The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer 9781474465786

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The Poetics of Singularity

The Frontiers of Theory Series Editor: Martin McQuillan

The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer Timothy Clark

Forthcoming:

Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human Barbara Herrnstein Smith Dreams I Tell You Helene Cixous Genius, Genealogies, Genres and the Genie Jacques Derrida

The Poetics of Singularity The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer

Timothy Clark

Edinburgh University Press

© Timothy Clark, 2005

Transferred to Digital Print 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1929 1 (hardback) The right of Timothy Clark to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Series Editor's Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: a school of singularity?

vu IX

x1 1

1 Freedoms and the institutional Americanism of literary study

11

2 Heidegger's dream of singularisation

32

3 The uniquely obvious: singularity in Gadamer's late essays

61

4 Pitching strangely: the poetic in Blanchot

91

5 Derrida: a pragmatics of singularity

124

Epilogue

158

Notes Index

161 180

Series Editor's Preface

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of autocritique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-thancritical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought's own limits? 'Theory' is a name that traps by an aberrant nomial effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a 'name', a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisons such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-isnecessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather, this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking. It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of crossing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines. Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment, this series promotes a certain closeness to

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that spirit: the continued exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory. Martin McQuillan

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the University of Durham for the two periods of research leave during which this book was written, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for a research fellowship. Anthony Mellors read and commented very helpfully on a first draft of the book. Thanks are also due to the series editor, Martin McQuillan, for his helpful feedback, and to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for her continual guidance and support.

Abbreviations

Texts GA BT E IM 1st OBT PLT WL

Gesamtausgabe [Collected Works] (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1975-). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). Elucidations of Holder/in's Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Holder/in's Hymn 'The Ister', trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971).

Texts EH

GC

GE

by Heidegger

by Gadamer

The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Gadamer on Celan: 'Who Am I and Who Are You?' and Other Essays, eds. and trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (eds), Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied

XII

GW HE HW PH PT RB TI

TM TW

The Poetics of Singularity Hermeneutics, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992). Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986-95). Hermeneutische Entwiirfe: Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). Heidegger's Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994). Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976). In Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays, trans. Chris Dawson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 'Text and Interpretation', trans. Dennis J. Schmidt and Richard Palmer, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer Derrida Encounter, eds. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 21-51. Truth and Method, 2nd, rev. edn., trans. Joel Weisheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994). 'The Truth of the Word', trans. Lawrence K. Schmidt and Monika Reuss in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), pp. 135-55.

Texts

B BR F FP IC LV SL SS

by Blanchot

'The Beast of Lascaux', trans. Leslie Hill, Oxford Literary Review, 22 (2000), pp. 9-18. The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995). Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1993). Le livre avenir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). The Sirens' Song, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Sussex: Harvester, 1982).

Abbreviations WF

The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Texts

ASPT

XIII

by Derrida

'A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing', in The Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of the Aesthetic in Theory Today, ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 180-207. ATS Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, eds. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Bio 'Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments', Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989), pp. 812-73. Che 'Che cos'e Ia poesia?', in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 221-37. D Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). DS 'The Double Session', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 173-286. GD The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). M Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Menshah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). P Points: Interviews 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). Passions 'Passions', trans. David Wood, in On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J. P. Leavey Jr and I. McCleod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 2-31, 131-44. Sauf 'Sauf le Nom', trans. John P. Leavey Jr, in On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J.P. Leavey Jr and I. McCleod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 34-85. SIL "'This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida', in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992). UG 'Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce', in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 253-309. WA Without Alibi, ed. and trans Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

To my parents, John and Mary Clark

Introduction: a school of singularity?

I started writing poetry because I didn't like poetry. (Benjamin Zephaniah)

The map of contemporary literary and cultural studies seems as diverse as the United Nations. However, just as the United Nations is too often dominated by a single power, so criticism cannot disguise a dominant paradigm of thinking, however diverse and fractured things may seem: it is one of a general reduction of all intellectual positions to stances within a certain model of cultural politics. To identify the action of literature and art with the cultural arena generally may seem a matter of definition, but what is at issue is a dominant understanding of this identification: to understand a text is taken to mean placing it within the various competing discourses of its time and (or) our own time, discourses being understood instrumentally as competing ways of representing or constructing reality, each reflecting or producing various kinds of identity, often defined in terms of ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, class or gender. The assumption is that once one has cashed in a text in terms of its cultural politics (so understood) nothing worthwhile is left to say about it. During the 1990s, as the cultural politics paradigm became an orthodoxy, a previously dominant 'deconstructive' school refused to disappear, even as it sought to accommodate itself to new pressures. Some thinkers continued to affirm an understanding of the 'literary' in terms of a 'singularity' that refuses to be conceptualisable or mastered, at odds with the aim of explaining a text as a document determined by its historical placement or by the politics of identity. These issues were in some ways already familiar from a previous generation, but refined, strengthened and brought to a new urgency by the times. An argument emerged, now itself becoming rather shop-soiled, that literature should finally be valued rather because it is inassimilable to fixed stances or cultural programmes. It may resist both intellectual dogmatism as well as the premature good

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The Poetics of Singularity

conscience of much politically engaged criticism. It reminds that 'The work always means: not knowing that art exists already, not knowing that there is already a world' (Blanchot, SL, p. 125). The task of this book is partly to offer a schematisation but also a deepening of the term crucial to this poetic, 'singularity'. The presiding figure for such arguments has been Jacques Derrida, especially his essay 'Psyche: Invention of the Other' 1 and his interview 'This Strange Institution Called Literature' (SIL). However, it was often a Derrida simplified and processed who was reasserted. One of the aims of this study is to broaden the frames of reference. Derrida's work emerges as a contemporary variant of a broader, far-reaching school of twentieth-century poetics, whose major impetus comes, usually unacknowledged, from Martin Heidegger's lectures of 1935-6 on 'The Origin of the Work of Art', first published in 1950 (OBT, pp. 1-56), and from his controversial readings of the German Romantic poet, Friedrich Holderlin. Derrida's work continues an impetus found in Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and, to a surprising degree, the late essays of HansGeorg Gadamer. In fact the poetics of singularity in these and other thinkers makes up a distinctive, intensely focused but little acknowledged school of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. Although these may seem familiar names, it would be a mistake to assume that this school forms part of any stock of recognised 'approaches'. It will not be found in any introduction to literary or cultural theory. The aim of this study is principally to unravel this poetic, offering a schematic account of its principle concepts and arguments in four closely intertwined thinkers. A secondary concern is to reaffirm much of this thinking against some dominant assumptions of contemporary criticism, assumptions which, as Chapter 1 suggests, are sometimes no more than an unacknowledged American nationalism. In many of the best accounts of the literary since the early 1990s the word 'singularity' has borne the main weight of argument, sometimes with a rather vaguely self-justifying force. To give a brief list of such work: J. Hillis Miller's Black Holes (1999) (black holes being known in physics as 'singularities', i.e. places where the natural sciences break down), and texts by Isobel Armstrong, Tilottama Rajan, Peggy Kamuf, Samuel Weber and Derek Attridge. Attridge's recent book The Singularity of Literature (2004) is primarily a schematisation of Derrida's thinking in this field. 2 Singularity names the specific being of a text or work, inflected so as to underline its resistance to being described in general categories or concepts. Its resistance may also be understood as upsetting the distinction between the realm of the conceptualisable, that which is masterable by thought, and that of passion, which is nee-

Introduction

3

essarily not so mastered. A recent essay by Derek Attridge affirms 'singularity' in relation to 'a non-discursive, non-rational potential in language and signification'. 3 An early example of these arguments already made the intellectual stakes clear. Bill Readings' paper 'Translatio and Comparative Literature' (1991) affirmed a notion of the singularity of the literary in terms of its provocative resistance to more general narratives (a Ia Lyotard) such as the progress of the European spirit, the struggles of history as the drive toward liberation or, most pertinently, the currently dominant modernist project of a political criticism, of a universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity. This seems to me to be the danger of a certain political consciousness in contemporary criticism which poses the political as the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively assessed. 4 These studies are diverse and challenging. However, a central argument of such defences of the 'literary' can be schematised from them: it differs drastically from the solipsistic 'formalism' to which detractors would reduce it and affirms the singularity of the literary as not only resisting but actively critiquing those more general contexts or categories that might attempt to contain it. 5 The literary may be singular as a mode of discourse whose inventiveness, while being based on certain conventions and rubrics, may also exceed being understood in terms of any pregiven linguistic or political or cultural norm. The literary may be an 'event', that is something that cannot be fully understood theoretically but must be engaged in its specific performance (word by word or line by line in the unfolding text). It may even, on occasion, be capable of transforming the conventions of understanding which made up its initial readability. These are also the crucial elements of what I take 'singularity' to mean in this study. However, my especial focus, as well as tracing this thinking to a much broader arena of thought dominated by Heidegger, is the implicitly anti-determinist, acausal force of eventhood, of inexplicability -something for nothing6 - at work in the thought of singularity. Its force, as a refusal of given categories, is to be understood by no thinking or conception which does not also, in the process, alter itself, changing even what 'understanding' will have meant. Singularity, in other words, may involve a kind of acausal discontinuity. This discontinuous jump is thought of in several ways in Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot, Nancy and Derrida, but it names for each something that, necessarily, cannot be anticipated or objectified. At issue in reading a literary text, however gently, is the force of a possible discontinuity, that the understanding

4

The Poetics of Singularity

achieved by the minute discipline of following its terms is not a kind of continuous progression of insight, but - somewhere - a jump. In other words, such 'understanding' (if that is still the best word) is not the modification or enhancement of an underlying consciousness or identity that would end the text as it began it, bar a little increase in its mental stores, but a becoming-other of that consciousness itself, whether minutely or significantly. This is why there must be an anti-intellectualist element in the poetics of singularity: reading as the mere increase in one's stock of ideas or images is not true reading in this alternative sense of existential engagement. One can say of this element of discontinuity, or jump, in the varied conceptions of it given by Heidegger and others, that it correlates with what Hannah Arendt names simply 'beginning' (and, in relation to the human generations, 'natality' 7 ). This is that uneliminable and incalculable element of freedom in (or of) human existence whose political realisation, at the most extreme, is the wide-openness or vertigo of the moment of achieved revolution. This space is necessarily uncomfortable, even unsafe, and usually fleeting: for a space in which new norms may be established is itself, necessarily outside the claim of given laws, a realm of uneasy trust. Arendt writes: It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space. For a moment, the moment of beginning, it is as though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity. 8

Arendt's 'natality' can be brought to bear on the topic of human finitude in Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot and Derrida. Human beings are limited: they are bounded by death and by the fact of birth. In Heidegger and the others, such finitude is usually treated through the more traditional concern with death. I believe, however, that use of the correspondent notion of natality- the fact of birth, of ever new people -will bring out more forcefully all that is affirmative in the thought of these four men (the 'event', the 'poetic', 'suprise'). To return to the reassertion of ideas of 'singularity' in critical work from the 1990s onwards, J. Hillis Miller sums up some other issues when he writes: Literary study hides the peculiarity of literary language by accounting for it, naturalizing it, neutralizing it, turning it into the familiar. This usually

Introduction

5

means seeing it as in one way or another a representation of the real world. Whether this accounting takes the form of relating the work to its author, or of trying to demonstrate that it is typical of its historical time and place, or characteristic of the class, gender, and race of its author, or of seeing it as a mirroring of the material and social world, or of relating to conceptual generalizations about the way literary language works, the unspoken goal is to appease the conscious or unconscious fear people have of literature's true strangeness. 9

This quotation from Miller underlines how something singular in the poetic and literary can be affirmed against the growth of culturalism, whose founding principle could be defined as the taking of everything in and of a text not in its singularity but as an example (as a stance in the process of culture seen as a contestation of diverse identity claims). Instead, the poetic is not fully intelligible by reference to something else as its basis (as a representation of the real etc.) but is a distinctive kind of thing in its own right: 'Poetry- that is the fateful uniqueness of language' (Paul Celan). 10 However, there is also a danger here that 'singular' be allowed to become only some kind of vaguely sensationalised textual 'strangeness', one whose principle drama takes place in the corridors of the professional interpreters and their competitive debates. Yet 'singularity' is also a term exactly suited to address more explicitly 'ethical' concerns, as in Jean-Luc Nancy's reformulations of notions of freedom and community outside their traditional categories, that is, homogenising categories that would attempt to ground what a person or a human community should be on the basis of some supposedly shared nature or attributes. 11 Many of the post-1990 reaffirmations of the singularity of the literary, while drawing explicitly on Derrida, are clearly also feeding from an older and even more influential argument, Immanuel Kant's seminal defence of the aesthetic. The Kant of The Critique ofJudgement (1790) 12 is an indispensable reference because modern defences of the singularity of literature often present themselves in terms which are a radicalisation of his notion of 'reflective judgement', of which the aesthetic was the purest example. A 'reflective' judgement is one in which a particular thing or things are presented to us but we lack a general term or concept by which to determine them- we have an x, so to speak, but we cannot satisfactorily name or conceptualise it. So unlike a determinative judgement, for which we both have an object before us and a definite given concept by which to name it (e.g. 'this insect is a type of beetle'), our act of judgement cannot fix on a determination (this xis a case of ... ?) but is set in search of one. The literary can easily be characterised and defended as just such an

6

The Poetics of Singularity

open, undetermined relation of the singular and the general. Charles Dickens's work, for instance, clearly concerns general issues -the nature of the social, of justice, of knowledge - yet it addresses them through inventing unique and idiosyncratic characters, situations and images (Wackford Squeers, the Jarndyce and Jarndyce Chancery case, the character of Miss Betsey Trotwood, etc.). Such writing is undeniably a form of thinking- there are thoughts on, say, education, the law, the status of women in Victorian Britain - and all are communicated here and with sufficient generality, at least, to keep the Dickens Studies Annual in business. However, this thinking also remains inextricably tied to these singular cases, and these resist translation without loss into the concepts of any broader argument. The tension between the intelligible/conceptual or the generalisable and the unique and opaque is the inherent unrest of the literary. In Rodophe Gasche's words, 'if the generality constitutive of thinking in literature is intrinsically dependent on uniqueness and singularity, this thinking, unable to ground itself in a higher truth, is tortured by a dependence on something that stands in a relation of contradiction to it.' 13 For instance, it is extremely hard to fix, without ambivalence or contradiction, exactly what could be being said in general of the status of women by Dickens's invention of Betsey Trotwood, even assuming, as one cannot, that that is the only topic at issue. For Kant himself it was the peculiar power of a poetic or literary text to be able to express such indeterminate quasi-concepts. Kant's own example is the image of Jupiter depicted as an eagle. In this image, he argues, the reader is given something partly determinate - it is certainly not meaningless in the way a piece of nonsense would be. It engages a precise and energising kind of undecidability. The image appeals to the sensuous imagination as well as expressing various concepts (power, danger, beauty, awe ... ) but none in a fully fixed way: In this way Jupiter's eagle, with the lightning in its claws, is an attribute of the mighty king of heaven, and the peacock of its stately queen. They do not, like logical attributes, represent what lies in our concepts of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else- something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over the whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken. (Critique of Judgement, pp. 177-8)

The major point about the 'aesthetic idea' is that the precise 'sense' of the image, passage or text is untransferrable. The precise connotations at

Introduction

7

issue cannot be divorced from the singular artwork in which it appears or the precise terms in which it is said. Salim Kemal offers the telling example of the cunningly dropped handkerchief which is used in Shakespeare's play to trick Othello into a belief in his wife's infidelity. The handkerchief matters only in terms of the plot of the play: 'The singular use does not determine the properties of handkerchiefs outside the play in that other writers may give those pieces of cloth other uses in their own works.' 14 Also, to the reader or spectator, the handkerchief or the image of Jupiter set off an open range of associations, of sensuous images and concepts whose potential and interplay cannot be summed up or paraphrased. The undecidability of implication (expressed for Kant in then current terms of the association of ideas) is precise enough, even in its elusiveness. Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century summarised: 'We call art ... every compound product in which we are aware of general rules, whose application cannot in the particular case be again brought under rules.' 15 This argument was to inform much literary theory since, often without explicit reference to Kant. Kant had gone on to recuperate this singularity in ways that led into well-known idealisations of the aesthetic. 16 For contemporary 'deconstructive' critics, however, the aesthetic refused this idealist recuperation and remains the realm of the singular in the sense of particulars which mean more than themselves but cannot be understood or determined under some pregiven rule of identificationY However, the fact that, as in Kant's example, the singular form or image means something in itself irreplaceable tended to drop out in favour of the argument about resistance to the domain of conceptuality in general. This rendered the institution of literature as a realm of entities that have the mode of being of a question which exceeds the grasp of any one answer, an attractively democratic arena of open debate which seems to rule out all dogmatism. Isobel Armstong, for instance, reaffirms an argument of this type, giving it an additional basis in psychoanalytic concepts of the transitional object, i.e. 'an intrasubjective space in which meanings are renegotiated' .18 However, to defend literature and the poetic as that which, by definition, escapes critical appropriation is surely a strategy with a limited future. One cannot go banging on indefinitely about the ever-elusive strangeness of the literary without giving the impression that one has nothing more to say. The greatest difficulty here is that, in itself, 'singularity' is necessarily an empty and purely relational term. Everything is 'singular' in some sense, even the tiny blotches on a desk or the intestines of a greenfly. To say of anything that it is 'singular' is the least one can say of it, short of saying nothing at all. For Kant, however, the reflective

8

The Poetics of Singularity

openness of the act of judgement, in art and elsewhere, was still finally determined by other arguments about the likely purposiveness of nature and of human transcendence - i.e. a speculative metaphysics that contemporary thinkers have not felt able to follow. 19 Without this further framing, the 'singularity' of the literary or aesthetic is in danger of becoming merely negative. Too much of the standard defence of the literary as singular comes down to highlighting our not being able to finally identify or fix the meaning of something, and then vaunting this inability or resistance as a kind of vaguely democratic challenge to dogma. So 'singularity', if it is to have specific focus here, needs to be taken much further than being simply ' the literary in so far as it is elusive'. It must be distinguished from arguments to which so-called 'deconstructionism' was often reduced in the 1970s and after: the claim, for instance, that because we can never finalise the meaning of a text, or match it to some (impossible) concept of full or final interpretation, it necessarily always transcends any one context or reading, thus imposing on each reader the task of unending rereading ... and so on - arguments very often performed with the camp drama of an overfamiliar conjuring trick and, beneath the surface pronouncements, recognisably part of a critical culture that still casts every critic as a wannabe intellectual celebrity. These arguments should now be treated as truisms, starting places for thought and not conclusions in themselves. What 'singularity' means in the thinkers covered here, however, is something positive. Its challenge is that of a peculiar economy in the working of language whereby it may seem to give something for nothing, to speak volumes in one aphorism, to imply without vagueness a host of implication, or to convey a sharp affect of which it is the only possible statement. Derrida, for instance, acknowledges the force in Heidegger's thinking on 'the irreducibility of song or of consonance in the poem (Gesang)', 'the non-semantic, non-substitutable character of the letter, in a word, of that which has to be learned by heart' (P, p. 314). Thus the singularity at issue here is not just part of a merely negative claim about the literary's resistance to meaning. Instead, whether valued greatly or not, it is, literally, the irreplaceable. The literary or poetic is not primarily to be conceived in relation to some sort of reflective entanglement of human judgement confronted with some forever yet-to-be-fully determined object. This way of looking at it remains too epistemological, too centered on the intellectualising consciousness of the professionalised interpreter. Instead, this book aims to draw out what can broadly be called a 'post-existentialist' strain in the four thinkers covered here. 20 What is at issue is not some endlessly replayed game of Interpreter's Dilemma, but something more akin to a

Introduction

9

realm of existential risk, however muted, with an anti-intellectualist element at odds with the dominant culture and assumptions of professionalised criticism. The discontinuous jump inherent in the very idea of singularity opens, even if only in often fleeting or minor ways, a force of 'beginning' in Arendt's sense. In other words, the interest is in something which is directly contrary to the basic neo-Kantian postulate of most modern thinking (analytic and 'postmodern') that there is no given which is not already an interpretation, or a function of our mode of approach, that we are inextricably enmeshed in our cultural representations, whether depicted as 'ideology' or the 'prison house of language'. This brief introduction must end here. One guiding thought, however, may be left to stand as a kind of epigraph governing all the chapters to come. To read a text solely as itself and on its own terms, in its singularity: no idea might seem simpler - not to make the text an example of some social or cultural point, nor a facet of some theory of poetics, but merely to affirm it in itself and as it is. The point is not to interpret the singularity of the text but to move towards a point, never finally attainable, at which the text is being understood only on its own singular terms. That is to say, the reading attains a space in which the text is felt to project itself so specifically that the terms of any mode of interpretation one might want to apply begin to be felt as inadequate. Singularity in this sense is both a mode of demand and a performative act - it ideally dictates the frame within which it is able to appear, and submits the reader to a kind of reversal, able to get near the text only by withdrawal of any pregiven method of approach. It becomes, not something one can simply think, but something that has to be let think, in its own way, within a space one tries to hold open. The ideal is an irenic and perhaps utopian one. But each of the four thinkers treated here bears the extraordinary and multiplicitous events of thought that arise in the carrying out of this simple, necessarily impossible yet thought-provoking idea. The bulk of this book traces this idea in four chapters devoted primarily to each of the four major thinkers in turn. First, however, a more general chapter must sharpen the sense of the stakes of this 'poetics of singularity' by comparing it to other elements of the contemporary institution of criticism.

Chapter 1

Freedoms and the institutional Americanism of literary study

To open the chapter with a quotation: In Derrida's work an ambivalent and marginalised French-Jewish-Algerian voice, both coloniser and colonised, is absorbed into and reinflects the elitist eclecticism of Parisian intellectual culture, and this produces such paradoxically authoritarian pronouncements as 'what is proper to a culture is not to be identical to itself. ' 1 This sentence is a quotation from a hypothetical book. It forms a wouldbe demystifying account of the intellectual career of Jacques Derrida, offered in terms of the dominant cultural political paradigm. This kind of authoritative culture speak is often taken as the kind of thing any aspiring critic should aim for, with its combined effect of sweeping panorama, political astuteness and explanatory power. In fact, though, such a sentence is twaddle: for it misleadingly and at once asserts the basis of a thinking to lie wholly in social identity and cultural location (Derrida's specific background in this case). This chapter will try to map out some things at stake in the poetics of singularity by setting it against some dominant features of contemporary literary and cultural theory, as exemplified by this hypothetical (I hope) book on Derrida. This is to argue that, for all the frequent dedication to progressive causes, the culture of criticism today often undercuts or compromises the freedom it seems to defend by promulgating only a specific, even a bourgeois Western model of it. Against this, my point is not, primarily, to offer some sort of alternative cultural-political line on the texts discussed here (though it may probably be read that way in any case, so deeply ingrained are the assumptions that this is the only way to read). Instead, the overall argument is what might be termed a post-existentialist one: that the thinkers covered here each contemplate the poetic and literary in terms of an uncomfortable freedom, one which will challenge the dogmatism in thinking in terms of cultural-political determinism.

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The Poetics of Singularity

Throughout, the topic of singularity is shown to feed into the distinctively post-existentialist thinking of the four thinkers, offering an alternative model of the challenge of the literary that is shown often to be ethically superior to the dominant culturalism. To treat something as singular is to move towards the idea of seeing it as irreplaceable, sole witness of what it says, an example only of itself, and thus 'free' in the sense of not being fully intelligible in the broadly deterministic categories of culturalism, which strives to explain all in terms of social location. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that 'absence of foundation is foundation for democracy'. 2 He is perhaps alluding to Claude Lefort's work on the distinctiveness of the modern idea of democracy, that of all the regimes known, it 'is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place and to have maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real', that is to affirm that those who exercise power 'do not, indeed, embody it'. 3 One danger for democracy lies in the very temptation to find foundations for it, for these may too soon serve to prescribe specific institutions or groups of people as a positive or even exclusive model of the democratic more generally. However, I believe this is exactly what has happened in much contemporary literary and cultural theory and that the idea of democratic freedom at work there is often an anachronistic and even damaging one. Against this, the poetics at issue here can be related to a notion of 'freedom' that Jean Luc Nancy and others work out from Heideggerian thinking, hermeneutics and deconstruction. The issue is less to disagree head-on with the dominant cultural studies paradigm, but to investigate the way it is often destructive of its usually worthy ideals. The political philosopher Wendy Brown argues 'how certain well-intentioned contemporary political projects and theoretical postures inadvertently redraw the very configurations and effects of power that they seek to vanquish.' 4 So the basic argument of this chapter is to contrast two ideas of freedom. The dominant cultural politics paradigm rests on notions of freedom that look, implicitly or explicitly, to the traditional discourse of rights as it demarcates the claims of identities taken as already given. Opposed to this, however, is the more disconcerting but also less circumscribed idea of freedom inherent in Hannah Arendt's notion of 'beginning', a state of radical emptiness prior to or outside given determinations of identity and ethical and legislative norms. Another way of expressing this is through what the political philosopher Paul Patton terms 'critical freedom', 'critical' here referring not to the institution of criticism, but to the notion of a crisis or turning point, one 'at which some state or condition of things passes over into a different state or condition'. Patton contrasts 'critical freedom' with the other 'liberal' model:

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Critical freedom differs from the standard liberal concepts of positive and negative freedom by its focus upon the conditions of change and transformation in the subject, and by its indifference to the individual or collective nature of the subject. By contrast, traditional liberal approaches tended to take as given the individual subject and to define freedom in terms of the capacity to act without hindrance in the pursuit of one's ends or in terms of the capacity to satisfy one's most significant desires. 5 In so far as the poetics of singularity can be identified with any kind of cultural politics, it can be said to affirm critical freedom against the limits and assumptions of the liberal model.

Individual freedom The association of literature and notions of freedom is all pervasive in Western poetics, so deeply ingrained that it is rarely made explicit. Ideas of freedom have been the central reference point for poetics since the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury, David Hume and others argued that civic freedom is both a condition for achievement in the arts and is sustained by them. 6 Romanticism has often been defined as an intellectual movement dominated by reactions both for and against ideas of individual liberty associated with the American and the French revolutions. The promotion of individual or social freedom became in effect, after the decline of patronage, the dominant argument for the utility of literature. Defences of literature in the twentieth century repeatedly linked it to ideas of democracy, dissidence and democratic debate, the right of free speech. In an interview of 1992, for instance, Derrida defended literature as an institution peculiar to modern societies with a democratic element, those with conventions and laws which enable an institution of language within which anything can be said, and in any way (SIL). In 1948 JeanPaul Sartre defended the literary as a supreme enactment of human freedom: 'The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it.' 7 Sartre corroborated Kant's argument that the artwork is an end in itself but argues that this does not sufficiently 'account for the appeal which resounds at the basis of each painting, each statue, each book' (p. 34). For the work only exists if it is first seen or read. It must appeal to a reader as a condition of its effective existence. So 'the author writes in order to address himself to the freedom of readers, and he requires it in order to make his work exist' (p. 36). During the Cold War the association of literature with democratic values often focused on the writing of dissident authors behind the Iron Curtain. The association of the literary institution and freedom has if anything

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intensified since then. This may be borne out by the growing tendency to categorise literature in terms of various 'minority' social groups whose 'voice' it is taken to be. The increasing diversification of criticism into competing camps attests further the centrality of ideals of freedom as what is at stake in each. The dominant conception of freedom implicitly at work in the institution of literature for the past two hundred years has generally been the liberal one: it has frequently formed the idea, for author or reader, of a mode of self-discovery and self-realisation against whatever may be inauthentic in tradition, in received norms of thought and behaviour or overly conventional elements of the personality. Such underlying ideas of the utility of literature come to accompany its increasing association with, even absorption by, institutions of education. The idea of freedom at issue here intertwines negative and positive elements. It is negative in so far as it affirms the right of an individual or a group to be rid of oppressive force, falsifying dogmas or mere delusion: it is positive, correlatively, in understanding this casting off as the assertion or realisation of an identity hitherto suppressed. Service to such a concept of freedom, usually too broadly assumed to be explicit, still functions as the dominant idea of what a modern writer is for. Assumptions and aspirations about freedom have informed not only the dominant conception of the social function of the writer but also technical minutiae concerning genre, form and technique. One of the crucial arguments to inform this link between ideas of art and ideas of individual freedom was Immanuel Kant's notion of aesthetic 'disinterest', that a kind of detachment or 'disinterestedness' is the condition of the beautiful and of its true perception. This does not mean that the spectator of a painting or reader of a poem should adopt a kind of passive contemplativeness, rendering art some sort of escapist entertainment. The notion of 'interest' at issue here simply means that which is important for its relation to something else. So a 'disinterested' entity in this sense is just one valued for its own sake, as its own end and seeming purpose. Thus, for Kant, the relation to the beautiful is disinterested in the sense of being unconstrained. As such it is not merely a putting out of action of the will, a kind of apathetic stepping out of things (as in Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's misreadings of Kantian disinterestedness). It is a realisation or affirmation of its object, freed to exist in itself, apart from the need to be justified in relation to other things or ends. Thus, for Kant, the aesthetic was a realm of freedom, defined in terms of autonomy or self-legislation - something realising its essence unconstrained by 'external' factors. Jay Bernstein writes:

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In claiming that works of art are devoid of external ends, and hence products of actions done for their own sake, Kant is insisting that such production not only presupposes freedom in the weak sense but manifests freedom, instantiates it, aims at it, has freedom for its meaning. Such acts are the production of freedom through freedom. 8

The claim of freedom extends, necessarily, to the disinterested nature of the person encountering a work of art, judging whether something is 'beautiful' or not. The judgements of taste as to beauty are 'free' in that they can hold up a specific work as an 'example' of successful art but never as a rule embodying principles to which all other supposedly beautiful objects must conform. The lack of a definite rule that could determine in advance whether something is 'beautiful' or not is no deficiency: it is crucial to the link between such judgements and Kant's ideal of freedom as autonomy. Aesthetic judgements may be general ones- not just expressions of personal preference - but they will only be genuinely aesthetic judgements if each person making them is following, without prejudice or interest, their own mind and really saying what they think. In this way, the claim of the aesthetic is also that of a liberation of ourselves from falsehood, from mere conformity or self-deception (e.g. saying that 'xis beautiful' because it is the fashion or the king approves it). In other words, the ideal of a universality founded on unconstrained judgements, of people deciding for themselves, correlated easily with emerging ideals of enlightened government. Any one judgement of taste, then, cannot be a rule, only an 'example' that others might follow or not. The would-be universality of the judgement that 'xis an excellent work of art' can exist only on the basis of such agreement freely achieved. Kant's importance here is that his arguments enabled an assimilation of issues in aesthetics and poetics to the general political tendency of the post-Enlightenment, the 'liberal' one. 'Liberalism' can be described here, following K. A. Appiah, as the recognition of civil and political rights to freedom in the protection of the individual person against state power and space for self-development and self-creation: What characterizes the beginnings of liberalism is, then, a combination of political institutions: constitutions, rights, elections, and protections for private property. In the twentieth century, in both Europe and North America, there was added to the recognition of these political rights a concern to guarantee certain minimum conditions of welfare for every citizen, what we calleven if the extension of the term rights in this way is a little controversial economic and social rights. 9

The Kantian ideal of aesthetic autonomy dovetails so neatly into thinking in terms of individual right that it became what surely remains the

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most powerful principle of artistic form in Western art to this day. The repeated ideal is that the work not be shackled by inherited norms but rather achieve, from out of itself, the form appropriate to it, one that most expresses its distinctive nature. A rhetoric of innovation and liberation becomes standard in manifestos of artistic schools and poetic creeds. With some exceptions (the religious poetics of G. M. Hopkins for instance) the freedom of the artwork came to stand repeatedly for various images of human freedom. The liberated form of the modern artwork, in fields as diverse as, say, Naturalist fiction, 'free verse' or the aims of the surrealist movement, is held to enable or release topics or elements of the human psyche and perception previously suppressed. We see this in modernist ideals of achieving some pure essence of the poetic that might be opposed to more exploitative or commercialised facets of culture. It reappears in so-called postmodernism, whether this be in a work's use of pastiche and fragmentation to defamiliarise and free itself from inherited genres and modes, or in the now widespread notion of the act of writing as a kind of performance or 'construction' of 'the self'. 10

Some basic assumptions of contemporary criticism Literary culture has formed an indispensable pillar of democratic debate, offering an arena for suppressed voices or issues to incite public notice or controversy. Even critics who take a more suspicious view of the workings of power and 'ideology' in literature, as in its appropriation as a bastion of traditional values, still belong to and hence reaffirm the same public sphere of open debate. This broad allegiance also characterises the thinking I am schematising here under the rubric of the poetics of singularity. However, this school also challenges some inherent norms of this broadly liberal literary institution as it has existed for over two centuries, finding it still limited and oppressive in crucial respects. To turn now to the far narrower field of the critical institution today: with the dominant cultural politics paradigm the liberal conception of freedom has become prominent almost to the point of self-caricature. Let us try to schematise those aspects of the current critical orthodoxy which are at issue here. The schematisation is broad, but should be very familiar to anyone in contact with the culture of the humanities academy. At the basis of the cultural studies paradigm - often even when it does lip service to thinkers who implicitly differ in this respect - remains the ideal of freedom in the sense of the Kantian and modernist ideals of selflegislation. Countless critical arguments, reading the major issues in a text as some sort of struggle for economic independence and/or personal

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fulfilment, often simply assume as a norm the model of autonomy or selflegislation. These readings enact, in other words, the notion of freedom as the realisation of a suppressed or distorted essence, affirmed against kinds of inhibition to it, whether these be the power of tradition, social oppression, the ideological connotations of the medium or systematic prejudice. That is to say, the text is seen in terms of the self-assertion or contestation of identities, understood as part of the impulse to selfrealisation of a group, class or nation. In weaker critics, this has tended towards the stance that the only things in a text of final interest are those stateable in terms of such a model of contestation (so William Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', for instance, is 'really' (as they say) a textual strategy expressing the stance of a disillusioned radical in the insecure context of England in 1798). Why attack such thinking at all? Its democratic credentials at least seem generally clear. One problem is that the model of freedom that looks to notions of rights and individual autonomy is a long way from being neutral. The fundamental claim of this critical practice is that a notion of identity, either as given or striven for, can serve as an exhaustive principle of explanation for anything in or of the text at issue. That is, anything which a person of type x or of type y does or writes can be understood as a representation of that x-ness or y-ness. Identity, whether individual or collective, is held to be an agent whose every representation or act is at once an affirmation or assertion of itself. Hence, a writer who finds herself describable as, say, 'gay', 'Iranian' and 'Christian' will have critics striving to explain all she writes in terms of the self-making of that 'identity'. Cultural processes are seen as the labour of various and often competing representations, with the underlying issue a 'freedom' understood as an identity's self-realisation. Here, though she never writes explicitly of literary criticism, the work of the political philosopher, Wendy Brown, is indispensable, especially her work on the ever-contentious meaning of 'right' or 'rights'. In contemporary cultural politics and criticism, the model of human agency as the striving towards self-possession/realisation draws implicitly on some deeply entrenched assumptions about 'rights'. 'Rights', as Brown argues, originated primarily as a social safeguard for an individual, free to enjoy his/her property apart from threats of arbitrary state power on the one hand and social disorder and theft on the other.U As they form part of such a general social framework, she argues that an appeal to rights in contemporary disputes often forms a double-edged sword. For 'rights' necessarily codify systems of power, ideas of property and of (constituted) identities even as they seek to protect those caught up in them. This is why Brown is uncomfortable with talk of striving for the 'rights' of minorities

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-for such 'rights' also tend to entrench and confirm the disadvantaged identity they nominally protect. Likewise, she is wary of 'the emergence of politicized identity rooted in disciplinary productions but oriented by liberal discourse toward protest against exclusion from a discursive formation of universal justice' (p. 58). Such a set-up may reinforce an essential pillar of the domination it seemingly contests: 'It reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified "I" that is disenfranchised by an exclusive "we'" (pp. 64-5). In effect, work on kinds of contestation for cultural power and recognition is too often 'tethered to a formulation of justice that reinscribes a bourgeois (masculinist) ideal as its measure' (p. 59). It reinforces the norm by its way of protestation of exclusion from it, an exclusion that allows its advocate only a moral superiority with a hidden investment in its own impotence (p. 73). Likewise, a focus on domination in politicised literary criticism too often shrinks in practice to the mere policing of inequalities. Brown argues that there is a need to find ways of contesting domination through a better vision of collective life, not through moral reproach (p. 47). Brown's point is not that such a model of cultural politics misses genuine grievances and deprivations, but that it gauges these in terms of an ideal taken from within the social framework being criticised (hence the stress on 'exclusion', 'marginalisation', etc. with their implicit, underhand valuation of the central as norm). In this way, instead of politics being a matter of aspirational ideals as to the nature of living together well, such thinking surreptiously confirms as a human norm an ideal of personhood and self-conception which is that of the privileged. Even while this structure of thinking- the ideal of individual autonomy pitched against repressive authority or falsehood- is sometimes criticised, its basic contours continue to determine the vast majority of literary critical practice. 'Culture' itself is broadly understood as the antagonistic, multi-layered, heterogeneous interaction of different groups, each asserting and working their self-representations according to the same model. Hence the tendency to make all politics mean identity politics and to see a 'radical' stance as 'a voluntarist politics of self-affirmation' .12 Sometimes this may become an identity politics that can only continue to affirm itself and its insignia (its positive freedom) by re-enacting and even seeking out marks of past oppression against which to restage its efforts (its negative freedom), hence, in literary criticism, the sense that far too much work hinges about the reaffirmation of values which almost all readers will already have. Brown notes that institutionalized freedom premised upon an already vanquished enemy keeps alive, in the manner of a melancholic logic, a threat that works as domination

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in the form of an absorbing battle with the past. Institutionalised freedom arrayed against a particular image of unfreedom sustains that image, which dominates political life with its specter long after it has been vanquished and preempts appreciation of new dangers to freedom posed by institutions designed to hold the past in check. (p. 8) Criticism of this kind can train its weaker students merely to an unscholarly complacency - the idea that to give a critical reading of a work means just to hunt out some features of prejudice in the characters or contexts, put markers on them and walk off in triumph. The issue is exacerbated by the philosophical laxity of contemporary theory. A general vague acceptance of elements of anti-foundationalist arguments bolsters too quickly arguments that all things be seen in terms of a cultural politics that affirms modern notions of freedom as self-realisation on behalf of under-represented groups, without a sense of the specifically liberal model of subjectivity such notions depend on and reinforce. Hence the unthematised rhetoric that pervades so much criticism: 'prison' ('prison house of language'), 'imprisoned', 'escape', 'free ourselves from', 'chained to', 'hemmed in by', 'held captive by', 'hostage to', 'subverts power', 'challenges the authority of', 'defies', 'resists'. Transgressive' or 'subversive' become ultimate terms of praise; to call a text 'marginalised' becomes to flag up its massive centrality, the noncanonical functions as a kind of canon, and so on. After Kant, formal and rhetorical innovation and the supposed liberation of some facet of the human are continually correlated. The same dynamic plays itself out in the cultures of criticism and commentary. Jonathan Ree argues that much contemporary thought, however alert to issues of historicity, is itself hiddenly dominated by a form of historicism by virtue of what he terms its 'modernist' institutional culture: For modernisn is not so much a particular style, as a particular kind of historical self-consciousness about style. Its twin imperatives are to avoid being provincial and to avoid being out-of-date; or, to put it more positively, to conform with the norms which govern the up-and-coming epoch. It divides the world with a single fence, with its own brave modernity on this side and stupefied provincial traditions on the other. Modernism, one might say, is a streamlined historicism. 13 Such modernism, reinforced by the basic institutional frameworks in which criticism and discussion take place (professional competitiveness and surveillance), perpetuates Enlightenment ideals of freedom as selflegitimation, of self-affirmation as the being liberated from ignorance or prejudice. What disturbs Ree is the kind of personal culture and self-image that too often emerges out of a broadly worthy Enlightenment tradition,

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and which 'we' critics find it hard not to adopt. He writes, 'the ultimate rhetorical and dialectical device of modernism is the phrase "no longer" along with claims that x or yin some author is "astonishingly modern"' (pp. 974-5). The objects of such a modernist consciousness appear on a scale calibrated from 'radical' on one side through to 'progressive', 'traditional', 'conservative' and finally 'reactionary' on the other. It may become at worst 'an epochal self-consciousness that does nothing except chronicle its own timeliness' (p. 976). The under-acknowledged basis of modern criticism becomes a kind of academic imaginary that makes the critic into a hero or heroine of a progressive narrative of liberation through knowledge. In other words, assumptions that critics may well attack in texts they are studying still actively determine the culture of intellectual production for critical work (such as that surrounding this very book), and are built into its institutional requirements. Ethically, such a stance always threatens to be less genuinely 'engaged' than a simplifying striving to do away with politics altogether as a space of inherent moral entanglement, uncertainty and difficult decision.

Deconstruction 'modernised' The institutionalised dominance of the (liberal) model of agency may underlie the way the massive effect of thinking associated with deconstruction and the work of Derrida has played out in practice since the early 1980s. The liberating effect of such work was a defining feature of intellectual life in the fast quarter, of the twentieth century but it happened in large part through the assimilation of 'deconstructive' modes of thinking into the essentially 'modernist' ones built into professionalised criticism as an institution. This can be seen especially in the legacy (from the earlier Derrida) of a conception of 'the metaphysical' as a block mode of thought held to be definitive for the West and its history. Texts and people are continually subjected to kinds of trial procedure designed to either condemn or acquit them of degrees of complicity in metaphysical/colonial/patriarchal thinking. Herman Rapaport writes: In postcolonialist studies we are told by many researchers that metaphysics is the reigning paradigm of colonial thinking; and, for some decades now, feminists have argued that patriarchal writing is inherently metaphysical and/or phallogocentric. In each case an antimetaphysical ideology has been extirpated from deconstruction, and its polemical force is that of a test that distinguishes between correct and incorrect thinking. 14

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In this way, in the modernist culture of criticism, supposedly superseded notions of progress, of subjectivity and freedom, have re-entrenched themselves in ways deeply antipathetic to the less aggressive understanding of deconstruction. One problem with the freedom as autonomy model that has re-emerged is its inherent violence in positing a central identity conceived as a striving against an antagonist in the form of tradition, prejudice, etc. In so far as the critic also tends to identify with the agent of this struggle, it produces an us/them polarisation that is conflictual, confrontational and often unhelpfully self-righteous. In Derrida the recognition that there are 'identifications' rather than identities, or that identities are constitutively non-identical, pushes his later work towards an affirmation of universal exceptionalism and singularity (that' Every other (one) is every (bit) other' [tout autre est tout autre])_lS In culturalist work that nominally looks to Derrida, on the other hand, recognition of division within identities was often assimilated to the modernist liberal model. It produced a certain structure of thought that now underlies perhaps the majority of new critical interpretations of literary works. The argument of deconstruction on the impossibility of any unitary identity and the irreducibility of the singular has been assimilated as something that is only superficially similar. The decisive step is taken when this impossibility is taken to determine a psychology. A good example here is William Connolly's formulation: 'Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.' 16 In other words, a constitutive lack is held to underlie a drive towards 'identity', so that denial of the lack or otherness within the would-be unitary self is argued to manifest itself in a rejection or suppression of real others outside. This produces a seemingly neat formula for sketching the workings of structures of domination and prejudice: the would-be secure identity (say of a masculinist self-image as hero) lives in a state of denial of its own lack which may lead to immediate social-political effects (e.g. casting the other as 'the native' and inferior). At the same time, the 'marginalised' other retains, in this set-up, a pivotal position that is immediately ready to be celebrated as its 'subversive' potential. In other words the deconstructive argument has become transformed into a kind of all-explanatory first cause in cultural politics, a psuedo-explanatory and ubiquitous psychological drive whose generality enables it to embrace almost any kind of human activity in terms of categories of identity/otherness and inclusion/exclusion. Take, for instance, the famous mid-Victorian sensation novel by Mary E. Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862). In this novel the central figure initially corresponds to an idealized female stereotype

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of youth, beauty and demure deference. In fact, Lady Audley emerges as both a bigamist and a determined would-be murderer. In the modern reception of this book, critics argue that she comes to be vilified in the narrative because she held the place, especially in the minds of women readers, of that angry 'otherness' whose denial is at the basis of a socially sanctioned identity, even as, at the same time, her actions supposedly enact the attractions of that 'otherness'. So, Lady Audley's condemnation and final incarceration as 'mad' are thus, it is argued, 'necessary' to the socially sanctioned standard of sane normality in Victorian lifeY However crudely workable this reading, its basic underlying assumption is that of a universal drive for (a certain idea of) identity which is itself never examined. Such a mechanism for social explanation is now almost ubiquitous in the reading of literature and culture. It is widely adaptable: such otherness/within (exclusion as inclusion) structures of supposed self-assertion can be made to work for almost any cultural context, as in the suppositions account of Derrida with which this chapter opened. It can be applied equally to individual psychology and to the self-definition of large cultural groups. For instance, Henry Yu mars an interesting essay on Tiger Woods and multiculturalism by drawing on the same questionbegging formula in a seemingly succinct summary of the joint origins of American nationalism and racialism: 'Trying to prove their worth in a transatlantic world dominated by British culture, postcolonial Americans created definitions of whiteness that both celebrated and denigrated what was perceived to be native to the United States.' 18 Was it really so neatly simple? This model's breadth of application, however, also suggests its vacuousness. Such readings drive an all-flattening highway through the real complexity and multiplicity of human events. They are insidiously reductive in that they always pivot around one unexpressed but all-determining norm, that of a supposedly natural drive towards self-assertion in self-definition. An entity, whether single or collective, is held to be striving for or asserting a unitary identity, one whose self-realisation is assertion against others. This is the 'ideal' whose seemingly built-in desirability shapes the contours of everything in a text being discussed: the contestation of various kinds of identity interacting with and 'constructing' each other in this aggressive drive towards selflegislation. Although critics may refer on the surface to psuedo-deconstructive or psychoanalytic arguments, it is most often this hidden liberal and even neo-Darwinian model that determines the reading. When a critical essay refers to the 'construction' of identity it is most often this implacable norm that is working itself out. 19 In other words, the supposedly anti-essentialist gesture (identity is made or is a project, not a given) is not what it seems at all, for an assumed norm as to what

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identity is in the first place (made or given) is already decisive. It determines what Peggy Kamuf satirises as a critic's working out of someone's "'raceclassgender" coefficient' .20 Derrida's insight is turned into a methodological tool for describing once more the interaction of various competing groups striving for autonomy. Deconstruction is absorbed as a move or moment in what is basically the same old set-up. Notions of identity as a 'social construction' - for all their seeming endorsement of anti-essentialist arguments against identities being seen as 'given', still in fact draw upon the very notions of subjectivity that are nominally at issue. For although such counter-cultural constructions may be argued by critics to be 'subversive' of the dominant order, this very way of thinking surreptitiously reinforces its aggressive norms. It does not change the basic conceptual function or structure of a term to put inverted commas around the use of it, especially when that use is still pivotal to the whole argument.

Institutional Americanism Wendy Brown writes that 'contemporary political moralism tends to conflate persons with beliefs in completely nonvolunteristic fashion: persons are equated with subject positions, which are equated with identities, which are equated with certain perspectives and values. To be a white woman is thus equated with speaking or thinking as a white woman .. .' 21 What Brown does not see perhaps, and which is conceivably more difficult to think from within the United States than across the ocean, is a further dynamic that may govern the stance occupied by that critic who sets out to explain the features of a text in terms of the workings of such 'subject positions' (e.g. x does x because she is a woman, another does y because she is white, while z affirms the view of an Inuit man etc.). This intellectual stance also works to define the person who takes it. In other words, it expresses a drive to position oneself as the embodiment of a supposedly fully enlightened eye to whom all these supposed subject positions and identities are visible and morally mappable. The progressivist culture of professionalised criticism makes this stance extremely hard to avoid. In addition, the old ideals of detachment and objectivity in a critical writing inevitably acquire a moralistic tinge with this particular model of cultural mapping. Even writers who affirm their own ethnic or other particularity often really do so from the position in which freedom is inherently embodied in the overview of the critic. From a genuinely international perspective there is yet another striking aspect of the cultural politics paradigm in criticism. Its generally

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'modernist' culture matches exactly one of the most familiar and insidious traits of American nationalism, its aggressively self-idealising exceptionalism.22 This is not so much a matter of what the criticism says, but the performative effect at work every time a critical text in English implicitly posits its author and implied reader as embodiments of some supposedly fully enlightened humanity against whom other people, in the present or the past, can be gauged and rendered transparent in terms of unredeemed tradition, a merely limiting particularity and various modes of supposedly all-explanatory prejudice. Given the latently moralistic nature of such a stance, together with the general domination of the humanities by people employed by American universities, the result is what may be termed the 'institutional Americanism' of critical debate. 23 This names both the pervasive identification of the critical arena in general with the norms and assumptions of an American institutional context, and the insidious presence in criticism of what is effectively, and sometimes explicitly, an American nationalism. This is meant, necessarily, not as the assertion of a nationality taken as given but in terms of the dominant forms of identification that lead people to suppress the recalcitrance of their singularity, or as Derrida put it, to suppress the 'Marranos that we are, Marranos in any case, whether we want to be or not, whether we know or not' (the Marranos were Spanish and Portugese Jews forced to confrom outwardly to Catholicism, but practising Judaism in secret). 24 It would surely be unsurprising if the criticism to become dominant since the late 1980s should be one later thinkers might label as a postCold War triumphalist movement (just as the formalism of the 1950s is sometimes related to the Cold War conservatism of those times). In fact it would be surprising if it were not. However, if the institutional Americanism of critical thinking is almost never an issue as such, this is because its dominance is such as to render it frequently invisible. To attend an international conference is always to be reminded how far nationalism as such remains as deeply pervasive as it is disavowed among critics, a vast but tacit determinant of so much intellectual work. However, institutional Americanism in the sense proposed need not mean simply the overt or hidden assertion of an assumed 'American' identity (often couched in terms of spuriously ahistorical ideals). It is a force of identification (in fact, many of the ugliest cases of 'institutional Americanism' I have met have been in Britain and Australia). One thing at issue is the widespread use of the first person plural ('we') to describe a community of critics and scholars presumed to be following, albeit contentiously, a continuously unfolding and broadly progressive project of communal labour (e.g. 'we no longer give credence to the argument that

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... ', 'what we need now is .. .'etc.). The problem with this ubiquitous practice is not only its obviously modernist culture (in Ree's sense), but also, given their numerical weight, the way voices within the US academy drown out others to the extent that this 'we' is frequently simply taken to mean no one else. Thus the editors of a large critical anthology, Feminisms (1997), write in their introduction, in what seems to take itself as a gesture of openness, 'We conceive "literary theory and criticism" as the realm of what is taught today in American departments of English'! 25 Likewise, innumerable essays assume their reader to be simply a colleague at another American institution, so that many British and other non-US critics have, unwittingly it seems, adopted the habit of writing as if they were in the US. There are also more obvious effects of power and numbers. For instance, a critic publishing work in any English-speaking country will almost always have that work assessed by a reader whose specific job is to gauge it against a possible US readership, so giving that market an effective veto and helping perpetuate a US-centric view of the world. '[W]hat is proper to a culture is not to be identical to itself' The antagonist of Derrida's remark is any form of nationalism, namely the identification of a singular people or peoples as the privileged embodiment of supposedly universal values. Nationalism affirms the particularity or even ethnicity of a specific people as examples, the best examples, of values with a more general claim, implictly denigrating others. Analogously, the 'we' of professionalised criticism, for all its supposed diversity, recruits its members to a culture of the 'good conscience'. 26 It slides towards being a predominantly American kind of exceptionalism,27 a practitioner of that peculiarly modern kind of bigotry which consists in being too keen to attribute prejudice or moral fault to others as a principle for interpreting their actions or words. Institutional Americanism often vitiates what ought to have been the generally globalising scope of modern criticism and thought. While recent thinkers in postcolonial theory, for instance, are coming to recognise the tension between its sweeping cultural categories (coloniser, subaltern, marginalised, etc.) and the particularity of literary texts, a culture of the good conscience still lingers. Thus, on one side, for instance, Deepika Bahri's Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (2003) is sceptical of some effects of the way some postcolonial theory has hardened into a routinised disciplinary space: A disciplined and predictable form of postcolonialiaty enters the academic and social arena, confounding any deep understanding of the economic and political realities of a postcolonial world whose sheer size, if not its internal

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The Poetics of Singularity

diversities, complexities, and saving grays, ought to have rendered it immune from such violently formulaic reductions. 28

This institutionalised complacency grates against what Bahri shows to be a 'text's singular and miniaturised interface with the general' (p. 8). At the same time, however, some oppressive effects of the modernist culture of criticism itself soon become evident in her own argument, as Bahri goes on to illustrate the reductiveness of some postcolonial typecasting in a specific case. Bahri attacks what has become postcolonial stereotyping by unpacking the way what she warily terms the 'Irish case' disrupts some of the dominant categories. However, the terms in which this argument deploys itself still remain so crudely generalising and appropriative as to suggest that even Bahri's own criticisms remain on the wrong ground. As follows: the Irish, Bahri writes, have undoubtedly been at times an object of ethnic vilification, yet, contrary to the usual scheme, they are white. Geographically, they are European, not 'third world'. The Irish have had to resist projects of colonial acculturation and assimilation to British norms on the one hand, but, on the other, many of them were active partners in the military and commercial business of the British Empire. And again, on one side, Irish critics have seen parallels between their own literature and writing from India, Africa, etc., but, on the other, Irish nationalism has its own strain of white triumphalism. There is also 'Ireland's own recent history of protectionism against the third world and its poor record of aid' (p. 68), and so on. In fact, such 'protectionism' would be a European Union matter, not a specifically Irish one, but the fact that Bahri still needs to make her case by this kind of moral points-scoring view of history is itself, ironically, already a vindication of it: the danger of a 'glib reduction of the complex circumstances of colonialism to a disciplinarily intramural drama with a cast of characters comprised of usual suspects and predictable victims'. Even with Bahri's chapter, a certain goodies-and-baddies-thinking is evident in the way 'the English' (seeming often to mean 'the British') are assumed, cartoon-like, to constitute a homogenous body to be immediately and unproblematically identified with imperialism. In fact, Bahri's history is inaccurate library cramming: Ireland is called 'the oldest of England's colonies' (p. 60), overlooking the contentious cases of Wales and Scotland, as well the inept anachronism of terms such as 'colonies' and even 'England' in relation to what was a Norman kingdom that also included much of France; the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle (more than six centuries later) is quoted as an instance of 'English' perceptions of the Irish (p. 59). The ambition to complicate the basic tools of some postcolonial theory seems timely, but that even this should result in work so simplistic is troubling when

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27

the issue is scenes of historical and contemporary violence for which 'denial of the singularity of each person' could be one description. Bahri's 'Irish case' chapter both argues against and yet still instatiates the intellectual crudity and unhelpful moralism of using sweeping labels of cultural identity as a principle of interpretation, as against the scrutiny of always singular cases and the accompanying ethics of scholarly accuracy. The detailed strength of Bahri's other chapters, which, unlike the 'Irish case' chapter, engage detailed and specific readings of Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie, supports the same point - that merely fine-tuning the stereotypes in postcolonial theory is insufficient basis for a responsible criticism. 29 Bahri's odd blend of caricature and attention to the singular case bears out Wendy Brown's observation that, while historiography based on notions of progress has been discredited, no obvious political substitute has emerged for 'progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going'. 30 In practice a kind of lax pragmatism has meant that even work attentive to the claims of subaltern and minority groups still tends to beg many questions by employing as its aspirational norm the autonomous, willing, reasoning, rights-bearing subject, liberated from the last feudal shackles of prejudice and supposedly free to possess itself as itself. Even as it acknowledges that 'the Irish' and 'the British' are often not so easily opposable, Bahri's chapter on 'the Irish case' still pivots on the undiscussed liberal norm, even as her book must query its (overwhelmingly American) institutional context. In this way, much so-called 'postcolonial' criticism often deploys a moralistic criticism of one empire in terms that effectively bolster the ideological underpinnings of its successor. It is striking to observe that if the terms of the inclusion/exclusion or other-within model were to be employed in turn on much of the criticism that uses it, this would only produce, as it surely does in Bahri's chapter, a cultural political reading underlining the present role of the United Kingdom as a client state of the US.

Conclusion To return then to Jean-Luc Nancy's claim that the danger for democracy lies in the temptation to find foundations for it. The pervasive implicit discourse of individual rights in the resistance vs. exclusion models of the dominant culturalism is precisely such a foundationalism. It prescribes specific notions of individualism and 'free' agency' which perpetuate the intertwining of democracy with capitalism, and closes off the force of debate and contestation inherent to the literary space. 31

28

The Poetics of Singularity

This study argues that the thinkers presented here offer a more fruitful- a more just- ideal for reading literary texts; that even the controversial Heidegger of the Holderlin readings is more genuinely thought-provoking than the American 'infringed-citizens' -rights' model. Each thinker, in different ways, elaborates what is a simply logical consequence of the idea that something or someone is 'singular': that the attempt to understand is going to reach a point at which its object can no longer be situated in terms of given concepts or explained in relation to known contexts or causes. Likewise, this means an acute sensitivity to the violence of stereotyping in others, in any issue, text or mode of research. To drive towards acknowledgement of the singular has often been an essential element in the ethics of scholarship and intellectual life. It must, of course, finally be cut short at some point, if conceptualisation and understanding are to be possible at all. But what is distinctive in the thinkers covered here is the challenging degree to which this point is held off. Each is intensely wary of the reductive violence that always lurks in the need to categorise or to conclude. If one contrasts such thinking to the dominant culturalism of much contemporary work, the latter's crudity is striking. Perhaps, as a counterweight, there is a need to recognise the extent to which all over-general schemas and machines of interpretation (with categories imagined to apply across the globe in some cases) can act as a kind of evasion. For the contemporary critic, an ethics of singularity may also be a safeguard against all the institutional pressures to assume in one's own writing the mantle of an unjustified exceptionalism. Also inherent in the idea of the singularity is the possibility of a radical break or rupture from the past. To be singular is, by definition, to refuse to be fully intelligible through heritage or environment. Nancy pushes the received idea of freedom as autonomy to a point at which it reveals its own conditions in a deeper and necessarily ungrounded notion of the free: Auto-nomy, which has always represented the very regime of freedom, must be understood on this basis: as a legislation by the self in which the self does not preexist, since its very existence is what is prescribed by the law, and this law itself is not based on any right, since it founds with its own juris-diction the possibility of a 'right' in general. Freedom is not a right, it is the right of what is 'by rights' without right: with this radicality it must be understood as fact, as initial and revolutionary. 32

The 'law' here prescribes something that is not subordinated to anything prior: 'Freedom cannot but precede itself in its own command.m Hannah Arendt writes:

Freedoms ond institutional Americanism

29

The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us. This frustration has the closest affinity with the well-known philosophic impossibility to arrive at a definition of man, all definitions being determinations or interpretations of what man is, of qualities, therefore, which he could possibly share with other living beings, whereas his specific difference would be found in a determination of what kind of a 'who' he is. 34

While the title of Nancy's The Experience of Freedom (1988) suggests that study as the obvious reference here, my preference in the following chapters will be to deploy analogies between work in the four thinkers covered there and Arendt's notion of 'natality'. As against Nancy's powerful but rather abstract formulations, Arendt's argument affirms a capacity for becoming other - for starting anew - that makes explicit how the notion of discontinuity inherent in singularity can relate, for example, to notions of reconciliation and invention. It helps map the details of specific literary readings to an alternative thinking of literature based on nonaggressive norms, a jump out of economies of justice-as-retribution or the use of cultural identity as a principle of explanation. 35 Natality is inseparable from singularity in referring to the absolute uniqueness of each person: 'With each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before. ' 36 'Natality' also recommends itself as a concept that feeds, directly and powerfully, into thinking about the nature of education, offering a sense of what a scene of teaching and reading may look like that fully engages the issue of human freedom. Natality underlies human freedom as the capacity 'to establish relations and create new realities.' 37 Natality is thus 'the essence of education'38 and of the art of teaching. For every student, facing what for a teacher may be the oldest exercise or the most familiar text, it is still a first time. Natasha Levinson writes of what she calls 'the paradox of natality': Each newcomer brings with him/her the possibility that the world might be reinvigorated. However, this continual influx of newcomers means that these attempts to rejuvenate the world are constantly interrupted and set off course. Herein lies both the promise and the pathos of the new: each of us has the capacity to renew a world that seems to each generation 'out of joint,' yet this process is never completed. The world is never set right once and for all ... It is constantly in need of the renewal that natality makes possible. 39

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The dominant thinking in criticism for the past decade and more has been deterministic in its basic arguments. And it is surely right that readers and students be exposed to a sense of how the past, with its bewildering mix of achievements and wrongs, determines their present contexts, even down to elements of themselves they may previously simply have taken as given. To find oneself responsible for a world one did not make is a crucial experience of education or of coming to adulthood anywhere. Derrida observes that 'We inherit a language, conditions of life, a culture which is, which carries the memory of what has been done, and the responsibility, so then we are responsible for things we have not done ourselves, and that is part of the concept of heritage.' 40 However, there is also a danger that criticism which inculcates a strong sense of how cultural identity (in terms of ethnicity, nationality, gender, etc.) determines how a person will be perceived or treated may actually reinforce past oppressions. Levinson argues: If students feel trapped by their social positioning, they are unlikely to act.

Instead, they become resigned to their social positioning or, worse, they become resentful of others. Depending on the social positioning of the student, this resentment may manifest itself in anger or at being forced into the category of oppressor, or in anger that results from a history of victimization, marginalization, or oppression that is simultaneously denied and reinforced by the broader culture. 41 In the seminar room, few things are more hurtful than for a person to find herself or himself treated or addressed as a type, or be taken solely as a member of a certain group or supposed category of person - a teacher can even be disciplined for it. Yet everyone, knowing herself or himself to be unique, continually encounters strangers as types in just this way and a great deal of criticism now even depends on this kind of thinking. Arendt concedes that the chances that tomorrow will repeat today are almost overwhelming, but the mere fact of natality means that the chance of invention and novelty is never extinguished. Those thinkers I have categorised under the rubric of a 'poetics of singularity' offer an understanding of the reading of the literary as a space in which natality is preserved. Natality can correspond to moments when we become social actors, taking responsibility upon ourselves for our words or acts and refusing passively to fulfil a role, obey conventional expectations or to behave as 'normal' or 'expected' for the type of the person society may cast us as. The feature that defines an agent in Arendt's sense is the capacity for a kind of existential jump, to initiate something unexpected. 'To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin ... Because they

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31

are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. ' 42 The four thinkers covered here, while not using Arendt's own term and with related but differing agenda, can be said to engage in the literary or poetic in relation to just this possibility of beginning, in both its elusiveness and excitement. So the topic of singularity engages the force of a crucial 'post-existentialist' strain in each of the thinkers treated here. This is something that has come increasingly to the fore in Derrida's work of the past dozen years or so (the terminology of 'singular', 'absolute', 'universal' and 'paradox/paradoxical' recalling that of S0ren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843) ). 43 Each offers, in relation to literature and beyond, a meditation on the irreducible singularity of each human life, so that, contrary to deterministic models of culture, the possibility of the completely new is always at work. As Kierkegaard writes, in relation to the crucial commitments, each generation starts again and can learn only very little from its predecessors. The non-liberal notion of freedom is decisive here- the 'dizziness of freedom' (Kierkegaard). 44

Introduction: a school of singularity?

I started writing poetry because I didn't like poetry. (Benjamin Zephaniah)

The map of contemporary literary and cultural studies seems as diverse as the United Nations. However, just as the United Nations is too often dominated by a single power, so criticism cannot disguise a dominant paradigm of thinking, however diverse and fractured things may seem: it is one of a general reduction of all intellectual positions to stances within a certain model of cultural politics. To identify the action of literature and art with the cultural arena generally may seem a matter of definition, but what is at issue is a dominant understanding of this identification: to understand a text is taken to mean placing it within the various competing discourses of its time and (or) our own time, discourses being understood instrumentally as competing ways of representing or constructing reality, each reflecting or producing various kinds of identity, often defined in terms of ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, class or gender. The assumption is that once one has cashed in a text in terms of its cultural politics (so understood) nothing worthwhile is left to say about it. During the 1990s, as the cultural politics paradigm became an orthodoxy, a previously dominant 'deconstructive' school refused to disappear, even as it sought to accommodate itself to new pressures. Some thinkers continued to affirm an understanding of the 'literary' in terms of a 'singularity' that refuses to be conceptualisable or mastered, at odds with the aim of explaining a text as a document determined by its historical placement or by the politics of identity. These issues were in some ways already familiar from a previous generation, but refined, strengthened and brought to a new urgency by the times. An argument emerged, now itself becoming rather shop-soiled, that literature should finally be valued rather because it is inassimilable to fixed stances or cultural programmes. It may resist both intellectual dogmatism as well as the premature good

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The Poetics of Singularity

conscience of much politically engaged criticism. It reminds that 'The work always means: not knowing that art exists already, not knowing that there is already a world' (Blanchot, SL, p. 125). The task of this book is partly to offer a schematisation but also a deepening of the term crucial to this poetic, 'singularity'. The presiding figure for such arguments has been Jacques Derrida, especially his essay 'Psyche: Invention of the Other' 1 and his interview 'This Strange Institution Called Literature' (SIL). However, it was often a Derrida simplified and processed who was reasserted. One of the aims of this study is to broaden the frames of reference. Derrida's work emerges as a contemporary variant of a broader, far-reaching school of twentieth-century poetics, whose major impetus comes, usually unacknowledged, from Martin Heidegger's lectures of 1935-6 on 'The Origin of the Work of Art', first published in 1950 (OBT, pp. 1-56), and from his controversial readings of the German Romantic poet, Friedrich Holderlin. Derrida's work continues an impetus found in Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and, to a surprising degree, the late essays of HansGeorg Gadamer. In fact the poetics of singularity in these and other thinkers makes up a distinctive, intensely focused but little acknowledged school of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. Although these may seem familiar names, it would be a mistake to assume that this school forms part of any stock of recognised 'approaches'. It will not be found in any introduction to literary or cultural theory. The aim of this study is principally to unravel this poetic, offering a schematic account of its principle concepts and arguments in four closely intertwined thinkers. A secondary concern is to reaffirm much of this thinking against some dominant assumptions of contemporary criticism, assumptions which, as Chapter 1 suggests, are sometimes no more than an unacknowledged American nationalism. In many of the best accounts of the literary since the early 1990s the word 'singularity' has borne the main weight of argument, sometimes with a rather vaguely self-justifying force. To give a brief list of such work: J. Hillis Miller's Black Holes (1999) (black holes being known in physics as 'singularities', i.e. places where the natural sciences break down), and texts by Isobel Armstrong, Tilottama Rajan, Peggy Kamuf, Samuel Weber and Derek Attridge. Attridge's recent book The Singularity of Literature (2004) is primarily a schematisation of Derrida's thinking in this field. 2 Singularity names the specific being of a text or work, inflected so as to underline its resistance to being described in general categories or concepts. Its resistance may also be understood as upsetting the distinction between the realm of the conceptualisable, that which is masterable by thought, and that of passion, which is nee-

4

The Poetics of Singularity

achieved by the minute discipline of following its terms is not a kind of continuous progression of insight, but - somewhere - a jump. In other words, such 'understanding' (if that is still the best word) is not the modification or enhancement of an underlying consciousness or identity that would end the text as it began it, bar a little increase in its mental stores, but a becoming-other of that consciousness itself, whether minutely or significantly. This is why there must be an anti-intellectualist element in the poetics of singularity: reading as the mere increase in one's stock of ideas or images is not true reading in this alternative sense of existential engagement. One can say of this element of discontinuity, or jump, in the varied conceptions of it given by Heidegger and others, that it correlates with what Hannah Arendt names simply 'beginning' (and, in relation to the human generations, 'natality' 7 ). This is that uneliminable and incalculable element of freedom in (or of) human existence whose political realisation, at the most extreme, is the wide-openness or vertigo of the moment of achieved revolution. This space is necessarily uncomfortable, even unsafe, and usually fleeting: for a space in which new norms may be established is itself, necessarily outside the claim of given laws, a realm of uneasy trust. Arendt writes: It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space. For a moment, the moment of beginning, it is as though the beginner had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity. 8

Arendt's 'natality' can be brought to bear on the topic of human finitude in Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot and Derrida. Human beings are limited: they are bounded by death and by the fact of birth. In Heidegger and the others, such finitude is usually treated through the more traditional concern with death. I believe, however, that use of the correspondent notion of natality- the fact of birth, of ever new people -will bring out more forcefully all that is affirmative in the thought of these four men (the 'event', the 'poetic', 'suprise'). To return to the reassertion of ideas of 'singularity' in critical work from the 1990s onwards, J. Hillis Miller sums up some other issues when he writes: Literary study hides the peculiarity of literary language by accounting for it, naturalizing it, neutralizing it, turning it into the familiar. This usually

Introduction

5

means seeing it as in one way or another a representation of the real world. Whether this accounting takes the form of relating the work to its author, or of trying to demonstrate that it is typical of its historical time and place, or characteristic of the class, gender, and race of its author, or of seeing it as a mirroring of the material and social world, or of relating to conceptual generalizations about the way literary language works, the unspoken goal is to appease the conscious or unconscious fear people have of literature's true strangeness. 9

This quotation from Miller underlines how something singular in the poetic and literary can be affirmed against the growth of culturalism, whose founding principle could be defined as the taking of everything in and of a text not in its singularity but as an example (as a stance in the process of culture seen as a contestation of diverse identity claims). Instead, the poetic is not fully intelligible by reference to something else as its basis (as a representation of the real etc.) but is a distinctive kind of thing in its own right: 'Poetry- that is the fateful uniqueness of language' (Paul Celan). 10 However, there is also a danger here that 'singular' be allowed to become only some kind of vaguely sensationalised textual 'strangeness', one whose principle drama takes place in the corridors of the professional interpreters and their competitive debates. Yet 'singularity' is also a term exactly suited to address more explicitly 'ethical' concerns, as in Jean-Luc Nancy's reformulations of notions of freedom and community outside their traditional categories, that is, homogenising categories that would attempt to ground what a person or a human community should be on the basis of some supposedly shared nature or attributes. 11 Many of the post-1990 reaffirmations of the singularity of the literary, while drawing explicitly on Derrida, are clearly also feeding from an older and even more influential argument, Immanuel Kant's seminal defence of the aesthetic. The Kant of The Critique ofJudgement (1790) 12 is an indispensable reference because modern defences of the singularity of literature often present themselves in terms which are a radicalisation of his notion of 'reflective judgement', of which the aesthetic was the purest example. A 'reflective' judgement is one in which a particular thing or things are presented to us but we lack a general term or concept by which to determine them- we have an x, so to speak, but we cannot satisfactorily name or conceptualise it. So unlike a determinative judgement, for which we both have an object before us and a definite given concept by which to name it (e.g. 'this insect is a type of beetle'), our act of judgement cannot fix on a determination (this xis a case of ... ?) but is set in search of one. The literary can easily be characterised and defended as just such an

Introduction

7

issue cannot be divorced from the singular artwork in which it appears or the precise terms in which it is said. Salim Kemal offers the telling example of the cunningly dropped handkerchief which is used in Shakespeare's play to trick Othello into a belief in his wife's infidelity. The handkerchief matters only in terms of the plot of the play: 'The singular use does not determine the properties of handkerchiefs outside the play in that other writers may give those pieces of cloth other uses in their own works.' 14 Also, to the reader or spectator, the handkerchief or the image of Jupiter set off an open range of associations, of sensuous images and concepts whose potential and interplay cannot be summed up or paraphrased. The undecidability of implication (expressed for Kant in then current terms of the association of ideas) is precise enough, even in its elusiveness. Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century summarised: 'We call art ... every compound product in which we are aware of general rules, whose application cannot in the particular case be again brought under rules.' 15 This argument was to inform much literary theory since, often without explicit reference to Kant. Kant had gone on to recuperate this singularity in ways that led into well-known idealisations of the aesthetic. 16 For contemporary 'deconstructive' critics, however, the aesthetic refused this idealist recuperation and remains the realm of the singular in the sense of particulars which mean more than themselves but cannot be understood or determined under some pregiven rule of identificationY However, the fact that, as in Kant's example, the singular form or image means something in itself irreplaceable tended to drop out in favour of the argument about resistance to the domain of conceptuality in general. This rendered the institution of literature as a realm of entities that have the mode of being of a question which exceeds the grasp of any one answer, an attractively democratic arena of open debate which seems to rule out all dogmatism. Isobel Armstong, for instance, reaffirms an argument of this type, giving it an additional basis in psychoanalytic concepts of the transitional object, i.e. 'an intrasubjective space in which meanings are renegotiated' .18 However, to defend literature and the poetic as that which, by definition, escapes critical appropriation is surely a strategy with a limited future. One cannot go banging on indefinitely about the ever-elusive strangeness of the literary without giving the impression that one has nothing more to say. The greatest difficulty here is that, in itself, 'singularity' is necessarily an empty and purely relational term. Everything is 'singular' in some sense, even the tiny blotches on a desk or the intestines of a greenfly. To say of anything that it is 'singular' is the least one can say of it, short of saying nothing at all. For Kant, however, the reflective

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The Poetics of Singularity

openness of the act of judgement, in art and elsewhere, was still finally determined by other arguments about the likely purposiveness of nature and of human transcendence - i.e. a speculative metaphysics that contemporary thinkers have not felt able to follow. 19 Without this further framing, the 'singularity' of the literary or aesthetic is in danger of becoming merely negative. Too much of the standard defence of the literary as singular comes down to highlighting our not being able to finally identify or fix the meaning of something, and then vaunting this inability or resistance as a kind of vaguely democratic challenge to dogma. So 'singularity', if it is to have specific focus here, needs to be taken much further than being simply ' the literary in so far as it is elusive'. It must be distinguished from arguments to which so-called 'deconstructionism' was often reduced in the 1970s and after: the claim, for instance, that because we can never finalise the meaning of a text, or match it to some (impossible) concept of full or final interpretation, it necessarily always transcends any one context or reading, thus imposing on each reader the task of unending rereading ... and so on - arguments very often performed with the camp drama of an overfamiliar conjuring trick and, beneath the surface pronouncements, recognisably part of a critical culture that still casts every critic as a wannabe intellectual celebrity. These arguments should now be treated as truisms, starting places for thought and not conclusions in themselves. What 'singularity' means in the thinkers covered here, however, is something positive. Its challenge is that of a peculiar economy in the working of language whereby it may seem to give something for nothing, to speak volumes in one aphorism, to imply without vagueness a host of implication, or to convey a sharp affect of which it is the only possible statement. Derrida, for instance, acknowledges the force in Heidegger's thinking on 'the irreducibility of song or of consonance in the poem (Gesang)', 'the non-semantic, non-substitutable character of the letter, in a word, of that which has to be learned by heart' (P, p. 314). Thus the singularity at issue here is not just part of a merely negative claim about the literary's resistance to meaning. Instead, whether valued greatly or not, it is, literally, the irreplaceable. The literary or poetic is not primarily to be conceived in relation to some sort of reflective entanglement of human judgement confronted with some forever yet-to-be-fully determined object. This way of looking at it remains too epistemological, too centered on the intellectualising consciousness of the professionalised interpreter. Instead, this book aims to draw out what can broadly be called a 'post-existentialist' strain in the four thinkers covered here. 20 What is at issue is not some endlessly replayed game of Interpreter's Dilemma, but something more akin to a

Introduction

9

realm of existential risk, however muted, with an anti-intellectualist element at odds with the dominant culture and assumptions of professionalised criticism. The discontinuous jump inherent in the very idea of singularity opens, even if only in often fleeting or minor ways, a force of 'beginning' in Arendt's sense. In other words, the interest is in something which is directly contrary to the basic neo-Kantian postulate of most modern thinking (analytic and 'postmodern') that there is no given which is not already an interpretation, or a function of our mode of approach, that we are inextricably enmeshed in our cultural representations, whether depicted as 'ideology' or the 'prison house of language'. This brief introduction must end here. One guiding thought, however, may be left to stand as a kind of epigraph governing all the chapters to come. To read a text solely as itself and on its own terms, in its singularity: no idea might seem simpler - not to make the text an example of some social or cultural point, nor a facet of some theory of poetics, but merely to affirm it in itself and as it is. The point is not to interpret the singularity of the text but to move towards a point, never finally attainable, at which the text is being understood only on its own singular terms. That is to say, the reading attains a space in which the text is felt to project itself so specifically that the terms of any mode of interpretation one might want to apply begin to be felt as inadequate. Singularity in this sense is both a mode of demand and a performative act - it ideally dictates the frame within which it is able to appear, and submits the reader to a kind of reversal, able to get near the text only by withdrawal of any pregiven method of approach. It becomes, not something one can simply think, but something that has to be let think, in its own way, within a space one tries to hold open. The ideal is an irenic and perhaps utopian one. But each of the four thinkers treated here bears the extraordinary and multiplicitous events of thought that arise in the carrying out of this simple, necessarily impossible yet thought-provoking idea. The bulk of this book traces this idea in four chapters devoted primarily to each of the four major thinkers in turn. First, however, a more general chapter must sharpen the sense of the stakes of this 'poetics of singularity' by comparing it to other elements of the contemporary institution of criticism.

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between Sophocles and Holderlin always in mind: 'The four parts that have been extracted attune, in their belonging together, the concealed lineaments of the song, and they concern what we want to inquire about with a view to the poetic essence of the river [in Holderlin]' (1st, pp. 59-60). Everything rests on a patient, scholarly unravelling of Greek terms, resisting the ever-present temptation of translating or understanding them in terms of what we find familiar or think that we already know. Heidegger's minute discipline of singularisation attempts to let the Greek terms and thinking project their own context, rather than one which our thinking may unwittingly construct, along with deep ontological prejudices of the kind to be put at stake here. Heidegger's thinking strives to solicit from these texts a sense of the kind of 'worlding' at sway there - the way 'being is said', as Heidegger puts it. So it is not a case of what Sophocles 'meant' (a hopelessly anachronistic phrase here) but of tracing the inflections brought to bear in the tragedy upon essential existential decisions pervasive in the world of the Greeks and marked in their language. The analysis turns on the recurrence of the Greek word 'to deinon'. This is usually translated as the 'terrible', but also as the 'awful' or 'wondrous'. Antigone, in the course of the play, will take on herself a confrontation with 'to deinon', becoming herself a disruptive figure of fear and wonder in the process. In the Penguin translation by E. F. Watling, the choral ode opens: 'Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these I Is man, who rides the oceans and takes his way I Through the deeps.' 13 This version has the effect, however, of suppressing the elements of anxiety in 'to deinon' by stressing only the element of awe. With the aim of bringing out what is most unassimilably singular about the Greek word, Heidegger translates it, against custom and a dictionary-led confidence, not as the 'terrible' but as the 'uncanny' (das Unheimliche). His version reads:

Vilefaltig das Unheimliche, nichts doch iiber den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres sich regt. Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing more uncanny looms or stirs beyond human being. (1st, p. 61)

Why inflect the translation in that way? Answering this question will bring us to the crux of Heidegger's understanding of the poetic in a great work of art - its uncanny singularity.

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'To deinon' emerges as a crucial word, in fact, of Greek antiquity (1st, p. 67). Heidegger argues that the word in Greek evokes simultaneously the fearful, the powerful and the inhabitual. These three senses, the fearful, the powerful and the inhabitual, may offer themselves as alternatives between which a translator or reader might choose on each occurrence of the word, depending on context. Nevertheless, they are mutually implicated in a 'concealed unity' -which is presumably why the Greeks used just the one word. The force of the singular word is the crucial thing here: 'The full essence of the deinon can therefore unfold itself in something singular' (1st, p. 64). In other words, one can say that the hovering between the fearful, powerful and inhabitual is what is fully 'to deinon'. Drawing further on knowledge of Greek, Heidegger observes that, in addition, each of these three meanings of 'to deinon' may refer, implicitly or explicitly, to 'something counterturning'. In other words, each (the fearful, the powerful and the inhabitual) is attuned inherently to ambivalent and opposed possibilities: The fearful is something frightful, yet also that which commands admiration. The fearful shows itself both in horror and in awe. The powerful can be that which everywhere prevails and looms over us, yet also that which is actively violent, that force that compels all necessity into a singular, uniform compulsion. The inhabitual is the extraordinary that directly and essentially exceeds everything habitual, so that in a certain way it stands 'outside' the habitual. The inhabitual, however, can also spread in the opposite direction within the habitual, as skilfulness in all and everything. (1st, p. 67) This quotation may seem like only a minute and singularising attention to a Greek word, were it not for the additional significance that 'das Unheimliche' carries for Heidegger. For it also names the human being in respect of its freedom from ontic determination: in other words, as something that cannot be defined, except in a term that expressly rejects the definable. The space of the leap inherent to the poetic is necessarily one which puts into abeyance saying 'I' in terms of some given cultural, familial or national identity. Uncertainty, impersonal insecurity and psychic dislocation or rapture may beset the artist in the holding open of a space against the vast pressure of given ways of perception. Thinking of the mountain cabin which was his own preferred place of work, Heidegger describes the solitude of the creative process: 'Solitude has the primordial power that it does not isolate us so much as throw the whole of our existence out into the wide nearness of the being of all things' (GA 13, p. 11). In Being and Time, Introduction to Metaphysics and the Holderlin lectures, Heidegger names this space of freedom and inchoate possibility 'das Unheimliche', the

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uncanny. This is not some property of human beings or something intelligible as some sort of impression or impact it has upon them: Uncanniness does not first arise as a consequence of humankind; rather, humankind emerges from uncanniness and remains within it - looms out of it and stirs within it. The uncanny itself is what looms forth in the essence of human beings and is that which stirs in all stirring and arousal: that which presences and at the same time absences. (1st, p. 72) It is a 'realm' in which received ways of thinking may break down. It may be one in which the bases of communal life tear themselves open, as in the Greek tragedies. Thus the necessary possibility of failure and even of madness may await the poet (as they did with Holderlin's breakdown in

1806). 'Das Unheimliche', 'the uncanny' and 'to deinon' work in different language worlds and could never be precise translations of each other. In correlating 'to deinon' with 'das Unheimliche' Heidegger is not, despite appearances, offering a reading of the Sophocles as an kind of allegorical harbinger of Being and Time. For the point of these strange words in each case is not so much to offer a defining concept of the human as the 'most uncanny' as to name something which cannot be defined except as an elusive field of various effects of a refusal of definition (hence, with the Greek, the three overlapping senses, each with positive and negative possibilities of inflection). One might say that, were anyone in a position to say exactly where the German, Greek and English make up equivalent univocal concepts and exactly where they differ (in cultural implication etc.), then the specific thrust of these words would thereby be destroyed. The figure of Antigone is said to be the essence of the tragedy in the sense of a becoming uncanny for the sake of the 'homely'. To gloss this in familiar and hence only semi-legitimate terms, her act disrupts the world in which she is born, transgressing its deepest edicts for the sake of an alternative and as yet unvalidated sense of how to live. In the end, both King Creon's wife and his son, betrothed to Antigone, will also die by their own hands. The ode, and the tragedy as a whole, remain, with the figure of Antigone, uncanny in the sense of exacerbating a sense of existential risk, the leap into the as yet unthinkable and the uncertainty as to whether the disruption set loose at the bases of Greek life is mere destructive adventuring or something fitting in some emergent sense. In this way, the 'counter-turning' at work in all the constituent senses of the uncanny is heightened, each in its respective force - the fearful as both frightful and as commanding admiration, the powerful as both stably pervasive and as alarming violence, and the inhabitual as both the abnormal and the excelling:

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The closing words [of the choral ode] conceal within them a pointer toward that risk that has yet to be unfolded and accomplished in the tragedy as a whole, the risk of distinguishing and deciding between that being unhomely proper to human beings and a being unhomely that is inappropriate. Antigone herself is this supreme risk within the realm of the deinon. To be this risk is her essence. (1st, p. 117) Charles Segal argues that tragedy concerns 'situations where the division between civilization and savagery no longer seems to apply. Where this division is disturbed, so is the very nature of man and humanity.' So, he continues, 'Tragedy no longer locates the boundary between the civilized and the savage on the frontiers of society, at the limits of the inhabited world, but brings it within the polis itself, within the very hearts of its rulers and citizens. ' 14 Segal's account of tragedy in terms of a crisis in 'the division between civilisation and savagery' is helpful, but, coming to this after reading Heidegger, even terms like 'civilization' and 'savagery' seem laden with the baggage of being what they are, words of a modern European language. A tension remains between them and the kind of singularisation Heidegger attempts. Something similar is at issue in Heidegger's objection to readings of Antigone within broadly anthropological/historical notions of 'culture': A recent interpretation of Sophoclean tragedy states: 'One can designate it in its entirety as the high song of culture.' In keeping with the poet's intentions, of course, one would have to note that to 'culture' there belongs 'religion,' and that religion has its subsistence solely in 'culture.' This view then enables us to clarify straightaway that Antigone stands for the 'value' of 'religion' as opposed to the 'values' of 'culture' and 'state.' (1st, p. 95) 15 Heidegger's sarcasm reminds us of something more than his unrivalled mastery of the lofty put down. Terms like 'civilised', 'savage', 'religion', 'values' or 'culture' come to seem especially clumsy in this context because the specific Greek words at issue are not so much being 'used' in the play as exposed to a realm in which their force and sense are being decided. These are scarcely things that admit of easy translations. Hence Heidegger's attention to the way the whole ode becomes readable or resists our reading, so that 'to deinon' is itself an uncanny word. It not only designates the uncanny, 'but, as a genuine word, names what it tells of in such a way that, as a word, it itself is of such a kind as that which it names, that is, it is itself an uncanny word' (1st, p. 68), a move, that is, into a space of contesting possibilities. What 'uncanny' means is poised uncannily on the threshold between different fundamental modes of being, modes whose clearer sense could only emerge once the threshold has been crossed. By reducing 'to deinon' to the merely 'inhabitual' or

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the 'frightening' - modes of feeling for a subjective consciousness - a modern translator would be deciding huge issues in advance, perhaps with barely a thought. 'To deinon' in the tragedy is what Heidegger terms a 'poetic word' (Ist, p. 69), as something that cannot be read off from the dictionary. It holds all three of its senses together (the fearful, the powerful, the inhabitual), together with the counterturning in each. By translating 'to deinon', unorthodoxly, as 'das Unheimliche' (the uncanny) Heidegger brings out the whole force of the word in its singularity, beyond what even the Greeks themselves may have explicitly conceptualised (Ist, p. 68). 'To deinon', in its resonant uncanniness, is 'the fundamental word' of the tragedy, 'indeed of Greek tragedy in general, and thereby', he wagers, 'the fundamental word of Greek antiquity' (lst, p. 67). To preserve the uncanniness of the poetic text is thus to refuse explanations and grounds and to preserve instead the elusive un-grounding of human existence in its freedom: 'The Greek poetic word is intrinsically equivocal, because what is to be poetized is equivocal in the truth of its essence. For our contemporary way of grasping things of course, we must seek detours and first establish one meaning and a univocality .. .' (Ist, pp. 104-5). Heidegger's refusal of univocity to Sophocles' text is not the affirmation of some glib 'play of the signifier' but a refusal to foreclose basic decisions about the nature of human existence. It is to remain in a realm of discomfort, lack of assurance and uncertainty, but also to keep open the possibility of a non-violent, non-appropriative relation to being that of 'the holy' in Holderlin's sense. Affirming such counterturning in 'to deinon' and not fixing it one way or the other, the ode and tragedy as a whole work to set forward Antigone herself as the most uncanny. 'Antigone herself is this supreme risk within the realm of the deinon. To be this risk is her essence' (Ist, p. 117). The reading of Sophocles clearly differentiates Heidegger's notion of the art-work from Romantic ideas of untranslatability and autonomy which it may superficially resemble. A familiar topos of Romantic and modernist aesthetics was that each text is the unique happening of what it says, each its own genre, each an original self-founding act that breaks from the given: the text is autonomous and self-conditioned, itself the only source of any kind of decision as to how it should be read, absolute. These are ideals found in Jena Romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Heidegger, however, the work itself could never have this auto-legislative status. Dichtung as he conceives is a measure of human finitude and is heteronomic. To affirm the singularity of Antigone means pushing the text until it becomes an encounter with a realm at which our knowledge and 'values' cease to apply. 'With what right do we

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make ourselves the standard of what the poem has to say?' (GA 39, p. 48). The crisis in the polis also bears out the distinction between what happens in tragedy (and potentially, in a different way, with Holderlin in 1942) and any reductive readings of singularity merely in terms of some impasse of intellectual judgement. At issue here is not merely an intellectual aporia but the deepest emotions and existential commitments that hold a community together. The tragedy thus puts into relief the whole world of the Greek polis as itself at stake. This is the basis for Heidegger's exalted view of Greek tragedy as that art-work in which the grounds of the life of the Greek people was decided. So 'polis' here means the basic sense of things - what we might term, anachronistically, fundamental values and identities and a sense of the world, including much that is simply taken for granted in what is fitting or not fitting in human affairs. This conception is far broader than the so-called 'city-state' into which the Greek word is now usually translated and so it does not mean 'political' merely in the narrow sense of the contestation for power or competing interests: 'The essence of the polis can never be determined in terms of the political, just as the ground can never be explained or derived from the consequence' (1st, p. 85). This is why 'The Origin of the Work of Art' had compared the singular thrust of the art-work to the act that may potentially found a state (OBT, p. 37). So, Heidegger lectures, gesturing to his immediate context in 1942, this 'means something completely different from the unconditional priority of the modern "totality of the political".' It is the 'realm which is properly worthy of question' (1st, p. 82) as the 'site' determining all human relation towards being and, necessarily, understanding of what 'human' itself may mean. Clare Pearson Geiman reads Heidegger's Antigone as arguing that 'the best way to confront large-scale violence is to reshape our personal and political action in such a way that it is fundamentally non-violent.' 16 Antigone's act of refusal becomes comparable to Holderlin's poetic thinking with its ideal of a non-appropriative relation to being. Although the terms of Heidegger's argument far transcend the scope of that context, it is hard not to read aspects of Germany in 1942 in Heidegger's reading of Sophocles' lines on the human as both potentially hypsipolis, 'towering high above the site [the polis]', and apolis, 'forfeiting the site' (1st, p. 86). This could be read as Heidegger's version of that notion of hubris which Aristotle had deduced from the same tragedies: The polis is not here some indifferent space that in turn admits of empty possibilities of 'towering above' and of downfall; rather, it is the essence of the polis to thrust one into excess and to tear one into downfall, and in such a

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way that the human being is destined and fitted into both these counterturning possibilities and thus must be these possibilities themselves. (1st, p. 86) It is not hard to think of prudential reasons in 1942 for not translating this any more closely into the terms of contemporary politics (Heidegger believed his lectures were being spied on). 17 However, the issue is also the violence inherent in general conceptions of the political itself. Heidegger's elusively sticking so close to the singular terms of the Greek also avoids a whole unsuitable baggage of assumptions (as in saying, for instance, that Antigone helps found a different set of 'values.)' The issue is not to choose between given political systems, but to oppose the violence inherent in more basic conceptions and to keep open the inchoate and uncomfortable space of human potential from out of which any possible new choice might emerge. Antigone makes real the fact that the 'polis' conceals within it the possibility of a counterturning abode' (1st, p. 86), in other or modern words (i.e. begging a lot of questions and assumptions), a non-violent revolution in ethics and politics.

Formalisms A corollary of the logic of singularisation is that, the more singular the text at issue may be, the more it must resist the frameworks that would try to appropriate it, and so the more the text may remain essentially concealed and in reserve, and in exact proportion, paradoxically, to the assurance of traditional modes of exegesis and contextual scholarship. Such a reserve is the space of a possible uncanny freedom that cannot be neutralised by historical placement. In relation to such ambitions, it is a question of 'that which sets this work into work and, that is, always, what it conceals and reserves in itself' (GA 52, p. 6, emphasis added). In his 1934 reading of Holderlin's 'Germanien' (a poem that was 'grievously misread in Hitler's Germany' (David Constantine)), 18 Heidegger traced a conflict between the images of the poem, which seem driven towards some sort of patriotic annunciation or portentous statement (the image of a man, possibly the poet, who is looking to the east, and that of an eagle foretelling her future role to the young and priestly Germania) with yet a deeper and finally victorious reserve, for any explict prophecy seems also to be held back. The poem's reserve, writes Heidegger, preserves it against the ever-present risk of its becoming merely situated in terms of 'content' and 'context' and banked as 'understood'. It keeps it a mystery in a non-mystifying sense:

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The secret is not a barrier placed beyond the truth, but in fact truth's highest form; for to let the secret remain what it is - the preservation of authentic being in its withdrawal - the secret must be manifest as such. A secret which is not apprehended in its power of veiling is not a secret. (GA 39, p. 119)

This is another corollary of the very idea of singularity: that any interpretation of a text must, in so far as that text is genuinely singular, include within itself the mark of its own finitude. This is to acknowledge that unappropriable limit, already traced in Sophocles in relation to the uncanny/to deinon!das Unheimliche, at which what is at issue cannot be defined except in a term that expressly rejects the definable. In the essay on 'The Origin of the Work of Art' this corresponds to Heidegger's idiosyncratic concept of the 'earth-' or the thing-like aspect of an art-work, that which remains opaque, resistant to understanding, not conceptualisable nor of our making. The work is seen as a site of struggle between these two complementary but adverse powers, 'world and earth', inseparable in their necessary antagonism. But what does this mean? Terms like 'earth', 'world' and even 'being' seem opaque, difficult, even a bit irritating. The reader's impulse is to seek their restatement in clearer terms, such as those of Gianni Vattimo when he writes: 'While the world is the system of meanings which are read as they unfold in the work, the earth is that element of the work which comes forth as ever concealing itself anew, like a sort of nucleus that is never used up by interpretations and never exhausted by meanings. 19 This is helpful but it already moves too quickly. To restate Heidegger's words in terms that are 'clearer' risks erasing what is ultimately most forceful in them. It is always more productive to try to think the singularity of these terms in ways that question given categories rather than assimilate it to them. With that in mind it is worthwhile to compare Heidegger's earth/world dichotomy, explicitly presented as a rethinking of the hackneyed form/content categories, with other work that aims to reconsider issues of 'form', this time in the context of contemporary criticism. Within the frameworks of culturalism the dominant understanding of form, whether it nods towards Russian Formalism or to Marxist and New Historicist kinds of reading, is that form is a mode both of defamiliarising and also a kind of relativising. The form of the work is affirmed as showing the 'constructedness' of the representations at work there, thereby pointing to their non-absolute or their 'ideological' or 'political' nature. Form, highlighted, in other words, is inherently relativising of content. To give a specific example, such a model of form is at the basis of one of the better known reassessments of formalism in poetic criticism, Susan

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Wolfson's Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997). 20 Wolfson argues against what she terms 'cultural formalism' (p. 230), meaning that understanding of form that reduces it to the reflex of social interest, or as merely imposing a falsely achieved unity or reconciliation on its material. She does so, however, by highlighting the constructedness of a form as inherently relativising of its content: that is to say, the specific form of a poem may impose its own shaping or unshaping influence on received discourses and this makes it capable of 'articulating a mobile set of practices and competing impulses', so affirming that '[c]ultural knowledge is not excluded but informed' (p. 232). Thus, in the chapter on William Blake, we read of 'Blake's critical confrontation with the role of poetic form in conveying the pressures of historical awareness in the present moment' (p. 62). So Blake's own formal innovations can be seen to highlight, inflect and challenge the cultural politics of those forms he adapts (ballads, salon recitations). For instance, 'The season poems [in Poetical Sketches] ... are a series of progressive experiments in poetic power that involve their reader in the play of its forms.' They 'test the artist's forms against the authority of cultural and social forms' (p. 37). Poetic practice, for Wolfson, is a space of contestation and renegotiation in 'the construction of forms in relation to subjectivity, cultural ideology and social circumstance' (p. 19). So 'form' in this account gives shape to modes of social representation but simultaneously enables a defamiliarisation and relativisation of the cultural forces at work in them. Such a revelation of constructedness then feeds directly into the aggressive liberal model already described - form is held to defamiliarise received discourses so as to demystify and reinflect them, so clearing new spaces for self-assertion in an essentially neo-Darwinian understanding of human life. Blake's formal experiments are to be praised as 'progressive' (p. 3 7) moves in the eighteenth-century culture wars. Wolfson's study recuperates and reaffirms notions of form in terms of the surrounding critical orthodoxy. Heidegger's account, on the other hand, seems at first so different as to be incommensurable. However, the critical points made about the basic liberal/individualist framework of notions of form as 'construction' and relativisation may already reinforce Heideggerian critiques both of the nihilistic notion of human activity as a kind of self-assertion and of an instrumentalist conception of art as the result solely of such activity. Let us go back a little here. If the poetic is singular then one must assume, at one's starting point, that any given way of approaching it will be tainted with arbitrariness and forcedness. Nevertheless, this is something one can only see once one has, starting from somewhere or other (for instance, with what Holderlin's contemporaries understood by

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'Nature'), become sufficiently attuned to the emergent singularity of the poetic to see the inappropriateness of given conceptions. Thus there is a movement between starting point and later understanding that is not so much a continuous progression as the realisation, after the event, of having made a leap. The individual elements of the interpretation only make sense in terms of an understanding of the whole that will have been retrospective. Thus, in relation to Holderlin's vocabulary, Heidegger takes up terms like 'earth', 'heaven', 'God', and does not gloss them so much as engage in a close reading that performs on each the same kind of singularisation as we have already traced in relation to Sophocles' Greek or the guide phrase 'language is language'. As a result such terms no longer name what they did in either Holderlin's or Heidegger's specific cultural context. 'Earth' is not just the physical object, and 'heaven' is certainly not the Christian concept, nor is it just a 'poetic' word for the sky. 'God' is even more problematic. Each becomes a productive but difficult catachresis whose understanding takes place only through the readers themselves enacting the displacement they perform in the specific text in which their sense is newly at stake. Only in that mobile and elusive sense can they be used to elucidate each other. Hence that sense of both the tantalising and the exasperating in Heidegger's lecture- its words will not be pinned down in terms of the already known, they demand a kind of patient and thoughtful participation that can neither be hurried nor summed up: it revises our presupposition even as to what 'clarity' means. Heidegger's mode of reading is the opposite of the customary path of taking the obscure elements of the text and rendering them clearer by rephrasing them in more familiar ways, linked up to given systems of thoughts and beliefs. Instead, terms such as 'Nature' or 'the gods' are slowly disengaged from what one might familiarly take them to mean, rendering them more and more singular. So one can extract no kind of political or reformist 'programme' from Heidegger's thought, only the example, singular each time, of a patient unlayering and reorientation of our stance towards even the most obvious thoughts and objects. Heidegger's objection to historicising readings of poetic or philosophic texts is not that they are incorrect or uninteresting, but that they work to fix this difficult singularising and potentially unsettling process within the framework of far broader assumptions about human existence and agency that are never themselves examined. One might say that such historicism performs only a reductive particularisation of its texts. Often such criticism makes the implicit claim that the more embedded in its immediate empirical context, or 'topical', a text can be shown to have been, then the more generally interesting it is somehow supposed to become. Heidegger objects, however, to attempts to understand what

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Holderlin means by such terms as 'Nature' and 'gods' merely by particularising them in reference to the immediate context of the poet's time. The same would apply to readings of the poetry in terms solely of Holderlin's engagements with republican politics. The difference between such psuedo-singularisations and Heidegger's work on Holderlin is that the latter keeps its force by rendering unstable and newly open the general categories of understanding that might encompass its text. In this case they would be those notions of agency and history, actuality and 'values', which enframe and make possible the particularisations of historicist accounts. Thus, compared to Heidegger's questioning, even the productive revisionism of much modern criticism might seem too self-assured in its own outlook and self-image. The liberal notion of formal 'construction' in Wolfson can be compared with the seemingly correspondent notion of 'createdness' in Heidegger's text. The work, as it emerges in its projective singularity, also becomes emphatic of what Heidegger terms its 'createdness'- its 'factum est': what makes the createdness of the work different from every other bringing forth is that it is also created into the created work ... in the work createdness is expressly created into what is created, with the result that it expressly rises up out of the work. (OBT, p. 39) This createdness seems, at first, to be a sort of reflexive self-marking: 'In other words this: that an unconcealment of beings has happened here and, as this happening, happens here for the first time; or this, that the work is rather than is not' (OBT, p. 39). So the work is not just an unconcealment of beings but a making explicit 'that an unconcealment of beings has happened' (emphasis added). This point is clearly meant to be decisive, but is also obscure. The marking of createdness serves, one might say, to keep open the way the work is not an object, but an event, a continual thrust or 'that ... [dass]- that something be or happen.' In other words, this element of the work keeps for it the status of an act. It is clearly crucial to that reserve which maintains the singular 'thrust' of the work - something that is all the more perceptible, Heidegger writes, when the work's immediate context of production is unknown: 'Precisely where the artist and the process and circumstances of the work's coming into being remain unknown, this thrust, this 'that [dass]' of createdness, steps into view at its purest from out of the work' (OBT, p. 39). These conditions resist the work's neutralisation by the reader or spectator's relating it to some supposedly known given. The marking of createdness stresses at once a certain lack of inevitability, of possible surprise, that the work be what it is and not anything else, even as this re-marking of

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its createdness serves precisely to make questionable the issue of just what it is: The more essentially the work opens itself, the more luminous becomes the uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not. The more essentially this thrust comes into the open, the stranger and more solitary the work becomes. In the bringing forth of the work there lies the offering forth 'that it is.' (OBT, p. 40)

In this way - insisting that it be read as ontological event and not as an object of aesthetic contemplation - the work claims the status of an act that must produce, or perform, the terms even of its own legitimation. In Michel Haar's words: ' ... with the emergence of artistic forms a truth which up to that point had remained imperceptible imposes itself as being antecedent to them.' 21 This sentence from Haar beautifully captures the temporal acausality of the work -that it imperceptibly projects and makes visible the realm it seems merely to follow and re-present. This is why Heidegger can say that the essential element in art springs from nothing. Wolfson's notion, on the other hand, refers the form or 'constructedness' back to the act and social-political location of its makers and recuperates it in terms of the aggressive liberal model of social agency. Moreover, history here remains understood in a particularised rather than genuinely singularised way - there is no sense, for instance, that anything in Blake's work might engage with a deeper historical context so as to challenge a contemporary reader. This dogmatically closes off precisely that element of potential in the work that Heideggerian singularisation keeps open, even if a necessary lack of closure makes it uncomfortable. For Heidegger, the 'createdness' of the work is an affirmation that it cannot be fully understood, or explained, by appeal to anything that went before. Another distinction from Wolfson must be stressed. The logic of thinking the poem as a singular event is that it may exceed being intelligible in terms of the immediate place or allegiance of the person who made it. For Heidegger this leads into a reprise of features of the ancient idea of 'inspiration': the poet speaks not personally but as the space of a letting happen - something that Blanchot was to pick up almost at once and deploy in an essay on Rene Char in 1949 (WF, pp. 98-110). The 'I' of Holderlin's 'Andenken' is quite different from the private tutor named Friedrich Holderlin reminiscing about about his travels to France. In relation to the wind evoked in the poem's first lines, he is 'The open whose being has found its fulfillment in "willing" that this wind be and that it be the wind it is' (E, p. 110) and 'Everywhere in this poem where

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Holderlin says I and me, he speaks as this poet' (E, p. 111 ). This may seem superficially similar to Wolfson's account of Blake as experimenting with the received forms of his times, following through the implications that may suggest themselves in the reinflecting of recieved cultural discourses. Both Blake and Holderlin, it might seem, could be seen as implicating themselves in the possibilities that arise out of the play of forms to which they give themselves. Wolfson's account, however, draws back into the familiar narrative of the poet as hero of progress: the space of composition becomes one of a positive identity claim against the oppressive ideologies of Blake's day, something the modern critic can now map out in terms of social location and competing identities. On the other hand, the Heideggerian singularisation works to affirm 'that an unconcealment of beings has happened' and, potentially, is still happenmg. It is the weak poet, or the writer of mere 'literature', who simply sets out to use or deploy language instrumentally, weighing up the meaning of words as already reckoned, and with a determined end in view, closing off any listening to language as a realm of inchoate possibility, the as yet unsaid. In other words, every word of the poem comes to bear an uncanny inflection of sense unique to this specific context, something that could never be discerned by, say, looking up the word in the dictionary. This holistic principle finds expression in Heidegger's concept of poetry's 'fundamental tone'. As he wrote in the lectures on Holderlin's 'Germanien': Beyond the choice, the place or enchainment of the words, it is ... above all the whole rhythmic configuration of the poetic word which 'expresses' what one calls the meaning. This rhythmic assemblage of saying is not, however, primarily the result of the placement of the words and the disposition of the verse, but in fact the other way round: the rhythmic configuration is first, the creative vibrancy first intuiting the language, the constant and all-pervading source, pre-resonant with the ranging of words, which presides not only over the distribution and the placement of words but also their selection. The rhythmic configuration of the speaking is yet determined from the outset by the poetry's fundamental tone which obtains its own form in the inner contours of the totality. (GA 39, pp. 14-15)

The 'sense' or 'force' of a word, such as 'to deinon' or 'Nature', both arises from and feeds into that singular context which is the poem itself. In this rich notion of the fundamental mood or tuning lies the singular force of the text, its context-projecting as opposed to its context-receiving nature. The 'Ton' is the non-thematisable element, a not-said determining all parts of what is said. So, paradoxically, a Heideggerian reading we need 'must show what does not stand there in the [individual] words and which is nev-

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ertheless said' (IM, p. 173). Heidegger's language of tonality is of course musical, a reading of Holderlin's notoriously obscure and fragmented doctrine of the 'Wechsel der Tone' ['alternation of tones'). 22 Ton in Heidegger, as it will be in Gadamer, is the appeal of what is singular and untransferrable, in the sense that its recognition can be, neccessarily, only a kind of participation. 23

A deep ecological Heidegger/Holderlin What remains perhaps most exciting and challenging in the Holderlin readings is what might be termed Heidegger's deep ecological thinking. 'Deep ecological' is an appropriate phrase in so far as Heidegger's readings work to undo the latent, unaknowledged anthropomorphism and instrumentalism of Western thought. His is the idea, both archaic and 'postmodern', of a non-anthropocentric poetics, so that reading becomes, not the extraction of themes or a locating in cultural politics, but a letting happen of the singular preconceptual space that the precise language of the work may project. The crucial point in all this is what Heidegger understands by 'essence'. It means the singularity of a thing in terms of its being a unique configuration of its world. 'What is essential to all essence is always singular' (1st, p. 64). As Heidegger writes in 'Seyn und Denken', a brief poem-like text in 'Winke [Hints]' (GA 13, pp. 23-33), 'Nothing is in vain I Everthing is singular/unique [einzig]' (p. 30). The singularity at issue is not some sort of punctual 'essence' to be particularised in its oddity and separateness. What something is, for Heidegger, is precisely its force of implication in the network of assumptions, usages, beliefs, emotions, etc. - the whole world of its context. So the singularity of the individual life or fountain or tree or bridge or river is its precise inflection of the relational interplay that makes it what it is. 'All things are singular.' Heidegger has a remarkable sensitivity, more 'poetic' than traditionally 'philosophical', to the way the smallest thing also projects its own context. This isn't a matter only of the homely objects or the poem which project a welcome measure of human life and its various existential dimensions (like the jug with its primordial 'gift' of water in 'The Thing' (PLT, pp. 163-86, at p. 172)). It can also be destructive: a hydroelectric dam alters the essence of the river, or the mere proximity of a road or a telephone mast can, without physically touching it, destroy what a place is. Human behaviour is conceived in the same way. One visit of pleasure-seeking tourists, writes Heidegger, can do more damage to the nature of a peasant village than can a decade of reductive

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teaching about folklore or customs (GA 13, p. 12) - a tellingly anachronistic example. As against such an intrusion of the world of the pleasure and culture industries, Heidegger searches for 'the possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not so much displace the other as anticipate his/her existential potentiality for being' (BT, pp. 158-9; trans. modified).24 This is what plays itself out in the patient, word-by-word minutiae of the Holderlin readings. It informs one of the riskiest features of Heidegger's language, one which led more than any other to perceptions of the readings as obscurantist myth-making, namely the recurrent anthropomorphic use of terms in relation to things that would seem normally applicable only to people. In 'Der Feldweg' (1949) (GA 13, pp. 87-90), for example, a strange quasi-autobiographical text about a country path in the environs of Heidgger's native town (Messkirch), we read: 'It [the path] runs from the park gate towards the Ehnried. The old lime trees in the Schlossgarten gaze after it from behind the wall [schauen ihm uber die Mauer nach)' (p. 87). How can a tree gaze after a path, as if both were conscious? Later in the same paragraph we find: 'Past the edge of the wood the path greets a tall oak under which stands a roughly hewn bench' (p. 87). Provocative 'anthropomorphism' of this kind is very common in Heidegger's writings. The model here is clearly Holderlin. For instance, in an essay on Holderlin's 'Andenken' we read of what is presented as a memory of the rivers near Bourdeaux, where trees are said to 'gaze' out over the river and the surrounding landscape: 'Deep falls the brook, but above I Gaze out a noble pair I Of oaks and white poplars' (E, p. 122). Let us take for a specific example what happens in a small section of one of Holderlin's poems, 'Heimkunft' ('Homecoming'). The poem opens with a dawn over the Alps on the day of a homecoming, a magnificent account of the play of light and shadow among the mountain tops, then its coming earthwards into the sounds of a new day. Heidegger writes of this opening that 'The year extends its greeting in the play of light' (E, p. 36). He continues, staying with Holderlin's own terms: 'Both, earth and light, the "angels of the house," and "the angels of the year," are called "preservers," because as the greeting ones they bring to light the gaiety in whose clarity the "nature" of things and people is safely preserved' (E, p. 36). This kind of language can seem sloppy and exasperating in a philosophical text. In fact, however, it's a kind of reverse anthropomorphism, thoughtfully enacting a rejection of subjectivism i.e. it rejects the assumption (especially common in understandings of the 'lyric') that an individual consciousness, its feelings and views, form the centre of all the lines of perspective in the world of the text - so that a

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phrase such as 'The year extends its greeting in the play of light' would be just a shorthand way of saying that the change of light in Spring is felt as if it were a greeting from some conscious agent. But, in fact, subjectivity and its projections do not come first, either for Holderlin or for Heidegger. This seems idiosyncratic at first, but what is at issue here is only the most elementary fact of all experience- that it is something that happens to us, not something that we represent to ourselves. Hannah Arendt writes in 'What is Freedom?' (1961) of that irreducible element of passivity or the 'given' in all human experience as the ordinarily 'miraculous': 'It is because of this element of the "miraculous" present in all reality that events, no matter how well anticipated in fear or hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once they have come to pass.'25 'Greeting' then is not an anthropomorphism: for the whole point of the 'greeting' of things is their always unanticipated nature, their never being quite what was posited or expected. For Heidegger, while the term 'greet' also names the feeling of welcome in the speaker, this 'feeling' is necessarily one that includes that incalculable element within it. It is not just a matter of what the consciousness of the speaker feels, but an encounter that envelops it. This 'greeting' in Holderlin happens as the giving of specific space and time that is experience when conceived other than anthropocentrically. Heidegger writes of Holderlin's 'Andenken' that 'The greeting wants nothing for itself, and precisely for this reason thereby receives everything which helps the greeted one to enter into his own being' (E, p. 120). Heidegger differs radically then from a strain of modernist poetics in that the poem, for him, is not essentially a drama of consciousness, engaged in symbolic representations of its inner life. Singularisation, pushed to such a point of reversed anthropomorphism, undoes the latent instrumentalism in Western thought to an extreme at which Heidegger's own language knowingly risks appearing nonsensical, or merely 'wildly poetic'. In the Holderlin lectures on poems on the Rhine and the upper Danube, for instance, there are assertions that have one rubbing one's eyes and reading twice: 'The poets, as poets, are these rivers, and these rivers are the poets' (1st, p. 166). This assertion compares with Heidegger's endorsement of the opening of Holderlin's 'Heimkunft', which writes of the Alpine cloud at dawn, 'Composing poems of joy'. 'The cloud composes poetry', repeats Heidegger, quite soberly (E, p. 34 ). This mode of writing, Heidegger insists, is no sort of symbolism or mere imagery. The rivers and the cloud can be called poetic in that their presence is decisive in giving to other things their measure and appearance. David Cooper writes of the later Heidegger that 'ordinary things - actual shoes, a jug, a farmhouse -can, when viewed appropriately, play the same revealing and "gathering"

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roles vis-a-vis world and earth previously reserved for art works.' 26 Thus, within the landscape, it is the river that sets out and dominates the significant relations to each other of hill and valley, of woods and fields, brings each into its own and makes possible various sites for human habitation: The poets are these rivers. Being a poet essentially prevails from out of the essence of the rivers. The essence of the rivers cannot at all be identified and made visible geographically and then subsequently allocated a symbolic function. The essence of the rivers can, from the outset, be experienced only from out of the poetic dwelling of human beings; the 'image' of the river that is supposed to then become a 'symbol' first shows itself only in the light of the essence of poetry. (Ist, p. 166)

Heidegger (after Holderlin) takes the place- or locale-making quality of the rivers or mountains first, and then thinks of the people there as ideally conceiving themselves from out of that granting of space. Heidegger writes elsewhere of a mountain range: 'The range holds together, in its height, the single peaks in their independence. Indeed, its mode is to be something other than the sum of its peaks but simply the peaks' essence' (GA 77, p. 236). The path 'greets' and the trees 'gaze' in the way each mountain achieves its 'self-affirmation' in the mountain chain. It is the river's presence that gives to the landscape its sense of an 'over there [Dort]' and the 'there [Da]' that makes a locality, a 'place', as opposed to the abstraction of a mere 'space'. Even more than the path and the trees that 'greet' each other, '[t]he river "is" the locality that pervades the abode of human beings upon the earth,' determining a place where they may find themselves homely (heimisch). Such thinking underpins Heidegger's anti-cosmopolitan localism, his defence of a supposed peasant mode of perception and living, of dialect and 'homeland'. It may seem utopian, and with potentially reactionary overtones (for does Heidegger always overcome the risk of thinking a person only as a function of place?). However, such letting be of the singular in its potentially projective force also offers a profoundly irenic, non-violent mode of thinking, contrasting, say, with essentially aggressive models of cultural identity as competitive self-assertion. The more one posits that a work may be singular in the sense of resisting current ways of thinking and perceiving then the more elusive it must become and yet, necessarily, also the more potentially decisive, even historic - for the more drastic may be the potential break from current modes of being. Such is the revolutionary status Heidegger insisted on always granting to Holderlin. 'Holderlin's poetry is a destiny for us. It waits for the day when mortals will correspond to it' (E, p. 224).

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However, a sentence like this also exemplifies what still makes a reader uncomfortable with the Holderlin readings. The logic of singularisation -that the more singular a work the more drastic its potential break from given ways of thinking- has shifted here from being a liberating hypothesis to being a dogmatic claim. Just as Wolfson recuperates Blake to a modernist narrative of liberation (culminating, implictly, in the overview of the modern critic), so Heidegger tends to appropriate Holderlin to his own eschatological narrative of the 'history of being'. One difference between Heidegger and the three other thinkers of a 'poetics of singularity' would be that, for Gadamer, Blanchot and Derrida, singularisation of the kind at issue will remain a postulate basic to the ethics of reading and understanding. It offers a model of responsible reading, as both calling on the most demanding and non-compartmentalised breadth of context while simultaneously engaging with a text's minutiae. It is a discipline of scepsis that can awaken the greatest issues in the smallest items. However, by elevating Holderlin to the exclusive status of a German messiah, Heidegger sometimes allows the cultural politics of his particular argument with Nazism and European nihilism more generally to foreclose the issues in ways at odds with his own dream of singularisation.

Conclusion Heidegger's is an irenic and perhaps 'utopian' vision. However, it is also one whose often exclusive address to German speakers and German history gives it elements of identity thinking that the logic of the argument should have led Heidegger to jettison - pronouncements such as, for instance, that 'A reflective world-reorientation can come only from the Germans.m Such dogmatism is only tempered slightly by the way, after 1945, the addressee of the Holderlin readings becomes European humanity as opposed to the Germans in particular. Read with this strong caveat in mind, Heidegger's affirmation of what is at stake in the singular eventhood of a text may still become something far more like Hannah Arendt's notion of 'natality', the affirmation of a notion of freedom that is constrained neither by reference to some identity taken as already given nor, equally question-begging, a presupposed sense of what 'identity' in general means. Heidegger's seeming fatalism ('only a god can save us') derived from his sense of the power of those deepest assumptions that govern and (almost) determine Western life. What fascinated him in Holderlin and in Antigone was the possibility, almost suppressed but still legible, of a break from the chains that bind

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the present to the past and which would thus already undo the future. A break at so deep a level of existence is not something that can become a recognised political programme. It can only be prepared for by not being foreclosed. As Arendt writes of 'natality': It is not in the least superstitious, it is even a counsel of realism, to look for

the unforeseeable and the unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect 'miracles' in the political realm. And the more heavily the scales are weighted in favor of disaster, the more miraculous will the deed done in freedom appear; for it is disaster, not salvation, which always happens automatically and therefore always must appear to be irresistible. 28

If one traces the path of other thinkers in a poetics of singularity that largely look to Heidegger, one possible way forward appears. While Heidegger's thinking cannot itself always overcome a kind of 'patriotic' identity politics or dogmatism (for instance, it is never clearly demonstrated that other modern writers might not challenge us as deeply as Holderlin does, in other ways), the inherent logic of singularisation must lead to the reader's own rejection both of any lingering nationalism in Heidegger but also of studies of his thought that are too hasty to explicate it all in terms of the cultural categories it thoroughly undermines. Such a double gesture, both for and against Heidegger, is in effect what happens in such astute readers of his thinking as Gadamer, Celan, Blanchot and Derrida. If Heidegger established no school of followers in literary reading, this may also be because his readings always set the intellectual stakes so high - the nature and destiny of the West. Heidegger's uncompromising reading of everything in terms of the most basic assumptions of his own civilisation and culture necessarily means that the intellectual pressure brought to bear on a text is so intense that perhaps only figures of the stature of Sophocles and Holderlin could withstand it. One of the developments to be traced in Gadamer, Blanchot and Derrida is a revision of basically Heideggerian arguments about the aggressive bases of Western ideas of knowledge into a more catholic approach, one able to affirm the singularity of multiplicitous texts without subjecting each to the extreme demand that they necessarily be capable of being singularised to the point of latent intellectual revolution.

Chapter 3

The uniquely obvious: singularity in Gadamer's late essays

We can ultimately define a researcher as someone who is familiar with what the textbooks say but does not believe it. (In Praise of Theory, p. 130)

Introduction: beyond Truth and Method More than that of the other thinkers covered here, Hans-Georg Gadamer's work aligns a concern with singularity with more familiar thinking in poetics. The hermeneutics of his classic Truth and Method (1960) bolstered that traditional defence of the humanities as offering a knowledge of particulars that does not reduce them to instances of general laws, and as acknowledging the authority of singular oeuvres that could never be substituted for each other. Gadamer stressed the way Heidegger's work on the essentially pre-reflective nature of human understanding can be taken to endorse the authority of traditional intellectual skills, such as textual interpretation, without any need to underwrite them with some more 'scientific' method (even if such were possible). The aim of this hermeneutics is to enquire patiently into what happens, at the most obvious yet most overlooked level, when someone reads or interprets something. Gadamer argues: Celan once put it beautifully: When a 'stone' is mentioned in a poem, it is, of course, important what can be meant by 'stones'; but what matters in the poem is this stone, the one the poem mentions. This is the secret to the capacity for judgement: that one makes something general concrete with respect to the given situation. This is missing in literary criticism and therefore I can see why creative people are upset and feel that their work is used up like cannonfodder in literary criticism. (interview in GE, p. 70)

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With its respect for the singularity of individual works, hermeneutics necessarily never developed into some fully systematic method of interpreting texts, some general 'approach' along with the others with its toolkit of concepts waiting to be deployed. If theorising means the subsumption of individual entities under general laws, hermeneutics is anti-theoretical: 'When we are interpreting a text, it is not to prove 'scientifically' that this love poem belongs to the genre of love poems' but' to understand this love poem, on its own and in its unique relation to the common structure of love poems.' 1 These arguments were to become relatively familiar. However, accounts of Gadamer's work have also become a depressing example of how received truths can caricature a work of thought to the point of its almost complete exclusion from debate. Gadamer's name now often conjures the mildly cartoon image of a ponderous Teutonic thinker concerned to protect old Western humanist traditions from further erosion -a thinker both conservative and Eurocentric. 2 In fact, little of the caricature is true of the Gadamer of Truth and Method and none of his many essays since the 1970s. Perhaps it was inevitable that a thinker so critical of the complacency in the predominantly modernist culture of the humanities should become, in effect, one of its minor scapegoats. Looking back over his long career, Gadamer posed himself the following question: How far did I succeed in presenting the hermeneutic dimension as beyond selfconsciousness, that is to say, in preserving and not simply sublating the Otherness of the Other in understanding? (GW 2, p. 5)

In other words, how far is the claim to 'understand' another person, or a text, only an appropriation of either to one's own sense of things, a refusal of singularity and difference? Accounts of Gadamer can often be drawn on two sides of the line formed by this question. Robert Bernasconi, John Caputo 3 and others have argued for what tends now to pass as an accepted truth: that Gadamer affords too much authority to inherited tradition and to some supposed 'common horizon' in the act of interpretation, so that his hermeneutics is reductive of otherness. On the other hand, E. D. Hirsch derides Gadamer's famous dictum, 'we understand in a different way, if we understand at all' (TM, p. 297) as finally meaning 'one understands only when one does not understand.' 4 The tension between these possible readings is legible throughout the minutiae of Gadamer's work. It is implicit, for instance, in his argument that 'Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, it creates a common language' (TM, p. 341, emphasis added).

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Both views have some plausibility. However, both tend to overlook the point that, in stressing the nature of understanding as always a dialogue, Gadamer's thought aligns itself most with the uncertain space of open tension and unfinalisable debate between those two notional poles (understanding as more of the same/understanding as unintelligibly different). The issue is Gadamer's commitment to what can again be described as 'critical freedom' with its 'focus upon the conditions of change and transformation in the subject', on a possible turning point 'at which some state or condition of things passes over into a different state or condition' (Paul Patton). 5 In Gadamer's dialogic model of understanding this means the freedom of the interpreter to be able to think beyond the immediate constraints of his or her intellectual context and its inheritances. Our horizon of understanding may be finite and conditioned but, Gadamer stresses, every sign or cultural marker is also open to reinterpretation. The over-familiar term 'horizon', which Gadamer adapts from Husserl, is in fact forcefully specific: a horizon is always encompassing but also unique and, above all, open. The horizon is not entrapping, but it opens onto other cultures and times: Just as the individual is never simply an individual because he is always in understanding with others, so too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never absolutely bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon. (TM, p. 304)

Such a notion of freedom underlies hermeneutics' argument with both the relativism and, implicitly, the dogmatism of some contemporary criticism. Hermeneutics disputes the argument that because every interpreter necessarily mediates texts, other cultures, etc. through the terms of his or her specific background, then he or she is necessarily trapped within that background. That kind of argument is also the basis of the dominant culturalism of contemporary criticism, the use of implicitly deterministic models of culture to underwrite claims to be able to understand every thing in and of a specific text as a product of its social location (e.g. tracing everything in the text as an effect of the workings of class, gender, race, nationality, etc.). Human existence, for a pupil of Heidegger's Being and Time like Gadamer, must escape the full grasp of any such understanding of culture, for existence is 'free' in the sense that no specific positive determination need exhaust it. Gadamer aligns his work with thinkers who defend the specific nature of the humanities by reference to 'the mystery of human freedom' (GE, p. 193) - meaning here that freedom from those deterministic kinds of explanation that apply above all in the natural sciences. It is this freedom

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that makes human responsibility and decision-making meaningful (GE, p. 203 ). 'The task of our human life in general is to find free spaces and learn to move therein' (GE, p. 59). Reading, seen as a modern version of Socratic questioning and answering, is itself human freedom in action (GW 10, p. 323). This is freedom as the capacity for critical distance, including above all from how one currently understands oneself. Such a distance is not primarily that of neutral observation, nor of 'intelligence' in the sense of an abstracted formal skill in the performance of pre-given tasks or problems, but it corresponds to the ancient Greek ideals of theoria or to later ideals of the contemplative life, a space that enables consideration of 'the setting of [human] goals themselves and the choice of the right form of life' (EH, p. 59). 6 One condition for such freedom is the duty of using the thinking and writing of others to 'particularise' oneself, to become aware of the limits of one's own arguments and opinions (see, for example, PT, p. 68). This is not just meant in the sense of a blandly democratic ethos. It aims to contribute to a reorientation of the basic sense of what human life is. It stresses human finitude to counter, for instance, the increasingly global technological fantasy that the universe exists as a realm of endless possibilities for human exploitation, as well as 'our obsession with emancipatory utopia' with all its risks of righteous dogmatism and oppression (PT, p. 79).7 For Gadamer, the decisive event in history remained the rise of the natural sciences. It was only with the Enlightenment that the claims of non-formalised knowledge and practice were held to lose their legitimacy. Against this, Truth and Method reaffirmed some features inherent in that tradition of humanism and practical thinking and know-how that the Enlightenment had discredited: Philosophically regarded, what emerges from the background of the great tradition of practical (and political) philosophy reaching from Aristotle to the turn of the nineteenth century is that practice represents an independent contribution to knowledge. Here the concrete particular proves to be not only the starting point but also a continuing determination of the content of the universal. (TM, Afterword, p. 557)

However, despite his stereotype image, Gadamer was not defending some specific European tradition as such against the Enlightenment, but defending that space of existential freedom which older non-formalisable kinds of knowledge had occupied: 'I never defended particular traditions, only that there is a horizon of tradition, which always constitutes the background for change' (interview in GE, p. 150). Reconfiguring what might be meant by this practical, non-reflective tradition enabled

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the Gadamer of Truth and Method to assert the validity of that nonformalised element of intellectual tradition without essentialising it or repeating the 'romantic' gesture of asserting the poetic or the mythic etc. as corresponding either to some timeless 'nature' or to some supposedly suppressed identity. Perhaps the most striking feature of hermeneutic thinking after Truth and Method remained Gadamer's defence of art, after Heidegger, as a mode of 'truth'. A work is not just something for the critic to 'understand' from the outside as an object intelligible in terms of, say, the psychology or social position of its author or the cultural history of its day, but as engaging still with questions of truth and falsehood to which we need to respond. Take, for example, the situation of a critic studying a poem by William Blake (1757-1827) or a prose essay by S0ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Both writers, in their different ways, grapple with the issue of a person's commitment to basic or ultimate beliefs. So to treat Blake's deep engagement with the question of how best to live simply as a historical document, situating it at some particular juncture of the history of ideas, or alternatively as of value only as a 'work of art' whose qualities we are to savour, is already to have made some fairly brutal decisions about how to read. In other words, a text cannot be relegated to the realms of the traditionally historical, the subjective or the 'aesthetic' without having made a possibly arrogant restriction of the kind of claim it may make. And what, of course, of reading the Bible or the Koran simply 'as literature' or as historical documents? Dominant commonsense ideas of 'art', 'literature' or the 'historical' are worryingly neutralising of the texts they are held to embrace. Gadamer repeatedly attacks the way in which, as science has been granted an exclusive claim to truth, a corresponding notion of the merely 'aesthetic' emerged, a notion that reduces works of art to mere experiences for a reader or spectator to consume (in effect giving a work the same status of being as a lollipop). Would William Blake- or any great writer- not have been outraged at the thought of being read 'as literature' in these ways? Gadamer writes: Is there to be no knowledge in art? Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience (Erfahrung) of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature ... but still knowledge, i.e., conveying truth. (TM, pp. 97-8)

What this means in practice is a respect for the singular, for the possible exceptionality of the text. Just as one not does respond to the appeal of

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a friend's deeply held views on some issue by saying, 'what you say can be understood as a precise articulation of the social and psychological conditions and tensions under which you live in early twenty-first century England', so we should respond to a text from the past, or from another culture, as if it were a partner in conversation with us. In other words, hermeneutics demands a stance of non-objectifying openness in the reader: 'a person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something' (TM, p. 269). Freedom from deterministic modes of understanding is definitive for what Gadamer terms a 'text'. Inverting a key assumption of historicism, Gadamer defines a text as most truly a text when it is detached from its origin and enabled, when read and reread in various contexts, still to make a claim in its own right (GW 8, p. 286). This is also the basis of Gadamer's understanding of the distinctiveness of the literary as part of 'das Schriftum', the written as a realm defined by its continuing intelligibility detached from the circumstances of its immediate production or reception. Gadamer rehabilitates the idea that texts that reach us from the past must be granted the space of some cultural authority, even if only provisionally. 8 This is a lot less 'conservative' than it sounds: as we shall see Derrida offers a similar idea of the need for a kind of 'faith' in reading a text. Likewise one must be wary of too swift an assumption of a good conscience in the act of 'understanding': 'By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitmacy' (TM, p. 360). To respond to the text as something singular is, necessarily, as we saw with Heidegger, a refusal to concede its explicability in terms of general laws or pre-established contexts. Defending this argument against accusations of uncritically conceding too much authority to tradition, Gadamer also brings in the issue of the singularity of any reader. A text, free to bear significance apart from the assumption of its being already determined by its initial context, is not only singularised in itself, it may singularise its reader in the very same movement whereby it becomes a mode of address rather than an object of historical research: therefore, something 'speaks' only when it 'speaks "originally," that is "as if it were saying something to me in particular'" (TM, Afterword, p. 577, emphasis added). In the later Gadamer the stress is on the relative solitudes of both writer and reader, both considered singly, as in the very title of Gadamer's small experimental book on some poems by Paul Celan, Who

Am I and Who Are You?

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The 'death of art' and the self-realisation of the literary Gadamer died as recently as 2002, at an age (102) that has the odd effect of making Truth and Method (1960) seem like a product of early middle age. Along with a substantial 'Afterword' to the second edition of his book, Gadamer's numerous studies and occasional essays since 1960 have seen a continuing enhancement but also revision of many of its concerns. In fact, Gadamer's thought has been equally directed 'toward not forgetting the limit [die Grenze] implicit in every hermeneutical experience of meaning' (TI, p. 25). Much of this work, including his readings of Celan and many untranslated essays, is less a practice of hermeneutics than an engagement with the challenge of poetic singularity to the limit of hermeneutics. A poem is 'a thoughtful word on the horizon of the unsaid' and unsayable (GW 9, p. 343). This brings us to one of the most distinctive features of Gadamer's later work. Art was a prominent issue in Truth and Method but it served there primarily to foreground issues crucial to the human sciences more generally. Truth and Method defended the free space utilised by traditional skills of a rhetorical/literary culture against excessive demands for methodology and rationalisation. Many later essays, however, focus on the changes that must befall the literary and other arts in modernity. It is ironic that so much secondary material on Gadamer occupies itself with the claim that he lends too much authority to inherited tradition in the interpretation of texts, for his focus on modern literature is precisely on the effects, often positive, of the lack of any such tradition. Hegel's famous claim about the essential pastness of art in the modern age is an inevitable reference point here. Gadamer reads Hegel's famous doctrine of the anachronism of art as describing the way in which, after the end of the eighteenth century, artistic forms were no longer embedded in a given religious or civic life, whose order they might embody or celebrate (see also GW 8, p. 209). The contexts that had previously given a painting or a work of poetry its readability and importance did so less and less. Art's relation to truth becomes questionable - works from the past become submitted to an aesthetic or museum consciousness that negates in advance any truth claim they might make on us. What, though, of works of art produced in the modern period, produced, that is, when the modern concepts of 'mere art' and aesthetic consciousness were already dominant? Truth and Method contained only three shortish paragraphs on this subject. According to these, the artist, severed from old ties to church or patron, loses 'his place in the world' (TM, p. 87), and takes on features of a social outsider, as in the nineteenth-century figure of the bohemian. The artist's position is made

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more ambiguous by the growth of redemptive ideals of 'culture'. As religious traditions decay, and limitations and oppressions in received tradition become criticised, the demands intensify that art take up the task of providing shared frames of reference and means of social cohesion. Such demands, wrote Gadamer: [have] since defined the tragedy of the artist in the world, for any fulfillment of it is always only a local one, and in fact that means it is refuted. The experimental search for new symbols or a new myth which will unite everyone may certainly gather a public and create a community, but since every artist finds his own community, the particularity of such communities merely testifies to the disintegration that is taking place. (TM, p. 88) This is the impossible dilemma of the modern artist in the West: to accept a duty of general cultural legislation in a context of always singular projects and careers that ensures in advance the failure of any such ambition. The claims of the art-work thus remain unsettled, controversially and unresolvedly. How do the difficult conditions of modern society affect the specifics of the arts of writing? If, in the West, a dominant classical-biblical culture no longer enframes and mediates it, then modern literature must assume an element of interpretative reflection within itself (RB, p. 73 ). Deprived of external support, literary texts necessarily became sole vehicle and sole witness of whatever truth-claims they project. To illustrate this shift, Gadamer refers to Kafka's way of writing texts (The Trial, Metamorphosis) which might initially look like allegorical narratives, the reader's job then being to decode whatever values or conditions 'K.' or Gregor Samsa may symbolise. In fact, of course, Kafka's writing is only apparently allegorical. His figures remain enigmatic, as if gesturing towards some further sense that is yet for ever withdrawn. The effect, both disconcerting and enticing, is of a quasi-allegory outside a secure sense of its codes, something resisting any clear translation into supposedly common values: 'Allegory presupposes a self-evident consensus, which no longer exists today. Poetry today presupposes a consensus which has yet to arise' (GC, p. 164). Kafka exemplifies a general tendency in post-romantic literature, the invention of figures or images, mythic or otherwise, whose status remains pregnant with a sense of significance but also relatively undefined by any available broader frame of reference (e.g. T. S. Eliot's 'hollow men', Tennyson's 'lotus eaters', the angels of H.D.'s Trilogy or of Rilke's Duino Elegies, even a blown paper bag or a wheelbarrow in the work of William Carlos Williams). Literature, one might say, has become the art of the open singularity, namely of specific images or narratives that clearly

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mean something more than their immediate or particular referents, but without this greater sense of context which they project being determinable in terms of inherited structures of thought or belief. Likewise, even Marcel Duchamp's setting up of a watering can as art makes it more than a watering can (HE, p. 159). Gadamer argues that the decay of generally acceptable common myths as the basis for social cohesion and mutual understanding has created conditions in which the literary arts realise themselves in new ways. The literary text, forced upon its own resources to project the truths that will render it fully communicative, must realise now more fully than before that essential power of language to project its own seeming referent. Literature, Gadamer reminds us, does not admit of being proved true or false in the sense of giving empirical references that can be checked, but it strives to become something 'schon [beautiful]', i.e. something that seems already fully justified simply by existing (GW 8, p. 286). For instance, how could you look elsewhere for some verification of the force of Holderlin's announcement of the return of the gods, or Kafka's fantasy of metamorphosis into a cockroach? '[T]he poetic creation does not intend something, but rather is the existence of what it intends- so much so that even the poet who hears it cannot think of himself as the one who said it' (RB, p. 113 ). Modern literature, assuming an element of interpretative reflection within itself (RB, p. 73 ), may become 'a saying that possesses absolute reality simply by virtue of its being said. The Greek word for this is mythos' (RB, p. 70). Surprisingly, then, the loss of monocultural frames of reference does not mean a loss of authority for the literary, but often the contrary. This 'mythic' element of the text is what, for Gadamer, helps secure its force by refusing the reader the easy option of interpretation within some pregiven framework. It draws understanding instead back into the work and its particular configurations, their singular resistance and resonance. This movement of singularisation and resistance has the effect of activating in the language latent and sedimented possibilities of sense. To throw the reader back upon the poem itself as its own authoritative context enables it to awaken the latent depth of its implication in its language. Thus, whereas in the scientific model of terminology, the connotations of a word can only be 'noise', impeding the aims of secured knowledge, in a literary text, 'the connotations of an expression do not muddy its intelligibility ... but increase it insofar as the intended context as a whole gains in intelligibility' (TM, Afterword, p. 564). The force of the literary is to perform, in itself, a Heideggerian 'Destruktion' of language, i.e. to take the received terms of language, with their ideally

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univocal, context-free meaning, and to reawaken in them the connotative force of a pre-reflective understanding: Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. (TM, p. 458)

The poetic word is one vibrant with its inherence in the life of the language as a whole, its history and associations. 'Each word stands for a whole field of meaning that opens itself within it' (GW 10, p. 79). Crucial then to Gadamer's whole enterprise is this idea of the open singularity of the work, not as a vague lack of determined sense, but a specific force, foregrounding its whole language world: In listening to a poem, one is not permitted to take the word as just a sign pointing to a specific meaning; rather, one must also simultaneously perceive all that a word carries with it, namely, the whole radiation and the multiplicity of directions contained in its power to mean; this intensifies the movement and direction of the meaning in its assertion and allows the volume of the poetic speaking to achieve three-dimensionality, so to speak. 9

Since a text's readability is not confined to the time of its inscription, this 'radiation' of connotations and inflections of possible contexts is continuously shifting: it projects itself into a future that always transcends the time of any one reading. The dialogue with language inherent to the working of the poetic text continues indefinitely. The real or latent presence of others is something that language always carries with it. So, despite the lack of a common myth or set of fundamental beliefs since the late eighteenth century, a poem, working through its resonance with its language world, cannot but still relate to the 'whole' sense of life implicit in that language - a sort of implicit, unsystematised 'myth'. So Gadamer's position is no conservative lament for the loss of a common, overarching religious or social context that would at once relate a specific text to a given frame of reference. It defends the literary as a realm of the plurally mythic in his specific sense of open singularities that offer themselves to general understanding while simultaneously refusing to be bound or exhausted by it. When Gadamer argues that poetic texts 'are only authentically there when they come back into themselves' (TI, p. 41) his position is strikingly unlike other arguments on the self-reflexive element in the literary, the argument, for instance, that literature is inherently anti-authoritarian because, in referring back to itself, it always stages or relativises its own speech-act and always puts, as it were, inverted commas around its asser-

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tions. Gadamer means something quite unlike any sort of dissolve into self-questioning. Against such a stress on the 'self-ironising' and selfundermining elements of the literary, Gadamer refers to Martin Luther's phrase 'it stands written' as instancing a certain claim to authority inherent in the written text's mode of being. Gadamer expresses this in terms that Derrida will also pick up. A literary text is a 'statement' in a testamentary sense: it is an unsubstitutable saying which is also the act of standing by what it says, and in this it is analogous to the language both of religion and of the law (as of the status of a recorded statement in court (TW, pp. 139££)). This is the textual force that is also put to work in constitutional or legal statutes. Gadamer writes: The poetic text exercises a normative function that does not refer back either to an original utterance nor to the intention of the speaker but is something that seems to originate in itself, so that in the fortune and felicity of its success, a poem surprises and overwhelms even the poet. (TI, p. 42)

At the same time, however, this potential increase in textual authority can easily reverse itself into irrelevance- for its very condition (the decay of outer frames of reference) is necessarily also the danger of mere hermeticism and obscurity. This anomalous situation surrounds the very concept of 'art' .It was its relative divorce from service to religion or other forms of patronage which enabled the very emergence of art as a distinct concept. But this happens only in art's being perpetually troubled about its perceived divorce from morality or knowledge: what 'art' means or should mean becomes at issue in any significant new work. The stakes here are at their most intense in Gadamer's focus on what he terms 'hermetic lyrics' (TI, p. 45), referring, for instance, to Stephane Mallarme and Celan. The need for the literary text to become its own Sage may strain finally the possibility of achieving a common understanding at all: 'The poetry of our time has reached the limits of intelligible meaning and perhaps the greatest achievements of the greatest writers are themselves marked by tragic speechlessness in the face of the unsayable' (RB, p. 9).

Singularity and holism: the 'lyric' That simultaneous self-realisation and self-secretion of the literary produced by modern conditions in the West is most fully realised in Gadamer's distinctive concept of 'lyric'. '[T]he lyrical word is language in a paradigmatic sense' (TM, Afterword, p. 575). What does Gadamer mean by this?

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Familiarly, the literary is singular in the broad sense of being 'untranslatable' and the lyric is most so. An appeal to the scale of translatability is actually a frequent and crucial gesture in Gadamer's essays (e.g. GW 8, pp. 291-2), translation serving here as a strong instance of the hermeneutic problem more generally (TM, p. 387). The issue is invariably the relation between language and conceptuality - the degree to which language accommodates or resists translation into univocal and fully 'transparent' concepts, 'the separation of saying from what is said' (TW, p. 153). Such untranslatability is a definitive feature for the modern mythic in Gadamer's sense, its resistance to full conceptualisation and, correspondingly, its demand for attention on its own terms. It is this condition that finds its extreme realisation in what Gadamer calls lyric poetry (TW, p. 15 3 ), a form he argues to be peculiarly suited to modern post-traditional societies. By 'lyric' Gadamer also means primarily a text that pivots itself on the saying of a solitary 'I'. This 'I' is a deliberately empty word: it may primarily refer to the poet, or the speaker of the poem, but it is usually capable of meaning anyone in his or her singularity: the 'poem expresses who the I and the you are, here and always: Kierkegaard's "this single individual" who is each of us' (GE, p. 77). Now that the big mythical structures of more traditional societies no longer have the same authority, Gadamer comes to privilege arts with minimal narrative content, such as abstract painting and 'lyrical' poetry. With abstract painting, for instance, the divorce of art from content in the sense of shared or recognisable themes or symbols becomes a constitutive feature of the work. With lyrical poetry, likewise, 'narrative content ... is reduced more and more' and the poem is at its purest in so far as it does not transmit any pre-given cultural inheritance but instead creates its own mythopoetic incantation. One calls this symbolism. Thereby lyrical poetry fulfils the full law of its genre, i.e. to be a whole of sound and meaning which does not tell us a saga but tells us how we are (GE, p. 89). In a mass-media dominated society poetry gives voice more quietly and discreetly than before, like a whispering from one individual to another. Kierkegaard's single individual, one remembers, is 'simply and solely the single individual without connections or complications'. 10 In this sense, Gadamer's 'I' can be correlated with mere existence (Dasein) as presubjective and minimally determined by cultural or social roles. The solitary 'I' is not to be understood as expressing itself in language in any sense of representing there given feelings or thoughts (nor, accordingly, is the reader's task that of any sort of reconstitution of such feelings or thoughts). Language is rather the element that articulates the existential space of the 'I', the contours of its encounter with its facticity - a kind of

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'limit-situation', if you like, though not necessarily with the overtones of crisis which that may suggest. (Gadamer's specific focus on the hermetic lyric stands out for avoiding that fraught rhetoric of high crisis dominant in modern poetics.) His 'I' is often also a mere 'who'? Moreover, since human life and language are inherently dialogical, the lyrical 'I' is to be found in relation with a 'you', a 'you' equally inderminate in the sense of covering possible addressees that may range from God to anyone whom the text encounters as a reader or listener. Gadamer seems drawn to texts that induce a sense of uncertainty as to who, in the text and beyond, 'you' and 'I' might be. These issues are experienced not in relation to some vacuous supposed universality of human nature (all people being taken as examples of commonly known characteristics) but as a basic existential unsettledness, one necessarily unconfined by specific cultural, ethnic or other coordinates. On the other hand, if one looks at the specific authors Gadamer writes about (Rilke, Stefan George, Ernst Meister, Hilde Domin, Celan) he does seem to limit the modern scope of the poetic to texts of existential self-definition or meditation. The singularity of the poetic mythos correlates with the singleness of the isolated individual. This is also why modern poetry tends to the hermetic, as if addressed to those for whom poetry is indispensable but who no longer feel secure in its inheritance. Holderlin is, as for Heidegger, exemplary here. The power of Holderlin in our time is that he is a poet who is constantly, falteringly, in search of a language for what he needs to say, and this struggle is what appeals so strongly ('What speaking was for Holderlin is perhaps the source [Urform] of speech in general. To speak is to search for the word' (GW 9, p. 41)). 'Lyric' then comes to mean a new kind of plural secular mythos, a site of fundamental encounters with our historicity and facticity. It forms for the reader an encounter with a singular 'I' whose bonds of community with other readers may be minimal. On the other hand, it risks becoming a merely hermetic art, a superior kind of crossword puzzle for university scholars. Gadamer's is an 'impersonal' conception and is a very long way from dominant concepts of the lyric in Anglo-American poetics. The lyric is obviously not a matter of the externalisation of subjective emotion, nor is it a kind of drama of consciousness, or any sort of 'epiphany.' (Contrast M. H. Abrams's entry for 'lyric' in his Glossary of Literary Terms: 'any fairly short, non-narrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of thought and feeling'.) 11 The principle of unity holding a lyric together for Gadamer is not then a matter of an expressed subjectivity or revelation of mood or thought, but untranslatability in the guise of what he terms 'tone' [Ton], a quasitechnical term derived from Heidegger and Holderlin. It names the

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specific, unalterable inseparability of phonetic and material structures and rhythms from what is said, variously amplifying, sharpening it or inflecting it with dissonance (TW, p. 150). It 'holds together the unity of the structure (Gebilde) with all the differences and degrees of disruptive moods and thick coherences that are possible' (TW, p. 150). 'Ton' is not discussed in Truth and Method but it corresponds to a tenet reaffirmed there that 'the whole in its relations is more original than the parts' (TM, p. 459). A pervasive 'tone' is the crucial mode in which the whole manifests itself simultaneously throughout each part of the work, something proven by the fact that the overall tone of a text can be picked up even in a brief extract from it. Gadamer's is very like Heidegger's notion of 'rhythm', a pervading force of the whole across the (superficially linear) unfolding of the sequence of words. Thus, Gadamer writes, we are drawn from the beginning of a poem into a going along with the whole (GW 9, p. 338). The tone is also that at issue when one learns the text 'by heart' (auswendig), a kind of knowing enabled by the impetus of the tone in the compulsion of the parts to seem to echo and repeat themselves elsewhere, as co-determinants of that whole. The presence of the tone throughout the text also means that each specific element of the text does not just signify immediately but is placed into a kind of internal dialogue with the rest, even as that effects its own singularisation: Gadamer writes of the poem's 'dialogue with itself'. The Ton, then, 'says' the whole of the text in a way that is finally impossible to describe, for it says more as a whole than anything that can be extracted or summarised in the way of a descriptive statement. Ton is a principle of the text's open singularity: 'It is always indeed the whole [das Ganze] that one wants to understand, just as the tone of a poem tells it us and as we are never capable in thought of saying it as a whole' (GW 9, p. 343 ). This is why the text can be described as 'always on the horizon of the unsayable' (GW 9, p. 343). This makes for 'the excess of meaning that is present in the work itself. The inexhaustibility that distinguishes the language of art from all translation into concepts rests on this excess of meaning' (PH, p. 102). If the 'Ton' correlates with the singularity of a whole that resists summary expression or description, then one might also ask how it is 'known' at all? What is it in the reader or hearer that intimates it? One cannot make a sharply defined object of knowledge out of something that exists in the mode of multidimensional resonance or as a precisely judged polyvalence. The kind of understanding required is not analytic: it must be more a kind of participation than a critical overview. This is the place for a distinctive concept of Gadamer's, the 'inner ear'. The phrase normally names a tiny organ connected with the sense of balance.

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Gadamer adapts it to name the correlate of that demand of singularisation inherent in the literary text, its projection of a ' new ideal speaking' as a task for the reader to realise (TI, p. 44; see also TW, p. 145). (So when Heidegger writes of the need for us to become 'more hearing' for what is singular in Holderlin, he is using a concept very similar to Gadamer's.) 12 The 'inner ear' corresponds, then, to an ideal of responding to the text in its singularity, as opposed to modes of interpretation based on the presupposition of knowledge 'brought in from the outside, or even one's own subjective impressions' (GC, p. 144). Towards this ideal an 'inner ear' strains, as a blend of memory, imagination and internal recital. Its distinguishing quality is that, as no merely physical sensing could, it corresponds and hearkens to the holistic ideal of the text maintained in its tone: [N]o oral reading or voicing is able to fulfill the intended sense and sound of a poetic text. I am speaking here about an inner ear, to which a kind of inner intonation corresponds, neither of which is totally absorbed by the contingency of any particular appearance. 13

The whole text forms, in effect, an 'ideality' of meaning-relations and sound-shape ('Sinnbezug' and 'Klanggestalt') whose interrelation is only fully possible for the 'inner ear' (GW 8, p. 290). Only in the 'inner ear' does a poem achieve a truly poetic existence (GW 9, p. 283). For instance, in Eduard Morike's 'Auf Eine Lampe', Gadamer argues, it is the 'inner ear' that 'hears the correspondence between "schon" and "selig" and "scheinen" and "selbst" ... ' (TI, p. 51). The 'inner ear' is the gauge by which we judge any specific performance of the text, the reading aloud of a poem for instance. Gadamer values the seemingly non-cognitive elements of rhythm, Ton, etc. as slowing the reader down, providing a 'holding fast' or 'stay' in language. Such resistance helps raise a transitory, substitutable flow of words into a steadier dimension of structure. This is why the poem, grasped as a whole, is apprehended at its fullest only if it is known by heart, and not translated, summarised or reduced to one or two remembered images or emotional impressions. The 'by heart' is also a mode in which the tone of the whole pervades any part which one recites to oneself, thereby setting itself anew into dialogue with the rest. This kind of lingering, non-appropriative dwelling with the text is not something that happens all at once or only once. It needs a repeated, intermittent dialogue, one allowing time for the text's elements to manifest their hints and implications (GW 8, p. 387). Thus, together, 'In fact we speak from intimate knowledge and knowledge by heart' ['In der Tat reden wir von In- und-Auswendigkonnen'] (GW 8, p. 278). Thus 'Ton' and 'Ganzes'

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are not apprehensible in the manner of a perceptible object that obeys the logic of self-identity ('A=A') and excluded middle: they are bearers of a recurrent singularity, a 'same' that is different each time. The 'inner ear' does not achieve interpretation as some sort of point of rest, rather as a ceaseless renewal and displacement of itself: 'From out of the much "unnamable" which interpretative thought engages and which the "concept brought to bear" (Kant) would like to grasp, the inner ear always reclaims the poem's effectuation and our accompanying thought anew' (GW 9, p. 443). So the characteristics which Gadamer ascribes to the literary text seem to pull in opposite directions at once, and it is these that make it both singular and open. The one seems to stress the autonomy of the text, its would-be self-legitimation as described, and the transformative effect of that holism upon the force and sense of any individual word or element of language within the text. The other, however, stresses the text's continuous relation of dialogue with its language world as a whole, something at work even in the least individual word or element. The open singularity of the literary is the maintenance of this contradiction, not its resolution. Successful interpretation lives in the tension of these opposed demands. It finds its law in the way dwelling with the text, by heart, increases its precision for us and enhances its coherence, fine-tuning itself towards a level of ideality which the 'inner ear' can intuit. Such a mode of 'coherence' must renew and revise those other effects of clarification achieved by placing it into broader contexts (such as other work by the same writer or the broader cultural context) (GC, p. 145). Too hasty an appeal to these may threaten the way every poem is its own topos. Gadamer cites Celan's objection to a question he was once asked about the so-called 'lyrical I' of his poetry by saying' "But isn't it the lyrical I of this poem!'" (GC, p. 146).

Singularity and truism: Gadamer's readings of Celan Gadamer's short book, Who Am I and Who Are You? (1973) works through part of a collection of Paul Celan's poems. It effectively puts to the test Gadamer's claims about lyric in a post-traditional society. Gadamer claims to help save the reading of poetry from becoming merely a university specialty, arguing that ' a true poem' is 'one whose form has a wholeness, acoustic form and semantic content' that remains 'independent from the results of scholarly discovery' (GC, p. 187). Gadamer acknowledges that he does not have special knowledge of the

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'traditions' out of which Celan emerged, those of Jewish mysticism, Hasidism and the various folk customs of East European Jewry, nor does he have the poet's minute familiarity with the natural world. Instead, Gadamer's readings will try to enact Celan's own claim that everything sufficient to their reading was in the texts, even if this involved the occasional use of a lexicon. The basic stance of these readings is striking. The supposed defender of 'tradition' is here taking up a stance which is deliberately unspecialised and which will not try to fill itself out by some programme of scholarly research into, say, the biographical genesis of the poems. It is this untheorised knowledge which Gadamer first put to work when lying in the sand dunes of the Dutch coast with a copy of Celan's collection Atemwende (1965).1 4 Who Am I and Who Are You? forms part of Gadamer's general campaign against the cult of the expert and all that supports it in modern society, but this time the expert is the professional university critic. Gadamer observes that Celan's poetry, while notoriously difficulty, has manifestly not needed scholarly props to attract readers and that Celan 'counted on his poems being accessible through general human experience, into which the horrors of our era have entered'- memory of the Holocaust pervades Celan's work (GC, p. 164 ). Gadamer's own book sold over 10,000 copies (GE, p. 70). It offers a genuinely modest mode of reading, deliberately putting aside all those displays of intellectual strength and sophisticated analysis usually expected of the academic critic. Gadamer's abdication of the normal professional role is, paradoxically, a gesture intended to affirm the force of the poetic, of the poem as the sole "'irrefutable witness'" (GC, p. 163) to what it says. The poem is to be understood both as a singular mythos and as 'intended for the members of a shared language community' (GC, p. 129). The demand at work in the modern lyric is both that it enact its own mythos and, in so doing, yet call for a common horizon with its reader in a consensus that is yet to exist. The poetic, so understood, answers forcefully the critics' caricature 'Gadamer' who seeks some fusion of horizons between text and interpreter on the basis of a common tradition that gets merely reaffirmed in the process. Rather, the space of the encounter with Celan is one of 'critical freedom'. When, looking to make these claims more concrete, one actually turns to Gadamer's readings of texts by Celan, Rilke, Ernst Meister and Hilde Domin, there is at first an undeniable sense of disappointment. In practice, what Gadamer offers may seem too close to a kind of prosification. For instance, Meister's 'Die alte Sonne' ('The old sun') becomes a kind of enactment of general existential pathos (GW 9, p. 345) and Celan is

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held to affirm such things as readiness for death (GC, p. 73 ), desire for the truth despite the cost (GTC, p. 82), search for the authentic amid the heaps of the false (GC, p. 121). In other words we seem to get a set of truisms and statements of the vaguely obvious. Is there anything further going on, or must one resort to the fact that most of these essays are the product of old age? The critic to compare to Gadamer here is perhaps Michael Riffatterre. Riffatterre's close readings of lyric texts aim to show how the various tropes and images of the text can be understood as intertextual transformations of commonplaces from literary tradition. Thus the two stanzas of Blake's '0 rose thou art sick' are argued to be transformations of a basic 'matrix' linking conventional to poi of 'love' and 'death' .15 All texts, in effect, can be read as riddling metamorphoses of cliches. The effect of one of Gadamer's Celan readings is worryingly like Riffatterre's deliberate banality. Gadamer teases out of Celan's hermetic lines what he terms 'transpositions' of meaning, i.e. movements of interpretations from the concrete particulars of the text to something more broadly meaningful. Thus in the Celan text starting 'In the hailstone' a late November landscape of hailstones and blighted corn cobs is transposed into Gadamer's 'knowledge of the ephemerality of existence' (GC, p. 102). Celan's final word 'Archer' becomes 'death' (Gadamer). Celan's line 'in your heart-thread the I conversations of worms are knit' admits of being read as 'the heart's innermost certainty of death ... That is why the "conversations of worms" are "knitted into the heart-thread"' (GC, pp. 102-3). When, in Celan's text, something called 'your arrow writing' whirs from the heart strings, it reads for Gadamer as the 'message' of 'the certainty of death' and readiness for it (GC, p. 103). This kind of transposition works in ways that seem all too like Riffaterre's work on Blake, and even with what seem already very recognisable topoi - worms, winter landscapes as death, the Archer with arrows etc. One difference from Riffaterre's method, however, is that in Gadamer, the exercise is often a doubtful one of posing possible alternative readings, pulling himself up short, asking open questions ('perhaps ... but ... although ... perhaps'). Overall, the readings move tentatively between 'transpositions' into familiar generalities and movements of turning back and withdrawal. With the poem after 'In the hailstone', Gadamer concludes, implicitly acknowledging the proximity of his reading to a vague truism, 'It would be useless to be more concrete about what is witnessed here' (GC, p. 105). So, for Gadamer, it is not so much a matter of decoding the poems but of making a unique hermeneutic struggle visible in such a way as to give the figures of the text a minimal generality helpful to other readers. 'With respect to Celan's work, a confession of incomprehension is, in most cases, a commandment of scholarly integrity' (GC, p. 144).

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Nevertheless, a slightly complacent feeling pervades the way some of these essays proceed, by way of a close attention to what 'one' feels or looks for in the process of reading. For instance, 'the question of the text is posed only when memory fails ... and it is necessary to refer back' (TI, p. 33); 'one is always steered by the picture [Vorblick] one has of the recipient' (TI, p. 34, emphasis added). What should be a phenomenology of reading seems in danger of slipping into an anecdotal account of personal experience. How is one to read then what seems a striking weakness: that when Gadamer's aim is to affirm the modern poetic lyric as a singular mythos, the results so resemble Riffatterre's argument that a text is no more than an activation of commonplaces? One conclusion might be this: that Gadamer's attempt to rescue the poetic from becoming 'an arcane cryptogram for scholars' (GC, p. 129) results only in pointing up the fragility of the conditions of understanding in the modern world. Limiting his references to an educated familiarity with the language-world of German, might not Gadamer be bound to produce results that are themselves no more than a lowest common denominator? So, one might conclude, if these readings so often seem to end in statements of the obvious, is this not a mark of the fragility of any shared understanding in a posttraditional society? That it is much more interesting than this may be signalled in what seems at first a massive contradiction in Gadamer's Celan experiment. It is that at the same time as the reader is following the trajectory of these Celan readings towards hermeneutic closure, 'understanding' as achievable consensus, he or she is also intermittently stopped short by equally strong injunctions toward openness and respect for the singularity of the text, in short a principled refusal of 'understanding'. The anti-scholastic hope that the poems may still realise themselves for some general reader knowingly pushes against Gadamer's simultaneous affirmation of the singularity of the poetic text - each poem to be seen not as part of a common world or in terms of commonplaces but in fact its own topos. Another response to this issue might be this: the generality of the readings is not a failure on Gadamer's part but part of a considered strategy to guide the reader back to the resistant specific mythos of the text by means of the least disruptive terms - and that can only mean the least particular ones ('It would be useless to be more concrete about what is witnessed here' (GC, p. 105)). Gadamer wants no 'Reader's Guide to Celan' but only a minimal displacement of the particulars of the text from their singularity. In other words- to make a subtle but decisive distinction - the almost empty truisms (death, readiness, knowledge of ephemerality) are there less to decipher Celan's poetry than to activate

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possibilities of sense within it. The general orientation offered by the reading is only a movement of necessary but temporary negation. In an epilogue defending his readings, Gadamer writes: 'What occurs with understanding is not so much transposition as the constant actualisation of transpositionality [Transponierbarkeit]' (GC, p. 131, emphasis added). That is, the concrete elements are to be 'sublated', i.e. both abolished and retained. The 'Ton' of the poem becomes audible, one might say, by a judicious striking of its words to let them sound and it resonate. In a paradox we will meet again in this study, the terms which most respect the singularity of a work may necessarily be those that are generalised to the point of saying the lightest minimum about it. The hermeneutic difficulty of Celan is not something that should be denied or treated as a 'problem' for expert decoding. The witnessing of the poem includes such difficulty as is inherent to it: 'It is by no means the case that the poet arbitrarily conceals and obscures the unity of meaning. This is precisely how the poet seeks to reveal something' (GC, p. 167). The pervading horror in Celan's world may highlight something that Gadamer is claiming for the literary more generally. Anyone who comes to it to affirm his or her 'yes, I understand' clearly does not know what 'understanding' might be in this context. So the modern lyric moves away from reliance on specific cultural codes of meaning to the dimension of a precisely judged potentiality of meaning. We cannot answer the question 'Who am I and Who are You?' in Celan's texts, and 'does anybody really want to answer it?' (GC, p. 134). Just as symbolic or contextual interpretation must give way to 'the constant actualisation of transpositionality' so any special knowledge which a reader may be able to bring to the text (such as information about the life of the poet) undergoes a similar movement of abolition and preservation: 'No reader can understand without specialities, and yet every reader understands only when the specialty of the occasion is sublated [aufhebt] by the universality of occasionality' (GC, p. 134 ). Thus each reader gives an occasional, personal response to what the poem's singular occasionality offers. This is why Gadamer's poetics, even as it strives to affirm the utopian idea of a common reader to come, repeatedly returns to the way the lyric works by refusing shared motifs and traditional topoi. A poem, he writes, both projects those expectations of sense that the reader deploys to render it legible but it may also frustrate this necessary projection. This is especially true of modern poetry: '[i]t is nothing like baroque poetry, whose statements are contained inside a uniform frame of reference and occupy a common mythological, iconographic, and semantic foundation' (GC, p. 131).

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Because the book on Celan is at odds with the normal expectations of academic criticism, it is easy to imagine a weaker reader complaining that Gadamer was 'of little use'. The ploy at work here might be called a Kierkegaardian one, for it underlines the degree to which 'understanding' can never be, in the end, just a theoretical issue ('Understanding is not a mere reproduction of knowledge, that is, it is not a mere act of repeating the same thing' (PH, p. 45)). Gadamer's minimal, general readings touch on the text just enough to help their claim to singularisation to work in each case, but not to substitute themselves for it. The logic of Gadamer's work here is that the reader at issue is no longer being addressed as a member of some pre-given community of shared, determinate values, but only as Kiekegaard's singular 'I'. Being such an 'I' is , apart from speaking German, all that the readers of Who Am I and Who Are You? are assumed to have in common- merely' the universality of occasionality'. 'Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, it creates a common language' (TM, 341, emphasis added). The commonality of the common reader is only the existential apartness of each. Gadamer writes, in relation to one poem ('Vor dein Spates Gesicht'), that the words 'I' and 'you' there come to express 'nothing other than aloneness in reciprocal intimacy' (GC, p. 89). 'Poetry today presupposes a consensus which has yet to arise' (GC, p. 164). This is not a consensus that could be legislated in advance by a professional critic's decodings, nor is it genuinely achievable by any short cut.

Das Unvordenkliche This double demand of both communality and singularity resounds throughout Gadamer's experiment without ever being discussed at length. Such a double demand will find more explicit engagement in Blanchet's notion of an 'unavowable community', or in Nancy's 'inoperative community', or Derrida's 'democracy to come'. However, the issue is implicitly at work in Gadamer's later essays, in the closely related but not quite synonymous terms: 'Das Unvordenkliche!Heimat/Zu-HauseSein.'16 In several places Gadamer recounts Heidegger's saying that 'life is hazy' ['Das Leben ist diesig'] (GW 10, pp. 63-4), that it resists, in other words, being made the correlate of the kind of drive for certainty and calculability in our representations which modern knowledge expects. This, Gadamer observes, names a limit to all accessibility or visibility, a limit which is not a clear line of demarcation but which always withdraws from any approach (GW 10, p. 64; see also GW 10, p. 398), something

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for which Schelling deployed the term 'Das Unvordenkliche', 'the unpreconceivable', or, perhaps 'that prior to whose terms one cannot think'. Such a conception is a necessary feature of the Heideggerian/hermeneutic stress on facticity and finitude. Gadamer also relates it to Heidegger's Holderlinian concept of the 'earth:' What Kierkegaard used to oppose the self-transparency of absolute knowledge, that is, existence, as well as what Schelling characterised as the unpreconceivable [das Unvordenkliche], which lies in front of all thinking, belonged to the truth of Being itself. For Heidegger, Holderlin's invocation of the earth came to symbolize this poetically. (HW, p. 191)

Das Unvordenkliche seems crucial to a full understanding of another of Gadamer's initially perplexing phrases, 'being-at-home' or 'home'. This refers to language, and our being-within-language as the main precondition of our having an intelligible world. 'Home', writes Gadamer, is something unvordenklich (GW 8, p. 367) and 'To the unvordenkliche nature of the home it is language that belongs above all else' (GW 8, p. 367). The familiarity of one's native language is, for Gadamer, an existential anchor, that by which we understand and into which other things are translated as a starting point of obviousness. It is this 'support of familiar and common understanding' that 'makes possible the venture into the alien' (PH, p. 15; alsop. 239). So this being at home is nothing cosy, evasive or complacent. It is rather that pre-reflexive giving of a world in a language that cannot become an object of our reflection without being pre-supposed (any more than consciousness can be reflected upon without also being inhabited). '[T]he reality of language that transcends all individual consciousness' (PH, p. 80) is a limit precisely because we cannot delineate it nor form any kind of bounded sense of it in which it is not already presupposed. It is that which is not seen for its very obviousness, or rather it is the obviousness of that by which we see, facticity at its least visible and most basic. 'In truth we are always already at home in language, just as much as we are in the world' (PH, p. 63). So any 'homecoming' at issue is clearly uncanny in the sense of both the familiar and unknown: 'We are always other and much more than we know ourselves to be, and what exceeds our knowledge is precisely our real being' (RB, p. 78). How can we relate these large points to the minutiae of reading? Gadamer's account of Heidegger on 'the word' clarifies the notion of the poetic at issue here: We all know that there are words that function merely as signals ... and then there are other words - and this is not confined to poetry- that bear witness

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themselves to that which they communicate. These words are, so to speak, proximate to something that is; they are neither replaceable nor exchangeable, a 'Da' ['There'] that discloses itself in its own act of speaking. (HW, p. 24)

These are places where understanding stops - something is reached which we can neither unthink nor explicate further. The English term 'the undefinable' seems a good basis on which to think about what Gadamer is discussing here. It is well known in philosophy that many basic notions cannot be defined without the definition, at some point, having to smuggle in some term or phrase that rests on a pregiven understanding of what is supposed to be being defined. Who can define 'movement', for example, without the definition slipping into circularity somewhere? Such undefinability is a mode of the unpreconceivable. In fact, this aspect of Gadamer suggests a new understanding of the poetic vocabulary of the later Heidegger. In Heidegger the word 'Weg' (way) for instance operates as a kind of undefinable in the sense of das Unvordenkliche.It is likewise with Heidegger's strange habit of focusing a meditation on so-called 'guide-phrases' such as 'The being of language: the language of being'. The point is not to define language (or being) by breaking our understanding down into a series of securely delineated concepts, but to put to work that irreducible pre-reflexive understanding already at work when we hear the word 'language' or the word 'being'. This will finally mean, in effect, defining something crucial in terms of itself, and so allowing the impasse produced to awaken how words may 'bear witness themselves to that which they communicate'. Other terms in Heidegger that resist any definition that does not draw back into itself might be: river, journey, memory, light, language, home, space, the uncanny (to deinon), word. Das Unvordenkliche in this sense can be said to define poetic singularity for Gadamer, its irreplaceable 'mythos'. 'The poetic word', he writes, 'is "itself" in the sense that nothing other, nothing prior, exists against which it can be measured' (GC, p. 130). The lyric, in its seeming opacity or excessive transparency, is less the expression of any set of ideas or feelings than a singular statement of something that is its own witness, truly definable only in terms of itself. The very semantic vacancy of some lyrics- their simplicity or obviousness, their refusal to be glossed except in what seem banalities- is equally a plenitude. The poem's 'content' for the analytic reader may be 'an interconnected structure of images or of meaning and sound elements that appear to "say nothing" .. .' (TW, p. 148), nothing, that is, that can be said except by being either exactly repeated or supplanted by platitudes. The examples are legion:

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Thus, even in its seeming emptiness, a lyric may be the form that most realises the aim of enacting the 'universal relatedness of being' (PH, p. 103) - a phrase that is itself 'hazy' to the point almost of disappearing. Gadamer seems to mean here an existential undefinable ... a mere 'Da', a 'there' or a 'this' of which no more can be said ('What is "there it is [es ist da]"? It is the mystery of the there [Da], not of how it is but rather that the "there" is') (GW 10, p. 65). The 'Da' or the mere 'there' to which lyric poetry gives access is necessarily very hard to describe or pin down, for it is not a matter of the perception of particular things, nor of states of mind, but something 'prior', the inexplicability of what is both obvious but singular. The implicit interplay of singular and communality is again at work here in this relation of the unsubstitutable naming power of a specific text or line and its simultaneous heightening of the unobjectifiable space of a shared language world. For Gadamer, the poem establishes a 'hold upon nearness' (RB, p. 113 ), a primordial 'feeling at home in the world' (RB, p. 114): The limit of translatability indicates exactly how far the sheltering in the word reaches. In its final concealment [Verborgenheit], it is the sheltering [Bergende]. Only one who is at home in a language is able to experience the self-preserving and self-determining statement of the poetic word, which secures another being-at-home in the primordially familiar [im Urvertrauten]. (TW, p. 154)

This at-homeness is also, however, a mark of irreducible finitude. In the Celan readings, we may remember, Gadamer describes the unsubstitutability of its language as 'incomprehensibly obligatory in a poem' (GC, p. 130, emphasis added). Language, as that by and through which we think, must, as it resists restatement or translation, at some incalculable point touch upon a 'place' where it cannot itself any longer be thought or be our conceptualised object. This place must be vague - if we were able to say precisely where the limit lay, and could articulate and con-

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ceive it, it would no longer be the limit at issue. On 'das Unvordenkliche' Gadamer writes: Everyone recognises something of it. The theologian would know how to say more of it than I. I recall here only something of the unpreconceivable nature of home. What this is for one can be conveyed to no one else. Possession? Loss? Reunion? Memory and resort to remembering? These are all unpreconceivables which meet in human life. They may challenge the exertions of our understanding. One would like to explicate what yet rests in darkenss there. And yet one experiences how it constantly withdraws itself and is just for that very reason always there. (GW 10, p. 64)

Thus, in these essays of Gadamer's extreme age, the fascination with that point at which art presents something both obvious and recognisable and yet barely conceptualisable or sayable except in privative or seemingly contradictory terms. Hermeneutics here becomes no longer an art of understanding but something that is repeatedly made to turn back upon its own limits - upon an element of transparency/opacity (the terms become interchangeable) that is certainly understood, but which is yet not further comprehensible. What may seem like a truism in Gadamer's reading of a Celan lyric is also, in its singular formulation in the poem, a saying of one of the 'fundamental articulations that guide our understanding of the world' (RB, p. 114 ). So, when a process of reading ceases: 'What stands at the end is not the secure consciousness of having understood the matter so that now one can leave the text behind, but rather just the opposite' (TI, p. 48). 'Understanding'- if that word is still fully appropriate here- is a matter of a singularity that must be approached only by being learned by heart. This is perhaps why Gadamer can argue, counter-intuitively, that 'Wherever translation, i.e., the illusion of a free and unrestricted transposition of thought, fails, thinking breaks through' (HW, p. 137)_17 Despite a superficial resemblance, this encounter with that prior to which one cannot think is not Gadamer's version of cultural relativism. Languages, for Gadamer, are not closed off sets of projections and representations: they are horizons open to each other. For instance, this chapter has been quoting from an English translation of Celan's Atemwende. The situation of the translator, however, is only the most striking instance for Gadamer of the dilemma of the interpreter in general, positioned between the resistance or uniqueness of a text and that destruction at work in saying it in other words. In this way, the burden of the translator is that of any reader, confronted with a resaying of the Unvordenkliche, so that there is only a difference in degree, not kind, between the situations of the reader of Celan in German and the

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reader of Celan in English, or even in Japanese. The situation of each is not opaque to the others, only hazy (das Leben ist diesig). So a translation, writes Gadamer, is 'at once clearer and flatter than the original' (TM, p. 386). Its singularity is not that of an irreducible mythos - for instance, it is permissible to modify the wording of a translation but not that of an original (though, of course, some translations, such as the Septuagint or the King James Bible, may themselves acquire the mythic authority of originals). Das Unvordenkliche is not a closed horizon formed by any sort of human subjectivity, individual or communal (some culture-bound set of representations), but an always singular limit(s) inherent to the human itself as a creature of language in its unobjectifiable and elusive obviousness. We are moving in the space of what Arendt terms 'the well-known philosophic impossibility to arrive at a definition of man'.l 8 One might say that, with human existence itself, the circularity of definition is at its most unvordenklich. Gadamer writes: Conservatives and revolutionaries alike seem to me to require a similar rectification of their understanding. Unchanging and enduring realities - birth and death, youth and age, native and foreign land, commitment and freedom - demand the same recognition from all of us. These realities have measured out what human beings can plan and what they can achieve. Continents and empires, revolutions in power and in thought, the planning and organization of life on our planet and outside it, will not be able to exceed a measure which perhaps no one knows and to which, nevertheless, we are all subject. (GE, p. 180)

Das Unvordenkliche, as a measure of human finitude, also forms part of the process of self-criticism necessary for true 'freedom'. In this way the poetic for Gadamer also forms part of a corrective to the effects of the excessive valuation of human rationality as a supposed transparent principle of surveillance and control. Modern societies seem riven by a vacillation between 'extremes of an affect-laden opposition to rational innovation and a no less affect-laden craving to "rationalize" all forms and sectors of life, a development which more and more acquires the form of a panic flight from freedom' (EH, p. 24). The poetic, as unvordenklich, is an active refutation of that fantasy of rational autonomy. We can never fully conceptualise our acts or interpretations as the justified application of self-grounding, rational norms. We encounter that element in our primary environment - language - where what we are is other than what we know. History and language always outstrip our ability to consciously conceptualise the way they enable us to think or justify ourselves.

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The poetic is part of Gadamer's call on his readers to the democratic responsibilities of individual judgement in a society that threatens to become a domain of foolishly surrendered authority, the realm of various specialists/experts, all cut off from broader questions about the goals of human life and each answerable only to the judgement of other specialists (GE, pp. 165-80). He calls for a general readjustment of basic human consciousness. This limit to what can be further thought is something that continually gives itself anew to thinking, precisely because this thinking cannot encompass it - that is how it 'takes us captive' (HW, p. 192). This refusal to be encompassed gives the Unvordenkliche more the status of a continuing event than of some kind of imprisoning or apprehensible boundary. 'The constantly new arrival of the poetic word is that in which we are totally at home' (GW 8, p. 278). Das Unvordenkliche offers a basis of Gadamer's claim that 'we understand in a different way, if we understand at all' (TM, p. 297).

Conclusion: Gadamerian natality? Gadamer's is clearly a Heideggerian argument, but one with a decisive swerve away from Heidegger. Heidegger affirms the poetic as a potentially geschichtlich [historic] event of Being, something that, in Holderlin's case, may possess the force of a rupture with received language and the most fundamental assumptions of Western tradition. The poetic enacts a kind of revolution in the obvious. However, Heidegger's claiming the poetic as some sort of alternative to a supposedly totalitarian metaphysical language would be nonsense for Gadamer. Gadamer sees Heidegger's view of the totalitarian grip of 'metaphysical' thinking as a dangerous exaggeration, likely to lead to dubious and unnecessary responses, such as Heidegger's cultivation of an increasingly opaque mythic/poetic discourse. Truth, in a poetic text, remains in Heidegger an obscure, incalculable event for which we can only prepare ourselves. For Gadamer the singular openness of a poetic text is not the exclusive property of any one writer, but is a widespread factor of change and debate. With the modern lyric in particular emerges a writing attuned to posttraditional society and engaged, far more dialogically than in Heidegger, with the open horizon of the reader as a solitary 'I'. Gadamer, while endorsing the conception of 'the true' as an event of disclosure which comes to us and not ultimately as the act of any sort of representing subject, stresses the conditions of such an event in ethically informed human practices, the dialogical nature of language, the discipline of conversation, close reading and questioning of texts. By contrast, Heidegger

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may seem a thinker 'burdened with ... violence ... driven by his own questions and a desire to rediscover himself everywhere' (HW, p. 165). Gadamer's account of art reads as a thinker's chastening encounter with the limitations of his own language. The true test of a true work of art is finally, after all the analysis and rationalisations, that it meet the response of a simple 'So it is, (GW 8, p. 375), or 'That is good' (GW 8, p. 388; see alsop. 392) ('The beautiful is something for which the question what it is for is never pertinent' (GW 8, p. 380)). 19 'That', 'it' - once again, Gadamer's argument compels itself towards terms that are the most general possible in the emptiness of their simultaneously always singular referents, like the 'I' and 'You' of Who Am I and Who Are You? Gadamer's essay on non-objective art, 'the speechless silence of contemporary painting' ('The Speechless Image', RB, pp. 83-91, at p. 85) follows a similar trajectory. It traces conceptions of 'still life' and the wordless image to the point of what seems again a conclusion of peculiar but seemingly unavoidable vacuousness: that what nonobjective art does is, outside ambitions to represent nature or to express inwardness, to be 'a pledge of order' (RB, p. 91), meaning some sense of fitness or regularity so basic that it cannot be further explicated. This is where the seemingly question-begging notion of the 'inner ear' receives its normativity. Needless to say, we are scarcely in the business of 'interpretations' here, nor is Gadamer any sort of model for a school of criticism if that still means some programme of demystification or social commentary. These readings are deeply antipathetic to any context of academic specialism. To affirm the poetic in terms of the 'Unvordenkliche, is to produce readings that culminate in a mere 'truism' and that testify to a place were the words are turned by their own undefinability (as a spade is turned by striking rock). 20 Unlike Riffaterre's demystifying a poem as a particular reconfiguration of commonplaces, Gadamer's interpreter's struggle with Celan has the effect of a re-enchantment of language. So the poetic for Gadamer draws us 'back' to an unthematised obviousness which is our unthought and uninterpretable starting point. It is a potentiality which is singular, undefinable and impossible to conceptualise except in truisms. Finally, because it is so deeply rooted, another instance of the bogus image of Gadamer should be confronted. According to the accepted view, Gadamer's theory forestalls the possibility of any new event or rupture in meaning that would not have been already latent in the language and its traditions (and so not really a break at all). By comparison with Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard and others, Gadamer is claimed to operate within traditional intellectual constraints. John Caputo is representative:

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Gadamer remains within the tradition. He is concerned with what is given in the tradition - with keeping it alive, with passing on the word and teaching us to listen- but not with the giving process itself, the event of unconcealment itself which comes to pass in and as the tradition. 21

This objection is that Gadamer's notion of dialogue with the poetic text forbids anything radically new in the sense of breaking from past possibilities (it is depressing that Caputo could still write of 'the tradition' in that simple way). In fact, 'das Unvordenkliche' is precisely that notion of 'unconcealment' which Caputo argues is missing, an oxymoronic general singularity that is newly verbalised each time. The poetic is an emergent property in the sense of one not calculable or predictable from the knowledge of its conditions or constituents: There is no being-in-itself that is increasingly revealed when Homer's Iliad or Alexander's Indian Campaign speaks to us in the new appropriation of tradition, but, as in genuine dialogue, something emerges that is contained in neither of the partners by himself. (See TM, p. 419)

This to affirm in understanding an unforeseen 'event', free in the sense of being incalculable, unrepeatable and singular. Just as, in a spoken dialogue, the mere presence of the other person can alter one's sense of one's own opinions, even before any word is said, so, in the repetition of texts from the past, there is always in us 'a potentiality for being other [Andersseins] that lies beyond every coming to agreement about what is common' (TI, p. 26). This potentiality comes increasingly to the fore in Gadamer's very last essays. At issue in this little known work on friendship, gratitude and reconciliation are arguments that many readers might more immediately associate with Derrida's work of the same period. At issue is the need to think of human relations in ways that affirm rather than foreclose a freedom to become other- for example, that the giving of something, or of oneself, only takes place as a gift if the giving is performed outside any kind of structure of exchange. An essay of 2000, 'Danken und Gedenken' ('Thanking and Recalling') (HE, pp. 208-13) concerns the comparable natures of a phenomenology of thanking and a phenomenology of thinking. To thank truly cannot be a matter of something conceived as 'a debt of thanks' (Dankeschuld), something to be merely restituted: 'When someone speaks of a debt of thanks, what strikes one is the opposite, I mean ingratitude' (HE, p. 209). Thinking likewise must involve an element of the incalculable gift. Similarly, a genuine reconciliation between people involves something more than some kind of payoff or requital: it involves the 'potentially for being other', for becoming

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someone else (HE, p. 212). (See also 'Freundschaft und Solidaritat' ('Friendship and Solidarity'), HE, pp. 56-65.) The poetic lyric draws on a kind of Gadamerian natality. Yet he takes pains not to overstress the otherness of this eventhood in meaning, its pulling its reader up short by refusing to make sense within traditional frameworks 22 ('I am much more of a realist than Hannah Arendt' (GE, p. 131)). Gadamer is also at odds with much suspiciously fashionable rhetoric of art as crisis. The 'at-homeness' or sense of normativity achieved in a poem encompasses both our being surpassed beyond our capacity to anticipate and a sense of recogition. Gadamer can write both: something is a poetic structure when everything prestructured is taken up into a new, unique form that the poem lays before us as if it were being said for the first time to us in particular. (GW 8, p. 219)

and: the poem and the art of language generally, as a heard or written text, is always already at a first hearing or reading something like a recognition in every single word. (GW 8, p. 62)

This active contradiction is the open singularity of the poetic, and, always, there is and there must be something for nothing.

Chapter 4

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Pitching strangely: the poetic 1n Blanchet

Each work is poetry, and it poses this necessity in an exclusive way. (FP, p. 136)

Introduction During an unusually long life Maurice Blanchot wrote narratives, reviews, theoretical criticism and fragmented prose works that blend these kinds. He is well known in debates about criticism. Nevertheless, it may be slightly misleading to call Blanchot a critic at all. His mature work is what we would now call 'freelance' writing. Blanchot's work has the now unusual status of someone astutely well-read in philosophy and literature but whose essays and reviews do not come out of a professionalised academic structure, together with all the pressures moulding stance, style and identity that accompany it. Criticism, Blanchot writes, is invariably 'not one of the ways in which literature shows itself, but how journalism and the academy assert themselves instead.' 1 Each of these has its own dynamic. In this sense Blanchot's writing is not a contribution to or example of 'criticism' as usually understood. He especially detaches himself from the way the critic becomes a kind of legislator of values, 'a spokesman applying general policy' .2 Blanchot's resistance to the demands of the critical institution consists in seeing things primarily from out of the more idiosyncratic experience of writers themselves. His key concepts are striking:' the work's "strange turn" ', 'fascination', the work's 'essential solitude' or 'worklessness'. In the secondary literature on Blanchot these terms can acquire an arcane and exclusive portentousness. However, they have perhaps less in common with the theoretical jargon of a Roman Jakobson or a Roland Barthes than with the often bizarre catachretic language that writers themselves use in relation to the difficulties of writing, the struggle to

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articulate, for instance, an emergent work's weird 'life of its own', its stretches of 'inspiration', those 'voices' of characters that repeat and dictate themselves in ways the author cannot command, the sentences that drift out of shape, and so on ('I have just typed out my morning's work ... There is something there ... but I can't get at it, squarely' (Virginia Woolf)). 3 Above all, the writer, as a writer, is amoral. Blanchot writes that people committed to a certain political party are right to distrust writers who share their views, 'because these writers have also committed themselves to literature, and in the final analysis literature, by its very activity, denies the substance of what it represents. This is its law and its truth.' (WF, p. 310). Blanchot's texts, in that overused word, are 'subversive', but subversive also all of the dominant rhetorics of liberation (these being, in any case, often not what they seem). '[I]t is precisely because literature does not have a message that it is ethical and political for Blanchot.' 4 Blanchot cannot but attack the humanist notion that literature can be a beneficially transformative experience as either the author or the reader's quest towards self-definition or expression- a path to the truth of our individual or communal nature, or its supposed affirmation against obstacles to its realisation. For Blanchot, this way of thinking about the literary silences its deeper contestatory force. An element in literature is simply not compatible with those ideals of acculturation that often define a society's education system. Although Blanchot does not refer to him, there are striking and useful comparisons to make with Gadamer's response to the problems posed by the erosion of traditional contexts of cultural authority. For Gadamer this meant that literature is forced to become more and more its own singular mythos. Blanchot has a very similar sense of the crisis induced in literary arts by the loss of immediate social utility (in the service of religious or social patrons). Like Gadamer, he also sees it as an opportunity. He asks: Why, when history subordinates it ... when the times have concerns and interests no longer in harmony with the sovereignty of art, when the poet yields to the belletrist and he to the chronicler of the day-to-day- why, at the moment when through the force of the times art disappears, does it appear for the first time as a search in which something essential is at stake, where what counts is no longer the artist or active labor or any of the values upon which the world is built or even any of the other values upon which formerly the beyond opened? (SL,p.220)

Divorced from the need to serve overt religious or political ends, art becomes free to explore itself, to affirm whatever its own nature may be ·outside the service of personal or social values. Yet no text can legitimate

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itself merely by what it says of itself. Lack of authority, the need for others- for readers- is inherent to any claim to authority a text will want to make. For the writer likewise, no longer in a world of patronage and without any prior instruction, there is no legitimacy for becoming an author other than the 'exigency of writing' itself, and this is something 'which allows neither reference nor guarantee' (IC, p. 393). This exigency of writing is not something that a person can use as their own instrument without at once annulling it, for it is not so much a need of expressing oneself but of being resolute in following out the possibilities that seem to beckon, impersonally, in what an emergent work seems to make perceptible. This lack of a prior basis for what it is saying is the crisis and insecurity of the modern literary text, its perpetual risk of seeming merely nonsensical or plain pointless. Of the poetry of Rene Char, Blanchot writes: 'It does not come from a higher reality, capable of guaranteeing it; it does not refer to a truth that would last longer than it; it is not rest, for it does not rest on anything .. .' (WF, p. 101). It is consequently also a realm of 'freedom' in the disorientating sense of a lack of ground and determination: Literature is perhaps essentially (I am not saying uniquely or manifestly) a power of contestation: contestation of the established power, contestation, of what is (and of the fact of being) contestation of language and of the forms of literary language, finally contestation of itself as power. (F, p. 67)

In all his work it is always as if Blanchot were driving towards that uncomfortable and necessarily unsustainable freedom that both underlies yet may undermine all human constitutions and conventions- that realm of which Hannah Arendt in On Revolution writes in describing how 'those who get together to constitute a new government are themselves unconstitutional, that is, they have no authority to do what they have set out to achieve.' 5 For Blanchot, literature, as something that must somehow legitimate itself on no other basis than whatever claim about itself it may choose to make, becomes analogous to a process of continual revolution. The writer's is a condition in which all posited values and opinions must continually confront the question of the ground of their own claims. Such thinking also underpinned Heidgger's comparison of the act of founding a state with the event (arising from nothing) of a genuine work of art, as well as that necessarily apolitical or prepolitical realm which Greek tragedy confronts beneath the securities of the Greek polis.

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Impossibility Blanchot is known mainly as an author and theoriser of narrative, especially the recit, and then as a writer of a hybrid kind of fragmented prose. However, the issue of singularity emerges earliest and most forcedly in relation to the 'poetic'. This clearly happened in the provocative shadow of Heidegger's readings of Holderlin in the 1940s. But Blanchot transforms this work by thinking from the point of view of an active writer, engaged with the technics of composition and with the issue, looking to Jean-Paul Sartre, of a writer's immediate political engagement or nonengagement. 6 Blanchot affirms the poetic in its singular uncanniness but without Heidegger's faith in its historical redemptiveness. Those elements of a singular language which Blanchot ascribes primarily to 'the poetic' in the 1940s and 1950s were to be inflected in new directions in several essays gathered in The Infinite Conversation (1969). There they already enact that 'fragmentary exigency' which makes up so much of Blanchot's later practice and thinking. So 'the poetic' would disappear as a specific issue only by expanding to fill up the field of vision (even as Blanchot occasionally draws on a distinction between the poetic and narrative prose to highlight polarised elements in the possibilities of literary language more generally)_? Singularity for Blanchot (in the provisional sense of that which resists conceptualisation or paraphrase) is a facet of his concept of 'impossibility'. By 'impossible' Blanchot means not that something cannot exist, but that its existence is not the effect of any human power, decision or intention. 'Impossibility', writes Blanchot, is 'a relation escaping power' (IC, p. 38). In this sense, of course, all the basic dimensions of existence birth, health, death, needs and passions, and the immediate recalcitrance of things - are impossible. Human beings cannot command them. The impossible is 'our ultimate dimension' (IC, p. 48) and 'impossibility is being itself' (IC, p. 4 7). To argue specifically that 'literature is impossible', however, is to give an extreme version (in terms derived from Being and Time) of the Kantian argument about the irreducibility of art to concepts and its refusal to be understood as the result of any sort of procedural rule. In a sense, the drive of the writer is to produce something 'impossible', that is a text whose oddly independent power is other than and exceeds the status of being the object merely of personal expression, planning or intention. The impossibility of literature is oddly impersonal, elusive and unobjectifiable, even to the person who is the immediate cause of the text. For instance, to accomplish a masterpiece is not simply something I can decide on. No sooner has a would-be writer transcribed some spe-

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cific or unique perception than it may seem a familiar cliche, stale echo - words with the grey thud of the instantly defunct. Conversely, some haphazard scrap of prose or verse, scribbled in an absent moment, may seem later to have unexpected promise and even a proleptic posterity. Or, thirdly, a writer's own sense of value here could well be wrong and the opposite be true in both cases. '[T]he impossible is not there in order to make thought capitulate, but in order to allow it to announce itself according to a measure other than that of power' (IC, p. 43). This becomes the basis for thinking that relates literature to other modes of impossibility: the immediate, the unknown, the other person. This is partly a matter of an incalculable singularity in the simple sense of 'untranslatabilty', that which does not admit of restatement or conceptualisation without loss. For Blanchot, however, the most fascinating aspect of such 'untranslatabilty' is its 'impossibility', its refusal to be merely a matter of decision or will. So Blanchot is at odds with any thinking about the poetic or literary whose stance evades this crucial, even definitive, element of a forceful literary or poetic text. For much contextual criticism, for instance, the text is repersonalised, as it were, as the entirely possible or explicable expression or representation of its writer's views or social location. Its elusive impersonality is turned back into a matter of individual property. Literature's contestation -even of its own legitimacy ('contestation of itself as power' (F, p. 67)) - takes place because it does not exist in the form of some stably identifiable entity. It is a peculiar mode of singularising impossibility that can touch, energise or undermine any piece of language or cultural sign. The 'impossibility' of singularity is crucial not only to what Blanchot says but to his elusive modes of saying it. Blanchot's essays and reviews enact the practice of a bizarre phenomenology of the unconceptualisable. They repeatedly turn about the way literary and poetic language supports, with equal truth, contradictory and logically exclusive attributes. So, writing of Blanchot, one often finds oneself abstracting from his essays two opposed arguments, both true though logically incompatible. In this way, Blanchot's own lucid prose engages something 'impossible', not consistently conceptualisable. His own writing is itself touched by such a peculiarity, something which decades of acquaintance do not erase. It seems lucid and straightforward but this is like the transparency of streaming water, at once both monotonous and always fresh.

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Kantian singularity A lot of the early Blanchot reads as the work of someone pushing through the consequences of the Kantian stress on art as not being intelligible in terms of any procedural rule and championing that incalculability and uniqueness in terms of modified Heideggerian notions of 'possibility' and 'impossibility'. The 1943 essay, 'Is Mallarme's Poetry Obscure?' defends an understanding of the singularity of poetic language against a book on Stephane Mallarme by Charles Mauron, Mallarme tObscur. 8 Mauron's book is, familiarly, a series of commentaries on Mallarme's poems. It sets out to tackle their difficulties by giving versions of them in easy, discursive prose. Such commentaries, writes Blanchot, 'are in fact necessary in order to be refuted' (FP, p. 111)). They perpetuate destructive presuppositions about the poetic and its reading, even as they offer themselves as simply making it more 'approachable' (FP, p. 108)- an epithet all the more insidious for its hidden accusation that the text it supposedly champions is both obscure and elitist, so reinforcing the anti-intellectualism the study nominally undermines. To introduce the poetic on such terms robs it of its proper authority by reinforcing the notion that 'every poem has an objective meaning, valid for everyone and guaranteed by the thought of its creator. This meaning can be expressed by a prose translation' (FP, p. 107). Against Mauron, Blanchot deploys what was already a fairly standard version of post-Kantian reasoning on the singularity of poetic language, comparable to the work of the socalled New Critics in the United States at this time. It is the 'first characteristic of poetic meaning' that it be inseparable from the 'unique form' of its appearance, without which it is destroyed: 'What the poem signifies coincides exactly with what it is .. .' (FP, p. 108). Elsewhere, Blanchot draws further conclusions from this premise: That, it seems, is the difference between poems that respond from outside to the nature of poetry and those that make poetry possible. The former communicate a definite emotion to us, like fear or pleasure, in which we vaguely recognise ourselves. The latter create in us a state that is opposed to any predetermined form of sentiment. This state is in itself unique in the sense that, linked in the clearest way to the poem that provokes it and to all the details of this poem, it seems incapable of being revived again by another work, even one as powerful and expressive as it. (FP, p. 135)

Pushing such a notion of singularity still a little further leads to that 'impossibility' already described: the more singular a work the less it can be explained in terms of given contexts or causes. If the poetic frees language non-instrumentally in the emergence of a singular work, then clearly

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that work should not be conceived as the expression or representation of some 'I' that could possibly pre-exist it. A work 'in the highest sense of the word' (WF, p. 314) is unforeseeable, and other than what a writer planned or thought. It is not explicable by its conditions or seeming causes. Even for its writer, the text becomes a transaction with impossibility: For me the written volume is an extraordinary, unforeseeable innovation such that it is impossible for me to conceive what it is capable of being without writing it. This is why it seems to be an experiment whose effects I cannot grasp, no matter how consciously they were produced, and in the face of which I shall be unable to remain the same. For this reason: in the presence of something other, I become other. (WF, p. 314)

Jean Paulhan and the poetic absolute 'What the poem signifies coincides exactly with what it is ... ' (FP, p. 108). The most arresting side of Blanchot's work is often its provocative superficiality - its refusal to jump over or evade the peculiarity of what may seem obvious, even if the obvious is singular in the sense of not being sayable except with newly unfamiliar obviousness. One of Blanchot's starting points as a mature thinker lay in his unravelling some of Jean Paulhan's work on the ideal of the poetic as singular language. Paulhan's Clef de Ia Poesie [Key to Poetry] (1944) suggested a hypothetical 'law' for the mystery of the poetic - a formalisation of its untranslatability. 9 This is, of course, a deliberate contradiction and its final purport is to affirm what Blanchot would call the 'impossibility' of the literary. Paulhan begins with a crude distinction of 'thought' on one side and 'words' on the other. This bears on the way, in poetic language, it is impossible to tell whether the words etc. were first and gave rise to the ideas they evoked or the ideas preceded and demanded these precise words. Paulhan envisages that a crucial feature of his hypothetical law would be its reversibility: a poetic law such that, in expressing a particular relationship of sounds to meanings, and of ideas to words, is capable, without thereby losing its validity or its verisimilitude, of seeing its terms inverted; of being inverted. 10 Paulhan's crude terms - 'words' on one side versus 'thoughts' on the other- encompass some very broad arguments. That pole which affirms the priority of thought matches the familiar ideal, widely taught in written composition, that an exact clarity of concept or feeling is the aim

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both for the writer to produce and for the reader to extract. Language exists, supposedly, to render such thought or feeling as precisely distinctive as possible ("'The poet must not write with what has already been written (that is to say with words) but with his soul and his heart'" (Victor Hugo, quoted in FP, pp. 81-2). Paulhan's other pole may seem less familiar. The priority of the 'word' over 'thought', however, corresponds to classicist contexts in which conventional expressions, received truths, maxims and topoi are highly valued, usually with an accompanying ethic of stability and tradition. The primacy of words and rhetoric over thought is also what modern critics might vaguely call 'ideology'. It tends, on the whole, to seem conservative in relation to the drive towards autonomy of thought or passion that makes up the other pole. In fact, the latter (oddly nicknamed 'terrorist' by Paulhan), espousing the liberation of a clear and self-transparent thought from the murk of mere words, corresponds in some broad ways with the dominant drive in modern literary culture towards a notion of freedom in terms of self-legislation. It may be, in effect, writes Blanchot, what many now take to be simply 'literature' (FP, p. 80). It is a feature of Paulhan's supposed 'law' that, with the poetic, any affirmation of the priority of one pole over the other is immediately reversible. This will lead Paulhan, and later Blanchot, to metamorphose the initial commonplace into notions seemingly very different. Paulhan's argument is like one that was to become far better known in hermeneutic thought on the unsubstitutable nature of literary language. His 'law', as it finally emerges, is not at all a formalisation of the 'mystery' in the sense of some sort of explanation of it, but recognises, in effect, the problem expressed much later by Andrew Bowie: If literary language involves the creation of new, previously 'unheard' meanings, language cannot be finally describable. For it to be thus describable would require new meanings already to exist prior to their articulation, leaving the problem of how one could assert that they do so exist without just invalidly assuming that they do.H

This 'mystery' in literature, as Blanchot puts it, is such that 'if we approach it to explain it, we encounter only that which conceals itself and we pursue only that which flees' ('Mystery in Literature', (WF, pp. 43-60, at pp. 43-4)). In some ways there is only a short distance between Paulhan's relentless defamiliarisation of a critical platitude and Blanchot's notion of the work's (not the writer's) 'essential solitude', its challenge 'to put forward an experience ... that no longer belongs to the whole of comprehension' (F, p. 63 ). So Paulhan's 'law' must be quite different from some claims in the

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fields of 'artificial intelligence' and theoretical linguistics that a formalisation of language yields its underlying working. Paulhan's law merely mimes the poetic's mystery and elusiveness in the form of rendering itself an inextricable logical knot. Two incompatible propositions, each the exact inverse of the other, are both affirmed as true (Paulhan's reversibility). In Michael Syrotinski's reading of the simple mathematical functions Paulhan offers: The function F (words) implies the function F' (ideas) (just as) The function F (ideas) implies the function F' (words). 12

In other words, for the poetic it makes no difference if we move from words to thoughts or from thoughts to words - if we consider that the movement of words generated the thought or vice versa. So, 'in poetry words and thoughts happen to be indifferent.' 13 So the 'law' is a provocative device to express the peculiar illogic of this situation as the unconceptualisable nature of poetic 'mystery', its refusal of explanation. We might say that the mystery is unvordenklich: it can be formulated but cannot be rationalised, mimed but not explained. This is the kind of weirdly resonant emptiness that reasserts itself throughout Blanchot's own essays; for instance, in a later essay on writing and atheism: [Paul] Valery thus characterizes literature by way of its form, saying it is form that makes meaning or signifies; but this signified that is proper to form also makes form that which has no other task than that of expressing this new meaning: the seashell may well be empty; it receives from this emptiness the presence that informs it. (IC, p. 261)

It is Paulhan's law of poetic reversibility again. Put it this way: the more uniquely tied the meaning to a specific form that may exist to convey it, then the more that unabstractable 'meaning' may appear as an effect of the material words (the way a shell is shaped around an emptiness). Each element challenges and unsettles the stability or would-be priority of the other in a reversible dependence. Paulhan on the poetic clearly helped Blanchot develop the better known argument on literature's two 'slopes' in the manifesto-like essay 'Literature and the Right to Death' (1949) (WF, pp. 300-44). Deeper than this, perhaps, the law's formal structure pervades Blanchot's own idiom down to the minutiae of its oxymorons and elusive syntax ('relation without relation', 'being without being', 'unhappiness without unhappiness', etc.). Paulhan's text cannily defends the poetic by offering a psuedo-formalisation of its singularity whose effect is precisely to foreground its refusal

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of analysis into logically consistent components. In a surprising turn, Blanchot follows Paulhan by thinking these issues through in relation to the commonplaces or cliches of ordinary language. For it is the clearest and most obvious language that is often also the most 'mysterious' (WF, p. 58). Take, for instance, the statement, made by a father to a son who is spending too much of his allowance, 'A penny is a penny' (Paulhan, 'Un sou est un sou' ).14 The statement is logically a tautology, which says nothing at all, but can be explicated as a piece of rhetoric: 'What makes it effective? Is it its obviousness, the logical nature of its content, a penny is a penny?' (WF, p. 57). Yet this logical obviousness plays against a subtext that is its own opposite: Does it not have an understood part, a silent double that differs slightly from it, for example, something like 'A penny is a lot more than a penny'? This second meaning is not expressed, and it comes to distort the logical exactness of the first meaning by forcing one to infer (without saying it) that a penny is not at all a penny. (WF, p. 57) Out of context this odd passage might even seem a parody of a certain kind of precious literary criticism. But Blanchot is focusing- obsessively, slowly - on something simultaneously obvious, elusive and decisive in language. His point is that, even analysed and explained as to its inherent sense, the rhetorical force- slight as it is- of the strictly empty expression ('A penny is a penny') continues to be felt. Even such a commonplace has an 'impossible' element which escapes paraphrasability and keeps its force, over and above .those explications that might demystify it. 'Such is the game of madness here: it looks just like reason each time analysis demonstrates it, then remakes itself as unreason each time verbal expression takes it up again' (WF, p. 58). (Just as, perhaps, to explicate a joke is to kill it.) Such commonplaces demonstrate how even everyday language does not operate according to the logics of identity, contradiction and excluded middle. In effect, these everyday sayings are poetic in Paulhan's sense for their inseparability of 'word' and 'thought'. A later essay, 'Everyday Speech' (IC, pp. 238-45), celebrates the 'poetry of Chekhov or even Kafka', with its 'depth of superficiality': The two sides always meet: the everyday with its tedious, painful, and sordid side (the amorphous, the stagnant); and the inexhaustible, irrecusable, constantly unfinished everyday that always escapes forms or structures (particularly those of political society: bureaucracy, the wheels of government, parties). (IC, p. 239)

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Such a singularising 'impossibility' of the poetic is a long way then from modernist ideals of language contemporary with Blanchot (ideals of language purified of its function as a mere instrument, or that 'organic' selfcontainment idealised by the American New Critics). Blanchot, in this early work on commonplaces, could even be taken to encompass what would much later be called 'language poetry'. For instance, even in everyday language, there are moments when a common phrase or dead metaphor suddenly appears in its linguistic opacity as well in the transparency of its common meaning. The phrase 'milky way', for instance (Ia voie lactee- it is the same figure in French), may give rise to a 'short circuit' 15 of contradiction that makes us see at once that 'the image, the verbal aspect', is the really 'essential' thing about it, and yet at the same time affirm the 'thought, the ideal aspect, as the only important thing': We discover at the same time that the word in itself, and the meaning in itself, make the language, and we see these two aspects as indispensable to each other, although each asserts itself as the fullness of everything and as disappearing so that the other can appear, both existing so that each can exist. (WF, p. 50)

It as if we could observe at once the two sides of a spinning coin. This is a marvellous phenomenon, writes Blanchot, but also a familiar one, for it bears 'the name of poetry' (WF, p. 50). So the poetic for Blanchot, as it emerges in these early essays, can be characterised according to two contradictory and incompatible traits, both coexisting nevertheless and each reversible into the other. By way of contrast, Blanchot first highlights an instability common to any use of language: Inherent in [language], at all its levels, is a connection of struggle and anxiety from which it cannot be freed. As soon as something is said, something else needs to be said. Then something different must again be said to resist the tendency of all that has just been said to become definitive, to slip into the imperturbable world of things. There is no rest, either at the level of the sentence or at that of the whole work. (WF, p. 22)

For instance, the person who tries to convey a certain thought is heard by the listener as deploying certain material words whose opaqueness will prompt a further question (what do you mean by 'freedom', by 'religion', etc.?). However, one distinction between the poetic and everyday language is that the duplicity or sliding of word and thought that goes on in normal dialogue may strive in poetic language towards a kind of stability - towards an expression that is so succinct that it both cannot be reworded and is also absolutely clear in its thought, so 'fixing the

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word in a stricter substantiality and meaning in a stronger awareness' (WF, p. 52). The practice of poetry often strives towards an absolute of language that would seem to realise, at the same time, two sides of language, i.e. it would both foreground the materiality of words, moving towards becoming purely sound, breath, rhythm and so on, but also and simultaneously it would achieve a clarity of thought that might seem, imperiously, merely to command words that serve it. This idea broadly corresponds to what Gadamer discusses in terms of the poetic as a singular mythos: [Language] aspires to an actual absolute. It aspires to it in the most complete way, and not only for itself, in its entirety, but for each of its parts, demanding to be completely words, completely meaning, and completely meaning and words, in a same and constant affirmation that cannot bear either that the parts that conflict with each other agree, or that the disagreement disturb the understanding, or that the understanding be the harmony of a conflict. This aspiration is the aspiration of poetry to existence. (WF, p. 51) So, finally, 'absolute' here would mean simply that the seemingly exclusive sides would be so inseparable as to be conditioned only by each other. This 'absolute', however, is an asymptotic ideal, never an achieved condition, for the poetic. Blanchot thinks through the possibility, elusiveness and instability of this idea in order to trace, not its falsity as such, but the way in which writing which approaches it can be understood simultaneously as its turning itself inside out - the singularity of the literary or poetic is this economy of restlessness. The hypothesis of the 'poetic absolute' engages with a drive to dispense with inherited convention, with all received forms, in the interests of some absolutely singular and idiomatic purity of thought or feeling, the extreme of 'a language without commonplaces, a language without apparent ambiguity'. Yet the language that strives towards such an ideal also reverses itself into its contrary. Stopping short of being a 'language' intelligible only to the writer (and so no language at all), the more frequent result of this drive towards autonomy of expression has been what the reader can only perceive as an increasing peculiarity of language, one whose effect, paradoxically, is less to highlight the purity of thought or feeling than to foreground the verbal oddity of its seeming expression ("'Beautiful phrases, images"[the reader] thinks. "The truest emotion, the thing itself," the writer feels' (WF, p. 4 7). Blanchot's peculiar phenomenology works through actual and hypothetical examples of this restless economy of reversal with an almost maddening patience of attention - like a finger slowly tracing over the

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surface of a shell until it has turned itself outward and around. That writer, for instance, who aims at the utmost refinement and originality of thought, seeking to work against the given expressions and traditional formulae in order to convey it, may yet well, from the reader's viewpoint, seem to serve up 'only unusual words at which he is embarrassed' (WF, p. 4 7) - a plausible description perhaps of the final effect of the drive to originality in such modernist works as David Jones's Anathemata (1952) or Ezra Pound's Cantos (1954). 16 Thus, inevitably, the drive towards an (impossible) poetic absolute also rediscovers an anarchic potential in language. It affirms the instability or the mismatch of the two sides of the spinning coin, even as they have become almost indistinguishable, 'thought' 'on one side' and the opaque materiality of 'words' 'on the other'.

Worklessness In practice, then, the language that strives to the status of such an absolute is not a fixed, stable singularity (could such exist) but a space of instability and 'worklessness'. However, Blanchot is a long way from the lax 'poststructuralist' identification of the poetic simply with negativity, the anarchic. Literature is disappropriating, unobjectifiable, inauthentic or, more truly, it abolishes the distinguishability of authentic and inauthentic. However, one should not turn Blanchot's thought into a kind of negative hermeneutics. As Gary Mole writes of L'Attente L'Oubli (1962): It is not a matter in Blanchot of replacing, for example, continuity with discontinuity, plenitude with interruption, union with dispersal. Rather, Blanchot's writing enacts a self-renewing interruption interrupting itself at every turn, preventing affirmation and negation from canceling each other out. 17

The issue is a peculiar displacement and self-repetition at work within and against the absolutising efforts, a singularity which displaces and reaffirms itself in the very impossibility of its full achievement. So the poetic may include that peculiar freshness which a phrase may achieve merely through being exactly repeated. The same is never the same. Elsewhere in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot refers to the way in which, with two people in dialogue, each learns so much simply from hearing his or her own language repeated in the mouth of the other: Men are very wrong to fear repetition, providing they seek in it not the means of convincing through stubbornness, but the proof that, even said again, a

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thought does not repeat itself - or, to say this another way, repetition only makes what is said enter into its essential difference. -Saying two times the same thing, not through a concern with what is identical but by a refusal of identity, and as though the same phrase, in being reproduced but displaced, in some sense developed of itself and in accordance with the very traits of the space engendered by displacement rather than according to the exterior organization of rhetorical development. (IC, p. 341)

Might a hidden rule be at work here- that the more a text may approach the supposed stability - the untranslatability - of a poetic absolute, the more it also engenders, as it is read, the kind of displacement and freshly repeatable event which Blanchot values in dialogue? Singularity renews itself in repetition, rather than being effaced by it. This may seem illogical, but it is also recognisably the experience of the poetic and the literary. One might also want to relate this to the oddly singularising effect of rhythm and tone in poetic language - the repeatability that sings even in the first word and line. The poetic is that 'impossibility' in the work: that element, acausal and unconceptualisable, that gives rise to effects which cannot be willed nor explained: I would even say that every important literary work is important to the extent that it puts more directly and more purely to work the meaning of this [poetic] turn; a turning that, at the moment when it is about to emerge, makes the work pitch strangely. This is a work in which worklessness, as its always decentered center, holds sway: the absence of work. (IC, p. 32)

It is this that the literary must somehow make or let work, 'directly or purely'. So it is not just a matter of recognising some anarchic potential or negativity in literary language, the unstoppable slippage of meaning. Work and 'worklessness' are not opposites but, so to speak, 'reversibles', and what relates them in their antagonism is precisely the poetic turn. And this 'turn' may be at times no more than the repetition of the already said. To give a specific example. In the 'The Beast of Lascaux' Blanchot compares the poetry of Char to the sayings of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, a thinker whose thought is pre-philosophical partly in the fact that it cannot be divorced from its precise diction and imagery. (Everyone recognises his saying that 'one cannot enter the same river twice,' now itself a commonplace.) We are always held, writes Blanchot, 'between the measure of the work which strives for power and the measurelessness of the work which desires impossibility' (B, p. 18). So, in poems such as Char's 'Lettera amorosa' as in Heraclitus, the text is this singular event, different in its sameness, like the river one never enters twice. In one of his extraordinarily nuanced passages on Char's poetry Blanchot talks of an 'eternal genesis'

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where transparency of thought is illuminated by the obscure image that preserves it, where the same language, undergoing a double violence, seems to be lit by the bare silence of thought, and seems to thicken and fill with speaking, unceasing depth, like a murmur in which nothing may be understood. (B, p. 17)

This extract again exemplifies how deeply, and to what effect, something like Paulhan's law of reversibility pervades Blanchot's prose at its most intense. 'Transparency of thought' (Paulhan's 'terrorism') is preserved by the rhetorical 'obscure image' even as this language seems lit, no longer obscure, by the 'bare silence' of thought, as saying something that is singular in the sense of being without prior justification. This is the poetic as the oracular, or the aphoristic, 'the indistinction of original speech' (B, p. 17). Blanchot continues: its 'speaking ... depth' is 'like a murmur in which nothing may be understood' (emphasis added). The simile is tantalising and important: Char's language is only 'like' something not understood. The force of this bizarre simile is precisely to reverse itself: for what is only 'like' 'a murmur in which nothing may be understood' is still something understood, but barely, as emerging singularised from the inarticulate. Mere repetition, for instance, can intensify such effects. Gertrude Stein's 'a rose is a rose is a rose' seems a tautology, for example, but also a stubborn refusal to define the rose in terms other than itself: yet at the same time it risks also withdrawing from the rose even the dignity of a name and turning language into a mere rattle (see IC, pp. 339-44). 18 So the singular in Blanchot means something more than the trivial sense in which everything, however familiar, is also unique. It is compulsively impossible as that which cannot be repeated but is also, as singular and unsayable in terms other than its own, that which can only be repeated, not explicated, but differently each time. As Blanchot writes of the 'unique truth' of Kafka's The Castle, it is: 'a truth that seems always to say of itself more than anything one could say about it, thereby engaging the reader, but above all the narrator, in the torment of an endless commentary' (IC, p. 394).

'Reading:' a phenomenology of the singular Other features of Blanchot's notion of singularising impossibility can now be quickly schematised. Firstly, the writer only becomes a poet by virtue of the poem. 'The poet is born by the poem he creates' (WF, p. 99). In other words, poetic art should not be exhaustively understood as the

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expression, act or representation of some pre-given nature or identity: that 'impossible' element that gives the poetic its status of transcending the status of mere 'expression' etc. is precisely that which is not available to be used at will. In each work it can only be singular, not representative. So 'the poem is [the poet's] work, the truest impulse of his existence, but the poem is what causes him to be, what must exist without him' (WF, p. 99). Secondly, there is no poetry in general: 'The poem does not look to poetry as to a power that might be anterior to it and from which it should await its justification or its existence ... To understand that the poem is creator and prime is to understand that it is always in this order: what is general depends on what is unique' (WF, p. 101). The poet will not compromise "'the prodigy of freedom in poetry"' (Rene Char; WF, p. 102). Pushing the thought of singularity a little further, it follows that not only does the poet not precede the poem but that the same logic must also apply to the reader. In so far as the poetic is singular its fitting reader does not pre-exist the encounter with it, but should become, through that encounter, the reader suitable to it. The reader does not precede the poem, but is created by it. Corresponding to this ideal of singular freedom Blanchot elaborates a notion of 'reading' as opposed to 'interpretation'. Blanchot defends the seeming innocence and force of reading in the sense of an activity distinguished from interpretation or evaluation. So by 'reading' Blanchot means precisely that, and is not using the word as a lax synonym for exegesis (as in 'x's reading of y'). He even suggests that Plato's infamous gesture in expelling the poets from his ideal republic could be understood as a defence of Homer's singular truth, against the domination of poetry by rhapsodes and others who set Homer up as a repository of general wisdom to be reprocessed in allegorical or symbolic interpretation. 'If I say the reader understands the poem, I confuse him with the interpreter who is essentially reductive, and who reduces the irreducible .. .' (IC, p. 321). Blanchot's ideal of reading as singularisation traces the consequences of the seemingly simple refusal to separate text and 'meaning': The critic is there to come between book and reader. He represents the decisions and the paths of culture ... He says what we must read and how we must read it, finally rendering reading useless. (IC, p. 318) Reading, on the other hand, seen as an activity that either preceded or which holds itself back from the critics, is something of which we are 'gravely and painfully deprived' (IC, p. 319).

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This notion of reading is a variant of the kind of phenomenological singularisation we have traced in Heidegger, but without Heidegger's relatively utopian hopes: for reading in Blanchot's sense is as insubstantial as it is potentially unsettling. It also contrasts strongly with Gadamer's experiment with Celan in that there seems no intended defence of some common reader or of the communality of those minimal frames of reference needed to enable the text to happen intelligibly. 'Reading' here has no social aspect except negatively. It engages with a process of singularisation in the text, something that could be represented in terms of a drive to break communal bonds of understanding or to move outside any given horizon of shared cultural meanings. Blanchot stresses the lightness of reading: 'it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends' (IC, p. 320). There is to be no positing of some underlying dualism that sets the surface text on one side against some underlying 'meaning' on the other, whether religious, psychoanalytic or cultural-political. That universal self-authorising gesture of the critic- to say that whereas the text appears as x or as y it is 'really' zis discounted at once. In its innocence and studied ignorance simple reading approaches more nearly this kind of attention to what is simply given, a 'receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze' (IC, p. 320). It would surely be wrong, however, to see this idea of reading as 'light' in any sense of relaxed or uneffortful. Merely lazy reading just assimilates a text in terms of stereotypes. Blanchot's ideal is of a phenomenological discipline of singularisation, a practice of intense concentration. It must keep open a space of inauguration - a space of singularity that holds off given determinations or explanations, that space of literature as an unstillable contestation even of its own seeming values. How does this singularisation take place? In an essay on reading 'symbols' in Le livre a venir (1959) Blanchot rejects the idea of symbolising as conventionally understood, i.e. that which demystifies a resistant piece of language by 'decoding' back into the realm of given meanings. Instead, the force and lure of symbolism draws in the reader in proportion to the degree that the work is referred back to itself in its approach to 'another space'. Blanchot's readings of the literary cannot compromise themselves by reading specific characters or situations as symbols or representatives of some broader cultural identity. The symbol, affirmed in this demand of singularisation, must become 'an experience, a radical change which must be lived, a leap that must be achieved' (LV, p. 122). A later essay, 'Vast as the Night' (IC, pp. 318-25), takes these issues up anew in relation to the notion of the poetic 'image'. Images are necessarily images of particular things - as when 'liberty' and other abstract

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concepts are rendered in specific and sensuous terms (e.g. a slave breaking his chains etc.). Blanchot's concern is again that resistance or tension between the singularity of the image and the more general meaning toward which it may seem to gesture. As soon as the reader starts to question the image, it becomes posed as an enigma, inviting decipherment. As enigma, its 'air of question ... calls up all our inclination to respond' and to do so by our calling on 'the assurances of our culture and the interest of our sensibility'. The image hovers between being, both at once and separately, the question and its elicited response. Contestation is inherent to it: it is, on the one hand, familiarly, 'sign and signified' (e.g. 'flower' will evoke certain cultural codes, 'mud' others) but, simultaneously, 'figure of the unfigurable, a form of the nonformal'. It addresses itself 'to what in us is double, reanimating the duplicity through which we divide and reassemble ourselves indefinitely' (IC, p. 324). Following Gaston Bachelard at this point, Blanchot further glosses the issue in terms of two kinds of response to the image: one of letting the image resonate in terms of the personal associations it evokes, and the other is a 'reverberation' of the image. This last sounds similar but is of a different order: This 'reverberation' is not, then, the image that resounds (in me, the reader, and on the basis of my self), it is rather the very space of the image, the animation proper to it, the point of its springing forth where, speaking within, it already speaks entirely on the outside. (IC, p. 321)

In terms of the quotation given earlier about the poetry of Char, it could be said that the image that resonates 'within' corresponds to what is already known, is part of subjective representations, while the reverberating 'outside' is a resistance to that realm. Thus, as we saw, a 'transparency of thought' may be illumined by an 'obscure' image, but, on the other hand, this same language, 'lit by the bare silence of thought ... seems to thicken and fill with speaking, unceasing depth.' The image is poised, unceasingly and unstably, between conventional 'understanding' and a type of reading that would give itself to its singular force: 'the image's summoning to what in it is initial, an instant summons to leave ourselves and to move in the shaking of its immobility' (IC, p. 321). 'Immobility' here means precisely the resistance of the image against being moved, shifted into other terms or words. Its obstacle is our own stiffness, 'that is, the certitude of our world and the obstinacy of our culture' (IC, p. 322). Reading's 'marvellous innocence' may seem to betray the intellectual sophistication of literary invention and critical thinking, but it is more attuned to the inaugural force of the image, pre-

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cisely by not seeking to explain it or understand it through its antecedents. 'Immobility' in reading may give space in language for what Blanchot calls simply a 'beginning': 'Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning' (IC, p. 320). In its bracketing, in holding off thinking on the basis of 'a currently held truth, or solely on language which has already been spoken or verified', reading may perhaps attend to a language which still has 'its meaning and legitimacy only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification' (B, p. 12, emphasis added). Such language may become like that impersonal speech of the oracle to which Heraclitus refers: it does not signify back but 'points' forwards, 'saying nothing, concealing nothing, [it) opens space' (B, p. 11). 'It points towards the future, because it does not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent that it is like a future language which is always ahead of itself' (B. p. 12). The 'poetic' in Blanchot bears the mark, or promise, of this necessary futurity. A major context for the discussion of the 'image' is Bachelard's own study of images of immensity, the eighth chapter of his The Poetics of Space (1958)_19 Blanchot specifies a particular passage from The Poetics of Space in which Bachelard gives images of vastness a certain privilege for the general insight they may afford. Bachelard writes that "'If we could analyse impressions of immensity, images of immensity, or what immensity brings to an image, we should soon enter into a region of phenomenology of the purest sort"' (quoted in IC, p. 459). By this he means that the normal goal of the phenomenological philosopher or critic - to return to the things themselves and describe, without presupposition or distraction, the phenomenon at issue purely as it shows itself - would become problematic when the vastness of space itself was the object, considered purely, apart from any particular thing within that space. Here may arise 'a phenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically, one that, in order to know the productive flow of images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imagination to take form and become stabilized in completed images.'20 Trying to intuit something that has no sensuous boundaries forces the human imagination to rebound upon its own act. 'In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination.'21 To illustrate his argument that this 'inner immensity' of the human imagination underlies the poetic force of images of space, Bachelard turns to a specific example. He offers a phenomenology of the word 'vast' that occurs as a kind of recurring signature in Baudelaire. This peculiar word, both evocative and empty, appears, Bachelard observes, in crucial

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places in Baudelaire's writing. It works elusively to evoke something very different from mere spatial size: The opium-eater must have 'a vast amount of leisure' to derive benefit from his soothing daydreams. Daydreaming is encouraged by 'the vast silence of the country.' The 'moral world opens up vast perspectives filled with new clarities.' Certain dreams are laid 'on the vast canvas of memory.' And elsewhere, Baudelaire speaks of a man who was 'the prey of great projects, oppressed by vast thoughts.' 22

As this list shows, 'vast' can be deployed upon impressions that have nothing really in common. Application of this epithet is less to do with physical extent than with a sense of 'grandeur' elicited in the inner 'immensity' of the imagination. So William Blake's seeing 'eternity' in a 'grain of sand' would render that grain 'vast' in Bachelard's sense. 'Vast' marks a crucial transformative point in poetic force, a cross-over between some object or term in empirical reality and the same as taken 'outside' into the elsewhere of imagination: 'The mind sees and continues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest of immensity in an object' (p. 190). 'Vast' is the word that 'marks most naturally, for [Baudelaire], infinity of intimate space' (p. 191 ), with its 'vast subjects of contemplation' (p. 192). Bachelard's is a recognisably romantic poetics: the word 'vast' marks the point of a synthesis uniting 'vast world and vast thoughts' (p. 192). Vast is not a descriptive word, but 'gives primal being to everything that must be described' (p. 193). Thus, 'immensity is an intimate dimension' (p. 194). It is as if a whole poetics of the sublim.e could culminate in the force of one common but peculiar word. Reading Poetics of Space, Blanchot often reinflects Bachelard's terms in such subtle ways that his essay cannot really be followed without detailed familiarity with that book. Blanchot's brief discussion of one image from Baudelaire's 'Correspondances'- 'As vast as night and light' - is arguing with those pages in which Bachelard expounds his romantic notion of 'intimacy'. The following quotation from Blanchot needs to be taken slowly. He asks himself a question, and then answers it: Thus, in Baudelaire's work, the word 'vast' becomes a figure on its own, and suffices to carry the entire 'force of speech.' As vast as night and light. In this case, where would the image be, if there were one? In the word vast, where night spreads to attain its nocturnal dimension, where light destines itself to light by way of the always unilluminated expanse, yet without night and clarity mixing or merging, being never 'vast' enough to measure the birth in this word of the image, which is each time the entire presence of this counterworld that is, perhaps, the imaginary. (IC, p. 324)

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At first, this reads as a repetition and endorsement of Bachelard's romantic or Rilkean idea of the imagination as an 'inner space'- that 'vastness' is a sublimity without sensuous dimensions because it partakes of inner, imaginary space. For Blanchot, however, the 'fascination' of an image, even as it helps project the exact nuance of some thought or perception, lies more in its 'impossible' or incalculable effects. Blanchot's passage on this single phrase from Baudealaire enacts his precise phenomenology of reading, attentive to the way the image can enable a certain force of 'beginning' in its terms, and, bracketing the habitual referents or senses, is singularised, blanked out to become something that faces the reader, distant and 'outside'. Vastness seems at first to be imaged by two things that ought to be opposites, darkness and light - to imagine the vastness of one is tantamount to imagining the ousting of the other: night becomes vast by banishing day, while light, conversely, becomes vast by banishing darkness. These specific images would surely be what is meant here by the 'space' of the image being 'engendered in measure and through measure' (IC, p. 324), each being a particular gauge or measure of the vast. The image 'As vast as night and light', however, invites readers to encompass both in a common vastness - a contradictory comparison. If 'night spreads to attain its nocturnal dimension [almost a tautology]' and 'light destines itself to light by way of the always unilluminated expanse [likewise]', yet the night and the clarity never mix or merge. They never, Blanchot writes, become 'vast' enough to 'measure' in the word 'vast' itself 'the birth of the image'. In other words, the simple word 'vast' may exceed in force the terms that seem to determine it in some imaginable, sensible likeness. (Blanchot's own weirdly tautological prose here, trying to convey this, recalls that circularity that Heidegger often deploys to defamiliarise and singularise the work of language through a defining of something only through itself.) So Blanchot takes over the claim that it is the very emptiness of 'vastness' that makes the word, as a problematic image, a source of insight into the nature of imaging more generally. Here, however, the emptiness is not, as it was for Bachelard, that of the reading consciousness turned back upon its own power of positing, released from empirical limits into its own intimate freedom (Poetics of Space, p. 195). What, for Blanchot, is constitutive of the image is not human consciousness, but that interval, distance, surprise, in its discontinuity from given terms. This is an 'outside' that, in its interruption, is vaster than any empirical vastness, precisely because what it affirms is not determined or measured in any way, that is, it is not yet any thing at all: 'there is no image of immensity, but rather ... immensity would be the possibility of image' (IC, p. 324). Blanchot argues that the affect of an image on us, contra Bachelard, is

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not that the 'imagination takes over experiences of space that are real or unreal' but rather that we approach through the image 'the very space of the image, the outside that is its intimacy' (IC, p. 324) and 'The space of the image, a site engendered in measure and through measure, is also entirely imageless' (IC, p. 324). Likewise, as we saw earlier, 'its meaning and legitimacy [are] only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.' Immensity is then 'the possibility of the image' as 'the manner in which it [the image] meets up with and disappears into itself', as in the two sensuous figures of night and of light, sharpened to a new 'beginning' in their inadequacy. So the phrase itself, 'vast as night and light' is immobile in both the immensity of outside (the unfigurable) and 'the most interior intimacy' that reverberates within the reader as yet 'without justification' in terms of given language or culture. So, in relation to the little example from Baudelaire, we might conclude that 'vast' touches its immediate verbal context primarily as a kind of intensifier. Its force is less a matter of spatial immensity than of a kind of rhetorical singularisation, enabling the contestation at work in language to be heard. 23 There is a final element of the image to consider. The 'image' needs to be thought of again in contradictory ways, simultaneously. To affirm its singularity it must be given the full weight of its specific place in the text as a whole. For instance, Matthew Arnold's famous line, 'the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea' gathers new force from being the last line of the poem in which it appears ('To Marguerite'), 24 sharpening and reinflecting it. Singularity is, once more, an inevitable effect of holism. '[H]ow', asks Blanchot, 'can images be heard outside the dimension they take from' 'rhythm and measure?' (IC, p. 323). Each image uniquely focuses and inflects the contours of the rest of the text in which it rests. At the same time, however, the exact opposite is also true. An image is also singularised, made freshly 'beginning', precisely by its detachability from its context. Is it not often the case that a poetic line, quoted in isolation, may acquire a new, sometimes aphoristic force by its unusual solitude? This is true again for the line from Arnold, made 'vaster' in its isolation. This detachment or essential solitude is already inherent to the image, at work in that surprise by which it irrupts with inaugural force, a 'brief newness that introduces an interval in duration' (IC, p. 321). These tendencies, singularisation through holism and singularisation by detachment, are opposites. Logically, they ought to be incompatible. Nevertheless, does not reading, as opposed to interpretation, actually and commonly do both? Reading in Blanchot's sense has no need whatsoever to be logically self-consistent. In 'The Beast of Lascaux' Blanchot celebrates the way a poem by Char will occupy 'the explosive brevity of

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a moment', but this 'moment' of reading has a peculiar and even inconsistent temporality, that of 'a power of both image and affirmation which "pulverises" the poem, and yet preserves the slowness, continuity, and understanding of that which brooks no interruption' (B, p. 15). The intentionality of reading here in this 'intimacy' is no longer the kind of freedom that Bachelard writes of. The more scrupulous the discipline of reading in Blanchet's sense, then the more the image may become, at the same time, both sharper in its particularity and obscurer in its transferable import. The 'immobility' or untranslatability of the image anticipates Blanchet's later speculations on writing in 'fragments' as the project of a writing without development. Each 'fragment' is singularised, quotation-like, by its isolation: It is not based on any theory, nor does it introduce a practice one could define as interruption. Interrupted, it goes on. Interrogating itself, it does not co-opt

the question but suspends it (without maintaining it) as nonresponse. 25 A final and drastic difference from Bachelard emerges. Reading in Blanchet's sense is a refusal of 'allegory' in the sense of any sort of dualism that poses the singular language of the text against some decodable 'meaning': '[Schelling] very quickly perceived that by destroying literal appearance allegory destroyed poetry, since it did away with the image ... ' (IC, pp. 319-20). An inevitable consequence of the ideal of reading as singularisation is that it must render the whole poem as image, and not something figurative that might be decoded by reference elsewhere. So, quite logically, Blanchot asserts, against Bachelard, that 'in the poem everything is image and everything becomes image' (IC, p. 323 ). Blanchot dissents from Bachelard's reduction of the image to a kind of adjunct to or component of the poem. The notion of 'the image' suggests readings that believe they can determine and then extract 'images' from the supposedly more normal language in the rest of text. Such an assumption is counter to the ideal of reading as singularisation. Reading should rather preserve the poem in 'the collectedness proper to it'. So Blanchot endorses Bachelard's account of the image in those poems closest to him, 'with the sole reservation that in them I find no image' (IC, p. 322). In these poems, writes Blanchot: Never, in the surprise of their discovery, does the sentiment of the image as such, brief and distinct, come to impose itself; on the contrary, there is a profound and an overwhelming absence of image, and in this absence - in the refusal of each to emerge and to show itself- is the very presence of the space of writing (qualified sometimes as imaginary), the evidence of its reality in the poem's unreal (non-positive) affirmation. (IC, p. 322)

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In this condensed passage the logic of singularisation has led to a crumbling of accepted notions of unity, identity and self-consistency in the poem. Blanchot has pushed the thought of singularity to that point at which it must resist any principle of synthesis that would strive to hold the text as one without at the same time being fragmented or 'pulverized' (as with the double demand traced earlier in relation to the line from Arnold). Hence Blanchot is able, without incoherence, to assert three seemingly incompatible things: firstly, that each image, considered separately, 'is as well the poem in its entirety' (IC, p. 323 ); secondly, that each image is also the poem in 'its unique centre, its absolute and momentary appearance, its discrete advance, and its restraint' (IC, p. 323 ); and finally, as we have seen, that 'in the poem ... everything becomes image' (IC, p. 323), so that, in Bachelard's sense 'there is a profound and overwhelming absence of image'. 26 So Blanchot is clearly no longer talking of Bachelard's '"brief, isolated, live transactions"' (IC, p. 459) whose main characteristic is their 'suddenness and brevity' (IC, p. 322). If the whole poem is image(s) and 'in the poem everything is image' in its detachability from the whole, and its unique centre, then what Blanchot will later call the 'fragmentary exigency' is at work. In 'vast', for instance, any opposition between the one and the many gives way to 'a/some' singular multiplicity. But 'vast' is also the 'unique centre' of the poem as a whole, as must be any other element in it. As a space of relation and isolation, detachment and concentration - singularisation in its unresolved and impossible contradictoriness - pervades the poem as a whole and projects its language, destabilised and sharpened, into the movement, always reversible, of legibility as enigma, simplicity as multiplicity and obviousness as inexhaustibility. Elsewhere in The Infinite Conversation, we read: Poetry: dispersion that, as such, finds its form ... language responds to a summons that brings its inherited coherency back into question. It is as though language were torn from itself ... one word to another is no longer possible. But once the internal and external ties are broken, there arises in each word as though anew all words; not words, but their very presence that effaces them, their absence that calls them forth. (IC, p. 360)

This is still, despite appearance, a phenomenology of reading. It instantiates Blanchot's sense of reading as bound neither to logic nor the demands of exegesis. Despite what seems the coldly intellectual composure of Blanchot's writing, no one captures with more skill the movement of becoming lucidly entranced by a text, a fascination that is immediate and non-synthesising, simultaneously focused and detached.

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Irenic contestation: Blanchot now

If there is an opposite or antagonist to singularisation in its multiple guises in Blanchot it is- quite logically- all that he names by 'development': 'To write without developing. A movement that was first recognized by poetry' (IC, p. 342). Developing means narrative explanation, the laying out of a frame of argument or explication. "'Alain [the teacher of Simone Weil] used to say that true thoughts are not developed. To learn not to develop would thus be one part, and not the least, of the art of thinking"' (IC, p. 339). This also means a challenge to the notion of knowledge or right as anything which a person- a teacher or intellectual say - should claim to embody or expound. 'Culture' is not usually a positive term in Blanchot. As deeply as Heidegger and more fiercely than Gadamer, Blanchot's thinking can be said to be fundamentally at odds with the culturalism of most current thinking about literature. Culture names powers of recuperation that always appropriate the literary or the poetic into the service of values or documentation or some broader narrative of history or of social development. Blanchot's extremism here, or at least that of the voices of one of his dialogues, is to see in all these a common refusal of singularity and even a latent totalitarianism: A developed thought is a reasonable thought; it is also, I would add, a political thought, for the generality it strives for is that of the universal State when there will be no more private truth and when everything that exists will submit to a common denominator. (IC, p. 339)

Even something so seemingly innocent and unavoidable as putting two different works of art next to each other can have the effect of negating their singular force. It already sets up a possible common horizon or context with its power of neutralisation. 'In the world of culture, it is necessary and good for us to have both Mallarme and Victor Hugo, Goethe and Holderlin.' Nevertheless, 'there is a point at which it is necessary for Goethe to remain deaf to Holderlin, to reject Kleist, and at which we, too, cannot open ourselves to Holderlin and to Goethe at the same time' (F, p. 56). As most students know, a deadly neutralisation is often at work in the very study of the poetic. It is comparable to that feeling of being overwhelmed and finally bored that comes when so many great works come together in the common space of a museum ('Museum Sickness', F, p. 45). Modern 'culture' is often such a museum sickness. (Think too of many psuedo multicultural projects that appear on the market, projects often neutralised in advance by the way the supposedly multicultural

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contributors emerge as American citizens with hyphens, i.e. essentially part of the same critical institution.) Of the ideal of a multicultural encyclopaedia, Blanchot writes: Yet is there a reader so enlightened as to be capable, beyond this banal theoretical knowledge, of truly feeling, concretely in experience, the prodigious encounter of these separate works, the movement that carries them toward each other, and the monstrous communal place that, it seems, they attempt to form together, in some strange spirit called on to greet them all at once, perhaps only to notice that each is weightier, more important, and more real when it is alone than when it has been added to all the others? (F, p. 51) This may sound more provocative now than in 1971. It is hardly, however, some sort of exclusive or reactionary affirmation of a specific identity, but a matter of ways of affirming the singularity of each, together and yet without the neutralising effects of a common horizon of definition. The issue is 'not that of understanding how singularities compose a community, but of how a community is, from the start, the exposition of singularities, an "unavowable community" .' 27 One step in this almost unimaginable programme is already at work in the way Blanchot's work undoes the dominant culturalism of literary studies, i.e. its rendering of a text's language as the expressive act of a given individual or group identity. In other words, the 'impossibility' and 'contestation' of literature render it inherently critical of such identifications or explanations- or better, it is the way that such 'impossibility' and 'contestation' are not themselves 'inherently' anything culturally identifiable that gives them their force: 'to learn not to develop is to learn to unmask the cultural and social constraint that is expressed in an indirect yet authoritarian manner through the rules of discursive "development"' (IC, p. 339-40). Against the familiar kinds of explication in terms of relation to society, history, etc., or in terms of rhetorical form or genre, Blanchot posits something which is less a question of interpretation 'knowing' the text but a reading that affirms the unknown. The force of 'beginning' in language, latent even in a commonplace saying, could be called 'poetic' not as part of a minority art-form but as its opening to an undetermined future, the pointing towards the unknown ('poetry, which is to say, also, the most simple speech' (IC, p. 301)). Blanchot writes: We must try therefore to recapture in the work of art the moment when language is still a powerless exchange, the language of naked correlation, foreign to mastership and servitude, a language, too, that speaks only to those who do not speak to acquire power, to know and to possess, to be masters and to learn self-mastery- indeed to those who are most un-manlike. Doubtless this

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is a difficult task, yet poetry and the poetic experience may suggest how it can be accomplished. (SS, pp. 50-1)

The Infinite Conversation offers the irenic idea of a mode of speaking 'the unknown . . . [to] receive it through speech while leaving it unknown' (p. 302). This thought is first sketched out in relation to Char and the poetic, and later extended in the 1950s and in The Infinite Conversation in an explicitly 'ethical' direction. The poetic bears the question of becoming an irenic possible new mode of relation, one that relates to the unknown as unknown. But how can one even relate to something as x without determining it knowingly as that x? One cannot, of course: thus the poem must be conceived as a mode of desire, and an ethical demand. This Blanchot styles 'metaphysical desire' which he differentiates from what he terms Eros, the nostalgic desire for a lost unity, by its being a desire for that to which it could never be united and which also affirms the separation from the other (IC, p. 53). In The Infinite Conversation (within the subtext of a debate with Emmanuel Levinas) this re-emerges as the idea of a dialogue between two interlocutors which would no longer use language as some sort of tool whereby to cross the space between them, but to find a mode of language that would affirm, rather than try to obliterate, that distance as a dissymmetric measure of the singularity of each. In addition, Blanchot writes of Heidegger in terms that seem initially like Arendt on natality: What begins is always what is most important for him: it is the upsurge of absolute renewal, the interruption that suspends our relation to established laws and values, perhaps even to the 'gods.' (BR, p. 247) But Blanchot is also writing here of what he thinks Heidegger saw in the early 1930s in the rise of Nazism! Risk and insecurity cannot be excluded from the idea of 'beginning' but what may give any such beginning a necessary ethical dimension is that relation of impossibility, of inherent contestation of myself and my identity, which is the other person. This is the other person, as inaccessible to my own immediate experience, taken in his or her singularity, i.e. not merely subsumed under the common horizon of a shared citizenship, political or other allegiance or some pact of mutuality. Such otherness is, paradoxically, a universal, but is present most forcedly and unignorably in the figure of the victim, the refugee, the internees of the camps - the other person in the exposure of a singular mortal existence. Blanchot is a long way here from the subject-centred notions of the 'individual' who relates to other 'individuals' in a relation of mutual 'respect' of given identities. For Blanchot, totalitarianism and

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individualism emerge as mirror images of each other: both rely on the ideal of a closed totality and evade or suppress the issue of that constitutive 'relation' itself that might keep them open. Thus language would open the possibility of a space of friendship foreign to knowledge in the sense of appropriation or assimilation, one that affirms a relating in its necessary hiatus, a relation without relation. It is perhaps part of the legacy of French surrealism that Blanchot is driven to engage the poetic as something to be affirmed in the everyday language of the streets. In a political as in a literary context Blanchot's demand is to 'affirm the break'. 'What break? The break with the powers that be, hence with the notion of power, hence everywhere that power predominates. This obviously applies to the University, to the idea of knowledge, to the language relations to be found in teaching, in leading, perhaps to all language, etc., but it applies even more to our own conception of opposition to powers that be, each time such opposition constitutes itself to become a party in power. ('Disorderly Words', BR, pp.200-5,atp.200) So one should repudiate any association of one person with another made merely for the power that association makes possible. As soon as opposition becomes a kind of institution, it loses itself. For example, Blanchot has made a public stand advocating that same-sex couples have the same full legal recognition as heterosexual ones, while also being wary of the formation of exclusively homosexual organisations that would bar others on the basis of sexual orientation. 28 The logic of singularity is likewise that of a refusal of any politics based on representation, i.e. a dissolution of politics as currently understood. Representation is a system that effectively debars the 'represented' from participation, except very rarely. In politics as in literature, it cannot be a matter of arguing for better representation, whether of some marginal or otherwise underrepresented group, nor can the critic pose securely as the representative of others. Both the notion of representation and the notion of the group as some sort of common identity are already problematic. All notions of community, of ethnic or national identity that look to some common myth or supposed past as the basis for some shared quality, are to be rejected. An essay of 1968 opposes 'Everything that allows men to become rooted, through values or sentiments, in one time, in one history, in one language, is the principle of alienation which constitutes man as privileged in so far as he is what he is ... imprisoning him in contentment with his own reality and encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose it as a conquering assertion' ('Disorderly Words', BR, p. 202). Politics, either as the striving for some supposedly

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lost unity, some common heritage, or towards some still future identity or idea of nationhood, etc., is still based on potentially totalitarian concepts of self-making as autonomy. A refusal of the nation or any group as a basis of subjective identification is necessarily also a refusal of notions of identity, citizenship or of structures of political representation grounded in membership of that group. For instance, the claim of the French government to enact the will of the French people was contested at its roots in 1960 through the 'right to insubordination' which Blanchot and others affirmed against the war in Algeria. Blanchot argued that he took this stance not out of an intellectual's traditional claim to represent the moral right or some sort of superior moral code, but to sustain that force of contestation that engages him directly as a writer. He described himself as 'an apolitical writer who felt moved to express an opinion about problems that concern him essentially'. 29 The corollary of the rejection of representation is a 'right of refusal'. Blanchot's is a refusal of the present and the past, and of any sort of notion of the nation as hero of history. He speaks of a 'right' of refusal here, because to call it a 'duty of insubordination' would infer some broader moral code: The right, on the contrary, depends only on itself, on the exercise of the freedom of which it is the expression. Right is a free power for which each person, for his part and in relation to himself, is responsible and which binds him completely and freely: nothing is stronger, nothing is more solemn. 30 Blanchot's 'right' is simply to be singular, that is to step out of whatever role, obligation, demand, etc. political society may place one in. Blanchot's idea contrasts strongly with 'rights' understood as the nexus of individualistic and atomistic norms. Such rights pertain to a sanctioned identity, and the nexus of legal and political statutes that garrison it, one's rights as a French citizen, for instance. 31 Blanchot, however, clearly affirms freedom in the sense of the lack of an identity determined by notions of representation or belonging. It embraces a residual right knowingly to defy the law of the state, not out of some bloody-mindedness to do what one pleases, but openly in the name of a superior claim, fully prepared to face the consequences. Those rare communal political moments that Blanchot endorses enact what might be called an interruption of politics understood as competing claims to the seats of power. Blanchot can be said to be affirming what Hannah Arendt calls the 'lost treasure' of the revolutionary tradition, the creation or emergence of a genuinely public sphere allowing everyone an active part in political debate and decision. 32 Blanchot

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recalls, approvingly, Acephale (a communitarian movement associated with Georges Bataille), the uprising of May 1968, the huge demonstrations of 13 February 1962 about the so-called Charonne killings (the deaths, during a riot five days earlier, of eight demonstrators against the Algerian war). 33 Each of these is knowingly temporary. Community is affirmed only as an inherently unstable and elusive force of beginning. As Blanchot wrote in 1986 of May 1968: a revolution ... destroying all without anything destructive, destroying, rather than the past, the very present in which it took place and not attempting to provide a future, extremely indifferent to any possible future (judged as success or failure), as though the time it sought to open up was already beyond these standard determinations. 34

Although Blanchot does not refer to her work, we can recognise here that exciting but deeply uncertain annulment of given identities and norms that Arendt called simply 'beginning' (though this word itself in just that sense is common in Blanchot). These episodes are understood as spaces of complete interruption and suspension of normal political life as a structured hierarchy of subordinations and mappable identities. Only such an interruption, without development, could break the syndrome of the past repeating itself - the affirmation of a community without identity or pre-determined purpose. Blanchot's affirmation of a space of worklessness is one that, on the streets at least, is knowingly transient, as opposed to what may be held to be working/unworking ceaselessly in literature. In a necessarily compromised, partial form, it may be feasible to realise this thinking in a seminar more readily than on the streets. There, however, an art of teaching may also intervene to open such a temporary and parenthetical space in the normal workings of culture and language. It involves, necessarily, a reconsideration of the place of literature in systems of education, as something taught as part of a society's reproduction of itself. The call that 'the search for a plural speech be affirmed, a speech no longer founded on equality and inequality, no longer upon predominance and subordination' (IC, p. 8), is actually from the opening essay of The Infinite Conversation, and concerns the forms taken by the search for knowledge, forms that may be written or institutional. The relation of 'master' and 'pupil', as in the Socratic dialogue, shows how the master in the scene of teaching may represent 'a region of space and time that is absolutely other' (IC, p. 5). This means not the space of some sort of inassimilable authority, but that the 'master' takes up the task of rendering the language relating to both topic and students no longer a medium of continuous development, but an 'infinite' one. In other words it is the

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task of the teacher to enact the demand of singularisation, a demand that he or she can only respond to and echo, but never embody: The master offers nothing to be known that does not remain determined by the indeterminable 'unknown' he represents, an unknown that affirms itself not through the mystery, the prestige, or the erudition of the teacher, but through the infinite distance between A and B. Knowing by the measure of the 'unknown,' approaching the familiarity of things while preserving their strangeness, relating to everything by way of an experience of the very interruption of relations is nothing other than hearing speech and learning to speak. (IC, p. 6)

This may still seem a little vague, more a description of what sometimes happens with succesful teaching than any kind of further guide. Blanchot's mode of reading certainly could never become another 'approach' or 'method' to be taken up and practised in the institution of criticism. It simply does not exist for that kind of purpose. The space of teaching would be less one of the unfolding of a continuous doctrine or competing identity claims, but of discontinuity, interruption. This calls for the discipline of a patient spacing and pacing of thought - one attentive to the burden of the past and its determinations (the scene of teaching being precisely that of assuming responsibility for a world one did not choose)- but also to 'affirm the break' from any such intellectual narrative. A 'true thought', Blanchot writes, may reject development but yet come about 'only at the end of a long development', one which such thoughts 'resume as they cancel' (IC, p. 342; trans. modified). Likewise, if 'education' has almost always meant some concept of self-development, self-realisation, Bildung, then Blanchot's thinking here gives new life to the commonplace that the only thing truly worth teaching is what cannot be taught. Elsewhere Blanchot specifies a triple (non-dialectical) movement of developing and discontinuity: 'To interrupt oneself for the sake of understanding. To understand in order to speak. Speaking, finally, only to interrupt oneself and to render possible the impossible interruption' (IC, p. 79). Though one would not think it from the portentous monotony of criticism about Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation goes into extraordinary detail, across 640 pages in the original French, over the various precise conceptual and rhetorical modes of language that make up varieties of 'development', 'continuity', 'dialogue', and 'interruption'. 'True thoughts', writes Blanchot, 'question, and to question is to think by interrupting oneself' (IC, p. 340), opening within one's 'own' speech such an infinity. 'Developed' thoughts, on the other hand, are those which impose themselves by virtue of the order in which they are massively embedded. When someone holds forth monologically, with a discourse of

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logical and coherent development, what is often at work is the fantasy of capturing and appropriating to oneself the space of language in general, having the last word (IC, p. 341). A true thought is lighter and may come as if by surprise. True thoughts do not develop, 'because they do not wish to impose themselves' (IC, p. 340). The scene of pedagogy is the very relation of speech 'when the incommensurable becomes measure therein, and interrelation, relation' (IC, p. 6). In this way, the space of teaching and reading may become, however fleetingly, a chance for 'natality'. Literature as the 'very passion of its own question ... forces whoever it attracts to enter completely into this question.' This leap is into 'a question which admits of no limits' (BR, p. 149): 'It is therefore not enough for it [literature] to make suspect literary ceremonial, hallowed forms, ritual images, fine language, and conventions of rhyme, measure and narrative' (BR, p. 149). Talk of a novel's 'challenge' to received notions or order is after all the commonest gesture in critical discussion. However, this is usually not what interests Blanchot. It usually means a gesture of demystifying or denaturalising within the familiar model of cultural politics. For instance, it is common to say that a particular writer 'subverts' modes of characterisation derived from the classic realist novel, as, say, in Peter Carey's rewritings of nineteenth-century classics. However, to stay with the same example, like much so-called 'historiographical metafiction', Carey's meta-novels finally offer only safely liberal rereadings of canonical texts. 35 When he does devote a text entirely to a kind of close reading of one author, as in the essay written on Paul Celan just after the poet's suicide, 'The Last One to Speak' (1972), Blanchot's own language remains so close to that of the poetry, moving in and out of it in large quotations, that the effect is very odd. It refuses conventional expectations of some sort of accessible exegesis or cultural placement. What Blanchot's 'commentaries' do is to try to affirm that 'turn' that makes the work 'pitch strangely' (IC, p. 32). So Blanchot stays close to Celan's own terms to affirm in them their inaugurality. 36 He enables them to happen in their singularity as unobjectifiable events, things which are simply not 'there' in the sense of some mappable artifact. Hans-Jost Frey writes: Blanchot has always identified the particularity of the poetic work in the fact that it remains a beginning one, and that what is visible, graspable, understandable in it does not cover up closeness to what is unavailable in its origin. The reconstitution of the work in this closeness is the reader's business. His 'yes' to the work is not an assent to what is said, signified, and intended, and does not at all concern that the work is a construct and the product of an ability, however much this deserves respect and consideration - it only says 'yes' to the fact that the work is, to the fact that it was able to begin. 37

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In the Celan reading, minimal commentary and discreetly chosen quotation enact this 'turn', the singularity in repetition- it may simply work like the well-placed pause of a punctuation mark, a space (see IC, p. 169). Elsewhere, Blanchot writes of the commentator's work as being to make a 'high-quality void'! 38 To think with Blanchot in relation to literature in the twenty-first century is inevitably to think of him as a resource against the dominant culture of criticism. Yet, a certain kind of modernist culture constitutes it too deeply to be challenged without also being perpetuated. This pervades all the mechanisms of intellectual life (its functioning as a market, its cult of celebrity and the inherent instrumentalism of being part of an educational system). Almost everything draws the very reading of Blanchot back into a process of development and to fitness for an international market economy which it expressly refuses. A thinking so eclectic and genuinely difficult may have little immediate effect, but it offers a space to be kept open. Blanchot is inassimilable and writing on Blanchot's work best serves it by not trying to dress it up into part of some manifesto programme of the 'what "we" need now etc.' kind, except to affirm that inassimilability, to refuse to speak on the asumed basis of any 'we'.

Chapter 5

Derrida: a pragmatics of singularity

Mustn't responsibility always be expressed in a language that is foreign to what the community can already hear or understand only too well? (GD, p. 74)

Introduction Those only mildly familiar with Derrida's work may be surprised at his averral that 'it is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful and who interests me most' (ATS, p. 40). 1 Likewise, in an interview of 1993 Derrida states a maxim: 'I am not one of the family' (ATS, p. 27). It affirms a universal right not to be assumed to belong to any group, nation or other affiliation. This is not an individualism based on some contract of right but an affirmation of the universal claim of singularity, as being always exceptional: I want to keep my freedom, always, this, for me, is the condition not only for

being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others. When someone is one of the family, not only does he lose himself in the herd, but he loses the others as well; the others become simply places, family functions, or places or functions in the organic totality that constitutes a group, school, nation or community of subjects speaking the same language. (ATS, p. 27) 2 Derrida has long changed from someone who seemed the leader of a challenging and imitable mode of reading texts ('deconstructive criticism' etc.) to someone as idiosyncratic and as puzzling as Blanchot, someone to be read, puzzled over and discussed, not to be summed up crudely and deployed. As the issue of singularity has become prominent in Derrida's work, its own status and 'case' have come increasingly to pose it. Derrida's work also presents itself as occasional in the way it often situates itself as thinking from out of the tensions between

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specific events or writings and the possibility of generalisable programmes. Much, however, of what may seem distinctive in Derrida's arguments on literature is in fact a schematisation and a partial formalisation of arguments already at work in Heidegger, Gadamer and Blanchot. To recap: the literary is seen, non-essentially, as a mode of singular inventiveness in language, one which, while necessarily based on given conventions and rubrics, may at times exceed being understood in terms of any pregiven norms of understanding or morals. Its singular and untranslatable texture may render literary language an 'event', i.e. something that cannot be fully understood theoretically, but which, by engaging the reader in its specific performance (word by word or line by line in the unfolding text) comes to project the reader suitable to it in ways that could not have been foreseen. It may also, if only in a small or fleeting way, transform the person who 'understands' it, and may be capable of transforming the conventions and understanding which made up its initial readability. Drawing on such arguments Derrida retains and revives the traditional term 'oeuvre' to describe the distinctive work and force of specific writers, highlighting 'the value of singularity and not that of identity to itself or of collection' (P, p. 354 ). An oeuvre is that which in its untranslatability must mark performatively the context in which it can be placed: 'let's say that oeuvres, be they philosophical or not, are as contextualizing as they are contextualized' (ATS, p. 15). After all, writes Derrida, 'If everyone can understand immediately what I mean to say- all the world at once- then I have created no context, I have mechanically fulfilled an expectation' (ATS, pp. 30-1). A new book, for instance, may be almost unintelligible but maybe its resistance will also help produce conditions in which it is possible for understanding, eventually, to emerge. So we may seem to be on familiar ground. Derrida's work, however, is more than the latest representative of a 'school of singularity', mainly distinctive for its being relatively well known and, to a necessarily partial degree, formalising its claims. Derrida's later thought also pushes further questions on the place of the literary in relation to the nature of the social bond, i.e. questions posed by the tension between the uniqueness of each individual existence and the demands of communal life. Literature interests Derrida in engaging 'this singularity of experience and of existence in its link to language' (ATS, p. 41), the kind of exceptionalism, for instance, at issue in Herman Melville's 'Bartleby' ('I would prefer not to') or in the idiosyncratic in Charles Dickens (ATS, pp. 26-7). Derrida broadly agrees with Jean-Luc Nancy's project of an 'inoperative community' and with Blanchot's similar 'unavowable community' ,3 but why,

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he asks, continue to use the word 'community' at all? Its resonances of common or shared identity remain too strong not to threaten the issue, the 'don't count me in' (ATS, p. 28; see also Sauf, p. 46). Derrida's concept of singularity draws together several interrelated issues. Firstly, it bears on the untranslatable element of a written text. Secondly, it designates the 'untranslatable' immediacy of experience as the always unique conjunction of a 'now' and a 'here', and the way chance and happenstance can make a singular mark on things which may upset the opposition between the meaningful and the meaningless. Thirdly, and increasingly to the fore in recent work, Derrida's concern is Kierkegaard's singular individual, each of 'us' in 'our' ultimately secret relation to 'our' own thought and perception. This means not only my incommensurable life-to-myself that no one could ever know, but also, after Levinas, the otherness of the other person, inaccessible and uneliminable. What marks all these modes of being singular are the features of both undeniable reality, incommunicability and impossibility of access: There is singularity of the here and now, even though presence, and self-presence, is dislocated. There are instances of dislocation that are singular, irreplaceable ... singular existence, even if it is given over to non-self-presence, dislocation, and the non-reappropriation of a present, is for all that no less singular. (ATS, p. 13) Derrida writes of 'the secret and singularity of what is absolutely proper to me'. 4 This is why 'I love you' is not a description of a verifiable state of affairs but a speech act that performs a kind of private testimony to what no one else could finally verify. 5 Arguing against the widespread association of his work with relativism, Derrida writes of the absolute nature of singularity: If I want to pay attention to the singularity of the other, the singularity of the situation, the singularity of language, is that relativism? ... No, relativism is a doctrine, which has its own history in which there are only points of view with no absolute necessity, or no references to absolutes. That is the opposite of what I have to say. Relativism ... states that there are only cultures and that there is no pure science or truth. I have never said such a thing. 6

Singularity has the paradoxical status of a universal in Derrida. Simon Critchley argues that 'there is a moment of formal universality in Derrida's work, which constitutes something like an ethical criterion ... political decisions must always be singular and context-sensitive acts of invention.' 7 Life is often the art of making the least bad decision in response to all the mutiplicitous and often mutually exclusive claims

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from the singular cases surrounding us. Yet as soon as one tries to generalise, as one always must, the singularity of each case must be overlooked. Justice is the question of unendurable but unavoidable choices. 'I have to compare, I have to use concepts, I have to refer to resemblance, everything ... divorced from ethics in the 4evinasian sense.' 8 What of 'literature' more specifically? Unlike Gadamer and Blanchot, whose starting point is the uncertain statuslof literary texts as modes of knowledge (and Hegel's much quoted dictum on the relative obsolence of art in modernity), Derrida describes 'lit~rature' as a juridical institution linked with questions of individual right. He argues that literature is a Western form of discourse, a mainly m~dern institution which he yet traces ultimately (though rather sketchily) tb the Roman 'litteratura' and the freedom within it, in theory at least, to ~ay, imitate or argue anything at all. He endorses E. R. Curtius's linking of 'literary experience to a juridical institution, to acquired rights, an~ this from the outset in the Roman figure of citizenship (D, pp. 23-4 ). In the modern West the institution of literature is inseparable from la~ently democratic notions of right. Derrida aligns himself with the ptogressivist tradition of the Enlightenment. 'I'm a progressist,' he asserts: I love the process of perfectibility, because it is marked by the context of the eighteenth century, the Aufklarung. It is ofterj. the case that people would like to oppose this period of deconstruction to the Enlightenment. No, I am for the Enlightenment, I'm for progress, I'm a 'progressist' .9

Association of literature and democratic right finds expression in Derrida's support for the 'International Pa~liament of Writers'. This is a group dedicated to the support of writers for whom the right of literature (the right to say anything) has led to nersecution or harassment. 10 So literature as an institution is not just dccidentally but constitutively aligned to notions of individual right. I-:Jiowever, as an institution of always unsubstitutable works it also eAacts the claim that justice requires that one respond to singularity. The language of universal, common identities, abstract rights, etc. is indispensable, but it is also inherently unjust. Sharing Enlightenment principles with the dominant progressivist cultures of the academy, Derrida's practice yet remains fundamentally at odds with any use of group identity or social location as principles of explanation for the details and motivations of an action or text. The Derrida who comes clear in texts such as A Taste for the Secret (1997) is also one implicitly closer to Gadamer than his celebrity image as arch 'sceptic' might suggest. For example, a certain notion of 'truth' is reaffirmed as indispensable for thought. The basis for this, as in

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Gadamer, is mainly ethical. It works, for instance, against the liberal ideal of 'toleration' for others, which, Derrida argues, is actually an insult. The objection is that such an ideal of tolerance is effectively a refusal of genuine dialogue, of the possibility that there may be truth in the other's thinking that needs to be addressed rather than 'tolerated': 'Truth is not a value one can renounce. The deconstruction of philosophy does not renounce truth- any more, for that matter, than literature does' (ATS, p. 10). Related to truth in this sense is a writer's or thinker's need for 'recognition'. 'Recognition' here does not mean credit in the sense of some gratified narcissism, nor the ambition merely to be understood 'in order to reappropriate what I said as my work or to get credit for it' (ATS, p. 22). It means that what I write will be met in its claim to be saying something valid beyond myself: it will not be simply received, as, say, a historical document or as some cultural example (e.g. of that 'Derrida' who recurs in the newspapers as a paradigm of intellectual decadence). This is a 'truth-claim,' as Gadamer would say. Derrida pushes its implications a little further in arguing that, for the claim to be possibly valid beyond myself, my own disappearance must be inherent to the structure of its functioning - it must do without me, though signed with my name. So the writer's is a kind of irresponsible responsibility. It correlates with 'a right to absolute nonresponse, just where there can be no question of responding, of being able or having to respond' (Passions, p. 29). An obvious example is that a writer may invent a provocative character that may or may not be identified with the author. More subtly, the detachment of the poetic or fictional sentence from its seeming source may exasperate, even as it provokes, attempts to determine it in terms of assignable meaning, social location, etc. This is literature's constitutive force of non-response: 'We should therefore conclude that not only is [a] thematization of the concept of responsibility always inadequate but that it is always so because it must be so' (GD, p. 26). This means not only that there cannot be a political grounding or justification for the institution of literature, but that there should not be one. Kierkegaard reacted to Hegel's philosophy as annulling the singular commitment of Christian faith: to turn the issue of trust in God into a matter of philosophical deduction is to mechanise and hence eliminate the searching, self-examination, passionate sense of need etc. that must, for Kierkegaard, constitute genuine faith. Referring to Kierkegaard's famous reading in Fear and Trembling of the story of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Derrida objects in unusually acerbic language to those who have turned deconstruction into a kind of moralIsm:

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In terms of the moral of morality, let us insist upon what is too often forgotten by the moralizing moralizers ... Philosophers who don't write an ethics fail in their duty, one often hears, and the first duty of the philosopher is to think about ethics, to add a chapter on ethics to each of his or her books ... What the knights of good conscience don't realize is that 'the sacrifice of Isaac' illustrates - if that is the word in the case of such a nocturnal mystery - the most common and everyday experience of responsibility. (GD, p. 67; see also Passions, p. 15)

Derrida is even willing to sacrifice the word 'ethics' if the word implies any calculability of obligation. There is a disarming drive to honesty in deconstruction, a refusal to evade things. It will deliberately awaken difficulties, impasses of incalculability- that, for example, my obligation to one person or issue necessarily means a neglect of others. To argue as if 'right' or acknowledged right were enough in one case is already unjust to another. A paradoxical Kierkegaardian logic pervades all Derrida's later work on the nature of the literary and of the social bond: 11 to merely follow a rule in, for instance, being polite, is oddly contradictory; it is impolite to be merely polite. To help a friend merely out of a sense of obligation (or restituted debt) is not to help as a friend etc. Likewise, to give something with the expectation of return (even if it be only gratitude) is to annul giving altogether by making it into an exchange. The point here is that the acts or gestures at issue, while recognising norms and ethical codes of behaviour, are also always occasional, singular each time. Their occasionality is what gives them force. There has to be something specific to its unrepeatable time and place to make each act of courtesy, generosity or friendship what it is. This arena of life, so ordinary but so vital, might perhaps be nicknamed 'the natality of the everyday': 'As soon as it yields to the necessity of applying the generality of a prescription to a single case, the gesture of friendship or of politeness would itself be destroyed' (Passions, p. 8). So any institution, group or mode of criticism or reading that claims, in itself, to embody justice, is necessarily wrong- it tries to anticipate an occasionality that can never be assured in advance. Derrida's work serves to remind us against the simplifications of any stance that puts one too easily in the seeming right. Singularity is both what it is impossible to do justice to, and impossible to avoid ('every one else is completely or wholly other' (GD, p. 68)). This is why justice forms the undeconstructible horizon of deconstruction. 'The relation to the singularity of the other is not assimilated by right' (ATS, p. 56). So the singularity of the literary makes a claim on the heavily compromised modern democracies in the name both of their own avowed Enlightenment ideals and of what Derrida terms the 'democracy to

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come', with its inherently conflicting but unavoidable claim for both universal right and recognition of the universality of the exceptional case. If justice is the impossible demand to respond to the always 'singular', the fate of the literary is to inhabit an elusive and incalculable space between such a claim and a public space of received norms and agreed terms.

Folds, tones and secrets It is one thing to come up with a general defence of the institution of literary writing attentive to its specifically singularising claims. It is another

thing, however, to put such thinking in practice in the minutiae of how to read, interpret and talk about specific texts. Derrida stands out from even the other thinkers covered here in the variety and minutiae of his practice of reading. This is the issue in the next few sections of this chapter, turning first to the singularity of the text in the sense of untranslatability. A feature of the literary is to be that language which strives to be (impossibly) absolutely singular, the only and the irreplaceable articulation of what it says or does. For example, no parsing or rephrasing of, say, even the twenty-six words of H.D.'s 'Oread' will exhaust it semantically, let alone one of Joyce's Ulysses. This especially fascinates Derrida in the hermetic work of Paul Celan (as in the study 'Schibboleth' of 1986), 12 and Derrida's own prose-ode, 'Che cos'e la poesia?' (1988), turns around the dream of the poetic or 'poematic' as an absolutely singular trace or monument. Yet the drive towards a recognised singularity is inherently contradictory. Not only is a would-be absolutely singular language impossible- for repetition and familiarity are necessary for any intelligibility - but the text is always inherently the call or demand to another, to be read, acknowledged, even, impossibly, in its unsubstitutable singularity. A poem is inherently a public thing, a monument out in the open. It calls out to that very horizon of shared norms and recognisable positions that it must also resist. Once again, we see that the singularity of a text is not some hidden quality, origin or affect: it will be simply the text itself, considered apart from the demand to say in a few (other) words what it 'means' or to situate it in terms its author's nature or belief system or as symptomatic of the social thought of its day etc. For those ambitious to read in that way, the singularity of text may seem a remnant that becomes more and more elusive, even irritating, the more one approaches it, and which is never eliminated. For one thing 'the text' itself is not isolable from the various 'extrinsic' norms of readability, legal frameworks, etc. that

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enable it to exist. Even to write such seemingly innocent and unavoidable sentences as 'Joyce argues that .. .', 'Shakespeare's view of marriage in .. .', or 'Mansfield depicts 1920s London as .. .' is to reduce these texts violently. Of course, this must also happen, even in the lightest reading. But there is always something left out, a remainder still to account for. The text's singularity is not some obscure quality in its diction or some hidden allusiveness, but it inheres simply in what Derrida terms its 'syntax', 'the placement and not ... the content of words' (DS, p. 220). To instantiate this briefly, a short text- the poetic extract from Charles Tomlinson given below - may be made up of the most commonplace terms (twenty-eight common words: 'door', 'open', 'now') but it is rendered singular by its 'syntax': To arrive unexpectedly from nowhere: then: having done what it was one came for, to depart. The door ts open now that before was neither open nor was it there 13

'[T]he placement and not ... the content of words' (DS, p. 220) relates not just to the composition of the text from common elements, but to that syntactical/logical/poetic operation that relates one to the other and to the rest. In this short poem a unique verbal space has been opened up in a syntactical movement that seems at first to follow the straight line of simply descriptive discourse ('the door is now open') but instead of continuing along it (with, for instance, 'and a garden is seen'), it loops back upon itself to open up, as it were, a new spatial dimension '(that before I was neither I open I nor was it there'). Such a placement of terms across the various syntactical relations and conceptual interdeterminations is always at work in a text, though rarely so visibly as here. Literature can be said to distinguish itself from juridical or philosophical language in the extent to which it deploys and exploits this aspect of language, this excess of the syntactic over the semantic. This is what Derrida names the

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'fold', or the 'folding' of terms across, over and about each other through the text and, incalculably, through the possible contexts it projects (DS, p. 177££). Necessarily, it cannot be fully caught in some sort of thematisation or summary proposition. It may produce the well-known but perhaps slightly misleading effect of the extra depth, sacrality or density, etc. of the semantic in literary meaning, as in Paulhan's 'mystery.' For instance, any 'fold' in Joyce's Ulysses is also such a self-positing space, but one far more multiplicitous than the Tomlinson and with an uncountable number of intersecting loops and dimensions. This plural event/action/fold, etc. is necessarily unique to each text. For Heidegger, as we saw, there is a Versammlung, i.e. a force of unifying gathering whose rhythm pervades and determines the rest. For Derrida, however, there can clearly be no 'centre' in the sense of a uniquely decisive word or phrase (e.g. as is 'to deinon' in Heidegger's Sophocles), but only verbal thickenings of a 'secret' syntax: it 'does not collect itself, it "consists" in not collecting itself' (P, p. 354). So the poem is not just the undifferentiated instance of some general issue, as it was in those forms of 'deconstructive criticism' that reduced all texts to instances of the same paralysing problematic. 'There is something secret. But it does not conceal itself' (Passions, p. 26) and 'the readability of the text is structured by the unreadability of the secret.' 14 Yet this unhidden secret is simply the text itself, its singular and irreducible nature. The secret is not hidden: but is everywhere and, as such, nowhere graspable. This is the source of the false attraction of those kinds of interpretations that, as it were, locate the secret in some symbol, episode or epiphany that can be presented as the whole in miniature: 'there is singularity but ... it "consists" in not collecting itself' (Points, p. 354). 15 So the issue is again something very simple, even obvious, but with farreaching consequences. No interpretation can gather the secret or singularity of the text under some summary heading without leaving some remainder. Discussing this in relation to Joyce's Ulysses, where he is trying to do justice to the specific force of Joyce's encyclopaedic novel, 'laughter', almost being laughed at, is one way in which this 'remainder' may appear. Ulysses, with its complex allusiveness and multiple reflexivity, may seem to anticipate and incorporate all that is written about it (UG, p. 281). It is as if a supplementary mark of laughter touched every word and syntactic operation. Ulysses makes perhaps the most notorious instance of a text that projects the new kinds of competence its reader will need: 'a James Joyce who can be heard laughing in this omnipotence', with the 'jubilation of a returned Ulysses' (UG, p. 293 ):

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Once one recognizes that, in principle, in Ulysses the virtual totality of experience - of meaning, of history, of the symbolic, of languages, and of writings, the great cycle and the great encyclopaedia of cultures, scenes, and affects, in short, the sum total of all sum totals - tends to unfold itself and reconstitute itself by playing out all its possible combinations, with a writing that seeks to occupy virtually all the spaces, well, the totalizing hermeneutic that makes up the task of a worldwide and eternal institution of Joyce studies will find itself confronted with what I hesitatingly call a dominant affect, a Stimmung or a pathos, a tone which retraverses all the others yet which does not participate in the series of the others since it re-marks all of them, adds itself to them without allowing itself to be added in or totalized, in the manner of a remainder that is both quasi-transcendental and supplementary. (UG, pp. 291-2)

'Tonality', 'laughter' (also, 'perfumes' (UG, p. 301) ): these kinds of psuedo-anthropomorphic expressions recur in Derrida's writing on literature. They relate primarily to elements of the text that are only partially cognitive. They are attempts to name that elusiveness of the text that is simply the singularity of the 'whole' of it. In calling this the 'tonality' of the text, Derrida alludes hesitatingly to the poetics of Heidegger and Holderlin, without engaging them explicitly. As in Gadamer too, this notion of 'tonality' makes up a principle of the text's non-cognitive singularity. However, for Derrida, the issue is less its unvordenklich nature, leading interpretation to a point of surrender (Gadamer's 'so ist es'), but something more radically non-cognitive and uncomfortably more like a mockery than a destination. The principle feature of such 'tonality' is that it is something with determining effects but utterly non-localisable: 'laughter is a fundamental or abyssal tonality in Ulysses,' and 'the analysis of this laughter is not exhausted by any of the available forms of knowledge precisely because it laughs at knowledge and from knowledge.' But Joyce's laughter can also seem hollow. Consider the following, perhaps initially surprising, statement: It is too often said that the performative produces the event of which it speaks. To be sure. One must also realize that, inversely, where there is the performative, an event worthy of the name cannot arrive. (WA, p. 234)

An oeuvre in the sense of a singular event can occur only when the work is not already intelligible solely as the result of an instituted action or procedure. In other words, just as the text is only a singular work in that its performative force cannot be understood by reference back to the conditions of its making or put 'back in context', so it must also resist recuperation as the product of one determinable self-legitimating fiat. In fact, such a fiat would an impossibility - for what text can dictate the future

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of how it will read, even to its own author? Even that text which aspires to dictate the conditions of its own intelligibility can only do so on the basis of this initial, implicit but constitutive appeal to others for 'recognition': [Literature's] passion consists in this- that it receives its determination from something other than itself. Even when it harbors the unconditional right to say anything, including the most savage antimonies, disobedience itself, its status is never assured or guaranteed permanently [a demeure], at home, in the inside of an 'at home'. This very contradiction is its very existence, its ecstatic process. Before coming to writing, literature depends on reading ... (D, pp. 28-9)

The notion of the work as projecting and performing its own context, including the figure of a reader competent to read it, was a crucial notion in 'deconstructive criticism' during its heyday. However, it corresponded only to a partial element of Derrida's thinking on the economy of a singular text. For instance, two authors Derrida writes of at length, James Joyce and Francis Ponge, are notable for the ingenuity with which they deploy textual effects that maximise the degree to which their oeuvre is a singular performative that may project its own context. ('Aren't we, today, people or characters in part constituted (as readers, writers, critics, teachers) in and through Joyce's dream?' (SIL, p. 74).) However, it is striking that this would-be projection is also described as an act or fantasy of power, one that Derrida even associates with 'phallagocentricism'. The interest of his essays on these writers is how the extremity of ambition in them is at odds with itself and opens the notion of the work as a singular perfomative to the fragility of its own conditions. Does not the drive to project one's own reader become an almost monomaniac drive of engulfment, a fantasy of always having the last word? This totalising side of Ulysses may even seem 'vulgar in that it never leaves its luck to the incalculable simplicity of a poem' (UG, p. 293 ). (The 'vulgarity' at issue also recalls a criticism sometimes made of deconstruction, especially when Derrida is at his most defensive - that it can always absorb any attack upon it as something already its own.) Any text that is legible is necessarily, as a condition of its appearance, performing an implicit appeal to others. A text that is never read or is totally opaque is no text at all. This greater requirement enfolds, as it were, all the formalisations and foldings. There must be what Derrida calls a 'countersignature.' This is a reference to the fact that, with cheques and other such documents a signature, to be valid, needs to be witnessed and certified by a countersignature- a Ulysses that no one ever read would be like a signature that was never countersigned. It would

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effectively cease to exist. So the text teaches its reader a reading competence, 'if s/he is willing, to countersign' (SIL, p. 74).

Formalisation Another characteristic that links Derrida to Gadamer, more perhaps than to Heidegger or Blanchot, is a certain drive to account for and conceptualise the force of the literary- of why it is that some texts may be more powerful and enduring than others. It is ultimately and necessarily an unanswerable question, but Derrida still pursues it, even while it must lead to a chastened sense of the fragility and risks of any would-be act of critical decision. All texts may well be (impurely) singular but clearly some must be, so to speak, more interestingly singular than others, valuable for others to read. For the more a text makes itself idiomatic and untranslatable - in order to escape being merely a repetition of commonplaces - then the more it risks becoming merely idiosyncratic and illegible, and so dying anyway. This leads us to the following point: if the 'unintelligible singularity' (Bio, p. 845) needs to generate interesting interpretations (countersignings) even as it eludes them, gaining in reserve even as it also enlightens, then it must be 'a meaning [that] has to link up in a certain way with that which exceeds it' (Bio, p. 846). So what then is the nature of that 'in a certain way'? Might not Derrida be more specific about that relation of singularity and generality in texts that endure and become part of the cultural debate over decades, centuries or millennia? In answering this question a certain notion of the 'economy,' or singular logic, of a text, plays a big part. In 'Border Lines' Derrida writes: If there is something that arrests translation, this limit is not due to some essential indissociability of meaning and language, of signifier and signified, as they say. It is a matter of economy (economy, of course, remains to be thought) and retains an essential relationship with time, space, counting words, signs, marks. 16

Economy here is a mode of 'syntax' as already described, but taken up in relation to the issue of a text's power and durability. The term 'economy' does a great deal of work in Derrida's thinking. Principally at issue here is formalisation - the discovery or postulation of some summary formula or rule of transformation that can be seen to underlie the workings of the text. 'Formalisation' is a term from logic and number theory and it may seem an odd criterion of preference for a thinker commonly associated with 'dissemination' and some 'free play' of the sign.

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Nevertheless, what interests Derrida about the literary, and might be said to distinguish more 'powerful' texts from those with no future, is the force of a partial formalisation at work across the text and the contexts it projects. For instance, Kafka's 'Vor Dem Gesetz ' speaks in a 'powerful, formalizing and economical way of the generality of the law' while yet remaining 'absolutely unique among all the texts which speak of the same thing' (SIL, p. 68). 'What is fascinating is perhaps the event of a singularity powerful enough to formalize the questions and theoretical laws concerning it' (SIL, p. 42). So formalisation concerns what might be called the philosophic, synthetic and meta-discursive element of the literary text, its ability to encompass huge questions about society in a seemingly minute compass. For example, the chateau that features in Derrida's reading of Blanchot's 'The Instant of My Death' is said to become 'a palimpsest for the entire history of Europe' (D, 82). In Joyce: 'In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophic culture- that's what really interests me' (SIL, p. 43 ). Joyce also offers Derrida a simple example of how a familiar kind of 'folding' as formalisation can work: A DISTANT VOICE -I'll answer it, the professor said going.

-Hello? Evening Telegraph here ... Hello? Who's there? ... Yes ... Yes ... Yes ... The professor came to the inner door. - Bloom is at the telephone, he said. Bloom is at the telephone. In this way, the professor defines a particular situation at a certain moment in the novel, no doubt, but as is always the case in the stereophony of a text that gives several levels to each statement and always allows metonymic extracts- and I am not the only reader of Joyce to indulge in this pursuit, at once legitimate and abusive, authorized and improper- the professor is also naming the permanent essence of Bloom. It can be read in this particular paradigm: he is at the telephone, he is always there, he belongs to the telephone, he is at once riveted and destined there. (UG, pp. 272-3)

Derrida's use of the phrase 'Bloom is at the telephone' repeats a common critical gesture. This is to use a brief quotation as a kind of paradigmatic guide-phrase for more general argument, as in readings of Ulysses that lean heavily on its title. The kinds of effects at issue are very familiar, e.g. if one hypothesised a book or an article on Ulysses entitled, say, 'the street' (or 'the house', 'the child', even 'the hat') this simple word could

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soon gather around itself, again in a partly formalising fashion, possible motifs and arguments (e.g. on the distinction of public and private spaces, the chances of encounter, anonymity and communication, and so forth). The mere posing of a word as a title or 'theme' sets up a kind of fold that may be variously weak or productive in its own singular force. What Derrida terms an 'inventive' reading is one which makes an intervention of that kind both as faithfully to the text yet also as surprisingly as possible. (In fact, criticism of Ulysses often reads as unwitting parody of this particular operation: it sometimes seems that neither Leopold Bloom nor Stephen Daedalus can scratch their noses without thereby reenacting the entire history of Ireland.) So the singular power of a text is not a matter of a possible plurality of interpretation per se, nor of some supposed 'indeterminacy' that enables ingenious interpreters to sacralise the text as always in excess of its reader. It is a matter of modes of 'fold' in the sense that a singular term allows a certain qualified generality: it is both itself and an open example, both unique term and transferable quasi-concept, both commentary and irreplaceable quasi-sacralised word. There is a striking difference between the formalising literary term here and a concept as philosophy traditionally understands it. For Hegel, for instance, his crucial concept 'Aufhebung', naming an operation of thought that both abolishes and preserves its object, is held to be lucky in that the German word already allows for just such seemingly opposed senses.l 7 Nevertheless the status of 'Aufhebung' as a concept in speculative logic means that its validity must transcend the accidents of any one language and be applicable universally, in all languages. In the literary case, on the other hand, terms such as 'the street' or 'Bloom-is-at-the-telephone' are not separable from the accidents of the particular language in which they appear, nor from their specific contexts. This is how they are both immediately weaker than the (ideally) universal coinage of concepts, but also potentially far more powerful. For the literary quasi-concepts may gather to themselves surplus meaning from the accidental, the rhythms and associations of specific languages or contexts. All the possible ramifications of the term can also be put to work in incalculable ways. This is the 'economic power' of the literary, that it make something quasi-conceptual of singularity in the sense of the touch of chance and contingency. Happenstance associations and contexts, consonances of mere sound or lettering between seemingly unrelated terms etc., all can be put incalculably to work. In this sense the literary becomes not antiphilosophical, as a commonplace view of Derrida has it, but, as it were, supra-philosophical: 'The "economy" of literature sometimes seems to me more powerful than that of other types of discourse' (SIL, p. 43 ).

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Derrida describes how he spent a whole seminar trying to unpack just a few words from a work by Samuel Beckett, finally giving up. Some works have a greater potential for formalisation, 'works whose performativity, in some sense, appears the greatest possible in the smallest possible space' (SIL, pp. 46-7). In Gadamer it was a frustration of just this sort that led to the affirmatively self-abnegating gestures of his late readings. Derrida's strategy resembles Gadamer's in affirming the limits of its own critical language, but he also devises a mode of recognition or countersignature more attuned to the specificity of its text than Gadamer's gestures of thoughtful inarticulacy. His strategy is to home in on a single word or phrase whose singular economy can be shown to bear a kind of formalising (and fractal) relation to that of the text from which it is taken: 'With Joyce, I was able to pretend to isolate two words (He war or yes, yes); with Celan, one foreign word (Shibboleth); with Blanchot, one word and two homonyms (pas). But I will never claim to have "read" or proposed a general reading of these works' (SIL, pp. 61-2). Derrida's operation seems to move, at once, in what might seem contradictory directions: it both highlights the untranslatable peculiarity of a term or phrase while also formalising its power as a source of meta- or supplementary readings. The effect is to 'singularise' these tiny elements of a work so that they stand in a 'powerful', fractal relation to the singular economy of the text. The singular mark can gather to itself, in its iterability and exemplarity, a whole host of condensed ways of being 'about' numerous issues, history, language, sexual politics, etc. It forms an odd and compelling conjunction of the idiomatic with a general power of formalising or reconfiguring various contexts. For both the texts at issue and also the fractal guide-words or phrases that focus Derrida's response to them, the following partial meta-formalisation applies: The more 'powerful' a text is (but power is not a masculine attribute here and it is often the most disarming feebleness), the more it is written, the more it shakes up its own limits or lets them be thought ... (SIL, p. 59)

At first, this connection between power and weakness seems odd. How can a text be 'powerful' in proportion to a 'disarming feebleness', defined as the shaking up or questioning of its own limits? We see in relation to the topics of economy and formalisation that Derrida repeatedly uses the metaphors of 'force' and 'semantic energy'. We must, however, remind ourselves that Derrida is also often at pains to stress the vulnerability, so to speak, of what after all are only marks and ciphers whose effect is a matter of relation to those who encounter them. The text is exposed, in

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its very legibility, to the unforeseen chances of its futures, its readerships and unpredictable contexts. Derrida writes that 'An immanent structure of promise or desire, an expectation without horizon of expectation, informs all speech' (M, p. 21 ). 18 If the notion of economy relates to the way a literary text could exploit and put to work elements that might seem to be mere contingency, this same economy is also the work's very vulnerability and risk. One cannot make the non-meaningful significant without also exposing any aimed-for hyper-significance to the threat of seeming merely incoherent - witness the response of many first readers of Ulysses for instance. (For me, even Derrida's own example of 'Bloomis-at-the-telephone' irritates slightly with its coy portentousness.) The singularity of the literary poises itself vulnerably between being supraphilosophical in the way described- an 'ordinary' event can be a rereading of the history of Ireland - or being merely sub-philosophical, just so much rhetoric and particularity without further point (who cares about the colour of a hair-brush in Trollope?)Y By way of contrast, we may remember that Heidegger's readings of Holderlin strived to become 'more hearing' for the poems, with an ideal of letting the interpretation itself disappear in the text's singular force. For Gadamer, a poetics of singularity led interpretation to a strange point of thoughtful inarticulacy. Blanchot's quasi-phenomenological practice found itself entwined with the text as a kind of object without abjectness that led his own writing into elusive formulations always blending reversibly into their opposites. Derrida, likewise, in a more schematically conceptualised way, writes interpretations ('countersignings') that also trace· out a Paulhan-like process of miming. The stronger or more powerful Derrida's mimicking gloss bears out the economic power -the supraphilosophic force - of its text, and the more irreplaceable that text thereby becomes, then, by the very same movement, the more the reading also risks heightening the text's opacity and refusal of any more general understanding. This double movement is akin to Paulhan's law on the 'mystery' (or secret) of the poetic which cannot be explicated or conceptualised, but only approached in the way its contours of resistance can be mimed in a formal law of necessarily almost total emptiness, or defined only in terms of itself. 20 This realm of maximised formalisation become oddly interchangeable with near tautology makes up the bizarre world of Derrida's most daunting and least readable text, Signsponge (1984) where this very logic leads to the proliferation of small objects, sponge-towels, washing machines, etc., whose singular names take on the status of quasi-explanatory quasi-concepts of the texts that project them. Derrida's work seems very close here to earlier arguments ofBlanchot's

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on the inherently self-contestatory nature of the literary. It may be useful to pause here and consider - if only cursorily - how Derrida and Blanchot compare. Blanchot's work is mainly a kind of very sensitive phenomenology of something that is inherently the most resistant to such attention. So a great deal of Blanchot on a text is the account of an extremely elusive kind of experience, one in which something appears/disappears, speaks and echoes, murmurs or repeats emptily. The dominant terms of Blanchot's essay tend to remain perceptual and sometimes form a sort of post-metaphysical reader response ('intimacy', 'outside', 'fascination'). Derrida's terms, however, are more immediately those of a philosopher: 'formalisation', 'syntax', etc. His essays attend closely to logical and discursive modes and levels. The primary stress is less perceptual or phenomenological than a scrupulous following out of consequences of inference, and of the peculiar kinds of conceptual or logical topography they create. Blanchot's writings are magnetised by an attention to an experience of reading always newly singularised by its sensitivity and precision, whereas Derrida's tend more towards the status of argument. In sum, we might risk here our own formalisation - a necessarily open or partial one- of what is meant by the 'powerful' singularity of the literary or poetic oeuvre for Derrida.lt is a kind of performative 'act'- but become an 'act' only through the risks of being reread or misread to which it is immediately exposed - that may project, for those who are willing to open its door, modes of competence for its own context and reading. Finally, however, these are especially 'powerful' when they comprise an element for their own surpassing and depropriation, thus simultaneously risking becoming opaque, even as they open the way hospitably for fresh invention, for new readings, 'powerful' themselves, that could not have been foreseen. So Joyce's text, for instance, both sets up and ruins the competences and modes of evaluation that might apply to it. There can be no such thing as a Joycean legitimacy, hence that mixture of assurance and distress in Joyce scholars (UG, p. 283). In this way, the text is 'powerful' to the peculiar degree that 'it shakes up its own limits or lets them be thought' (SIL, p. 59)

The poematic The contradictory and 'impossible' status of a text as both powerful and helpless, both opaque and potentially encyclopaedic at once, finds its more precise formulation in Derrida's notion of the 'poetic' or 'poematic' (Che, p. 233).

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If the oeuvre is only an oeuvre through the 'cut' by which it is not fully intelligible in terms of given context or procedures or as the intentional act of a subject, then the 'poetic' in Derrida specifically names that 'cut' .21 The poetic here is not meant as a genre of verse, but a decisive element in the economy of the oeuvre. It can initially be compared to what Blanchot called that 'poetic turn' which gives a work its force and renewed singularity by making it 'pitch strangely' (IC, p. 32). Derrida writes that his 'point would be thus to remove what I am calling the poem (or the poiemata) from the merry-go-round or circus that brings them back in a circular fashion to poiein, to their poetic source, to the act or experience of their setting-to-work in poetry or poetics' (P, p. 304). Derrida further distinguishes the poetic in this sense from given categories of poetics (categories grounding the poetic in some underlying principle, cause or explanation) in proposing a neologism, the 'poematic'. A concern with chance and irreducible insignificance distinguishes Derrida's work here. Poetry, texts like those by Mallarme or Ponge for example, make an investment in what is not conventionally meaningful - in the contingency of the letter, the 'proper name', etc. - as marking or saying something in non-substitutable ways. Such writing works at the limits of the sayable, not in the sense of the sublime (the representation of the infinite etc.) but as saying something unsubstitutably singular, by the fragile means of a particular cast of letters, the materiality of a specific rhythm or accent, a shibboleth. It produces the possibility, simultaneously, of both a surplus of meaning or of mere obscurity and nonsense. The vulnerable irreplacability of the poem is 'wounding', in that it may inspire in the reader the desire to keep it, to learn it by heart, to nourish it and listen to it (the poetic dictates 'learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me' (Che, p. 223) ), to keep it safe either by transmitting it to others or by keeping it to oneself (or maybe by setting it to music, or letting it never be heard, seemingly safeguarded to silence): Thus the dream of learning by heart arises in you. Of letting your heart be traversed by the dictated dictation. In a single trait - and that's the impossible, that's the poematic experience. (Che p. 231)

The poematic is open to the possibility of absolute loss of its meaning, whether of content or of form, of becoming mere ashes. Hence Derrida's glancing use in 'Shibboleth' of Holderlin's phrase 'Wechsel der Tone' ('alternation of tones): 'This is the gift of the poem, and of the date, their condition made up of distress and hope, the shift of tones, the "Wechsel der Tone" .'22 When Derrida comes to write on the question 'what is poetry', he does so through the idiomatic phrase 'apprendre par coeur' (to learn by heart):

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Literally: you would like to retain by heart an absolutely unique form, an event whose intangible singularity no longer separates the ideality, the ideal meaning as one says, from the body of the letter. In the desire of this absolute inseparation, the absolute nonabsolute, you breath the origin of the poetic. Whence the infinite resistance to the transfer of the letter which the animal, in its name, nevertheless calls out for. (Che, pp. 229-31)

Derrida draws upon a specific image: that of a hedgehog, a small mammal that, sensing danger, rolls itself up into a ball of prickles, often doing this while crossing a road. The reader may wish 'to guard from oblivion this thing which in the same stroke exposes itself to death and protects itself' (Che, p. 229). The demand that constitutes the poematic is an impossible one; it is the reiteration of the order 'never repeat' (Che, p. 233). To value a poem one loves is also to fear for it, to mistrust those that reshape it to narrow ends, or drown out its singing in their arguments about what it 'actually' is. So one effect of the wound in the reader may be a kind of wounded narcissism, the illusion that only very few truly 'understand' or can guard this legacy faithfully. The impassioned reader will want to stop the poem from becoming part of the banal roar of daily traffic, or appropriated by the system builders: 'set fire to the library of poetics' (Che, p. 233). This is also how the singularity of the poetic cannot but risk becoming part of a reactionary politics. It may, for instance, underlie one reader's distaste for changes in the language: with each little alteration in grammar or pronunciation, the poem may seem to die a little, or die more quickly. The desire to keep it safe may become as destructive of the poem as the most cavalier dismissal of it. Hence texts become safeguarded and 'treasured' within so-called national literatures, added to a repository of values held, inevitably, to be 'endangered'. Reactive and hopeless cries are heard against cultural change, as in the person who responds to a poem by Benjamin Zephaniah by asking 'is this the language Shakespeare spoke?' The decaying smell of old literature may incite some to fresh defences of it, or it may merely renew in others the urge to bulldoze it out of the way in the supposed interests of unimpeded communication. In short, the passion of the poetic is an impossible passion. This is the 'poematic experience' (Che, p. 231). It happens upon consciousness as its powerlessness or its ecstasis: an experience of impossibility, of the poetic as a singular trait that both compels and frustrates the desire, apprendre par coeur, its keeping as losing. Eventually, it can only be a matter of time; the cutting force will run out of chances. It will effect no renewal in the singularity of the text, and this will appear a mere mark, a meaningless happenstance: 'it is neither

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a work, nor poetry, nor truth, only a letter and a few syllables destined to die by accident' (P, p. 304 ).

Testimony

Why Kierkegaard then? The 'secret'- in the sense of what shows itself as something that also holds itself back - secretes itself but not as some disguised clue or buried key waiting for its ingenious reader. It is 'heterogeneous to the hidden' and exceeds the play of veiling/unveiling. We have so far traced this with a focus mainly on the untranslatability of the oeuvre. 'A Taste for the Secret', however, concerns that absolute secrecy of each person to the other, the irreducible singularity of what happens to me- 'the sharing of what is not shared', that point at which 'we know in common that we have nothing in common' (ATS, p. 58). A later text reads: In my address to another, I must always ask for faith or confidence, beg to be believed at my word, there where equivocation is ineffaceable and perjury always possible, precisely unverifiable. This necessity is nothing other than the solitude, the singularity, the inaccessibility of the 'as for me,' the impossibility of having an originary and internal intuition of the proper experience of the other ego, of the alter ego. (WA, p. 111) This necessity may provoke such questions as: what is the person or text trying to do in saying what they claim to know? What is the hidden nature of that person's motives or are they simply what they seem to be? Is the only secret at issue that there is no secret? How can I truly know the person I love? ('I don't see the other, I don't see what he or she has in mind, or whether he or she wants to deceive me. I have to trust the other, that is faith. Faith is blind'). 23 The literary text, for which the only warrant for what it says is what it says, seems a deceptively accessible version of the secret that we live all the time: this is why it impassions us. The general image of Derrida is of a thinker who stresses the inaccessibility of some final meaning in the act of interpretation. He writes 'Something of literature will have begun when it is not possible to decide whether, when I speak of something, I am indeed speaking of something (of the thing itself, this one, for itself) or if I am giving an example, an example of something or an example of the fact that I can speak of something' (Passions, pp. 142-3 ). So it may seem all the more surprising that so much of Derrida's recent work should relate the literary to the idea of testimony- to that form of discourse that is most tied to the speech of a specific witness at a specific time and place, the seeming opposite, in fact,

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of 'the literary' as just described. In both the court room and in historical scholarship the value of a testimony is that it testifies to something necessarily unique to that witness - even if what a witness says merely corroborates what is already known, it still remains, as testimony, unique to that witness and irreplaceable. At first it seems that the relation of testimony and the literary must be that the literary would haunt all testimony as a kind of parasite, as the never totally excludable possibility that the testimony is, or contains, fiction. Yet this very possibility is also constitutive for testimony- for the more irreplaceable the text the less otherwise 'provable' it must also be: I can testify, in the strict sense of the word, from the instant when no one can, in my place, testify to what I do. What I testify to is, at that very instant, my secret; it remains reserved for me. I must be able to keep secret precisely what I testify to; it is the condition of the testimony in a strict sense, and this is why one will never be able to demonstrate, in the sense of a theoretical proof or a determinate judgement, that a perjury or lie has in fact taken place [i.e. I could be simply mistaken or deceived rather than committing false testimony - the issue is that there is nothing in the language of the testifying itself that could settle this]. Even an admission will not be enough. (D, p. 30)

Meditation upon the ways in which the distinction between the literary and testimony is undecidably reversible becomes Derrida's most distinctive reconfiguration of a poetics of singularity. It puts him explicitly at odds with the culturalism of most contemporary writing on literature.The aporia between the literary and testimony links issues of the singularity of each person to concepts of the social bond, of the juridical, and of the status of language in relation to both credence and inventiveness. The issue of testimony also has a religious aspect (an apostle is a messenger of something personally witnessed). To elucidate the seeming contradiction between an act of testimony and refusal of the literary to be determined by a specific sender or addressee, it may be useful to make a comparison between Derrida and Kierkegaard here. Kierkegaard, as a Christian theologian, writes about the language of unverifiable testimony that distinguishes an apostle. He argues that what distinguishes such language is not its style, its poetry, its wit or even its profundity, but its possible authority. Furthermore, it is inherent to the peculiar authority of the apostle that no one can prove the truth of what is said. 24 • This is even just the way it must be, since otherwise the believer would enter into a 'direct' relation to the apostle's claim, not into a 'paradoxical' one in Kierkegaard's sense. He writes that to celebrate St Paul as a great stylist or thinker or rhetorician is even to approach blasphemy, just as, Kierkegaard argues, a son who obeys his father because the father is witty or talented is still essentially disobedi-

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ent as a son. It is necessary that the authority of the apostle and of what is said be incapable of proof, precisely because it is a necessary element of the message that it appeal to faith, or (to perform a reshaping that looks to Derrida) that its claims be incompatible with the norms of the knowable. For Kierkegaard this argument leads to a strong differentiation between the 'apostle' and what he calls the 'poet', for the stylistic and other formal qualities of the apostle's language are irrelevant. For Derrida it is quite different. The passion of what may be called the literary testimony, one can say, is that it has to create whatever authority it may have, and do so solely on the basis of what it says and through the inventiveness, linguistic and otherwise, of what it is saying. Love poetry would seem a clearest instance of singular testimony in just this sense, committed as it is to standing witness to a singular truth which must somehow be projected and underwritten merely in the language that conveys it. If the testimonial act bears witness to the singular, it must needs 'invent its language and form itself in an incommensurable performative' (D, p. 83). Above all, but paradoxically, if the poem is to approach the status of such an action, its 'I love you' must work, as it were, by itself - the poem must not need to be read back as the specific declaration of person x to person y at a certain date, even if that's what it was or pretends to be. As with the Gadamer of Who Am I and Who Are You?, the text's 'I' and 'you' must become spectral, that is, each is both singular (singularised as the 'I' or 'you' of this poem) and yet also openly exemplary, readable by innumerable others. This is why the contradiction between the singularity of testimony and the elusiveness (or 'destinerrance') of the literary is necessary to the existence of the text it may seem to debar. So that lack of a sure ground of tradition that Gadamer saw as giving a kind of 'authority' to written texts becomes something more perplexing in Derrida's work, both ethically and politically. Take, for instance, the text's inherent call for 'recognition' described earlier. The wish to be recognised in this sense is necessarily a wish for an acknowledgement or act on the part of an other or of unknown others over whom I have no control. If what I say is valid beyond me - which is what I want recognised - then any recognition that I could compel or programme would be no recognition at all. '[W]hat I have said is something that I cannot reappropriate' (ATS, p. 23 ). Thus the very drive to make the text effective (or apostolic) beyond myself also renders it spectral, its 'own' only witness so to speak. At the same time, even in witnessing in public, or in court, the testifying keeps an element of the unsubstitutable secret- of a singular event to which there is no other access. There must be even a 'miraculous' element in any testimony:

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Any testimony testifies in essence to the miraculous and extraordinary from the moment that it must, by definition, appeal to an act of faith beyond any proof. When one testifies, even on the subject of the most ordinary and most 'normal' event, one asks the other to believe one at one's word as if it were a matter of a miracle. (D, p. 75)

Such a status would also apply to overtly occasional and political poems such as Alexander Pope's 'The Dunciad' or Andrew Marvells's 'Horation Ode Upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland'. The singular element of 'this is what is seen, and known' is universal in its very occasionality. It is incommensurable, as testimony, with the theoretically provable. We are to read the text as a spectral witness, calling, beyond possibility of proof, for credence and recognition. For the reader then comes the impossible need to meet the claim of an authority based only on itself, not as a product of historical or social determination. This may be to grant it its singularity and free up its refusal of belonging to any predetermined category or cultural placement. It is an appeal to the reader to render justice to the singularity of its witnessing, which may mean suspending and perhaps reinventing given criteria of judgement. The irreplaceability or the unsubstitutablity of the singular witness is also its pathos, its endurance of the fact that, even when corroborated in many ways, it remains inherently unprovable. A recent essay poses these issues in a reading of one of Celan's best-known poems: Aschenglorie [... ] Niemand zeugt fur den Zeugen Ash-glory[ . .. ] Noone bears witness for the witness (ASPT, p. 181)

The singularity of the poem says something exactly, irreplaceably. It follows that we are also incapable of saying exactly what the 'meaning' might be that could be substituted for it, even when we both know and can say a great deal about it, after extensive research for example. One issue here, perhaps, is the terrible one of Holocaust denial; but that does not exhaust the secret, or finally decode it. To respect the secret means

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trying to know it on its own terms, which means also laying aside the claim to 'know' as conventionally understood, except by quoting it: 'What we are calling the force of the poem, and first of all in its language, is what makes us have to quote it, again and again, by an irresistible compulsion' (ASPT, p. 198). We quote by heart because we cannot bear witness for the witness but must let the poem's own words come forward. The compulsion of the 'by heart' arises partly from not being able to say quite what it means, and thus being unjustified in trying to speak for it, in its place. Celan's clause -no one witnesses for the witness- may also read as a prohibition. There is, for instance, the untranslatability of specific German words. For example, at the very opening of the poem, Celan's compound word 'Aschenglorie' becomes two words in the English translation and three words in the French, with significant effects in each case, especially when we remember that this poetic word is a coinage (an 'invented composition, the inauguration of a new body' (ASPT, p. 183)) and that it is the first word of its text. Secondly, and absolutely untranslatable, is the fact that this text is in German and 'related to events of which the German language will have been a privileged witness, namely the Shoah .. .' (ASPT, p. 182). Confronted by the text's irreplaceability we should not try to restate or bear witness to or substitute for it with our own expertise: Is not this limit that of a crypt, and thus of a certain secret? In bearing witness for witnessing and for the witness, the poem says that there is no witness for the witness. It is presumably an indication, a descriptive statement, but also, implicitly perhaps, a prohibiting prescription: no one does in fact bear witness for the witness, no one can, it is true, but first of all because no one should. No one can, because it must not be done. (ASPT, p. 198)

To give a more complex example, in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (1998) Derrida takes up these issues in a reading of a late narrative by Maurice Blanchot (which may or may not be autobiographical) concerning the suddenly suspended execution by firing squad of a young man in occupied France. Blanchot's The Instant of my Death (1994), 25 is singularised as an open secret whose 'economic' power is also to engage huge questions about the history of Europe and its violent legacies. I will focus here, however, only on one small element of the text. A chateau is suddenly visited by a group of soldiers in German army uniforms. Everyone is ordered outside. The troops form a row opposite their victim and his family are ushered away. Then the firing squad is interrupted, at the last minute, by a rescue attempt from the Resistance - one of the most disturbing aspects of Blanchot's text is the bizarre repetition of the crassest

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narrative commonplace. The Nazi soldiers who then urge 'Blanchot' to escape turn out to be Russian collaborators, not Germans. Despite (or because of?) the legacy of the Russian revolution of 1917, they spare their relatively genteel captive, will leave the chateau undamaged but will go on to murder some farmers' sons nearby, 'truly strangers to all combat, whose only fault was their youth'. This legacy of injustice haunts the survivor as part of the trauma of the suspended death sentence: When the lieutenant returned and became aware the young chatelain had disappeared, why did anger, rage, not prompt him to burn down the Chateau (immobile and majestic)? Because it was the Chateau. On the facade was inscribed, like an indestructible reminder, the date 1807. Was he cultivated enough to know that this was the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on his small gray horse, passed under the windows of Hegel, who recognized in him the 'spirit of the world,' as he wrote to a friend? Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote to another friend, the French pillaged and ransacked his home. But Hegel knew how to distinguish the empirical and the essential. In that year 1944, the Nazi lieutenant had for the Chateau a respect or consideration that the farms did not arouse. (D, p. 7)

The sudden memory of French soldiers plundering a thinker's home in Germany projects a dream-like serial image of Europe's history. Derrida considers the oddity of the young man's torment, the sense that, rather than the farmers' sons, he 'ought' to have been shot but was spared because of his social rank. The inverted commas around 'ought' gesture to the incalculable nature of the sense of wrongs here, of 'Blanchot's being in some sense responsible for an act he did not commit, burdened with a moral debt that cannot be paid. This unresolved haunting contrasts strongly with, say, the Hegel of this extract, thinking to take on himself a stance of exceptionalism that dismisses plunder and personal loss as accidents in the essential direction of history. The guilt further intertwines itself with the subtextual issue of French collaboration with the Nazis -the lieutenant speaks 'shamefully normal French' and the whole narrative cannot be divorced from continuing controversies, flaring up even in the 1990s, about Blanchot's own right-wing (though anti-Hitler) journalism of the 1930s. So in The Instant of My Death the element of overt testimony is especially strong. We have a narrative which may or may not be autobiographical and in which the young man may or may not be Blanchot. The fact that Derrida refers to a personal letter from Blanchot that refers to some such an event as real modulates but does not fundamentally alter the literary/testimonial nature of the recit and the claim beyond knowability that it makes on the reader.

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In accordance with that economic power of the literary to take up some seemingly accidental feature (the street, the telephone) and give it supra-philosophical status, Derrida traces in detail how the 'Chateau' (always capitalised), as both ransacked home, place of meeting and of conflict and collaboration between nations, a centre of social privilege and the site of stolen and irrecoverable manuscripts, 'becomes a palimpsest for the entire history of Europe' (D, p. 82): This residence [demeure} harbors the essential archive of modernity. In the genial and genealogical economy of [this] elliptical narrative that occupies no more space than a missive, in the absolute brevity of an event that did not arrive [the suspended execution], so to speak, in what arrived without arriving, the entire memory of European modernity comes to be metonymized. (D, pp. 82-3) By 'metonymized', here, Derrida seems to mean the kind of fractal singularization already described. The singular topos of the Chateau projects possible contexts for reading the conditions of the young man's survival, including the injustice done to the youths who were murdered, as it were, in his place. Blanchot's guilt takes on elements of a passion, i.e. he must expiate crimes he did not commit (but without the innocence of the homeless Jesus), so that 'this narrative of self-justification is also, inversely, the confession of the unavowable' (p. 85). At the same time, Derrida writes, the reader may need to be clear about the unavoidable element of calculation that makes up this short narrative's place in the debate in contemporary France about collaboration and Vichy (here is Maurice Blanchot, still sometimes attacked for his rightist journalism of the 1930s, portraying 'himself' in a last minute rescue by 'Comrades from the maquis' (D, p. 5)). Overall, the text communicates an incalculable mixed guilt and innocence that, Derrida argues, is problematically generalisable. To illustrate this further, Derrida takes up some basic points about the nature of narrative to relate them to the inherently undecidable interimplication of testimony and the possibility of perjury/fiction. A possibility of slippage between 'I' and 'you' and 'he/she' is at the basis of narration and of language more generally: through a shared language 'you' can, in part, understand something as if 'you' were 'I' ('my' or 'his' facing a firing squad, for instance). Elsewhere Derrida considers Franz Kafka's 'Letter to My Father' ('Brief an den Vater'). Here the writer, as a son, addresses himself to his father for forgiveness for his refusal to marry and his exclusive dedication to writing. What interests Derrida particularly is the way the letter also invents the father as responding, debating with and accusing the son. So that 'Indisputably, this letter from father to son was also

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a letter from son to father and from son to son, a letter to himself where what was at stake was a pardoning of the other that would be a pardoning of oneself.' Such a letter foregrounds that appeal or testimony which is at the very basis of language as the element of the social bond and of a shareable world (its necessary but impossible fiction of 'I' as 'you' and vice versa). The text, Derrida writes, does not, however, become 'literature' 'in the literarity of its letter' except from the moment of being published, so institutionalising, as it were, the potential slippage of 'I' and 'you' in the text into a possible and unstable 'we' that may embrace future readers. 26 Derrida is difficult to read here, but what he is getting at can perhaps become clearer if one compares it to the hemermeneutic argument that a text proposes, to its reader, a shared world which he or she may inhabit and cannot 'understand' except by inhabiting (Ricouer)F One should inflect this argument to say that the literary fascinates and impassions because it proposes to us a world, a realm of possible referents, that are 'as if' shared - as if 'I' were 'you' or as if you could be in the place of the young chatelain facing a firing squad. What is commonly called the 'imaginary' is here that impossible but necessary fiction whereby any understanding is both made possible yet also compromised and debarred, for its element is the absolute singularity of each person (that where we know in common that we have nothing in common). What is 'fictive' here is not ultimately the opposite of the working of 'real' language, but an extension or extenuation of its underlying working, for the necessary but impossible fiction of 'you' as 'I' underlies all discourse. It inheres, obviously, in all common codes and norms of understanding - the law, for instance, in whose eyes everyone is equal. It also underlies the necessarily occasional and singular acts of courtesy, giving and pardoning whose Kierkegaardian logic Derrida takes up. So the literary could be said to inhabit and, potentially, to reinfleet this realm of shared singularity. To a minimal degree, each singular work must institute, or appeal to institute, a common 'we' of some sort- that is its very readability. In criticism itself one example would be the forces of identification discussed in the first chapter under the heading of 'institutional Americanism'. 28 With this perhaps, as with some literary works, readers may find themseves implicated in a 'we' they must refuse. Parts of, say, Ernest Hemingway or D. H. Lawrence may now seem 'unreadable' - but 'unreadable' here only names a reader's sense of rejection at having been already been drawn in, even taken in, by the mere fact of having read. The sense of contamination in such an experience can be strong, and may seem irrational, but it demonstrates the sense in which reading is always a kind of implication, even collaboration, so that repudiation must come

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with the vehemence of being, ever so slightly, too late. 29 Of the undecidable attestation at work in Blanchot's narrative, Derrida writes: But this attestation both secret and public, fictional and real, literary and nonliterary - we only judge it to be readable, if it is, insofar as the reader can understand it, even if no such thing has ever 'really' happened to him, to the reader. We can speak, we can read this because this experience, in the singularity of its secret, as 'experience of the unexperienced,' beyond the distinction between the real and the phantasmatic, remains [demeure] universal and exemplary. (D, p. 93)

Blanchot's text itself enacts this necessary but impossible 'we' in the conventional form of the third person past tense narrative (interpersed with the language of personal testimony ('I remember ... ')).It is the psuedoobjectivity of such sentences as 'The Nazi placed his men in a row in order to hit, according to the rules, the human target' (D, p. 5). Such language occupies, in relation to the young chatelain, the impossible space of being a 'witness for the witness'. This 'witnessing' (like a supposedly objective camera angle) works in what traditional narrative poetics calls the 'focalisation', that is the focusing upon a central consciousness from whose singular vantage point the narration orients itself. Throughout almost the whole recit, the focalisation is on 'Blanchot', as one would expect. Briefly, it switches to allow 'us' to follow the Nazi lieutenant as he searches the top of the CM.teau. Derrida writes of this scene: The witness-author, the witness of the witness-narrator who knows everything, who has an absolute knowledge of what he speaks of, he knows in particular that there was in the residence [demeure] a room called the 'high chamber'. It was probably his own room, he resided [demeurait] there, he wrote there, since:' ... the lieutenant found papers and a sort of thick manuscript- what perhaps contained war plans.' (D, pp. 84-5)

However, the 'young man or the witness of the young man' knows that this manuscript has nothing to do with war plans. With the suspicion that they are war plans, narrative focalisation, however, the 'witness of the witness,' passes 'surreptiously into the head of the lieutenant'. Then '"Finally he left. Everything was burning, except the Chateau. The Seigneurs had been spared"' (D, p. 85). So the reader of this scene has had to occupy, one might say, the doubly impossible place of the witness for the witness for the witness. There is no possible exceptionalism of the secure overview, no secure 'we' whose recognised codes could pose and judge the issues in one's place. The text calls for a kind of 'faith', a 'believe me', on the part of the reader. This is something spectral that cannot be objectified, conceptualised. Its force,

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its uneliminability, does not belong to the cognitive dimension on which it yet makes such demands. Literature or the poetic interweaves the 'private' and 'public' in destabilising and challenging ways. So the literary here plays across the nature of the social bond: it occupies the site of its articulation, where a link is both made and breakable, together with its open horizon of readability that means it belongs necessarily to no one community, place or time. This need not be only the kind of 'big gesture' to be found in Joyce, or Blake or Blanchot's last narrative. Even the slightest lyric testifies to this necessary but impossible co-belonging or singularity and communality, to the natality at work in everyday acts of friendship, love, dedication, mourning, pardon, self-devotion. In following the claims of the text to be the only saying of what it says (so making 'what it says' both peculiarly demanding and elusively up in the air) Derrida's remains a residually hermeneutic argument: that true or responsible understanding can only be a kind of participation (this is also at issue in '"Le Parjure," Perhaps' (WA, pp. 161-201) and 'La litterature au secret: Une filiation impossible' ). The text cannot be known as a table or chair can be known- from the outside and from all sides. To read something is, however problematically, to become it. Moreover, the reader's participation is that of contradictory, uncomfortable but compelling claims. We have here 'an example of this limit that trembles between understanding/not understanding' (D, p. 93). Blanchot's text, for instance, is an unobjectifiable, spectral scene of inherited guilt/innocence, all the more powerful for not being apprehensible except by being participated. Such is also the space of the reader, having to occupy the (impossible) position of witnessing for the text's own witness or witnesses. In so far as this space pushes against the limits of given criteria of judgement, it is a space for freedom in the Kierkegaardian sense. 'A decision that didn't go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision' (emphasis added). 30 Literature clearly involves both greater risks and with greater stakes than the way we tend to take 'everyday language': it may be more frivolous and yet also more serious. The possibility of perjury- always there and ineradicable in official testimony- is heightened in a writer's responsible irresponsibility to say, to make up, anything in any way. The risk of nonsense or bombast or other kinds of falling flat is also inseparable from the chance given, in such a freedom, to modes of inventiveness that may also, sometimes, unpredictably, 'make truth' in a way not possible before - just as, say, Tolstoy or Shakespeare's fictions remain more than fictional, although their testimony is not of a kind compatible with proof, nor could translation into the truths of history, philosophy or psychology represent them without injustice.

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Derrida and natality? 'There is no witness for the witness' - except that the reader has, necessarily, to occupy such an impossible position. Here Derrida's work opens again upon both the most exciting and also intractable element in the poetics of singularity, that existential risk, however muted, in which the discontinuous jump inherent in its very idea opens onto Kierkegaard's 'madness' of decision - or upon the possibility of 'beginning' in Arendt's sense. Derrida makes no reference to Arendt's thinking in direct relation to questions of literature. 31 Yet in defining 'poetic' witnessing as 'a singular act, concerning a singular event and engaging a unique, and thus inventive, relationship to language' (ASPT, p. 199), Derrida is determining the poetic, or literary, not in some formal or even generic sense, but as an intense case of what may be called the natality of the everyday. Referral to Arendt here is my own gesture, not Derrida's, but I believe this offers a way of thinking what Derrida terms 'an impossible that would not be negative'. 32 It clarifies the stakes of the literary/poetic text as an intense kind of that witnessing that is the basis both of shared norms, laws, affiliations and identities, and of the possibility of breaking from their inevitable injustices. Derrida's major step in the poetics of singularity, then, is to identify the unpredictable and incalculable inventiveness of the literary work (its 'impossibility' in Blanchot's sense) with the Kierkegaardian paradoxy at the basis of human freedom and responsibility. Derrida quotes a summative point in Kierkegaard on the secrecy and apartness of Abraham: "'if there is such a hiddenness, then we face the paradox, which does not allow itself to be mediated, since it based precisely on this: the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal"' (GD, p. 62). Derrida, compared to Blanchot, is a figure of committed reform not a revolutionary. His reaction, for example, to the events of May 1968 contrasts strongly with Blanchot's euphoria at that time. As it happens, Derrida's sense of apprehension, of the uprising provoking an authoritarian backlash, proved to be fully justified: I was guarded, even anxious in the face of a certain spontaneist, fusionist, antiunionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally 'liberated' speech, of restored 'transparency,' and so on. I never believe in those things. 33

Blanchot's political engagements took the form of a series of always occasional alliances. Derrida's more gradualist strategy is to help found and support various counter-institutions, such as GREPH (formed to defend the teaching of philosophy in French schools), the International College

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of Philosophy (a kind of genuinely open university where members of the public can simply walk in) and, more recently, the International Parliament of Writers, already described (now renamed as the 'International Network of Cities of Asylum'). Above all, literature itself is 'not one institution among others' (SIL, p. 72), but both an insitution and a counter-institution. It is 'founded' in self-contestation, the tension between necessarily general norms of understanding and behaviour and the simultaneous claim of the singular work, impossibly and ineluctably, to be taken as an example of nothing but itself. The element of the counter-institution opens, as in Heidegger and Blanchot, the provocative analogy between the act of the literary text and the founding of a state: While literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with 'jurisdiction,' with the juridico-political production of institutional foundations, the constitutions of States, fundamental legislation, and even the theologicaljuridical performatives which occur at the origin of law, at a certain point it can also exceed them, interrogate them, 'fictionalise' them: with nothing, or almost nothing, in view, of course, and by producing events whose 'reality' or duration is never assured, but which by that very fact are more thoughtprovoking, if that still means something. (SIL, p. 72)

A literary work thus heralds the uniqueness of a language to come. Its singularity is the claim 'there must be a language' (which necessarily implies 'for it does not exist' or 'since it is lacking'), and 'I promise language', 'a language is promised' (M, p. 67). In a long interview responding to the 11 September atrocities, Derrida outlines his commitment to the contradictory imperatives and yet promise of the 'democracy to come': The demos is at once the incalculable singularity of anyone, before any 'subject,' the possible undoing of the social bond by a secret to be respected, beyond all citizenship, beyond every 'state,' indeed every 'people,' indeed even beyond the current state of the definition of a living being as living 'human' being, and the universality of rational calculation, of the equality of citizens before the law, the social bond of being together, with or without contract, and so on. 34

This simultaneous but contradictory demand remains ineffaceable. Derrida relates this contradiction - both necessary and unavoidable - to the idea of a democracy beyond those defined by its members having any given 'we' in common, let alone the boundaries of national citizenship. So, the fact that there is no passage of deduction from the singularity of each case to general principles of judgement or of action (no

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passage from ethics to politics) is not a rejection of the democratic or of 'the classic emancipatory ideal' 35 but their continual overhaul and improvement under the demand of singularity and the chance, always open, for something new and unprecedented. The appeal of the work is that of a democracy to come, not in the sense of some future utopia but as actualised in the need to respond inventively to the singularity of a testimony. So far this chapter has focused on texts where the issues are obviously and massively crucial (war, murder, the Holocaust), but the literary excludes nothing and has often, in fact, worked through singularising the seemingly trivial. No element of language is intrinsically literary, but poetic singularity intensifies, as it were, an element of anyone's language. It may emerge, for instance, in the effects of treating something that was written as a historical record as 'literary' in the sense of singular language (as opposed to the now far more common gesture of treating a novel or a poem as a historical document). The gently monumentalising act of quoting a small extract can be already singularising. The kind of claim the language makes upon us shifts, even in say (a deliberately risky example must also be the most apt) the following relatively prosaic and almost accidental passage from an eighteenth-century (public) letter on natural history, of 2 September 1774, from Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selbourne (1788-9): In the garden of the Black-bear inn in the town of Reading is a stream or canal running under the stables and out into the fields on the other side of the road; in this water are many carps, which lie rolling about in sight, being fed by travellers, who amuse themselves by tossing them bread ... 36

Quoted, set apart in a strange context, even a fairly ordinary passage can start to compel. In White's letter, this slight but undeniable element of both irreplaceable witness and inaccessible secret may become a little haunting, even in its ordinariness (reminding us that the 'secret' is not the art/genius etc. that distinguishes a work from the product of artisanal technique (Passions, p. 24)). Its very triviality, detaching it from the force of some larger narrative frame, moves it towards the impossible status of being an example, if of anything, of only itself, lending it a quasisymbolic quality that is simultaneously offered and withdrawn. At the same time, such resistance may gain for itself an economic power: after all the passage, once highlighted, could be made to fit all sorts of traditional topoi, the human being as traveller, the road before and after, the image of running water, the simultaneous anonymity and uniqueness of the stranger (long departed, even as if dead from the moment they left

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the spot, the place untraceable or at least unrecognisable). Above all, perhaps, in this passage from White the staging of the watching but unseen witness, whose space the reader must seem to hold, however fleetingly. There is a pathos of triviality but also an element of 'the fantastic, the phantasmatic, the spectral, vision, apparition, the touch of the untouchable' (as Derrida writes of what is miraculous in testimony (D, p. 75)). The same problematic status of singular testimony arises here- that is, the possibility of fiction. The passage would have whatever effect it has and be readable irrespective of whether it was factual or imaginary. The fact is, of course, that it is impossible to tell: this always-present possibility of fiction and even perjury is inevitable and necessary. The disappearance of the moment testified to (or perhaps imagined) is inherent to testimony, with its always memorial aspect. Its singular uniqueness is also the possibility of fabrication. So while the convention that this is a historical account is part of White's letter, to be accepted by his readers in good faith, the same convention can be and often is deployed in fiction. The fictional historian of the realist novelist (writing of the history of Middlemarch or of Madame Bovary) may have a voice that is indistinguishable. This, however, is not to correlate such fictions with mere lying or false witness. Middlemarch and Madame Bovary use all the conventions and resources of historical truth-telling to give space for the possibility of a meta- or supplementary witnessing. Literature's right to say anything in any way risks irrelevance even as, simultaneously and with an enormous power, it may allow the condition of a whole society to be examined in the banal affairs of one small group. In fact Gilbert White's letters were unknowingly inventive. His letters were written as contributions to natural history. Nowadays, when his observations as a naturalist are superseded, his letters are held to be vital to the emergence of the peculiar, 'minor' and very popular genre of 'nature writing'. Such a shift exemplifies the way the literary is not determinable by its formal qualities, but as a singularising claim and cognitive unsettledness in language that may sometimes acquire, unpredictably, the force of an oeuvre, become contextualising as much as contextualised. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, Richard Jeffries writes within the space that White had unwittingly helped to open, no longer as a naturalist but as someone trying to render witness in prose to the flight of a swallow. Striving towards a seemingly insignificant or even an ideally meaningless testimony, such minor writing is still uniquely odd. Is it about more, or about less, than what it is about?

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A swallow never hesitates, never looks before he leaps, threads all day the eyes of needles, and goes on from half-past two in the morning till ten at night, without so much as disturbing a feather. He is the perfection of a machine for falling. His round nest is under the eaves, he throws himself out of the window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall, fall, for twenty hours together. 37

Epilogue

Under the title of The Poetics of Singularity this book has tried to highlight a distinctive school of critical thought in Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot and Derrida. Such thinking is commonly associated with Derrida alone but has a much broader and diverse provenance. Its striking critical distance from currently dominant conceptions of literary and cultural criticism renders its consideration especially timely.While 'singularity' seems at first a straightforward and even familiar idea - i.e. of that which cannot be said in any way but its own - its ramifications extend to and link such issues as a uniquely meticulous practice of close reading, the undefinability of the human and the nature of freedom. The four thinkers covered here are also linked by their having lived through major traumas of European history in the twentieth century, above all those of the Second World War. It is easy to hypothesise a book that would be in some ways the antithesis of this one, a study that would offer to 'demystify' the work of Heidegger, Derrida and the others by tracing the 'poetics of singularity' here described as a product of such traumatic mid-century conditions. This hypothetical book would trace to such conditions issues such as: unease about the violence that may be inherent in the deepest bases of Western civilization; the concern with the fragiility of the state as a cause for both hope and fear; the helpless appeal of the singular individual against forms of totalitarianism; the distinction of notions of justice and understanding that acknowledge the singular case as opposed to the homogeneities of procedure; a deep sense of finitude and a fascination with the limits of intelligibility; and the challenge posed by the Holocaust to the very idea of making any moral sense of human events. This would be an interesting and, in its limited terms, even a valid exercise. Yet it would remain at odds with the most challenging and exciting thrust of this work. Who, after all, could honestly claim to be able to understand such vast issues as those just listed by being somehow able to

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'situate' them as products of a historical context of which one has an assured overview? Yet such an extraordinary and ultimately incoherent claim is implicit in the culturalist paradigm now dominant in literary study. According to this the critic's task is to highlight in a text competing ways of representing or constructing reality, each reflecting or producing various kinds of cutural identity locatable in terms of ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, class or gender - the assumption is that once one has cashed in a text in terms of its cultural politics (so understood) nothing worthwhile is left to say. The distinctive feature of this thinking is that it is deterministic. Everything in or of a text is held to be determined by its conditions of making. This basic position is not fundamentally altered even when such 'making' is allowed to embrace the difffering 'constructions' of a text that may arise in subsequent readings (as in 'eighteenth-century constructions' of Hamlet) for such 'constructions' are themselves usually understood as cultural-political productions in the same deterministic way. Another issue here is the limited nco-Darwinian assumptions of such culturalism, its bleak panorama of human life as the working out in diverse human groups of a universal and essentially aggressive drive towards self-representation and self-construction, one in which each group is always in its every word and activitity at work against the others, either subtly or overtly 'appropriating' or 'subverting' them. The topic of singularity, however, feeds into the distinctively 'postexistentialist' thinking of the four thinkers. It offers an alternative model of thinking about literary and cultural work which is ethically superior to such bleak culturalism. It embraces similar progressive ideals in so far as it must, necessarily, attack all actions or words based on casting others as types explicable in advance by their categorisation. However, such a stance also puts it at odds with the aggressive bases of culturalism. To treat something as singular may be to move towards the idea of seeing it as irreplaceable, sole witness of what it says, an example only of itself, and thus 'free' in the sense of not being fully intelligible in the broadly deterministic categories which strive to explain all in terms of social location. Thus while it can clearly be plausible and sometimes helpful, for instance, to read Heidegger's work in terms of his conservative, 'lower middle-class' background in provincial Germany, or Derrida's in terms of being a French/Jewish colonist in Arab Algeria, such an approach is already to close off, dogmatically, any possibility of being oneself the addressee of this work in ways that may challenge the assumed explanatory power of one's own categories. Here Hannah Arendt's work on 'natality' can be brought to bear, inflecting that Kierkegaardian concern with the untranslatable uniqueness of each individual person in each of

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the four thinkers. This offers finally, in Derrida and Blanchot, ways of engaging questions of right and justice beyond categories of cultural identity and in relation to Derrida's notion of a 'democracy to come', i.e one not limited by the juridical boundaries of any specific nation state. Resistance to stereotyping is a basic scholarly ethic, but one consequence of thinking these issues through with Derrida, Blanchot and others is the need to be suspicious of those simplifiying forms of identification that often lie at the basis of the criticial institution itself. The first chapter of this study traced how deconstructive thought was absorbed in the 1990s into an essentialist modernist and in many ways US-centric understanding of criticism as the adjudication of competing identity claims. The work of the political philosopher Wendy Brown can be used here to criticise culturalism: that, for all its usual dedication to 'progressive' causes, it remains centred surreptitiously upon an underdiscussed, masculinist, bourgeois model of what 'identity' actually is (whether asserted or striven for). The dominant rhetoric of criticism ('subvert', 'free from', 'break chains of', etc.) remains pervaded by liberal-individualist assumptions about 'freedom' and 'rights', just as the equally pervasive rhetoric of 'marginalisation' and 'exclusion' works insidiously with a hidden valorisation of the central as norm. A poetics of singularity can surely work as a corrective and even a cauter-discourse here. Against the sweeping use of categories of cultural identity as a principle of explanation in reading texts may be set a Kierkegaardian concern with the always exceptional nature of the singular case, along with deeper Heideggerian/Arendtian notions of freedom and of natality. Natality is inseparable from singularity in the sense of the absolute uniqueness of each person: 'With each new birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before.' 1 Such natality underlies human freedom as the capacity 'to establish relations and to create new realities'. 2 Natality is thus the essence of education and the art of teaching. For every new reader, facing what may seem to someone else the tritest exercise or the most familiar text, it is still a first time.

Notes

Introduction: a school of singularity 1. 'Psyche: Invention of the Other', trans. Catherine Porter, in Reading De Man Reading, eds Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 25-65. 2. J. Hillis Miller, Black Holes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Tilottama Rajan, 'In the Wake of Cultural Studies: Globalization, Theory, and the University', Diacritics, 31 (Fall2001), pp. 67-88; Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature: Or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Samuel Weber, 'Ambivalence: The Humanities and the Study of Literature', in Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1987), pp. 132-52. The term singularity has come explicitly to the fore in Derrida's work since the mid-1980s, and has become the focus of studies on Derrida such as Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998), esp. pp. 107-46; Joseph Kronick, 'Between Act and Archive: Literature in the Nuclear Age', in Future Crossings: Literature between Philosophy and Cultural Studies, eds Krzysztof Ziarek and Seamus Deane (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), pp. 52-75; Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). For a useful wide-ranging discussion of the broader issues see Culture Machine, 6 (2004) 'Deconstruction is/in Cultural Studies', eds Gary Hall, Dave Boothroyd and Joanna Zylinska (http://culturemachine.tees.ac.ukl frm_fl.htm). 3. Derek Attridge, 'Singular Events: Literature, Invention, and Performance', in The Question of Literature, ed. Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 48-65, at p. 49. 4. Bill Readings, 'Translatio and Comparative Literature: The Terror of European Humanism', Surfaces, 1.11 (1991): 19 pp., at p. 14 (http://www. pum. umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol1/readin-a.html). 5. For an account of the overworked association of such 'deconstructive' work with the 'New Criticism' see Peggy Kamuf 's introduction to Derrida's Without Alibi (WA, p. 20). 6. Attridge offers a lucid and compelling schematisation of what are recognisably

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8. 9. 10. 11.

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Derridian concepts of the literary, invention and singularity. The accessibility of Attridge's argument is achieved by the decision to present these things in terms of a general phenomenology of reading, detaching the arguments from the broader philosophical and other stakes (the nature of language, institutions, of the social bond, the 'metaphysical'). A cost of this strategy is that the book sometimes risks becoming descriptive truism. For instance: 'At any given moment in cultural history, some works of the past convey their inventiveness powerfully to attentive readers, while others which may have been just as inventive in earlier periods remain dumb' (p. 46). Attridge understands the singualrity of each human life in terms of what calls 'idiocultures' - naming the fact that each person is the product of a uniquely specific set of cultural and social factors. Thus the appeal a text may make to me in my singularity is a matter of the incalculable and sometimes surprising interplay of such idiocultures. However, abstracted from the crucial post-existential thinking that informs Derrida's work, the notion of an 'idioculture' seems bound to a merely empirical/social field of reference, of which it is the (albeit incalculable) product or correlate. This is unlike that more radical thinking of an absolute groundlessness in human freedom as is found in Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, Arendt and others. As Dana R. Villa writes of the notion of natality in Arendt, 'This effort - to think of freedom in its nonsovereign worldly form, as a "mode of being" rather than as a capacity of the subject - is complicated not only by our habitual reduction of freedom to will but also by our embarrassment with the idea of there being an "absolute" beginning' (Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 118. Arendt's conception is recognisably working under the influence of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, but she also relates it to much older debates about the bases of human freedom in St Augustine and Duns Scotus ('Of all the philosophers and theologians we have consulted, only Duns Scotus, we found, was ready to pay the price of contingency for the gift of freedom the mental endowment we have for beginning something new, of which we know that it could just as well not be' (The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1971), II, p. 195). See also, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 177-8. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [1963] (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 206. J. Hillis Miller, On Literature, Thinking in Action (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 33. Remark quoted in John Felstiner, 'Translating Celan's Last Poem', American Poetry Review, July-August (1982), pp. 21-7, at p. 22. Nancy's work on freedom (The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988)) is becoming a recurrent reference in new defences of the literary. See, for instance, the essay by Rajan mentioned above and Reingard Nethersole's essay in the same journal, 'The Priceless Interval: Theory in the Global Interstice', Diacritics, 31 (Fall2001), pp. 30-6. The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). The huge debt to Kant is explicitly acknowledged in the texts on singularity by Samuel Weber and Derek Attridge.

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13. 'The Felicities of Paradox: Blanchot on the Null-Space of Literature', in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 34-69, at p. 37. 14. Salim Kemal, Kant's Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 45-6. 15. Requoted from Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 111. 16. Kant values the expressive power of the poem as an active deployment of the various mental faculties as they test the possible but still indeterminate concepts evoked. In other words, the artful refusal to make exact determinate sense in a way that can be expressed in precise concepts serves to highlight a general capacity for making sense that is usually simply taken for granted. In this way, for Kant, the singularity of the successful artwork reconciles itself with our general pre-cognitive sense of order and harmony. 17. The presence of Kant here was especially clear in people who affirmed the singularity of the literary as a space of open reflection by looking to JeanFran