responsibility or being-inquestion in the form of the total exposure to offence in the cheek offered to the smiter. This responsibility is prior to dialogue, to the exchange of questions and answers . . .” (qtd. in Adieu; 56–57). It is a responsibility that involves being taken hostage, being given as hostage, and giving oneself to hostage, and thus to trauma. The assignation of responsibility in this election of the hostage, says Derrida, is more traumatic “than the sometimes pacifying vocabulary of the welcome and of the hospitality of the host might suggest” (Adieu 59).

Trauma, Fragmentation, Identity Referring to the healing of his patients, Shoah victims who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Henry Krystal says: Whatever one is ashamed of has to be lovingly accepted as part of one’s life that was unavoidable. Every pain aroused in the process of reviewing one’s life

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Like many pop-psychologists, Krystal is concerned with healing as a workingthrough that freely involves forgetting or falsifying to strengthen the ego and the sense of identity: trauma asks for defragmentation, assimilation, and mastery. Nevertheless, what Krystal finds, to his frustration, is that many of his patients are reluctant to let go of the trauma, and cling instead to a notion of survival-asresponsibility. This is perhaps not surprising: in such a framework, Adorno’s humanity—the humanity in which the Shoah could never happen again—could only be seen as unnatural or unhealthy.5 Pure hospitality to trauma is impossible: it would dissolve the subject. But as Derrida says, the risk is necessary: “this possible hospitality to the worst is necessary so that good hospitality can have a chance, the chance of letting the other come, the yes of the other no less than the yes to the other” (Adieu 35). It remains faithful to the humanity that is dead and thereby holds out for, and invites, the humanity to come—a humanity that may be, as Levinas and Adorno humbly describe it, “better.”

Notes 1. Miller quotes from Derrida’s On Touching: “Mourning as im-possible mourning—and moreover, ahuman, more than human, prehuman, different from the human ‘in’ the human of humanualism” (Derrida 192; qtd. in Miller 13, above). Taking my cue from Adorno, I am reversing this treatment of the word “human” so that it refers to that which is absent—a syncopated ahuman or prehuman that is consistent with impossible mourning. 2. It opens “like a hiatus,” says Derrida, “both the mouth and the possibility of another speech, of a decision and a responsibility (juridical and political, if you will), where decisions must be made and responsibility, as we say, taken, without the assurance of an ontological foundation . . .” (Adieu 21). 3. Ethics as first philosophy, as it is opposed to, or in response to the failures of, Heidegger’s ontology as first philosophy. But it also goes beyond that. Derrida says: “Yes, ethics before and beyond ontology, the State, or politics, but also ethics beyond ethics” (Adieu 4). Here, I suggest that this “ethics beyond ethics” is ethics beyond (ethical) praxis. It is also important to note the explicit relationship between hospitality and this ethics that is beyond ontology. As Derrida interprets it, “The essence of what is or, rather, of what opens beyond being is hospitality” (Adieu 48). Hospitality is therefore “infinite or it is not at all; it is granted upon the welcoming of the idea of infinity, and thus of the unconditional, and it is on the basis of its opening that one can say, as Levinas will a bit further on, that ‘ethics is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy’” (Adieu 48). 4. It seems to me that this relation between trauma and hospitality cannot be emphasized enough. For Derrida as well, “One will understand nothing about hospitality

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if one does not understand what ‘interrupting oneself’ might mean, the interruption of the self by the self as other” (Adieu 52). This interruption is also the open space that is left— that is worked open and worked to be left open—to trauma. Trauma is cultivated as interruption. Much like footnotes . . . 5. The perception of a health that is to be curbed is not rare in Adorno’s work. For instance: “Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. Its antidote is a sickness aware of what it is, a curbing of life itself” (Minima Moralia 77).

Chapter Ten ●: Hospitality and Its Discontents (As Such) Tony Thwaites

The phrase se toucher toi, however, names . . . anyone’s relation to another person by way of their bodies. This is an essentially sexual or sexed relation. (Miller, “Absolute Mourning” 16–17, above)

Hospitality and Its Discontents On 16 June 1904, Molly Bloom, a Dublin singer, is planning a sexual encounter with her manager, Blazes Boylan, who is coming round at four that afternoon, ostensibly to discuss her forthcoming concert tour. She has let her husband Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, know that he should make himself scarce around this time. Ulysses follows Bloom through much of this day, and one of the questions it raises is just what he is going to do once he arrives home again. The second-last chapter, “Ithaca,” ends with Bloom and Molly talking top-to-tail in bed, studiously avoiding the subject that is no doubt on both of their minds, until Bloom falls asleep: In what posture? Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator: reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted on a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the childman weary, the manchild in the womb. Womb? Weary? He rests. He has travelled. With? 141

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Thwaites Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer. When? Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? ●

(17.2311–31: all references are by chapter and line number)

“Ithaca,” made up entirely of question-and-answer, ends with a question, “Where?,” which either is answered by that unutterable dot, “●”, or doesn’t get answered at all as Bloom falls asleep. On the other hand, the very last chapter, “Penelope,” which follows immediately, begins with an answer, “Yes,” to a question that either wasn’t asked, or has been posed implicitly by the entire book we have just been reading: Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan (18.1–4)

Whichever way it goes, the “Yes” of “Penelope” is an answer to a different question from the “Where?” of “Ithaca.” It is a response that both continues the catechistics of the previous chapter and short-circuits it: for all their variety of procedures and relations between question and answer, none of the questions of “Ithaca” is quite as disjunct as this exchange across the boundaries of the two chapters: “Where?” “Yes.” If Molly is “the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity,” as Joyce wrote to his friend Frank Budgen (Joyce, Letters 278), then sign and countersign, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” are curiously out of phase with one another. The very position of Bloom and Molly top-to-tail in the bed reminds us of Freud’s famous statement, “One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” (Freud, New Introductory Lectures 134), and of Lacan’s notorious rephrasing of it as “There is no sexual relationship” (Seminar XVII 116; Seminar XX 12). So what is happening in these two last chapters, these two different but paired ways of ending the book? How is one the countersign to the other when in a sense they speak past rather than to one another? What is it that links them, and perhaps separates them at the same time? Between the final “Where?” of “Ithaca” and the opening “Yes” of “Penelope”—between those enisled windowless monads (Miller 191, above) of Bloom and Molly—is that unspeakable “●”: a stop, an extended silence around which these two chapters gather, blown up large as if to emphasize its emptiness: nothing at all, a sort of

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upper-case nothing. What are we to say about the resolution of Ulysses—if indeed it is a resolution of any sort whatsoever? If it occurs, it is not because the view of one or the other party on the day’s events prevails, or because an equilibrium has been reached between them, as the conversation has been working to avoid even any mention of the topic. It would seem instead to lie, somehow, in the gap between the two parties and their views, in that extended silence around which the two chapters gather, and touch without touching.1

i Slavoj Žižek points out in a number of places how on the broader social level of ideology—for which he sees Lacanian ideas of fantasy as providing a description—there are always at least two fantasies at work about the social and its resolution. The first is the fantasy that the social is indeed a consistent whole that works according to the just distributions of an invisible hand. The second is the fantasy that gets invoked to explain why that first one never actually works (“Between Symbolic Fiction” 229–48; Enjoy 89–90; Sublime Object 126). If things fail to resolve, is it because there’s something, some rogue element, that isn’t playing the game? Everything should form a whole, it suggests, but if it doesn’t, that’s because there are certain elements in it which are preventing that from happening, working to undermine the harmony that should rightfully be ours. It is easy to see how this easily becomes a paranoid and catastrophic logic of scapegoating, into which that fantasy of completeness so easily inverts itself on contact with the real world, once it has to explain its own failure. As Žižek says, it’s the foreclosed obverse of the Nazi harmonious Volksgemeinschaft returned in the guise of their paranoiac obsession with the Jewish plot. Similarly, the Stalinist’s compulsive discovery of ever new enemies of Socialism was the unavoidable obverse of their pretending to realize the ideal of the “new Socialist man.” (“Between Symbolic Fiction” 244)

These two positions are strictly, logically, complementary. On the one hand, we have the fantasy of a consistent and complete world, on the other a world that is incomplete because of the nefarious presence within it of an inconsistency. To restore order, so the fantasy goes, all you have to do is get rid of the rogue element.2 Žižek goes on to say of these two fantasies, fantasy1 and fantasy2, that “Perhaps, the freedom from the infernal hold of fantasy2 provides the most succinct definition of a saint” (“Between Symbolic Fiction” 244). But that, surely, is not enough, if we take it to mean that the saint is the person who steadfastly refuses to let utopian fantasy1 slide into paranoid fantasy2. Žižek’s point has, after all, been that the specter of fantasy2 is the “unavoidable obverse” of the symbolic fiction that is fantasy1, which always fails; the very foreclosure of fantasy2, even by a saint, guarantees its return. The two are not just

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complementary, but supplementary: the one lurks at the heart of the other, as its necessary obverse. One is free from the “infernal hold of fantasy2” only once one is free from fantasy1. The saint may be the one who refuses not only fantasy2, but, far more important, the utopia of fantasy1 (Figure 10.1). consistent complete corresponds to utopian fantasy in which there is an orderly totality because all elements, without exception, follow that order (Žižek’s fantasy1)

inconsistent incomplete corresponds to paranoid fantasy in which there is not an orderly totality, because there is at least one element that refuses to play the game (Žižek’s fantasy2)

Figure 10.1

ii Now, whatever the ending of Ulysses might be, with its interrogation stretched over an inscrutable, unsayable blank mark, it is neither of these: it is neither the fantasy of a marriage of true minds, where two hearts beat as one, nor is it the inverse fantasy, some sort of variant on the familiar nineteenth-century novel of bourgeois adultery (Madame Bovary, Effi Briest, Anna Karenina) with all of its logic of escalating blame, recrimination, and reparation. Look how easy that last option would be: all Bloom would have to do at any stage is open his mouth and say what has been perfectly clear to both parties all along: I know what you’re going to be doing this afternoon, I know what you’ve done today . . . —in short, nothing more than I know. The very statement could not help but be an accusation, no matter how mollifying Bloom might make it. And an accusation requires answering, and defence: and so the argument begins.

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But instead, what we get is silence and cunning: Bloom says nothing, and in this silence between the two of them about what is clearly of most importance to both of them, and whose figure is that inscrutable dot, something very interesting is happening. At the end of “Ithaca,” almost the end, is the moment the entire book has been leading up to: Molly and Bloom are talking in bed. Their exchange takes the form of what the chapter calls a “catechetical interrogation” (17.2249): Molly is quizzing Bloom about what he’s been doing that day. Now this is the only occasion on which this most catechetical chapter actually refers to its own technique. A catechetical interrogation, “Ithaca,” is telling us about a catechetical interrogation. It is as if the chapter is pointing up this occasion for us, tugging silently at our sleeve to get us to notice it. We have had many moments where the Ithacan catechism tells us of other conversations between Bloom and Stephen, even of questions and answers that would have passed between them (“Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?” [17.11]); we have even had a moment where, twice in succession, it answers a question with another question. It is almost as if one of the real topics of this catechism, one of the things it keeps coming back to as the topic it is reporting, is catechistics. But here, at this moment with Molly and Bloom in bed together, talking on the edge of sleep at the end of this day, and saying more to each other now than they have in the rest of the day—here, we have the first conversation that “Ithaca” has actually labeled catechistic. And yet we hear nothing of it. Here is the longest and most crucial exchange between Bloom and Molly in the book, the one toward which the whole day has been moving, and we hear not a word of it, or of any other conversation that takes place in this chapter. The Ithacan narration tells us about this conversation but hides it from us, in a “tentative velation” like Bloom’s replacing Molly’s nightdress over her buttocks after that “prolonged provocative mellonsmellonous osculation” (17.2245, 2243). One catechism (the Ithacan one) hides the other catechism it reveals (Molly’s interrogation of Bloom)—a catechism which is oddly all about hiding, for everything we’re told about this exchange is carried in a list of Bloom’s tactful modifications of the truth: With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation? Negative: he omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and in the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and Co, Limited, 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street, the erotic provocation and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude (Gerty), surname unknown. Positive: he included mention of a performance by Mrs Bandman Palmer of Leah at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street, an invitation to supper at Wynn's (Murphy's) Hotel, 35, 36, and 37 Lower Abbey street, a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency entitled Sweets of Sin, anonymous, author a gentleman of fashion, a temporary concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the course of postcenal gymnastic display, the victim (since completely recovered) being Stephen Dedalus, professor and author, eldest surviving son of Simon Dedalus, of no fixed occupation, an aeronautical feat executed by him

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Thwaites (narrator) in the presence of a witness, the professor and author aforesaid, with promptitude of decision and gymnastic flexibility. Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications? Absolutely. (17.2250–2268)

And just as the Ithacan catechism makes perfectly clear what it conceals (the words that pass between Bloom and Molly), and makes them perfectly clear in hiding them, so too is there a strange sort of transparency about the exchange it describes: neither party is saying what each knows to be the real, silent focus of their words. This is, of course, not new. In “Calypso,” the only other chapter in which Bloom and Molly exchange words, everything they say cautiously circles the things that are really on their minds. Once we are alerted to these things, the studiously casual conversation is fairly crackling with the tensions of what underpins it, as they talk about the concert tour, what Molly will be performing (Love’s Old Sweet Song, and Là ci darem [4.314]), a request for a new bodiceripper from the stalls at Burgh Quay (Paul de Kock, no less: “Nice name he has” [4.358]) and, above all, the knowledge we piece together only later, that Boylan will be round that afternoon. But while these important things may be avoided, they are by no means hidden. There’s an odd sort of transparency at work here. Nobody is fooling anyone else, or being fooled, for a minute. Bloom knows that the purpose of Boylan’s visit is a sexual encounter, even though as far as we know Molly’s never actually said that. Indeed, it’s so transparent that a considerable number of the people Bloom meets during the day probably know it too (Boylan’s hardly one to keep such things to himself). Bloom knows all too clearly about the affair. And Molly knows that he knows it, and he knows that she knows he knows it, and she knows that too (as he well knows). Everything is perfectly transparent, at least in that space between Molly and Bloom, but with the vertiginous transparency of a hall of mirrors. The peculiar thing about this bit of marital unfaithfulness is that there is absolutely no deception involved. Molly has made sure that Bloom even knows the precise time Boylan’s due round—as he would have to, if the whole thing’s to work. And however and whenever she’s passed that bit of information on to him, it’s surely functioned as a wordless confession: Boylan is coming round at 4.00. You know what’s going to happen then. If you want to step in and do something about us, catch us in the act, then this is the time and place to do it: at 4.00, here at 7 Eccles Street. But you don’t, and won’t, and I know that, and you know it, and I know that you know it and you know that I know it . . . And if there had been even the slightest suspicion that Bloom would do anything but avoid Eccles Street, we can be sure that Molly would have taken care to meet Boylan elsewhere. Some eighteen hours later, back at Eccles Street, the hardly disguised evidence of the events is all around—not only the crumbs and “additional odours” in the bed, the real or imagined impression of another body, but from the very moment Bloom has entered the house, the rearranged furniture, the

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betting slips, the two cigarettes, the abandoned sheet music of Love’s Old Sweet Song on the piano, where even the purely musical indications on the score seem to speak of what has followed (“ad libitum, forte, pedal, animato, sustained pedal, ritirando, close” [17.1309–10]). That ritirando is worth noting, as it is not actually a musical term. The usual indication would be ritardando, holding back, which is appropriate enough on its own as a description both of what the singer does in the last lines of Love’s Old Sweet Song and of the sexual climax whose ghostly presence is even here on the music stand. Ritirando is a coinage from the verb “to retire” (Gifford 597), which is exactly what the scene gives us and Bloom to imagine the lovers to have done sometime during the singing of the song. The conflation mirrors Bloom’s own anxiety, both presenting what the lovers did and withdrawing from it. It also mirrors his strategy for dealing with the events: withdrawal, from jealousy to abnegation, from envy to equanimity: What retribution, if any? Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witness), not yet. . . . (17, 2195, 2200– 03)

And, as we know, this is not a new resolution. It has been there all along since “Calypso,” as what made possible Molly’s veiled revelation that Boylan is due round today at four. Here, as Bloom is stretching out in the marital bed again, the decision is not so much being made as being affirmed. Yes. In getting Bloom to talk, Molly is of course turning the conversation away from herself and her day; and Bloom, on the other hand, is clearly talking just a bit too much about his, with a nervousness and an elaborately evident preparation which don’t really fool Molly for a moment: “yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite” (18.34–35). The sheer amount of what Bloom has to say no doubt signals that he has something to hide, and, what’s more, that he must know that she must know this, and that she knows he knows that, and so on. Bloom’s response to the strangely transparent secret Molly has offered him has been, wittingly or not, to offer an equally transparent secret of his own, to affirm it as a secret and to double it. Yes I said yes. As Bloom concludes the ritirando of his decision to do nothing, that catechetical voice of “Ithaca” asks: In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge? (17.2227–28)

“Antagonistic sentiments and reflections” “converge” in a “final satisfaction”: what the sequence of questions is describing is the process of narrative resolution, in its general and familiar form: tensions resolve in satisfaction, differences dissolve. And yet, (i) Bloom’s resolution is to do nothing; (ii) it involves an elaborate deception (“With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation?” [17.2250]), and (iii) that deception actually fools no-one.

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Yet what it does is precisely prevent what Žižek calls fantasy1 from forming, that fantasy of an overall unity whose ready reverse is the scapegoating of recrimination and blame that is fantasy2. This is part of the significance of that catechistics. At the heart of the relationship we have not a fantasy of wholeness and unity, but an interrogation. Its aim is not to fill that space between the two with an answer (This is what we are, or what we must be, or what we should be, and its inevitable freights of recrimination), but to keep that space open, as a question, or as shared but unsaid secrets. It is an affirmation, but an affirmation of an emptiness and noncoincidence that is the source of the optimism and the enormous comic energy of these last pages: Yes I said yes I will.3 In spite of all this, we do not yet know what we are. Interrogation holds apart, where too much proximity would be the end of everything. The catechistics are doubled, and doubled again: not only do we have the Ithacan catechism doubling and veiling Molly’s interrogation, and Molly’s interrogation standing in the place of the accusing interrogation Bloom has decided not to make, but the relation of the two last chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” is itself essentially catechistic, interrogatory. They speak at an angle to each other, chiasmic and crossing. Where “Ithaca” offers the fantasy of a universe that essentially approves of Bloom, “Penelope” offers a far more ambivalent view (“where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail” [18.709–10]). The two last chapters speak at cross purposes, and in doing that keep the question of resolution open: Where? Yes. What “Penelope” offers is not fantasy2. Instead, what the two last chapters offer between them is an undoing of both fantasy1 and fantasy2. And that delicate balancing act is marked by an infinitely ambivalent gift. Earlier on that day, as he mentions, Bloom had bought Molly a book from the second-hand barrows at Merchants’ Arch. Molly is fond of bodice-rippers, which she regularly gets him to buy her in his travels. Bloom is convinced that this book, Sweets of Sin, is the right one when he reads in it the sentence, “All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!” (10.608–09). Sooner or later, the book will pass from one to the other, like a receipt of recognition of what cannot otherwise be acknowledged as having passed between them: a book that is not only called Sweets of Sin but is itself, in its very giving, sin’s sweets, adultery’s dessert: just, in the mutual recognition it affords, and at the same time a sweetener; not recrimination and the demand for an end to certain pleasures, but the offer of another pleasure again, a surplus, excessive pleasure, intercourse’s aftercourse; not just deserts, just dessert: re-signed, countersigned, by a resigned Bloom, as a silent affirmation of his own: Yes I said yes I will.4

iii All these exchanges occupy a space very different from either that utopian space of completion and consistency, or the paranoid space of deception that threatens it from within. They occupy a far more liminal, tentative, and evanescent space,

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whose strategy is instability itself. Utterances and actions avoid direct statement and the agonistics of claim and counterclaim, and devolve instead into bottomless indirection: tentative, veiled, silent because it is carried in what is not said, and cunning because it means that in this indirection we are no longer in the familiar bourgeois tragedy of adultery, but in a different and profoundly comic mode. What we have here in those gaps is a phase apart from that space of fantasy (Figure 10.2). The utopian–paranoid relationship demands an impossible consistent complete

consistent incomplete

corresponds to utopian fantasy in which there is an orderly totality because all elements, without exception, follow that order (Žižek’s fantasy1)

inconsistent complete

inconsistent incomplete corresponds to paranoid fantasy in which there is not an orderly totality, because there is at least one element that refuses to play the game (Žižek’s fantasy2)

Figure 10.2

completeness and consistency. This interstitial relationship, on the other hand, works on and across those very incompletenesses and inconsistencies, which it perpetuates and even prevents from closure. Without offering any guarantees, it welcomes what “Ithaca” will call “the imprevidibility of the future” (17.979– 80). What can we call this but a space of hospitality, the very space of hospitality itself (Figure 10.3)?

150

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consistent incomplete

corresponds to utopian fantasy in which there is an orderly totality because all elements, without exception, follow that order (Žižek’s fantasy1)

inconsistent complete

inconsistent incomplete corresponds to paranoid fantasy in which there is not an orderly totality, because there is at least one element that refuses to play the game (Žižek’s fantasy2)

Figure 10.3

This is not for a moment to claim that somehow this is a resolution, either narrative or marital, as if 17 June 1904 will be the first day of the Blooms’s new and stronger marriage. The most cursory reading of Molly’s monologue should dispel that. Everything is incomplete, yet to come. There are no guarantees: hospitality runs risks, as it must if it is to remain hospitality. These interstitial positions correspond quite precisely to what Lacan calls “sexuation.” For Lacan, the Symbolic, that network of signifiers in and by which alone we make sense of the world, is constituted solely by and in empty difference. What distinguishes a signifier is nothing more than its being other than all the other signifiers. This means that the Symbolic is subject to a strictly Gödelian logic: we can have completeness, or we can have consistency, but not both. Systems are complete only at the cost of their inconsistency, and consistent only at the cost of their being indefinitely and uncountably incomplete. We can think of these as variations on what Kant designates as the dynamic and the mathematical versions of the sublime, the two ways in which the very idea of order leaks away into—or is supported by—infinity and contradiction. On the one hand, we have God, the very figure of the totalizing principle of the universe, but Himself not subject to those laws: completion at the cost of inconsistency. On the other hand, we have Nature, with no exception at all to those laws, but of boundless extent, like those infinite spaces of the night sky whose silence so terrified Pascal: consistency at the cost of incompletion. God the Father and Mother Nature. These two possibilities describe the two basic ways in which one can be inscribed in the Symbolic. Because there are two of them, they thus come to

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represent the two available ways by which masculine and feminine can be inscribed in the Symbolic—or rather, by which the Symbolic fails to inscribe sexual difference, for these ways are necessarily and rigorously quite inadequate (Figure 10.4). Logical statement of a system which is both consistent and complete

Logical statement of a system which is consistent but not complete

corresponds to

corresponds to

utopian fantasy in which there is an orderly totality because all elements, without exception, follow that order (Žižek’s fantasy1)

feminine position of sexuation in which there is no element which is not orderly, but those elements nevertheless do not form a totality (Lacan)

Logical statement of a system which is complete but not consistent

Logical statement of a system which is neither consistent nor complete

corresponds to

corresponds to

masculine position of sexuation in which the elements form an orderly totality because of the exception (Lacan)

paranoid fantasy in which there is not an orderly totality, because there is at least one element that refuses to play the game (Žižek’s fantasy2)

Figure 10.4

The obvious thing that has to be said immediately is that this has nothing whatsoever to do with biological sex. Lacan’s later mathemes are not saying that men live on one side of some idealistic or formal split, and women live on the other. Lacan quite explicitly states that it’s possible for anyone of any physical sex to be inscribed on either side (Seminar XX 80), which makes it sound a bit like cross-dressing: a bit of a squeeze, but you can do it. We should add two riders to that. The first would be to strengthen the assertion: it would be utterly impossible not to do this, and impossible not to switch around over and over during the course of a single day, or not to occupy both irreducible and subcontrary places. The second would only apparently be to undermine this, by insisting that these are not in any sense “subject positions,” in the rather reductive sense in which that term is often used to describe a position of address that a text is attributed as inviting readers to occupy or identify with. Lacan refers to them all the time as inscriptions, which is to say that they are not so much positional as propositional. Indeed, it is essential to his argument that one

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cannot occupy those inscriptions in the way in which an object occupies its place in the symbolic system, no matter how complex or ambiguous that object or place might be. To be a subject is a different matter altogether. As subject, one does not have a place in the Symbolic in the way that furniture has a place in a room or a catalogue. The mathemes are descriptions of the ways in which the Real of sexual difference necessarily fails to be inscribed in the Symbolic, leaving in the wake of this failure only an endless series of anxious questions. What is it to be a woman or a man? How am I to be that? What should I be? Why am I never simply, or never enough of, what I should be? What is the other sex, that I am not it? Was will das Weib? What the mathemes represent is thus the complete and ongoing failure of any such assignation of quasi-Foucauldian “subject-positions” to sexed subjects, and the logical combinatory of ways in which subjects live out this failure (Figure 10.5). The two last chapters of Ulysses face each other across this divide of sexual difference. It is important to insist that it would be quite uninteresting from the point of view of this argument to argue whether men or women “really do think like that,” and to tally up masculine characteristics on the one hand and feminine on the other. Whatever we arrived at could only be by definition an ideological list. It would be easy to find counterexamples: Molly is, after all, constantly contradicting herself, and the orotund questions and gargantuan lists of “Ithaca” suggest an endless and untotalizable stream of data, like the turning-on of a tap. It is much more fruitful to remember that terms in the Symbolic are diacritical. Ulysses has nothing at all to tell us about what “really makes a man,” what “really makes a woman.” Instead, it stages sexual difference as both empty (that is, without essence) and everywhere a matter of the real. What we need to keep in mind about Bloom as the New Womanly Man is that we simply do not know what that might be, and neither do Bloom, Ulysses, or Joyce. It is not a set of qualities to be determined on, but a catechetical interrogation, across that divide of sex—one which no longer demands just the truth, a single propositional truth, as there is no single position within the Symbolic from which such a thing would be possible. But this is in no sense the jettisoning of truth, or a retreat into relativism. On the contrary, what we see here is the slyness of truth, its subterfuge, silence, and cunning in having no place from which to speak but that of exile. For in that murmuring in a bed, in which the top-to-tail loves of man and woman are indeed a phase apart, something true, and transparently true on all levels and to all parties, is indeed said, and said in deception itself. When Lacan argues notoriously that there is no sexual relationship, we may say that this is precisely what he means. There is no single position to speak from, no commonality that would guarantee the sexual relationship. Relationships between actual men and women are always to be improvised anew.5 Paradoxically, what that lack of the sexual relation makes possible is what is named in a characteristically displaced way through Stephen, the one who

z: Hospitality and Its Discontents (As Such) Logical statement of a system which is both consistent and complete corresponds to utopian fantasy in which there is an orderly totality because all elements, without exception, follow that order (Žižek’s fantasy1)

Logical statement of a system which is consistent but not complete

ž_h_ Ÿ_g_

ž_h_ ¡_g_

corresponds to feminine position of sexuation in which there is no element which is not orderly, but those elements nevertheless do not form a totality (Lacan)

Logical statement of a system which is complete but not consistent

Logical statement of a system which is neither consistent nor complete

corresponds to

corresponds to

masculine position of sexuation in which the elements form an orderly totality because of the exception (Lacan)

153

›_h_ Ÿ_g_

›_h_ ¡_g_

paranoid fantasy in which there is not an orderly totality, because there is at least one element that refuses to play the game (Žižek’s fantasy2)

Lacan’s mathemes (from Seminar XX, 78) are to be read in this fashion: x stands for any element of a system, whose ordering principle is . A bar over any term is a negation. The logical operator stands for some: thus, says Some elements are not subject to , and says There are no elements that are not subject to . Statements beginning with or are statements about consistency or inconsistency. The logical operator stands for all, the totality: thus, says The totality of all elements is subject to , and says The elements which are subject to do not form a totality. Statements beginning with or are statements about completeness or incompleteness. Figure 10.5

perhaps has yet the most to learn about it: that “word known to all men,” love (9.429, 15.4192–93). And this is, perhaps, something very different from the fantasy that seeks to combine, to override and heal the trauma of difference. It is instead that impossible thing, a relation where there is none, built on that very impossibility.6 In this, it is closer to what Lacan calls the sinthome, that singularity that brings

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together things quite alien to one another, and which is thus the only thing that supports the relation to the other sex (Séminaire XXIII 98, 101). Perhaps, in its refusal of fantasy1, it is even (let’s speculate) a certain succinct saintliness.

As Such (Notes) 1. Touching, then, without touching. Toward the end of his paper, Hillis Miller will invoke the moment when, in A Taste for the Secret, Derrida “borrows Leibniz’s figure of the windowless monad to define his own sense of the human situation.” This, Miller says, “is quite different from Nancy’s idea of an aboriginal partage, which is a sharing as well as a shearing, a cleaving in both senses, a parting of the ways, and a taking part. For Derrida no sharing or taking part as such exists” (19, above). What would sharing as such be, a proper sharing, a sharing proper to sharing, appropriate to it, worthy of the name? What is it to share something as singular as a mourning, a haunting (Tuggle 69, above), even a crypt (Johnson 118, above)? Here, in these endnotes, I want to trace out part of this thread of Miller’s argument about that touch-without-touch. The endnotes will thus form an argument of their own, parallel to the argument of the main text, touching often on it and on the other arguments in this book, but separate from them. Miller’s examination of mourning through Derrida’s On Touching traces out some of the relations among a string of “non-metonymical metonymies, or catachreses, for that vacant place at the center” of the human being (16, above). Catachresis, which Miller says he “would rather say” than metonymy (13, above), is the improper use of words, the misapplication of a term, and particularly of a figure or trope. It is thus where metonymy, and beyond that the figure in general, breaks down, the limits beyond which the figurative should not properly proceed. But any metonym is already pushing beyond the sheer “proper meaning” of literal designation, sliding somewhere it doesn’t belong, so to that extent metonymy is already, from the outset, never entirely distinguishable from catachresis. We cannot distinguish metonymy proper, metonymy as such, from the point at which it breaks down. Catachresis is coiled up at the center of metonymy, as its improper, prosthetic heart. Metonymy always breaks down, and this breaking down is never quite distinguishable from what we might like to think of as its proper functioning. The very boundary between the two—the boundary between catachresis and metonymy proper, metonymy as such, or, in short, simply the boundary between the proper and the improper—is itself catachrestic and improper. 2. That the boundary between metonymy and catachresis, proper and improper, is itself catachrestic is not in any way an argument that there is no difference between proper and improper, whether in the use of metonymy or anywhere else. It is important to refuse the sort of hasty reading that quickly declares Derrida to be some sort of “postmodern relativist” (if that’s ever anything more than a straw figure) for whom nothing is proper, nothing is true, and all things are equal. The only reading that could come to that conclusion would be one that itself has little regard for—let’s say it—the proper, the proprieties of reading and argument, the responsibility one has to do justice to the very thing one might wish to argue against, in the very act of arguing against it. That the boundary is catachrestic does not mean there is no difference between the things that lie on either side. Let’s just say that there are many obvious and great differences between proper and improper. It would be unthinkable otherwise: not in the weak moralistic sense that might want us to have no truck with relativism, but in the strongest sense, that thinking itself would be impossible without such distinctions. What it means is that no

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matter what is taken to be the proper use of metonymy, not only will catachresis by definition exceed that proper use, but so will the very boundary between the two. A boundary always has one foot in what lies outside it, so there will always be something improper about the boundary between proper and improper. We cannot make a purely proper distinction between them. There are, in short, no proper definitions of the proper. Another way of putting that would be to say that a boundary is always a site of interchange. No matter how solid and impregnable a boundary may be, it is always porous: what lies inside it is structured by what it excludes, which is thus already and ineradicably within. To attempt to eradicate what is excluded by setting up more boundaries or by policing boundaries with ever-greater vigilance can only reinforce what one shares with the very thing one attempts to exclude. 3. This sharing is something Laurie Johnson’s figure of the twin pathway emphasizes (118, above). From the outset, the boundary is nothing more than the interchange between its two aspects, a conversation across thin air. The parties distinguish themselves from each other in this conversation. We begin with conversation rather than with the parties; the sharing is prior to and gives rise to the parties involved in the sharing. What else could we call this but, by analogy with Derrida’s term, an absolute sharing (Derrida, On Touching 290; qtd. in Miller 17, above)? Like absolute mourning, it is not something that befalls an already-constituted subject from outside, but is already constitutive of that subject. Sharing is another name for heart, that “sanctuary of what one keeps (garde) when one can no longer keep anything—keep inside oneself, as one often says, to name what infinitely exceeds the inside” (290; qtd. in Miller 17, above), “intimate to me, part of me, but at the same time something that is absolutely beyond me” (18, above). Like absolute mourning, this absolute sharing is “the place where the selfsame itself exappropriates itself, at the same instant when I am invisibly touched by the other, without any possible reappropriation” (On Touching 305; qtd. in Miller 19, above). “[A]bsolutely general and universal,” it is “identified with life itself” (18, above). This absolute, life itself, life as such, thus takes its place in that chain of nonsubstitutable metonyms that “circle in combinatorial sequence around an absent center” (15, above). 4. Derrida’s first use of the term “absolute mourning” in On Touching occurs late in the book, and as Miller notes, it is in a cascade of questions: Finally, isn’t what the “heart” names the ultimate place of absolute mourning, the sanctuary of what one keeps when one can no longer keep anything—keep inside oneself, as one often says, to name what infinitely exceeds the inside? The sensible but invisible and untouchable place for what one not only keeps committed to memory, not only in oneself, but in yourself in myself, when you are greater still, a heart in me greater than my heart, more alive than I, more singular and more other than what I can anticipate, know, imagine, represent, and remember? When “my” heart is first of all the heart of the other, and therefore, yes, greater than my heart in my heart? (290; qtd. in Miller 17, above)

Miller characterizes these questions as “in effect, like ‘rhetorical questions’ in general” (18, above). For the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a rhetorical question is “one that does not require an answer, but is only put in the form of a question to produce a more striking effect” (SOED); for Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, the rhetorical question, erotesis, is “one which implies an answer but does not give or lead us to expect one” (71). (Is that final “Where?” of “Ithaca” then a rhetorical question? Or is it a “rhetorical question,” to use Miller’s scare quotes, if that is indeed what they are? Or is it even only like a “rhetorical question”? Are these rhetorical questions? What then could “‘rhetorical questions’ in general” be?) A rhetorical question is not even a proper

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question, if a proper question is one that requires and leads us to expect an answer. It is as if that absolute mourning, that improper prosthesis at the very heart of heart itself, can be presented only as a question, a catachrestic question that immediately devolves out into a series of others. Absolute mourning has no place at all, no answer other than that chain of metonyms around an empty center: “Where?” “●” For Miller, these questions are, “like ‘rhetorical questions’ in general, performative demands asking for the reader’s assent,” for the “yes” that is already embedded in the last of those questions (isn’t “heart” the name for the “sensible but invisible and untouchable place” one keeps when “‘my’ heart is first of all the heart of the other, and therefore, yes, greater than my heart in my heart?” [17, above]). Far from being just the answer to a catachresis (“●” “Yes”), the implied answer to a question that only pretends to be a question for the sake of the effect, this “yes” is at the heart of even the most proper question, even of utterance itself. As Derrida argues elsewhere—speaking, as it happens, about Ulysses and what happens at the end of it— Yes indicates that there is address to the other. This address is not necessarily a dialogue or an interlocution, since it assumes neither voice nor symmetry, but the haste, in advance, of a response that is already asking. For if there is some other, if there is some yes, then the other no longer lets itself be produced by the same or by the ego. Yes, the condition of any signature or any performative, addresses itself to some other which it does not constitute, and it can only begin by asking the other, in response to a request that has always already been made, to ask it to say yes. (“Ulysses Gramophone” 299)

The rhetorical question is that aspect of any utterance that calls forth first of all nothing but a bare affirmation (“Yes, I hear”), even if that should be silent, implicit, and given only in order immediately to disagree. Without that catachrestic, improper, absolute affirmation of what is shared even when it is refused and placed out of bounds, there could be no utterance. 5. Boundaries are catachrestic, even for a windowless monad where “no sharing or taking part as such exists” (Miller 19, above), or for those enisled “hidden places in the psyche” (Smith 86, above), the enclaves of the crypt (Johnson, above). In this sense of the “as such,” there can be no proper sharing, because all sharing is improper, from the outset and absolutely: this improper sharing is what I have suggested calling absolute sharing. No matter how hedged round by protocols and proprieties it may be, sharing is always in its very first movement something that extends beyond the proper and that takes all the risks of hospitality: improper, unwise, imprudent, beyond calculation. Fidelity itself—the fidelity of Miller to Derrida, or Derrida to Levinas, or of this book’s authors to the Miller and Attridge essays that are its occasion—is not only subject to that law, as it were, of absolute sharing, but emerges from it. Even the most meticulous verbatim citation will be a metonymic slide that takes elsewhere the words it cites. Because of that, the repetitions of fidelity itself will always be marked out, explicitly or not, by another set of repetitions, catachrestic this time, such as those Attridge points out punctuate Derrida’s keeping-faith with Levinas: “Levinas would probably not say it this way . . . Levinas does not say it this way, but . . . even if Levinas never puts it this way” (Attridge 26, above). All sharing is first and foremost, and at heart, improper. But—and this is the characteristic Derridean turn—this impossibility of a pure, proper sharing is precisely what allows there to be sharing, the improper, impure, and incalculable sharings that fill our day. Sharing as such, the general case or principle common to all sharing, the regularity or model to be followed, does not exist: absolute sharing is something that predates all such regularities, models, and principles, as their possibility; without it, they would not arise. Absolute sharing is ineradicable, nowhere at all (“Where?” “●”), because it is the very possibility of place, of boundaries, of markings-out. What it gives

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rise to is sharings, plural, many, and everywhere. There are no rules that completely cover them; we play them by ear. There is no sharing as such, but there are sharings. There may be no sexual relation as such, no model to go by, but there are sexual relations, many of them, improvised again from scratch, each time different. Just as every death is “chaque fois unique, la fin du monde” (Miller 20, above), every sexual relation begins again, from nothing, a conversation across empty air. 6. But if no sharing as such exists, there is also another side to this catachrestic relation. Earlier, Miller has cited Derrida on how the other’s alterity “will always remain inaccessible to an original presentive intuition, an immediate and direct presentation of the here.” . . . Paradoxically, Derrida holds, this inaccessibility is what makes it possible for me to “make contact” with the other as other. “Let us be quite clear that without this unbridgeable abyss, there would be no handshake, nor blow or caress, nor, in general, any experience of the other’s body as such.” (Miller 14, above, citing Derrida, On Touching 191; final emphasis added)

This is quite different from the sense in which there is no sharing or taking part as such. There, the “as such” was the marker of the proper, and the separation of the proper from what is not properly its own: the thing itself, as against the figure, the catachresis. Now, though, it marks a division that is folded over upon itself, doubled as an internal division of the proper from itself: “the division of the selfsame, of me, ipse, meisme, etc.” is also the division “of me from you” (Miller 19, above). Now the proper is the proper only in this exappropriation without possible reappropriation. What this “as such” now marks is that there is no proper except in this division of itself against itself, no touch without the unbridgeable abyss. If, as Wordsworth says, “an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven” (qtd. in Smith 75, above), the very solidity of the monument is already hollowed out, made porous by commemoration. And in this, the distinction between the figure and the thing itself becomes catachrestic: “Nancy’s experience . . . of having the heart of another person . . . beating in his own breast, perhaps a woman’s heart, is not a figure for absolute mourning. It is absolute mourning, self-same, ipse, the thing itself” (Miller 20, above). And, we may add, as such.

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Index Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, 5, 6, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 73n9, 83, 84, 117–29; and Lacan, 120, 128 Adorno, Theodor, 132, 135–38, 138n1, 139n5 Agamben, Giorgio, 99, 100, 136 alterity, 13–15, 24, 32, 49–50, 70, 87, 94, 100, 133, 157 Apfelbaum, Erika, 126 Arad, Michael, and Peter Walker, 70 archive, lyric as, 80–82, 84–85; and death drive, 81, 90n10; Aristotle, 5, 10, 108, 110 Arrivant. See haunting Asseily, Alexandra, 53 Attridge, Derek, 2, 3, 4, 23–39, 91–93, 106, 124, 125, 132, 134, 156n5 Augustine, 18 Auschwitz, 121, 131–32, 135–37; See also Adorno; Holocaust Austin, J. L., 81; See also performative

catachresis, 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 16, 108, 154nn1–2, 155–56nn4–5, 157n6 Caygill, Howard, 32 Chamaa, Nasser, 46, 53–54 Coviello, Peter, 65 Critchley, Simon, 38n8, 49, 50, 58, 59n5, 115n2, 115n7 cryptonymy, 6979, 83–84, 118–23, 125–29, 154n1, 156n5 Davis, Colin, 121-22 death drive, 81, 90n10, 108–9, 112–13, debt, 1, 93 deconstruction, 2, 3, 5, 38n4, 45, 47, 49, 57, 59n5, 86, 93, 100, 101n6, 103– 14, 133 de Man, Paul, 11, 24 democracy, 47, 86, 99; dedemocratization, 103–14; to come, 45, 55–56, 58 Derrida, Jacques, “Acts of Religion,” 59; “Adieu,” 26, 27; Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, 23, 27, 28, 29; Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 23, 26–29, 32, 36, 39n18, 131–34, 137, 138nn2–3, 139n4; Aporias, 63; Archive Fever, 80, 85, 90n10; “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” 25, 35, 94; “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” 57; “Circumfession,” 24; On Cosmopolitanism, 43–45, 51, 52–57, 106; “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” 24; “Derrida avec Lévinas,” 36; “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” 12, 109; “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” 57, 59n2, 91, 94, 98,

Badiou, Alain, 5–6, 99, 105, 107, 110– 14, 114–15nn2–4 Beardsworth, Richard, 38n10 Beckett, Samuel, 135 Beirut, 4, 43–47, 49–52, 57, 59, 86, 98, 106, Figs.3.1–8; See also Garden of Forgiveness; Martyrs’ Square Benjamin, Walter, 5, 44, 56–57, 59n3, 91, 97, 101nn5–6 Bennington, Geoffrey, 26, 38n14 Bernasconi, Robert, 38n8 Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Michael Naas, 37–38n3 Burkhart, Ford, 121, 129n1 Burns, Shannon, 6, 47, 68, 70, 113, 125, 126, 131–39 Caruth, Cathy, 89n8, 89n11, 131 167

168 101nn2–6; “Fors,” 83, 84; The Gift of Death, 18, 25, 36, 39 n16, 53, 135; Glas, 118; Of Hospitality, 56, 62, 69; Hostipitality, 45, 46, 52; Mémoires for Paul de Man, 5, 24, 61, 69, 70, 71, 72; “Le mot d’accueil,” 23; Le Toucher—JeanLuc Nancy, See On Touching; On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy, 9, 10, 11, 12–19, 24, 25, 26, 48, 63, 72, 91, 93, 106, 107, 118, 138n1, 154n1, 155n3, 155n4, 157n6; Politics of Friendship, 48–49, 108; Preface to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, 86; Rogues, 5, 4748, 55, 56, 99, 103–5, 110; Sovereignties in Question, 87; Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 92; Speech and Phenomena, 23; Of Spirit, 109; “Ulysses Gramophone,” 156n4; “Violence and Metaphysics,” 24– 25; “A Word of Welcome,” 23, 26, 29, 30, 36, 38n7; The Work of Mourning, 3, 23, 24, 38n3, 51, 61, 62, 89n7; Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 9, 19, 37– 38n1, 39n15 108, 154n1; Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Louis Labarrière, Altérités, 24; Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies, 101n7; Derrida, Jacques, and Mustapha Tilili, 37 Descartes, René, 13, 27–28 de Vries, Hent, 26, 38n8, 38–39n14, 39n17, 124–25 Dufourmantelle, Anne, 62–63 ecotechnics, 11–12, 20; “ecotechnicity” 9, 17–18, 105 elegy, 78, 85, 88 Engle, Karen, 70 epitaph, 75–76, 77, 28, 80, 81, 89n2 ethics, 24, 25, 28–30, 34, 38n5, 38n8, 38n14, 44-45, 50, 52, 55, 58, 59n5, 76, 89n4, 99, 106–7, 115, 131–36, 138n3; and epitaphs, 77 exquisite corpse, 64

Index Fisk, Robert, 59n2 Floodwall, See Napoli, Jana forgiveness, 4, 45–46, 49, 52–53, 54, 55–57; See also Garden of Forgiveness Freud, Sigmund, 2, 3, 5, 9, 13, 90, 118– 21, 129n1; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 15, 16, 93, 126, 127; New Introductory Lectures, 142 Gallop, Jane, 39n18 Garden of Forgiveness (Beirut), 44, 52– 56, 59 Ghosts. See haunting Gifford, Don, 147 Giroux, Henry A., 71, Ground Zero Memorial (New York), 48, 63, 69–72, 117 Hall, Jonathan, 4, 43–59, 86, 98, 106 Hamacher, Werner, 58, 86, 87 Hanssen, Jens, 47 Hariri, Rafiq, 50 Hartman, Geoffrey, 79, 81, 84, 89nn8– 9, 90n11 haunting, 5, 49, 91–98, 105, 109, 117, 118, 121; as act of hospitality, 61– 65, 69, 106, 132, 154n1; transgenerational, 6, 69, 120, 122– 23, 125–26 Hayter, Alethea, 89n5, 90n15 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 14, 20, 23, 25, 56, 109, 115n3, 138n3 Holocaust, Abraham and Torok as survivors of, 121–29; See also Auschwitz hospitality, 4, 5, 6, 27, 39, 44, 45–47, 52, 62–66, 68, 29-70, 88, 125, 126, 131, 132, 135, 136–38, 138nn3–3, 149–50; See also Thwaites 141–57 Hoyeck, Youssef, 51, Figures 3.5–3.7 humanualism (humainisme), 15, 16, 138n1; Hurricane Katrina memorial (New Orleans), 5, 69–70, 72, 117 Husserl, Edmund, 13–15, 18, 86; See also alterity illeity, 32–33 incorporation, 16, 64, 69, 71–72, 107, 117, 120, 126–27

Index introjection, 14–16, 93, 120, 126 Johnson, Laurie, 6, 63, 69, 70, 73n9, 84, 117–29, 154n1 Johnson, Samuel, 75–77 Joyce, James, Letters, 142; Ulysses 6, 28, 141–54, 156n4 justice; and the emergence of the third, 34, 36; and the law, 44, 45, 54, 5657; to the other, 5, 24–26, 28–37, 38n5, 38n8, 38n11, 91–99; and violence, 101n6 Kafka, Franz, 18–19 Kant, Immanuel, 46, 55, 58, 86, 105, 108, 109, 150 Khalaf, Samir, 49 Krystal, Henry, 137–38 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 6, 12, 120, 122, 128, 142–43, 150–54 Lamb, Charles, 78, 89n5 Landa, Fabio, 121 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 19, 154n1 Leitch, Vincent, 45 Levi, Primo, 135 Levinas, Emmanuel, 2, 4, 5, 23–37, 38n5, 38n8, 38n10, 38n14, 39nn16–18, 44, 58, 92, 93, 100, 131–34, 136–8, 138n3; and face, 28–36: the third, 23–37 Levinson, Marjorie, 87, 90n14 Llewelyn, John, 31 Lyotard, François, 51, 98, 113, 136 Mancuso, Luke, 66 Martyr’s Square (Beirut), 44, 46, 49–50, 53, 55; Figs3.1– 3.7 Mattessich, Stefan, 5–6, 47, 99, 103–15; memorial, Leaves of Grass as, 61–64; See also Ground Zero Memorial, Hurricane Katrina Memorial, Martyr’s Square; memory place; monument memory-place, 79–82, 89n8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 13–15 metonymy, 3, 4, 10–15, 21m 46–49, 51, 53, 54, 82, 101n2, 108, 154nn1–3; See also catachresis; prosthesis Miller, J. Hillis, 2, 3, 6, 9–21, 47, 48, 56, 63, 72, 86, 90n13, 91–93, 106, 107, 108, 118, 124, 128, 136,

169 138n1, 141, 142, 154n1, 155– 56nn3–4, 156–57n5, 157n6 monument, 49, 51–53, 62, 66, 69–72, 79–81; Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 81,” 79–80, 81; “Sonnet 123,” 85; Wordsworthian, 80–83; See also Ground Zero, Hurricane Katrina, Martyr’s Square Morris, Roy J., 65 mourning, absolute, 1–21, 48; infidelity of, 1–3, 24, 38n3; impossible, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 24, 61, 72, 73, 91, 92, 93, 108, 138n1; as a political act, 45; pre-originary, 13–16; See also incorporation; introjection Mules, Warwick, 5, 91–101, 106–8 Naas, Michael, 26, 37 n3 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 3, 9–12, 16–20, 91, 108, 124, 154n1, 157n6 Napoli, Jana, 5, 72 Nelson, Horatio, 75 neoliberalism, 6, 47, 104, 105, 110–14 New Orleans. See Hurricane Katrina New York. See Ground Zero Niederland, William G., 125 Novalis, 17 Oppen, George, 90n14 other, the, 3, 6, 11, 14–21, 23, 45, 48, 56, 59, 62, 63, 65, 69, 71, 73, 85, 87; ghost as, 91–92, 122; Islam as, 103; and justice, 24–37, 38n8, 39nn17–18, 91–98 Park, Terry Lee, 72 Pascal, Blaise, 150 performative, 13, 18, 47, 55, 81, 156n4 phantasmatic corpse, 63, 67, 68, phantom, and impossible mourning, 5, 6, 16, 63, 65, 66, 68–73; introjection/incorporation of other as, 15–16; See also haunting Place de l’Étoile/Sahat al-Nejmeh (Beirut), 44, 46–47, 53 Plato, 104, 110 prosthesis, 4, 18, 88, 93; city as prosthetic device, 45, 48; as metonymy, 9–13, 16, 18, 20, 48, 154, 156; as spectral, 136 Psyche, 3–4, 9–13, 16

170 Rancière, Jacques, 111, 115n6 Rand, Nicholas, 119–120, 121, 122, 123 refugee, 46, 121 Rose, Gillian. 44, 56–57 Rothberg, Michael, 132 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 120, 122 singular, 1–2, 17–18, 25, 26, 28, 31–32, 58, 79, 83–85, 87, 89, 95, 99, 111, 112 singularity, 1, 2, 31, 32, 45, 52, 55, 58, 78, 83–86, 88, 100, 104, 115n4, 153, 154n1, 155n4 Sixth Sense, The, 5, 91–92, 94–100, 106–7 Smith, J. Mark, 5, 75–90, 118 Solidere, 46–47, 50, 52–53, 55, 156n5, 157n6 Specters. See haunting spectrality, 5, 47, 48, 57, 67, 109, 133; and urban space, 45, 47–49, 57 survivor syndrome, 125–26 technē, technicity, 11, 17, 18; technics, 93, 94; See also “ecotechnicity” testimony, 79, 89, 121, 125–26 third, the, 5, 28–37, 38n6, 38n8, 38n11, 38n14, 39n15 Thwaites, Tony, 6, 118, 141–57 Traubel, Horace, 65–66 trauma, 6, 47, 68, 69, 70, 84, 90n11, 113, 119–20, 132, 153; See also cryptonomy, Holocaust Tuggle, Lindsay, 5, 48, 61–73, 117, 123, 154n1

Index Ulysses. See Joyce Vattimo, Gianni, 37n1 Whitman, Walt, 5, 48, 117; “Ashes of Soldiers,” 68, 73n5; Leaves of Grass, 61–69; Drum Taps and Sequel to Drum Taps, 62, 73n5, 73n7; “Hymn of Dead Soldiers,” 73n7; Memoranda, 62, 66, 73n4; “Of Him I Love Day and Night,” 62, 67; “O Living Always, Always Dying,” 68; “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” 66; “My Visits,” 66, “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” 62, 67; Prose Works, 62, “Second Annex—Goodbye, My Fancy” (Preface), 61; “Songs of Parting,” 73n5, 73n7; Specimen Days 62, 66–71; “The Wound Dresser,” 66 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 83, 84, 88, 89n6, 90n15 Wordsworth, John, 76–79, 81–84, 88, 89nn5–6, 90n15; drowning, 78–79 Wordsworth, William, 5, 75–90; “Character of the Happy Warrior”, 75, 76, 88; “Elegiac Stanzas,” 8789; “Essay on Epitaphs”, 81; “I only looked for pain and grief” 78– 81, 83, 87, 88; “Michael”, 80–81; The Prelude, 82, 84; “The Ruined Cottage”, 82; “Song,” 87; “The Thorn,” 82; “To the Daisy, 82–83; “When first I journeyed hither,” 84 world-building, 20-21, 128–29 Yassa, Maria, 121 Žižek, Slavoj, 105, 143–44, 148–51, 153

Contributors

Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York. His many books and articles include work on Derrida and literary theory, James Joyce and poetics. Shannon Burns is working on his PhD thesis on trauma in post-Auschwitz literature, at the University of Adelaide. Jonathan Hall completed his PhD thesis on pragmatism and postmodern fiction at the University of Cambridge in 2004. He is currently teaching in the Department of English at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. His research interests include postmodern fiction, writing the self/writing the nation, religion and nation, and US intellectual history. Laurie Johnson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Queensland. He was awarded his doctorate at the University of Queensland in 2000 for The Wolf Man's Burden (Cornell University Press, 2001). His major current project is an inquiry into the nature of cultural agency and an attempt to develop sound methodologies for tracing the role of individual everyday practices in collective cultural identification, based on an eclectic approach to theories of body, capital, memory, place, praxis, and time, among others. Stefan Mattessich teaches English at Santa Monica College in Southern California. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz. His 2003 book on Thomas Pynchon, Lines of Flight, was a finalist for the MLA First Book Award. He has published numerous articles on contemporary culture and literature in such venues as ELH, Postmodern Culture, Theory & Event, New Literary History, and Modern Language Notes. He is at present working on a book-length project that explores cultural representations of the relations between subjectivity, language, and public space. J. Hillis Miller, one of the foremost literary critics in English, is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of 171

172

Contributors

California Irvine, a former President of the MLA, and the author of more than two dozen monographs and over three hundred articles on literary theory and Victorian and modernist literature. Warwick Mules is the General Editor of the journal Transformations, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. He has published widely in the area of visual and cultural studies, and most recently on environmental aesthetics. He is currently writing a book entitled Contact Aesthetics. Judith Seaboyer teaches Victorian and contemporary literature at the University of Queensland. She has published on British and American contemporary fiction, and is presently working on the turn to pastoral in contemporary literature and on the pedagogy of reading well. J. Mark Smith has a PhD from the University of California, and teaches at Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He is the author of articles on Romantic and contemporary poetry, and of the collection of poems, Notes for a Rescue Narrative (Oolichan, 2007). Tony Thwaites teaches modernist literature and literary and cultural theory at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises and Countersignatures (UP Florida, 2011) and Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (SAGE, 2007). He is currently working on a book on Lacanian narrative theory. Lindsay Tuggle is a poet who completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Sydney.