Philosophy Beside Itself

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Philosophy
Beside Itself
On Deconstruction
and Modernism

Stephen W. Melville

Foreword by Donald Marshall

Theory and History of Literature, Volume 27

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

 The University of Minnesota gratefully acknowledges assistance
provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for publication of
this book.

Copyright 1986by the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis MN 55414.
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Markham.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Melville, Stephen.
Philosophy beside itself.

(Theory and history of literature ; v. 27)

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Deconstruction. 2. Derrida, Jacques-Contributions in
criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
PN98.D43M45 1986 801\95 85-14025
ISBN 0-8166-1437-7
ISBN 0-8166-1438-5 (pbk.)

Excerpt from L'Ecorce et le noyau by N. Abraham and M. Torok

(pp.337-39), (pp. 337-39), © 1978 Flammarion, translated and
the permission of the publisher.

The University of Minnesota

is an equal-opportunity
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for Ruthie
Theory and History of Literature
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse

Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics

Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss
Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
Volume 4. Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich,
and Wallace Martin
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
2nd ed., rev.
Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Volume 9. Erich Auerbach
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction
and the Power of Fiction
Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939
Volume 15. Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays
Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise
Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies
Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English
Renaissance Drama
Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy
of the Beholder
Volume 20. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud
Just Gaming
Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem
Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, Volume 1. Women, Floods,
Bodies, History
Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, Volume 2. Male Bodies:
Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
Volume 24. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement
The Newly Bom Woman
Volume 25. Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of
a Historical Structure
Volume 26. Andrzej Warminski Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin,
Hegel, Heidegger
Volume 27. Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself:
On Deconstruction and Modernism
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Foreword by Donald Marshall xi

Preface xxv
1. On Modernism 3
2. A Context for Derrida 34
Hegel: Realizing Philosophy 37
After Hegel (I): The Disposition of Philosophy 45
After Hegel (II): Philosophy Beside Itself 60
After Hegel (III): The Philosopher's Death 71
3. Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction 84
Questions of Tradition and Method 84
Psychoanalysis of Philosophy: The Status of "Freudian Concepts"
Philosophy and Psychologism; Freud and Hegel 84
Odds and Evens: The Argument with Lacan 88
Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: Critical Realism;
De-idealization; Mise-en-abime 93
Contre-bande: The Opposition; the Legacy; Anasemie;
the Exorbitant 97
[Questions of Style] 106
Open Questions 113
4. Paul de Man: The Time of Criticism 115
5. Psychoanalysis, Criticism, Self-Criticism 139
Notes 159
Bibliography 173
Index 183
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Foreword
Donald Marshall

In 1912, Arnold Schonberg composed Pierrot Lunaire, a musical setting of

"thrice seven" poems by the French poet Albert Guirard. The texts assemble
a conventional symbolist environment, through which move characters from the
commedia dell 'arte engaged in vaguely ritual actions of indeterminate import but
with overtones of hostility to the order and monuments of ordinary bourgeois
culture. They are, in short, "dated." But Schonberg's music remains irre-
ducibly strange even after three-quarters of a century (this fact has seemed to
some Schonberg's chief excellence). And the "method of composing with
twelve tones" goes even further. For that method can no longer be simply
defined against a reigning orthodoxy, and yet its methodicalness is inaudible
even for the trained ear. Any amateur can hear an organizing key, but not even
an expert could write out the tone row from hearing a serial composition. Some-
thing so natural, a convention so deeply in accord with our actual makeup that
all the accumulated training of modern life has not reduced its power as a norm
against which strangeness is experienced, is here violated, producing instantly
the effect of "the modern." (To be sure, Schonberg remarked that his music
was not modern, just badly played.) Such an experience of undiminishing
"modernity" resists the historian of art's commitment to describe a series of
"period" styles and discern the law or logic of their succession. And yet
Schonberg himself saw the "twelve-tone method" as the culminating point in
the historical progression of music and as the origin for a new era in that
progression.
Just this ambiguity—establishing an opposition between the historical (or any

xi
 xii D FOREWORD

other mediation) and the immediacy of an absolute present (or of an autono-

mous, self-standing object), and then oscillating between these poles—defines,
according to Paul de Man, "modernity" as a value, not just as a shifting and
contingent historical moment. My parentheses imply that the opposition between
history and a posited absolute present lies close to, is even the same as, an
opposition between two kinds of consciousness, one directed toward objects and
constituted by tacit influences and components, the other fully and rigorously
self-constituted. I mean to assert an equivalence between "modernity" and the
kind of consciousness called in philosophy "critical." We have no obvious label
for its opposite, but the temptation to call it "ordinary" has not often been
resisted. Ordinary consciousness may be naive or sophisticated, but critical
consciousness is sophisticated or it is nothing. Its discoverer—or inventor-
according to the usual account, is Kant, and his characterization of a conscious-
ness aware of its own conditions of possibility and limits has seemed to provide
the model for "modernity" in every field of the mind's exertions, from science
to the arts. To say that "modernity" in philosophy and in thought generally
"begins" with Kant is, of course, paradoxical, since the point of such a
consciousness is to escape just that sort of contingency. What may be said (is
sometimes said; would have been said by Kant himself) is that Kant laid bare
what had been there all along, not exactly the "essence" of consciousness, or
its "foundation," but how it appeared to itself when it was, so to speak, at
home. The therapeutic and cathartic effect of setting one's house in order
impelled and still sustains the quest for self-awareness and self-justification.
Reformulating modernity as critical consciousness in this way lets us see the
peculiar ambiguity of both Marxism and psychoanalysis. On the one hand,
consciousness is lured into forfeiture to the everyday and blindly subjected to
historic forces (manifested as ideology) and to its own unacknowledged desires
(manifested as repression). But, on the other, it can struggle against these
degradations and seek—even if only in an endlessly deferred and Utopian
form—a world beyond class struggle (and the history it generates) and beyond
repression and its analytic dissolution.
The connection of modernity, critical consciousness, and deconstruction is as
difficult and obscure as possible. A preference of taste is manifest in, for
example, Derrida's respectful tone—one could speak of an "endorsement," in
all its senses—when he writes about Artaud or Blanchot. One might surmise that
Derrida and even de Man respond to Rousseau much as Kant himself did, a sur-
prising elective affinity described well by Ernst Cassirer. Yet no one could be
more alert than Derrida and de Man to the self-effacing (in a double sense)
claims of critical consciousness to pure self-constitution. The taste for
"modern" writers justifies itself on the principled ground not of their achieve-
ment of critical consciousness, still less of their solving the antinomy between
its possibility and impossibility, but of their awareness that that antinomy is
 FOREWORD D xiii

inescapable. Are we to take this awareness as a triumph of critical consciousness

because it is an awareness, or as a defeat, because it is awareness of an
inescapability?
The antinomy certainly cannot be figured as an opposition between the self-
deluding pretenses of philosophy and the life-enhancing complexities of litera-
ture: it is not a "romantic" protest. If literature enjoys an advantage here, it is
that a writer is, before anything, a writer, wedded to the action of writing in a
way that constantly threatens to obtrude itself on him. As de Man remarks, one
can imagine a thinker who never writes, like Socrates, but not a writer who
never writes. Calling a writer a philosopher or a poet merely distracts from the
question, whether he or she has lost sight or not of being a writer. The labor
or gift of keeping in view what it is to be a writer characterizes the particular
form of critical consciousness we call simply "criticism." I do not mean the
ancient activity of assessing the success of a written work according to a canon
of rules or models or according to the effect one suspects it may have on readers
or other writers. In its modern sense, criticism is an effort to see just how a
writer keeps (or fails to keep) writing in view. A distinction between "writer"
and "critic" would be equally distracting. Nor would it be easy to sustain the
more inviting distinction between writing and reading.
In undertaking to investigate the relations between deconstruction, criticism,
modernism, psychoanalysis, and history, Stephen Melville has not written a
conventional, has written an unconventional "introduction" to deconstruction.
It is not simply his intelligence which invites the qualification. But by isolating
issues that arise at the origin of modern thought in and around Kant and then
thinking these along through Hegel and the absorption of Hegel into French
intellectual life in the 1930s, Melville makes of "deconstruction" what Stanley
Cavell achieves with skepticism: it becomes not just an odd system of notions,
but what it makes sense for an intelligent and thoughtful (in every sense)
individual to say from a certain position within history or the history of thought.
In this sense, the book is not simply propaedeutic, intended to lead up to the
study of something; nor is it simply an exposition of a school and its leading
figures. It is an introduction in a more important sense, as one might speak of
the introduction of Derrida into American criticism and ask how this was
accomplished, what made it possible, and what were its consequences. But I
want to hold to the idea of an "introduction" in the full range of its implications,
for our almost immediately negative reaction to that idea leads directly, I think,
into the central issues Melville faces.
A book is like a city, and not every reader is native to its complexities. One
wouldn't automatically praise those who refused to draw a map or give a clear
direction to a visitor on the ground that the city itself was a unique experience
one ought to master for oneself. Yet distrust of every mediation runs deep in
modern intellectual life. Paraphrase has been called a heresy by a critic who does
 xiv Q FOREWORD

not take religious language lightly. An introduction offends by producing a

miniature of the book itself, implying that a thin thesis seeks liberation from
layers of discursive fat or that the introducer finally stated what the author was
too tongue-tied to utter. In Schonberg's Moses und Awn, God startles the
hermitic/hermetic Moses with the mission to proclaim Him. When Moses
protests his tongue is "ungelenk," inflexible, God makes his brother Aaron his
mouthpiece. There follow all the predictable ill consequences of representing the
unrepresentable to an excitable populace. Modernism could almost be defined
as a conviction that any book can never be explained.
Yet it is a plain fact of language that any utterance can be paraphrased.
Understanding would be paralyzed if we could only ritualistically recite the
ipsissimi verbi and never take them up into our own words. It is doubtful enough
that we can think anything that cannot be put into words, and incredible
that what has been put into words once cannot be put into other words. The
ideology of anti-paraphrase expresses a perverse Selbsthass on the part of
criticism: every comment obtrudes into the pure and immediate relation of the
reader to the "poem itself." Publishing such comments is even worse,
explicable only in economic terms as a necessity of academic employment, or
even worse in psycho-moral terms as a lust for fame achieved by the subreptive,
parasitic expropriation of another's "genuine" creative, original work. Even
Derrida and Paul de Man have incautiously expressed moral indignation at para-
phrasing, at explaining, at faithfully summarizing—at all the sins of introducing.
In the preface to On Christian Doctrine, Augustine was already driven to defend
training commentators and preachers of the Gospel against those who claimed
that anything but insight straight from the Spirit was illegitimate and futile.
Augustine's answer is, we would say, political. Let those on speaking terms
with the Holy Ghost rejoice, but let them not deny more ordinary mortals access
to a saving word. There is a Parnassian and finally rather nasty tone to this scorn
for aids to the audience. Not everyone's education assures him or her of
immediate membership in the charmed circle of those who read with under-
standing; not everyone has consulted the oracle in Paris. Shall not these be fed?
Even if we concede the harried reader may cut a corner and let the introduction
supplant the introduced, by what right do we let a moral condemnation cover
over the accelerating speed and volume which are precisely the temporal and
technological characteristics of modern culture that ought to invite reflection?
In this insistence on an originary, immediate contact between author and reader,
between reader and book, are we not living out the hermeneutics and the politics
of the Reformation?
An introduction puts a book in a nutshell—or takes the nut out of the shell.
The contradictory reversibility of the metaphor tells the tale. The introduction
is outside the book, yet its inmost essence, where its real core emerges. It is
essentially preliminary, but a preliminary essential. This relation Derrida calls
 FOREWORD D xv

"supplementarity." At once outside and inside, the introduction violates and

erases the threshold: when you read the introduction, have you already begun
to read the book or not? Where does the book "really" begin? Between the title
page and the text, the introduction is a part and not a part, in but not of. The
introduction is a parasite, one who feeds at another's table, but earns his keep
by making lively conversation, making conversation lively. It is an advance
man, a warm-up act, a pro-phet. Yet its perversion of the bordering, defining
threshold goes further. Everyone has had the experience of reading a brief
comment on some book and finding it incomprehensible until one has read the
book itself. De Man and Derrida supply this experience in abundance, and only
when you have read closely the text of Freud or Plato or whoever is under
examination do you comprehend the explanation. Readers may expect that they
will read Melville to understand deconstruction and Derrida. They may find, to
their chagrin, that they must read deconstruction and Derrida to understand
Melville. By a curious reversal, Derrida becomes the introduction to Melville.
This is to say that a genuine introduction, an essential introduction must already
itself participate in what it introduces. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind begins
with an introduction that leads us up to the real philosophical thinking. But, as
Melville says, it is only from the perspective of that completed thinking that one
can grasp the necessity for this way in. An introduction to philosophy must itself
be philosophical. These are the dialectics of all literary imitation, and equally
of any commentary ambitious to enter the circle of predecessors commented on.
Derrida is in the line straight from Hegel, for whom the historical "introduc-
tion" to philosophy was itself philosophy and in fact the philosophy which was
the outcome of philosophical history. We never come to the history of philos-
ophy or culture "from the beginning"—even if we could locate the beginning.
As the theorist of narrative Gerald Prince once remarked, "We read because we
have read." Always in the midst, the later is our constant introduction to the
earlier. Thus Derrida is metaleptic, turning his later into an earlier. How many
readers come to a text after reading Derrida on it, and hence coming to it
through him?
The power of an introduction before we have read the work it introduces is
just that it is fascinating but unintelligible: to use a term Melville takes from
Michael Fried, the art historian, it is "absorptive" and hence unreadable. If the
risk of staging a work is that theatrical representation, however brilliant, is
artificial, not simply true, the risk of absorption is the loss of critical distance,
especially when the assumption that what we see is the genuine article is
unchecked by familiarity with the original thus represented. To be sure, if we
must read what the introduction explains in order to understand the introduction,
the lazy reader's project of saving labor is frustrated. But, meanwhile, the
introduction owes its success to its being fascinating. There exist strange books
comprising an author's introductions to other books, which are now sometimes
 xvi D FOREWORD

of interest only because this author once introduced them—think of Poe's

marginalia and reviews. Since understanding and therefore "truth" isn't in
question, the fascination must be a fascination of style: how could anyone learn
to talk this way? The glimpsed prospect, the promised land is the possibility that
if I read Derrida or whatever the introducer has read, then I too may learn to
talk like this. We get a sort of ventriloquism, a speaking not from the brain, but
from the belly (style is the man; you are what you eat), a concern less with what
is said than with how it sounds (or feels) to say it. An introduction thus seems
to tap independent sources of interest: one may read it with no intention or no
impulse remaining to read further. Yet in supplanting, it doubly "rips off the
authorial identity of what it introduces, stealing both what it says and how it says
it. An introduction rouses some of the same disapproval as plagiarism and every
effort to gain intellectual credit for someone else's work.
Just to the degree an introduction transcends its secondariness, it opens the
full complexity of historical time. How many were led to read Hegel and other
monuments of the philosophical tradition by an interest in, a wish to understand,
Lacan or Derrida? Reading this way is doubly nachtraglich, "after the fact":
one understands Hegel in the light Derrida throws on him, but one also under-
stands Derrida in the light Hegel throws on him. When Kant's critics accused
him of taking all his ideas from Leibniz, Kant replied that the charge was true
enough, but that it was only when he had written his books that it became
possible to see that Leibniz had said that. To have seen what one's great pre-
decessors made it possible to say is highly creditable. Of course, one may
question the legitimacy of such a proceeding: it seems the weakness of
Aristotle's summaries of the metaphysical opinions of his predecessors that he
makes them all answer his questions, lead up to his solutions. We have been told
that we must efface ourselves, leap imaginatively into the world of our ances-
tors, think their thoughts uncontaminated with anachronism. It seems cynical to
say that history is written by the winners. But in fact this only means that what
matters to history is what has had and continues to have consequences. Even if
we temporarily bracket ourselves in order to guess what the ' 'original audience''
understood (a notion full of unexamined abstraction, as Hans-Georg Gadamer
says), we do so only in the service of historical integration at a larger level, not
as an end in itself.
The only sensible choice is to write history in relation to its results, its out-
comes. Supplementarity applies in the history of ideas too. If one cannot really
understand Derrida without reading Hegel, then Hegel is at once outside and
inside Derrida, a supplement made necessary by Derrida himself. To "intro-
duce" the past, one must actually return to it. Derrida is introduced (in)to Hegel
and Hegel is introduced (in)to Derrida. It is not clear what "earlier" would
mean in such a case, nor does Melville shrink before the speculative possibility
 FOREWORD D xvii

of weighing "Derrida's influence on Hegel." We cannot understand the history

of ideas without thinking, without ourselves having ideas, and we must therefore
necessarily turn to those among us who have ideas and stimulate thinking. What
"intellectual" history teaches us—and it is true of all history—is that historical
time is anything but linear. T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
is no less powerful merely because it has ceased to be the common reference
point for a generation of students of literature. What Kant or Hegel or Heidegger
means must constantly be readjusted in the light of what thinkers like Lacan or
Bataille struggle to make of them. This is just what tradition is—not a linear
series of fixed opinions safely encrypted, but a mobile dance of vampire-like
figures that, by feeding on the blood of the living, not only gain new life for
themselves, but welcome their victims into perpetual fellowship.
The process may be made to sound less mysterious than this chiasmus of
earlier and later seems: if we write the history of art, we must still write the
history of art; and our idea of what art is is itself the outcome of history and
the point at which history is forever open. There is no escape from this abyss,
and there had better not be. To be out of it is to be outside both history and our
idea of art which emerged from it. Where would that put us? Derrida himself
has no illusions about ignoring or escaping history. He works like frost, levering
open the granite blocks of monuments along their edges and fissures. If Derrida
owes his life to the great writers whose parasite and parodist he has become,
they owe their living on to his unflagging interest in them.
The further paradox of filling in the background Derrida claims for himself
is that in Melville's introduction, Derrida never quite arrives, and we never
quite arrive at him. Our interest cannot but grow as we pass from Kant to Hegel
to Heidegger to Lacan and Bataille—with so great a weight of tradition, surely
some revelation is at hand. And yet just when we get to Derrida, we suddenly
swerve into Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson and Shoshanna Felman. This
curiously elided figure, known only in what he compels into the position of
predecessors, adversaries, and sequelae, never appears at the outer edge, the
border or shore where past attains a peak and stares with wild surmise over its
future. Nor does he figure as the father of waters, the discovered source, or a
root diversely engra(ph)ted. Derrida thus (dis)figured exemplifies his own
critique of Heidegger. Against any idea of Ereignis, of history conceived as the
event in which we make the past our own, Derrida disclaims "personality," all
attempts to make ourselves responsible for the endless improprieties of the past.
This is not to say that Derrida is ir-responsible, only that history is never any-
thing we could own, and hence never lives in history books, but is only some-
thing done and still doing. Those who think history never repeats itself are as
wrong as those who think it never does anything else. Those who think that
through history they can know the future are as wrong as those who think that
 xviii D FOREWORD

through history they can know the past in order to have done with it. We are
not outside history as the masters or mere victims of its movement, nor as spec-
tators in a darkened theater before its futile panorama. Ni Marx, ni Ranke.
To write an introduction is to recognize that time is out of joint. For Melville,
the exploration of how we are in and out of history is central to what is
"modern" in modern culture, and deconstruction's centrality lies in its pro-
longation of precisely this exploration. That Melville unostentatiously uses the
resources of deconstruction to put before us its past makes his a thoroughly
modern introduction. History is the reality that everything we do—and writing
is action of a kind purer perhaps than any other—is other (more and less) than
us, than our intentions. Modernism is just the self-consciousness we feel in the
presence of this basic fact. For unlike our heroic ancestors, we have no confi-
dence in history. It is not a stage on which we seek applause or submit to hisses,
not a court where we can be saved or damned. Even the fame which tempted
the noble mind (or tempted the ignoble mind to rise above itself) seems to us
pure illusion or at least worthless.
Philosophy attempts to escape history by acts of pure self-reflection. What
differentiates these attempts from earlier transcendentalisms is the maintained
relation to what it flees from. Critique gets to the border of historical experience
and tries to live on that border line, never stepping over it. This ambition has
finally talked itself out of itself. In Husserl's return to the category of the life-
world, in Wittgenstein's return to "forms of life," the most rigorous forms of
reflection undo themselves, often explicitly as therapy against the pride of
reason. Literature's resources for waking from the nightmare of history are
perhaps even more devious. Originality, novelty, the absolutely outrageous are
efforts to break the chains of history, but they show that history had first to be
conceived as chains. Myth, symbol, and the varied appropriations from religion
are not only attempts to capture religion's cultural role, but a project to discover
for literature resources proper to it yet able to rival the success of its chief
antagonist, science, in escaping history. Even allusion, borrowing, and parody
are devices to evade historicality by establishing a decontextualized immediacy.
But the most paradoxical move by which both philosophy and literature try to
escape their own history and therefore themselves is by turning each to the other.
Deconstruction is the exemplary no-man's-land where this purely modern
warfare, truce, and incessant exchange of prisoners between philosophy and
literature is carried on.
One might suppose that modernism's resistance to history would make it
congenial to America. A country could scarcely be more thoroughly con-
temporary than the United States. But the American is wrong to think modern-
ism means a break with the past. The European knows that modernism rather
seeks Lebensraum in a world where the dead crowd out the living, where
monuments of the past are so thick on and under the ground that digging a new
 FOREWORD D xix

foundation is ineluctably archaeological. A culture cannot break from a past it

never had. The immigrants did not simply forget their heritage; they never had
any. They were, in Eric Hoffer's richly ironic phrase, "the scum of the earth,"
the huddled masses excluded from the history of their "homelands." Politically
conscious educators had no difficulty filling this blank slate with the mythic
shapes of the Founding Fathers. The children of immigrants, drawing pictures
of turkeys and playacting Pilgrims and Indians, forgot even the deliberateness
of their parents' assimilation to the New World. As a consequence, when
American academics want to teach their students modernism, they must first
infect them with the cultural disease of which it is either the cure or else the most
virulent strain. Lionel Trilling despaired to find his students dutifully studying
and blandly accepting the most harrowed, anguished expressions of modernist
consciousness. For the American, modernism is not the sign of alienation and
cultural despair in the face of historical catastrophes. On the contrary, through
modernism America triumphantly accedes to its rightful status as a world culture
in the "American century." It is the end of provincialism, the end of childhood.
Americans domesticate modernism by regarding it as something with a quite
smart European accent, mental furniture harmonious with cheap trips abroad
and fond recollections of croissants for breakfast. Nausea in Kalamazoo is a
cousin far removed from Bouville. American kitsch voraciously absorbs
modernist cliches, which become a standard background, a universalism
unconstrained by local history.
I am speaking, of course, about the political implications of deconstruction.
I intend something other than partisan politics: neither deconstruction nor
modernism more generally has as origin or destination a political program or
party affiliation. Ingenious attempts have been made to connect deconstruction
with current politics: decolonization has shifted the relations between center and
periphery or margin, and deconstruction shows us how to analyze these rela-
tions; as the most rigorous form of modernism, deconstruction shows the nature
of all forms of modernization; because everything is a text, the textual opera-
tions of deconstructive reading are immediately political and applicable to all
institutions; by exposing at the most general level the ruses of authority and the
deceptive and self-deceptive linguistic maneuvers of ideology, deconstruction
unmasks the claims of neutrality and objectivity by which interested power
structures underwrite their legitimation. Such arguments on inspection seem like
merely verbal maneuvers, all puns and metaphors. Equally ingenious reasoners
demonstrate that on its own showing, deconstruction makes no difference: at
best it merely invites us to examine metaphysical presuppositions and at worst
it leaves us in a state of demystified resignation to structures and operations that
it asserts are as delusory as they are unavoidable. But this analysis seems
abstract: the political significance of an idea rarely coincides with what its
advocates think or claim for it, nor with what merely follows logically from a
 xx a FOREWORD

systematic formulation of it, especially one gleaned by an adversary from

diverse writings for the purpose of criticizing it. The controversy seems to be
whether deconstruction—taken as exemplary of modernist thought—issues in
effective action or only in some state of mind. The questionableness of that
contrast ought to alert us that something is fishy in the whole debate. Both sides
seem too sure they already know what politics is. They miss the point insofar
as the challenge of deconstruction is not to decide which political camp it
belongs to, but in what terms we are to think of politics at all.
In meeting this challenge, Derrida and de Man have not given us much help.
At the end of a profoundly intelligent essay on "Literary History and Literary
Modernity," de Man writes: "To become good literary historians, we must
remember that what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do
with literature and that what we call literary interpretation—provided only it is
good interpretation—is in fact literary history." So far, so good, but one can
only feel a certain embarrassment when he adds the concluding sentence, "If
we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for
historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts
masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions." This is boilerplate rhetoric
from a modernist manifesto, an anarchism at once cryptic and timid, uttered in
the manner of jesting Pilate. One feels how little de Man really cares about
historical knowledge, empirical fact, wars, or revolutions, and how little serious
thought he has given any of them. Nor has Derrida done much better, whether
darkening counsel with equivocations on "property," "representation," and
"copyright," or muddying the waters of feminism. I think this rhetoric in bad
taste, leaves a bad taste, but my point is not to reproach de Man and Derrida
for not doing what they never intended to do. It is simply that if we wish to ask
about "modernism and politics" or even "deconstruction and politics," we are
on our own and can't expect simply to read off what to think from their
pronouncements.
I have no intention of pursuing this question in general terms—I don't think
it makes much sense in such terms. I want to stick instead to some more local
surmises about modernism and deconstruction in America. This topic is political
in Gerald Bruns's sense, that deconstruction and modernism must, like every-
thing else, make their way in the world. Gerald Graff argues for a hidden
convergence between modernism and consumer capitalism. Of course modernist
culture in this country thinks of itself as anti-establishment. But this delusion
covers a divided self: adversary in style and rhetoric, in substance a reliable ally
of everyday order, because what it dreams is already the unacknowledged
reality. A country where a television series can star a talking horse can only
pretend to be shocked by Surrealism. This seems persuasive, largely perhaps
because it pursues a Marxist demystification of an ideology's "objective" social
correlates and class interests. But, on reflection, it may seem no less merely
 FOREWORD D xxi

metaphorical than some deconstructors' notion that "subverting" a text is the

same thing as "subverting" an economic system. We might expect more insight
from examining the lives and thoughts of actual individuals. Julia Kristeva's
change of heart about America is suggestive: from Paris, it had seemed the
archetypal imperialist, rigid conservator of a materialistic domination of the
world, that is, the projected embodiment of everything "bourgeois" in her own
culture. After her residence in New York, it showed itself as just that dissemi-
nated society of which modernism dreams. But, again, conclusions could only
follow systematic collection and analysis of facts, and I know of no such venture
yet undertaken. We may be on firmer ground to consider the more relevant con-
vergence noticed long ago by Charles Feidelson in Symbolism and American
Literature. The peculiar parallelism he finds between the premises of, say,
Melville's Pierre and Gide's The Counterfeiters explains, among other things,
the sympathetic reception of American literature by some European modernists.
This suggests a complex genealogy: a culture which diverges from its parent,
like separated twins, after pursuing an indigenous evolution, bears an uncanny
family resemblance at a reunion some generations later. The ambiguous relation
of deconstruction to New Criticism may be even more pertinent. Literary
modernism made its way into the world of academic literary study as New
Criticism, not without struggle. I am certainly not alone in finding that New
Criticism paved a broad, smooth highway to deconstruction—which certainly
does not mean they are the same thing. Virtually the dying words of Paul de Man
were a bitter defense of New Criticism against its cultured despisers. The dif-
ference between New Criticism and deconstruction lies much more in the con-
flicting rhetoric of their mutual self-representations and accusations than in any
substantive reality when they close in on a text. American academics nurtured
on New Criticism oscillate between finding deconstruction an echo, even a
parody, of familiar notions and finding it an ungrateful offspring of modernism
whose tooth is turned against the parents who taught it to speak. This is a
familiar scene in the drama of politics: the young zealots struggle with the old
guard for control of the revolution. The tragic conflict is not between enemies,
but between allies who cannot recognize each other or the older and younger son
of the same father. The sharpest pain is not defeat, but the fear that the convic-
tions one has served with dedication have been usurped and turned into accusa-
tions by those one trusted to be their heirs: see Stanley Cavell on King Lear.
Because of this problematic immediacy—uncanny homeliness in an impres-
sively alien dress—Americans have a responsiveness to a thinker like Derrida
that has made him rich. The potential for misunderstanding is all the greater,
and Derrida has himself been surprised, sometimes even offended, at how he
reads in America, at Americans' tendency to think he simply means what he
says. Some Americans seem quite unaware of and others have no appetite for
the laborious route by which Derrida actually got to his position—the slow work
 xxii D FOREWORD

through Kant and Hegel and Heidegger, the tortured labyrinth of European
leftism and psychoanalysis, the respectful weighing of grotesques like Bataille
and Artaud. As a result, Derrida is perhaps more alarmed by the Americans with
whom he succeeds than by the Europeans unpersuaded of any of his ideas. With
them he feels at home, for they see that he occupies a known, even a respectable
position, one they can acknowledge in their thinking, neither raging against it,
nor epigonized by it.
Under these circumstances, the need for a formal introduction is unavoidable.
One can have no faith in those who dismiss the social barrier that keeps strangers
in silence side by side in an elevator, as though the realities that barrier acknowl-
edges could be swept aside by an ideology of spontaneous bonhomie. There is
a false camaraderie in those who think one can just "strike up" a conversation,
without acknowledging the implied commitment to and risk of mutual conse-
quences and without needing a mediating third party, who stands between us
precisely to bring us together and then stand back. One must not presume too
much on a common background and a common outlook. Despite a rare success,
such casual encounters always border on a moment of madness, a language not
embroidered on a durable web of social connections.
We need an introduction to Derrida because he is undeniably foreign. He
doesn't "speak our language," though he is steadily mastering it. An intro-
duction permits or gives permission to two people to converse. According to
Aristotle's conception that our mutual conversation is what makes us political
animals, such an introduction is a profoundly political act. One of Melville's
aims is to make Derrida conversible, that is, to situate him within the world of
talk we occupy. If we are to hear what Derrida says, he must learn to talk our
language. But the irreducible reciprocity of all introductions reminds us that the
strain and profit of meeting someone is that we must learn to talk our language
too. We are never masters of our language once and for all, but relearn it, as
it were, whenever we speak. We want to keep up our end of the conversation.
That is why the introduction of Stanley Cavell into this book is so apt, for he
is the most accomplished of our philosophical conversationalists. Cavell's tact
at hearing what we mean when we speak teaches us that in conversation we do
not wish simply that our partner be an echo of ourselves, nor do we even seek
a mere exchange of experiences and opinions. In conversation, we acknowledge
a claim: the point of talking with Derrida is gained by having Derrida be and
sound like Derrida. Otherwise, why talk with him at all? The great art of intro-
duction is not the bare bringing together, but finding the few well-chosen words
whose offering starts a conversation that can continue of itself. Such a never-
stabilized circulation of positions is for most of its American enthusiasts the
excitement of deconstruction.
In venturing the model of conversation, I want to take up a final topic, the
notorious "difficulty" of modernist art, and at the same time return, without
 FOREWORD D xxiii

resolving it, to the antinomy or self-reversals between history and modernity

with which I began. Let me first put the best possible face on the matter. A
genuine conversation does not just echo received opinion, but ruptures historical
ties to let us gain a present glimpse of what we speak of. Yet it also calls into
being a lasting relation between its partners, whether of alliance or opposition.
The clearer insight they may gain of what matters most must be put into the
words they can mutually bring, and all words, Plato points out, block the very
view they open. This is the ineluctable condition not just of language, but of our
finitude: autonomy and heterogeneity, acknowledgment and critique, tradition
and modernity stand together. The absoluteness of a conversation's present aims
to originate a fresh point of departure in the wider world. It thus makes us
aware, as Melville says, of "the ways we do and do not belong in time and in
community." For Plato, insight into the good, achieved in Utopian moments of
conversational inquiry when ordinary time and commitments were in suspen-
sion, served not abstracted contemplation, but the nurturance of a capacity to
return to the world of contingency with mastery, instead of blind submission.
Deconstruction sets into play the same shuttling movement of mind.
The unsettling question is whether in fact any such return is possible. If there
is no appeal to ordinary language or ordinary experience against modernism
(because modernist thought as critical is aware of premises blindness to which
is what makes ordinary experience ordinary), can there be any return from the
critical self-consciousness of modernism to anything we could recognize as
"ordinary" experience? Is the discourse of modernism possible never face-to-
face with ordinary language, but only, so to speak, behind its back? Theodore
Adorno insists that true art is irreducibly oppositional. Heidegger could find
only in Angst the phenomenological moment when the question of existence
could obtrude itself on the everyday and seem to offer an answer the everyday
itself could acknowledge. Walter Benjamin sought in urbanization and indus-
trialization the new social experiences under whose pressure traditional forms
took on the distinctiveness of modern art, sometimes with, usually against the
artist's knowledge and intentions. We now find fantastic Schonberg's vision of
a time when children would whistle his music. Literary interpreters make an
industry of showing that "pre-modern" writings always exhibit a modernist
aspect under intense scrutiny, but the demonstration is often so difficult to keep
in mind that it seems rather the interpreter's obsession than anybody's exper-
ience. Some artists now dare to suggest that modernism was somehow a huge
mistake and that "high" art needs to recover contact with the "popular" mind
or achieve its alienations at most by invoking the contrasting ordinariness of past
or ethnically divergent traditions. If philosophy anticipated modernism with
Kant, then it seems already to have attempted a return to "ordinary" language.
That return is prolonged in the revival of moral philosophy. Even the much-
debated resurgence of political conservatism may reflect a widening sense that
 xxiv D FOREWORD

we cannot make ourselves or the social order objects of a fully explicit, critical
consciousness. It may even be too hopeful to say that the "lesson" of modern-
ism has somehow been absorbed: it was essential to modernism that it not be
able to be "absorbed," and the versions of it which have been vulgarized have
somehow missed its essence. Yet no one wants to leave modernism just hanging
there: a vast museum of works no one can live with. The risk is that we will
seem to ourselves to have been not up to the rigorous demands of modernism,
once more slackly preferring the salon to the refuses.
There can probably be no answer to this dilemma. Whether in domestication
modernism and deconstruction have their heart torn out or whether permanent
revolution is simply the last tyrannical delusion of the bourgeois aesthete may
in fact be an opposition falsely posed. One could only welcome a reformulation
that did not seem merely evasive. The terror of modern physics is not that the
theoretical formalisms don't work or don't allow the physicist to work, but that
what the physicist accomplishes may be uninterpretable, may lie beyond any
human power of understanding. In The Savage Mind, Claude Levi-Strauss
argues that "non-representational painting adopts 'styles' as 'subjects'. It claims
to give a concrete representation of the formal conditions of all painting. Para-
doxically the result is that non-representational painting does not, as it thinks,
create works which are as real as, if not more real than, the objects of the
physical world, but rather realistic imitations of nonexistent models. It is a
school of academic painting in which each artist strives to represent the manner
in which he would execute his pictures if by chance he were to paint any.'' And
yet, as Geoffrey Hartman has remarked of Derrida's Glas, there can be no going
back from this self-consciousness. If in Stanley Cavell's term we genuinely
acknowledge modernism, we may have to say that it puts us in the impossible
position of being unable to go on or go back or just stay put. It is not easy to
say why anyone should tolerate being put in such a position, but the defensive
hostility modernism still arouses strikes me as evidence that it has its grip on
a real fact. What that fact is perhaps can't be said otherwise, but modernism
shows it can be said this way. What more has anyone a right to ask?
Preface

The writings of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been unquestion-
ably the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in this
country over the past decade and more. But this influence has been curiously
mediated. Until just a few years ago, very little of Derrida's work was available
in translation. American philosophers have, with few exceptions, taken little or
no interest in Derrida's work, and the whole business of reception, translation,
and commentary has been left to the literary critical community.
The Yale literary critic Paul de Man has played an essential role in this recep-
tion. His seminal 1971 book, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, provided one of the first and still most lucid accounts
of Derrida's project and, in effect, established the foundations of the enterprise
of deconstructive criticism in terms of which Derrida's work continues very
largely to be received. It is then of special interest to remark that this moment
of reception has the form of a critique and that the appropriation of Derrida to
literary criticism goes hand in hand with a certain rejection or correction of him.
A more nuanced account of this extremely complex moment is one of the central
objects of this book.
Derrida has appeared to us, for the most part, as a figure already caught up
in and defined by essentially literary critical kinds of activities and interests. It
is a striking feature of our reception of him that it has involved very little writing
of the kind that normally accompanies such work—books and essays with titles
like "Derrida and Hegel," or "Derrida and Kant," or "Jacques Derrida and
the Heritage of Surrealism," or "Derrida's Quarrel with Psychoanalysis," and

XXV
 xxvi D PREFACE

so on. The case of "Derrida's Quarrel with Psychoanalysis" is instructive.

There has been a fine, compelling, and influential essay written on the topic—
Barbara Johnson's "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida"—but the
title alone betrays its interests and points toward the difficulties that finally undo
it: the essay is conceived as an exercise in deconstructive literary criticism and
somehow (exactly how will be one of the subjects of chapter 5) manages to lose
track along the way of the quarrel with which it means to be explicitly con-
cerned. Johnson's conclusion discusses the reasons she finds herself unable to
decide who is saying what and whether or not there is in fact any disagreement
between the participants in the apparent argument; but something has to be
wrong here—both on the face of it and for deep philosophic reasons. The very
terms through which Johnson addresses Derrida's text block any access to its
properly philosophic motives.
With this invocation of the "properly philosophic," a certain "deconstruc-
tive" objection to the drift of these remarks may find its focus. Deconstruction,
the objection runs, is a subversion of philosophic property and propriety (this
is why it has become so quickly entangled with literature and its criticism). The
attempt to contextualize it, to drag its texts back into the confines of a received
tradition and problematic, is to domesticate it, to neutralize it, to undermine or
deny its deepest motives. It is to be less than rigorous with a writing that depends
everywhere on its rigor. My response must be that there is a point at which rigor
betrays itself and becomes evasive rather than enabling. I will be arguing that
we cannot grasp Derrida's improprieties unless we first grasp his property, and
I will be arguing this because I will be arguing as well that until and unless we
grasp his philosophic ambition, we remain fundamentally unable to see his
significance for criticism.
I have put the argument of this book rather harshly. But I am myself very
much a product of Derridean subversions—neither fully critic nor fully philoso-
pher, at once uneasily and joyously adrift between departments and disci-
plines—and would have it no other way. Derrida's work is subversive, pro-
foundly so—so profoundly that nothing is obvious either in advance or after the
fact about what does and does not neutralize it, where it has and has not been
domesticated, or what approaches to it are or are not rigorous. What I insist—
what I think I have learned from Stanley Cavell—is that there is no way around
the question of criteria, and it is upon that question that my argument turns. The
embeddedness of the question of criteria within what would otherwise appear a
considerably more straightforward argument is characteristic of enterprises we
call modernist, and the argument I am making about Derrida, about his philo-
sophic property and impropriety, is that he is a profoundly modernist philoso-
pher. The first task of this book will be to fill in the sense and interest of this
formulation.
 PREFACE D xxvii

Earlier versions of this book devoted themselves very largely to making good
on—"supplying" I suppose I should say—the deficits in Derrida's reception-
offering things that could count as "Derrida and Hegel," "Jacques Derrida and
the Heritage of Surrealism," and "Derrida's Quarrel with Psychoanalysis."
This ambition made for an extremely unwieldy manuscript, traces of which still
litter the present work. I am delighted that the past few years have brought about
a situation in which I no longer feel the need for such gross quasi-historical
excursions. Vincent Descombes's Modern French Philosophy has taken mag-
nificent care of the first of my headings and done nicely by the second as well.1
Crucial aspects of the second are also addressed by Michele Richman in her
book-length study of Georges Bataille.2 Although there is still considerable room
for straightforward exegetical work on Lacan, his writings are increasingly
available and increasingly common property. Anthony Wilden's early eassay on
Lacan continues to provide a useful introduction, as does Sherry Turkle's
Psychoanalytic Politics.3 There remains a great deal to be done: Derrida's
relation to Kant is of increasing centrality and has been very little discussed in
any context; his relation to Maurice Blanchot is crucial, and translations of
Blanchot's criticism as well as his recits are badly needed.4 The list, of work
needed and of work done, can be extended quite a distance and has grown with
every draft of this book.
In the meantime the present work has been freed to a somewhat more stream-
lined and systematic exposition, beginning with an attempt to fill out the notion
of philosophic modernism, passing through an exploration of Derrida's work—
very much along the lines of his quarrel with psychoanalysis—and closing with
a consideration of the appropriation of that work to literary criticism. Jacques
Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert, in
detail, that the task of philosophy is criticism; our work will be done when we
have found a way to acknowledge this achievement, a way to bring a certain
recognition of criticism back home, to the extent that criticism allows itself such
domesticity.

Despite its baggy shape, this book has a rather narrow focus: first on the
relation of Derrida's philosophic work to an overridingly Hegelian context and
then on de Man's criticism considered as an appropriation of this work. I hope,
naturally, that my choices here will be their own argument, but I cannot help
noting two other ways in which I might have proceeded.
—By presenting Derrida in such a thoroughly Hegelian context, I have been
led into a systematic neglect or disparagement of Kant that is based upon what
is, finally, neither a particularly deep nor a particularly generous reading of him.
 xxviii D PREFACE

The story can be told differently: sooner or later it will have to be, because Kant
remains a central node and test for modern philosophy—as he remains also a
central point of appeal for our understanding of our various romanticisms.
—My relatively restricted concern with the texts of Derrida and de Man left
me little room to recognize the work of other writers arguing along similar or
parallel lines. The number of people taking what amounts to a second look at
Derrida and at de Man grows almost daily (and in many instances these are in
fact first looks only now gaining a public forum). More or less arbitrarily I
would want to point to writings by the late Eugenic Donate, Rodolphe Gasche,
Frank Lentricchia, Joseph Riddel, Samuel Weber, Christopher Fynsk, Stanley
Fish, Christopher Norris, William Ray . . . as the manuscript was going
through its last revisions Suzanne Gearhart published a stunning piece in
Diacritics and Henry Staten's important Wittgenstein and Derrida appeared
while the manuscript was being edited. As will be readily apparent, this list
represents no emergent school or position—but it does signal a renewed willing-
ness to grapple with the novelty and difficulty of things and texts Derridean, a
new willingness to receive or re-receive that work.

The book has incurred considerable debts along its way and only the most
pressing can be discharged here. The foremost is certainly to Francoise Meltzer
at the University of Chicago. Ted Cohen and Paul Ricoeur of the Philosophy
Department there also contributed greatly to the final shape of the manuscript.
More diffuse debts are owed to Kenneth Northcott and Richard Strier.
Much of the material has been worked through at some length with one or
another member of an institution known intermittently and informally as La
Groupe de Recherche de Gnu (the Gnu critics). The lives and fates of its
members have been as various as such intellectual lives and fates now are, and
so it seems particularly urgent to acknowledge the help and criticism of Richard
Eldridge, Lorna Gladstone, Paul Gudel, and Andrew Parker.
Other readers of the manuscript in one or another of its stages have offered
useful criticism; I would want to single out especially Robert Knapp at Reed
College and Donald Marshall of the University of Iowa. I would like also to
thank the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for its timely financial support.

There is a last debt, undischargeable. It is of course to the late Paul de Man.

There are pages in what follows that may make mine seem a hard acknowl-
edgment of his influence—but it is such an acknowledgment nonetheless and I
 PREFACE D xxix

would not wish it to be thought anything else. The shape of our literary critical
and theoretical concerns is very largely the shape he has given them—and will
continue to give for some time to come. His achievement has been immense.

S. M.
Syracuse
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Philosophy Beside Itself
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1
On Modernism

Speaking at Johns Hopkins University in 1967, Jacques Derrida introduced his

work to the English-speaking world in the following way:
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of
structure that could be called an "event" if this loaded word did not
entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or
structuralist—thought to reduce or suspect. But let me use the term
"event" anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation
marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rup-
ture and a redoubling.1
The simultaneous reliance on and evasion of notions of "history" and
"event" evident in this passage is deeply characteristic of Derrida's writing.
This writing emerges always within a history it would subvert and takes its sense
from that history even as it would undo that history's claims to mastery over
sense: to the extent that his writings can be seen as moments within that history,
they have fallen short of their goal—and yet if they cannot be seen as such, they
fail equally and inversely. Derrida is thus double-bound, his words necessarily
at war with themselves, struggling to exempt themselves from the very grammar
in which they are caught up and by which they mean. Inevitably they are quali-
fied, hedged with quotation marks, "written under erasure," submitted to what
a late essay on psychoanalysis refers to as "ploys of designification."
Such devices and evasions are not without a philosophic pedigree of their
own. Their nearest precedent is in Heidegger's various neologistic plays with

3
 4 D ON MODERNISM

"Sein"—^x> Seyn—and there is a clear sense in which Derrida's various

"graphemes" are revisions or translations of Heidegger's, just as the term
"deconstruction" with which he names his project is a revision or translation
of Heidegger's terms Destruktion and Wiederholung (usually rendered
"destruction" and "retrieve"). Somewhat further in the background is
Nietzsche with his aphorisms and fragments—his refusal to mean philosophi-
cally. The dominating figure still further in the background is Hegel, whose
work is, in this respect, a sustained argument for the absolute propriety of
"history" and "event" and who thus seems exempt from the problems that
increasingly complicate the texts of those writing in his wake. Yet Hegel's sus-
tained excursus on the prosody of the speculative proposition in the "Preface"
to the Phenomenology of Spirit seems a first version of the difficulty posed by
writing for Nietzsche and Heidegger and Derrida—just as that text's assertion
of truth as a "Bacchanalian whirl in which no member is sober" seems the first
echo of what Nietzsche would later claim as news.
Setting Derrida's remarks about the "event" at stake in his writing into this
context gives those remarks a properly problematic edge. Is this contextualiza-
tion a neutralization of the subversive force of Derrida's writing, and thus a
reduction of that practice to what Derrida dismisses as "un episode moderne de
la reproduction philosophique"? Or is it a gesture toward one of Derrida's
deepest points, that, as he puts it in an essay in which he takes a careful distance
from Heidegger, "the text of metaphysics is comprehended. Still legible; and to
be read. It is not surrounded but rather traversed by its limit, marked in its
interior by the multiple furrow of its margin."2 What does it mean that one can
come to have this kind of question-that the difference between the domestica-
tion and the preservation of deconstruction can seem so infinitely narrow?
Derrida's "Episode moderne de la reproduction philosophique"—referred to
elsewhere in the same essay as "la reproduction auto-critique" and "1'auto-
critique interne de la philosophic"—may well recall the powerful vision of
modernism advanced in this country in the fifties and sixties in relation to the
visual arts and especially associated with the writings of Clement Greenberg.
I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerba-
tion of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant.
Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I
conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist. . . . The Enlightenment
criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its more accepted
sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the pro-
cedures themselves of that which is being criticized.3
This is the Modernism Derrida fears being co-opted by. It is also, as will
become apparent, a version of modernism which, depending as it does on a
strong distinction between inside and outside, Derrida's tools are particularly
 ON MODERNISM D 5

well designed to dismantle. However, rather than submit Greenberg's definition

to any easy simulacrum of deconstruction, I prefer to explore its ambiguities a
bit as a prelude to Derrida.
As Greenberg develops his essay, "Kantian self-criticism" is glossed as a
demand for the "rational justification" of "every formal social activity." This
is a demand before which it is possible to fail: "We know what has happened
to an activity like religion that has not been able to avail itself of 'Kantian'
immanent criticism in order to justify itself," Greenberg writes; and what we
know, presumably, is that religion has been unable to justify itself as the bearer
of a particular and autonomous truth, and so has withered away. Having no self
to criticize, it vanished under the force of the Enlightenment.4
On this view, "self-criticism" names an effort to find the irreducible rational
kernel of one's activity. In Greenberg's words:
The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of
each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from
or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be ren-
dered "pure" and in its "purity" find the guarantee of its standards of
quality as well as independence. ("Modernist Painting," p. 68)
The scare quotes around the forms of "purity" might warn us against
thinking that we know what is at stake in them; they might well be taken to mark
a place at which Greenberg is less than happy with the way he finds himself
putting things. If we do take the notion of purity to be transparent here, we are
likely to have little trouble seeing where this view will lead. Each art will have
to be said to possess its own irreducible essence, and the modern history of each
art will be that of its progressive paring away of the inessential as it moves
toward an increasing awareness and display of the essential kernel:
It was the stressing, however, of the ineluctable flatness of the
support that remained most fundamental in the process by which pic-
torial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. Flatness alone
was unique and exclusive to that art. The enclosing shape of the
support was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art
of the theater; color was a norm or means shared with sculpture as
well as with the theater. Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only
condition painting shared with no other art, and so modernist painting
oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else. ("Modernist
Painting," p. 69)
The development of modern art is, on this view, convergent with that of
modern science, so that "Modernist art belongs to the same historical and
cultural tendency as modern science." But with this Greenberg's view comes
into apparent conflict with itself—or, more exactly, appears to discount wholly
 6 D ON MODERNISM

its own distinction between the spirit of Enlightenment and the spirit of Kantian
self-criticism. Greenberg seems to be setting aside the very distinction on which
he would found his position.
Self-criticism is the term on which Greenberg insists, but it is also the term
that seems, in the end, to get somehow lost. And it seems to get lost in, so to
speak, the scare quotes around "purity." When we discount them and take
"purity" at something like face value, we find it naming the rational kernel of
art, a kernel that may be revealed in time (because not everything can happen
at once, or because we are confused in our perceptions or misled, or stupid) but
that is not in any essential respect historically determined.
If, on the other hand, Greenberg does mean, deeply, his distinction between
two modalities of criticism and is therefore properly nervous about his use of
the word "purity," the distinction will have to be worked out in a way that is
essentially historical. This version of things will not be organized around some
central and essential truth, but by a continuing and continuously difficult attempt
to find, in Greenberg's phrase, "the way to stronger, more expressive art."
(This version of Kant makes him Nietzsche's precursor.)
We can start developing this picture by looking at the brief historical asser-
tions from which Greenberg's essay takes off:
We know what has happened to an activity like religion that has not
been able to avail itself of "Kantian" immanent criticism in order to
justify itself. At first glance the arts might seem to have been in a
situation like religion's. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all
the tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were
going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple, and enter-
tainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated like
religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from this leveling
down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided
was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other
kind of activity. ("Modernist Painting," pp. 67-68)
The account of the emergence of modernism begins here not from a concern
for the purity or rationality of the particular arts, but from a concern with the
value of art at all (and this concern appears as a reaction to and against
Enlightenment criticism). It is as if art suddenly found itself in a situation in
which it became aware that it was capable of losing itself altogether—becoming
"mere" entertainment, devoid of larger relevance or authority—and so moved
to reoccupy its own proper and wholly aesthetic ground as more or other than
mere decoration. Thus Greenberg writes: "The essence of modernism lies, as
I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the
discipline itself—not in order to subvert, but to entrench it more firmly in its
area of competence."
 ON MODERNISM D 7

There are, of course, two stances one may take toward this kind of perceived
threat of loss and assimilation. If we take it that this perceived threat is in fact
nonexistent, the version of Greenberg we have already sketched will follow. The
movement toward aesthetic autonomy is nothing more than a reactive reen-
trenchment, a shedding of the inessential and a reappropriation of the central
kernel of art. In this view there is no room for anything that would deserve to
be called modernism (except as a style like another style within the sequence of
styles that would be the history of art). The idea that art must retreat into some
more restricted region of purely aesthetic activity, surrendering moral authority
as the cost of renewed security, is simply confused: there was never any need
for such reentrenchment since the danger was never real. The history of modern
art reduces to an unhappy episode, the confused attempt of art to maintain itself
in a logical and aesthetic space that would be magically closed to all extraaesthe-
tic contingency and so would be incapable as well of generating any history
beyond the simple fact of progression. We are free on this view to imagine a
"postmodernism" in which art would reassume its full moral and spiritual
authority as it wakes from its bad dream and realizes it need never have shed
that authority in the first place. The entire story is one of error, of overestima-
tion of the force of the rational criticism of the Enlightenment. The notion of
self-criticism proves radical only in its emptiness and absolute irrelevance.
"Purity" names precisely nothing.
Clearly, however prone Greenberg may be to misread himself, he is not
trying to say this, and if we are to understand his position fairly and fully we
are going to have to explore the other option. We are going to have to see what
happens if we take it that the perceived threat is (in some sense: we shall see
that it is difficult to pin this sense down) correctly perceived. Such an account
can begin only from the assumption that art is in fact something capable of being
"assimilated to entertainment pure and simple." The threat can be real only if
art is understood from the outset to be the sort of thing that can go astray in this
way.
We want, then, to say that it is an essential possibility of art that it can mistake
itself in a certain way. In so doing, we rule out any radically aestheticist position
from the very beginning, and this means that we are going to be able to use
notions like purity only if they are somehow bracketed; we have in effect already
built an impurity into our notion of art in a way that cannot be overcome. At
the same time, because we have begun from an effort to take a certain kind of
threat seriously, we are forced to speak of something like "purity" as a central
project for or aspiration of art. And with this double handling of "purity," we
have installed a contradiction at the heart of modernism and so given it a dialec-
tical motor capable of generating a real history operating in something other than
logico-aesthetic space—a space organized by a desire to continue the enterprise
of art and not a desire to offer "theoretical demonstrations."
 8 D ON MODERNISM

It should be noted that part of the power of this second reading of Greenberg
lies in its ability to map out within itself the very terms in which it (Greenberg)
is tempted to misread itself (himself). Greenberg can be said to oscillate between
a tendency to participate in or accede to the purifying impulse within modern-
ism, and another, more critical and complex tendency. Both positions can be
seen at work in his essay—but the first appears to preclude the second, while
the second, critical, position can place the participatory moment as a necessary
temptation. (This is of course to be expected, since we constructed this second
reading precisely in order to recover a central function for Greenberg's "self-
criticism.")
Greenberg's ablest student in this regard is undoubtedly the critic and art
historian Michael Fried. His series of brilliant and persuasive articles on the
emergence of modernist painting is an exemplary fleshing out of this second
Greenbergian position.
Fried argues, in a series of articles on Diderot now gathered together in his
book Absorption and Theatricality, that the abstract threat of the reduction of
art to entertainment is realized for French painting in the rococo.5 It is in the
paintings of, for example, Francois Boucher that art sees how it is that it might
lose itself: it catches a glimpse of a possible future, and that future is purely—
merely—decorative. One does not want to speak here of any cataclysmic Death
of Art. It is not the case that one fears that the activity of painting will somehow
cease; instead, that activity will cease to be one that matters. Painting will simply
become the creation of vaguely pretty objects, panels of pleasant wallpaper,
things to be glanced at and passed by. Painting would simply cease to be an art
(would cease to be able to be the bearer of the values we associate with, say,
the works of Rembrandt or Van Eyck or Poussin) and this could happen—would
happen—in silence and invisibility. A world in which painting had become mere
decoration would no longer even know how the Old Masters might have
mattered except as decoration (accompanied perhaps by some vague imputation
of inarticulate monumentality). (And if we are to have a fear for Jane Austen
or Henry James, Samuel Johnson or Lionel Trilling, it will have to be a fear of
this sort: a fear that they will be lost in plain sight, not behind some flood of
critical articles, but—as it were—on the very surface of that flood.)
There are, I think, real problems involved in trying to think or work through
the sense in which this vision can be said to be of a real possibility, but it is
important that these difficulties not block our recognition of the stakes in play.
The fear we attribute to the world of art is not bizarre; it is based on the way
things of culture increasingly do appear to die, to cease to count, in our world:
not with a bang, but a whimper. It is, among other things, fear of Muzak. We
can respond to this, recognize it—even as we hold on to our reservations about
the sense we can make of it as a real threat to the world of art.
Within the admittedly vague limits of these reservations, we can see that
 ON MODERNISM D 9

rococo is telling—revealing—a fundamental truth about art, and this truth is that
it exists for a beholder: that art will be decoration and answerable only to the
beholder's pleasure, the vagaries of taste, unless it can master its relation to that
beholder and make itself count for him or her. Rococo raises the question of the
aesthetic as such (and opens accordingly the possibility of "aestheticism" for
modern art and theories of it).
Rococo painting—whether one finally finds it "decorative" or not—registers
or responds to the emergence of a new public for painting, forces a recognition
of that public, of the publicness of painting in general, and so also of the
"primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld." It thus engenders
a complex problematic of aesthetic autonomy. It becomes of utmost importance
to painting that it be able to find a way to say that what happens with a person
standing before a painting is fundamentally different from what happens with a
person looking at wallpaper or gazing through a window. This project appears,
in the first instance, as a repudiation of something fundamental and ineluc-
table—the fact that paintings exist for a beholder. That this is precisely a repu-
diation of something that cannot be repudiated in that way determines the struc-
ture of the ensuing history: such a denial cannot but betray the recognition on
which it is founded.6 It is at this level that we can recover and justify our reser-
vations about the reality of the threat art perceives for itself. The account we
will want to have in the end will have to be able to steer its way between our
recognition of the fate art fears and our knowledge that this fear is also a denial
of the necessary conditions under which art always labors. This means that we
have to ask continually how seriously we can take this fear, not as a rhetorical
question but as a real and difficult question that nonetheless cannot even ensure
its own final seriousness. It is the insistence of this question that has become
central for criticism now.
I have said that for painting rococo raises the question of the aesthetic as such.
The consequent attempt to (re)establish the autonomy of the aesthetic can be
posed initially in terms of a problem of purification—but the attempt at purifica-
tion has become necessary only because painting has already glimpsed (and
would suppress) its openness to and implication in the "impurity" of the extra-
aesthetic. The problem at first appears to be simply semantic—a matter of
getting things (aesthetic and nonaesthetic) properly sorted out—but it can appear
at all only because of a prior structure that might be called grammatical insofar
as its full explication demands our parsing out the implications and transfor-
mations of the sentence, "Painting does (not) exist for a beholder." It is the "not"
that precludes, in the long run, any simple semantic solution for the art of
painting.
The initial problem as we have laid it out is that painting finds itself imperiled
by its own possibility of becoming mere decoration, and this means that it can
assert its aesthetic autonomy and purity only by refusing to admit this possibility
 10 D ON MODERNISM

of going astray. It has to think its own possibility of failure as itself already an
aesthetic failure. Painting that fails is not to be understood as "non-art"—
because then painting that succeeds would have to be understood on the basis
of its openness to non-art and so would be unable to guarantee its proper
aesthetic autonomy. Painting fails by failing to be painting, by being some other
art. The threat of the "merely decorative" is reconstrued as a threat of "theatri-
cality" and so a threat that remains itself properly aesthetic. Theater is the name
within an autonomous aesthetics for that which succumbs to the desire to exist
for its beholder. Painting no longer runs the risk of not being art; some
paintings, however, fail to be painting.
It will come as no surprise that the development of this position in practice
is accompanied by certain difficulties. If, for example, theatricality is to name
the possibility of painterly failure, and if it is not itself to become simply another
term for the extraaesthetic, it must be understood in some relation to the "real
drama" of the stage, a drama which would then figure as the master term for
successful painting—which would then be not painting, but another art: unless
we say that this drama has been realized on no stage, that the stage can learn
its (proper) drama only from painting—as Diderot does.
Clearly, there is a sort of game being played in which a claim to autonomy
and "purity" is being negotiated through a system of transformations and dis-
placements that aims not only to relegate a certain (inner) threat to outside the
enterprise proper, but even to relegate that place in which the threat can appear
to outside the discipline: not only is painting not liable to fall into mere decora-
tion, the threat itself bears not on painting but on the stage.
We should note here that, because of the way in which the issues of painting
(as a particular art) and aesthetics (in general) are intertwined, the system we
are explicating prescribes not only an impulse toward "pure painting" but also
an impulse toward a "total painting"—some synthesis of all the arts under
painting. Such double prescriptions are one of the constants of modernism. It
is worth seeing that in Mallarme, for example, the impulse toward a radically
purified poetry and the impulse toward a "Book" that would be the poetic
transumption of all art can-and, in a sense, must—coexist. This necessity
belongs to the grammatical linkages that tie a given artistic discipline to the
larger problem of the autonomy of aesthetics uberhaupt, and that tie a given art
to those other arts through which it determines and articulates its "proper"
possibilities. It is again the "not" that ties everything together.
All of this can be said to end in the disengagement of a properly aesthetic goal
for painting: a successful painting is one that (dramatically) masters its beholder,
stops her in her tracks and draws her into its frame, does not allow her to behold
it simply as an object hanging on the wall. Now, within the field of representa-
tional painting, not all subjects are equally apt to promote this absorption of the
viewer—a landscape or a still life, for example, invites—at least at first
 ON MODERNISM D 11

glance—external viewing or beholding in a way that a picture of a family

gathered around the bed of a dying patriarch or of an engraver bent over his
work does not. The latter subject matters already have a considerable ability to
draw us into participation (we face the paintings as, in effect, already a part of
the group around the bed; we find ourselves looking over the engraver's
shoulder and sharing his concentration). The restructuring of the painterly field
in terms of a polarity of absorption and theatricality leads not only to a certain
set of "lateral" distinctions between the arts (the distinction that sets "bad art"
and "non-art" together under the heading of "theatricality"), but also to a
"vertical" distinction within painting, organized by the master theme of
absorption and articulating itself as a hierarchy of genres. One of Fried's essays
on Diderot and the problem of theatricality begins expressly from a question
about the renewed emphasis on problems of genre and hierarchy.
Any particular hierarchy will be subject to continuing critique—and any
"genre" can appear to be the (more or less naturally) adequate vehicle for
serious painting. A painting like Greuze's "La Piete filiale" (Filial piety) will
quickly come to seem sentimental and "literary," playing on and to extra-
aesthetic responses in its viewer and so hurling him or her out of the instant of
the frame and into some larger narrative that is summed up in the painter's
moment. The very realization of this possibility of absorption reveals itself as
inherently theatrical (and looking at Greuze now we have, I suspect, little
trouble seeing this theatricality—what is difficult for us is to see how such a
work could ever have appeared as other than, even anti-, theatrical). So now it
is perhaps the solitary figure turned away from the viewer and absorbed utterly
in his work that seems to invite our absorption; but in so soliciting our attention
it implicitly places us as voyeurs and so once more as beholders and view-
ers ... so now it may be historical subjects absorbed in the fullness of their
action that demand our attention (and claim to be able to bear it), seeking to
realize as explicit tableaux the integral drama that remains unrealizable for the
stage. . . . The sequence appears arbitrary, answering to no logic given in
advance or through the essence of painting. In large measure Fried's task has
been to show the critical logic that makes the history of art here something other
than mere and arbitrary sequence—but also something other than a simple
unfolding of truth in time.
Insofar as all of these efforts aim at the realization of an artistic purity that
is predicated on a denial of theatricality and a denial of the beholder, they are
doomed to critique and to failure. There is no way to absorption because
absorption is, in the last analysis, a lie. In this dialectic of absorption and theatri-
cality, absorption may appear as the master theme but theatricality is the only
real term. The dialectic, as it were, limps along on one leg—and this leg is
supposed to be the bum one, the one to be expunged from the whole and healthy
body of pure and absorbing painting. In this history we have neither a simple
 12 D ON MODERNISM

and progressive purging of the inessential from some final truth of painting (as
in Greenberg) nor the (in some ways more inviting) dialectical development of
painting toward its truth, but instead something like the retrospective dialectical
responsiveness of painting to its failure to be autonomous and free of extra-
aesthetic contingency.
This last statement brings into view a new aspect of the development we are
considering. The history of the field polarized the terms theatricality and
absorption would be self-enclosed, would be purely a history of painting—thus
analyzable entirely in terms of the movement of painting toward ever more
absorptive—ever more successful and more fully painted—works. But even as
theatricality is the term that would ensure the distinction between the aesthetic
and the nonaesthetic, it is also the term that reinserts the nonaesthetic at the very
heart of what would be pure art. (To put this another way: we have said that
theatricality names at once "bad art" and "non-art" undecidably. It puts both
terms into play. In discussing paintings or objects claiming to be paintings one
will want to use both but will frequently find oneself unable to use either
comfortably, and it is through this "confusion" that it seems possible to mark
off a region that would be an autonomous art: Duchamp's work makes its claim
on our attention by the way it plays on this confusion).
All of this means that an adequate history of art during this period will
necessarily involve reference to extraaesthetic contingency. But this reference
will, in its turn, be necessarily constrained by its relevance to or visibility for
the issues that the history of art has generated for and out of itself. In Fried's
analysis, the move from the historical tableaux of David to the political action
paintings of Couture is a move responsive to the contingencies of French politi-
cal history; and it is because French politics are thus made part of the problem-
atic of painting that Manet is able to pose the issues of his painting in terms of
"Frenchness" in a way that allows him to recover a certain contact with the
larger tradition of Western painting.7 We might note that it is because this his-
tory in effect made itself as a history of French painting—and not simply because
it is peopled with French painters—that the history Fried finds of interest is
always to be described as a history of French painting. This is very different
from some ' 'preset'' dialectical development in which the spirit of France (say)
has its own bit to contribute to the working out of the overall pattern. To the
extent that there is an overall pattern, it is there as the product of a certain per-
sistent movement toward autonomy that must continually take account of those
other histories from which it cannot simply disimplicate itself.
We ought to be able to see now that within the history of modernist painting
the problem raised by the attempt to distinguish aesthetic and nonaesthetic
complicates itself not only into a question of genre and subject matter, but also
into questions about what is and is not proper to—internal to—the history of
 ON MODERNISM D 13

painting, and—finally—into questions about the continuity and discontinuity of

that history.
One wants, for example, to say both that new paintings—new claims to the
absorption of the beholder—are implicit or explicit denunciations of the
(theatrical) work that has preceded them, and that they are possible and compre-
hensible only on the basis of that work. In this history each work is making a
claim to autonomy and to the adequate realization of what painting ("as such")
really is. But the claim itself can only be explicated through reference to those
other works that the claim itself would disallow. There is tension between an
impulse to novelty unburdened by any past and the necessary implication,
rootedness, of that impulse in a certain history—or between the desire of
painting to see itself as deployed simply in a logico-pictorial space of problems
and solutions, and the obvious fact of its historicity. This tension is the historical
reflection of the tension we have seen at work in the attempt to institute a radical
distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic.
Fried summarizes much of this history as follows:
As I see it and have tried to demonstrate in previous studies, the
evolution of painting in France in the nineteenth century up to and
including Courbet is largely to be understood in terms of the dialec-
tical unfolding of a problematic of painting and beholder which
emerged as an issue for French artists and critics as early as the mid
1750s and which received its classic formulation in Diderot's writings
on drama and painting of the 1750s and 1760s. The fundamental
question addressed by Diderot concerned the conditions that had to be
fulfilled in order for the art of painting to successfully persuade its
audience of the truthfulness of its representations. . . . I have else-
where summed this up by saying that Diderot's conception of painting
rested ultimately upon the supreme fiction that the beholder did not
exist, that he was not really there, standing before the canvas.8
To this point we have been exploring the consequences for painting of its
project of pure absorption as it is prescribed by this frame, and in this explora-
tion we have always come back to the way in which the project is complicated
and even disrupted by the fact that its foundation is, in the end, a fiction, a
denial. It should be intuitively clear that such an enterprise can only become ever
more difficult, the denial ever more extreme. Fried finds it coming to a crisis
in the work of Gustave Courbet. Here the struggle against the facts of beholder
and beholding becomes a battle against the very identity of the artist himself:
"The self-portrait was at the outset a privileged genre for Courbet because his
struggle against his own identity as a beholder found there a natural—a counter-
conventional—home." As Courbet's painting develops out of this struggle it
comes ultimately to "aspire to abolish the impersonal or objective conditions
 14 D ON MODERNISM

constitutive of the very possibility of spectatordom" (that is, it aspires to realize

in fact the terms of Diderot's supreme fiction). This cannot but force a crisis,
a turning point, within the development of modernist painting, and Fried locates
this turning point in Manet:
In Edouard Manet's seminal masterpieces of the first half of the
1860s, Courbet's enterprise is reversed in almost all respects. Most
important, Manet seems intuitively to have recognized that Courbet's
attempt to abolish the very possibility of spectatordom was doomed in
every instance to (ontological not artistic) failure, or at any rate that
success in that attempt was literally inconceivable, and that it was
necessary to establish the beholder's presence abstractly—to build into
the painting the separateness, distancedness, and mutual facing that I
have associated with the painting-beholder relationship in its traditional
or unreconstructed form—in order that the worst consequences of
theatricalization of that relationship be averted.
This is, radically, an event in the development of modernist painting—an
event in a way that the move from David to Couture or from Couture to Courbet
is not. These latter transitions at least offer the possibility of being thought of
purely in terms of a logico-pictorial matrix. The event Fried wants to localize
in Manet is not simply a further move within such an apparent abstract matrix,
but a transformation of the terms that engendered such an appearance in the first
place: Manet's painting —as Fried's essay "Manet's Sources" argues —is
predicated on an explicit pictorial acknowledgment of the fact and presence of
the beholder. Such an acknowledgment is to be sharply distinguished from any
dialectical overcoming of the opposition between "theatricality" and "absorp-
tion." These terms are not surpassed but redistributed in such a way that the
absorptive project can and must be recognized as itself inherently theatrical—so
that the only way to whatever can exist in the place "absorption" set out to name
is through an explicit acknowledgment of the theatricality of such an under-
taking. The attempt to create pure and absorptive (nontheatrical) works is now
bound to appear "merely theatrical."

One is tempted to say that what has happened here is that painting has finally
come into its truth, has appropriated for itself its proper field or problematic—
except that this problematic is precisely that of painting's essential impropriety,
its essential—if profoundly difficult—possibility of losing itself. "Theatricality"
can no longer serve as some external dumping place for the failures of painting
because it is now a term internal to painting itself. By the same token, one will
no longer be able to maintain some sort of implicitly absorptive concern with,
for example, the hierarchy of genres separate from the outer darkness of the
theatrical. (But, of course, this was always true; it was only that one had thought
 ON MODERNISM D 15

that one could maintain such a separation—the event we are examining has the
form of an acknowledgment and not that of the emergence of a new truth or new
knowledge of the real situation or essence of painting.) The contradiction or
system of contradictions at the heart of the world of painting has been acknowl-
edged in such a way that the claim of a given painting on its audience (a claim
it now, in effect, admits to making) can no longer be explicated solely out of
that painting alone (it cannot be said to be simply and in itself absorbing), nor
can its value be determined in simple contrast to other and merely theatrical
works. Rather, the claim a given painting makes on us can only be fully articu-
lated through its relation to other paintings. Fried can, for example, advance his
claim for Morris Louis only by distinguishing that work from the theatricality
of the work of Donald Judd or Tony Smith—and these works are thus themselves
already implicitly recovered from the darkness to which the label of theatricality
might appear to condemn them.9
We might say that Diderot advanced a theory that would ideally have allowed
him to stroll through a gallery being arrested by some paintings and not by
others; presumably all the arresting pieces could then be gathered into one place
and that place would be a collection of works that were at once ' 'art'' and ' 'good
art." We have now moved into an area where this is explicitly impossible.
Nothing—as we may find ourselves protesting—can be kept out of a museum—
which now becomes the place or one of the places where the struggle to sort out
art and non-art, good art and bad art, is necessarily fought out in complex and
ultimately undecidable ways (and, again, Diderot's gallery was never possible,
but Diderot could not say this).10
We might also say that the central questions in this newer frame are no longer
on the order of "What is art?" but "How is art?" I want to call this a shift from
semantics to grammar.
A part of what has to be said here is that this acknowledgment radically alters
the way one can think or talk about the history that preceded it. This history can
no longer appear (as, we may be tempted to say, it did to itself) as simple and
progressive but must show itself instead as organized by its denial of the
beholder. It is not clear whether one wants to claim that some new and deeper
level of coherence has been discovered—a level at which what had appeared as
merely accidental now answers to a new necessity that is the real organizing
principle (of the text, of the history)—or to claim that a certain disruption of any
principle of system or coherence has occurred, so that the history of painting
from Greuze to Courbet seems to be traversed everywhere by gaps and faults.
At different times and in varying circumstances one or the other of these claims
will tend to take the lead—one and the same painting may need to be said to
count for us in its novelty and as a "breakthrough," or in the way it develops
and prolongs some of the deepest tendencies of the strongest art of the past 200
years. . . . The grammatical structure at work here is a reflection of the
 16 D ON MODERNISM

grammatical tensions we have seen in the opposition of theatricality and absorp-

tion.
This is the structure of "radical self-criticism," and such criticism is dif-
ferent from either knowledge of the self in its inmost essence on the one hand,
or the utter dissolution of the self on the other. These latter are recognizable as
temptations that belong to the project of "radical self-criticism" or as possibilities
through which such a project may have to understand itself in certain
circumstances. But if they are taken up as independent stances, we will be
inclined to condemn them as "theatrical" (with all the recognitions and
acknowledgments that condemnation must entail).11
Such "radical self-criticism" is also clearly different from any search for
abstract purity. The search for purity may have a certain justice as a description
of the history from Diderot to Courbet (as sketched by Fried)—but even here
its usefulness, its ability to understand the paintings in question—is extremely
limited; the history as a history is comprehensible only on the basis of our
recognition of the deeper complications that prescribe both the search for an
abstract purity and its necessary failure. The two terms of "radical self-criti-
cism" together circumscribe the historicity of modernist art.
"Self-criticism" can be "radical" only if it genuinely places its self at stake
and holds itself in this condition of being at stake, assuming neither the positive
guarantee of that self s inviolable autonomy nor the negative guarantee of its
nonexistence; and this means that self-criticism is radically and inevitably
critical—one can paint only out of the history of painting and the particular
concrete paintings that matter for and constitute that history. For the art critic
or historian, the confrontation with a given painting is necessarily an explication
of that history within which the painting in question exerts its claim on us. For
the painter who would explicitly acknowledge the situation of painting (for
example, Manet), this acknowledgment necessarily takes a form that can be
described either as an appropriation of the great paintings of the past or as
criticism of them. One can see a parallel logic at work in Greenberg's descrip-
tions of surrealism: the tension between a movement of return and a more
"revolutionary" moment of parody belongs properly to such an attempt to
reopen the possibility of art.12 The critic who writes from the position of a
Greenberg or a Fried cannot simply "exclude" anyone from the history of art;
exclusion belongs to the way the issues are set up for modernism: so that one
will, on the one hand, always want very much to find that artifact (dadaist or
minimalist or conceptual . . . ) that lies definitively beyond the limits of art
(and one will be led inevitably to assert such exclusions); and one will, on the
other hand, be equally inevitably led to acknowledge that this "far side" of art
always lies within art itself (so that one's exclusions will always be given in
terms of theatricality, and such an exclusion is, finally, no exclusion at all).13
But then it will also be true that one can no longer offer the sorts of historical
 ON MODERNISM D 17

accounts one might like. One cannot pick out cleanly the "true" or "central"
line of development except by including in that account a number of works that
one wants to exclude from that central line. One cannot lay down an orderly
sequence of steps in the progressive solution of certain problems given—more
or less—in the nature of art, as the real problems of painting. And, by the same
token, one will be hard put to find some simple origin for such a set of problems.
One may want to attribute the origin of modernism to Diderot and the painters
of the mid-eighteenth century, but one will also want to attribute this origin to
Manet. This cannot be settled by breaking the history into a first phase and a
second, because the first is only comprehensible on the basis of the second, and
the second does not supplant or otherwise do away with the first—instead, it
persists within it in such a way as to present one with the temptation to break
"modernism" into orderly phases—"traditional" and "antitraditional,"
"modern" and "postmodern." This original tension is overcome only at the
cost of doing away with the problematic itself. What is needed is a way to think
about how this tension works, what notions of time and event it puts into play.
This tension within modernist painting ends by breaking its apparent histori-
cal bounds—the development of painting from neoclassicism to the present. It
forces Greenberg's description of the Old Masters as "using art to conceal
art"—a description that does not condemn them to painterly irrelevance and
error but stresses the way they are both again and newly visible for us. The
modernist project is importantly a conservative one, motivated by a desire to
ensure the production of works of art that can matter to their audience, can exert
a claim on that audience, in the same way that the Old Masters do; but this also
means that the success of modernist painting will entail a reevaluation of the
great art of the past, or, perhaps more accurately, a new recovery of the value
of the great art of the past. It is altogether too easy to call this a reduction of
the Old Masters to their modernist rereading and revision; these painters are
valuable not simply because they somehow manage to be modernist despite
themselves, but also and primarily as they are masters and as their works are
the standards that set in motion the modernist enterprise—as they are the source
from which it draws its inspiration and strength. These same objects may,
however, also be or seem to be the bearers of what has become the "merely
tasteful" and as such come to represent that which must above all be purged
from serious painting.
The relations between the modern and the traditional are satisfactorily caught
neither by an insistence on rupture nor by a counterinsistence on continuity.
Stanley Cavell, whose writings on modernism have emerged in close dialogue
with Fried's work, has offered the following:
The essential fact of (what I refer to as) the modern lies in the relation
between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that
 18 D ON MODERNISM

enterprise, in the fact that this relation has become problematic.

(MWM, p. xix)
This formulation, tying together the thing and its grammar, "the modern,"
and "what I refer to as the modern," is of surprising simplicity and equally
surprising complexity. Of particular significance in the present context is the
way it seems to cut the modern away from any historical particularity—if "the
modern" is an event, that event is primarily grammatical and not—not easily—
chronological. "Modernism" seems almost to invade history, transforming that
field in such a way that every point within it is able to bear the weight both of
radical rupture with the past and of resolution of continuity with it. "Modern-
ism" becomes properly capable of finding itself wherever it looks, even as it
thus finds itself only in division against itself.
Such logic returns us to the "exterior form"—rupture and redoubling—of the
"event" announced by Derrida at Hopkins. Our business from here on will be
with the "inner form" and philosophic particularity of this "event."

I am suggesting that we see Derrida in something like the way Fried sees
Manet or Morris Louis—as a figure deeply involved in a history and a discipline
that has become complex and problematic, to the point of being deeply,
internally, at war with itself. It should be apparent from what we have seen of
Fried's work that the critic of modernist art cannot escape his own implication
in the logic of that modernism. He cannot, for example, mean "theatricality"
quite the way he perhaps would like (as radically exclusive of certain types of
work) without undercutting his own ability to valorize the works he does want
to call art—without, that is, falling into a certain theatricality himself. Such
criticism is thus obliged to a project of radical self-criticism, an undertaking that
is at least implicitly a reflection on its own condition. In general, Fried has been
content simply to mark the place where such further reflection becomes
necessary:
Moreover, the notion that there are problems "intrinsic" to the art of
painting is, so far as I can see, the most important question begged in
this essay. It has to do with the concept of a medium and is one of the
points philosophy and art criticism might discuss most fruitfully, if a
dialogue between them could be established. Similarly, an examination
of the ' 'grammar'' (in the sense Wittgenstein gives to this word in the
Philosophical Investigations) of a family of concepts essential to this
essay—e.g., problem, solution, advance, logic, validity—would be
more than welcome.14
Stanley Caveil's definition of modernism means to be responsive to these
issues, and the notion of grammar to which we have had recourse in the pre-
 ON MODERNISM D 19

ceding pages is itself a crude and unsystematic derivation from Cavell and
Wittgenstein. It is now time to look more directly at Cavell's writings on
modernism and philosophy. It is through this work that we will make our first
approach to the meaning of modernism in philosophy, and so to the sense of the
claim I am making for Jacques Derrida.
Caveil's work plunges us immediately into the complex field of the "oblique
and shifting relations between an art, and its criticism, and philosophy" (MWM,
p. 223). This is a space in which the relations of the various disciplines to their
proper pasts and to each other are always problematic, necessarily critical, and
always caught up within the terms of radical self-criticism. It is the region we
enter when we say that the problem with Greenberg's essay on modernist
painting is that it finally fails to take seriously its dependence on a philosophic
"model" that is a demand for its own submission to self-criticism—and there-
fore something other than a simple model.
In Cavell's case, this exploration of oblique and shifting relations is not
separable from his meditation on philosophic modernism itself; and this
meditation, in its turn, can be no more sure of exactly where it begins and ends
than a modernist painting can be sure of its claims to be painting or to be art.
Cavell writes that two of the essays in Must We Mean What We Say?-essays
on King Lear and on Endgame—may be thought to be pieces of literary criticism
or of applied philosophy, while the remainder "are (at least closer to being)
straight philosophy."
I wish to deny this, but to deny it I would have to use the notions of
philosophy and of literature and of criticism, and the denial would be
empty so far as those notions themselves are unexamined and so far as
the impulse to assert such distinctions, which in certain moods I share,
remains unaccounted for. In wishing to deny that some of these essays
are philosophical and others not, I do not deny that there are differ-
ences among them, and differences between philosophy and literature
or between philosophy and literary criticism; I am suggesting that we
do not understand these differences. (MWM, pp. xvii-xviii)
A similar problem has grown up around Derrida's writings as they have been
received in this country—although the impulse has been to take this work as
already both philosophy and criticism rather than to insist on their distinction.
Throughout the following chapters I will tend to insist on such distinctions and
on the necessity of trying to come to some understanding of them—without
losing touch with the impulse to blur over such distinctions, an impulse "which
in certain moods I share."
Cavell's insistence on finding a way to hold open the question of the relation
between philosophy and literary criticism so as to understand both the possibility
of their coincidence and the necessity of their distinction is implicitly also an
 20 D ON MODERNISM

insistence on posing the question of modernism in philosophy. It entails our

taking a more partial stance toward two other distinctions:
If I deny a distinction, it is the still fashionable distinction between
philosophy and meta-philosophy, the philosophy of philosophy. The
remarks I make about philosophy (for example, about certain of its
differences from other subjects) are, where accurate, on a par with
remarks I make about acknowledgment or about mistakes or about
metaphor. I would regard this fact—that philosophy is one of its own
normal topics—as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish
philosophy to do. (MWM, p. xviii)
I do assert a distinction throughout these essays which, because it
may seem either controversial or trivial, I want to call attention to
from the beginning—a distinction between the modern and the tradi-
tional, in philosophy and out. My claim is not that all contemporary
philosophy which is good is modern; but the various discussions about
the modern I am led to in the course of these essays are the best I can
offer in explanation of the way I have written, or the way in which I
would wish to write. (MWM, p. xix)
The denial of the distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy pre-
cludes the displacement of the question of philosophic modernism into mere
epistemological regress and enforces our taking seriously the challenge latent in
Kant's "explicit recognition that the terms in which the past is criticized are
specific to one's own position and require justification from within that posi-
tion" (MWM, p. xix). This cuts off at its source the sort of confusion we have
seen at work in Greenberg's essay (Greenberg in effect thinks to offer a loosely
metaphilosophical report on Kant's philosophical position). What Cavell calls a
recognition, Greenberg reports as a discovery—a truth about the limits of dis-
ciplinary work roughly parallel to the truth of physics, and so capable of over-
seeing the self-critical project of the various arts. It is this tacit assumption of
the distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy that enables Greenberg's
slide from a notion of "philosophy, which is critical by definition" to the asser-
tion that "Kantian self-criticism finds its perfect expression in science rather
than in philosophy"—a slide in which what is lost, what becomes incoherent,
is precisely the central notion of self-criticism.
To deny the distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy is to rule out
as well any picture in which philosophy figures as a form of science—and with
this any picture in which the fundamental stakes are stakes of knowledge. It is
this that sets up, for example, Cavell's sustained engagement with the argument
between skeptic and anti-skeptic. This argument takes itself to be about knowl-
edge, but can neither understand nor resolve itself until it is reconceived of terms
of acknowledgment. The confrontation with skepticism—both about the world
 ON MODERNISM D 21

and about other minds—is central to Cavell's work. An understanding of this

centrality will feed directly into Cavell's notion of philosophic modernism and
so open into our exploration of Derrida's work.
At the heart of this confrontation is a question of criteria—a question the
approach to philosophy through ordinary language is particularly well suited to
raise. What ordinary language can teach us, according to Cavell, is not—not
primarily in any case—that certain philosophic questions arise only through
mistakes about—abstractions from—our ordinary use of language, but rather
that all utterances—even philosophical—mean from within their human use. The
appeal to ordinary language is not an appeal to truth or authority, but an appeal,
as it were, to our selves—to what Cavell calls "the specific plight of mind and
circumstances within which a human being gives voice to his condition" (MWM,
p. 240). The appeal thus operates not as a means to or a guarantee of knowledge,
but as a way of reminding ourselves what kind of thing will count for us in
response to the questions we raise. Such an appeal does not drive a wedge
between ordinary usage and its philosophic etiolations; rather it reminds us of
their solidarity, so that one can take the burden of the appeal to be either that
one must seek that place from which the saying of what one wants to repudiate
as extraordinary, abusive, far-fetched, catechristic, is in fact ordinary (how the
skeptic can mean what he or she says) or that one must learn just how extra-
ordinary what we ordinarily say finally is (how Austin's Finney manages to get
everything just right as he recounts the scalding of his patient).15 However we
proceed through this choice we end with our philosophy and our selves, our
words and our plight, facing one another. As Cavell puts it:
The way you must rely upon yourself as a source of what is said when,
demands that you grant full title to others as sources of that data-not
out of politeness, but because the nature of the claim you make for
yourselves is repudiated without that acknowledgment: it is a claim
that no one knows better than you whether and when a thing is said,
and if this is not to be taken as a claim to expertise (a way of taking it
which repudiates it) then it must be understood to mean that you know
no better than others what you claim to know. (MWM, pp. 239-40)
The very possibility of making this kind of appeal implies a stance toward
skepticism, but, as Cavell stresses,
the appeal to ordinary language cannot directly repudiate the skeptic
(or the traditional philosopher generally) by, for example, finding that
what he says contradicts what we ordinarily say or by claiming that he
cannot mean what he says: the former is no surprise to him and the
latter is not obviously more than a piece of abuse. What the appeal
can and ought directly to do is to display what the skeptic does or
must mean, even how he can mean what he says. (MWM, p. 240)
 22 D ON MODERNISM

The moment we approach the skeptic no longer by thinking to refute him,

but by asking how he can say that, the ground shifts beneath the traditional
arguments. The classic antagonists reveal themselves to be complicitous with
one another, agreed in advance that a self or feeling is properly an object of
knowledge (and therefore also one that can be found to be "unknowable"). The
skeptic and the anti-skeptic are united in the belief that a feeling is something
one has first of all privately, so subject equally and indifferently to expression
or concealment. They read, together, the utterances "I know I am in pain" or
"I know you are in pain" as if they are epistemological statements, judgments
in need of that sort of grounding—in certainty, transparency. In fact, Cavell
argues, the case is just the reverse: what the skeptic has discovered is that there
is no such grounding available for such utterances and that this is a fundamental
fact about what it is to be human:
there are special problems about our knowledge of another; exactly the
problems the skeptic sees. And these problems can be said to invoke a
special concept of knowledge, or region of the concept of knowledge,
one which is not a function of certainty. This region has been pointed
to in noticing that a first person acknowledgment of pain is not an
expression of certainty but an expression of pain, that is, an exhibiting
of the object of knowledge. (MWM, pp. 258-59)
The problem for Cavell is that as the skeptic and his would-be confounder
trade their arguments about the knowability of selves and feelings, they lose,
together, the experience the skeptic means to offer for registration—transform-
ing an experience of our separateness (the "terrible or fortunate fact, at once
contingent and necessary, that / am not in that [your] position") into an
epistemological problem, "a metaphysical fact [into] an intellectual lack"
(MWM, pp. 259, 263). Cavell's impulse is to redeem these facts from our
reduction of them to matters of cognition, epistemology, and what we have come
to call "psychology"-our faith in the psyche as the radically private object of
our knowledge.
This impulse is attuned to the deepest motives of modern philosophy. Both
Anglo-American and Continental philosophers find their way into the twentieth
century only by passing through a critique of "psychologism," whether in Frege
or in Husserl. In Cavell's case, however, the screw is turned tighter still:
We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl
to undo the "psychologizing" of logic (like Kant's undoing Hume's
psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe
such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it
attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the neces-
sity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral cate-
gories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and
 ON MODERNISM D 23

passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of phil-
osophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat
them, what their role is in our lives. (MWM, p. 91)
We do well here to note the resonances of this with a passage from one of
Derrida's essays on the psychoanalytic writings of Nicolas Abraham (with
whom we will be concerned at greater length in a later chapter):
Nicolas Abraham sought . . . an effective passageway through phe-
nomenology . . . a reinterpretation of its content . . . and of its
method. . . . These were the conditions for a critical break with
every sort of presupposition or naivete, whose traces psychoanalysis
itself, even today, is still unevenly maintaining. A break, in particular,
with every sort of psychologism.18
The result in both cases is, in ways that may look radically different, a con-
cern with "what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our
lives."
Derrida and Cavell stand together at a major crossing in modern philosophy,
a point at which what seemed philosophy's search for its own pure and proper
ground apart from any psychology or psychologism is radically complicated by
what can appear either as philosophy's invasion of psychology (as if to protect
psychology from its own internal tendency to psychologism) or as philosophy's
coming to acknowledge psychology as something inevitably internal to itself
(and so not simply dismissible as an accidental and exterior encrusting "-ism").
The obvious question here is, "What can Cavell mean in speaking of the need
to undo the 'psychologizing of psychology' "? This does not appear to be, on the
face of things, a bad thing: what would psychology look like if it were
"depsychologized"?
I suppose the simplest answer to this would be that it would not look quite
like psychology. In particular, it would not look like that disciplinary thing that
lies just alongside but clearly outside, for example, logic; the world—the human
world in any case—would no longer break in two along that line of division.
Things would no longer parse easily into the merely psychological and the
logical. This might mean, for example, that what we find funny might be not
simply a matter of opinion, personal perspective, or point of view, but rather
a matter of what is funny. Some things aren't funny no matter who laughs at
them, and those who do laugh at such things are not so much expressing their
selves or their opinions as they are displaying their being apart—for better or
worse—from the conventions that compose our nature. This laughter demands
a psychology in a way shared laughter does not; a psychology that stands on this
foundation is one that begins precisely in a forgetting of what binds us together.
Such a psychology is already a psychologism, a reduction of the psyche to its
privacy or claims to privacy—a locking of that psyche in its garden and so an
 24 D ON MODERNISM

enforcing of it within that "picture." Cavell's diagnosis follows directly from his
understanding of Wittgenstein's diagnosis of the philosopher:
He finds that someone has become obsessed with a "picture" of the
way he imagines the world or the mind must be; or supposes himself
to be communicating a piece of information when in fact no one could
fail to know what he says (hence no one could be informed by it).
Such a person—any person at such a moment—is lost not in parable
but in fact; he has lost not the depth of his words, but their surface,
their ordinariness—not their power to save, but their power to record;
he is out of touch not with his individual existence but with his
common human nature.17
The skeptic, along with his psychologizing opponent, arises just at that point
at which the fact of our "common human nature" to be registered is that of our
separation from one another. When this effort at registration turns, behind its
own back, into a search for an epistemologically grounded reconstruction of that
common human nature, then that nature has already been deeply lost, and we
can find our way back to it by collapsing and conflating the distinctions our quest
for certainty brings in its wake:
[Wittgenstein] also says that language, and life, rests on conventions.
What he means is, I suppose, that they have no necessity beyond what
human beings do. He does not mean, for example, that we might all
convene and decide or vote on what our human forms of life shall be,
choose what we shall find funny or whether we will continue finding
loss or comfort where we do. If we call these arrangements conven-
tional, we must then also call them natural.
The argument about skepticism is thus not simply an argument within
philosophy. It is an argument that makes plausible a certain purifying separation
of disciplines and thus spills over into issues one might otherwise be tempted
to call "metaphilosophical." The position of skepticism within modern
philosophic thought is of a piece with the disciplinary position of philosophy
itself. To stand, as Cavell would, in a new relation to the argument between
skeptic and anti-skeptic is to stand in a new relation to the discipline itself.
In this transformed field—a field in which philosophy admits to its inevitable
entanglement with psychology (its dealing with questions that it is essentially
human to have)—philosophy is free to recognize once again within itself an
impulse that can be called therapeutic. And what this therapy would address is
our tendency to take ourselves for psychological, or for epistemological, as
objects of knowledge in either case, rather than the living beings we, more or
less, actually are.
A consequence of this in Cavell's writings is that a certain notion of therapy,
 ON MODERNISM D 25

loosely derived from psychoanalysis, and a certain understanding of the nature

of the philosophic response to skepticism flow together, most visibly in Cavell's
rapprochement of Wittgenstein to Hegel:
That is, of course, Wittgenstein's sense of the way philosophical prob-
lems end. It is true for him, in the Investigations at any rate, this
happens when we have gone through a process of bringing ourselves
back into our natural forms of life, putting our souls back into our
bodies. . . . That a resolution of this sort is described as the solution
of a philosophical problem, and as the goal of its particular mode of
criticism, represents for me the most original contribution Wittgenstein
offers philosophy. I can think of no closer title for it, in an established
philosophical vocabulary, than Hegel's use of the term Aujhebung
. . . as an ideal of (one kind of) philosophical criticism—a criticism
in which it is pointless for one side to refute the other, because its
cause and topic is the self getting in its own way—it seems about
right.
. . . It is my impression that many philosophers do not like Wittgen-
stein's comparing what he calls his "methods" to therapies; but for
me part of what he means by this comparison is brought out in think-
ing of the progress of psychoanalytic therapy. The more one learns, so
to speak, the hang of oneself, and mounts one's problems, the less one
is able to say what one has learned; not because you have forgotten
what it was, but because nothing you said would seem like an answer
or a solution: there is no longer any question or problem with which
your words would match. (MWM, pp. 85-86)
This confluence is of but intermittent interest to Cavell—his philosophic
center lies in Kant not Hegel—but is absolutely central for Derrida's work, and
our approach to Derrida will be very much in terms of it, in terms especially
of the problematic play of identity and difference, philosophy and psychology,
at work between Hegel and Freud. It is enough here, however, to remark how
Cavell's notion of acknowledgment—opening on one side into an image of
therapy—opens on another into a version or reading of what Hegel calls "the
labor of the negative." The achievement of acknowledgment is deeply bound to
its failure—and its radical failure, the denial of acknowledgment, inevitably
gives itself away, leaves its mark:
A "failure to know" might just mean a piece of ignorance, an absence
of something, a blank. A "failure to acknowledge" is the presence of
something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion,
a coldness. Spiritual emptiness is not a blank. —Just as, to say that
behavior is expressive is not to say that the man impaled upon his
sensation must express it in his behavior; it is to say that in order not
 26 D ON MODERNISM

to express it he must suppress the behavior, to twist it. And if he

twists it far or often enough he may lose possession of that region of
the mind which the behavior is expressing. (MWM, p. 264)
Here we are as close as Cavell ever comes to explicitly Freudian formula-
tions, close enough for us to say that for Cavell a theory of repression will make
sense only insofar as it is a theory of how a certain failure of acknowledgment
comes to pass.
The contrast between knowing and acknowledging has another interesting
feature. If the issue is one of knowledge, you have, in respect to your pain, an
apparently privileged relationship from which I am excluded; but when the issue
is one of acknowledgment, I stand in a position no better and no worse than your
own. Finitude lies not simply between us, but within us. Cavell's essay
"Knowing and Acknowledging" thus ends:
Here is the source of our gratitude to poetry. And this sense of
unknownness is a competitor of the sense of childish fear as an expla-
nation for our idea, and need, of God. —And why should the mind be
less dense and empty and mazed and pocked and clotted—and why less
a whole—than the world is? At least we can say in the case of some
mental phenomena, when you have twisted or covered your expres-
sions far enough or long enough, or haven't yet found the words
which give the phenomenon expression, I may know better than you
how it is with you. I may respond even to the fact of your separate-
ness from me (not to mention mine from you) more immediately than
you.
To know your pain is to acknowledge it, or to withhold the
acknowledgment. —I know your pain the way you do. (MWM, p. 266)
In such a passage one sees the way in which a doubleness of language and
of voice insists even into what appears to be—what wants to be—a conclusion,
a resolution of the controversy that has presumably set the two voices against
one another in the first place. Even in this brief passage, it becomes increasingly
difficult to sort out where one voice ends and the other responds—or to tell
which voice is Cavell's and which that of another. We can take the last para-
graph to employ two voices—and yet they here appear to say the same—and yet
again each demands that it be heard somehow distinctly. The grammar of such
disruption is the grammar of the acknowledgment it would accomplish.
Cavell's "other voice" arises from his concentration on the problem of other
minds as it emerges through skepticism about material objects and in tragedy,
and as it calls for an act of (philosophic) acknowledgment. Such an acknowl-
edgment must, Cavell argues, be an explicit recognition of the way in which the
skeptic can mean what he says—of the way in which his apparently outrageous
assertions are in fact ordinary statements once one recognizes when and where
 ON MODERNISM Q 27

one is tempted to them. Philosophic acknowledgment of the recurrence of

philosophic skepticism demands recognition of the skeptic in one's self. So
Cavell writes, "Wittgenstein's interlocutors, when he writes well, when he is
philosophically just, express thoughts which strike us as at once familiar and
foreign, like temptations," and so also Cavell comes to put such interlocutors
at work within his own writings.
Acknowledgment and its tendency to lose itself in—or as—epistemology is
thus a central theme in CavelFs work, and it is one that bears not only on
questions internal to philosophy but also on the structure of the field itself. Not
only are Cavell's remarks about philosophy "on a par with remarks I make
about acknowledgment," his remarks about acknowledgment are, in the end,
remarks about philosophy as well. It is in these terms that we should understand
Cavell's refusal to accept or deny a distinction between philosophy and literary
criticism: such a distinction is not something to be known, but something to be
acknowledged—and it is not clear what this might mean. Certainly such an
acknowledgment is not just a matter of submission to the truth about the distinc-
tion, for this would make the distinction nothing more than an object of knowl-
edge and Cavell's determined muddling of it a product of ignorance or con-
trariety. But neither is it a simple recognition of the disciplinary facts of life,
because if it were there would be no problem for Cavell to raise. One of the
things we want to be able to say about acknowledgment is that it figures some-
where between knowledge and recognition, and our use of it should be one that
lets us acknowledge the way in which, at various times, we want to use these
words as well.
But if acknowledgment can carry the weight of articulating a problem of
philosophical autonomy, we should expect to find it reappearing when we turn
to the distinction Cavell does want to assert between the modern and the tra-
ditional (in philosophy and out). We have in fact already glimpsed it in the redes-
cription of Kant in terms of an "explicit recognition" instead of an episte-
mological discovery, and we need now only put that redescription in its proper
place. For Cavell, the fact that the relation of past and present has become
problematic for philosophy is most clearly evident in the writings of Wittgen-
stein and Heidegger:
Innovation in philosophy has characteristically gone together with a
repudiation—a specifically cast repudiation—of most of the history of
the subject. But in the later Wittgenstein (and, I would now add, in
Heidegger's Being and Time) the repudiation of the past has a trans-
formed significance, as though containing the consciousness that his-
tory will not go away, except through our perfect acknowledgment of
it (in particular, our acknowledgment that it is not past), and that one's
own practice and ambition can only be identified against the contin-
uous experience of the past. (This new significance in philosophical
 28 D ON MODERNISM

repudiation itself has a history. Its most obvious precursor is Hegel,

but it begins, I believe, in Kant. For it is in Kant that one finds an
explicit recognition that the terms in which the past is criticized are
specific to one's own position, and require justification from within
that position). (MWM, p. xix)
We can specify the traditional mode of repudiation as (loosely) epistemo-
logical—taking the form of asserting (or proving) someone to be wrong, or
right, but partial and so ultimately mistaken. Certainly one culminating moment
in the history of this mode of repudiation is Wittgenstein's Tractatus with its
determination to tell the (relatively uninteresting) truth about things with as little
fuss as possible. In the later Wittgenstein the repudiation of the tradition implicit
in the Tractarian correction of philosophy is transformed through the appeal to
ordinary language—an appeal that opens out into a demand that one struggle to
meet the tradition as something radically inevitable—or, for example, to meet
the skeptic not only or primarily as someone who has made a mistake but as
someone who, in a sense, one already is—someone whose meanings cannot but
be acknowledged. Heidegger's existentialism and project of "the destruction of
the history of philosophy" have, on the surface, a very different look; but
Cavell's remark that "Heidegger's consciousness that our deepest task, as
philosophers and as men, is one of getting back to a sense of words and world
from which we are now away" (MWM, pp. xix-xx) touches precisely at the
juncture of the two bodies of work.
What differentiates them is, of course, the split between Anglo-American and
Continental that has come to be one of the more obvious features of con-
temporary philosophy. Because Heidegger and Wittgenstein belong to such
different traditions, their modernisms are articulated very differently. In
general, the Anglo-American exploration of philosophic modernism, as exem-
plified by Cavell, finds its starting point in Kant, and particularly in Kant's
opposition to Hume and to skepticism; it is the recurrent moment of skepticism
that carries the weight of the tradition of the past (so Cavell writes that "one
could say that in a modernist situation 'past' loses its temporal accent and means
anything 'not present.' Meaning what one says becomes a matter of making
one's sense present to oneself" [MWM, p. xix]). The Continental tradition is
more inclined to find its problem in Hegel and his positing of the history of
philosophy as a history of Spirit—with the result that "past" here regains its
"temporal accent." It is across this difference that one can call Cavell's attempt
to acknowledge the skeptic and Heidegger's effort to destroy/retrieve the history
of philosophy "the same."
"Repudiation" names a new difficulty in getting at what may be very old
truths; its new significance is at work in Greenberg's assertion that the problem
 ON MODERNISM D 29

of the Old Masters in modernist painting is not one of overcoming but of

recovery:
Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the
idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is, among many other things, con-
tinuity. Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion
to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as Modernist art
would be impossible. ("Modernist Painting," p. 77)
"Authenticity" appears as the stake in our relation to our past (as it does also
for Heidegger). "Sincerity" and "authenticity" are of course catchwords of our
modern selves and times. The terms that are set against them within the grammar
of the modern can be said to cluster around the notion of "fraudulence"—the
name with which we will perhaps denounce Carl Andre laying down a row of
bricks in a London gallery or by means of which we will perhaps try to point
toward the empty core we may see behind the rhetorical flights of a John Earth
or a Donald Barthelme or an Alain Robbe-Grillet . . . they may well be the
terms by which we would denounce Derrida's work.
Cavell has argued at length that this risk of or openness to fraudulence is
more crucially defining of the modern than the apparent positive terms of sin-
cerity or authenticity or demystifying truth telling insofar as it is the omnipresent
possibility of fraudulence that determines our countervailing valorization of
authenticity.18 This is not a simple possibility—not just the possibility of our
being duped by someone else, someone of malicious intent. The risk to which
Cavell points cuts much deeper: it is the risk that inheres in (for example) his
own inability to decide the questions he raises about his essays on King Lear and
Endgame—could it be that these are not philosophical writings? And if so, has
Cavell put a fast one over on us? on himself? Could Cavell have known this?
And if so, could he have done something else? What would it mean to call (for
example) such essays "fraudulent," "counterfeits of philosophy," "not the real
thing"? How can fraudulent art, or philosophy, be exposed?
The last of these is Cavell's question in his essay "Music Discomposed." He
goes on to answer it (in part) as follows:
Other frauds and imposters, like forgers and counterfeiters, admit
clear outcomes, conclude in dramatic discoveries—the imposter is
unmasked at the ball, you find the counterfeiters working over their
press, the forger is caught signing another man's name, or he con-
fesses. There are no such proofs possible for the assertion that the art
accepted by a public is fraudulent; the artist himself may not know;
and the critic may be shown up, not merely as incompetent, not unjust
in accusing the wrong man, but as taking others in (or out); that is, as
an imposter.
 30 D ON MODERNISM

The only exposure of false art lies in recognizing something about

the object itself, but something whose recognition requires exactly the
same capacity as recognizing the genuine article. . . . You often do
not know which is on trial, the object or the viewer: modern art did
not invent this dilemma, it merely insists upon it. (MWM, p. 190)19
"The artist himself may not know": this is the crucial depth to the possibility
of fraudulence and describes the risk that is inherent in Cavell's writings on Lear
and Endgame or, more recently (perhaps more obviously), in his work on and
claims for the movies. All of this writing is (holds itself) open to the charge of
fraudulence, and this charge is not one Cavell can refute through more argument
or the production of proofs. The charge is met or not met, refuted or not refuted,
in his writing—the way the same charge is refuted or not refuted on the canvas
of a (modernist) painting. And we will want even to say that some works may
stand convicted precisely by their inability or refusal to pose the possibility that
they are in fact fraudulent (exactly as we want to call "theatrical" those works
that fail to pose the question of their own theatricality).
It is, I take it, significant about modernism and its "permanent revo-
lution" that its audience recurrently tells itself the famous stories of
riots and walkouts and outrages that have marked its history. It is as
though the impulse to shout fraud and storm out is always present, but
fear of the possible consequences overmasters the impulse. Remember
Saint-Saens: He said the Emperor had no clothes, and then history
stripped him naked. The philistine audience cannot afford to admit the
new; the avant garde audience cannot afford not to. This bankruptcy
means that both are at the mercy of their tastes, or fears, and that no
artist can test his work either by their rejection or their acceptance.
(MWM, pp. 205-6)
The assertion that the avant-garde cannot afford not to admit the new cap-
tures, I think, something deep in our fears of it: that modernism opens up a
course that leads inevitably to an indiscriminate acceptance of all that claims
novelty, that with modernism one buys willy-nilly a background ideology of
progressivism that ultimately undercuts any moral sensibility whatsoever.
But it matters more to see that Cavell is here working again at the grammar
of our modernism, seeking to show where and how its crises arise and what
demands they impose on us. That, for example, modernism must work without
any ability to appeal to the authority of its audience points to the way in which
the work of the modernist must (if it is to be anything) conceive itself in and
test itself against its own history; it points also to the way in which modernist
works will present themselves inevitably as fighting against their audience
(including the artist himself insofar as he participates in that audience) and
 ON MODERNISM D 31

against its taste—fighting in the name of the morality or integrity of the disci-
pline and the tradition that has formed those tastes.
It is only through this having of "history as a problem, that is, as a commit-
ment" (MWM, p. xxii) that the modernist can authorize himself, find his proper
authority. The rest we condemn as "merely modernizing" and bent solely on
novelty—except that we can never pin this distinction down, in ourselves or in
others. The critic is as fully at risk as the artist himself:
He is part detective, part lawyer, part judge, in a country in which
crimes and deeds of glory look alike, and in which the public not
only, therefore, confuses one with the other, but does not know that
one or the other has been committed: not because the news has not got
out, but because what counts as one or the other cannot be defined
until it happens; and when it has happened there is no sure way he can
get the news out; and no way at all without risking something like a
crime or glory of his own. (MWM, p. 191)
We have come a long way from Greenberg's statement that "nothing could
be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of con-
tinuity." We have come far enough that, although we now know what this wants
to say and know also the ways it is precisely and powerfully correct, we now
know also that we have to rewrite it to read: nothing could be further from and
more familiar to the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of
continuity. The history of modernism is in effect everywhere haunted by this
idea and, through it, develops itself as a continuous betrayal of its audience and
itself, a betrayal of the standards of taste in the name of those standards (or in
the name of their conditions of possibility).
What looks like "breaking with tradition" in the successions of art is
not really that; or is that only after the fact, looking historically or
critically; or is that only as a result not as a motive: the unheard of
appearance of the modern in art is an effort not to break, but to keep
faith with tradition. It is perhaps fully true of Pop Art that its motive
is to break with the tradition of painting and sculpture; and the result
is not that the tradition is broken, but that these works are irrelevant
to that tradition, i.e., that are not paintings, whatever their pleasures.
(Where history has cunning, it is sometimes ironic, but sometimes
just.) (MWM, pp. 206-7)
With this we are returned once again to considerations of the ways in which
modernism is and is not an event, and of the ways in which this "event" trans-
forms the terms in which we can construe history—so that history appears as a
continuity that is traversed at every point by discontinuity and disruption,
permanent revolution.
 32 D ON MODERNISM

It may be that we can now feel the grammatical sense behind what might be
called the "modernist imperative"—the way in which the modernist must say
"must" without being able to know whether or how he or she really means it.
If I say, "Philosophy must now put itself into question if it is to maintain itself
as philosophy . . . ," I am, I think, not giving orders nor am I attempting to
exclude from philosophy all work that does not' 'put itself in question'' (except
of course that I am attempting precisely that)—it is more nearly the case that with
this "must" I commit myself to philosophy, its history and its discipline, in the
only way that I can, which is: at risk and with no authority beyond that com-
mitment and the conviction it may compel. The force of such a "must" does
not lie in me, but elsewhere. In this it is a little like a promise, dependent on
an uptake it can only secure elsewhere—a risky imperative.
I am then at risk here. I am in the position of arguing for the Emperor's
clothes. The robes that count here are the robes of a certain tradition and a
certain problematic developed within it, handed down by it: to claim Derrida as
significantly a modernist philosopher entails placing him within a tradition—
Continental, philosophic—and describing him as powerfully responsive to it.
Success in this enterprise carries its own risks. The figure of the Emperor,
and the interest we take in establishing his truth, is one Derrida has addressed
within his texts—in, especially, the introduction to—or pretext for—his polemic
with Lacanian psychoanalysis, "The Purveyor of Truth." I leave it to other
readers and writers to make something of this knotting of figures, controversy,
and argument. Derrida has also registered more direct dissent from the project
I appear to be (may in fact be) engaging. I will simply recall here the strictures
of "Ou commence et comment finit un corps enseignant?" (Where begins and
how ends a teaching body?).
If deconstruction had rested at a simple semantic or conceptual
deconstitution, which it has never done except in the eyes of those
who benefit from seeing nothing there, deconstruction would have
formed nothing more than a—new—modality of the internal auto-
critique of philosophy. It would have risked reproducing philosophic
propriety, the self-relation of philosophy, the economy of traditional
questioning.20
I recall also another passage from the same essay:
Always interminable in this sense, and in order not to reduce itself
to a modern episode of philosophic reproduction, deconstruction cannot
associate itself with a liquidation of philosophy.21
If deconstruction can be said to aim at some kind of revolution (and clearly
it does) it is important to see that this is a revolution that in one sense will have
always already happened and in another sense will always be still to come, but
 ON MODERNISM D 33

in which one will never participate as if in some present event. Reproduction

and rupture risk one another, and I risk both in advancing my claims for
Derrida. To attempt to proof myself against such risk would be to lose every-
thing.
And I may of course be wrong about the Emperor. History stripped Saint-
Saens naked and is no doubt not done yet. Time, as we say, will tell.
But my question is: What will time tell? That certain departures in art-
like pursuits have become established (among certain audiences, in
textbooks, on walls, in college courses); that someone is treating them
with the respect due, we feel, to art; that one no longer has the right
to question their status? But in waiting for time to tell that, we miss
what the present tells—that the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust,
are essential to the experience of art. (MWM, pp. 188-89)
Among the things we do not, in the end, know is what nakedness—or cloth-
ing—is. This vision of the way in which time can tell—nothing—and so can only
return us to—perhaps maroon us in—a present that is built of nothing but risk,
dangers either of fraudulence or of trust—this vision may well seem uncomfort-
able. What Cavell is saying is that there is, however, no other way to the
experience of art (or, now, of philosophy): we have no choice then but affir-
mation—can do no better than affirm that affirmation—within—and without—
our history.
Chapter 2
A Context for Derrida

We begin then, once again, in and from the double bind constituted by and con-
stitutive of Derrida's philosophic position.
The double bind, like so many of the terms by which one would describe
Derrida's position, has itself come to work as a figure within it.1 And as with
most of Derrida's terms, what begins its life as the name of a concept ends, in
his hands, differently—as a word or a trace or a gramme (more "concepts" that
Derrida has retrieved from themselves, or destroyed). The double bind trans-
lates itself into French, miming its sound and its sense, as "double bande"—and
so translated it unfolds a new complexity of sense, touching on sexuality (bander
is slang for having an erection) and on wounding and healing (bandage) and on
the reproduction of voice (bande electromagnetique). As it thus unfolds, it at
once deepens and displaces the crisis it would appear to name; even the double
bind in which a certain errance of sense places us is itself in errance, adrift-
exiled from itself.
The double bind: when it is stretched to the limit, what threatens is
cramp; it encorpsulates without containing [se cadaverise a vide]
between two incompatible desires, condition of the possibility (and)
impossibility of the erection. The game is thus paralyzed by the very
indecidability that also opens its field.
But if this double bind is ineluctable (in me as idiom and/or outside
of me), there must be—an entirely other there must fee—somewhere,
no last word. Without this it would arrest, paralyze, or petrify itself,

34
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 35

immediately, I mean even before it stops itself, since, yes, it will

arrest itself in any case. It must be that beyond the untiring contradic-
tion of the double bind, an affirmative difference—innocent, intact,
gay—succeeds in being absent without leave, escapes with a leap and
laughingly signs that which it lets go, that which it makes and
unmakes, en double bande.1
The second paragraph turns on its idioms:
Mais si cette double bande est ineluctable (en moi comme un
idiome et/ou hors du moi), ilfaut, un ilfaut tout autre, que quelque
part elle ne soil pas le dernier mot. Sans quoi ca s'arreterait, se
paralyserait, se meduserait, immediatement, je veux dire avant meme
que ca s'arrete, car, n'est-ce pas, ca s'arretera de toute facon. II faut
que au-dela de 1'infatigable contradiction du double bande, une
difference affirmative, innocente, intacte, gaie, en vienne bien a
fausser compagnie, echappe d'un saut et vienne signer en riant ce
qu'elle laisse faire et defiler en double bande.
The double bind in which we find ourselves is then as proper a frame as any
for Derrida's writing—and as such demands both its violation and its preserva-
tion (this demand risks Hegel, then). Inside and outside, possibility and impos-
sibility, will be its privileged topoi.
If it is indeed here that we are to find ourselves, then while we may be
tempted to say that there is no way into Derrida' s work (we may be particularly
tempted to this if we see Derrida's work as a radicalism always threatened with
domestication), we must say also that we are already within that work (and
saying this will perhaps register our sense that Derrida is writing about nothing
other than the world). Subscribing to this double necessity, we encounter
Derrida's texts not as objects of knowledge, but as moments both of acknowl-
edgment and in need of acknowledgment. This I would suggest would be to
grasp that "difference affirmative" which signs "en riant ce qu'elie laisse faire
et defiler en double bande."

Stanley Cavell, continuing his meditation on the "new significance of philo-

sophical repudiation," has written:
Hegel, I am told, said that he was the last professor of philosophy. I
think I know what he would have meant—that he was the last man to
feel that he could speak evenly about every way in which the philo-
sophical impulse has found expression, the last with the natural convic-
tion that his own work was the living present of philosophy's history,
able to take that history for granted. And that would mean that phi-
losophy, as it has been known, is past. (MWM, p. xxiv)
 36 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

Two features of the remark seem to merit special attention: (1) If the passage
is to be granted its fullest force, "professor" must be understood not simply as
a title or particular institutional position, but in its first and most active sense—
"one who professes something . . . who openly declares his sentiments." The
tension between these two senses shows something of the way in which, for both
Cavell and Derrida, a problem about the profession of philosophy is also a
problem about the philosophic profession . . . however one distributes the
weight of these phrases. (2) Cavell's remark is cast in the subjunctive—as if he
is giving us what Hegel would have meant if he could have meant it, although
he could not. This, I take it, is a tacit recognition of the grammatical structure
of modernism: had Hegel been able to mean what Cavell takes it he would have
meant, then he—Hegel—would have been something other than the last pro-
fessor of philosophy. Instead, and at best, Hegel could end only by finding him-
self, too late, to have already been the last professor:
One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought
to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late. As
the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already
there cut and dried after its process of formation has been com-
pleted. . . . When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a
shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be
rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of the dusk.3
Rupture and redoubling: an "event" has already passed, invisibly, between
Hegel and himself. The Hegelian project opens by promising to put an end to
that night of philosophic confusion in which all cows are black; but it ends here,
grey on grey, at dusk, with the night still to come.
Beginning here, with the last professor of philosophy, we find ourselves at
once too near to and too far from Derrida, as if we have found ourselves, too
quickly, outside the work of history. We might say that we have already made,
"as some may be tempted now, an assured value of indecidability—which is to
double-bind oneself to the point of paralysis or tetanus."4 A certain double bind
has in effect become a simple truth of philosophy, belonging to a certain
apparently reflexive moment within philosophy, but not capable of placing
philosophy itself in question. From this position one can no longer understand
how it is necessary for philosophy that it place itself in question (how the fact
that philosophy is one of its own normal topics is defining for it): we cannot now
understand the imperative/promise of "un ilfaut tout autre."

We have seen that Cavell is inclined to attribute the emergence of philosophic

modernism to Kant (while recognizing the ways in which Hegel may look to be
a better candidate to some). It may be that what has to be said here is that Kant
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 37

so philosophized that there could be no strong post-Kantian philosophy that did

not begin by explicitly posing philosophy itself as a problem. That is, in making
the position of the philosopher a part of his philosophic problem, Kant implicitly
demanded that philosophy henceforth see itself as situated within a larger dis-
ciplinary context and as needing to give an account of that situation. It is this
legacy that Hegel saw and claimed. The problem with our earlier attempt to
grasp "the last professor of philosophy" is that it clove too closely to the initial
Kantian matrix, problematizing only the position of the philosopher while
continuing to assume the ability of philosophy as a discipline to master the
difficulty (more or less) unproblematically. Within this frame a certain "double
bind" appears as the "true" result of a moment of self-criticism in the same way
that one understanding of self-criticism in the work of modernist painting can
claim to find an (absorptive) "truth" of painting behind the extravagant outer
garments of theatricality.
It is in Hegel that the connection between the position of the philosopher and
the position of philosophy itself is explicitly developed. This takes the form of
a phenomenology of spirit, a narrative articulation of the relation of the
philosopher to philosophy, and so of philosophy to itself. The Phenomenology
of Spirit will provide our primary context for Derrida.5 The notion of a
"context" for Derrida returns us again to the deconstructionist demon of
"domestication." There is nothing I can do to insure that my contextualization
is not a domestication; sooner or later, inevitably, it will be something of the
sort. At the same time, it may be helpful to entertain the notion that contex-
tualizing Derrida in terms of the Hegelian Phenomenology amounts to a
description of the double bind within which Derridean philosophy finds itself—
"between" the Phenomenology—and by which it finds itself torn. This context
is a structure at once of appropriation and of shear.

Hegel: Realizing Philosophy

We can begin by setting the stage for Hegel. The first generation of philoso-
phers following Kant tended to see their task as one of reassembling certain
terms set too radically asunder in Kant's philosophy—self and world, subject
and object, sense and understanding. What was needed and sought after was
some tertium quid with which to reestablish the broken unity of experience. In
practice, this third term ended either by reproducing within itself the split it was
intended to breach or else by sliding off to one side or another of that split
(becoming, as it were, a "bigger," "meta-" subject or object that simply
subsumed all of Kant's distinctions). Philosophically considered these are weak
efforts, too visibly in the service of certain desires and so forced to misread
Kant's texts in very specific ways. In general, the essential tendency of these
efforts can be described as an attempt to reinstall the Sublime of the Critique
 38 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

of Judgment at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason; this pastiche has come
to be a major influence in English and American literary theory, arising first in
Fichte, then in Novalis and the Schlegels in Germany, and passing through
Coleridge and Carlyle in England.
The general impulse behind these various projects can be said to prefigure
Hegel's dialectic of overcoming (Aufliebung), but his radically post-Kantian
problematic emerges first of all from a critique of such attempts to find some
unifying Absolute within the Kantian framework. This critique begins from the
recognition that such attempts to reassert the unity of experience invariably
finish in mere opposition to the articulation of experience:
Dealing with something from the perspective of the Absolute consists
merely in declaring that, although one has been speaking of it just now
as something definite, yet in the Absolute, the A = A, there is
nothing of the kind, for there all is one. To pit this single insight, that
in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of artic-
ulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment, to
palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all
cows are black—this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity. (PG 16)
It is on this basis that Hegel is able to turn in a different direction and to begin
from an explicit acknowledgment of the problem of positionality. This acknowl-
edgment demands in its turn a critique of those elements in Kant that would still
deny the priority of such a problematic.
The picture Hegel sets out to break down in the "Introduction" to the
Phenomenology of Spirit may be put as follows: philosophy aims at "the actual
knowledge of what truly is"; to gain this knowledge philosophy must—before
it undertakes its proper business with "what truly is"—ensure that its way of
knowing is indeed legitimate and reliable. The picture advances a distinction
between the preliminary critique of the epistemological "tool" and the more
authentically philosophical use of that tool.
It is of course true that what matters to us in Kant (and what we insist on
referring to as his philosophy) is nothing more or other than the mere and
preliminary critique. To the extent that Kant recognizes a certain doubling of
philosophy and what is (would be) preliminary to it, we can, with Cavell and
Greenberg, attribute to Kant the foundations of philosophic modernism. But to
the extent that Kant continues to maintain this distinction between "philosophy
proper" and something prior to it, less "real" but nonetheless necessary, we
are more inclined to locate these foundations elsewhere, in a structure we can
call the post-Kantian.
The effect of this distinction is to reduce our temptation to pose modernism
through a certain rhetoric of purity; the relocation of modernism within the
"post-Kantian" shifts the burden off "purity" and toward "integrity," or away
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 39

from questions of scientific knowledge and toward those of disciplined and

disciplinary activity.
In the instrumental picture of knowing that Hegel finds at work in Kant, we
are here; it is there; some tool or medium must bridge the gap between; and we
must be sure of that tool or medium first of all—or else "we might grasp clouds
of error instead of the heaven of truth" (PG 73). Our basic impulse here is to
protect ourselves against skeptical attacks on our unbridled speculation. Such an
impulse dovetails easily with Greenberg's reading of the Kantian project as an
attempt to reentrench philosophy within its (purer) self. Within this picture, if
we know what our tool does to what it grasps or if we know how the intervening
medium refracts it, we should be able to correct for the truth of the object,
for this would enable us to eliminate from the representation of the
Absolute which we have gained through it whatever is due to the
instrument, and thus get the truth in its purity. But this "improvement"
would in fact only bring us back to where we were before. If we
remove from a reshaped thing what the instrument has done to it, then
the thing —here the Absolute—becomes for us exactly what it was
before this [accordingly] superfluous effort. On the other hand, if the
Absolute is supposed merely to be brought nearer to us through this
instrument, without anything in it being altered, like a bird caught by a
lime-twig, it would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn, if it were not
with us, in and for itself, all along and of its own volition. (PG 73)
For Kant, philosophy seems a terribly difficult enterprise, hedged about with
dangers and traps for the unwary. Best first build up a stronghold one can count
on ("entrench it more firmly in its area of competence") and then make forays
therefrom. Hegel, in contrast, assumes that the world lies before him for the
taking; philosophy is there, obvious, waiting. There is work to be done.
If the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in
the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually
cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round
and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to
whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? (PG 74)
This is not to say that there are no problems involved in doing philosophy or
that the philosopher does not (cannot) make mistakes. It simply says that philoso-
phy is done by doing and not by preparing, that if one devotes all one's effort to
laying out the conditions of possibility for philosophy either one will never get
to its actuality or one will end by finding that one is in fact already doing
philosophy and the preliminary effort was therefore unnecessary from the outset.
These Hegelian formulations can be see to point at once toward Wittgen-
stein's appeal to "what we ordinarily say when . . . " and to ward Heidegger's
 40 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

complex meditation on our distance from and proximity to the world and Being.
Each undertakes a complication and closer grasp of what lies before us; each
can lay a claim to being (or trying to be) profoundly "realistic"—committed to
what is there, "the actual knowledge of what truly is." This is, as we shall see
in chapter 3, a commitment shared by Derrida.
These concerns with obviousness, with our proximity to and distance from the
world, are intimately entangled with questions about beginnings and especially
about the beginning of philosophy, the way in which one-you or I or he or she-
comes to philosophy. As we shall see shortly, this is, for Hegel, the demand for
a phenomenology; in Heidegger, it is the problem of Dasein—human being as it
is always already caught up in ontology, tied to Being; in Cavell, it is the question
of audience. In Derrida such questions are posed, among other ways, through his
involvement with GREPH (Le Groupe de Recherches sur I'Enseignement
Philosophique, an organization founded by Derrida and others to examine the
place and value of the teaching of philosophy in the wake of the Haby reforms)
as questions about the ways in which the writing and teaching of philosophy are
political practices. "We" too are everywhere entangled with these questions of
distance and proximity, of beginning, already deeply within the Derridean prob-
lematic and still outside it, laying out a context for it. This is one way to point
toward certain problems of style, organization, and argument that press every-
where in upon the present work: "we"-reader and writer-stand neither simply
inside nor simply outside the matter under discussion and can lay no claim to a
naive and privileged viewpoint on it; this is both a point to be argued in and an
inevitable assumption of the work.
Finally, we should remark that the Hegelian critique of Kant displays
Cavell's new mode of repudiation. Insofar as it undercuts the distinction
between that which is preliminary to philosophy and that which is more properly
philosophical, it does not reject but recovers Kant's writings for philosophy—
and does so in a way that implicitly locates the Hegelian project as simply an
explicit repetition of what works only implicitly in Kant. "Repudiation" and
"acknowledgment" here become very close, as close as the rupture and
redoubling that are the relation between Hegel and Kant.

Hegel's basic point can be put another way. The task of the philosopher is
not to build a fort the skeptic cannot storm; instead, it is not only to admit the
skeptic and recognize that he too belongs to an enterprise already under way,
but even to take on for itself this skepticism in its most radical form.6 For Hegel,
the abstract insistence on Nothingness betrays the same fear of truth that
animates the Kantian fear of error (so that the critique of Kant here is also a
critique of skepticism). If knowledge is to be nothing, it will become so only
through negation in detail and not through some one-sided and blanket denial.
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 41

This is just the scepticism which only ever sees pure nothingness in its
result and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is specifically
the nothingness of that from which it results. For it is only when it is
taken as the result of that from which it emerges, that it is, in fact, the
true result; in that case it is itself a determinate nothingness, one
which has a content. The scepticism that ends up with the bare
abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot get any further from
there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and
what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss. But
when, on the other hand, the result is conceived as it is in truth,
namely as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately
arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the
progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.
(PG 79)
For Hegel, philosophy—Science—is simply there, has already appeared on
the scene. Pushing this presence aside in a rush to strengthen its foundations and
pushing it aside through abstract negation betray the same fear of truth and fore-
close equally on the development of that Science. This development is one that
arises through determinate negation, a radical skepticism in detail. It is a
progress through a "series of forms" that are generated out of their critiques
of themselves—so that the path of philosophy lies through the appearance of
Science, with all its errors.
It can be regarded as the path of the natural consciousness which
presses forward to true knowledge; or as the way of the Soul which
journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they
were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may
purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a
completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in
itself.
Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of
knowledge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it
directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has negative sig-
nificance for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion counts
for it rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this
path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or
more precisely, as the way of despair. (PG 77-78)
The notion of science belonging to natural consciousness is, indeed, the
Notion of Science—but, at the outset, nothing more. It is the appearance of
Science, but it is also the mere appearance of Science, not yet adequate to itself
nor able to understand itself: "It is not yet science in its fully realized and
propagated truth simply by virtue of making its appearance." It will become
 42 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

fully articulated and unfolded Science only through radical criticism of every
determinate position it takes up. Because such criticism insists in each instance
on the determinacy of its negation, the process of criticism itself will generate
new content, new positions of consciousness. And these will themselves be
subject to renewed criticism, determinate negations set up by the very criteria
that each shape of consciousness proposes for itself.7
The overall Hegelian scheme—whether in the Phenomenology, the Logic, or
the Encyclopedia—always has the same form: one begins from the Notion and
submits it to its own immanent critique of itself, allowing this critique to unfold
through its entire chain of transformations until the Notion shows itself finally
to be adequate to itself and so puts an end to its configurations. The imagery
of the via dolorosa points toward the theological underpinnings of the project,
its redemptive and puritan tendencies. The Phenomenology is, as M. H. Abrams
has quite properly pointed out, a secular theodicy in which every truth the
Notion loses along the way is recovered in the final accounting.8
The logic of the Hegelian enterprise is ultimately governed by the tautology
"the Notion is adequate to itself," but this tautology is separated from itself by
the course of the Phenomenology. It becomes the frame of the narrative by
assuming a certain delay as proper to what it wants to say—so that it might be
rewritten "the Notion (is) adequate to itself."
This "delay" becomes more directly visible if we look at what it means to
begin from the fact that philosophy is already on the scene. The statement entails
the recognition that when one sits down to do philosophy one is taking up a place
in the history of an activity; the (Cartesian) impulse to start from scratch is
entirely foreign to Hegel. The impulse to philosophy is inseparable from the
developed history of that impulse. The Hegelian course is predicated on the
simple fact of philosophy, which is also the fact of a history of philosophy and
of a succession of philosophic systems (which are therefore not simply wrong,
not to be repudiated that way). This course is thus necessarily an interpretation
of the history in which it finds itself as a part of the process through which the
germinal Notion comes to be adequate to its developed Idea. As the
Encyclopedia has it,
the History of Philosophy gives us the same process from an historical
and external point of view. The stages in the evolution of the Idea
seem to follow each other by accident, and to present merely a
number of different and unconnected principles which the several
systems of philosophy carry out in their own way. But it is not so.
For these thousands of years the same Architect has directed the work;
and that Architect is the one living Mind whose nature is to think, to
bring to self-consciousness what it is, and with its being thus set as
object before it, to be at the same time raised above it, and so to
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 43

reach a higher stage of its own being. The different systems which the
history of philosophy presents are therefore not irreconcilable with
unity. We may either say that it is one philosophy at different stages
of maturity; or that the particular principle which is the ground work
of each system is but a branch of one and the same universe of
thought.9
The double view Hegel takes on the history of philosophy as system and as
development knits history and discipline into a single fabric, so that whatever
may be said of one may be said of the other as well. It is this melding of history
and discipline that gives rise to what post-Hegelian thought conceives of as "the
tradition"—the body of work in which this coincidence is realized and becomes
recognizable. This is, of course, a rather vague description and is so necessarily.
One of the continuing concerns of this chapter and those that follow will be with
this necessity and its consequences. It should be clear that this coincidence of
history and discipline is visible only from one particular, privileged point; it is
one of the distressingly obvious features of Hegel's view here that, since Hegel
is capable of articulating this history as the adequation of the Notion to (itself
as) Idea, history in fact ends with Hegel. There are, of course, various qualifi-
cations attached to this claim; the tendency among commentators on Hegel has
been to grab hold of these qualifications and show that the claim doesn't mean
exactly what it seems to mean. But in crucial ways it does mean exactly what
it seems to mean. It is a strong and consequential claim with which one must
come to grips sooner or later. It is the preliminary determinant of whatever it
might mean to do "post-Hegelian philosophy" and it determines this activity as,
in the first instance, impossible. It is this claim and its consequences that we will
be exploring in Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. In this section I want only to
lay out its most general form.
Truth in philosophy is traditionally defined as some form of adequatio intel-
lectui ad rem—an adequation of thought to its object. A true statement is one
that "matches" the thing it is about. In Hegel the initial push for the dialectic
arises from an untruth, the inadequacy of the Notion to itself, to its Idea. The
end of history is the concrete realization of truth and the adequation of the Idea
to itself. This all works within the traditional mold. But it also conceals within
itself a radically historicized notion of truth, a sense that is dependent on time
and system. Because history itself is now scaffolded by the prepositional form,
it is possible to say that such-and-such an event is true—"The Roman Empire
is true"; "Napoleon—the world spirit on horseback—is true" (or, as one might
later be tempted to say within a more Heideggerean frame, "The National
Socialist state is a mittence of Being"). The prepositional form of truth has not
been dropped, but it has been displaced into the whole of the historical and
systematic process: history as process and proposition is true and so, equally,
 44 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

are its parts. Epistemology and theodicy crisscross in a narrative of philo-

sophical redemption; the Absolute Idea extends its grace to all life and thought:
In the course of its process the Idea creates that illusion, by setting an
antithesis to confront it; and its action consists in getting rid of the
illusion which it has created. Only out of this error does the truth
arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude.
Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic
element of truth; for truth can only be where it makes itself its own
result. (EL 212 Zusatz)
In such a passage one sees how far the concrete operations of the Hegelian
dialectic are from the traditional picture of truth. The adequatio remains
minimally, but necessarily, present in the relation of the Idea to itself (a relation
that is of course refracted within every shape of consciousness and serves as the
ground for that shape's dialectical overcoming of itself), but "truth" now lies
essentially in the dialectical moments of surpassing and "error" in those of
opposition and alterity. The whole of this process is also "true"—so that error
ends by belonging to truth as, so to speak, its condition of visibility.
The sense of truth at work here, emerging within Hegel's writing, is one that
pulls away from propositional adequacy and inclines to ground itself instead in
the objectivity of the enterprise itself. "Objectivity" here is obviously somewhat
special, disciplinary rather than scientific or epistemological, closer perhaps to
Aristotle than to Descartes. Within the encircling propositional frame, Hegel
seems to be working with a meaning of truth that might be described as the
Notion in its articulation—what is true is what belongs to this articulation, and
as such is not something that can be partitioned wholly off from error, since
error is also a part of what belongs to this articulation, this sort of objectivity.10
This sense of truth as the Notion-in-articulation ultimately undermines the
propositional frame itself. I pointed to this in my suggestion that the fundamental
tautology might be rewritten as "the Notion (is) adequate to itself."
What has been really made explicit is the oneness of subject and
predicate, as the notion itself, filling up the empty 'is' of the copula.
While its constituent elements are, at the same time, distinguished as
subject and predicate, the notion is put as their unity, as the connec-
tion which serves to intermediate them: in short: as the Syllogism. (EL
180)
With this the proposition is caught up in a radically reflexive scansion of it-
self; the logical syllogism is no longer a simple chaining of subjects and predi-
cates, but a complex system through which subjects and predicates are dis-
tributed and positioned with respect to one another. The whole of the dialectical
movement of the Encyclopedia is the Absolute Syllogism:
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 45

Nature, the totality immediately before us, unfolds itself into the two
extremes of the Logical Idea and Mind. But Mind is only Mind when
mediated through Nature. Then, in the second place, Mind, which we
know as the principle of individuality, or as the actualizing principle,
is the mean; and Nature and the Logical Idea are the extremes. It is
mind which cognises the Logical Idea in Nature and thus raises Nature
to its essence. In the third place, again, the Logical Idea itself
becomes the mean; it is the absolute substance both of Mind and of
Nature, the universal and all pervading principle. These are the mem-
bers of the Absolute Syllogism. (EL 187 Zusatz)
I have claimed that Hegel's philosophy is built around a problematic of posi-
tionality; at this level his claim is, in effect, that all positions in their possible
relations to one another can be fully mapped out. The resultant whole is trans-
parent despite the opacities found at any particular position. We can know this
because the whole has been laid out. Metaphysics has ended in Hegel.
Philosophy has realized itself and is no longer merely possible; philosophy
has realized itself and as such is now impossible. "Post-Hegelian philosophy"
can only be an oxymoron (unless, of course, one finds Hegel simply irrele-
vant—a gorgeous excess of speculation of no philosophic consequence. But then
one will not find "post-Hegelian" an interesting or sensible description of a
philosophic position at all). If there should nonetheless emerge something that
must be described through this phrase, its mere existence will force—or testify
to—a radical shearing within the tight structure of history, truth, and discipline
that welds Hegel's philosophy to itself. "Post-Hegelian philosophy," simply by
naming itself, lays waste the prepositional frame on which the Hegelian whole
depends, and can find itself only by carrying the problematic of positionality—
first set in place as a question about the philosopher by Kant, and then radi-
calized as a question about the relation of philosophy to itself in Hegel—deeper
into the central core of philosophy, perhaps into its very notion of truth (as in
Heidegger) and perhaps beyond that into the merest fact of its textual embodi-
ment (as in Derrida).

After Hegel (I): The Disposition of Philosophy

The general shape of the Hegelian legacy is clear enough in advance. The post-
Hegelian prosecution of philosophy will be committed to assuming its errors as
a condition of its pursuit of truth and will have to do so apart from any promise
of redemption of those errors in the closed totality of history and system. It
will, that is, be increasingly inclined to pose itself not in terms of a claim to
knowledge, but in terms of a certain art of display, a bringing of the world to
light—and that light will be understood to imply a necessary and concomitant
 46 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

shadow or system of shadows, unable to attain either to a state of pure and

sourceless light or to the security of a system of self-canceling and self-ful-
filling crosslightings. It will be committed to seeing this display as crucially
bound to time and to the stuff of history, but it will not see history as any kind
of guarantee—of sense, of philosophy, of human being—and indeed will increas-
ingly come to see in history and its claims over sense a certain suppression of
what is necessary to philosophy. History more and more will seem the arena in
which philosophy is removed from itself and from which it must be recovered.
Hegel is the philosopher of the philosophic tradition; in his writing that tra-
dition is closed and fulfilled, consummated. But this very act is also constitutive
of that tradition, making it visible as such and so open to what will necessarily
appear as its "outside." Hegel creates what will be named the "metaphysical
enclosure" (Heidegger) and the "logocentric closure" (Derrida)—to philoso-
phize after Hegel is to do so from somewhere else, somewhere from which that
enclosure is in view.
This picture—of philosophy as engaged, against itself and its tradition, in
rediscovering a deeper and more deeply temporal play of truth and error, light
and shadow-can serve as a first shape of Heidegger's philosophy. But it is
important to see that this more or less properly philosophic project is not the
whole of Hegel's legacy. The movement that pushes history to its limits also
pushes philosophy as an objective discipline to its limits; and what would be
post-Hegelian finds those limits, that discipline, already violated. Hegel's legacy
will not be realized simply within the terms of philosophy, however radical and
revisionary. In the following pages we will be as interested in Hegel's "extra-
philosophical" legacy in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the exuberant
indiscipline of Georges Bataille's writings as in Heidegger's philosophic appro-
priation of Hegel.
There is a further difficulty for us that needs airing here as we try to trace
the shape of a Hegelian legacy. It is above all Hegel who shows what it means
to take history as a vehicle of sense and a means of understanding. Hegel's
writings invent and justify a vision of intellectual history that is vastly persua-
sive—a history in which thoughts engage one another, often in extraordinarily
complex ways, and so offer up problems and solutions and developments tightly
integrated into a single, forward-looking, and moving narrative. We cannot
avoid assuming some such picture here—even as the figures we will be exploring
are all set more or less radically against it. One way of putting this would be
to suggest that Hegel's Phenomenology can legitimately and powerfully serve as
a context for Derrida only to the extent that it does so precisely as a text and
not, finally, as a movement of Spirit or being or history. The shape of the field
in which we move now obliges us to believe in the effectiveness of texts as
texts—not as philosophies or worldviews or systems of thought. The historical
situating of Derrida becomes almost a species of textual commentary; we will
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 47

see just how close deconstruction is willing to push these two things when we
turn to Derrida's attempt to address the question of a "Freudian legacy" in the
next chapter.
In the following pages we are going to be interested in a very few passages
from the Phenomenology insofar as they are the sites within which certain
aspects of (Heidegger's and Bataille's and Lacan's) post-Hegelianism might be
said to be inscribed—passages from the preface, introduction, and the chapter
called "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and
Bondage," which is a crucial early step in the production of the Pheno-
menology's subject-object as a consciousness and a self-consciousness. We will,
in effect, be tracing the "shear structure" of Hegel's crystal, looking to see on
what faces it cleaves when struck with the fact of time and the prefix "post-".
A few words may be in order here about the mere facts of the matter. Hegel
had no early and enduring impact in France, and indeed his work remained
largely untranslated until the middle of this century. Raymond Queneau, in an
article on Bataille's lifelong intrigue with Hegel, picks out an emblematic cluster
of events around 1930:
Jean Wahl published La Conscience malheureuse dans la philosophic
de Hegel [The unhappy consciousness in Hegel's philosophy] (1929);
Gurvitch, Les Tendances actuelles de la philosophic allemande
[Current tendencies of German philosophy] (1930); Levinas, La
Theorie de I'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl [The theory
of intuition in Husserl's phenomenology] (1930). Heidegger appeared
in Bijur in 1931, and Husserl's Cartesian Meditations were published
in French the same year—which was also the centenary of Hegel's
death.11
Two years later, Alexandre Kojeve arrived in Paris and began a series of
seminars on Hegel that lasted for most of the decade. The twenty years from
1930 to 1950—that is, roughly the years between Lacan's dissertation and his
groundbreaking "Discours de Rome," (Discourse of Rome) or between Bataille's
first draft of an economic theory, "La Notion de depense" (The notion of
expenditure), and its most developed statement, La Part maudite (The
condemned portion), or between Kojeve's arrival and the emergence of Jean
Hyppolite's magisterial commentary on Hegel, Genesis and Structure of the
Phenomenology of Spirit—are a period of intense absorption in Hegel. This is
an absorption at once burdened and enabled by the entanglement of Hegel's
phenomenology with Husserl's, and of Husserl's phenomenology with Hei-
degger's existential thought. Much of what is most deeply compelling and
problematic in contemporary French thought is rooted in the work and ferment
of this period.
It is perhaps of special interest that Hegel and Heidegger should have
 48 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

appeared in France so tightly bound together, because Heidegger's thought is

overwhelmingly oriented to Kant. Heidegger's two translated works on Hegel
share a certain tentativeness and a sense of a distance in need of bridging quite
alien to his work on Kant. ("The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics"
offers itself as "an attempt to begin a conversation with Hegel," while Hegel's
Concept of Experience is explicitly written as a dialogue between Heidegger and
Hegel's introduction to the Phenomenology with the apparent object of under-
standing nothing more than the book's title.12 It is not accidental that Heidegger
selects precisely that text in which Hegel is most concerned with establishing his
distance from and relation to Kant.)
I have suggested that the Hegelian tautology "the Notion is adequate to it-
self ought to be read as if the copula were set in parentheses, as an emptiness
to be filled with the unity of the Notion, and I have suggested that the bare
thought of a "post-Hegelian philosophy" is enough to lay waste this frame.
From the bare post-Hegelian position, everything that is packed into the tau-
tology, into the Notion, can appear as a forgetting or suppression of the "is" at
its heart. The tradition, one might say, can come to itself, articulate itself, only
through a certain forgetting of what it is for something to be, to ("actively," as
it were) is. From here the tradition can and must be thought as essentially the
"forgetting of Being" and even (in a phrase reminiscent of Heidegger that
reverses the volitional rhetoric of the Hegelian Notion) "the self-forgottenness
of Being."
In some ways, Heidegger's response to and repudiation of Hegel seems
simple enough. It amounts to the assertion that Hegel fastened on to the wrong
object—"the actual knowledge of what truly is"—and that Heidegger has now
gotten hold of the right one—the " is-ing" of what is, the question of Being. But
this is, of course, continuous with Hegel's repudiation of Kant: it repeats the
claim that the precursor has gotten himself into trouble by letting episte-
mological worries take precedence over the truer and (in some sense) more
obvious business of thinking. The work of philosophy—the philosophic work-
has ended by displacing, losing, or forgetting the experience on which it is—
must be—founded. Heidegger's small book Hegel's Concept of Experience holds
itself precisely in the ambivalent play between conceptuality and experience,
offering itself finally as a meditation on the appearance and eventual disappear-
ance of the word "experience" in Hegel's titles and subtitles for the work. The
general program behind this "dialogue" with Hegel's thought and experience
is laid down in Heidegger's first major work, Being and Time:
Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-
evidence: it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from
which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in
part quite genuinely drawn. . . .
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 49

If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent,

then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealment
which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task
as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to
destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at
those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of
determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever
since.13
Even as Heidegger repeats the Hegelian repudiation of Kant and even as he
repeats and radicalizes in his central figures the rhetoric of that repudiation,
making the proximity of Being even more deeply internal and intimate than
Hegel's Absolute laughing at the lime-twig lure and doubling Hegel's road to
the Absolute with his own woodland trails, half-covered over, leading nowhere
and so not walked in view of any goal14—even as, then, Heidegger's work
repeats and is worked in response to Hegel's, it can do so only by returning to
Kant and renewing in Kant the question of the conditions of possibility of any
experience whatsoever. But for Heidegger these conditions will be, in the end,
ontological—terms of our relation to Being—and not epistemological. Heidegger
takes as the charter for his engagement with Kant the first Critique's "Highest
Principle of All Synthetic Judgments":
We then assert that the conditions of the possibility of experience in
general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of
experience, and that for this reason they have objective validity in a
synthetic a priori judgment.15
Being and Time begins, in effect, by offering a rewriting of Kant's principle
of reason as a fundamental statement about the ontological implications of
human existence:
Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein's
Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological. (BT, p.
32)
Dasein—"existence, life, being" according to the dictionary and built from
da, "here" or "there," and sein, "to be"—is Heidegger's word for human
being. Human being is unique among beings because it exists, essentially, in
relation to Being. Da-sein shows in its very construction the internality of that
relation, and so has that relation as an essential question put in and through—
finally as—the structure of its experience.
The very fact that we already live in an understanding of Being and
that the meaning of Being is still veiled in darkness proves that it is
necessary in principle to raise this question again. (BT, p. 23)
 50 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

Kant's text is an exemplary instance of a life lived within an understanding

of Being and in which that understanding is nonetheless veiled. Heidegger,
moving through the sclerotic articulations of Kant's text toward their primordial
source in the (ontological) experience of Kant, locates himself in an implicitly
romantic—post-Kantian and pre-Hegelian—position and takes up again the
search for some sort of tertium quid. And when this search has run its course,
it will have to face Hegel's critique of philosophic romanticism:
Dealing with something from the perspective of the Absolute (for
which we may now read "Being") consists merely in declaring that,
although one has been speaking of it just now as something definite,
yet in the Absolute, the A = A, there is nothing of the kind, for there
all is one. To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is
the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least
seeks and demands such fulfillment, is to palm off its Absolute as the
night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black—this is cog-
nition naively reduced to vacuity. The formalism which recent philoso-
phy denounces and despises, only to see it reappear in its midst, will
not vanish from Science, however much its inadequacy may be recog-
nized and felt, till the cognizing of absolute actuality has become
entirely clear as to its own nature. (PG 16)
This then will be our itinerary, leading from an examination of Heidegger's
attempt to recover the experience of the conditions of possibility of experience
from Kant's analysis thereof to a confrontation with the complex condition of
Hegel's legacy of sheared identity and tautology.

The knowing subject of the first Critique appears dual. On one side it is open
through sensory intuition to the things of the (more or less) external world; on
the other side it appropriates these sensory intuitions to a network of categories
of the understanding. A manifold of appearances thus impinges on a passive
sensibility and is appropriated under the unity of the self and its categories of
understanding. It is these two poles of sensory multiplicity and imposed unity
of understanding that post-Kantian thought finds to be too deeply sundered from
one another, whether as phenomenon and noumenon (so that Kant was felt to
reinflict rather than overcome a radical skepticism) or as sensory intuition and
categorial understanding. The early attempts to reestablish the unity of experi-
ence across its apparent dismemberment had—"naturally"—inclined to find that
unity in the structure of self and understanding, since these clearly represented
the unifying pole within the system. The sought-after Absolute tended to take
the form of a Transcendental Ego. Heidegger's cross-grained emphasis on the
priority of Being gives the lead to the passivity of the intuition and so discovers
a new site for the problem.
In Kant, it is the faculty of the imagination that mediates between sensible
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 51

intuition and the categories of the understanding (as it is the imagination that
mediates everywhere in Kant, among the critiques as well as within them).
Heidegger's investigation of the ontological ground of the analysis of the first
Critique is an investigation into the nature of an imagination capable of perform-
ing such mediation. Sensibility and understanding are opposed as temporal to
atemporal, passive to active, and manifold to unitary; and it is the imagination
that offers the possibility of passing from each of these terms to the other.
But pure concepts of the understanding being quite heterogeneous
from empirical intuitions, and indeed from all sensible intuitions, can
never be met with in any intuition. For no one will say that a category
such as that of causality can be intuited through sense and is itself con-
tained in appearance. How, then, is the subsumption of intuitions
under pure concepts, the application of a category to appearances
possible? . . .
Obviously, there must be some third thing, which is homogeneous
on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with the
appearance, and which thus makes the application of the former to the
latter possible. This mediating representation must be pure, that is,
void of all empirical content, and yet at the same time, while it must
in one respect be intellectual, it must be in another sensible. Such a
representation is a transcendental schema.16
This "transcendental schema" is not a concept and yet is something more
than an image; it is something like a method for producing images in accordance
with a concept, a rule-generating function.
At its simplest level, the schematism is that whereby we are able to recognize
this particular mass of inert and rumbling fur as belonging under the concept
"cat," this instance of an apple as belonging under the concept "apple" or the
concept "fruit," or these five apples as subsumable under the concept "five."
But in the layering of Kantian analysis, this function accomplishes larger work.
The transcendental synthesis of the imagination is the most abstract repetition
of the operation of the schematism, appropriating the formal manifold of sensi-
bility in general to the understanding in general. It binds the pure form of intui-
tion—time—to the atemporal unity of the self and so establishes what Kant
describes as the transcendental and synthetic unity of apperception, the place in
general in which experience can occur, the mutual presence of subject and
world. A Heideggerean might speak of this as the "worlding of the world"—the
coming to be of that horizon within and against which anything that is appears.
What is the imagination that it can accomplish such world-creating media-
tion? It is, in the first instance, a temporalization of the categories of the under-
standing; indeed, at the most abstract level this is the only meaning we can give
the notion. The schematizing imagination works as a ' 'determination of time.'' 17
For Kant the imagination, beyond this, is "an art concealed in the depths of the
 52 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow
us to discover, and to have open to our gaze." Further Kantian description of
the imagination involves nothing more than reference to and adaptation of the
table of categories in terms of temporal determinations.
But for Heidegger, the real question has only just been broached. The crucial
task is to push on through this notion of the schematism to what it both reveals
and conceals: the objectivity of the object ("the worlding of the world") and
the subjectivity of the subject ("the depths of the human soul").
If the imagination is able to generate determinations of time, if it is able to
mediate between the flow of outer events and appearances and the inner stasis
of the understanding, then (this is Heidegger's thought) it must be temporal in
a sense more radical than is presented by the apparent alternatives; it must be
a "time forming" from which both sensibility and understanding can be grasped
as derivative. Heidegger urges a conceptual Gestalt shift, so that the single term
of the imagination comes into the foreground as a figure against the divided
background of its polarization into a sensibility and an understanding. Instead
of thinking of the imagination as something added to the Kantian analysis to
bridge a gap within it (a tertium quid), Heidegger asks us to think of the emer-
gence of the gap as itself an act of the imagination—which is always already a
bridging of it. One is, I think, in the end forced to feel, to imagine, one's way
into this new picture—to sense how it exerts a certain pressure on one's gram-
mar—"always already," for example, is a recurrent Heideggerean phrase that
is (or attempts to be) directly responsive to the notion of temporality involved
here. This is a notion that inclines one to speak of expression and recognition
rather than knowledge; the shape of time is such that we find ourselves always
already within it—"thrown" or "protended" by it. Time is not the simple and
empty frame within which we are, as it were, free to understand; our under-
standing itself derives from a time in which we are (always, already)—it is pene-
trated with temporality, and its business with the world can begin only in
acknowledgment of this.
Temporality, Heidegger argues, is the horizon of Being. Time—deep, ori-
ginary time—is that by which beings unfold in their Being, the means of their
presence. It is that by which we are worked, and it is as we let ourselves be so
worked that we can begin to come to grips with the understanding of Being
within which we live.
This "retrieve" of Kant, this attempt to show that beneath Kant's text there
are visible the outlines of a deeper problem and presence of Being and its neces-
sarily temporal horizon, is implicitly responsive to pressures imposed by Hegel.
Hegel had, in effect, presented the apparently linear flow of historical time as
ultimately closed on itself, come full circle in the adequation of the Idea to its
Notion. Heidegger, as a philosopher, finds himself already thrown out of this
charmed circle. And if he can so find himself, the circle must be other than
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 53

simply closed against him—it must be cut or broken. The working of time is the
working of this circle that cannot close itself, that can only turn through itself,
bringing into light and casting into shadow, leading the world into articulation
that falls always and necessarily short of totality.
This "temporality" is the way in which Being shows itself, revealing and
concealing at once; it is according to the rhythm of this temporality that the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason belongs to the history of ontology and is subject to both
an act of destruction and an act of retrieve. The Critique is, on this view, not
a set of right or wrong statements about the world or even "the worlding of the
world," but a site of and for the recognition of Being.
Implicit and inevitable in this picture is a tendency for temporality and lan-
guage to press toward one another, becoming the joint medium through which
Being is concealed and revealed. Together they spell out the structure of Dasein
as the being that is ontically distinctive in being ontological, so that its (ontical)
existence is everywhere caught up in the larger movement of Being as it gives
itself through time and language. A number of Heidegger's more evocative (or
cryptic) phrases cluster around the confluence of these various notions: time is
"the horizon of Being"; man is "the shepherd of Being"; language is "the
house of Being''; and so on. These phrases together point toward the essentially
hermeneutic structure of human understanding—an understanding that is fun-
damentally determined as interpretive rather than knowing and is so determined
by Dasein's implication in a circuit that belongs, in the first instance, to Being
and not to itself—"the there of Being." Proximity to Being will be registered
by a submission to the "speaking of Being"—to the way in which Being gives
itself to language and to Dasein. It is finally the language of poetry that alone
is capable of being fully responsive to Being, of bringing it to light. The phrases
cited above come to a point in the title (itself a citation from Holderlin) of a late
(1951) essay " . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . "18 The activity of philo-
sophy, beside this primordial poetizing, is secondary, derivative, and conserva-
tive at best; it is the moment at which the revelation of Being becomes open to
the "tradition" of Being and Time, liable to "hardening" or forgetting.
In Being and Time, Heidegger claimed to recover from or supplement Kant
with "an ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject" (BT, p. 45). But
this recovery of the subjectivity of the subject is accomplished precisely through
a submission of the subject to the conditions of objectivity. The "subjectivity
of the subject" is found to lie outside of or prior to the subject. Every subject
must be said to emerge into an already constituted, already structured world.
The fundamental structure of this world is given through the workings of the
retrieved Kantian imagination, originary temporality. This temporality is a con-
tinual movement beyond and out of itself, a system of determinate possibilities
emerging from the past and coming toward the present as the future. The past
then is not a line of dead facts of fixed and ordered significance, but a continuing
 54 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

determination both of and from the present on the basis of the possibilities
emerging from it through the future. There is no irruption of a subject into an
empty space of time, which the subject would then proceed to fill, to act in and
on. There is in Heidegger's work no "space" of time at all; his thought can be
described as an attempt to think as cleanly as possible the sheer temporality of
time—that which makes it something other than our spatializations of it allow.
"Facticity"—the fact of prior structuration, of the way in which the subject
must find itself through a certain "always already" that betrays the eccentricity
of the subjectivity of the subject—names a certain belatedness as fundamental
to human being. It names also the belated position of the philosopher (elabora-
ting the problematic of positionality handed down from Kant) with respect to
both the activity of the poet and the philosophic tradition. It generates Hei-
degger's double project of destruction and retrieve that both is and is not a
project of "demystification."
And here, of course, I am claiming Heidegger as a modernist philosopher-
one for whom the relation of the present practice of an enterprise and the history
of that enterprise has become problematic, one whose "own practice and ambi-
tion can," in Cavell's phrase, "be identified only against the continuous exper-
ience of the past."
A part of what this means is that there can always be a certain discomfort
in calling Heidegger a philosopher at all. One will perhaps feel justified so long
as it is clear that the history with which Heidegger is (problematically) engaged
is the history we all understand to be "of philosophy." But this engagement is
predicated on the notion that this history is precisely the forgetting of itself: the
history of philosophy is the mask of thinking, other than the thought of Being.
The question of Being is what is unthought "in" philosophy. Heidegger's
development consists in a continual sharpening of the opposition between the
thought of Being and the work of metaphysics, and so also in an ever more radi-
cal, and ever more generous, critique of the tradition—a critique, in particular,
of what Heidegger comes to call the "onto-theo-logical constitution of meta-
physics"—and it is under this title that Heidegger engages in his "attempt to
begin a conversation with Hegel."
"The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics" is one of a pair of lec-
tures given in 1957 and published under the joint title Identity and Difference.
Its companion piece, "The Principle of Identity," is a meditation on the inner
complexity of the assertion A = A. As often in Heidegger's later work, the
primary reference for this text is pre-Socratic (in particular, Heidegger worries
at the sense of to auton, "the Same," in Parmenides' "For thinking and Being
are the same")—but it should be clear in advance that the two pieces are pro-
foundly linked to one another as attempts to think within and without the tradi-
tion. The attempt to engage in conversation with Hegel about the constitution
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 55

of metaphysics cannot but entail a meditation on the obscurity and lucidity of

identity.
This attempt at conversation with Hegel has for its first topic the necessity
of thinking about philosophy as conversation:
Hegel rigorously thinks about the matter of his thinking in the
context of a conversation with the previous history of thinking. Hegel
is the first thinker who can and must think in this way. Hegel's rela-
tion to the history of philosophy is the speculative, and only as such a
historical, relation. (ID, p. 43)
This recognition of a problematic relation to the past common to both bodies
of thought opens naturally enough into an attempt to make out the difference
between the Hegelian and Heideggerean modes of conversation, and thus invites
a summary description of the kind of relationship at work in, for example,
Heidegger's reading of Kant:
For us, the criterion for the conversation with the historical tra-
dition is the same [as it is for Hegel], insofar as it is a question of
entering into the force of earlier thinking. We, however, do not seek
that force in what has already been thought: we seek it in something
that has not been thought, and from which what has been thought
receives its essential space. . . . The criterion of what has not been
thought does not lefd to the inclusion of previous thought into a still
higher development and systematization that surpass it. Rather, the
criterion demands that traditional thinking be set free into its essential
past which is still preserved. This essential past prevails throughout the
tradition in an originary way, is always in being in advance of it, and
yet is never expressly thought in its own right and as the Originary.
(ID, pp. 48-49)
This formulation means to distinguish the Heideggerean stance from the
totalizing onward roll of Hegelian dialectic—but its very statement—"set
free . . . still preserved . . . "—brushes inevitably up against Hegel's
language, and so Heidegger is led to further attempts to distinguish his move-
ment—"the step back"—from Hegel's Aujhebung (and we will see Derrida try
to undo this distinction, or to show it undoing itself, by pressing on the inevitable
entwinement of negation and step within the French word pas).
The Hegelian sublation urges the recognition of an identity; the Heideggerean
step back intends the recognition of a difference. Hegelian dialectic is the
detailed display of beings in their multiplicity and as they sum themselves up into
a whole, so that for Heidegger the logic of identity finally undergirding the
Hegelian project serves to display, if we but step back and look, metaphysics
as a problematic flattening out onto the level of mere beings of the deep question
 56 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

of Being. Metaphysics shows itself as onto-logy insofar as it is concerned with

beings in their common multiplicity, and as theo-logy insofar as it is concerned
with beings as a whole and in relation to a highest being, an Absolute.
The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics is then, for all its com-
pelling unity and totalizing power, a divided constitution, concealing and reveal-
ing a deeper difference and a deeper unity (as the imagination opens a deeper
abyss within and so offers a deeper unity to the Kantian project):
Because the thinking of metaphysics remains involved in the dif-
ference which as such is unthought, metaphysics is both ontology and
theology in a unified way, by virtue of the unifying unity of per-
durance.
The onto-theological constitution of metaphysics stems from the
prevalence of that difference which keeps Being as the ground, and
beings as that which is grounded and what gives account, apart from
and related to each other; and by this keeping, perdurance is achieved.
(ID, p. 71)
The difference between onto-logy and theo-logy is a derivation of the prior
unity of the ontological difference, and the apparent unity of the two in the
constitution of metaphysics is the forgetting of that difference.
The pressure all of this imposes on Heidegger's language should be clear
enough. It is a small step to his suspicion that "our Western languages are
languages of metaphysical thinking, each in its own way" (ID, p. 73), and so
to the accompanying fear that this language and its inherent complicity with
metaphysics is always on the way to reappropriating or undoing the work
achieved by the step back: "Everything that results by way of the step back may
merely be exploited and absorbed by metaphysics in its own way, as the result
of representational thinking" (ID, pp. 72-73). This fear is adequately, if
partially, glossed as a fear that the integrity of the step back cannot be
guaranteed in the face of the Hegelian Auftiebung. Heidegger can resist Hegel
only so long as he can insist on the priority of difference over its schematization
into the terms of a progressive dialectic, and much of his most difficult writing
can be said to mean primarily by virtue of its resistance:
While we are facing the difference, though by the step back we are
already releasing it into that which gives thought, we can say: the
Being of beings means Being which is beings. The "is" here speaks
transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of
a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its own place and go
over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be
approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes uncon-
cealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed
only by that coming-over. Arrival means to keep concealed in uncon-
cealedness-to abide present in this keeping-to be a being. . . .
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 57

Being in the sense of unconcealing overwhelming, and beings as

such in the sense of arrival that keeps itself concealed, are present,
and thus differentiated, by virtue of the Same, the differentiation. That
differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which
the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are
borne away from and toward each other. . . .
In our attempt to think the difference as such, we do not make it
disappear; rather, we follow it to its essential origin. (ID, pp. 64-65)
"Difference as such": this is what needs to be thought in the face of Hegel. To
think difference as such is to recall philosophy—metaphysics—to its properly
abyssal ground in the thinking of Being, in experience, in that place where our
articulations find their origin.
But it is of course far from clear what it might be to think ' 'difference as
such." For Heidegger much of the obscurity of this task lies concealed in our
inability to think identity as such. This is something we all tend to think we can
do: A = A. But this, for Heidegger as for Hegel, fails to state what it claims
to represent:
The formula A = A speaks of equality (between two things). It
doesn't define A as the same. The common formulation of the princi-
ple of identity conceals precisely what the principle is trying to say: A
is A, that is, every A is itself the same. (ID, p. 24)
Even this formulation doesn't satisfy Heidegger, and, pushing on it, he
pushes once again on the limits of our language:
Does the principle of identity really say anything about the nature of
identity? No, at least not directly. Rather, the principle already pre-
supposes what identity means and where it belongs. How do we get
any information about this presupposition? The principle of identity
itself gives it to us, if we listen carefully to its key note, if we think
about that key note instead of just thoughtlessly mouthing the formula
"A is A." For the proposition really says: "A is A." What do we
hear? With this "is," the principle tells us how every being is,
namely: it itself is the same with itself. The principle of identity
speaks of the Being of beings. As a law of thought, the principle is
valid only insofar as it is a principle of Being that reads: To every
being as such there belongs identity, the unity with itself. (ID, pp.
25-26)
Heidegger's reading of the principle of identity is a repetition in a minor key
of his reading—destruction and retrieve—of Kant; Heidegger presses here
through the "is" as he presses through the notion of the imagination in the first
Critique. His reading also exemplifies the step back as opposed to the Hegelian
 58 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

Aufliebung. Whereas Hegel in effect embraces and radicalizes the prepositional

frame in order that the speculative whole of the world may be subsumed within
its own tautological totality, Heidegger refuses its apparent settlement of the
question of identity in order to reach a prior moment in which a thing appropri-
ates itself to itself and so becomes capable of figuring (and being forgotten) in
such dry formulae as A = A. This step back would capture the radical fact of
mediation and synthesis within identity itself prior to its schematization by the
simultaneously onto- and theo-logical structure of metaphysics. This move
seems at once pre- and post-Hegelian, attempting to register the fact of media-
tion in its Hegelian centrality, but attempting to do so by plunging precisely into
the night of identity within which, for Hegel, "all cows are black."
"The Same" becomes in Heidegger the name for that difference by virtue
of which identity comes to prevail within our language and our metaphysics. The
recollection of the Same is then at war with the terms with which we would
embody it; our task is accordingly always to move back toward the origin of
those terms, toward their essential inward sense, the living kernel within the
husk of tradition and received formulation, the seed:
Our facing the difficulty that stems from language should keep us
from hastily recasting the language of the thinking here attempted into
the coin of terminology, and from speaking right away about perdur-
ance instead of devoting all our efforts to thinking through what has
been said. For what was said, was said in a seminar. A seminar, as
the word implies, is a place and an opportunity to sow a seed here and
there, a seed of thinking which some time or other may bloom in its
own way and bring forth fruit. (ID, pp. 73-74)
I have quoted at length from Identity and Difference, because an awareness
of Heidegger's language is at least as important to our purposes as an awareness
of his "argument." On the one hand, we can recognize in Heidegger's stance
toward the tradition the ground plan of the position Derrida will later take up—
Derrida assumes, like Heidegger, a certain closure of the tradition in the wake
of Hegel and finds his primary task—deconstruction—as a revision and perhaps
radicalization of the operation Heidegger called variously "destruction,"
"retrieve," "appropriation," "a step back." But at the same time, Heidegger
seems to offer the paradigmatic instance of the object of Derrida's critique—the
thing called "phonocentrism," or "logocentrism," or "phallocentrism," and
so on. The terms Heidegger deploys in his attempt to find a site for philosophy
after Hegel are precisely the terms on which Derrida's critique fastens most
powerfully and compulsively: "the Originary," "unconcealment," "arrival,"
"abiding," "presence," "the Same," "saying," "hearing," "appropria-
tion," and even "seminar." At the same time, Derrida will valorize many of
the terms of Heideggerean disparagement—"formulae," "coin of termi-
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 59

nology"—and radically reconstrue still others in ways that outrace their

apparent place in Heidegger's argument—recognizing a notion of metaphor at
complex work in the assertion that "Being transits (that), comes unconcealing
over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that coming-
over," or insisting newly on the complexity of "that differentiation (that) alone
grants and holds apart the 'between' " (ID, pp. 64, 65).
Derrida stands to Heidegger very much as Hegel stood to Fichte and
Schelling, in a relation at once of rupture and repetition, continuity and critique.
To be able to pose this relation as such-as Derrida implicitly does in his wary
reference to "something . . . that could be called an 'event' " and his explicit
awareness of the provisional and strategic nature of his deconstructive opera-
tions-is to advance into a thought of history that is not open to Heidegger. For
Heidegger, history, no longer the unifying frame through which meaning and
being are unfolded but simply a derived, sclerotic block to those things, is con-
demned to be merely that series of disguises beyond which —epochally, Hei-
degger says—Being episodically shows itself. No particular law of continuity or
discontinuity links any one such "mittence" or "advent" of Being to any other.
The field divides in two, becoming either wholly redeemed by its openness to
Being or wholly empty through its suppression of Being; either a random set of
disguises or a game that has been played out, its possibilities of movement are
in any case exhausted. In the end, what is rational in history is empty; what
counts is irrational: and the two aspects can only slide against one another with-
out touching. It is this pure, contactless sliding that makes Heidegger finally,
and radically, an irrationalist. We will see Derrida recognizing and reacting
against this Heideggerean motif in Lacan as well.
It is in his fundamental inability to think history as such that Heidegger ends
as something other than "post-Hegelian" (however responsive his work may be
to Hegelian motifs). In a sense, Heidegger spells out what it is to philosophize
after Hegel but remains unable to find that oblique slice through his precursor
that would make visible a new site for philosophy. Even as he points to the
closure of metaphysics in Hegel, he is continually led to drag out the last act
of metaphysics, distinguishing (or attempting to distinguish) its closure in Hegel
from its consummation in Nietzsche and both of these from the turn (Kehre) to
come in his own thought—so many distinctions that simultaneously slur and
suppress what ought to be problematic. This final inability to think the tradition
as a problem leaves him unable to do more than reassert the ("deeper")
autonomy of the philosophic enterprise, taming the very difference his thought
discovers in order to hold it within the propriety of the Same, the mutual co-
appurtenance of, for example, thinking and Being, saying and hearing, the
intimacy of a conversation.
Living up to the Heideggerean demand to think "difference as such" will
necessitate breaking with the assumed hegemony of the Same and with the
 60 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

Heideggerean-Parmenidean belonging together of thinking and Being in

originary and poetic speech. In the long run, a thought that would be of "dif-
ference as such" will have to break both with the claim to some sort of deep
philosophic propriety and autonomy and with the oppositional drama that sup-
ports it—in this sense deconstruction both depends on a recognition of and works
to acknowledge fully the ways in which Hegel's legacy is not—cannot be—con-
fined to any seminar but is and must be more widely broadcast (this points
toward the interest the text of Derrida's seminar on the Freudian legacy and its
narration will have for us later on).
Derrida's project can be said to begin from Heidegger's. But we can also say
that Derrida' s experience of Heidegger is of a continuing and radical failure of
the closure of metaphysics, so that Derrida begins in explicit contestation with
that project and its insistence upon—rather than questioning of—the autonomy
and identity of philosophy itself. As Derrida argues the necessity of a certain
impropriety and impurity for philosophy, so the experience that forms and
informs his practice of deconstruction is itself not solely philosophic. Of par-
ticular interest to us here, because of their explicit and central reference to things
Hegelian, are the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the hyperbolically gener-
alized theory of excess elaborated by Georges Bataille, and it is to them that we
now turn.

After Hegel (II): Philosophy Beside Itself

We will appear here to be crossing a border, and a dialectically charged one at
that, passing from some properly philosophical "inside" to an improper "out-
side" on the way to assembling them into some final Idea of Deconstruction
adequate to the germinal Notion of the Hegelian Legacy. This appearance is
inevitable and in that sense not simply false—it is the deep risk internal to
deconstruction as well as to its presentation here. As we will see, deconstruction
intends, in effect, a simulacrum of dialectic, disrupted at every point of its itiner-
ary—it repeats and contests the risks of Heidegger's step back.
Deconstruction's (broken) dialectic can be said either to begin from a
peculiarly problematic object or to found itself in no simply definable tradition.
If we follow out the first statement we will find ourselves describing or justifying
our work not in terms of adequacy to some given notion or Idea, but in terms
of strategies, ways of getting at the thing in question. If we take up the second
statement, we will find ourselves repudiating any attempt to fix the definition
of "the tradition" or "the enclosure." The enclosure as such is visible only
from the privileged position of a Hegel—a position infinitely extended in
Heidegger's realism of the (forgottenness of Being everywhere beneath the)
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 61

tradition. Derrida begins where, however necessary it may be to speak of a

metaphysical enclosure as if one could somehow stand outside, we have no
choice but to recognize our own belonging to that tradition and enclosure:
The expression "long metaphysical sequence" well indicates that
for me it was not a question of taking "metaphysics" as the homo-
geneous unity of an ensemble. I have never believed in the existence
or consistency of something like metaphysics itself. . . . Keeping in
account such and such a demonstrative sentence or such a contextual
constraint, if I happened to say "metaphysics" or "the" closure of
"metaphysics" . . . very often elsewhere . . . I have put forward
the proposition according to which there would never be "meta-
physics," "closure" not being here a circular limit bordering a
homogeneous field but a more twisted structure which today, accord-
ing to another figure, I would be tempted to call: "invaginated."
Representation of a linear and circular closure surrounding a homo-
geneous space is, precisely, the theme of my greatest emphasis, an
auto-representation of philosophy in its onto-encyclopedic logic.19
This figure of "double imagination" can serve to describe the relation
between the two apparent sides of our broken dialectic—sides that are only
"inner" and "outer" on, as it were, a local basis, for a certain duration and
purpose, strategically.

Psychoanalysis figures repeatedly and variously in our accounts of the

modern. It has been taken to represent the demystifying onslaught of modern
science, a last outburst of poetry in a rationalized age, a way out from under
the modern burdens of history and guilt, or the normalizing tool of contempo-
rary capitalism; and all of these representations have opened out into a series
of claims for or critiques of Freud's work to the point that one may well feel
it both necessary and difficult to return psychoanalysis to itself, to Freud's text.
Jacques Lacan's writings, for all their obscurity, have for their announced
goal simply this return to Freud, the restoration of psychoanalysis to its specific
practice and discipline. In many ways this is an enterprise that could have arisen
only in France: Sherry Turkic has done much to trace the way in which the long
French resistance to psychotherapy in general and psychoanalysis in particular
led to an explosive and highly theoretical interest in Freud at a time when the
rest of the world assumed it had already understood and absorbed the psycho-
analytic impulse. A central element in the French reception of Freud is its coin-
cidence with the reception of Hegel. The coupling of Hegel and Freud in Lacan's
writing is something new in the history of psychoanalysis (more orthodox
philosophic references are to Kant or to Nietzsche) and is responsible for much
 62 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

of what seems most powerful in Lacan's attempt to restore psychoanalysis to

visibility. It is responsible too for the overwhelming interest Derrida takes in
psychoanalysis as, in Lacan's hands, it works the complex boundaries between
philosophy and psychology.
For Lacan, the objectivity of psychoanalysis resides in its disciplined
adherence to its object, the Unconscious revealed in the Freudian text. The
impulse here is close to Hegel's in that it too turns away from preliminary and
directly epistemological considerations in favor of an adherence to what already
exists and is under way. Psychoanalysis so conceived can become something like
a "science of the experience of the Unconscious" complementary to the
Hegelian science of the experience of consciousness, and this suggests that it
can, in significant ways, gain an understanding of itself through a certain appeal
to the Phenomenology of Spirit. This appeal will of course also open up the dif-
ferences between Freud and Hegel, authorizing an implicit psychoanalytic
critique of Hegel. This double movement of appeal and critique will provide our
entry into Lacan's work. It should hardly need stressing that this approach is
partial and interested, a very particular version of Lacan.
Lacan's path intersects the course of the Phenomenology most obviously
when it comes to matters of desire and mutual recognition:
The very desire of man is constituted, Hegel tells us, beneath the
sign of mediation; it is a desire to have its desire recognized. Its
object is a desire, that of the other, in the sense that man has no
object constituted for his desire without some mediation, which is
evident even in his most primitive wants—in, for example, the fact
that even his food must be prepared—and which one rediscovers
throughout the development of satisfaction from the conflict of master
and slave through the entire dialectic of work.20
Before turning to an elaboration of the Hegelian reference in this passage,
some preliminary observations may be in order. The general location of desire
"beneath the sign of mediation" refuses, from the outset, any biological reading
of psychoanalysis and is thus of a piece with Lacan's rejection of the translation
of Freud's Trieb by the English "instinct." This radical distinction between the
psychoanalytic and the biological was enabled, for Lacan, by Levi-Strauss's early
work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship; its presentation of culture as a
simultaneously linguistic and social order through which man lays claim to
himself as something other than natural is the basic form of Lacan's "Symbolic
Order." It is the Symbolic that is able to articulate Lacan's early work on narcis-
sism and the "mirror stage" with the central Oedipal motif of classical psycho-
analysis. The "sign of mediation" is equally the "mediation of the sign."
When Lacan insists that desire constitutes itself beneath the sign of mediation,
he is arguing that desire is an achievement and not a natural given—thus is some-
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 63

thing that answers neither to a biology of (instinctual) need nor to any simply
conceived anthropological "lack" that could be somehow made up or filled in.
Situating this "achievement" entails abstracting from Lacan's writings a theory
of child development that these writings are in large measure designed to resist
for reasons that will become apparent later. If we do abstract such a theory, we
get a story along the following lines:
Of an infant virtually nothing can be said except that it exists—in some
sense—in state of free-floating indifferentiation that is strictly ineffable and
unknowable. Some myths may help to understand the child's later development
out of and on the basis of this state. We may say (as Lacan sometimes does) that
man, as distinct from other animals, is born too soon, is out of step with himself,
is (as) an anticipation of what is not yet there (his own integral totality). Or we
may say, more mythically, that it is as if the Aristophanic myth of the primordial
androgynes were true, that human being is the sundering of a totality that once
existed in another place and is thus a search for the "other half that once made
it whole. Or we may say, most simply, that human being is the sort of being
that can come to construe itself as "lacking," and that the vicissitudes of such
construals are the vicissitudes of (what in man are not) the instincts. It is, in any
case, because the infant is somehow less or other than whole that it can come
to have its self and its desire as a problem (and this can seem to echo Heidegger's
Dasein, that being whose Being is a problem for it).
It is, Lacan argues, through an other that the child first comes to its self. The
paradigm for this difficult and alienated assumption of self is given in the "mirror
state," the period during which the infant learns to recognize its reflected image
(and one of the points here is of course that this "recognition" cannot be read
as re-cognition; the knowledge of self is founded on this [mis]recognition, and
not vice versa). The infant of the mirror stage inscribes itself
in a primordial ambivalence which appears to us, as I have
indicated, as that of a mirror in that the subject identifies itself in its
sentiment of Self with the image of the other and the image of the
other comes to captivate that feeling in him. . . .
Thus, the essential point, the first effect which appears from the
imago in the human being is one of the alienation of the subject. It is
in the other the subject identifies itself and even experiences itself first
of all.21
The infant comes to itself in alienation, in slippage against itself and as other
than whole. In Aristophanes' account, after their division the androgynes are
marked on their surfaces by the seams where the cut faces have been sewn up
by Hephaestus. For Lacan such a system of seams may be taken as a metaphor
for the libido, which would then be described as an irreal organ coincident with
the surface of the body; each seam may likewise be said to mark an erogenous
 64 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

zone, a site for totalization or completion. The erotic impulse is thus fundamen-
tally tied to the search for an integral self and so is ultimately reflexive:
Since we refer to the infant and the breast, and since suckling is
sucking, let us say that the oral drive is getting sucked, it is the
vampire.22
This oral drive is fundamentally autoerotic, but its autoeroticism is neces-
sarily mediated by an object "around" which it turns on itself, calling forth a
distinction between the "aim" (the breast) and the "goal" (the self). This
emergence of erotic appetite as a means to the grounding of the self brings us
to the opening moments of the Phenomenology's dialectic of desire:
174. The simple T is this genus or the simple universal, for which
the differences are not differences only by its being the negative
essence of the shaped independent moments; and self-consciousness is
thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself
to self-consciousness as an independent life; self-consciousness is
Desire. Certain of the nothingness of this other, it explictly affirms
that this nothingness is for it the truth of the other; it destroys the
independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a
true certainty, a certainty which has become explicit for self-conscious-
ness itself in an objective manner.
175. In this satisfaction, however, experience makes it aware that
the object has its own independence. . . . Thus self-consciousness, by
its negative relation to the object, is unable to supersede it; it is really
because of that relation that it produces the object again, and the
desire as well. (PG 174-75)
Our parallel can be maintained however, only so long as we isolate the erotic
object from its implication in another subject. For Hegel this encounter of the
independent consciousness with the object is prior to the encounter of that
consciousness with another consciousness, whereas for Lacan the whole devel-
opmental sequence occurs within the overarching context of the preexistent
sociolinguistic order, the Symbolic. It is this difference and its consequences that
we want ultimately to explore, but we can get at its full scope only by looking
at the moment in which Lacan and Hegel coincide completely—in the analysis
of the struggle for recognition. The dialectical transition to this moment is given
in the continuation of the passage we have just cited:
It is in fact something other than self-consciousness that is the essence
of Desire; and through this experience self-consciousness has itself
realized this truth. But at the same time it is no less absolutely for
itself, and it is so only by superseding the object; and it must exper-
ience its satisfaction, for it is the truth. On account of the indepen-
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 65

dence of the object, therefore, it can achieve satisfaction only when

the object itself effects the negation within itself, for it is in itself the
negative, and must be for the other what it is. Since the object is in its
own self negation, and being so is at the same time independent, it is
consciousness. In the sphere of Life, which is the object of Desire,
negation is present either in an other, viz. in Desire, or as a deter-
minateness opposed to another independent form, or as the inorganic
universal nature of life. But this universal independent nature in which
negation is present as absolute negation, is the genus as such, or the
genus as self-consciousness. Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction
only in another self-consciousness. (PG 175)
The upshot of all this is at once simple and complex:
179. Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it
has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost
itself, for it finds itself as another being; secondly, in doing so it has
superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential
being, but in the other sees its own self.
180. It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is the superses-
sion of the first ambiguity, and is therefore itself a second ambiguity.
First, it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in
order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being;
secondly, in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this
other is itself. (PG 179-80)
The complexities of this problematic discovery of self as other and other as
self are for Lacan the central teaching of Hegel. The Hegelian dialectic of Desire
as sketched out here marks out the region proper to psychoanalysis as the science
of (necessarily human) Desire insofar as it is unable to confine itself to the level
of mere appetite (capable of attaining to some form of satisfaction) but must push
beyond the object in order to pose itself for itself and in an other. What a given
self-consciousness demands of that other consciousness through which it finds
itself is a recognition of itself as autonomous and independent. It implicitly
demands that the other consciousness negate its own independence in such a way
as to let the given self-consciousness secure itself within itself. (My indepen-
dence means that I do not need you.) But because it is only through the other
consciousness that the given consciousness can attain such security, the negation
of that other consciousness is finally a loss of security for the given conscious-
ness. (My independence is assured only through my not needing you', and if you
are not there, my independence from you can no longer be assured.)
The immediate consequence of this struggle for recognition in which two self-
consciousnesses face one another and demand each other's negation in favor of
their own autonomies is the dialectic of master and slave, the result of which
 66 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

is the submission of one self-consciousness to another and then a reversal of that

submission, all of which works to set up a moment of mutual recognition and
forgiveness. This recognition comes, much later in the Phenomenology, as the
transition to the religious shape of consciousness, itself the threshold of Absolute
Knowledge.
It is just here that psychoanalysis breaks with Hegelian Phenomenology,
insisting that the Imaginary dialectics of mother and child find no solution except
through the disruptive intervention of a third—paternal—person who announces
the necessary submission of both mother and child to a Symbolic law that pre-
cludes any totalization. Hegel's image of the family, in The Philosophy of Right,
is one in which parent and child simply alternate positions through the mediation
of a process of "education" that is the domestic repetition of the education of
consciousness to philosophy in the Phenomenology. Oedipus is not a figure for
Hegel (and, indeed, it is in Antigone and not Oedipus Rex that Hegel finds his
tragic paradigm). From the standpoint of a psychoanalysis that draws upon the
Phenomenology in order to understand itself, Hegel finally appears to claim to
find an integral and autonomous individuality at the level of the Imaginary, and
this can determine the questions with which we will be concerned throughout
the remainder of this section:
—Our fundamental interest lies in determining the relation of a psycho-
analytic logic that feeds on the structure of the Phenomenology, even as it is
unable to endorse its resolution, to the language and logic of that text. The claim
that psychoanalysis is a paradigmatically modernist discipline is to be filled out
in terms of its participation in and dependence on a certain failure of the
Absolute. We want to tease out of the Phenomenology itself the structure of this
"failure"—to see along what faces the crystal shears, and to see the conse-
quences of this shearing at work within the theoretical structure of psycho-
analysis. All of which is to say that we want to see Lacan's psychoanalysis as
specifically and consequentially "post-Hegelian."
—Our task must be to work in Hegel at the structure of reading Hegel. It is
only the reading of Hegel that can strongly ground something that can with
justice be called the post-Hegelian. We will see that our object is, in the end,
the interplay between the reader's claim to read and the text's claim to mastery
over that reading. We want to get at the way in which to read the Phenomenology
is already to find oneself as, somehow, post-Hegelian even as the text would
claim to close off that possibility.
—This means that we have to make some attempt to come to grips with the
difficult notion of the Absolute and its quasi-eschatological aspects. As
remarked earlier, whatever we may want to say about the "real meaning" of
Hegel's claims to have attained the end of history and the fulfillment of
philosophy, we must begin by recognizing that these claims are made, are
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 67

radical, and are prior to any modifications, however "obvious," we might want
to make.

If we cannot say with any real satisfaction what the Absolute is, we can
certainly say something of what it does: it closes the Phenomenology, proclaim-
ing the final resolution of its conflicts and displaying the adequacy of knowledge
to itself. The consciousness whose course we have followed through some five
hundred pages of dialectical cunning and reversal is now fully a philosophical
consciousness, ready to enter into—to read or to write—the system of the Logic.
—But there is something funny here: we had thought to bypass the necessity for
a preliminary, more or less Kantian, movement and now we find ourselves
simply to have completed it.
Hegel's preface, written after the completion of the Phenomenology itself,
functions as a kind of retrospect on the processes of the Phenomenology and as
a prospect toward the larger and more properly philosophic system of the Logic.
It is thus as much a postface to the Absolute as it is a preface to the text, located
logically somewhere that is at once prior and posterior to the Phenomenology
of Spirit. It has for its implicit task the reabsorption of the Phenomenology into
the larger system, breaking down the appearance of the text as "merely pre-
liminary." It has, in a certain sense, to make the Phenomenology disappear (so
that we can say that although the Phenomenology is absolutely necessary to the
Hegelian project, it is [or ought to be] absolutely unnecessary to the system—a
ladder to be thrown away after it is climbed: the preface is the gesture that would
throw it away).
We might say: the Phenomenology ought not be a self-standing text; it ought
to efface itself before its achievement of the standpoint of Absolute Knowledge;
it intends its own radical transparency before the final self-showing of the
Absolute. Or, we might also say: it intends to educate its reader to that stand-
point, to transform that reader into the fully philosophic consciousness of the
Logic, a consciousness capable of recognizing itself in the Absolute. The persis-
tence of a reader exterior to the Absolute, the insistence of some lingering
textual presence in the face of the Absolute—these are the coupled moments that
the preface would finally render impossible.
The preface, I am suggesting, is that place where the Phenomenology would
ensure its absorption of itself and of its reader. It would attempt to guarantee
the movement of Phenomenology beyond any lingering, merely textual pres-
ence. Such a movement beyond textuality is the simplest—perhaps the only—
sense one can grant Hegel's claim to the self-showing of the Absolute. That the
project is incoherent means nothing here; what we are trying to give an account
of is why it doesn't quite make sense and what the consequences of that are.
The preface would then be prior to the Phenomenology, giving the "rules"
 68 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

for its successful reading; at the same time, it is necessarily posterior to the
whole of the Phenomenology, since it is only from the standpoint of Absolute
Knowledge that one can grasp the necessity for the sort of reading the preface
would establish. Finally, the preface is itself a part of the Phenomenology—the
part that has for its essential object the Phenomenology (including itself). Its job
is to make—somehow—all this mass of interlocking language "vanish." This
is very different from saying that the purpose of the preface is to give us
"Hegel's theory of language"—that theory belongs to the Phenomenology itself.
The task of the preface is to work a transformation that is capable of embracing
the language in which any Hegelian theory of language is itself couched. The
preface is called upon to produce a rule for reading that does away with the act
of reading and makes of the text a pure showing.
This view points to a gap between language known as an object within the
history of experience and the language by which that history is known and
communicated. The two cannot be subject to the same constraints, and the
preface must bridge the gap between them. Putting the issue this way lets us see
the way the preface is left, after the Phenomenology has run its course, to
grapple with the issues the introduction had claimed to bypass. The initial
avoidance of Kant comes home here. The moment of preliminary critique turns
out to have been only displaced by the movement of the text from its initial
Kantian context into the specifically logico-linguistic region within which the
preface works. The Phenomenology must still end by showing itself to be some-
thing other than preliminary.

The initial, introductory evasion of the epistemological question depends, as

we have seen, on the givenness of the philosophic Notion, the idea of philosophy.
The same insistence of the Notion will, in the preface, hold together the logical
and prosodic aspects of what Hegel calls the "speculative judgment" (or "proposi-
tion")-and it is on the actuality of the speculative proposition that the Hegelian
project depends. Finally, the Notion organizes as well a certain denial of the
reader and of reading as a subject and an activity exterior to the Phenomenology.
The Notion is the principled object of philosophy through which it defines
its disciplinary propriety. We are claiming for it here a triple function in Hegel's
text:
(1) The denial or surpassing of epistemology and preliminary critique in the
introduction.
(2) The guarantee of the logical force of the Absolute Proposition and so also
of the speculative judgment in the preface.
(3) The denial of the reader and reading in the preface.
This triple function defines the structure through which the Phenomenology
can claim to control its own reading. Our claim (the reader's claim) is simply
that the persistent "readability" of the text has consequences that it is radically
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 69

unable to control—consequences that subvert the claims of the text and vouch-
safe to the reader the space in which post-Hegelian thought unfolds. The mere
act of reading is sufficient to undermine Hegel's attempt to circumscribe
rigorously the limits of the discipline of philosophy.
Hegel's discussion of the speculative proposition emerges through a critique
of the traditional logical sentence. This critique attempts to establish within and
as if beneath that sentence a deeper movement that is to be thought of as proper
to the Notion. The exposition develops through two stages:
(1) Traditional logic is held to be in opposition to the Notion. The Notion
struggles against the confinement of logical form and asserts itself as a "counter-
thrust" within that form.
(2) The sentence—formerly logical and now recognized as containing a
counterthrust and movement against itself—takes on a prosodic form that is a
direct reflection of the working of the Notion in language.
This overcoming of the opposition between Notion and logic by language
forces Hegelian science to understand itself in the last analysis rhetorically.23 It
entails also a shift in the primary locus of meaning. The sentence now appears
as "dead" but for its implication in a larger, more embracing system of
sentences—a text.24 And this migration of meaning demands in its turn a trans-
formation of the criteria of truth, now detached from any image of logical
adequacy and insisting instead in the coherence and systematicity of the text:
—This conflict between the general form of a proposition and the unity
of the Notion which destroys it is similar to the conflict that occurs in
rhythm between metre and accent. Rhythm results from the floating
centre and the unification of the two. [Der Rhythmus resultiert aus der
schwebenden Mitte und Vereinigung beider.] So, too, in the philo-
sophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not
meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the
proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a
harmony. (PC 61)
The stake is the status of the logical subject, the autonomous A of which B
is predicated: It is this subject that is undermined by the system of sentences—
the text that continually displaces its apparent autonomy and priority into other
sentences, rendering the world finally thinkable, in an Hegelian phrase, as both
subject and substance. The subject is thus recuperated at the level of the text-as-
totality-of-language. The "erasure" of the Phenomenology in order that it
become a self-showing of the Absolute is accomplished through a "linguefac-
tion" of the world—the self-showing of the Absolute is a showing forth of
language. The ladder is not so much thrown away as shown to be that to which
it appeared to lead. The Notion is at once that which guarantees the largest
logical form of the Phenomenology (its ultimate adequation to itself) and that
 70 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

which releases it from the sway of epistemological critique. The Absolute is the
Notion's rhythmic scansion of itself.
Which is to say that the Absolute is the product or result of no reading
exterior to itself. The "rhythm that results from the floating centre and the
unification of the two" is a wholly internal product of the interplay of "metre"
and "accent," and not the consequence of a reading, a scansion that would be
the result of an exchange between reader and text. It is indeed this relation of
exchange that Hegel everywhere rejects; the Notion, as the givenness of philoso-
phy, is the denial of (rhetorical) exchange.
1. It is customary to preface a work with an explanation of the
author's aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he
believes it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the
same subject. In the case of a philosophical work, however, such an
explanation seems not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of
the subject-matter, even inappropriate and misleading. For whatever
might appropriately be said about philosophy in a preface— . . . none
of this can be accepted as the way in which to expound philosophical
truth. (PG 1)
The opening paragraphs of the Phenomenology are engaged in a radical
denial of the rhetoric of prefacing along with all that such a rhetoric (or any
rhetoric) implies about the relation of text to reader in the name of the nature
and notion of philosophy. This is characteristic of Hegel's prefaces and intro-
ductions, except in those instances (the lectures on fine art for example) in which
the topic is a subdivision of philosophy and so can be treated in an anatomy. The
totalization of the subject as and in language depends on a preliminary rejection
of any autonomous and exterior reading subject.
I want then to say that there is a certain tension that cannot accurately be said
to be in the Phenomenology but that certainly must be said to belong to it: a
tension between, on the one hand, its totalizing claim over its proper scansion
and the concomitant recovery and valorization of the absolute subject, and, on
the other hand, the fact of its necessary submission to a reader—or, a tension
between its necessary appeal to a certain rhetoricity in understanding its own
operations, and its refusal of any field in which such a rhetoric could be under-
stood. Within this tension it is the reader who comes to know himself as that
by means of which the Notion's scansion of itself is realized.
The reader finds himself as the one who is unable to acknowledge his relation
to the text within the terms the text would impose on him and thus discovers
himself as a particular exclusion on which the Phenomenology depends. The
reader may even discover himself as herself—as at once engendered and denied
by the experience of Hegel. The subject of psychoanalysis would then emerge
in the same moment as its object. For this reader, excluded from the text, the
Notion's scansion of itself can be no more than metaphorical, belonging to the
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 71

order of signification and not that of totality or being. The reader is inevitably
that phenomenological nonsense whose suppression is the condition of
phenomenological sense—a sense which is thus no longer total.
This "reader," thought abstractly and for itself, appears now as a systematic
unconscious proper to the Phenomenology—linguistically structured by its field
and yet nonsignificant from the standpoint of the adventure of consciousness
enacted in the text. And because Hegel aims to show the world as subject and
substance at once, the reader's self-discovery is complex, double—a discovery
of what it is to be a self and of what it is to be a discipline. This Unconscious
has emerged from a systematic interlacing of language with the disciplinary
claims of philosophy—the articulation of its autonomy and objectivity—in such
a way that philosophy demands henceforth to be thought of as the kind of thing
that operates this kind of exclusion-the kind of thing that has this kind of
unconscious. Drifting into more explicitly Lacanian terms, we can say that a
contestation of its claims to Imaginary autonomy and identity with itself is
inscribed within philosophy itself as a moment of radical self-criticism, a call
for acknowledgment. The Heideggerean project of destruction/retrieve responds
to this call; so also Derrida's "deconstruction"-and Derrida's response is
explicitly informed by psychoanalytic considerations. The mutual entanglement
of psychoanalysis and philosophy we thus arrive at opens out both into a psycho-
analytically informed notion or critique of philosophy and into a philosophic
contestation with the claims of psychoanalysis. Derrida's deconstruction can, for
example, appear as a psychoanalysis of the history of philosophy—but it can
appear equally as a continuing and radical critique of psychoanalysis. These
various relations between the two disciplines will form the substance of our
presentation of Derrida in the next chapter. For the moment it is enough to have
seen something of the way in which psychoanalysis can lay claim to the Hegelian
legacy and of the escape it appears to offer from the totalizing progress of
Hegelian dialectic.

After Hegel (III): The Philosopher's Death

Georges Bataille's lifelong argument with Hegel began as simple opposition to
the closed totality that seems the end of Hegel's dialectic. As Raymond Queneau
puts it, describing Bataille's early writings, "the enemy is .
logicism of Hegel and the determination to oppose himself like a brute to any
system had itself no system." But as Bataille became more familiar with Hegel,
largely under Kojeve's tutelage, this easy irrationalism became more complex.
In Queneau's words, Bataille gradually came to Hegel "to define himself not
through opposition, but, in a sense, through fraternization." Although Bataille's
problem with Hegel can be said to have remained always within the terms of
system and antisystem in which it was initially posed, it became, within those
terms, ever more nuanced and ever more aware of itself as necessarily unable
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to escape them, bound in and to them. Queneau concludes his essay on Bataille
and Hegel as follows:
For nearly twenty years he compared himself against Hegel, or
rather against the different Hegels discovered one after another by the
French philosophic public. Ending by perceiving the true, he knew
himself—knew himself as radically non-Hegelian, but with an aware-
ness also that this self-knowledge could not have come about except
after knowledge of a doctrine to which he said nothing else was
comparable—thus rediscovering himself, mediated but not reduced.25
The sense of this mediated self-discovery through Hegel is perhaps best
reflected in a passage from Bataille's L'Experience interieure:
Small comic recapitulation: Hegel, I imagine, touched the extreme.
He was young still and feared going mad. I imagine even that he
elaborated the system to escape (every form of conquest is no doubt
the act of a man fleeing a menace). Supplication is dead in him. Even
seeking safety, passage beyond, one continues to live; one can never
be sure; one must continue to entreat. Hegel, living, won safety, killed
supplication, mutilated himself. There remained of him nothing but an
artificial arm, a modern man. But before mutilating himself, he doubt-
less touched the extreme, knew the entreaty: its memory draws him
back to the glimpsed abyss, to annul it! The system is the annulment.26
The closed ring of the system appears here as the papering over of an abyss
that cannot or will not be faced any longer, and Bataille's clear suggestion is that
the Phenomenology is to be read toward the experience it would conceal or
evade. The psychoanalytic and Heideggerean resonances of this should be
obvious.
"The rational is actual; the actual is rational"—thus Hegel in the preface to
the Philosophy of Right. The sentence is as succinct a summary of Hegel's
system as anything he ever wrote. Bataille would have us see in it, in its very
concision, symmetry, and simplicity, the annulling of an abyss—and would have
us see Hegel, writing it, being led back to the very edge of that abyss. In the
Hegelian text the statement does indeed lead us to a moment unique in the
philosopher's works. It is tempting to describe this moment as Hegel's own
brief, posthumous, post-Hegelian instant—a moment in which he brings himself
to the very brink of a recognition that he has left the dark of his post-Kantian
predecessors' absolute night only to leave himself marooned in the grey on grey
of dusk, the night still, or again, ahead. Bataille, a sun worshipper of sorts,
might be said to begin from this statement and to move ever more deeply and
more willingly, back or ahead, into the night no longer called "cognition
reduced to vacuity" (PG 16) but "la nuit de non-savoir" (Oeuvres, V: 40)—
perhaps, cognition sophisticatedly reduced to vacuity.
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 73

If the rational is actual and the actual is rational, it would seem to follow that
what is possible is in fact actual and what is not actual is in fact impossible: that
is, the space one wants to call that of the possible has no proper existence,
dividing immediately into the actual or the impossible. Possibility—or impos-
sibility—would be a name of the abyss. This seems one of the things Hegel is
pointing to in his image of the grey on grey: actuality as it is given through
Hegel's philosophy stands as figure against no ground of possibility deeper and
richer than itself. This is clearly one way of getting at the sense of the post-
Hegelian anxiety so visible in the young Marx or in Kierkegaard or wherever
the Hegelian system appears as capable of absorbing in advance any philosophic
position that would present itself as novel, as posterior to or other than the
system. It is an easy and obvious move from this anxiety to taking up the cause
of the brute and irrational against an omnipresent hyperrationalism—the position
from which Bataille's writing career begins.
It is rather more difficult to see a way from this closure of possibility, of
philosophy and of human being, to some more positive statement of legacy. It
is far from clear that or how one might take up the task of philosophy again.
But, at the same time, the very insistence on such difficulties marks the necessity
for and, in some measure, the actuality of post-Hegelian thought. Something of
the logic entailed here was mapped out in the previous section; we are now
facing again the problems on which that section closed. It might seem that the
solution to all these problems about being post-Hegelian is to dismiss Hegel (in
any number of ways—as wrong, as misguided, as basically right but in need of
correction . . . ). Such dismissals are, however, more than dismissals of
certain texts; they are (would have to be) dismissals of a position whose power
has been felt and which cannot be so simply denied. Jackson Pollock does not
present a crisis to everyone—only to those for whom painting matters in a certain
way, and, for them, to sidestep the issues posed in Pollock's painting would be
to sidestep their selves.
All of which is to say that it is precisely in the measure that one buys Hegel
(that one finds his claims about philosophy and about human reality compelling),
that one will find oneself faced with the problem of the post-Hegelian—and this
means that the first condition any "solution" to the problem must meet is that
it do justice to this sensed power. The post-Hegelian emerges out of one's sense
of the truth in Hegel, and not from a determination of falsity.
In terms of Bataille's privileged topos of the possible and the impossible this
means that the issues must be posed finally not through the valorization of a new
(irrationalist) truth against the old (rationalistic) falsehood of System, or through
the championing of a radical openness of human being against the closure of the
Notion. Rather, they must be posed out of rationality, out of closure; so that one
ends by wanting to know what it is to say that human possibility as such lies in
the impossible. This work draws the consequences of Hegel's power. It is to
 74 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

choose a region that is necessarily defined as post-Hegelian and that is structured

everywhere by its complex reference to Hegel, and it is to acknowledge one's
self as already located in such a space. The progression from the Hegelian to
the post-Hegelian is organized neither by the emergence of Truth nor by any new
knowledge, but as a movement of acknowledgment.

For Bataille, the problem is to understand how human possibility is given as

the impossible. His job is to elaborate a logic of the (im)possible. This logic is
worked through in Bataille's writing in a number of forms—as a theory of
religion and mystical experience, as a poetics, as a theory of and literary practice
of eroticism, as an economic theory . . . The project is encyclopedic, but also
post-Encyclopedic—richly interconnected, but deprived of any final unity or
closure. Bataille's early "Dossier 'heterologie'"—a parody of the Hegelian
Encyclopedia with its numbered sections and Zusatzen — is an emblem for the
whole of his work.
Here we can focus on one relatively circumscribed area of Bataille's thought.
Our primary reference will be to the 1955 essay, "Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice"
(Hegel, death and sacrifice) and it will lead us to the economic theories advanced
in "La notion de depense" and La Part maudlte.
"Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice" is probably Bataille's most developed state-
ment on Hegel. It is announced as an "extract from a study of the fundamentally
Hegelian thought of Alexandre Kojeve."27 The terms in which Bataille pays his
tribute to Kojeve may serve as an indirect measure of the pressure Bataille felt
from Hegel:
The originality and, it must be said, the courage of Alexandre Kojeve
is to have seen the impossibility of going further, and, in consequence,
the necessity of renouncing the creation of an original philosophy and
with it the interminable recommencement that is witness to the vanity
of thought. ("Hegel," p. 21)
The article begins from a concern with Hegel's panlogicism and theoreticism,
especially as it tacitly determines the course of the Phenomenology in the
preface. Bataille looks in particular at the following passage:
Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all
things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the
greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for
asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of the Spirit is not the life
that shrinks from death and keeps itself from devastation, but rather
the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only
when, in utter dismemberment [Hyppolite has "le dechirement
absolu"], it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive,
which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 75

that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away
and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power
only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This
tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into
being. (PG 32) (in "Hegel," pp. 26-27)
Bataille ends his citation here, but we may as well finish off the paragraph:
This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which
by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes
abstract immediacy, i.e., the immediacy which barely is, and thus is
authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not
outside of it but which is this immediacy itself. (PG 32)
Bataille's concern with this passage is to show how it is—in the terms of the
"small comic recapitulation"—an annulment of a perceived abyss and so the
founding of a system. The passage is, of course, about the power of the Hegelian
Negative. It is a part of Hegel's effort to take the skeptic more seriously than
the skeptic takes himself, and so to move beyond mere nothingness to determi-
nate negation, thus opening the way for the dialectic. A different reversal of the
skeptical position, one that hypostasizes "mere nothingness" into a Nothingness
(which presumably then is, in some strong if vague sense), leads to a position
usually considered mystical. It is a variation on the "night in which all cows are
black" that Hegel is so concerned to avoid; it is also "the dark night of
unknowing" to which Bataille is always so attracted. It is not surprising to see
Bataille venturing a footnoted correction of Kojeve's reading of this passage in
order both to reassert the possibility of this mystic position and to undo that
possibility:
Here my interpretation differs somewhat from Kojeve's. Kojeve says
simply that "impotent beauty is incapable of fitting itself to the
exigencies of the Understanding. The aesthete, the romantic, the
mystic—all flee the idea of death and speak of Nothingness as if of
something that is." This defines the mystic in particular admirably. But
the same ambiguity is found also in the philosopher (in Hegel, in
Heidegger) at least in the end. Indeed, Kojeve seems to me to fail in
not envisioning, beyond classical mysticism, a "conscious mysti-
cism," knowing itself to make a Being of Nothingness and even
defining that impasse as belonging to a Negativity which will, at the
end of history, no longer have a field of action.
This atheist mysticism, conscious of itself, conscious of having to
die and disappear, would live, as Hegel says, evidently speaking of
himself, "in utter dismemberment"; but for him, this is only a
moment: unlike Hegel, the atheist mystic would not pass beyond it—
"looking the negative in the face," but unable to transpose it into
 76 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

Being, refusing to do so and maintaining himself in ambiguity.

("Hegel," pp. 29-30)
This not only locates with some precision the enterprise of Bataille's mystical
writing, La Somme atheologique, and its centerpiece, L'Experience interieure,
but displays as well the way in which Bataille tends to read Hegel. The statement
that the life of the Spirit maintains itself in utter dismemberment must be
(among other things) a statement Hegel makes about himself and his philoso-
phizing. (In the text proper Bataille writes, "In the passage cited from the
Preface, Hegel on the contrary affirms and describes a personal moment of
violence" ["Hegel," pp. 28-29].) The problem for Bataille is that Hegel fails to
see in this a demand for nonclosure, for something other than the security and
satisfaction of a completed philosophy: "It is not an unchained violence"
("Hegel," p. 29). The difference between Hegel's "utter dismemberment"
("dechirement absolu," "absoluten Zerrissenheit") and Bataille's "dechirure
originelle" is the difference given in the statement that "the system is the
annulment." But if the very affirmation of an experience of this sort tends
already to a betrayal of that experience, Bataille's own writing is subject to the
same threat to which he claims Hegel has succumbed; it may itself become the
annulment of what it intends to communicate. This is the most obvious way in
which language itself finally becomes problematic for Bataille—an issue to
which we will return shortly. The relation between Hegel and Bataille that has
been sketched in this paragraph is neatly captured by a simple juxtaposition:
"Hegel, I imagine, touched the extreme. He was young still and feared going
mad. I imagine even that he elaborated the system to escape"—"What obliges
me to write, I imagine, is the fear of becoming mad."28
Bataille's concern with the Hegelian paragraph before us is only secondarily
with this opening toward a problem of ineffability. His main interest in the essay
lies in thinking through "the activity of dissolution . . . the power and work
of the Understanding" (PG 32) that Hegel is presenting here, and the domesti-
cation of that activity to philosophic ends. This activity is conceived by Hegel
under the two aspects of work and death, as the labor of the negative. These two
terms are closely coupled in the dialectic of master and slave marking that
dialectic as a particular repetition of the one with which we are concerned at
present. This central linkage of work and death is for Bataille one of the great
strengths and distinguishing marks of Hegelian philosophy. With one eye clearly
on the master and slave (and clearly under the influence of Kojeve), Bataille
points to
the continual connection of an abyssal aspect and a tough, earthbound
aspect in this philosophy, the only one with a pretension to complete-
ness. The divergent possibilities of opposed human figures confront
and unite with one another there: the dying figure and the proud man
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 77

who turns from death, the figure of the master and that of the man
bound to his labor, the figure of the revolutionary and that of the
skeptic whose desire is limited by egoistic interest. This philosophy is
not only a philosophy of death. It is one also of class struggle and of
labor. ("Hegel," p. 30)
It is one moment in this dialectic of work and death that Bataille would
explore by pointing up the presence of a certain sacrifice in the passage we have
cited: the emergence of the Spirit from Nature is—Bataille is following Kojeve
here—a sacrifice of its (animal) nature. "In a sense, Man has revealed and
founded human truth in sacrificing: in sacrifice, he destroys the animal within
himself, letting remain only, of himself and of the animal, the incorporeal truth
Hegel describes" ("Hegel," p. 31). It is sacrifice, Bataille suggests, that answers
most precisely to Hegel's description of the Spirit that finds itself in utter
dismemberment.
The attempt to think about sacrifice and Hegelian Negativity together quickly
points to a problem. Both Hegel and the practitioner of sacrifice insist that death
is somehow to serve as the bearer or revealer of the deeper truth of Negativity
and Totality. But, as Bataille remarks, "In reality death reveals
nothing. . . . Once the animal being which supports it is dead, the human
being itself has ceased to be" (p. 32). There is—from this point of view—a trick
being played in or by Hegel such that his subject manages to live through
("survive," but also "come to life") its death. "In other words, death itself
becomes conscious (of itself) at the very moment at which it annihilates the
conscious being" (p. 32). But this is precisely the trick upon which the practice
of sacrifice turns.
In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal killed.
Thus he dies in seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, does this
by his own will, willingly, with the arm of sacrifice. ("Hegel," p. 33)
Hubert and Mauss, whom Bataille is certainly following here, refer to the
way in which the sacrificer "prudently" sets himself aside;29 Bataille is some-
what blunter: "But this is a comedy!"
But if this is indeed the way in which the Spirit emerges from Nature, it is
at least a consequential comedy—one that shows man as a creature rooted still
and always in nature, fooling himself into a passage beyond, willfully imagining
for himself an impossible autonomy (and doing all of this in some measure
"successfully''). This can appear as a condemnation of sorts, or as a liberation—
Man does not live by bread alone but also by comedies in which he
willingly mistakes himself. In Man, it is the animal, the natural being,
that eats. But Man attends to cult and to spectacle. Or, again, he can
read: then literature prolongs in him, in the measure that is authentic
 78 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

or sovereign, the obsessive magic of the tragic or comic spectacle.

("Hegel," p. 34)
By bringing sacrifice to bear upon the Hegelian passage, Bataille can advance
several claims.
First, he can claim to have placed Hegel's text as a certain kind of unacknowl-
edged spectacle, a staging of the passage from Nature to Spirit behind its own
back—papering over the abyss it nonetheless betrays. This is tantamount to
attributing a literary existence to the text; in this it approaches the terms of criti-
cism developed in our previous section.
Second, the reduction of this passage to spectacle operates an implicit denial
of the Hegelian assertion that "accident as such . . . should attain an existence
of its own and a separate freedom . . . the tremendous power of the
negative . . . the energy of thought, of the pure T " (PG 32). By so doing
Bataille refuses the systematically powerful conjunction of thought, negation,
and self that organizes the Phenomology of Spirit and refuses as well the
envisaging of death as an event able to emerge wholly from the contingency of
nature. There are severe limits on Bataille's willingness to describe human
reality in terms of such markedly Hegelian notions as Heidegger's "being-
to ward-death." This is perhaps best thought of as a part of Bataille's "realism,"
his attempt to remain true to Hegel's "continual connection of an abyssal aspect
and a tough, earthbound aspect."
Finally, if death and negation are not themselves unified, are not reliable
bearers of meaning, the entire progress of the dialectic in the Phenomenology
becomes open to possible disruption at every point along its course. This dialec-
tic remains nonetheless that through which human being is to be grasped—even
as its passage is now opened to the impossible. The apparent consequences of
the Hegelian slogan—"the actual is rational; the rational is actual"—have been
reversed. The impossible now defines, guarantees, and disrupts the sense of
every moment of the Phenomenology.
For example, the life-and-death struggle for recognition that results in the
emergence of the master and slave in the opening moments of "Self-conscious-
ness" now appears as a comedy that both depends on and is subverted by the
simple fact that neither "master" nor "slave" is really risking anything. The
figures that do risk death are phenomenologically invisible; they drop out and
leave behind only their survivors. But it is these figures, as if hovering about
the fringes of the Phenomenology, that attain the (imaginary, impossible)
position of irreversible sovereignty at issue in the dialectic—the position from
which we might be said to recognize the mastery of the master (however
inadequate that mastery proves in the dialectical event). That "we" can so
recognize the master is important here; the point from which "we" accomplish
this is constitutive of our reality—even though it cannot be articulated by the
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 79

Phenomenology. What has to be caught here could be caught by no Phenome-

nology—except in this willfully perverse fashion. If the actual is rational and the
rational is actual (and it is), then what remains ("merely") possible is impos-
sible (and it is): and the difficulty is to find a way to say yes to both these sides
at once-to affirm the real and continuing (im)possibility of our human being.

Bataille's economic theories are probably best thought of as attempts to

marshall evidence for or to display the concrete workings of the (im)possible.
La Somme atheologique would then be Bataille's attempt to convey the experi-
ence of the (im)possible, to locate those places where the (im)possible might be
touched, glimpsed, affirmed.
The economic writings include the early essay "La Notion de depense" and
the later La Part maudite. Bataille intended to use the latter title eventually to
cover three volumes (much the way La Somme atheologique brings together
under its single head a number of theretofore independent texts)—the first was
to be a revision of La Part maudite under the new title La Consumation
(Consumption), the second was to be called La Souverainete (Sovereignty), and
the third (later published separately) was to have been L'Erotisme (Eroticism).
Only the first volume—La Part maudite or La Consumation—and the early essay
are properly considered economic writings —and even here the term is applied
loosely at best.
For instance, Bataille's economics begin from the sun. If, he suggests, we
conceive of the earth as a single, global economic system, we find that all its
wealth comes ultimately from outside of itself as energy received continually
from the sun. The fundamental economic-energetic situation of life is not one
of scarcity but of surplus; and the fundamental problem is accordingly not one
of making good a shortage but of managing an excess: "It is not necessity but
its opposite, luxury, which poses to living matter and to man their fundamental
problems" (Oeuvres, VII: 21).
It is from this point of view—the standpoint of "general economy"—that
Bataille states his "elementary fact":
the living organism, in the situation determined by the play of energy on
the surface of the globe, receives in principle more energy than is neces-
sary for the maintenance of life: the extra energy (or wealth) can be uti-
lized for the growth of the system (the organism, for example); if the
system can grow no more, or if the excess cannot be entirely absorbed
into growth, then it must necessarily be lost without profit, spent, will-
ingly or not, gloriously or else catastrophically. (Oeuvres, VII: 29)
Those specific economies organized around growth and the conservation of
economic or energetic wealth are called by Bataille "restricted economies." Such
systems are necessarily inscribed in and dependent on the larger general
 80 D A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

economy—whether they acknowledge that dependence or not. But at the same

time, there is no sense in which one can speak of a "general economy" apart
from its effects on or refractions through the projects of growth and conservation
given within the restricted economy—just as the notion of "sovereignty" is
bound wholly to the "restricted" dialectic of master and slave whose disruption
and (im)possibility it is. If we recall here once again Bataille's "small comic
recapitulation," we can see that what it claims Hegel to have seen and fled, to
have (visibly) annulled with his system, is the fact that the progress of Spirit
depends on the necessity of pure and irrecoverable loss. This is why some part
of Bataille's critique can be put in terms of Hegel's settling for or succumbing
to satisfaction or in terms of an act of self-mutilation that is the killing of suppli-
cation in himself. Bataille's "atheist mysticism" is visible in the background
here.
In this view, the difference between the Hegelian and the practitioner of
sacrifice lies in their understandings of their local economic situations: the
Hegelian is committed to a faith in the autonomy of the restricted economy and
is therefore submitted to the catastrophic expenditures demanded by the priority
of excess (expenditures he cannot acknowledge); the practitioner of sacrifice
lives in a society of consumption, organized by its awareness of the necessity
for glorious celebrations of pure loss—potlatch, sacrifice.
The Aztecs are Bataille's privileged example of such a consuming society.
(Their mythology also intersects repeatedly with Bataille's own.) What struck
Bataille about the Aztecs was above all their belief in the sun as itself a sacrifice,
a god who has thrown himself into (his own) fire. All Aztec life and achievement
took their sense from this sacrifice and from the need for its continuation, for
the sun to be fed. The Aztec practice of human sacrifice was modeled on and
pressed toward the limit of solar sacrifice as pure and gratuitous loss. The solar
sacrifice lies on the far side of the prudence remarked by Henri Hubert and
Marcel Mauss; the sacrifices that imitate and maintain it would themselves touch
at that far side, break the restricted terms of everyday life and labor, in order
to realize a world of sovereignty and intimacy.
From the moment a world of things is posited, man becomes himself
one of the things of that world, at least for the time he works. It is
from that diminution that man at all times struggles to escape. In his
bizarre myths and cruel rites man is from the beginning in search of
lost intimacy. (Oeuvres, VII: 62)30
This peculiar blend of Marx and Durkheim is typical of Bataille.31 It should
be apparent that this formulation of sacrifice and related practices returns us to
the passages we have discussed in Hegel, in the preface and in the dialectic of
master and slave, through the opposing figure of work. Sacrifice recovers
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 81

human being and possibility from its submission to the restrictions of "project"
and utility—or would: it continues to be the case that sacrifice works only for
those who generously renounce their right to be sacrificed. Bataille concludes:
This understandable absence of rigor nonetheless changes nothing in
the sense of the rite. All that matters is an excess which surpasses the
limits and the consumption of which seems worthy of the gods. Men
escape at this cost their diminution; they lift at this price the heaviness
introduced in them by avarice and the cold calculus of the real.
(Oeuvres, VII: 165)
The cost of such intimacy, radically, is death; but for Bataille this changes
nothing in the sense of things. An imaginary goal can have real consequences,
and if "intimacy" is strictly not possible, its possibility is nonetheless real—
intimacy is (im)possible: what counts for Bataille is to maintain it as such, to
remain capable of acknowledging this (im)possibility within an order of
language and society that would more simply deny it.32
But this brings finally to a head the implicit problem with which Bataille has
been faced all along; La Part maudite puts it this way:
My researches have aimed at the acquisition of a knowledge. They
have demanded coldness, calculus. But the knowledge acquired is of
an error implied in the coldness inherent to all calculation. In other
words, my work has tended first of all to increase the sum of human
resources, but its results have taught me that accumulation is nothing
more than a delay, a recoil before the inevitable due date when
accumulated wealth has value only in the instant. Writing the book in
which I have said that energy cannot in the end but be squandered, I
have myself employed my energy and my time for work: my
researches have responded in a fundamental way to the desire to
increase the sum of goods acquired by humanity. Will I say that in
these conditions I cannot but respond to the truth of my book and that
I cannot continue to write? (Oeuvres, VII: 20-21)
This is a problem of positionality with a vengeance, the central problem of
communication in Bataille. Bataille lacks any guiding disciplinary matrix
through which to pose this issue. Instead, his writings tend to fall into either the
"science" of La Part maudite or the "mysticism" of La Somme atheologique,
and the problem of communication likewise falls into two complementary forms.
Either communication, in the everyday sense, is a betrayal of what must be
communicated; or real communication, "intimacy," can arise only through a
destruction of the terms of everyday language and understanding. Bataille fights
the former betrayal by trying to make such propositions as ' 'the sexual act is
in time what the tiger is in space" (Oeuvres, VII: 21) figure within the economic
 82 Q A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA

"science" of La Part maudite; he elaborates the latter possibility theoretically

as a problem of ineffability in L'Experience interieure and practically by an
insistence on the materiality of language.
It is language, in the end, that marks the (im)possibility of sovereignty:
Sacrifice is then a means to sovereignty and autonomy only to the
extent that signifying discourse does not inform it. To the extent that
signifying discourse does inform it, that which is sovereign is given in
terms of servitude. ("Hegel," p. 40)
The Phenomenology's exclusion of anything not informed by discourse (see
PG 95, which implicitly establishes a grasp of language as the terminus a quo
for anything that would count as "an experience of consciousness") is emble-
matic and can return us to Bataille's problem with Hegel's vision of redeeming
Negativity:
Thus the simple manifestation of the link between Man and destruc-
tion, the pure revelation of Man to himself (at the moment at which
death fixes his attention) passes from sovereignty to the primacy of
servile ends. . . . A slippage cannot fail to be produced, to the profit
of servitude. ("Hegel," pp. 40, 41)
This "slippage" points back toward the possibility of sovereignty, at the
same time announces the limits of any movement toward a recovery of such
sovereignty, and so determines the shape of Bataille's "correction" of Hegel:
If he fails, one cannot say that this is the result of an error. The sense
of the failure itself differs from that of the error that causes it: only
the error is perhaps fortuitous. It is more generally that one must
speak of the "failure" of Hegel, as of an authentic movement, heavy
with sense.
In fact, man is always in pursuit of an authentic sovereignty. It
seems that in one sense he has this sovereignty initially, but there is
no doubt that this cannot then be in a conscious manner, so that in
another sense he does not have it, it escapes him. We will see that he
pursues in a variety of ways that which always steals away from him.
The essential thing is that one cannot reach for it consciously, cannot
search for it, because research distances it. But I believe that nothing
is ever given to us except in such an equivocal fashion. ("Hegel," pp.
42-43)
The central pursuit of our sovereignty can only lead to ever more extreme
affirmations of what escapes from our discourse, from our projects and our
calculations. For Bataille these are affirmations that embrace shit and sacrifice
and, above all, laughter—not only as it escapes its submission to discourse and
 A CONTEXT FOR DERRIDA D 83

project, but also as it affirms the comic (im)possibility of our sovereignty,

intimacy, and communication.
With this last "the idea of seriousness itself'33 is indeed threatened—in, as
it were, its own name. This threat can only become more visible as Bataille's
affirmations are turned back on themselves, no longer simply affirming what
escapes our discourse, but affirming as well what escapes in and as our dis-
course, its inessential accidents—for example, its materiality; the sheer con-
tingency of writing, for example; the inevitable fact that a Phenomenology of
Spirit is only as it is given over to print, publication, and even copyright.
Chapter 3
Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction

Questions of Tradition and Method

Psychoanalysis of Philosophy: The Status of "Freudian
Concepts''; Philosophy and Psychologism; Freud and Hegel
It can be tempting to describe Jacques Derrida's work as in large measure
an extension of psychoanalysis into the history of philosophy. Despite Derrida's
insistence to the contrary (in the section called "The Exorbitant Question of
Method"), the reading of Rousseau offered in Of Grammatology—probably the
work best known to Derrida's English-speaking audience—looks like a particu-
larly sophisticated variety of psychobiographical analysis, showing the inevi-
table inscription of the word "supplement"—the word with which Rousseau
would name writing, his own writing in relation to speech, and culture in rela-
tion to nature—in a larger psychosexual economy (in which it names also mas-
turbation in relation to normal sexuality). If one finds Of Grammatology
powerful, one is likely to feel that the careful tracing of the consequences of this
double inscription ends by showing a new and more coherent version of
Rousseau—and a version that depends on the discovery of the psychoanalytic
key to Rousseau.
If one fights past this appearance—reads the Grammatology carefully—there
is still the temptation to think of Derrida as replacing Heidegger's "forgot-
tenness of Being" with his own "repression of writing," so that the new project
is a logical, if critical, development out of a central line of philosophic specula-
tion, finding its new truth—writing—essentially in the same place and way (that

84
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 85

is, as the secret and real center of an enterprise that does not know itself) as the
older truth of Being. This picture has, for us, the pleasant consequence of
encouraging a rapprochement between Derrida and Cavell or Wittgenstein on
the ground of their parallel therapeutic ambitions for philosophy (and the way
to this rapprochement has already been prepared by Cavell's insistence on a
parallelism between Heidegger and Wittgenstein). Derrida would, of course, be
a latecomer in this philosophic clinic: he sees the world's ills in terms of forces
and hegemonies rather than the presumably easier terms of ontological absent-
mindedness and is thus prone to confuse politics and therapy, to confound kill
and cure.
Whatever the value of such a picture—and its value is certainly greater than
this parodic presentation of it admits—Derrida's writings on Freud begin
precisely as an attempt to break it down. Derrida's earliest essay on psycho-
analysis presents itself as having been preceded (in its oral version) by an intro-
duction concerned to address two points in particular:
(1) Despite appearances, the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a
psychoanalysis of philosophy. . . .
(2) An attempt to justify a theoretical reticence to utilize Freudian
concepts, otherwise than in quotation marks; all these concepts, with-
out exception, belong to the history of metaphysics, that is, to the
system of logocentric repression which was organized to exclude or to
lower (to put aside or below) the body of the written trace as a didac-
tic and technical metaphor, as servile matter or excrement.1
In this chapter we will move through these two points repeatedly and from
a variety of angles. As we shall see, "appearances" here are persistent and, in
the end, constitutive; they cannot be simply or finally put aside, and psycho-
analysis has become one of the most insistent references in Derrida's writing.
The interest deconstruction takes in psychoanalysis is permanent and complex:
its continuing rediscovery of this interest is of a piece with its continuing redis-
covery of itself and its project of radical self-criticism. Deconstruction finds
itself ever more deeply in its controversy with psychoanalysis—a controversy
whose central terms have already been given in the remarks we have cited. We
will see, for example, that Derrida's recent interest in the psychoanalytic work
of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok is in large measure still caught up in "an
attempt to justify a theoretical reticence to utilize Freudian concepts, otherwise
than in quotation marks," with the difference that the enterprise has become
more radical, no longer poses itself as a concern about the "application" of
Freudian concepts outside of psychoanalysis but reaches instead into the very
heart of psychoanalysis, suggesting that there is no arena (including that of
psychoanalysis itself) in which Freudian concepts can be used without quotation
marks.
 86 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

Modern philosophy in both its Anglo-American and Continental variants is,

to a great extent, definable through its resistance to psychologism—perhaps
more cogently by its obligation to acknowledge some form of psychologism,
transcendental or empirical, as its constitutive temptation. "Psychologism"—
like "theatricality"—is a risk both ever changing and omnipresent, figuring
increasingly now as precisely that which was to protect us from it, as "episte-
mology." If we define psychologism as the tendency to think that all can be
made clear for and by a consciousness fully transparent to itself, the threat of
psychologism is or can come to be as fully embodied in Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit as in some more obvious psychology of consciousness. In such a field,
psychoanalysis, with its insistence on a necessary and systematic Unconscious,
can appear as a means beyond any such simple psychologism. Lacan, for
example, can make Hegel look merely psychological; this is one way of restating
the force of our earlier remark that "Hegel finally appears to claim to find an
integral and autonomous individuality at the level of the Imaginary." But
nothing can guarantee the radical exemption of psychoanalysis from psycho-
logism, and the threat inevitably reappears in this new region in an altered form.
Lacan in particular appears to enter a tacit claim for the adequacy of a science
of mind to the task and place of philosophy. The claim of psychoanalysis to
scienticity comes to carry the claims to integrity, transparency, and self-
adequacy previously borne by the consciousness at the center of a simpler
psychology or phenomenology.
A late footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams can open this field for us from
a slightly different angle:
The proposition laid down in these peremptory terms—"whatever
interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance' '—is easily
open to misunderstanding. It is of course only to be taken as a tech-
nical rule, as a warning to analysts. It cannot be disputed that in the
course of an analysis various events may occur the responsibility for
which cannot be laid upon the patient's intentions. His father may die
without his having murdered him; or a war may break out which
brings the analysis to an end. But behind its obvious exaggeration the
proposition is asserting something both true and new. Even if the
interrupting event is a real one and independent of the patient, it often
depends on him how great an interruption it causes; and resistance
shows itself unmistakably in the readiness with which he accepts an
occurrence of this kind or the exaggerated use which he makes of it.2
This passage seems to me typical of much of what is most powerful and most
maddening in Freud: interrupting his own text, Freud seems to engage in an
excessive excursus upon an obviously exaggerated proposition about the exag-
gerated use the analytic patient may make of interruptions in the analysis; what-
ever may have initially been obvious about the technical rule ends by being
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 87

utterly lost—but significance, inevitable significance, is secured in the face of

the most radical of contingencies—death, war. Freud's gesture here—even in its
hesitancy, its attempt to recall itself to the limits of a "technical rule"—is fully
as sweeping as anything in Hegel. Like the Hegelian dialectic, this rule of resis-
tance admits of nothing irrecuperable or radically accidental. Even what is
"real" and "independent of the patient" ends up inside the analysis (as indeed
the register R ends up defined and enclosed by the Imaginary and the Symbolic
in Lacan's various schemata).
This problem—this tendency toward a certain psychologism, a certain
imperialism of sense—persists throughout Freud's work, becoming most explicit
and dramatic in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In that text the search for some-
thing beyond the pleasure principle finds its evidential ground in those
cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience, over
which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of
the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman who
married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon after-
wards and had to be nursed by her on their death beds. . . .
If we take into account observations such as these . . . we shall
find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a
compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle.3
That Freud's examp'e here is radically and inevitably unconvincing (and not
helped any by a second example drawn from Tasso and invoking a "strange
magic forest")—that the entire progress of Freud's argument to this point in the
text has been a progress of failed examples—these things need not concern us
here, except insofar as they help make visible the way in which this meditation
repeats even in its hesitations the simpler gesture of the footnote on resistance.
In each case, the gesture is one that would subsume all of reality under the logic
of psychoanalysis. This is, as we will see, structurally of a piece for Derrida
with that representation through which voice would understand itself as pure
self-affection and so subsume all meaning under itself, condemning writing as
a mere secondary representation (of a representation), meaningless and wholly
exposed to contingency. What Derrida now calls "phallogocentrism" is the
ultimate outgrowth of what began as "phonocentrism," the illegitimate and
incoherent privileging of speech over writing in the philosophic text.

Our aim in the following pages is to explore this complex field: to see the
ways in which psychoanalysis is at once an enabling force and an object of criti-
cism for Derrida; to follow some of the turnings through which the critique
deepens and widens its scope; and to understand this permanent controversy as
it is caught up in—articulates and is articulated by—the problems of philosophic
discipline and history. At the heart of this field is Derrida's quarrel with Lacan.
It is through this controversy that we will pose the question of "deconstructive
 88 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

criticism," and the problematic relations between psychoanalysis, criticism, and

deconstruction will be of continuing importance throughout the remainder of the
book.

Odds and Evens: The Argument with Lacan

However, we will begin at some remove from these larger issues; we will,
in fact, begin from a consideration of randomness and coin tossing. The material
on which we will be drawing here can be found in the "Introduction" and
"Parenthese de parentheses" (Parenthesis on parentheses) appended to Lacan's
"Seminar on The Purloined Letter'" and in the second volume of Lacan's
collected seminars, Le Moi dans la theorie de Freud et dans la technique de la
psychanalyse (The ego in Freudian theory and in psychoanalytic technique)—the
seminar in which the reading of Poe was first developed.4
In these pages we are going to stay close to the original seminar—that is, we
are going to be concerned with the logical problems raised in and illustrated by
the seminar on "The Purloined Letter" rather than with the literary critical
problems perhaps raised by it. For Lacan, these problems cast light on the struc-
ture and limits of the intersubjective logic invoked by the mirror stage and its
Imaginary interimplication of self and other. In particular, they show something
of how the workings of the Imaginary assume and are limited by a prior order—
the Symbolic—which is itself not submitted (which cannot be submitted) to the
mastery of any subject or any simple dialectic of self and other. What is at stake
for Lacan here is the way in which human reality is always and already sub-
mitted to language and signification.
Lacan's meditation begins from a child's game (which Poe's Dupin offers as
an analogue to his own activity in finding the stolen letter) in which I am to guess
whether you are holding an odd or even number of fingers behind your back.
Is there a long-run winning strategy for such a game? There would seem to be
two ways for me to play, at least in principle. The first, almost unimaginably
naive, would be for me to guess whatever struck me as right to guess (for the
moment we can call this random guessing). The second would be for me to
"identify" with my opponent, realizing that I am an object of knowledge for
him or her, that he or she is capable of putting himself or herself in my place
and anticipating my guess. A third strategy—in which I undertake to make
myself unanticipatable by guessing deliberately "at random"—collapses back
into the first. But in so doing it renders the second apparent strategy nugatory:
it reveals the game as always at once too random and too reflexive. There is no
winning strategy at odds-and-evens, despite the fact that one can know the laws
of randomness and despite what one may feel as an almost palpable secret order
only just out of reach.
Lacan shows that a random sequence can in fact conceal a surprising amount
of order. If, for example, we take a random sequence of odds-and-evens, heads
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 89

and tails, pluses and minuses— +H 1 1 1 H 1 h -

+ + . . . - and go on to mark that chain off into overlapping groups of three—
abc, bed, cde- ( + [+/-) (-][-//-) (+][-//-) (+][-//+) (-][+//+)
(-][+// . . . -which can be disentangled into- (+ + -) [H ] / /
( )[--+]/- + -/(+--)[--+]/ /(+ )[- + -]/+-+/
. . . —we can (reasonably) easily see that the rules governing this new se-
quence are in fact highly orderly. There are three possible types of groups
involved: two symmetrical groups—one constant (that is, either + + + or
) and the other alternating (H h or - + -)-and a set of asymmetrical
groups (-I , - + + , + + -, and h). If we have produced three pluses
(call this a group of type [1]), our next move will create a new group that will
be either another three pluses (+ + +/+) or two pluses and a minus (+ + +/—)
From group (1) we can either advance to one of the asymmetrical formations
(group [2]) or remain in place:

If we have produced the minus and so find ourselves now in the second posi-
tion, we can expect that our next move will give rise either to another asym-
metrical group (+ + -/-) or to a symmetrical and alternating group (3):

A little reflection will suffice to show that there is a significant difference

between two subgroups of (2), which we will distinguish as (2a) and (2b). This
distinction is purely positional (that is, what composes subgroup [2a] depends
upon whether the group [1] from which one starts is or + + +, and that
will change as the system chugs along):
 90 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

Some of the rules of this system are that there is no passage from (1) to (3)
except through the mediation of (2), and that the passage from (1) to (3) is signif-
icantly different from the passage from (3) to (1).
If we go on to take the transformations themselves as our terms, we can con-
struct a still more complex network:

Where—or how—does all this elegant order exist? Not, certainly, in the brute
fact of random pluses and minuses—that is sheerly contingent, purely statistical.
If it were not, then all of this would help us to a winning strategy at odds-and-
evens—which it simply cannot do: odds-and-evens is a game one can manage
at best not to lose. But—one wants to say—these laws are close enough to that
order that it is possible to believe that they can be made to count for the game:
their presence, their possibility, seems to hover about the game, promising an
impossible victory. What you and I both know when I attempt to outthink your
outthinking of me at odds-and-evens is that the game is not without order; what
neither of us can admit (or can admit only with great difficulty because it will
cost us the game) is that there is nothing in that order which we can touch or
make count for the game. We face each other as in a mirror and through a glass,
but the real logic of our relationship, the structure of our intersubjectivity, is at
work elsewhere.
Where then does all this elegant order reside? One reasonable answer would
be to locate it in the apparatus of parentheses and brackets with which we have
encumbered the simple sequence of pluses and minuses, but the deeper answer
demands our seeing that these brackets are just a simple reflection—a remark-
ing—of what is already present in the bare presentation of the pluses and
minuses. The structures we have laid out were generated by our mere ability to
remark randomness—the same ability that makes us think we can win at odds-
and-evens. "Randomness" cannot appear for us except as a random order,
marked already with significance.
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud goes to some lengths to show
the impossibility of choosing a random number.5 His argument could be cast into
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 91

the terms of our game by our saying that if I play against you and I am an
analyst, I will win in the long run—because in that long run your choices will
not be random, will become visible for me as they are conditioned by your
Unconscious and its conflicts. Lacan uses the game of odds-and-evens to
advance a claim that is more radical and more palpable—not that a human being
cannot pick a random number, but that for a "speaking subject" (one of Lacan's
favorite designations for the subject of psychoanalysis) there is no such thing as
a random number. What we have stipulated here as a random sequence, what
we can generate artificially as such, what we think we can know as the brute
finality of randomness—all of this is always and already given to us as random
order, appropriated to the Symbolic. (If Dupin can find the purloined letter it
is because of the way both he and the letter are inscribed within such an order,
and not because of Dupin's supposed superiority at the unwinnable game of
odds-and-evens.)
Someone goes into analysis. This person thinks that he or she lives in a world
composed of forces and counterforces, actions and agents, accidents, failures,
happy surprises, and disasters, and that he or she has, let us say, certain
problems understanding or controlling his or her self, his or her relation with
other people or things. This person, we can say, comes into analysis seeking a
winning strategy at odds-and-evens, the special knowledge the psychoanalyst is
supposed to have.6 All Lacan can give is the hard knowledge that it is not like
that, there is no way to that kind of victory, because, in the end, there is no
simple random world to be guessed at from within the strategies of reflexivity.
The appearance of such a world and such a strategy is itself an effect of the
priority of the Symbolic order of signification over both self and world. This
Symbolic is not something one can come to have or master or be—it is the logic
behind the veil, the real machine that moves the characters who claim intention
and agency only through an inevitable misunderstanding of themselves and of
their real position in the world (Dupin's strategy in recovering the letter is not
what he thinks it is because Dupin is neither who nor where he thinks he is).
If we try to push the three Lacanian registers still closer to the game of odds-
and-evens, we are going to say:
(1) The Imaginary is the way we live the gap between the real contingency
of the world and its recuperation into the law of the Symbolic that we can never
quite touch.
(2) The Real is at once the measure of the gap between the Imaginary struc-
tures of our desire and the Symbolic law that sets the limit to that desire, and
the ground, source, and content of that law.
(3) The Symbolic is the truth of what the Imaginary can perceive only as the
Real.7
That is, the three registers are so imbricated on and enfolded in one another
as to allow no outside to the system they compose—no surface on which
 92 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

something other than itself—other than a destiny—might impinge. In particular,

everything one wants to call the real (everything one has every reason to call
the real) turns up on the inside of the system as "the Real." There are no
accidents.
And yet this has to be nonsense: a real chain of accidents has been somehow
elided, forgotten, or suppressed; and it is only on the basis of this chain that the
system could have been thought at all. (But this should sound like what we
sketched as the implicit Lacanian critique of Hegel—and should show as well
how Lacan's psychoanalysis seems to end by taking up once again the Hegelian
task of redeeming experience, no longer just for consciousness but for the
Unconscious as well. The philosophical trick here will be to balance this per-
manent human interest in redemption against its own conditions of possibility,
to hold to the hard and obvious lessons that so repeatedly drove Bataille to
impossible and self-defeating theories: our relation to the world is untouchable,
ineffable, and irredeemable; we discover it only as we break our speech and
thoughts on it.)
We can put this another way: everything comes to pass in Lacan's psy-
choanalysis as if what one wants to call reality had been divided in two-
into a merely accidental, contingent, and wholly excludable reality that remains
forever outside the circle of psychoanalytic sense (to the point of being unable
even to impinge on that circle from the outside: the radical claim is that there
is no relation at all between inside and outside), and a Real that lies at the
very heart of psychoanalysis and is wholly understood by it. And yet these
two are the same; the division is impossible and is unable to recognize itself as
such. One obvious temptation is to offer a psychoanalytic diagnosis of this —
to speak of a repression of accident and a resulting structure ofmeconnaissance.
If the issue is posed in this way, it will always appear possible for psycho-
analytic theory to overmaster the intended critique since it need only reassert
itself as the science of repression, of meconnaissance, of the divided subject.
And yet every time it performs its gesture of mastery, it repeats its repression
of the contingent and leaves itself open once again to the same critique. It is to
this delicate line, to this oscillatory and finally permanent controversy that
Derrida clings in the repeated assertions that "despite appearances, the
deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy" and that
"logocentric repression is not comprehensible on the basis of the Freudian con-
cept of repression."8
Psychoanalysis emerges for Derrida at the limit between "logocentrism" and
the "critique of logocentrism":
Our aim is limited: to locate in Freud's text several points of refer-
ence, and to isolate, on the threshold of a systematic examination,
those elements of psychologocentric closure, as this closure limits not
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 93

only the history of philosophy but also the "human sciences," notably
of a certain linguistics. If the Freudian breakthrough has an historical
originality, this originality is not due to its peaceful coexistence or
theoretical complicity with this linguistics, at least in its congenital
phonologism.9
We will be exploring the controversy of deconstruction with psychoanalysis
as it unfolds across Derrida's various articles and across the various topics of
the structure of the person, the objectivity of science, and the logic of legacy
and tradition. In so doing we will stumble again and again across the structure
of mutual enfoldedness that we have developed out of Lacan's play with random
sequences and the Derridean critique of it. The confrontation is perhaps most
succinctly posed in the juxtaposition of the "lesson" Lacan draws from "The
Purloined Letter"—"A letter always reaches its destination"—with Derrida's
counter to it—"that a letter can always not arrive at its destination"—
Its "materiality" and its "topology" result from its divisibility, its
ever-possible partition. It can always be broken up irrevocably and this
is what the system of the symbolic, of castration, of the signifier, of
truth, of the contract, and so forth, try to shield it from. . . . Not
that the letter never arrives at its destination, but part of its structure is
that it is always capable of not arriving there.10
But here—as Derrida remarks throughout "The Purveyor of Truth"-we are
getting ahead of ourselves.

Psychoanalysis and Philosophy: Critical Realism;

De-idealization; Mise-en-abime
What, after all, is our interest in all of this? We have seen that psychoanalysis
seems able to take up once more the task of philosophy and seems able to pose
the problem of tradition—the project of a destruction and a retrieve—for philoso-
phy in a new way. But it is also in psychoanalysis that there is the greatest risk
that this "taking up again" could turn out to be another form of Aufliebung,
returning into rather than pushing beyond the limits of the tradition, relieving
it as one guard relieves another, rather than offering us relief from it (prendre
la releve de . . . [changing the guard] is a Derridean rendering of Hegel's
Aufliebung). Neither philosophy ("by itself) nor psychoanalysis ("by itself)
can prove adequate to the challenge of being post-Hegelian; the challenge
demands that the two be put to work, as it were, within one another—demands
a thought of heterogeneity rather than purification. The elaboration of such a
system of mutual self-criticism is a project that depends on a strong and explicit
sense of its disciplinary moorings—even as these moorings guarantee nothing
and give themselves over only to suspicion and contestation.
 94 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstruction faces the history of philosophy without any access to some

deeper truth of that history (a truth like, for example, Heidegger's Being in its
revealing and concealing), and so also without access to terms in which to
ground a criticism of that history or even—more radically—in which to ground
a recognition of it as "the tradition." Derrida is explicitly unable to offer any
"realistic" description of the "logocentric closure" parallel to Heidegger's
descriptions of the "metaphysical enclosure." For Derrida this enclosure itself
is describable as an artifact of the strategies employed to criticize it—with the
further provision that the existence of some such artifact is (now) a condition
of any philosophic writing whatsoever. I want to say here that if Heidegger can
be described as the last "epistemological realist" in a tradition complicated
beyond endurance after its achievement in Hegel, Derrida would stand as a
"critical realist"—and it is frequently difficult in reading Derrida to hold
present for oneself the interlacing of the two terms, "criticism" and "realism":
the first seems always to "reduce" the world to a "mere" text and play of
signifiers, while the second seems always to boil down to a long-winded insis-
tence on the obvious—patients' fathers do die without being murdered, letters
do get lost, things are more complicated than that—and even on the trivial-
copyrights and footnotes and margins and shoelaces . . . "
The two terms work together above all wherever the idealist gestures by
which philosophy leads itself beyond the world are enabled by a denigration of
writing. For the person I am calling a critical realist, the most striking instances
of such denigration arise precisely in those philosophic texts that refuse to
recognize that they are in fact written and so subjected to all the frailties they
would attribute to writing and on which they would ground their rejection of it.
For example, what is one to make of the condemnation of writing in a text like
Plato's Phaedrus?12 What is one to make of the fact that this rejection goes hand
in hand, within the text, with a valorization of an inward writing on the soul that
serves as the basis of the voice and speech the dialogue would finally valorize
over the debilitating duplicity of writing? How deeply does one want to say the
tradition is confused here? Could this be fixed simply by recognizing the truth
about writing? (What would that truth be?) These are questions about the
medium of philosophy, questions designed to force recognition of that medium.
They are, at bottom and belatedly, Kantian questions, and we do well to recall
him here:
Misled by such a proof of the power of reason, the demand for the
extension of knowledge recognizes no limits. The light dove, cleaving
the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that
its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato
left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the under-
standing, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the
empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 95

all his efforts he made no advance—meeting no resistance that might,

as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to
which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in
motion.13
Heidegger took from Kant a thought about the inward essence of philosophy
and so sought to find the pure kernel of thinking that lay concealed at the very
heart of the tradition as what it had forgotten. Derrida, in contrast, takes from
Kant a thought about resistance, support, a certain heterogeneity.14 For him the
"logocentric closure" can only be an enabling strategy for displaying the
philosophic ways in which we forget our philosophic selves, escape the world
in which we (would) live: it is a belated and radically self-critical de-idealization
of the Heideggerean metaphysical enclosure and the Hegelian tradition. It exists
where it is read; it insists where it is written.
De-idealization inevitably trails in its wake the notion of demystification,
something we recognize as one of the fundamental projects of the modern spirit.
Freud, with Marx and Nietzsche, is generally taken to be one of the great
masters of such truth telling and the suspicion it entails. But the demystifier's
truth cannot guarantee itself against its submission to idealization—even Marx's
"materialism" can become one more idealist trope (and almost inevitably will
once it escapes its critical function and pretends to name something directly).15
So also the terms by which Freud names for us our embodiment—"phallus,"
"feces," "self," "other" . . . Things can easily become confused in the
crisscrossing of de-idealization and demystification—the simple demystifying
insistence on the phallus may become a vehicle of idealization, just as an
apparently abstract reformulation of the phallus may be the most powerful way
back to Freud's realism (or, this reformulation may escape the world as
thoroughly as, at first blush, it appeared)—there are no guarantees, one has to
gauge one's position and act, strategically, upon that estimate. What one takes
for one's phallus may turn out to be one's fetish, or just a cigar.
The logocentric closure is not conceivable—as against both its Heideggerean
and Hegelian precursors—as any simple limit, linear or circular, on the history
of philosophy. It is internal to philosophy and to philosophic texts. It is,
accordingly, not a limit one could somehow cross, step beyond—il n'y a pas
d'au-deld.16 The very condition of possibility of philosophic objectivity and
discipline imposes an ultimate and radical heterogeneity on it (so that while a
context for Derrida may have appeared as divisible into a properly philosophical
part and an extraphilosophical supplement to that, it is in fact the case that both
parts are "properly" philosophical and were so precisely insofar as they escaped
from or contested the closure of philosophic discipline). In the final analysis, this
closure (however qualified as metaphysical or phonocentric or logocentric or
phallogocentric—or even simply as a previous history of errors and uncontrolled
 96 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

speculation) is itself part of a certain philosophic self-understanding, such that

to contest it demands not only that we attempt to break out of it but also that
we break with the idea of that closure as something to be broken out of. (But
of course here psychoanalysis has much to tell us about the limits of any "final
analysis.")17

I have suggested that the sense of Derrida's "critical realism" becomes most
concretely accessible wherever the idealist gestures by which philosophy leads
itself beyond the world are enabled by a certain denigration of writing. As a
practical matter, this means that the deconstructionist interest in a given
philosophic text will tend to settle on that moment—or chain of moments—
through which the text would articulate and master itself as (other than) textual,
those places where the text attempts to determine for itself a simple "outside"
in which it is not implicated, to which it has no relation. This can give decon-
struction the appearance of a practice or philosophy of self-reflection, die
privileged moment of which would then be that of the mise-en-abime. J. Hillis
Miller has proposed that this term be rendered in English as "interior dupli-
cation," but the tendency has been (even in Miller's own writing) simply to take
tiie term over as it is. The expression is originally heraldic, referring to the
setting of a smaller version of a given shield at the center of that shield; its
emergence as a central term in Derrida's work can be said to have been prepared
by its use in Gide (Les Faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters}), Leiris (L'Age
dliomme [Manhood]), and Ponge (Le Soleil mis en abime [The Sun Placed in
the Abyss and Other Texts]). As should be clear from the heraldic sense, the
mise-en-abime implies an infinite perspective on and reduplication of the initial
motif: the Morton Salt girl carries Morton Salt bearing the Morton Salt girl
carrying Morton Salt bearing the Morton Salt girl carrying . . .
With this appearance of infinite self-reflection, the deconstructionist interest
bears precisely on its disruption—a disruption that can be thought of either as
a blocking of adequate self-reflection (the intervention within the field of
reflection of something both necessary to it and radically heterogeneous with
respect to it: the insistence of the general economy within the appearance of its
restriction), or as that which obliges the field of self-reflection always to a
further reflection, a supplement of mise-en-abime that allows the process of self-
reflection no rest, no moment of self-adequacy (and this movement can be
described as the always belated effort of a restricted economy to expand itself
far enough to master and subsume the general system within which it is
inscribed). . . . All real mise-en-abimes end in disruption: after three Morton
Salt girls we are faced with nothing more than a few dabs of blue, yellow, and
white. A mise-en-abime that continues into the infinite is merely ideal, and its
appearance stands in need of explanation, say deconstruction. (It is note-
worthy that Miller, discussing the term, apparently does not recognize the
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 97

problematic idealism that slips into the notion and, in fact, seems to fall in with
it by suggesting that mise-en-abtme be respelled, as it now is by most Yale
critics, as mise-en-abyme, thus making the word "abyme itself a mise-en-
abyme."Ys
Despite a strong appearance to the contrary (an appearance we can now place
and acknowledge), deconstruction is a practice and philosophy of self-reflection
only in order to be a practice and philosophy of its disruption—a philosophy of
consciousness only in order to be able to trace out that system through which
the Unconscious makes its presence felt. It is in this perspective that we can
grasp the appearance of deconstruction as a certain psychoanalysis of philos-
ophy: it is, after all, psychoanalysis that has taught us what it is to have an
Unconscious for an object and that makes available the model through which we
can speak of a repression of writing. But if this model becomes available only
through precisely that repression of writing . . . ? Then psychoanalysis itself
is possessed of an internal limit like that of the logocentric closure of philos-
ophy—psychoanalysis can become the site for a deconstructive exploration
wholly comparable to that which deconstruction brings to bear on the texts that
belong more obviously to "the philosophic tradition" (an entity whose apparent
unity is utterly shattered by this inclusion of psychoanalysis within it).
It is thus that philosophy—deconstructive philosophy—comes to find itself in
its controversy with psychoanalysis and to claim that this controversy is one
outside which neither philosophy nor psychoanalysis can be found. It remains
for us to attempt to fill the gap we have left between the game of odds-and-evens
and our meditation on the fate of logocentrism.

Contre-Bande: The Opposition; the Legacy;

Anasemie; the Exorbitant
Derrida's writings on psychoanalysis can be sorted into three large groups—
first, those on Freud and the relation of psychoanalysis to the metaphysical
tradition ("Freud and the Scene of Writing," "Speculer—sur 'Freud' " [To
speculate—on "Freud"], "Du tout" [Of all]); those belonging to the controversy
with Lacan ("The Purveyor of Truth," a long footnote in Positions, and some
extended remarks in "La Double Seance" [The double session] and "La
Dissemination" [Dissemination], both in Dissemination); and finally, the recent
writings on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok ("Fors," "Me—
Psychoanalysis," and various remarks in the two interviews "Entre crochets"
["In brackets," or, perhaps, "Hooked"] and "Ja, ou le faux-bond" [Ja, or the
broken word]). These groups are of course highly artificial; the various texts
mentioned all contest their classification to a greater or lesser extent, communi-
cate with and open into one another in a variety of ways, and so on. In addition,
this sort of classificatory scheme takes no notice of the myriad of passing
 98 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

remarks to be found throughout Derrida's writings, and bypasses as well whole

texts that simply refuse easy schematizing (Glas [Death knell] and "Envois" are
certainly the most obvious examples).19
Here we will simply trace one possible itinerary through this body of writing,
showing one version of the way in which these essays do and do not hang
together—a way in which Derrida works psychoanalysis and a way in which
psychoanalysis works Derrida. Our particular interest lies in moving from the
general considerations on deconstruction that have engaged us this far to a more
specific focus on the role of literature within the strategies of deconstruction.
This is a route that will lead us from fiction to fiction. The opening fictions
are those taken from Imre Hermann by his students Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok; I cite at considerable length:
—As to that which never was—is it anything other than the poem
one is? —As to that which never was, the couch
remembers. . . . Myself; poetry, that re-membering animates my
verses.
—My poem, here it is, you are going to hear it. It is as rigorous as
mathematics and as fantastic as a fairy tale. Yes, fantastic, because its
content, its support of images, surges from my fantasy, or from the
fantasy of those who call themselves knowing, "savants." But also
rigorous because it is postulated in all our thoughts, all our gestures,
all our life. . . . For the moment let us learn to see: primitive
hordes, pithecanthropes, young apes hanging on mothers, mothers
hanging on branches, eyes shining with wildness, the burning stare of
the leader, the forest, the forest, the good, original forest, then,
suddenly, cataclysms, glacial cold, fire, infants hanging from their
mothers, mother hanging from the tree, fire, fire everywhere, a fire
that chills (un feu qui "jette le froid"), a fire that heats as well, yes,
but at such a cost, at the price of becoming torch oneself, torch
burning with shame, the red fires of shame, the firey lightning of the
look that shames, the regard that like fire releases (decramponne) the
infant from the mother, releases the mother from the infant, from the
infant become her tree. . . . The mother and the child! Always!
Their indissoluble unity! Dissolved nonetheless, dissolved too soon,
that is what we are the memory of, enacted memory, acting memory:
there is our most primitive human instinct, our filial instinct, always
frustrated, always at work!
—Now you see that what I have just said . . . is no longer of the
order of the science fiction of the past nor of the observational science
of the present, but of the order of first truth (verite premiere) or of
Ve-ri-te itself, the without-foundation of all foundations, the fantas-
matic, the mathematic; the mythological, the economic, the polemic,
the political; the -ocracies, magics, techniques, arts. . . . Yes, with-
out "the-shining-eyes-that-have-released-the-infant-from-the-mother-too-
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 99

soon" we would still be within the simian poetic of the secure

maternal pelt. . . .
What is it that could have forced our primordial mother to lose her
long thick pelt, the passive organ of instinct? It must have been that
she herself had been dropped and that she thus formed a melancholic
identification with "no-hair-for-baby" (pas-de-poils-pour-bebe). Then,
just as she had been let fall, so she let fall all her pelt, thus making of
her now hairless skin a first notice that reality exists, that it is pre-
cisely that which is not, that which fails instinct. . . . And all of
mother-culture, is it not made of just this "reality" of lack, trans-
formed into the illusion of attachment and grip (cramponnement)?20
These passages resonate through much of Derrida's recent writings,
especially his essays on Blanchot and the extraordinary "Envois" that opens La
Carte postale (Post card). We want here to remark the way in which these pas-
sages seem to resurrect in the name of a new and more radical rigor for psycho-
analysis much of the worst of Freud's own tendencies toward a biologically
mythologized history. It is this overtly fictional tale of apes and hair and fire that
Jacques Derrida would erect (in contre-bande, in double-bande) against Lacan's
psychoanalysis and its dream of—claim to —scienticity.
Abraham and Torok offer a version of psychoanalysis that claims to find its
rigor precisely in such a myth or poem rather than in the abstract schemes,
formulas, and "mathemes" that have become increasingly important to Lacan.
It is as if Lacan and Abraham/Torok take up two distinct and easily separable
sides of the Freudian legacy: so that whereas Lacan takes up the Freud who
dreamt of science and reestablishes that dream on linguistic rather than ther-
modynamic foundations, Hermann's students take up instead the Freud who kept
disrupting his science with fantastic dreams of ontogenetic recapitulations of
phylogeny. A number of contrasts between Lacan and Abraham/Torok fall out
rather nicely along the lines given in this picture: Lacan's central term is desire;
Abraham and Torok's is identity. Lacan expounds his vision of science in terms
of the "little letters" of his quasi-algebraic "mathemes"; Abraham and Torok
speak of poetry, of "capitalization" and "anasemy." Lacan sees language as
always prior to human experience; Abraham and Torok see it caught up in the
prior structure of cmmponnement.21
Before we examine some of the notions advanced by Abraham—that of
anasemie above all—we can profit from an inquiry into the general nature of a
"legacy" that is open to this kind of division.
An examination of "the Freudian legacy" rapidly opens out into a series of
interconnected issues. If, for example, we begin with the view that Lacan has
returned psychoanalysis to itself, accomplished a genuine return to Freud, we
have to go on to ask how this purified psychoanalysis can understand the errors
and detours into which Freud's legacy fell. If a letter always reaches its desti-
 100 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

nation (to take up again the terms of the Poe seminar), how did the Freudian
letter go astray? How does this possibility of going astray belong to the (proper)
structure of the Freudian legacy and how can it—how is it—to be thought by
psychoanalysis? If, on this basis, we go on to suggest that the Freudian legacy
is one that is necessarily divided (divided, among other ways, as Lacan and
Abraham are divided), we can ask also what the relation is between two legatees
each of whom is necessarily in the position of laying claim to psychoanalysis as
such and in a way that excludes the other. (It appears here that a part of what
structures the Freudian legacy is a certain system of exclusions: so that there is
a logic of sorts operating behind the splits, breaks, and fissions that have
characterized the psychoanalytic movement during Freud's lifetime and after, in
France above all perhaps.)22
These interlinked questions can point to a rereading of the Freudian text as
that text whose letter not only bodies forth the truth of psychoanalysis but is the
continuing charter of its movement. That is, we can begin to read Freud's
writings as the place where a certain legacy is forged, where a certain will is
written. This will is one that includes within itself a special testamentary con-
dition in the event that the legator outlives—survives—his presumptive heirs, a
condition that forever ties psychoanalysis to the name and person of Sigmund
Freud (and so also to whatever in Freud escapes the terms of psychoanalysis,
what remains beyond the terms of his self-analysis). What psychoanalysis would
mean by "repression" is forever other than completely that, because it cannot
mean other than personally. The laws psychoanalysis wants to attribute to,
anchor in, the Father and the Symbolic are always and already abrogated by the
secret complicity of grandfather and grandchild, a complicity implicit in the
Oedipal confrontation of father and son and disruptive of it.23
These are, more or less, the terms and tendencies of Derrida's extraordinary
reading of Freud's still more extraordinary Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The
final object of "Speculer—sur 'Freud'" is —and is not—an object separate from
the text and its workings—a certain Freudian rhythm of distance and proximity,
inclusion and exclusion, descent and return, fort and da, recovery and loss (of
a science or a self or a certain "beyond"). This rhythm, this complex patterning
of hesitation and speculation, exaggeration and obviousness, is the pulsing of
that logic by which Abraham and Lacan are laced in and through one another,
excluded from each other—and it is also the rhythm each claims to have
mastered as "psychoanalysis" (and it is finally the rhythm through which
psychoanalysis is destined to [escape] itself). This rhythm is one that pulses in
a different way through Heidegger's writings, and this second, transformed
rhythm ripples through the Freud essay, appearing, above all, as the place
marked out for an essay yet to appear, "Donner—le temps" ("Giving-time").
"Speculer —sur 'Freud' " advances no master theory of psychoanalysis
beyond the texts in question. Derrida insists that the theory given in the text is
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 101

precisely that text—he insists, that is, on the literality of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, on the "a-thetic" writing that does and undoes the thesis it appears
to offer (just as the "beyond" of the pleasure principle appears only as what
continually, ceaselessly, does and undoes that principle, without thereby
supplanting it or emerging as a principle in its own right). Derrida's interest lies
in how psychoanalysis gets (always) beyond itself: the inevitable meaning of its
literality and the inevitable literality of its meaning.

What then is psychoanalysis? How is one to speak of it outside its texts and
their a-thetic logic? How is one to speak of its writing?
These terms that attempt the impossible—to grasp through language the
very source from which language arises and which enables it insofar
as they signify nothing other than that very return to the source of its
significance—we have called these terms anasemies. A psychoanalytic
theory recognizes itself as such precisely insofar as it operates with
anasemies.2*
Abraham advances his notion of anasemie within a very particular logic here:
anasemies do not, in themselves, define psychoanalysis; they are the means to
or occasion for a certain self-recognition. It is, it seems, entirely possible for
a "psychoanalytic theory" to fail to recognize its dependence on or use of
anasemies-but it would then fail to recognize itself as a psychoanalytic theory:
it would mistake itself. Such mistakes are always possible—this possibility is
itself part of what or how anasemies mean.
This notion of anasemie is given its fullest and most systematic development
in Abraham's review of The Language of Psychoanalysis.25 In his essay "The
Shell and the Kernel" Abraham insists on the novelty and specificity of psycho-
analysis ("if a conceptual organization of psychoanalysis must indeed exist, it
cannot surrender its unity within the bounds of traditional thinking and its appre-
hension requires a new dimension yet to be found"), and he insists above all on
"the radical semantic change that psychoanalysis has introduced into
language."26 This radical change is visible throughout Freud's writings. It is, for
example, at work in Freud's statement that "in psychoanalysis the concept
of what is sexual comprises far more; it goes lower and also higher than its
popular sense."27 What is this concept—Sex—that is other than sex? How are
we suppose to think with or about it? to grasp it?
One way to think this new concept of sex would be to think it as (something
like) the whole system of meanings and feelings with which the biological facts
of sexuality are essentially imbrued for us, by which they are transformed and
through which they come to count for psychoanalysis. Clearly, this attempt
moves in the right direction, gets closer to what the psychoanalyst means by Sex
(it may even be what the psychoanalyst thinks he means by Sex): what it wants
 102 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

to say is that Sex is the kernel of whatever our ordinary usage of sex wants to
say, what that usage has to have grasped in order to say what it does. It is the
living kernel beneath the hardened shell of popular usage.28 But these formula-
tions are almost paradigmatically phonocentric, opposing the vital inward
presence of (good) sex to the dead husk that passes as the popular currency of
(debased) sex. The definition we are looking for cannot pretend to separate the
wheat from the chaff in this way. If our semantic model is to be that of the shell
and the kernel, we are going to have to insist not only on the recession of the
kernel from its linguistic embodiment but also on the way that embodiment is
its, belongs essentially to what it is to be "enkerneled." Sex in this sense is the
secret of sex (and of psychoanalysis) only as Psychoanalysis is (anasemically)
its own secret; we have to replace the infinite inwardness of ever-receding ker-
nels with the logic of an enkerneling that calls forth always a supplementary
kernel.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle turns on the difficulties of a pleasure principle
in a system that permits of "a pleasure that cannot be felt as such" (and that
can even be felt as pain). What Abraham would have us recognize is the
anasemic functioning of pleasure within psychoanalysis:
What then is the principle of coherence of a discourse where
Pleasure no longer means what one feels, where Discharge refers to
something other than what one sees? In this tangle, some would be
tempted to appeal to a phenomenological description of the meanings
at issue. [This is roughly the way we first attempted to handle the
example of Sex above; Sex is the sexuality of sex, how it counts for
us—Abraham would write this as "sex."] . . . Now, strangely
enough, metapsychological capitals steadfastly reject the quotation
marks of the phenomenologist. The concept of Pleasure cannot be
bracketed. . . . Our graphic ploy is suggestive enough to attract
attention to the following: the effect of capitalization invokes a
mystery, the very mystery of the unthought that burdens reflexive
philosophy with a congenital naivete. It reveals the opaque gratuity of
the distance that separates the reflecting subject from himself, a dis-
tance endangering even patent notions founded on an illusory prox-
imity to self. . . . To state this is already to designate, if not to
resolve, the problem which faces us: how to include in a discourse—in
any one whatever—the very thing which in essence, by dint of being
the precondition of discourse, escapes it? If non-presence, the kernel
and ultimate ground of all discourse, is made to speak, can it, must it,
make itself heard in and through presence to self? Such is the form in
which the paradoxical situation inherent to the psychoanalytic prob-
lematics appears.29
It is the distinction between the phenomenological "pleasure" and the
anasemic Pleasure that is central here; the movement claimed for the "meta-
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 103

psychological capitals" is not toward a deeper inner meaning of the thing—sex,

pleasure, the unconscious—but toward the thing itself:
This, then, is the role of the capitals: instead of re-signifying them,
they strip words of their signification, they de-signify them, so to
speak. . . . Psychoanalytic de-signification precedes the very possi-
bility of the collision of meanings. The capitals carry out de-significa-
tion in a very particular and precise mode, capable of defeating signi-
fication and, at the same time, of laying bare the very foundation of
the signifying process. Their rigor resides in the always singular way
in which they oppose semantic actualization—that Pleasure should
mean pleasure—all the while referring precisely to the non-presence
from which "pleasure" emerges and which, in "pleasure," manages to
be represented. In order to make such a capitalized discourse into
something other than a mystical or religious illusion, the second step
of the exegesis should take it upon itself to define the requirements,
constraints, and the universe proper to this scandalous semantics of
concepts designified by the action of the psychoanalytic context and
revealed as such through the ploy of capitalization.30 [This last recom-
mendation may be taken to describe Derrida's reading of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle—and it should be clear that the terms of that
reading are thus fundamentally critical rather than theoretical.]
We will pause over these two long citations only long enough for a few fugi-
tive remarks. The designifying movement toward the thing itself, this desperate
clinging to the singed hairs of the world, names the workings of reference for
Abraham; it is the fact of decramponnement that makes our meaning a work of
mourning.31 We should note as well that the project of including in a discourse
that which "by dint of being the precondition of discourse, escapes it" is a
Bataillean project, and its risk of sliding into "mystical or religious illusion"
a Bataillean risk; such a project (and such risk) is called forth by our recognition
of the ways in which Lacanian analysis ends up repeating Hegel and the conse-
quent recognition of the way in which the Hegelian legacy demands a thought
of heterogeneity. We can on this basis see how exactly Abraham's notion of
anasemic designification answers to Lacan's insistence on the remarkability of
any random sequence—how this notion works to recover la chose meme, the
thing itself, from its theoretical oblivion.

Capitalization is of course far from being the only ploy of designification. We

have already seen Abraham employ two other such devices-the reduction of a
phrase to a string of words or the reduction of a word to a string of syllables
(pas-de-poils-pour-bebe, Ve-ri-te), and the use of sans to force a sort of eccen-
tric and critical enkerneling (as in le sans-fondement de tons fondements [the
without-foundation-of-all-foundations] or, more simply, le fondement-sans-
 104 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

fondement [foundation-without-foundation]).32 Derrida uses all three of these

devices with some frequency in his recent writings.
For Derrida, Abraham is a man who speaks above all about translation,
even from one language into itself (with the "same" words suddenly
changing their sense, overflowing with sense or exceeding it
altogether, and nevertheless impassive, imperturbable, identical to
themselves, allowing you still to read in the new code of this anasemic
translation what belonged to the other word, the same one, before
psychoanalysis, that other language, makes use of the same words but
imposes on them a "radical semantic change").33
A psychoanalytic text is, in this light, its own absolute homonym, exceeding its
own apparent simplicity and integrity at every point. Abraham's formulation of
anasemie allows Derrida to understand the disciplinary economy of psycho-
analysis, its adherence to its proper object—its purity34 —as already trans-
gressive, "general" (in Bataille's sense), and other than "merely" disciplinary:
psychoanalysis, we will say, is necessarily and variously excessive, peculiar,
exorbitant, and everywhere open to criticism and reading. Its difference inheres
everywhere within its absolute homonymy: differance.
It is of course just this to which we were pointing in our discussion of the
Freudian legacy and its implications in and for a movement (that does not step)
beyond the pleasure principle. Derrida's reading of Freud's text is a critical
elaboration of the anasemic structure of the Pleasure Principle, showing how the
divisions and oppositions that characterize the institution of psychoanalysis (its
founding, the means of its continuation) are inscribed within the absolute
homonymy of the text—just as a simple chain of pluses and minuses ends up as
its own absolute homonym and runs the risk of losing itself or of becoming
sundered from itself within that apparent identity. So also "Freudianism" ends
as its own homonym, a complex anasemie through which the founder inscribes
himself-permanently, necessarily—within the structure of what would be more
simply a science: so also a certain experience of consciousness insists in and
recedes from the Hegelian Experience of Consciousness, stands at once as con-
dition and subverter of its proper science, is both readable and unreadable,
written and unwritten, thought and unthought, within it.
The exorbitant economy of anasemic homonymy reorganizes and redistri-
butes the relations between fiction, theory, and history in and around psycho-
analysis in such a way that it is no longer possible to exclude from the corpus
of psychoanalytic seriousness its textual moments of madness, absurdity, or (less
romantically) ridiculousness—the primal horde, the hairless ape, or the
influence of the lunar period on the mucus membranes—or to exclude from the
canon of psychoanalytic science its overtly speculative moments. We can say
that this economy demands our acknowledgment of the inevitability of a fictional
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 105

supplement to psychoanalysis or, equally, that it demands our acknowledgment

of the way psychoanalytic theory is responsive to something other than truth
(perhaps, truth-without-truth).35 We could also say that recognition of the
anasemic structure of psychoanalysis has the effect of freeing fiction and theory
to one another, or of placing both these terms as secondary to and enabling of
a more fundamental critical and self-critical undertaking.
What I have just referred to as the "freeing of fiction and theory to one
another" will be explored more fully in the ensuing chapters, but it is important
to see here that this setting aside of truth as a central organizing and distinguish-
ing term cannot but undercut certain notions of history—a subversion on which
I have presumed already in speaking of the anasemies of the Phenomenology
above. "The radical semantic change that psychoanalysis has introduced into
language" existed in language prior to psychoanalysis, but could not be recog-
nized as such. The psychoanalytic recognition of anasemy and absolute homon-
ymy has consequences that rebound, through a logic psychoanalysis recognizes
as that of Deferred Action, upon the whole of the history in which one would
presume to locate the simple "event" of anasemie. We can be content here
neither with the picture of a certain radical change introduced into a preexistent
and simpler language at a certain time, nor with the idea that this apparent
change is simply the recognition of what had really always been the case: the
"event" we are trying to grasp here is complex—insists on time, takes time,
works in time.
We can say that through the lens of anasemie "the tradition" becomes visible
as its own homonym, and the historical field becomes the privileged playground
in which theory and fiction interlace with one another, permitting such mad
hypotheses as a historical "repression of writing" (in which—we can say
now—"repression" must be read anasemically, as Repression, within and
without psychoanalysis at once). Perhaps more madly still, we might write about
the influence of Hitchcock on Freud or of Plato on Socrates. We can feel what
this would be about, its subject and critical legitimacy can easily seem clear
enough; the madness of theory counts as it enables reading, and reading counts
as it counts or fails to count. The power we find in Lacan's reading of Freud
is clear and familiar enough; the power Derrida attributes to Abraham is less
familiar—critical, ungrounded, strategic. Derrida could be wrong here—but he
would then simply have been wrong: a legitimate and paradigmatic critical
failure.
Derrida's epistolary text "Envois" works in and out of his discovery of and
fascination with a medieval woodcut that portrays-mistakenly? accidentally?
with the cunning of history?—a certain "plato" dictating to his apparent scribe
"Socrates." To a greater extent than any other Derridean text (including Glas),
"Envois" operates within an explicit interlacing of fiction and theory, history
and its subversion, autobiography and philosophy, holding itself at the very limit
 106 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

of (de)signification and (un)readability. The rules for its reading are perhaps
given in some remarks Derrida made elsewhere, on Blanchot:
The double invagination of this narrative body in deconstruction [for
which we might simply read, "the logic of anasemy"] overruns and
exceeds not merely the opposition of values that make the rules and
form the law in all the schools of reading, ancient and modern, before
and after Freud; it overruns a delimitation of the fantasy, a delimita-
tion in the name of which some would here abandon, for example, the
mad hypothesis to "my" fantasy-projection, or to that of one who
says "I" here, the narrator, the narrators, or me, who am telling you
all this here. This unreadability will have taken place where it
remains: that's the proof. From here on it's up to you to think what
will have taken place, to work out both the conditions for its possibil-
ity and its consequences.36
As "rules" these statements are open to the same logical criticisms as the
simpler slogans "All reading is misreading" or "All reading is rereading." The
ground on which they can claim to stand is one that is anasemically structured
(and so no ground at all): "This text then must be deciphered with the help of
the code it proposes and which belongs to its own writing."37 It is around this
notion of anasemie that we can pose questions about Derrida's language—the
ways in which it means, the ways in which it is invariably excessive, always
inadequate—or about his idiom, the ways in which he clings to it, the ways in
which he is pinned on it, the ways in which it ends as other than mere idiolect:
questions of style.

[Questions of Style]
[Such questions of style emerge in the interstices and pauses of our reading of
the relation between Derrida and psychoanalysis. At the same time, Derrida's
style is everywhere explicitly answerable to the terms of this reading and rela-
tion—the logic of the a-thetic uncovered in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the
enkerneling recession of metapsychological anasemies, the uncanny multipli-
cation of doubles beyond and in subversion of any possibility of adequation.
"Style" is also a moment for Derrida's own work of reading and deconstruc-
tion—in Eperons (Spurs) it is Nietzsche's "style(s)" that organize the text, and
in the polemic with Lacan, it is Lacan's "style" that is said to have concealed,
for a time, the shortcomings of "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.'"
In pausing here, in creating this parenthesis within the present essay, we
involve ourselves, briefly, fleetingly, with another body of Derridean texts:
essays on Heidegger and the fictions of Maurice Blanchot, or the poetry of
Francis Ponge. At one limit of this field we touch on everything Derrida has had
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 107

to say and continues to say about the signature, its uniqueness and its divisibility,
as well as on the contexts and polemics that have become proper to this problem-
atic (Austin, Searle). This new field is more nearly philosophical than the one
in which we have been working so far. Even when Derrida writes on Blanchot
or Ponge, it is easy to see through to the hidden agenda: Heidegger and
Blanchot, Heidegger and Ponge. The transition into this parenthesis is thus a
crossing into philosophy—given what we know of the boundary between
psychoanalysis and philosophy, given that we now, from this side, call this
relation one of "chiasmatic invagination of borders."38
Here, now, in philosophy and in parentheses, between psychoanalysis,39
within the space of its homonymity, we play in and upon a question of style,
clinging to the Derridean idiom until we are burned away from it.
Questions of style are here, already, questions of location—of what we have
called "positionality." They are, that is, questions of how we stand in relation
to philosophy—belatedly, in time or not in time—and of how we read the texts
of philosophy—repetitiously, rhythmically, hesitantly.
(Under what conditions will these paragraphs have made sense? And what in
these paragraphs dictates that this question be posed through the gratuitous
complexity of what is called the "future perfect"?)

Here we are, no doubt, too far ahead of ourselves. What might it mean for
a theory, psychoanalytic or not, to recognize itself through its anasemies? What
does such a theory recognize about itself? I think we have to say here that it
recognizes itself as possessed—over and above a certain context, perhaps even
regardless of that context, a-thetically—of or by something like a style—d'une
style. This style, we want also to say, is precisely that which eludes our grasp
as content and recedes from us (coinciding, within a certain traditional strain of
philosophy and criticism, with la chose meme).
Let us begin by saying that for Derrida the history of metaphysics is founded
on a repression of writing and is therefore organized, for the analytic eye, by
the effects of that repression and so is readable against its own grain, open to
the "correction" of deconstruction. Insofar as this version of the Derridean
project has for its implicit goal a movement beyond repression, a step outside
its history and the enclosure of metaphysics, it is faced immediately with the
central difficulty that all its concepts and terms mean only within the very history
they would contest. If, for example, "book" is everywhere caught up in a system
that devalorizes writing in favor of speech because (roughly) speech is
understood to be more nearly, more deeply, self-identical, closer to the thought
it would body forth, possessed of greater integrity and force—if what a ' 'book''
is and how "publication" counts and how "copyright" becomes necessary are
all determined by their belonging to such a system—what then is one to call that
 108 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

in which one would make public a certain revalorization or liberation of a

positive and disseminatory writing? It is here, from this kind of complexity, that
deconstruction begins:
This (therefore) will not have been a book.
So begins Dissemination. The "(therefore)," we can say, is "understood."
The belated recognition reported in this sentence determines deconstruction
from the outset as a paleonymic practice—intending to make new meanings
show themselves, turn into the light, within the shells of their old names:
"writing," "trace," "supplement," "gramme," . . . so many terms taking
their turn at organizing Derrida's readings and writings and accompanied always
by a new variant of the same caution: "Differance is neither a word nor a
concept."40
Let us begin again. To take some examples: why should "litera-
ture" still designate that which already breaks away from literature—
away from what has always been conceived and signified under that
name—or that which, not merely escaping literature, implacably
destroys it? (Posed in these terms, the question would already be
caught in the assurance of a certain foreknowledge: can "what has
always been conceived and signified under that name" be considered
fundamentally homogeneous, univocal, or non-conflictual?) To take
other examples: what historical and strategic function should hence-
forth be assigned to the quotation marks, whether visible or invisible,
which transform this into a "book," or which still make the decon-
struction of philosophy into a "philosophical discourse"?41
The necessity for a paleonymic practice of deconstruction is viewed here as
a response to a theoretical difficulty within a naive and fundamentally idealist
project of escape from history. In practice this paleonymy comes to sponsor
reciprocal invasions of style by content (so that nothing appears neutral,
"merely rhetorical," trivial, or frivolous) and of content by style (so that every-
thing appears frivolous, self-indulgent, empty). This double movement is one
that becomes increasingly able to name itself as a liberation of writing—a freeing
of writing to itself. If we began by describing this practice of paleonymy as a
way of turning new meanings into the light within their old shells, we find now
that this practice becomes a way of turning itself as it were through itself—old
meanings into new shells: paleonymy into anasemie, negation into affirmation,
double bind to double-bande. It becomes a practice that would everywhere
demarcate the remarkability of our language, its identity with and difference
from itself.
As paleonymy turns through itself to find its anasemie affirmation of itself,
as the practice of deconstruction finds its way ever more surely to "writing,"
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 109

it becomes ever more able to recognize itself and its ground (sons-ground,
Abgrund, abyss). It is thus in part himself that Derrida appears to be correcting
when he writes that
dissemination . . . does not play, as one might too easily believe,
with the plural, the dispersed, the scattered, nor between multiplicity
and unity, but between the unique.42
We have already seen something of how this insistence on "the unique"
animates the argument with Lacan, and we may have glimpsed already, here and
there, something of the way in which "literature" functions for Derrida as the
vehicle of the unique in writing. Here—in parentheses and in philosophy—we
want to see how this insistence presses Derrida back toward Heidegger. It is
because this work turns always around the unique, the thing, the event, that it
cannot bypass some ontological moment (even if its work is finally only to
criticize).
Derrida has from the outset recognized the Heideggerean moment as
"extremely important . . . a novel, irreversible advance all of whose critical
resources we are far from having exploited."43 The pressure of the Heideg-
gerean problematic on the Derridean seems at present greater than ever,
appearing most explicitly (to date) in the essay '' The Retrait of Metaphor.'' The
article matters to us here insofar as its critical points turn on a matter of style:
Of more importance to me for the moment is the other of the two
motifs common to Greisch and Ricoeur, namely, that the metaphoric
power of the Heideggerean text is richer, more determinant than his
thesis on metaphor. The metaphoricity of Heidegger's text would over-
flow what he says thematically, in the mode of simplificatory denun-
ciation, of the so-called "metaphysical" concept of metaphor. . . . I
would quite willingly subscribe to this assertion. What remains to be
determined, however, is the meaning and necessity which link this
apparently univocal, simplifying and reductive denunciation of the
metaphysical concept of metaphor on the one hand, and, on the other,
the apparently metaphorical power of a text whose author no longer
wishes that what happens in that text and what claims to get along
without metaphor there be understood precisely as "metaphoric," nor
even under any concept of metalinguistics or rhetoric.44
Derrida's interest in the gap between the metaphoric power of the Heideg-
gerean text—its style—and its theses on metaphor is, as this passage makes clear,
an interest in the unity and simplicity of the metaphysical tradition and so also
in the "reality" of that object whose absence, repression, or forgetting is the
unity of that tradition. For Heidegger, the denunciation of the distinction
between literal and metaphorical as "metaphysical" would free his language
into a deeper propriety—tying, for example, such statements as "language is the
 110 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

house of Being" to the deeper ground of a-lethia and freeing it from any merely
metaphysical reading as either literal or merely metaphorical, simply true or
simply poetic or evocative. (It is, in effect, as if it is Being that is to ground,
to fill out our reading of "house"—rather than "house" opening the way to a
particular sight of Being.) The sense Heidegger wants to attribute to (what
appear as) metaphors in his text is the sort of sense we have seen Abraham attri-
bute to the phenomenological understanding of sex as "sex"—caught up in an
inward movement, generative of deeper sense, truth, and presence.
Derrida's critical and deconstructive task is then to show that Heidegger's
text cannot escape its own, "mere" metaphoricity. With this Derrida renews an
argument first advanced in "The White Mythology" and does so in response
to criticisms by Paul Ricoeur calling particularly for a clarification of Derrida's
relation to Heidegger, a spelling out of his critical, rather than realistic, stance
toward the "metaphysical enclosure."45 The argument for the radical insistence
of metaphor in language is simple enough—all that needs to be shown is that the
condition for any metaphor whatsoever is a plurality of metaphors, and that this
must mean a plurality that can neither be reduced to the literal nor be subsumed
under some larger and more embracing meta-metaphorics. The argument insists
on the heterogeneity of language, the incoherence of any dreams of any ideal
homogeneity or simplicity of meaning.
Heidegger appears to be entering a claim for just such a dream prior to or
deeper than the distinction of metaphorical and literal. Derrida's deconstructive
reading sets out to demonstrate that this recessive movement beneath the separa-
tion of literal and metaphorical, poetic and philosophical, itself depends on a
heterogeneity which repeats that of the literal and the metaphoric and which it
cannot think—and which thus sets in motion the gap that is so apparent in
Heidegger's writing between its theses on metaphor and its superabundant
metaphorical power. At issue here is the way in which a certain withdrawal or
retreat of Being behind and before the metaphysical tradition and its distinctions
can and cannot organize a plenum of sense, can and cannot make itself (philo-
sophically) present to us—how far, finally, we can lay claims to a metaphysical
tradition and an escape from it—how far we can step beyond or back from our
condition. Derrida's reading shows that the organizing withdrawal of Being, its
retreat, is unable to organize and master its own sense, is submitted to anasemie:
When trait or retrait is said in a context where truth is in question,
"trait" is no longer a metaphor of what we usually believe we recog-
nize by this word. It does not, however, suffice to invert the propo-
sition and say that the withdrawal (re-trait) of truth as non-truth is the
proper or the literal by way of which current language will be in a
position of divergence, of abuse, of tropical detour in any form.
Withdrawal is no more proper or literal than figurative. . . . Retraits
thus writes itself in the plural, it is singularly plural in itself, divides
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 111

itself and reassembles in the withdrawal of withdrawal [that is, this

Heideggerean "mystery," "the self-concealing of Being," and so on,
appears as the guarantee of an inwardness of sense, papering over the
way in which each of its terms is in itself already plural, divided,
borne away from itself]. It is what I have elsewhere tried to name pas.
It is a question here of the path again, of what passes there, or not.46
These last words can be taken to figure for us a part of Derrida's argument
with Lacan and with what remains Heideggerean in Lacan; we would want then
to say that neither Heidegger nor Lacan can think the possibility (and so the
necessity) of a detour, of something other than the path. In the terms of a con-
trast employed earlier Derrida is claiming that behind the apparent richness of
the image, the road that lies behind Heidegger's ontological "forest paths" is
no less direct than Hegel's road to the Absolute (and also, of course, no less tor-
tured), no less prone to pass beyond the terms of the world.
But for us now the difference between Derrida and Heidegger can be most
simply marked in a point of style: Heidegger casts his final terms centripetally
and phenomenologically (the Being of beings, the neighborliness of neigh-
boring, and so on), whereas Derrida casts his centrifugally and anasemically
(and so as other than final)—truth without truth, foundation without founda-
tion.47
If I write for example: the water without water, what happens? Or
again, a response without a response? The same word and the same
thing seem withdrawn from themselves, delivered from their reference
and their identity, even as they continue to let themselves pass, in their
old bodies, toward something entirely other hidden in them.48
The closing lines of this passage elude translation and approach a limit of
Derridean writing, becoming very close to something like the pure rhythm of
designification: "Mais pas plus que dans 'pas,' cette operation ne consiste a
simplement priver ou nier, il s'en faut." (But no more than in "pas," this opera-
tion does not consist simply in privation or denial—necessarily it falls short.)
Elle forme la trace ou le pas du tout autre qui s'y agit, le re-trait du pas, et du
pas sans pas. It forms the trace or footprint/negation of the wholly other at work
there, the retreat/reinscription of the step/negation, and of the step/negation
without step/negation.
The closing sentence is nothing other than its scansion of itself, of the inner
periodicities through which it means, meaning without meaning, voulant dire
sans vouloir dire, sens-sans-sens. In the flickerings of Derrida's pas (or Pas) we
can feel resumed—recapitulated, deconstructed, read—not only Hegel's logic of
trace and negation but also Heidegger's dialogical revision of it into the step
back, a moment of retreat. Such sentences are—I want to say—"speculative
propositions," holding themselves within rather than claiming to overcome the
 112 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

tension between prosody and logic. These are propositions that participate in the
logic of the Hegelian Phenomenology even as they subvert—are acknowledg-
ments of—it, rewriting the notion of Aufhebung in another place, forcing its
anasemie:
In order that "I find myself truly in the beyond, if the beyond is
that which admits of no beyond," it must be the case that the step
(pas) which carries me there overcome itself [se franchisse lui-
meme—for more onfranchir, see Signsponge], annulling while pre-
serving the beyond; and at the same time the structure of the step
(pas) precludes that the double effect of pas (annullingffipreserving the
beyond) be a negation of the negation returning to include, interiorize,
or idealize that step (pas). This is the strange process of which the
negation of the negation (in its powerful system) is but a determined
effect, du pas, un pas.*9
These "speculations" rhyme absolutely as well with those of Freud in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
What we have retained of Beyond . . . , is it anything other than a
rhythm, the rhythm of a negation (pas) that always returns (revient),
that returns from leaving (revient de partir)? That has always just left
again [Qui vient toujours de repartir—v/e might also say then, "that
has always just replicated itself" and with only a slight change of
accent (Hegel: "the conflict that occurs in rhythm between metre and
accent"), "has always just distributed, divided, itself]? And if there is
a theme in the interpretation of this piece—a theme rather than a
thesis, it is perhaps rhythmos, and the rhythm of the theme no less
than the theme of rhythm.
If speculation remains necessarily irresolute because it plays on two
tableaux, bande centre bande, failing to win and winning to lose, why
be astonished that it progresses badly (que qa marche mat)! But it
must progress badly to progress at all; if it lacks, if it must move, it
must move badly. It staggers well, doesn't it? (S'il faut, s'ilfaut que fa
marche, ga doit mal marcher, fa boite bien, n'est-ce pas?) °
This staggering, perhaps drunken, march along what we might call the
pathway of despair or a forest trail or a royal road we can now also call a boite
postale or a boite postale-box or limp, the way we get our mail in any case,
the way our sense is delivered, to us, from us.
As this hesitant and limping dialectic passes over into music, the space in
which we can claim to pose a "question of style" closes down for us, returns us
from our detour. (Another opens elsewhere in which we would be called upon
to dance in another style: ce seminaire aura joue le fort:da de Nietzsche.) But
we must now pass back to Freud, literature, fiction.]
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION D 113

Open Questions
One way of summing up this whole matter of style would be to say that Der-
ridean philosophy aspires to the condition of literature, and that the achievement
of that condition would be at once the fulfillment of the Hegelian legacy within
which such an aspiration arises, and the undoing of (or passing beyond) the
philosophic interests that animate this desire. (It would be like trying to live
within an economic order that refused itself any restriction whatsoever, refused
itself any accumulation in the name of a radical depense [expenditure] that was
no longer even recognizable as such—a step beyond the problematics of trans-
gression into a simpler annihilation of limits.) There are senses in which one
would want to call this achievement the "forgetting of philosophy"—this is
increasingly the name by which we tend to recognize the success of philosophy
(a success which, if it is not impossible, is certainly invisible, having come to
pass only where philosophy is not [is no longer? never was?] done).
The problems posed for philosophy by the terms in which it is given to think
its own success cut to the very heart of its modern condition. We need perhaps
only cite Cavell here:
The figure of Socrates now haunts contemporary philosophical
practice and conscience more poignantly than ever—the pure figure
motivated to philosophy only by the assertions of others, himself
making none; the philosopher who did not need to write. . . . If
silence is always a threat in philosophy, it is also its highest promise.51
Derrida's critical practice of deconstruction appears or can appear as a
belated and desperate Socratism, the work of a philosopher who can only write,
and whose writing is always threatened with a passage over into the radical
irrecuperability—restance—of literature. It is in seeing this that we can see also
that literature is what the philosophical practice of deconstruction cannot face
directly, cannot have as an object of its criticism: literature can figure for
deconstruction only indirectly, as means to its radical self-criticism (or as its
end, in which case it is too late).
This is not to say that deconstruction does not, like stained color on canvas,
"bleed" literary theory, or that it does not cast light, even essential light, on
a variety of literary works: it does, of course, all of this and is everywhere
inextricably tangled up with literature and with criticism. To this point I have
been concerned simply to recall the sources and motives of that entangling from
their still deeper entanglement in a morass of critical assumptions about the
relevance or irrelevance, necessity or gratuitousness, value or perniciousness,
of deconstruction for literary and critical theory.
It is time now to attempt to rearticulate the consequences of deconstruction
for such theory. In this undertaking we are going to be concerned above all with
 114 D PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DECONSTRUCTION

what has so far proved to be the most compelling account of how Derrida's work
counts for criticism, Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric
of Contemporary Criticism, and with the practical criticism that has followed
from it. In the end we will want to know how it is that this work could give rise
to an essay—a brilliant and compelling essay—which finds itself unable to know
"whether Lacan and Derrida are really saying the same thing or only enacting
their own differences from themselves."52 Such "ignorance" seems too close
to the forgetting with which Derrida charged Lacan in the first place, a failure
of reading where such a failure ought not arise and a more sophisticated error
than de Man's theory of criticism intends or can understand.
Chapter 4
Paul de Man: The Time of Criticism

The burden of the argument to this point has been that philosophy, in re-
sponse to needs generated within its "own" history, has come to be at neces-
sary odds with its self, its history, and the proprietary self-presence implicit
in such notions of self and history. In these straits, philosophy has turned
increasingly to criticism for an understanding of its activity, and so has risked
also its possible disappearance into literature. Literary criticism and theory thus
find themselves in an odd position: a discipline that has a long-established
habit of looking elsewhere—primarily to science or philosophy—for models
of its activity and guarantees of its sense and validity suddenly finds itself
in the position of the model appealed to, and it is far from clear what conse-
quences such an appeal should have for criticism or for theory. It seems, in
general, that such an appeal should have no consequences: if I have a coat and
it so impresses you that you get one for yourself (in, of course, your size), it
would be odd of me to now go out in my turn and buy a coat cut to your size.
It would seem the most I am called upon to do is take renewed pride in my
coat—perhaps even wear it places for which I had initially thought it too shabby,
and so on.1
The example is too easy of course. But it remains true that we do not, for
the most part, expect physics (for example) to have to or even want to change
itself in the light of some appeal to it from criticism or even philosophy. There
is a real question about whether and—more important—how one is to think about
the transition from Derrida's project to the practice of literary criticism and
theory.

115
 116 D PAUL DE MAN

That transition has been accomplished for the overwhelming majority of

theoretically oriented critics and scholars in and by the work of the late Paul de
Man, in and by his collection Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism above all.2 In view of the situation I have outlined, it
ought not be a major surprise that what has functioned as the foundation of the
enterprise we commonly call "deconstruct!ve criticism" takes in that book the
form of a critique of Jacques Derrida's work on Rousseau. This is nonetheless
a peculiar mode of foundation—as, indeed, "deconstructive criticism" may
seem a peculiar and peculiarly redundant enterprise to have founded.
It is within this complex field that I want to examine the achievement of Paul
de Man in Blindness and Insight. This is in part the achievement of a transition,
and we do well to note in advance both that' 'transition'' is a term with profound
Hegelian echoes and that the question of the possibility or impossibility of
transition and mediation is central to all of de Man's work. That work is in fact
the transition from deconstruction to its critical acknowledgment—but it is a
transition accomplished through an insistent rejection of the possibility of such
mediation and transition.
These difficulties organize from the outset our examination of de Man's work
and urge on us a difficult doubleness, a new version of the coupling of rupture
and acknowledgment with which we have been working throughout this book:
what will appear with increasing sharpness in these pages as a critique of de Man
can be such only insofar as it begins as and is everywhere enabled by an
acknowledgment of the deep and continuing power of that work. The critical
path claims to move deeper into rather than away from the sense of de Man's
work.
This path leads also into the most compelling work of some of de Man's
students or followers, and here too critique and acknowledgment will be twined
about one another. We are led this way because everything we have done so far
has argued that psychoanalysis occupies a special place within our general field
of disciplinary and interdisciplinary concerns. Acknowledgments or appropria-
tions or rejections of psychoanalysis are images of knowing, of reading, and of
writing—and the way or ways in which de Manian "deconstructive criticism"
stands toward psychoanalysis can be unfolded into more general statements
about knowledge and criticism. And here it is a curious fact, in need of our
understanding, that de Man's implicit rejection of and explicit lack of interest
in psychoanalysis (a lack of interest that seems to reflect a more or less
"Sartrean" insistence on consciousness and "bad faith") is balanced, perhaps
mirrored, by a strong interest in psychoanalysis on the part of some of his most
prominent followers, notably Barbara Johnson and Shoshana Felman.
I suppose the first thing that should be said about de Man is that his career
has been much longer and more consistent than has been generally thought.3
Writing in France throughout the fifties and in this country in the sixties
 PAULDE MAN D 117

(primarily for the New York Review of Books), de Man established early and
clearly the basic positions about literature and life with which he came to be
associated in the wake of his writing on Derrida. De Man has never been in the
position of follower or interpreter of Jacques Derrida, however much the essay
in Blindness and Insight, read in relative isolation and as an upsurge of the new,
may have fostered such an impression. Rather, what we see in "The Rhetoric
of Blindness" is one fully formed and deeply held intellectual position facing
another with which it shares or seems to share a great deal. This description can
be applied also to de Man's essay on Blanchot in the same book and to his series
of essays in the mid-fifties on Heidegger as a reader of Holderlin. De Man's
negotiation with Derrida is but one in a series of such negotiations; I will treat
none of them here although I will touch briefly on their significance below. De
Man's reading of Blanchot has recently been the object of a careful critique by
Donald Marshall, and a full appraisal of de Man's dealings with Heidegger
would require a separate forum.4
More surprising, no doubt, will be my willingness to pass by de Man's direct
encounter with Derrida—even if it can be seen to follow from my suggestion that
there is indeed no direct passage from Derrida to criticism. Rather than present
a historically and conceptually misleading picture in which Derrida gives rise
to a certain new literary critical and theoretical activity, I want to sketch out a
literary critical position by which Derrida has been received (or, more harshly,
to which he has been appropriated). We can then ask of this position how far
it can count as an acknowledgment of criticism (the question of this chapter) and
how far it can count as an acknowledgment of "Derrida" or at least of the
Derrida at issue in the reading of psychoanalysis (the question of the next
chapter). Acknowledgment is, as I have stressed throughout, a peculiar act, in
a sense achieving itself only in its failure, and failing deeply only where it denies
its self, its failure. There are failures and failures here, but there are not final
terms of criticism and no final moments of damnation or salvation. We deal in
(the criteria of critique are matters of) tact and tactics. The difficulties are
difficulties above all of tone, of weight and balance. Such matters may seem
fallings away from what we have learned to think of as Derridean and de Manian
"rigor." Shoshana Felman's remarks on tact may be of service here:
But tact is not just a practical, pragmatic question of "couchside
manner"; it also has a theoretical importance: the reserve within the
interpretative discourse has to allow for and indicate a possibility of
error, a position of uncertainty with respect to the truth.5
We might equally cite Derrida:
Much would depend on the tone I want understood. A tone is decisive;
and who shall decide if it is, or is not part of a discourse?6
 118 D PAUL DE MAN

Such words risk "phonocentrism"—risking it, they demand that we recall

why that would matter, what sense and necessity—or nonsense and contin-
gency—are staked by it.
Derrida's work is, I have argued, a recognition of criticism—an appeal to it
as if it offered a legitimate and (more or less) autonomous mode of knowledge.
This is, for the most part, not how criticism in the twentieth century has thought
of itself; it has, again for the most part, tended to think of itself as ungrounded,
not (yet) scientific, in need of principles, objects, procedures, guarantees, and
the like. It is in the resulting crisscross of aspirations—of philosophy to criticism
and of criticism to science (say, Wissenschaft)—that the wager of a deconstruc-
tive criticism is made. The risk is that the critic may see in Derrida the latest,
best, or most powerful source of grounding principles for criticism and will thus
use Derrida to re-epistemologize criticism, to set it once more on deeper,
sounder, or truer foundations; the promise is that the critic may come to some
acknowledgment of his ungrounded condition and so make such peace as is to
be made with his aspiration to '' science.'' Our current use of the word "theory"
is clearly governed by this double structure of risk and promise, and de Man's
late essay "The Resistance to Theory" is one of the most interesting—if also
most deeply disturbing—efforts to come to grips with the complexities now
packed into this word.7 That essay closes as follows:
Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself
this resistance. The loftier the aims and the better the methods of
literary theory, the less possible it becomes. Yet literary theory is not
in danger of going under; it cannot help but flourish, and the more it
is resisted, the more it flourishes, since the language it speaks is the
language of self-resistance. What remains impossible to decide is
whether this flourishing is a triumph or a fall.8
One way of putting the central question I will be posing about de Man's work
would be to ask whether this "self-resistance" is or is not the same as the
activity I have been referring to as "self-criticism" or "radical self-criticism."
If—as I will argue—they are not the same, what is the difference between them
and what, especially, is the particularity of the one term's evasion of the other?
These questions would lead in the end to Derridean questions about whether or
not such distinctions can be made to stick, whether or not one can finally purge
self-criticism of self-evasion, disentangle a theatrical "self-resistance" from a
purer moment of "radical self-criticism." But the answer to these questions
should be clear in advance and, indeed, establish such criteria as there are for
the critique. I do not—except here and there—have an argument with de Man;
I have a critique of sorts, a reading, that both does and does not escape or contest
de Man's own terms of, for example, blindness and insight: it is, or would be,
an act of self-criticism.
 PAUL DE MAN D 119

Probably the most frequently voiced critique of Paul de Man is that he

"privileges" literature. Paul Bove can provide us with a representative cento:
A destructive reading of Bate, Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, and to a lesser
extent Paul de Man, shows that they are all caught within essentially
the same metaphysical critical tradition. To varying degrees all of
these critics' works—consciously or not—nostalgically reify an aestheti-
cally ordered, often humanist, tradition as an alternative to the radical
flux, disorder, alienation, and death which characterizes the Post-
modern world. . . . de Man's own simplifying blindness, that is, his
claim that all poetic language is already demystified and not in need of
destruction, emerges as an unexamined presupposition. . . . de Man
reveals Derrida's perhaps necessary blindness, that is, to the possibility
that literature itself can approach total demystification at times, but as
an observer, he is himself partially deconstructed by his exchange with
Derrida. In the chapter on Rousseau, de Man's commitment to the
absolutely self-aware fictionality of all literature is revealed as an
unexamined presupposition. . . . his theory of literature remains
partially mystified.9
This welter of reifications, partial deconstructions, and partial demystifi-
cations is very largely nonsense. Yet it is a seductive kind of nonsense—one that
has, always, a familiar tang to it: it is a fact of critical modernity that we suspect
the "privileging" of literature—even though it is hard to know what a literary
critic is to do if not that. And it is a fact of critical modernity that we take it
that there is something to be "demystified" in literature, even though we know
that none of the ways in which we normally make sense of the notions of
"mystification" and "demystification" apply to fictions as such.
Bove's criticism is direct, simple, and traditional enough: de Man sees almost
correctly, has only one small patch of blindness left-one more minor correction
and he will have full, demystified critical vision. It should be clear that this kind
of criticism is precisely what is not open to us, is what we have been concerned
to fight off throughout this book. It is also a "mode of repudiation" (in Cavell's
phrase) that de Man himself works to set aside from the very beginning of
Blindness and Insight: "My remarks are meant to indicate some reasons,
however, for considering the conception of literature (or literary criticism) as
demystification the most dangerous myth of all, while granting that it forces us,
in Mallarme's terms, to scrutinize the act of writing 'jusqu'en I'origine' "
(Blindness, p. 14). We will not be engaging de Man's project unless and until
we step up to the level at which he would repudiate the language of privilege
and demystification—and, at this level, our critique will necessarily focus on
whatever in de Man continues to invite this kind of correction, on what continues
to set up literary criticism as a certain kind of knowledge of a certain kind of
object (even one that defeats knowing). Our argument will be with those
 120 D PAUL DE MAN

statements in de Man's work that invite the confusion of (certain defeats of)
knowledge with the activity of criticism. Our thesis is nonetheless close to just
what it would criticize in de Man; it is that criticism begins and endures just so
long as we can set the question of knowledge aside.
De Man's desire to step away from the modern language of privilege and
demystification is but part of a larger revision of modernism at work in Blind-
ness and Insight and ultimately in service to a certain complex revaloriza-
tion of romanticism that becomes most explicit in "The Rhetoric of Temporality"
(henceforth cited in the text as "Rhetoric"). Although de Man came to feel that
a selective interest in romanticism evidenced a bad literary critical conscience,
his own career began from just such an interest, and it is in terms of a continuing
effort to recover romanticism from its New Critical dereliction that one can most
easily and clearly see the pressures driving his work forward. De Man's early
project is surprisingly close to Harold Bloom's. De Man's 1962 essay "The
Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image" is cast as "an effort to understand
the present predicament of the poetic imagination" and offers as its conclusion:
We are only beginning to understand how this oscillation in the status
of the image is linked to the crisis that leaves the poetry of today
under a steady threat of extinction, although, on the other hand, it
remains a depositary of hopes that no other activity of the mind seems
able to offer.10
Bloom's description of his own undertaking as the search for a way between
the "paths of demystification of meaning and of recollection or the restoration
of meaning" fits de Man's early work with uncanny accuracy.11
The literary-critical and historical situation in which de Man began writing
was one in which the central claims of romantic poetry—loosely, those involved
with notions of the Sublime, of presence, and of some essential coincidence of
word and thing in poetry—were no longer allowed, had been debunked and
demystified; in this situation it seemed urgent—not only as a critical issue, but
also as a response to a crisis within poetry itself—to find a new way to assert
the values of romanticism and romantic poetry (and it may be that this will sound
not only like Bloom but also like Abrams—the difference between Abrams and
de Man would then be a difference in their conception of how hard it is—how
much it costs—to bring about this recovery).
Roughly, de Man's strategy has been to claim that if what appears as presence
or a claim to presence can be shown to conceal a nothingness, that nothingness
can equally be shown to be revealed in and by the poem:
In the same manner that the poetic lyric originates in moments of
tranquility, in the absence of actual emotions, and then proceeds to
invent fictional emotions to create the illusion of recollection, the work
 PAUL DE MAN D 121

of fiction invents fictional subjects to create the illusion of the reality

of others. But the fiction is not a myth, for it knows and names itself
as fiction. It is not a demystification, it is demystified from the start.
When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in
fact being demystified by it; but since this necessarily occurs in the
form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves.
(Blindness, p. 18)12
The demystified recuperation of romanticism envisioned by de Man neces-
sarily involves a reorganization of its internal history, devaluing Wordsworth in
favor of later poets—Yeats for example—and declining a Miltonic ancestry in
favor of a genealogy passing through Rousseau. In the long run, this internal
reorganization of the romantic canon will not hold up, the impulse behind it will
turn against the notion of romanticism itself—to the point that a "selective
interest in Romanticism" becomes for de Man "clear evidence of a persistent
commitment to the historical outlook that keeps haunting the textual analyses as
their bad conscience."13 This "historical predicament" is a direct consequence
of his handling of romantic poetry; we will want to understand this predicament
as a loss of modernism, for literature and for criticism—and we will want to
understand this as a way of losing criticism.

If there is a single pivotal text in de Man's bibliography it is almost certainly

the 1969 essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality." The chapter of Blindness and
Insight devoted to Derrida is in this perspective a distinctly secondary effort, a
defense of the central place the earlier work assigns to Rousseau as origin of and
paradigm for romanticism. For de Man it is Rousseau's work above all that
opens a path into romanticism which passes between the two pits that bracket
all modern interpretations of it. "The Rhetoric of Temporality" states the
central issues as follows:
When it comes to describing just in what way romantic nature poetry
differs from earlier forms, certain difficulties arise. They center on the
tendency shared by all commentators to define the romantic image as a
relationship between mind and nature, between subject and object.
("Rhetoric," p. 178)
The contradiction reaches a genuine impasse. For what are we to
believe? Is romanticism a subjective idealism, open to all the attacks of
solipsism that, from Hazlitt to the French structuralists, a succession of
de-mystifiers of the self have directed against it? Or is it instead a
return to a certain form of naturalism after the forced abstraction of
the Enlightenment, but a return which our urban and alienated world
can conceive of only as a nostalgic and unreachable past? ("Rhe-
toric," p. 182)14
 122 D PAUL DE MAN

In these passages a position that will later be attacked by Abrams and others
as illegitimately and perniciously demystifying begins by trying to take its
distance from a choice that seems to leave romanticism too open to demystifying
critique: if, on de Man's view, M. H. Abrams, Earl Wasserman, and W. K.
Wimsatt are not themselves demystifiers, they are nonetheless creators of or
complicitous with a picture of romanticism that can lead only to its demystifi-
cation—that can end only by leaving us without significant access to the poetry.
De Man's implicit argument—apart from any deconstructionist premise—
becomes explicit in J. Hillis Miller's polemical review of Natural Super-
naturalism: certain high valuations of romanticism are immediately reversible
into radical devaluations and demystifications; interpretations of romanticism
that do not explicitly face this difficulty can appear to us only as hopelessly
idealistic or irredeemably nostalgic; we can gain meaningful access to the poetry
only by reconceiving its poetics along another axis, through a redefinition of the
romantic image outside any dialectic of mind and nature, subject and object.15
If de Man is reacting against a generalized modern and New Critical critique
of romanticism, he is doing so precisely by prolonging the terms of that critique
rather than by reasserting the romantic self-understanding against its critics. To
show that romanticism properly understood is a movement from Rousseau to
Yeats is to heal over its apparent break with the eighteenth century at one
extreme, and to tie it directly to a seminal moment within the modernist tendency
at the other. This extension of the modernist critique thus ends not only by
opposing the romantic self-valorization and its renewal by Abrams and others
but also by undercutting the very "modernism" from which it derived its initial
terms: the rupture, the historical break and sudden dissociation of poetic sensi-
bility that modernism sought to overcome, to reach back beyond, turns out to
have existed only as a (critical and self-critical) mystification of a body of poetry
that, as such, existed in seamless continuity with its proper history.16 Both
within and without romanticism, in both poet and critic, "romanticism" itself
names only a moment in poetry's misapprehension of itself—is only its "bad
conscience." We will see that the effect of this is to force the traditional stuff
of literary history into the internal dynamics of the poem itself—thus, in a certain
sense, justifying or placing Abrams's claim that de Man's criticism makes
literary history impossible. But one can with at least equal justice see in this a
recovery of the deep sense, the ground of possibility of what we too easily let
pass for "literary history."
De Man's critical concern is, as we have indicated, with an understanding of
the romantic image that he finds underlying an entire series of views he contests.
Explicating Holderlin in "The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," he
writes that
 PAUL DE MAN D 123

it would follow, then, since the intent of the poetic word is to origi-
nate like a flower, that it strives to banish all metaphor, to become
entirely literal. . . .
This type of imagery is grounded in the intrinsic ontological pri-
macy of the natural object. Poetic language seems to originate in the
desire to draw closer and closer to the ontological status of the object,
and its growth and development are determined by this
inclination. . . . At times Romantic thought and poetry seem to come
so close to giving in completely to the nostalgia for the object that it
becomes difficult to distinguish between object and image, between
imagination and perception, between an expressive or constitutive and
a mimetic or literal language, (pp. 68, 70)
A complete surrender to this desire would yield the symbolic self-under-
standing of romanticism de Man opposes:
This movement is essentially paradoxical and condemned in advance to
failure. There can be flowers that "are" and poetic words that "origi-
nate," but no poetic words that "originate" as if they "were." ("In-
tentional Structure," p. 70).
The strong and saving reading of romanticism is one that does not fall in with
this symbolic desire but emphasizes instead the ways in which the poetry must
inevitably betray the impossibility of that desire:
Nineteenth century poetry reexperiences and represents the adven-
ture of this failure in an infinite variety of forms and versions. It
selects, for example, a variety of archetypal myths to serve as the
dramatic pattern for the narration of this failure. ("Intentional Struc-
ture," p. 70)
Both de Man and Abrams may well find the Christian myth of Fall and
Redemption secularized and at work in romantic verse: Abrams will, at least
from a de Manian viewpoint, systematically take the working of this myth at face
value, as if guaranteed by the real symbolic structure of the romantic image; de
Man, in contrast, refuses to accept this structure and works to show how its
failure—the noncoincidence within the image of essence and existence or of
being and origination—makes of the poem a performance of the failure of
redemption. Poetry thus read, slowly and closely, tells us the truth, both its own
and that of our condition. Romanticism is not the secular recovery of religious
forms for "thinking about the conditions, the milieu, the essential values, and
aspirations, and the history and destiny of the individual and of mankind,"17 but
is instead the active purging of the theological patterning of the world: it is
demystifying—it knows.
 124 D PAUL DE MAN

"The Rhetoric of Temporality" adds two features to this account. It attempts

to name explicitly the real, nonsymbolic working of the romantic image—as
"allegory" above all—and it takes up questions of temporality that are only
implicit in de Man's earlier writings. De Man's notion of allegory is given its
fullest development in Allegories of Reading. Our interest lies particularly in its
interlocking with the problematic of temporality, treated in the concluding
chapters of Blindness and Insight.18
The central statement of "The Rhetoric of Temporality" is:
Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or
identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its
own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it
establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. . . . It
is ironically revealing that this voice is so rarely recognized for what it
really is, and that the literary movement in which it appears has
repeatedly been called a primitive naturalism or a mystified solip-
sism. . . .
We are led, in conclusion, to a historical scheme that differs
entirely from the customary picture. The dialectical relation between
subject and object is no longer the central statement of romantic
thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal rela-
tionships that exist within a system of allegorical signs. It becomes a
conflict between a conception of the self seen in its authentically
temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from
this self-knowledge. On the level of language the asserted superiority
of the symbol over allegory, so frequent during the nineteenth century,
is one of the forms taken by this tenacious self-mystification.
("Rhetoric," p. 191)
This problematic makes much of the contrast between what the literary work
may claim—may say for and about itself—and what it does—what it shows about
itself. What gives itself as a symbolic style, in Wordsworth for example, will
now be taken to represent a darkening of the allegorical lucidity of Rousseau—
and will be troubled by its own continued submission to the allegoresis of
language, so that it "will never be allowed to exist in serenity; since it is a veil
thrown over a light one no longer wishes to perceive, it will never be able to
gain an entirely good poetic conscience" ("Rhetoric," p. 191).19
It is then only with the high artifice and overt allegorism of, for example, the
"Byzantine" Yeats that we can begin to see the real structure of the romantic
image and so recover the connectedness of romantic poetry with its past. But
this may lead us simply to overleap romanticism entirely—to reject its claims
and its poetry together, finding a new foundation perhaps in the prelapsarian
lucidity of Metaphysical verse. But here de Man's argument is, I think, that we
risk losing the deep sense of allegory that is opened up precisely by the roman-
 PAUL DE MAN D 125

tics. Certainly, for de Man "the example of Rousseau shows that we are dealing
instead with the rediscovery of an allegorical tradition beyond the sensualistic
analogism of the eighteenth century.'' We seem entitled to say that Rousseau is
taken to show us both the discontinuity at the heart of allegory and the depth
at which that heart can be concealed as against the too easy appearance of an
allegorically unified sensibility in earlier literary periods. Such "analogisms"
appear to be uneasy compromises between a deeper notion of allegory and its
romantic simplification into the near-total mystification of the symbol. This
deeper notion of allegory is rooted in language itself— is, as it were, a recog-
nition of its own proper and inevitable fictionality:
But this relation between signs necessarily contains a constitutive
temporal element; it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that
the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it. The meaning
constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repeti-
tion . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it
is of the essence of this previous sign that it be pure anteriority. The
secularized allegory of the early Romantics thus necessarily contains
the negative moment which in Rousseau is that of renunciation, in
Wordsworth that of the loss of self in death or in error. ("Rhetoric,"
p. 190)
"Literature" is then for de Man essentially the allegorical process of
language as it is menaced by its temptation to reference and to world beyond
itself. It is, in its purest form, an upsurge of freedom, an irruption of nothing-
ness, in the determined massiveness of the world—drawn always to a surrender
of its freedom and its concomitant negativity in order to lose itself in, disguise
itself as, the solidity of the world. Literature is the moment of truth in and for
language, the place in which language acknowledges its failure and limits, its
entrapment within itself, its fictionality. But "fiction" itself thus becomes
nothing more than the measure of time—the pure fact of sequence: not only the
failure of reference but also the submission of that failure to the flow of anteri-
ority. Literature—fiction, allegory—disrupts and disqualifies all claims to refer-
ential and temporal presence, uncovering them as (failed) escapes from the brute
facts of freedom, time, and language. Poetic meaning lies precisely in its non-
coincidence with itself, its failure to simply be—a failure that obliges it not only
to meaning, but to meaning something else, somewhere else—alias agoreuein.
In this sense, allegory names the essential duplicity of all literature as it is con-
demned to meaning and as it is open—or opened—always to interpretation and
to criticism. Allegory models all forms of figuration and indirectness as the
essence of literature (and so may itself appear as a late repetition of New Critical
irony).20
The impulse to so name literature seems deeply right, and its immense power
 126 D PAUL DE MAN

has been abundantly evident both in de Man's work and in a growing body of
work shaped by his example and formulations. We are in the midst of a full-scale
revision and reinterpretation of a major element of our history and our
modernity, and the angle of vision established in "The Rhetoric of Tempo-
rality" and other essays by de Man is central to this work. The interesting and
difficult theoretical questions begin when we ask how far de Man's enabling
formulations have committed us to a literary essentialism and how far we are
bound to or implicated in particular histories and textual constellations.
Romanticism appears as a rediscovery and a forgetting of the essence of
literature—as is the "easy analogism" of the eighteenth century and also the
poetry of modernism. Indeed, the history of the reception of romanticism is
determined by this; and literary history is itself structured by the push and pull
of fiction and reference, time and transcendence, that is at work within literary
language itself. The historical recognition of a "romanticism" is nothing more
than the exterior reflection of our critical complicity with the mystification of
the symbol. To demystify the inner structure of the romantic image is to undo
as well the historical formation called "romanticism," letting it find its proper
place in the simple flow of time, in the intertextual allegory called "literary his-
tory" (which then may well be no longer possible in its usual sense, becoming
nothing more than the ceaseless reiteration of our submission to time, the ever-
renewed demystification of our desire).21

De Man and Derrida may both be said to "privilege" literature, to allow it

a peculiar status as an agent of demystification or deconstruction. For Derrida
this status is a consequence of the nature of his philosophic object and enterprise
and claims not to be prescribed by any particular theory of literature ("theories
of literature" are generated from time to time as incidental features of the philo-
sophic work). De Man takes literature as his direct object (an object whose
essence is rhetoricity and indirectness), and its demystifying and deconstructing
privilege is a direct consequence of its demystified nature (literature does not
fool itself; it deconstructs itself).
When Derrida does attempt to face the literary text directly—as in his work
on Francis Ponge and Maurice Blanchot, and, differently, in his work on
painting—he does so in terms of a philosophic problem of la chose—the thing—
which renews and recreates the opposition of literature and philosophy within
the literary text itself, leaving the means of deconstruction once more in shadow,
an indirect object once again. Here the contrast between Derrida and de Man
becomes both concrete and interesting: the romantic symbol, which de Man sees
only as a mystification of the truth of allegory, is likely to be taken much more
at face value by Derrida, as marking the irruption of the thing, la chose, into
the apparent closure and simple self-reference of the literary. La chose marks
the difficult seam language makes with the world, the submission of language
 PAUL DE MAN D 127

to heterogeneity; allegory insists on the radical withdrawal of language from the

world and from itself. La chose is, in itself, an acknowledgment of the way in
which the universe of the literary exists within a larger universe. It is the mark
of the general economy within and against which the apparent closure of litera-
ture takes form—a closure allegory would name and control as its truth.
Derrida's ultimate concern is no more with "the failure of reference" than it
is with "polysemy": these two appearances belong to Derrida's writing insofar
as each can be a moment within his effort to think heterogeneity, differance. I
am suggesting here that de Man tends always to pull the problematic of decon-
struction toward a demystification of reference, just as he tends to replace the
Derridean "trace" with a Sartrean nothingness. If we say, in all justice to de
Man, that this is just what allegory tries to name-the "difficult seam language
makes with the world" above all-then we are saying that trying to name that
is inherently and incurably theatrical.
We may well want to say that de Man uses his notion of allegory to erect
literature into a species of Absolute, freed of the world, bent back upon and
through itself, summing up within itself both time and its evasion—thus finally
evading its own submission to time and world, refusing its own historicity. But
if this literary absolute were itself the product of a history, a moment—per-
haps—of rupture and redoubling within a certain past and a certain tradition, the
question of the symbol, of la chose, could not be so easily sidestepped into the
sheer heaven of allegory, nor could the structure of time itself be so easily parsed
out into sequence and its transcendence. It is interesting to note that Derrida's
interest in la chose emerges in response to a set of philosophical issues about
art and literature elaborated most explicitly by Heidegger in his writings on das
Ding, but finding their source and sense in Kant and, above all, in Kant's aes-
thetics; la chose appears as the philosophic concomitant of the Absolu litteraire
established by German romanticism in its reaction to Kant.22 With this we slip
into the field whose complexities we have glimpsed already in recounting
Greenberg's and Fried's views on the origins of modernism and the complicity
it poses between autonomy and heterogeneity. De Man's concern with allegory
and symbol appears as one more moment within such a limping dialectic—and
as such it would depend radically, its claims to the contrary notwithstanding, on
a system of particular historical moments.23
With this last formulation we are suggesting that what appears in de Man as
a species of hypermodernism and as an extreme valorization of allegory against
the appearance of romantic naturalism entails a radical forgetting, even sup-
pression, of its own historical conditions of possibility (and so also of the
complexity of its situation). De Man's rejection of the romantic symbol is of a
piece with the dissolution of romanticism itself into a seamless flow of before
and after standing in for any more complex history of rupture and redoubling,
"event" and acknowledgment. Both of these are of a piece with de Man's
 128 D PAUL DE MAN

further rejection of any possibility of "crisis" within the history of criticism

(and with his disavowal of what appears in Blindness and Insight as a recounted
history of modern criticism).
Although "allegory" is supposed to point precisely toward the temporality
of language, the very attempt to so name the essence of literature seems to
preclude any recognition of its historicity. Our argument here is that the tempo-
rality of language can be adequately acknowledged only by begging the
epistemological question, by refusing to ask about the truth of literature.24

In Blindness and Insight, de Man's focus shifts from allegory to the general
embeddedness in language of rhetoric and figural potential. At the same time and
in the same movement, his interest shifts away from questions of canon and
periodization toward the internal temporal dialectics of literature.
Blindness and Insight is a book of extraordinary complexity and is much
more tightly built than its more or less occasional foundations would suggest.
Six of its nine chapters are devoted to developing in rough chronological order
a thesis about the relation between blindness and insight in the writings of a
number of critics, primarily European. This discussion culminates, in the
chapter devoted to Derrida, with the production of a notion of "literariness"
that serves as the basis for the closing chapter's discussion of modernity and
literary history. In an introductory chapter de Man rejects the suggestion that
there is anything either systematic or historical in his presentation of critical
positions—and this denial turns out to have deep roots in the notions of literari-
ness and of literary history the book proposes. Although the late chapter's
interest in modernity seems to be little more than a particular, albeit engaging,
transformation of the notion of literariness developed in chapter 7, a thematic
concern with modernism and its critique is evident at least as early as chapter
5, in which the work of the "little-publicized and difficult writer, Maurice
Blanchot" is introduced precisely by its opposition to "the illusion of a fecund
and productive modernity."
Our interest in the book lies primarily with the arguments about modernity
and literary history in the closing chapters, but it is, I think, important to note
the density of the relations between these two chapters and the two on Blanchot
and Derrida that prepare them. It is, in the light of de Man's theses on roman-
ticism, of some significance that the texts Blanchot and Derrida are measured
against are those of Mallarme and Rousseau respectively-and that it is
Mallarme who provides the standard for "modernity" in the closing chapters.
It is of still greater interest to note the controlling background presence of
Heidegger—Derrida's most immediate philosophic precursor, Blanchot's most
sustained philosophic reference, and the object of a number of de Man's essays
from the mid-fifties. All three of these writers share an insistence on the regis-
tration of some essential co-appurtenance of truth and error that makes them not
 PAUL DE MAN D 129

simply exemplary of certain structures of blindness and insight but also com-
peting theorists of it (so that in these chapters we see de Man's characteristic
ambivalent attributions of intention—"perhaps consciously," "too deliberate
not to be intentional," and so on). We might note also that Blanchot's is, without
question, the body of work that has done most to form Derrida's notion of criti-
cism, and, finally, that de Man's critique of Blanchot on the impossibility of
self-reading is itself curiously traversed by verbal echoes of de Man's earlier
work, especially his 1960 essay on Holderlin (whose attraction for Heidegger
de Man had discussed in essays written for Critique and Monde nouveau in the
mid-fifties).25 In general, de Man's insistence that he is providing neither history
• nor system but simply exemplary instances of general facts allows him here t
bypass a complex tissue of mutual readings and writings—facts variously of
influence, rivalry, filiation, and communication—in which his own text is cru-
cially implicated. Much of the real work—the distances achieved, the positions
transumed or appropriated—is done at this unacknowledged level, substantially
deeper than the apparent argument about Blanchot's reading of Mallarme or
Derrida's of Rousseau. There is a great deal at stake in the full unpacking of the
relations between Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and de Man; such unpacking
is, in effect, an alternate way to the critique engaged here.28
Our path, however, begins from the notion of literariness that de Man disen-
gages from his critique of Derrida on Rousseau. De Man takes Derrida, interest-
ingly, to be a would-be demystifier of Rousseau. The burden of his argument
is then to reassert Rousseau's lucidity, his "self-deconstruction," in advance of
any reader. It is thus that he comes to the statements that lay the foundations
of deconstructive criticism:
We are entitled to generalize in working our way toward a definition
by giving Rousseau exemplary value and calling "literary" in the full
sense of the term any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own
rhetorical mode and prefigures its own misunderstanding as the cor-
relative of its rhetorical nature; that is, of its "rhetoricity." It can do
this by declarative statement or by poetic inference.
The statement is completed in a footnote:
A discursive, critical, or philosophic text that does this by means of
statements is not therefore more or less literary than a poetic text that
would avoid direct statement. . . . The criterion of literary specificity
does not depend on the greater or lesser discursiveness of the mode
but on the degree of consistent "rhetoricity" of the language. (Blind-
ness, pp. 136-37)
(De Man's own prose is for the most part a fine example of a solidly discur-
sive mode that is consistently aware of its own rhetoricity and everywhere
"prefigures its own misunderstanding.")
 130 D PAUL DE MAN

J. Hillis Miller, in a two-part article for Georgia Review, has given the
clearest formulation of this notion of literature as that which deconstructs itself,
names its own void:
Literature, however, has always performed its own mise en abyme,
though it has usually been misunderstood as doing the opposite. It has
often been interpreted as establishing a ground in consciousness, in the
poem as self-contained object, in nature, or in some metaphysical
base. Literature therefore needs to be prolonged in criticism. The
activity of deconstruction already performed and then hidden in the
work must be performed again in criticism.27
These statements are clear and simple extensions of the position that de Man
had been developing since the mid-fifties and that had already achieved suf-
ficient form in "The Rhetoric of Temporality." Our concern now is to see how
they feed into his handling of modernism.
De Man's considerations begin from the assertion that we cannot
divide the twentieth century into two parts: a "creative" part that was
actually modern, and a "reflective" or "critical" part that feeds on
this modernity in the manner of a parasite, with active modernity
replaced by theorizing about the modern. Certain forces that could
legitimately be called modern and that were at work in lyric poetry, in
the novel, and the theater, have also now become operative in the field
of literary theory and criticism. . . . This development has by itself
complicated and changed the texture of our literary modernity a great
deal and brought to the fore difficulties inherent in the term itself as
soon as it is used historically or reflectively. . . . One is soon forced
to resort to paradoxical formulations, such as defining the modernity
of a literary period as the manner in which it discovers the impossi-
bility of being modern. (Blindness, pp. 144-45)
The first thing to remark here is that our own thesis repeats the central state-
ment of this passage—that "certain forces . . . have also now become opera-
tive in the field of literary theory and criticism." To make this remark is to be
thrown back into a reflection on the terms of criticism at stake here, on the way
in which our concern is finally with the strength of de Man's formulations and
with showing that strength to itself. The claim we will advance, that de Man gets
caught up in a complex denial of modernism, might as easily appear as the more
positive statement that he shows forth the modern precisely as its own impos-
sibility. And indeed it seems inevitable that to argue the modern as its own
impossibility is inevitably to leave one's self open to the charge of denying the
modern. It may then be the case that showing the modern as its own impossi-
bility is inevitably a dance that takes two, persisting only through a moment of
repetition and critique, so that, for example, it will always be from de Man
 PAUL DE MAN D 131

that one learns what it means for criticism to feel the weight of modernism, and
so that one will, learning that, find always also that de Man has already forgotten
just that: there is no knowledge to be conveyed here, only acknowledgments
enacted and passed on. Blindness and Insight is about the crisscrossing of
critique and repetition; to read it is then to engage its crisscrossed critique and
repetition. This can seem a game of mirrors or a submersion in a bottomlessly
knowing and corrosive irony. It can also and more powerfully become a work
of recognition.
How, then, does Blindness and Insight set its structure of critique and repe-
tition to work in and upon the question of modernism? How does it (fail to)
acknowledge modernism—in the literary text, in literary history, and for itself?
The first movement we have already noted: Blindness and Insight insists on
the complexity of modernism, refusing its sundering into two moments, creative
and critical, traditional and antitraditional, or modern and postmodern. From
this de Man goes on to define "the radical impulse that stands behind all genuine
modernity" as "a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of
reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that
marks a new departure" (Blindness, pp. 147-48). The task becomes that of
showing the inevitable temporal complications to which this impulse to pure
forgetting, radical origination, being without time, is always and immediately
open.
Considered as a principle of life, modernity becomes a principle of
origination and turns at once into a generative power that is itself his-
torical. It becomes impossible to overcome history in the name of life
or to forget the past in the name of modernity, because both are linked
by a temporal chain that gives them a common destiny. . . .
Only through history is history conquered; modernity now appears
as the horizon of a historical process that has to remain a
gamble. . . .
Modernity and history relate to each other in a curiously contradic-
tory way that goes beyond antithesis or opposition. If history is not to
become sheer regression or paralysis, it depends on modernity for its
duration and renewal; but modernity cannot assert itself without being
at once swallowed up and reintegrated into a regressive historical pro-
cess. . . . Modernity and history seem condemned to being linked
together in a self-destroying union that threatens the survival of both.
(Blindness, pp. 150-51)
In the assertion that "modernity becomes a principle of origination" we can
see de Man in the very process of forgetting what he is—even as he is—teaching
us about modernism and the complexity of its temporal predicament: he is
already subsuming what he wants to call the modern under the truth of literature.
His next assertion is:
 132 D PAUL DE MAN

If we see in this paradoxical condition a diagnosis of our own

modernity, then literature has always been essentially modern.
(Blindness, p. 151)
This opens into a suite of assertions familiar enough that we need only follow
their track, interpolating an occasional comment or two.
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an
act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it
can never coincide. As such it both affirms and denies its own nature
and specificity. (Blindness, p. 152)
This inversion of Sidney opens up the space for de Man's later (and
problematic) use of J. L. Austin's performative/constative distinction and
establishes the continuity between literature and criticism (and the complicity
between literary truth and literary mystification) reflected in the passage we
cited from Miller.
The temptation of immediacy is constitutive of a literary consciousness
and has to be included in a definition of the specificity of literature.
(Blindness, p. 152)
It follows that the question of bad faith is always appropriately put to the
literary work—but also that the response will always show bad faith having over-
come itself—by admitting itself. This in turn is responsible for some of the
tighter theoretical circles in which de Man from time to time turns: no sooner
does the essay on Derrida pose literature as demystified, rhetorically self-aware,
than it goes on to pose the now seemingly superfluous question of the difference
between "blinded" and "nonblinded" authors—the truth is that the moral battle
has always to be fought again.
Baudelaire states clearly that the attraction of a writer toward his
theme—which is also the attraction toward an action, a modernity, and
an autonomous meaning that would exist outside the realm of
language—is primarily an attraction to what is not art. (Blindness, p.
159)
Here, in Le Peintre de la vie modeme (The painter of modern life), we stand
at a central crossing in the history of modernism, an essential complication in
the specific histories of painting, poetry, and criticism that is perhaps something
more than "a good case in point" and that is too lightly dealt with outside the
weight and recognition of those histories.
In other words, literature can be represented as a movement and is, in
essence, the fictional narration of this movement. After the initial
moment of flight away from its own specificity, a moment of return
follows that leads literature back to what it is—but we must bear in
mind that terms such as "after" and "follows" do not designate
 PAUL DE MAN D 133

actual moments in a diachrony, but are used purely as metaphors of

duration. (Blindness, p. 159)
Now—now—the turn that subsumed "modernism" under the essence of
literature is being repeated within literature as the appearance of temporality is
volatilized into metaphor, consumed by the rhetoricity of language. From this
passage we have once again unimpeded vision back to "The Intentional Struc-
ture of the Romantic Image" and forward to the tension between rhetoric as
trope and rhetoric as persuasion (positing) that structures Allegories of Reading.
Modernity turns out to be indeed one of the concepts by means of
which the distinctive nature of literature can be revealed in all its
intricacy. (Blindness, p. 161)
The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of litera-
ture toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding
back upon itself, engenders the repetition and the continuation of liter-
ature. Thus modernity, which is fundamentally a falling away from
literature and a rejection of history, also acts as the principle that gives
literature duration and historical existence. (Blindness, p. 162)
With this, de Man has implicitly done away entirely with any real temporal
structure to either history or literature. As he sees it, "we are more concerned,
at this point, with the question of whether a history of an entity as self-contra-
dictory as literature is conceivable" (Blindness, p. 162). In fact, there is nothing
in principle to keep de Man from the conclusion that comes only in a 1979 essay
on Shelley:
The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word,
thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to any-
thing that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random
event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness
of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then
have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuper-
ation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy.28
Time has slipped away, dissolved into a universe of merely transcendent and
mutually external moments: the event becomes—radically—absolutely—
impossible.
In describing literature, from the standpoint of the concept of
modernity, as the steady fluctuation of an entity away from and toward
its own mode of being, we have constantly stressed that this movement
does not take place as an actual sequence in time; to represent it as
such is merely a metaphor making a sequence out of what occurs in
fact as a synchronic juxtaposition. The sequential, diachronic structure
of the process stems from the nature of literary language as an entity,
not as an event. Things do not happen as if a literary text (or a
 134 D PAUL DE MAN

literary vocation) moved for a certain period of time away from its
center, then turned around, folding back upon itself at one specific
moment to travel back to its genuine point of origin. (Blindness, p.
163)
But what we want to call time in its fullest complexity has always slipped
between diachrony and synchrony in de Man's work, between his alternative of
transcendence and duration. What was to count as a resistance to transcendence
and an admission of the facts of time and anteriority has swallowed its own tail,
evaded itself:
With respect to its own specificity (that is, as an existing entity
susceptible to historical description), literature exists at the same time
in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own
mode of being. (Blindness, pp. 163-64)
And this closes the circle of de Man's system: the temporal predicament of
literature ends in epistemology—literature ends as that which gives itself as both
mystifying and demystified. The position is perhaps Heideggerean, but not
Derridean. It is a position that makes of the knowing defeat of knowledge—the
conscious aporia—the truth of literature, and that demands of criticism only the
reenactment of that truth, its renewal against the illusory inroads of time.
Could we conceive of a literary history that would not truncate
literature by putting us misleadingly into or outside it, that would be
able to maintain the literary aporia throughout, account at the same
time for the truth and the falsehood of the knowledge literature
conveys about itself, distinguish rigorously between metaphorical and
historical language, and account for literary modernity as well as its
historicity? Clearly, such a conception would imply a revision of our
notion of history and, beyond that, of the notion of time on which our
idea of history is based. . . . The relationship between truth and
error that prevails in literature cannot be represented genetically, since
truth and error exist simultaneously, thus preventing the favoring of
the one over the other. (Blindness, pp. 164-65)
We are with de Man in seeking a revised notion of history, of time; here,
in this passage, we should be able to see and almost to feel de Man gaining and
losing time, reaching out for something he still wants to call literary history and
watching it slip his grasp. The conclusion, its assurance notwithstanding, is
desperate—
All the directives we have formulated as guidelines for a literary
history are more or less taken for granted when we are engaged in the
much more humble task of reading and understanding a literary text.
To become good literary historians, we must remember that what we
usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature
 PAUL DE MAN D 135

and that what we call literary interpretation—provided only that it is

good interpretation—is in fact literary history. (Blindness, p. 165)
Am I then accusing de Man of blindness and insight? I suppose so. One way
of putting de Man's achievement is to say that what one will have with him,
when one has it, will not be an argument; he has shifted the ground out from
under that image of criticism and theory, that image of criticism as theory or
as informed by theory. There is no end to the need for that shifting and so there
will always be a need for what appears as both argument and acknowledgment,
critique. What I have with him is not a disagreement in theory.
It is easy to see now how M. H. Abrams might come to claim that de Man's
deconstructive criticism "renders impossible anything that we would account as
literary and cultural history." Certainly Abrams can no longer write of the
decline of Symbolist verse and aspiration from the height of its greater romantic
precursors (as he does in "Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics")
without the intrusion of, for example, J. Hillis Miller's deconstructive revelation
of how just this decadence has always been present ' 'as a shadow or reversed
mirror image within the Western tradition"—romanticism's uncanny double and
demon, marker of a structure of truth and error, knowledge and mystification—
and not (not simply) of an event or an epoch at once historical and moral.
This article and its intersection with Miller's controversial review of Natural
Supernaturalism can point to the way in which practical and theoretical issues
are here intertwined: the argument between de Man and Abrams is an argument
about symbol and allegory within romanticism and in modernism, about the
continuity or lack of continuity between romanticism and modernism, and about
the various complicities of these terms. To de Man, Abrams will appear to be
typical of those who use the romantic mystification of the symbol in order to
cordon romanticism off, historically and critically, from the contaminations of
modernism, using history as the field in which to smooth out and order—cover
over—the contradictions inherent in all literary language. Abrams's acceptance
of a sharp, theologically patterned break between modernism and romanticism
is in service to his desire to put all the good over here and all the bad over there.
His periodization haunts his textual analyses as his bad conscience—and betrays
itself accordingly. Miller's review of Natural Supernaturalism simply traces out
the shape of this bad conscience.
For Abrams, on the other hand, it is clear enough that de Man can appear
only as the willfully perverse undoer of even the most obvious features of our
history, a mad contaminator of eras and a disrespecter of poets, a modernist run
amok, broken free of all historical limit and sensibility, finding only himself
wherever he looks.
In the end, of course, each is accusing the other of losing whatever it is that
matters about, gives power to, is the truth of, the works we call romantic; each
finds the other failing to protect the real import of the poetry against its demysti-
 136 D PAUL DE MAN

fication. Together they represent two opposed ways of having the past for a
problem, neither one of which can thematize that problem in terms either of
acknowledgment or of rupture and redoubling.
It is important to see here that de Man will feel as free to deconstruct
modernism as anything else (free, that is, to show that modernist texts are as
self-deconstructing as any others). If on the one hand he seems to level romanti-
cism to allegory, on the other hand he undoes as well any claim to a pure
modernist allegoresis somehow entirely beyond the temptation to symbol,
reference, and representation. This is the argument he directs against Karlheinz
Stierle's reading of Mallarme in the closing chapter of Blindness and Insight-an
argument that is explicitly as much with Abrams as it is with Stierle, and one
that aims to destroy the statement of any genetic linkage between romanticism
and Symbolism—whether conceived as Fall or achievement—in order to show
both to be repetitions of the difficult truth of literature:
All representational poetry is always also allegorical, whether it be
aware of it or not, the allegorical power of the language undermines
and obscures the specific literal meaning of a representation open to
understanding. But all allegorical poetry must contain a representa-
tional element that invites and allows for understanding, only to dis-
cover that the understanding it reaches is necessarily in
error. . . . To claim . . . that modernity is a form of obscurity is to
call the oldest, most ingrained characteristics of poetry modern. To
claim that the loss of representation is modern is to make us again
aware of an allegorical element in the lyric that had never ceased to
represent, but that is itself necessarily dependent on the existence of an
earlier allegory and so is the negation of modernity. The worst
mystification is to believe that one can move from representation to
allegory, or vice versa, as one moves from the old to the new, from
father to son, from history to modernity. . . . The less we understand
a poet, the more he is compulsively misinterpreted and oversimplified
and made to say the opposite of what he actually said, the better the
chances are that he is truly modem: that is, different from what we—
mistakenly—think we are ourselves. This would make Baudelaire into
a truly modern French poet, Holderlin into a truly modern German
poet, and Wordsworth and Yeats into truly modern English poets.
(Blindness, pp. 185-6)
So ends Blindness and Insight. As de Man absorbs "representation" into the
play of allegoresis he overcomes a poetic opposition that had been implicit
throughout his work and explicit in a 1962 essay "Symbolic Landscape in
Wordsworth and Yeats," and in so doing he makes it clear that "modern" no
longer has any meaning for his work (except perhaps "poetic," properly
literary, rhetorically conscious, allegorical, knowing). "Modernity" looked
like the climax and achievement of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric
 PAUL DE MAN D 137

of Contemporary Criticism; it is instead the term that drops out in de Man's later
work.

It should come as no surprise that all of this rebounds on the situation of

criticism and turns Blindness and Insight back on itself, back to the opening
essays in which it sets out to determine its own status.
A "truly modern" criticism, on de Man's account, will be one that is open
to the truth of literature and that is capable of acknowledging its own deter-
mination by that truth. It is reading that knows itself to be misreading and speaks
that knowledge. Such criticism speaks of the truth of literature as what it reveals
behind the veil of literary mystification even as it discovers that this truth has
always already shown itself. The necessity for criticism is inscribed within the
internal structure of literature—but also inscribed therein is its inevitable failure.
Literature gives itself to criticism as that which stands in need of a demystifi-
cation that will end as self-mystification; literature itself escapes, as it were,
untouched, secure in its prefiguration of its inevitable misunderstanding.
Miller's formulations are once more exemplary:
The critical text prolongs, extends, reveals, covers, in short, cures, the
literary text in the same way that the literary text attempts to cure the
ground. If poetry is the impossible possible cure of the ground, criti-
cism is the impossible possible cure of literature.29
Criticism takes its sense and possibility from the truth of literature, a truth
it recalls, preserves, and displays as best it can. Its task is above all to know—to
force the knowledge of—that which we would mostly deny: the literature that
names our nothingness and our isolation, the weight of our freedom. "Criti-
cism" thus becomes relay within a "philosophical anthropology" that takes
literature as a "primary source of knowledge." With admirable rigor de Man
disclaims in his forward "any attempt to contribute to a history of modern
criticism'' as well as any attempt to contribute to
a science of criticism that would exist as an autonomous discipline.
My tentative generalizations are not aimed toward a theory of criticism
but toward literary language in general. The usual distinctions between
expository writing on literature and the "purely" literary language of
poetry or fiction have been deliberately blurred. (Blindness, p. viii)30
One of the seminal works in critical theory of the past twenty years—and
Blindness and Insight is at least that—cannot acknowledge itself as such. This
is, I think, a failure that has to be taken seriously. What has emerged as "decon-
structive criticism'' is unable to pose for itself the question of criticism except
by passing immediately beyond criticism toward the twin truths of literature and
philosophy, confusing the defeat of knowledge with the achievement of criti-
cism, a prolongation of what literature has always already known.
 138 D PAUL DE MAN

With this we return to our starting point, "The Resistance to Theory." The
propositions with which that article concludes—that theory is itself the resistance
to theory, that theory is the theory of its own impossibility—should now show
themselves as belated repetitions of the theses we have seen in Blindness and
Insight about criticism and about modernity. It is, I think, important to see that
this repetition is belated, pressured, figuring in and responsive to a historicity
it would nonetheless deny. The very fact and shape of de Man's career fly in
the face of the propositions that attain their most radical formulation at the close
of the essay on Shelley-continuity, self, theory, are the permanent facts of a
thought that would volatilize them utterly. I take this contradiction to lie behind
the astonishing intellectual violence not only of "The Resistance to Theory" and
"Shelley Disfigured" but also of de Man's late work on Kant and Hegel. Such
self-resistance—a resistance erecting itself on a radical denial of self—forecloses
in advance upon anything that could count as radical self-criticism or as
acknowledgment of self.
—But to point this as an objection to the work of Paul de Man is to point out
also how long it has been since criticism has conceived of itself as anything other
than, precisely, the knowledge of literature (and we can let this ambiguous
genitive stand). It was, after all, de Man who set out to indicate "some
reasons . . . for considering the conception of literature (or literary criticism)
as demystification the most dangerous myth of all" (Blindness, p. 14). And it
is de Man who, more than anyone else, has shown the inevitability of this myth.
To fault him for prolonging it is simply to recognize the way in which his work,
with and against its own grain, does belong to the history of criticism and is a
contribution to something that would exist as an autonomous discipline—even
though this recognition is precisely what de Man closes for himself as he
inscribes criticism within the truth of literature.
I have suggested that Derrida's philosophic contribution has been, in some
measure, to free fiction and theory to one another (to enable the reading and
writing of philosophy). This sounds as if it could serve directly as a means to
criticism—but taken over thus directly it ends only in a renewed submission of
literature to its truth and to that of philosophy-a solution to the question "What
is literature?" To insist on some other autonomy of criticism is to insist that
criticism appropriate this freeing of fiction and theory to one another as its
own—that it see in this the means to its own achievement, recognize itself as its
"own" activity. To do this is to begin by asking not "What is literature?" but
"How is there criticism?" And the first step in answering this question is to see
that its fullest form is "How is there criticism in this instance?" The question
is neither methodological nor epistemological; it is critical. (Criticism owns
itself anasemically.)
Chapter 5
Psychoanalysis, Criticism, Self-Criticism

Freud is hardly mentioned in Blindness and Insight, and the few scattered refer-
ences to him in Allegories of Reading seem aimed at assimilating psychoanalysis
to literature. Here is de Man discussing Paul Ricoeur's work on Freud:
The part here played by Freud (and we are not now concerned with
the "validity" of this interpretation with regard to Freud) could be
equally assigned to literary texts, since literature can be shown to
accomplish in its terms a deconstruction that parallels the psychological
deconstruction of selfhood in Freud. The intensity of the interplay
between literary and psychoanalytical criticism is easy enough to
understand in these terms.1
This is, I think, a profoundly curious statement, taking note as it does of an
interplay that otherwise has no place in de Man's own work and doing so in a
way that reduces that interplay immediately to parallelism or identity, voiding
it of any particular interest in either case.
To the extent that it is right to see in de Man's work a faith in the clarity of
consciousness and a concomitant impulse to moral judgment rather than psycho-
analytic diagnosis, such a setting aside of psychoanalysis is hardly surprising;
the surprise lies rather in de Man's effort to stake out any place for psychoanaly-
sis at all. What place does psychoanalysis in fact have within the field organized
by the formulations of Blindness and Insight! What interplay between
psychoanalysis and criticism does that book open, and what is the nature of that
opening?

139
 140 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

These are difficult questions to pose, depending as they do on our taking an

apparent simple absence or neglect or lack of interest and turning it into some-
thing more determinate: a distinctive feature, a denial of interest. Two observa-
tions may help justify pushing our reading in this direction.
First, the criticism we have made of de Man's work is close to the critique
Derrida makes of Lacan—both depend on a claim that the work in question ends
by enclosing itself away from its conditions of possibility and so allowing a
certain resistance to theory (a certain rejection of metalanguage) to become itself
a mode of theoretical mastery (as, for example, a certain rejection of theatri-
cality can itself become the most theatrical of gestures). The deepest moments
of theoretical self-criticism can come only with its admission; the claim simply
to read—a little and slowly—is itself, finally, theoreticist in a way that more
overt admissions of theory are not. This suggests a complex affinity between de
Man's work and Lacan's—a sharing both of theory and of the denial of theory.2
Second, there has been in the wake of Blindness and Insight, growing out of
its theoretical terms, an intense interplay between psychoanalysis and literary
criticism. The issue of Yale French Studies entitled "Literature and Psycho-
analysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise" is perhaps the most visible
epitome of this interplay, containing two powerful and interesting explorations
of the relations between psychoanalysis and criticism, Barbara Johnson's "The
Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida" and Shoshana Felman's "Turning
the Screw of Interpretation."31 will be suggesting that these explicit meditations
on psychoanalysis arising in the wake of de Man's work are positive counter-
parts to de Man's avoidance of it, that all three belong to a single, necessarily
divided theoretical field. The field is necessarily divided precisely by a complex
entanglement with psychoanalysis—an entanglement in which de Man's theory
would on the one hand deny or evade what it would on the other hand more
simply subsume: as if what it does not—cannot—permit is an independent
psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism (and so also cannot permit itself to
recognize its own dependence on psychoanalysis). This meditation cannot but
finally lead back to the suspicion that, whereas Lacan and Derrida are locked
in controversy by their interest in maintaining the autonomy of psychoanalysis,
the de Manian interest in that controversy can lie only in depriving it of that
central stake, turning it into a matter of good and bad faith, the truth of
literature.
Our object in this chapter is to explore this entanglement of de Manian decon-
struction with psychoanalysis. Our interest here continues to be in making a
distinction between one aspect or tendency of this position that is caught up in
a disabling and theatrical epistemologism, and another that is more nearly (that
is, more powerfully) critical. But now we want to make this distinction more
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 141

concretely, not as a theoretical point but as one responsive to the experience of

criticism itself.
Johnson's "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida" is explicitly
concerned with the relation between Lacan and Derrida and its relevance for
criticism; Felman's "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" is not. Both assume
a central continuity between Lacan and Derrida—but this assumption counts
differently in the different instances. Both unfold within a shared theoretical
framework derived from Blindness and Insight, and both exemplify the peril and
promise, strength and weakness, of this adaptation of deconstruction to
criticism.
Johnson's essay "The Frame of Reference" is one of the most influential
works of recent deconstructive criticism. Yet its conclusions simply cannot be
right as they stand:
If at first it seemed possible to say that Derrida was opposing the
unsystematizable to the systematized, "chance" to psychoanalytical
"determinism," or the "undecidable" to the "destination," the posi-
tions of these oppositions seem now reversed: Lacan's apparently
unequivocal ending says only its own dissemination, while "dissemi-
nation" has erected itself into a kind of "last word." . . . And
"Symbolic determination" is not opposed to "chance": it is precisely
that which emerges as the syntax of chance. But "chance," out of
which what repeats springs, cannot in any way be "known," since
"knowing" is precisely one of its effects. . . .
As a final fold in the letter's performance of its reader, it should
perhaps be noted that, in this discussion of the letter as what prevents
me from knowing whether Lacan and Derrida are really saying the
same thing or only enacting their own differences from themselves, my
own theoretical "frame of reference" is precisely, to a very large
extent, the writings of Lacan and Derrida. The frame is thus framed
again by part of its content; the sender again receives his own message
backwards from the receiver. And the true otherness of the purloined
letter of literature has perhaps still in no way been accounted for. (YFS
504-5)
We should have no difficulty picking out the main slips and troubles in the
passage: the slippage, for example, of an argument that seems to emerge
crucially in time (between an "at first" and some later time, between "chance"
and its transformation into its own "syntax") into a simple and simply reversible
spatial confrontation—the folding of a letter (a matter of "positions" then, not
"moments"); the presentation of both Lacan and Derrida as self-betraying
allegories of reading against the ground of the revealing-and-concealing,
sending-and-withdrawing, truth of literature; the theatricalization of the mise-
 142 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

en-abime into the timeless contradiction of the double bind; the recession of the
text read behind its defeat of knowledge.
But our business here is complex: what we must see in Johnson's essay—and
this is not easy—is both the wrongness of its conclusions and the persuasiveness
of its itinerary, its apparent critical power and sense (perhaps the opposition we
want is between the strength of its being in time and the ridiculousness of its
evasion thereof). We must see also-and this is still harder—how very close
Johnson's conclusion is to something else, something that does count, both for
Derrida and for literary criticism.4
The obvious problem is that Johnson appears to have maneuvered herself into
a position such that she forgets—or is, at any rate, no longer able to tell—the
difference between phallogocentrism and its critique. But if, as we suggested
long ago now, Derrida's critique of the tradition—the event he marks as having
the "exterior form of a rupture and redoubling"—has the interior form of an
acknowledgment of that tradition, that critique is, even in its most radical
moments, a means also of access to or recovery of that tradition. (When we
write later of "the achievement of criticism," one of the senses intended will
be just this access or recovery.) The interchangeability of Heidegger's projects
of "destruction" and "retrieve" is already packed into the Derridean port-
manteau of "deconstruction."5 The difference between the tradition and its
critique is as thin and subtle as the difference between the tradition and itself,
as obvious and elusive as the difference between a shell and its kernel, a kernel
and its shell: Is this then what "the letter . . . prevents me from knowing
whether Lacan and Derrida are really saying the same thing" means to say—that
criticism is in the end always a mode of acknowledgment?
If this is right, if this gets to the real work and substance of Johnson's essay,
we have to say that her theoretical commitments (her unacknowledged commit-
ment, in particular, to theory) have led her instead, in spite of herself perhaps,
to a position from which she can, precisely, not say what she means—must
mean—to say: a position from which she can, among other things, no longer
recall or recognize the terms that underlie those commitments—and so also no
longer recognize or recall the way in which those terms are everywhere caught
up in a project of recognition, recall, and acknowledgment (recalling, for
example, psychoanalysis, in Lacan and out, from itself, to itself). What keeps
Johnson from knowing whether or not Lacan and Derrida are really saying the
same thing is just her insistence on knowing that, on making of their controversy
an object of knowledge in relation to a specific truth (of literature). What keeps
her from knowing is just her refusal to acknowledge the controversy as such.
That the knowledge in question turns out to be impossible and that the truth—
"the true otherness . . . of literature"—remains unaccounted for changes
nothing in the structure of things here.
Johnson facing the argument between Derrida and Lacan is distinctly
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 143

reminiscent of Lacan facing his string of odds-and-evens—in both cases the

initiating events, the events that have aroused our interest and presented some
claim on us, end by being lost behind the truth they are compelled to bear. If
we say that the Unconscious persists in the seam of controversy between Lacan
and Derrida, Johnson's essay is an undoing of that seam (as Lacan's reading of
his Markov chain game undoes the seam between chance and its syntax).6 The
transformational critique of "Le Facteur de la verite" can be brought to bear as
fully upon this position as upon Lacan's. We can say:
La litterature, a supposer, se trouve.
Quand on croit la trouver, c'est elle, a supposer, qui se trouve.
Quand elle trouve, a supposer, elle se trouve-quelque chose.
Se contenter de deformer ici la grammaire, comme on dit, gen6ra-
tive, de ces trois ou quatre enonces.
Let us suppose there is literature.
When you think that you have got it, it is—to be supposed that
literature evidences itself.
When it is evidenced—to be supposed—it evidences itself—
something.
To limit oneself here to deforming the generative grammar—as it is
called—of these three or four statements.7
To see this is to see how de Man's deconstruction is in both competition and
complicity with psychoanalysis—how psychoanalysis and de Manian criticism
have been able to crisscross in ways sometimes enabling and sometimes self-
defeating but always powerful. Stanley Cavell has described contemporary
French thought as "a reception or appearance of Freud" and the reception of
French thought by American literary criticism as in its turn "a displacement of
Freud." These passing remarks seem increasingly and uncannily apt.8
The central lines of the matrix that results from the encounter of psycho-
analytic and literary allegories are sketched by Felman in her introduction to
"Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise." This
field is organized by two centers, each of which appears as a locus of truth—a
subject supposed to know and a subject of knowledge.
It could be argued that people who choose to analyze literature as a
profession do so because they are unwilling or unable to choose
between the role of the psychoanalyst (he or she who analyzes) and the
role of the patient (that which is being analyzed). Literature enables
them not to choose because of the following paradox: (1) the work of
literary analysis resembles the work of the psychoanalyst; (2) the status
of what is analyzed—the text—is, however, not that of a patient, but
rather that of a master: we say of the author that he is a master; the
text has for us authority—the very type of authority by which Jacques
 144 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

Lacan indeed defines the role of the analyst in the structure of the
transference. Like the psychoanalyst viewed by the patient, the text is
viewed by us as 'a subject presumed to know'—as the very place
where meaning, the knowledge of meaning, reside. With respect to the
text, the literary critic occupies thus at once the place of the psycho-
analyst (in the relation of interpretation) and the place of the patient
(in the relation of transference). (YFS 7)
These statements set out the relation of critic and text in terms of a (compli-
cated) epistemological field. At this level, psychoanalysis and literature appear
to face each other as competitive truths for or masters of criticism. And each
is able to read the other's allegory as its own:
Psychoanalysis tells us that the fantasy is a fiction, and that conscious-
ness is itself, in a sense, a fantasy-effect. In the same way, literature
tells us that authority is a language effect, the product or the creation
of its own rhetorical power: that authority, therefore, is likewise a
fiction. (YFS 8)
Within this system of mutual convertibility, the critic has no place to call his
or her own and seems condemned to be the simple spectator of the reciprocal
undercutting of literature by psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis by literature. This
is, more or less, the position occupied by Johnson in her account of the argument
between Derrida and Lacan—which she implicitly reenvisions as an argument
between literature and psychoanalysis. In this position Johnson, the critic,
cannot choose sides—except by choosing not to choose, asserting the impossi-
bility of choice: this defeat of knowledge then appears as the achievement of
criticism and the conclusion of the critic's work.
But we can work our way out of Felman's statements another way-a way that
lies as if concealed within or behind the grain of their intention. Say that what
appears as an inability to choose between the role of analyst and the role of patient
is the negative statement of a positive commitment to self-criticism, and that the
central object of this self-criticism must be its imputation of truth and mastery to
other subjects-its desire for knowledge—especially insofar as this imputation
works as an avoidance of the labor of analysis and acknowledgment.
What appears as a certain inability to choose now reappears as a refusal to
choose—and as a refusal that is burdened by the knowledge that, sooner or later,
it will choose (as Johnson chooses Lacan—a choice she cannot acknowledge).
Here the dream of criticism is no longer epistemological but onto logical, a
dream of some ultimate coincidence of text and critic, of each with itself, a
moment of pure and self-conscious surface, in which what is felt is perhaps the
simple repose of the text within itself, free of hierarchy, schematism, thematic
or structural or other subdivision. (It is a dream in the tradition of New Criti-
cism: a poem should not mean but be; criticism is not an explanation of meaning
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 145

but a showing forth of being, a moment of pure apophansis.) The fact of crit-
icism remains otherwise; we are in the end obliged to knowledge. Criticism
cannot avoid saying something, somehow blocking the view it would enable.
Sooner or later the truth will out.
Sooner or later: between, for example, the twinned allegories of psycho-
analytic and literary truths, criticism would not choose but hover, playing the
one against the other; and it will, inevitably, finally, choose, submit itself to the
automatism of one allegory or another. It is allegory that delivers criticism from
itself and from time (as the Symbolic delivers chance from itself)—delivers it
bound hand and foot to knowledge. The truth that criticism obtains is but the
measure of its failure.
Sooner or later: it is then only in time that the movement of allegoresis is
seamed to texts and things, open to heterogeneity—as, for example, psycho-
analysis and literature are seamed to one another in their heterogeneity only in
the time of criticism and the time of their self-criticism. Psychoanalysis names
this seam, inevitably, in its own terms (and so unstitches it as it goes):
We would like to suggest that, in the same way that psychoanalysis
points to the unconscious of literature, literature, in its turn, is the
unconscious of psychoanalysis; that the unthought-out shadow in
psychoanalytical theory is precisely its own involvement with litera-
ture; that literature in psychoanalysis functions precisely as its
'unthoughf: as the condition of possibility and the self-subversive blind
spot of psychoanalytical thought (YFS 10).

As the reader drowns under the ever-accumulating flood of criti-

cism, he is justified in asking, why is there criticism rather than silent
admiration? If every literary text performs already its own self-
interpretation, which means its own self-dismantling, why is there any
need for criticism? . . . Why must there be literary criticism at all,
or at any rate more literary criticism? Don't we have enough already?
What ineluctable necessity in literature makes it generate unending
oceans of commentary, wave after wave covering the primary textual
rocks, hiding them, washing them, uncovering them again, but leaving
them, after all, just as they were?9
The question Miller seems to want to pose here slides away from itself in the
very act of being posed—a question about criticism ends as a question about
literature (it drifts into theory). If we reset it to ask "How is there criticism
rather than silent admiration (and so on)?" our response must begin by an appeal
to the fact of criticism, the wash and ebb of wave over rock. (We don't thereby
say that Miller's literary truth is wrong—it's good enough; it can get certain
 146 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

work done—it just isn't interesting to criticism except incidentally and inevit-
ably.) It is just the possibility of this alternate question we have tried to show
counterpointing Felman's remarks.
What is the fact of criticism? —That it is, always, essentially, too late. That
what will suffice will suffice without the help of the critic. That whatever
necessity we may finally claim for the activity of criticism, in the beginning we
can find it only gratuitous. The condition of criticism is essentially temporal—
this has to be what it means to talk about the "priority" of the work over the
critic; the moral over- and undertones are just that (Samuel Johnson and
Matthew Arnold are the proof)—and the time in which criticism finds itself is
first of all discontinuous. This is a time that is not only already more complex
than allowed by any opposition of flow and evasion but is also distorted by it.
It has lain behind our attempt to describe the "event" of modernism in terms
of rupture and redoubling and in terms of an act of acknowledgment structured
and limited by its inner ellipsis—and has lain as well behind our account of
Derrida and our focus on the difficulties of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the
rhythmic structure of psychoanalytic theory and posteriority. It is or would be
describable as a "retemporalization" of de Man's troping of modernism into the
truth of literature, and it is what I would recall in using—even to abuse—the full
range of tense and mood open to our language.
How is this time? Complex. Broken. Bent back on itself here and forward
there. Welded to itself and filled with language. Seamed: with itself and with
the world for the time that we are in it and to the extent that we can maintain
ourselves within an element that is everywhere so differed from itself, so inter-
fered with by itself. The time perhaps of deferred action—or of Deferred Action;
the time that is already ruptured in our acknowledgment of it and our being in it.
For us it is enough that it is above all the time of criticism—the time a decon-
structive criticism would acknowledge in recovering itself for itself. Felman's
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation" can serve as a paradigm.
What is a 'Freudian reading' (and what is it not)! What in a text
invites—and what in a text resists—a psychoanalytical interpretation? In
what way does literature authorize psychoanalysis to elaborate a dis-
course about literature, and in what way, having granted its authori-
zation, does literature disqualify that discourse? A combined reading of
The Turn of the Screw and of its psychoanalytical interpretation will
here concentrate, in other words, not only on what psychoanalytical
theory has to say about the literary text, but also on what literature has
to say about psychoanalysis. In the course of this double reading, we
will see how both the possibilities and limits of an encounter between
literature and psychoanalytical discourse might begin to be articulated,
how the conditions of their meeting, and the modalities of their not
meeting, might begin to be thought out. (YFS 102)
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 147

These opening questions and the project they propose follow clearly from the
same understanding of literature and unfold very much in the same space as the
opening remarks of "The Frame of Reference."10 The concluding paragraph of
Felman's very long essay seems also to echo Johnson's conclusion:
The deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding partici-
pants [Felman is quoting James here] are here indeed none other than
the members of the "circle around the fire" which we ourselves have
joined. As the fire within the letter is reflected in our faces, we see
the very madness of our own art staring back at us. In thus mystifying
us so as to demystify our errors and our madness, it is we ourselves
that James makes laugh—and bleed. The joke is indeed on us; the
worry, ours. (YFS 207).
And yet, Felman's reader will by now have found the first-person plural she
has used throughout to have been deeply earned—the temptation to a certain
solipsism, a skepticism about other minds seems to have been implicitly over-
come (showing by contrast a curious isolation in Johnson's final claim to
bewilderment). A certain "we" has been constituted or reconstituted—brought
to a recognition of how it has always existed in and across the conflicting
readings of The Turn of the Screw and of how its unity and division from itself
has always already been acknowledged and anticipated in the text.
Felman's essay is long and complex. "The circle around the fire" is but one
of its elements, one of the many threads that appear and disappear as she ravels
her way through the text and its readings. It receives its most explicit and
extended handling in the sections entitled "The Turns of the Story's Frame: A
Theory of Narrative" and "The Scene of Writing: Purloined Letters."11 These
sections accomplish the central transition of the essay, from its opening treat-
ment of the "merely external" controversies over The Turn to Felman's "own"
reading of the text "itself." They do so by picking up the frame the story gives
itself, its internal account of its reception. And in doing so the essay makes of
the circle of listeners around the fire a critical tradition in which we too will
come to have a place—it displays James's circle as a major means by which
James creates his reader and allows us to recognize ourselves as so made—as
caught up by James in just that way. Our access to the work and to its criticism
are the same access: this is what I want to call the achievement of criticism. It
is an achievement that leads us to take up a place in a history that we may want
to say that we have, in some measure, debunked or demystified, but that we have
also acknowledged as our own. In the end we have to say also that this history
is not simply ours, but also James's—since it is Henry James who has shown
us this interlocking of mystification and demystification in our critical and
uncritical selves. The last words are thus not finally ours: whereas Johnson
found herself alone within the ever-receding arch of a certain epistemological
 148 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

stage from which literature itself has always already withdrawn, we find our-
selves here at a moment in which what we most need to say for ourselves is what
James has to say to us. —There is no other participant, of course, than each of
the real, the deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding partici-
pants. We repeat this: acknowledging how we are James's, how he is ours.
I want, however, to be careful here. When Felman writes, just a paragraph
earlier, that
literature (the very literality of letters) is nothing other than the
Master's death, the Master's transformation into a ghost, insofar as
that death and that transformation define and constitute, precisely,
literality as such; literality as that which is essentially impermeable to
analysis and to interpretation, that which necessarily remains unac-
counted for, that which with respect to what interpretation does
account for, constitutes no less than all the rest (YFS 207),
she is saying in fact just what Johnson said so much more simply with: "And
the true otherness of the purloined letter of literature has perhaps still in no way
been accounted for." Worse still: both are saying just exactly what the worst
of antitheoretical humanists tell us over and over again—the richness escapes;
theory only kills. It may still be hard to see that this is all right, and that it does
not touch the critical questions. We are not looking for truths about literature,
new or old; we are looking for criticism, for reading—responsibility to and con-
testation of a canon, of literature, of criticism.12 This is a matter of time and of
detail. For criticism, "indecidability" is not a thesis but a fact—the fact that is
no longer acknowledged, is no longer even recognized, by "richness."
I am claiming "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" as a critical achieve-
ment. This does not mean that I find it to do away with—correct or replace—the
earlier criticism of this text. Indeed one of the criteria implicit in the phrase
"achievement of criticism" points in just the other direction—toward the
renewal of earlier work, toward showing the way that work has counted and
continues to count, or toward showing the way that its controversies are, finally,
the text's as well.
Nor do I mean that I find Felman to have spoken any sort of last word, to
have accomplished some sort of synthesis or other overcoming of the opposition
between psychoanalytic and more literary approaches to The Turn of the Screw,
because she has not. In fact, Felman is committed to the psychoanalytic reading;
that this might well escape her reader's notice is not without interest for us.
This commitment becomes explicit only at one point in her essay. The two
sections that move us from the controversies over The Turn more nearly into the
text itself lead first of all into a discussion of the way in which the governess
acts as a reader in search of the truth behind the obscure text that her wards are,
and of the way in which her search for a crux, a moment of absolute decidability,
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 149

eventuates in the death of little Miles. The next section, "A Child Is Killed,"
attempts "to discover the meaning of this murderous effect of meaning; to
understand how a child can be killed by the very act of understanding" (YFS
161). It is in this section that Felman offers her own psychoanalytic analysis of
a passage from the text:
her attention is divided between Miles and the ghost at the window,
between a conscious signifier and the unconscious signifier upon which
the latter turns, between a conscious perception and its fantasmatic
double, its contradictory extension toward the prohibited unconscious
desire which it stirs up. Thus divided, her attention fails to "grasp"
the child's reaction. The failure of comprehension therefore springs
from the "fierce split"—from the Spaltung—of the subject, from the
divided state in which meaning seems to hold the subject who is
seeking it. (YFS 164-65)
One way of restating my remark that criticism cannot avoid saying some-
thing, and so somehow blocking its own view, would be to say that no reading
can avoid the institution of a crux—which is then the mark of its failure to be
purely reading, the trace left by the insistence of theory, the understanding that
kills.13 The passage I have cited is perhaps the crux instituted by Felman's
reading: the place at which her grasp of the truth and that of the governess,
Felman's primary critical adversary, cross: a chiasmus of blindness and insight,
grasp and division—as it is also the seam along which Derrida and Lacan
struggle within her work. One could no doubt graft a further deconstruction onto
the critical chain at this point.
Felman's reading is developed to a very large extent by letting one or another
feature of the text organize the whole, stand as its dominating figure: letters,
turns, grasps, the Master, and so on.14 Each of these is capable of generating
theory—theories of narrative, theories of literary sense or nonsense—and each
inevitably will as it theorizes its text. What matters is that these theories are
properly critical, bound in their innermost being to particular texts and general-
izable beyond them only through their grafting into the body of other texts. That
is how, for criticism, fiction and theory are freed to one another.
In the passage just cited this rhetoricity comes to a halt. The division in the
governess's attention is precisely and literally a division in her attention, the
truth of which is psychoanalytically accessible and which is, in fact, a particu-
larly Lacanian sort of truth. A limit is necessarily imposed on the circle of
allegoresis; literature and psychoanalysis coincide. Something has after all been
said: the governess is mad. But this is not what matters and counts for nothing.
What we value in Felman is not this thesis but the time it took to say it, the
willingness to say it in time. And this we can say of Johnson's essay as well.
It is what we will say when we assent to de Man's Pascalian motto for Allegories
 150 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

of Reading, "Quand on lit trop vite ou trop doucement on n'entend rien"

("When one reads too fast or too gently, one understands nothing").
I have taken it that "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" is compelling
criticism. Although I could no doubt go on at greater length about its virtues and
its flaws, comparing it more or less favorably with one or another piece of
criticism, I would still come round in the end to asking your assent in my con-
viction. I could, in time, be proved wrong; Felman's letter could go unde-
livered. (I could, for all that it matters and means, be right in everything I say;
Felman's letter might still get simply but finally lost.) There are no guarantees
for criticism outside the experience of criticism. This we tell ourselves often
enough. What we say less often is that criticism can be its own model, needs
nothing from philosophy or science (except itself). Theory we may well want
to call bad or false can (and often does) give rise to good criticism—work that
we want, in any case, to call criticism; good theory, theory we want to call true,
can (and probably very often does) give rise to terrible criticism, work that fails
to be criticism at all (and some of the very best theory may have failed to be
criticism at all: Blindness and Insight, for example).
With good and bad, critical and extracritical, de Manian and anti-de Manian,
all so jumbled up with one another, how are we to tell what counts for us?—Just
the way we do. How are we to know what is and isn't criticism, who is and is
not a literary critic, what does and does not make criticism possible? —What
makes us think we have to know these things? These are short answers; for a
fuller response we must turn once more to "The Rhetoric of Temporality."

For de Man "irony" names the tropological structure of the novel as

"allegory" does that of the romantic lyric. While the poem gives itself as an
act of transcendence that inevitably betrays its own failure, the novel appears
as a narrative that continually gives away its inability to keep faith with itself.
Allegory and irony are complementary modes of demystification:
Essentially the mode of the present, [irony] knows neither memory
nor prefigurative duration, whereas allegory exists entirely within an
ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless
future. ("Rhetoric," p. 207)
The act of irony, as we now understand it, reveals the existence of
a temporality that is definitely not organic, in that it relates to its
source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for no end,
no totality. Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past
that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by
a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity, but
never overcome it. ... The temporal void that it reveals is the same
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 151

void we encountered when we found allegory always implying an

unreachable anteriority. Allegory and irony are thus linked in their
common discovery of a truly temporal predicament. They are also
linked in their common demystification of an organic world postulated
in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic
mode of representation in which fiction and reality could coincide.
("Rhetoric," pp. 203-4)
De Man is here reconstructing for the novel the analysis we have already seen
for lyric poetry. We should recognize in it the notion of time as either flow or
punctual break within that flow which cooperates with a certain epistemological
insistence so as to land us before a void we can only know, over and over again.
But what we need more importantly to see is similar to what we needed to see
in considering Johnson's essay on Lacan and Derrida: how this passage is its
own block to what it wants to say—how, in particular, this passage cannot forge
for itself a notion of acknowledgment as the means by which we manage our
being in time because it cannot imagine for itself the complexity of that being
in time.
De Man's notion of irony is derived from Friedrich Schlegel and is definable
as "parabasis"—the intrusion of an author or narrator on his narrative (as in
Fielding or Sterne, for example). Such ironic intrusions, overt markers of fic-
tionality, work to disrupt any promise of realism or of totality, sundering the
narrative from itself (at the extreme, as in Tristram Shandy, the unity of the
work can come profoundly into question—a problem for Wayne Booth but more
nearly a paradigm for de Man). One can imagine the permanent parabasis of a
narrative, its ironization at every point of its progress (this might recall our
remarks about the way modernism finds itself and its precipitating event at work
wherever it looks). For de Man such a radical ironization would be the creation
of an allegory of irony, a novel of novels, reduced to telling itself only emblem-
atically. This highest achievement of the novel would be "to seal, so to speak,
the ironic moments within the allegorical duration" ("Rhetoric," p. 208)—a
species of supreme fiction, having the same moral, cast into an inverted form,
that de Man attributes to Shelley's The Triumph of Life. De Man offers
Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma as a candidate for this position, sketching an
immensely powerful view of that novel in the closing pages of his essay.
We can think of the radical ironization de Man describes as "permanent
parabasis" as if it were, in effect, the placing of every word of a given text in
quotation marks, marking each word with an ironic "I say." "Marking"
"each" "word" "with" "an" "ironic" " T " " 'say'": a palpably suspicious
proceeding uncannily reminiscent of much recent criticism (and clearly related
to Derrida's talk of "writing under erasure" and his insistence on "iterability"
in his work on Austin and Searle). Its effects, beyond parody, are various: the
quotation marks can be said to ironize the words they bracket but also to attribute
 152 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

to them or enforce upon them an appearance of deeper intentionality; they work

as well to level out the emphasis given in the usual and casual reading of the
phrase, offering the possibility that each word could become emblematic of,
could organize, the whole. Overall, we might say that the quotation marks
"aerate" the sentence and open it to critical occupation. We might also say that
the imposition of quotation marks has the effect of repeating the sentence for us
as its own rule, recalling its content, its message, to its particularity—its
meaning to its being. "The sentence becomes autonomous."
Working through these possible variations on the notion of permanent para-
basis should show how de Man's formulations work to recover the text as an
object of criticism and as an object that is at once autonomous and hetero-
geneous, pure and impure—ruling itself only through its difference from itself.
It is just this kind of autonomy that Felman is exploring and exploiting as she
lets one or another feature of the text enfigure the whole—and it is just this heter-
ogeneity she would acknowledge as "the Master's death," "the very literality
of letters," and "that which is essentially impermeable to analysis and interpre-
tation. '' This recovery is one in which the text appears, as it does for philosophic
deconstruction, as its own absolute homonym and as its radical recession from
itself—seamed by (in a now perhaps vaguely Jamesian phrase) the insistent
thing. Criticism finds itself not in its defeat as knowledge but in the anasemic
complexity that marks its attachment to literature as neither wholly internal to
that literature nor simply an external addition to it—a primary supplement, a
fact.
It is this difficult fact of criticism that is recognized and denied—betrayed,
then—in Miller's attempt to pose a question of criticism that too quickly
collapses back into the question (and answer) of literature. In the previous
chapter we set this fact of criticism out as the fact of belatedness, of the
"priority" of the text. But here we want to set out its inverted corollary: there
always will have been criticism. (And now de Man's theories about the literary
text and literary language will point powerfully to the way the fact of criticism
can always be pursued into the text itself; they are theories that make the text
visible as at once object and condition of possibility of criticism.)
There always will have been criticism. It is within the complex temporality
this statement would register that we articulate the achievement of criticism. We
can begin from a few programmatic questions and responses.
Can we deconstruct a given literary text?
—No. (Nor can those who claim to: the entire complex of issues that consti-
tutes the picture of deconstruction as a demystifying achievement of the truth of
the text is radically misleading and a submission to the temptation to episte-
mology that is precisely what deconstruction contests. To the very large extent
that Booth, Abrams, and Bove [but also de Man and Miller] work from such a
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 153

picture, their remarks and criticisms [or programs] have no interest for decon-
structive criticism.)
Can we speak of a literary text's "self-deconstruction"?
—Not coherently and not without falling into the epistemologism we hope to
sidestep—but at the same time some such locution is the inevitable consequence
of our pursuit of criticism into the text, so we have to say: "not coherently and
not without falling into the epistemologism we hope to sidestep—but also
unavoidably." It is the way we will have to say "literary" when we feel
compelled to say it. Truth will out. (And so we cannot be rid of our Booths and
Abramses and Boves [and de Mans and Millers and selves] as neatly and finally
as we wish; we will inevitably put ourselves in the position of being accountable
to them. We need then to understand the kind of community to which we are
bound.)
Can we deconstruct criticism? Can we speak of criticism's "self-decon-
struction"?
—Certainly. To do so at length and in detail is to do criticism and to do it
as radical self-criticism, to acknowledge the way in which criticism finds itself,
and to admit the complicity of criticism and modernism that works de Man's
chapter "Crisis and Criticism." The achievement of criticism is just that—
letting it be free to itself. This achievement does and does not have the structure
of an event; it stands in need of repetition, of acknowledgment—a double move-
ment of rupture and redoubling (the complex relation in which Felman would
stand in relation to The Turn of the Screw and its criticism: the relation as well
in which we will come to stand to her—to call her work paradigmatic is to
recognize it as an achievement of criticism that will itself be in need of repe-
tition, acknowledgment, betrayal—and not to set it forth as methodologically
sound or epistemologically and metaphysically correct. Except, of course, that
it is that too.)
Can we keep these questions and answers isolated from one another?
—No, of course not.
The impulse to criticism is the impulse to make of or find in finitude a
positive achievement. It is because of this that it insists on being in time—and
because of this that it is condemned to be too early and too late, so that to find
itself in time is to find itself dispersed through the entire complexity of tense:
past, present, and future, but also future perfect, pluperfect, imperfect—and also
the play of mood that works this dispersion of tense and animates it with desire.
There always will have been criticism. The future perfect lets us comprehend
a stretch of time, a fact of time, across its internal discontinuity. It allows us
to acknowledge our being in time and can serve as an emblem of what we might
mean by acknowledgment: a projection or imagination that would let the dis-
continuities and finitudes in which we find ourselves be. Such acknowledgment
 154 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

is the revelation not of some temporal void, but of the way in which we live
between temptations to the void and to plentitude—in a universe of traces—just
as the critical acknowledgment of the text reveals it as neither a meaningless
nothingness nor a plenum of meaning and being, but as something more like the
imprint these two terms leave on each other—a writing that hovers between the
logocentric dream of presence, of the coincidence of being and sense, and its
simple reversal into nothingness and absence. "Allegory" and "irony" are
terms that would work this structure of trace and internal ellipsis as the "future
perfect" would work it in time. All of these terms aim to enforce upon criticism
its achievement and recognition of itself—even as they would enforce also the
acknowledgment that this achievement is itself traversed by the finitude it would
attain. It is thus that the arguments I have and do not have with de Man are
arguments only in time—matters of sooner and later, first and second, questions
of itinerary and not truth: critical and self-critical.

The conclusions to which this book inclines are susceptible to a variety of

formulations. I have argued, for example, that the philosophic interest in
deconstruction lies in forcing philosophy to acknowledge explicitly its impli-
cation in and dependence on literature; and that this counts for criticism only
insofar as it enables a moment of self-recognition and self-criticism. I have
argued that deconstruction offers criticism a means to acknowledge and assert
its autonomy—an a-thetic autonomy set up in opposition to or against the grain
of the reciprocal play through which philosophy and literature claim to find their
truth in one another. The work of criticism is, on this view, one that takes place
crucially in time, in complexes of rupture and continuity with its traditions. It
is, in this sense, a paradigmatically modernist discipline; and where criticism
cannot acknowledge modernism—not as a literary historical program, field, or
canon but as a fact of our inhabitation of time—it fails as well its deepest self-
recognition as criticism. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means
through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition (and
in this lies the particular privilege of psychoanalysis for criticism now). I am
arguing for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we
do and do not belong in time and in community.
These may not seem on their face terribly Derridean conclusions. Derrida
does not, for example, seem to address such matters as "community"—a term
we are more likely to associate with Wayne Booth. But to speak of selves in a
deconstructive vein is precisely to unfold their absolute sociability, their
constitutive entanglement in altereity and difference. We might then want to say
that Booth's "community" stands in need of deconstruction, in need of
acknowledgment. Similarly, my insistence on the temporal situation of criticism
and the "priority" of literature may seem to fall back directly into phono-
centrism—but here it would be a mistake to think the essential claim for criticism
 PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM D 155

could be made apart from such an admission (as if, for example, the goal of
deconstruction were to promote writing to the place and value of voice rather
than to transform that place and value precisely by relying on and working
through such terms as "trace" and "secondariness"). Criticism gains its
(proper) autonomy only through an acknowledgment of its essential impro-
priety, its inherent submission to ... (But only criticism can show us that to
which it is submitted; the "priority" of the work is neither epistemologically
nor ontologically guaranteed; it is an effect and not an origin.)
Behind this general worry about how far the consideration of de Man's work
has led us toward and how far away from Derrida, lies, I think, an understand-
able and inevitable desire to assure something very much like the purity and
integrity of the Derridean position—as indeed a version of such a desire under-
lies the general movement of the present work. Given the overarching subver-
sive force of Derrida's writings, it seems that such an assurance ought to take
the form of a guarantee of that force—a keeping clear of the terrain that separates
the various "-centrisms" from their critique. But neither acknowledgment nor
critique can stand apart from one another, and the desire to guarantee something
that would be pure subversion, pure play, and so on is simply incoherent.
Deconstruction does indeed invite and encourage us to talk nonsense; this is a
major and genuinely risky philosophic move, but it would be a mistake to think
that it offers a general license to nonsense. That maneuver has no claim upon
us at all. So the risks deconstruction runs include the making of sense and the
recovering of sense, the chance that part of what we will come to will be not
so terribly different from what we have left behind. This returns us to the
deepest points registered in the best work of de Man, Johnson, Felman, and
others working in this vein: as I have tried to put it earlier, "if . . . Derrida's
critique of the tradition . . . has the interior form of an acknowledgment of
that tradition, that critique is, even [and, I would now add, most especially] in
its most radical moments, a means also of access to or recovery of that tradi-
tion. . . . The difference between the tradition and its critique is as thin and
subtle as the difference between the tradition and itself, as obvious and elusive
as the difference between a shell and its kernel, a kernel and its shell."
The desire to protect Derrida from a betrayal into the hands of his enemies
is of a piece with a desire to see the passage from Derrida to literary criticism
somehow guaranteed—and here again a version of such a desire underlies the
present work. But we have seen that there are strong senses in which there is
no such passage—such passage as there is lies solely in writing and in reading.
De Man here regains his exemplary force, offering us such passage in the guise
of a critique that we, reading, take, also as an acknowledgement. If then I have
seemed to argue that in his writing de Man is somehow wrong, the proper note
to strike is that of mere wrongness,15 a wrongness that is not to be corrected,
but understood, which is to say criticized, which is, I would have you say,
 156 D PSYCHOANALYSIS, CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM

acknowledged. There is no more positive vision of theory (and indeed the

frequent object of our critique is precisely theoria, the interlocking of theory and
vision) for us to arrive at beyond or in separation from the more various facts
of our writing, our reading, and our readings.
This book itself aspires to criticism and attempts to maintain itself in time,
refusing—to the extent possible—the temptation to speak a truth of literature or
of philosophy or of literary criticism. Its ambition is perhaps to say nothing—
nothing, in any case, that does not belong to and vanish with the time of its
saying; it asks that we recognize in this aspiration to silence an established
ambition of criticism. It would itself be a-thetic—even as it argues for criticism
as an a-thetic and autonomous discipline. It would have its conclusions be
radically self-reflexive, anticlimactic, and without thesis; it would be aware of
its own failure and finally justificatory only of its own writing—its grammar and
rhythms and style.
That it succumbs to thesis and theory after all is simply a fact about the
condition of criticism—that it (and we) are no more free to time than we (and
it) are free from time. Our time and our community are marked and marked
inwardly by our fmitude. It is because they—we—are so marked that they—
we—need always to be recalled, recollected, reopened to criticism, its inevita-
bilities and impossibilities.
Notes
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Notes

Preface
1. Also useful are Heckman, "Introduction" to Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit; Hughes, The Obstructed Path; and Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar
France. Poster begins his account by reviewing the effect of Alexandre Kojeve's arrival in Paris in
the early 1930s and in doing so goes a long way toward sketching out a vision of recent French intel-
lectual history rather different from Hughes's. Alan Montefiore's Philosophy in France Today (which
includes an interesting reflection by Derrida on the course of his career, "The Time of a Thesis:
Punctuations") is a collection that serves as a companion volume to Descombes's Modern French
Philosophy.
2. Richman, Reading Georges Bataille, includes a very useful selected bibliography and direc-
tions to still fuller lists. My own reading of Bataille emphasizes his interest in sacrifice while Rich-
man takes pretestation to be central.
3. Other works of interest include Lemaire, Jacques Lacan; Juliet Mitchell, "Introduction I,"
and Jacqueline Rose, "Introduction II," to Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, Feminine Sex-
uality; Muller and Richardson, Lacan and Language; and Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan.
4. Recent—somewhat overlapping—translations of Blanchot's criticism include The Gaze of
Orpheus, The Sirens's Song, and The Space of Literature. Lydia Davis and Station Hill Press have
also brought out translations of the recits Death Sentence and The Madness of the Day.

Chapter 1. On Modernism
1. Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 247. Reprinted, in a slightly modified translation,
in Derrida, Writing and Difference.
I have in general tried to avoid bibliographical complexity, citing English translations where they
are available (and what I take to be the most accessible version if there is more than one). Otherwise
unattributed translations from the French throughout the text are my own.
2. The first short quotation in the paragraph is from Derrida's "Ou commence et comment finit

159
 160 D NOTES

un corps enseignant?" the second from "Difference" in Margins of Philosophy. The short quotations
in the following paragraph are likewise from "Ou commence."
3. Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," p. 67. Otherwise unattributed short quotations in chapter
1 are from this essay, which was first published in 1965.
4. Richard Rorty's recent writings on Derrida seem to set him in just this context; see Con-
sequences of Pragmatism.
5. I take the central formulation of Fried's book to be the statement that "it seems clear that
starting around the middle of the eighteenth century in France the beholder's presence before the
painting came increasingly to be conceived by critics and theorists as something that had to be
accomplished or at least powerfully affirmed by the painting itself; and more generally that the exist-
ence of the beholder, which is to say the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld,
emerged as problematic for painting as never before" (Absorption, p. 93).
6. I mean with this formulation to suggest that Fried's account is open to a variety of psycho-
analytic parsing —in which we would speak of denial in a strong sense, of a certain resultant fetishism
of the aesthetic, and of the history of (modern) art as organized by a complex play of temporalities
that invite formulation in terms of deferred action. This play between history and psychoanalysis
will become explicit in our discussion of Derrida.
7. See Fried's essays "Thomas Couture" and "Manet's Sources."
8. Fried, "The Beholder in Courbet." The short quotations in the next paragraph are from this
essay (pp. 116-17), as also the concluding statement about Manet (p. 121). Fried has recently pub-
lished several further essays on Courbet, notably "Representing Representation" and "Painter into
Painting."
9. Rosalind Krauss can thus —within and against the "same" formalist tradition—make the very
works Fried would reject central to her account of modern sculpture. See, e.g., her books Terminal
Iron Works and Passages in Modem Sculpture. For more on this general topic—with particular
reference to claims to "postmodernism"-see my "Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory."
10. This paragraph should afford a glimpse of how or why talk about and theories of modern
art are haunted by the possibility that art is "nothing more" than whatever gets hung on museum walls
(as, e.g., George Dickie's institutional theory of art) and so also why certain claims to "post-
modernism" are accompanied by an attack on or revision of the idea of the museum. See, e.g.,
Crimp, "On the Museum's Ruins."
11.1 suspect that anyone with even a superficial acquaintance with the vagaries of contemporary
psychotherapy can feel the force behind "theatricality" here-and perhaps so sense the acuity of
Greenberg's remark that art fears losing itself first as entertainment and finally as therapy. It might
also be remarked that much of the performance art of the late sixties and seventies can appear as
a radical realization of just this psychotherapeutic theater.
12. Greenberg, Art and Culture, pp. 7, 62.
13. "This is the essential reason that redefinitions and borderline cases are irrelevant here. For
the question raised for me about these new objects is exactly whether they are, and how they can
be, central. If they are not, if I cannot in that way enter their world, I do not know what interest,
if any at all, I would have in them. It may turn out to be one which would prompt me to think of
them as borderline cases of art; or I might think of them as something which replaces (which replaces
my interest in) works of art." Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (henceforth abbreviated
"MWM"), p. 215.
14. Fried, Three American Painters, pp. 50-51.
15. Austin, Philosophical Papers, pp. 195-97.
16. Derrida, "Fors," pp. 90-91.
17. Cavell, "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy," p. 969. The ensuing quotation is from
the same essay, p. 963.
18. " . . . 'voluntarily' and 'involuntarily,' in spite of their apparent connexion, are fish from
 NOTES D 161

very different kettles. In general, it will pay us to take nothing for granted or as obvious about nega-
tions and opposites. It does not pay to assume that a word must have an opposite, or one opposite,
whether it is a 'positive' word like 'willfully' or a 'negative' word like 'inadvertently.' Rather, we
should be asking ourselves such questions as why there is no use for the adverb 'advertently.' For
above all it will not do to assume that the 'positive' word must be around to wear the trousers; com-
monly enough the 'negative' (looking) word marks the (positive) abnormality, while the 'positive'
word, if it exists, merely serves to rule out the suggestion of abnormality." Austin, Philosophical
Papers, pp. 191-92. (The affinity of this kind of empirical attention for Derrida's systematic critique
of binarism bears remarking.)
19. This problem of forgery, of counterfeiting, of the signature and the propriety of the name
that is signed in "one's own hand" organizes the two texts Derrida has devoted to the writings of
J. L. Austin ("Signature Event Context" in Margins of Philosophy) and to John Searle's "defense"
of Austin ("Limited Inc") as well as a variety of later texts.
20. Derrida, "Ou commence," p. 64.
21. Ibid., p. 67.

Chapter 2. A Context for Derrida

1. The term "double bind" was coined by Gregory Bateson in his work on schizogenesis and
is defined by him as "a primary negative injunction. . . . A secondary injunction conflict with the
first at a more abstract level, and like the first enforced by punishment or signals which threaten
survival. . . . A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping the field" (Steps
to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 206-7). A shorter definition might be: heads I win, tails you lose.
2. These quotations are from a two-part interview of Derrida published in the journal Digraphe,
"Entre crochets" (1976) and "Ja, ou le faux-bond" (1977).
3. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, pp. 12-13.
4. Derrida, "Entre crochets," p. 110.
5. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. All references in the text to the Phenomenology of
Spirit will use the abbreviation PG (Phanomenologie des Geistes) followed by the paragraph number
as given in Miller's translation. Derridean texts of special pertinence to our discussion include "The
Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy, "Outwork" in Dissemination, and "From Restricted to
General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" in Writing and Difference.
6. This challenge is taken up again, in a way very different from Hegel's and yet very close
to it, by Stanley Cavell in his essay "Knowing and Acknowledging" (in MWM) and at greater length
in The Claim of Reason.
1. It will become apparent that Derrida moves between a logic of "determinate negation" and
a certain abyssal imagery (notably that of the mise-en-abime). To his detractors, he appears then to
throw everything into the same empty abyss, but such Derridean terms as "trace" would hold them-
selves between the content Hegel can attribute to his determinate negations and the emptiness of a
merely abstract abyss. (It is interesting to remark in the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel's state-
ment that "in a Spirit that is more advanced than another, the lower concrete existence has been
reduced to an inconspicuous moment; what used to be the important thing is now but a trace [eine
Spur], its pattern is shrouded to become a mere shadowy outline" (PG 28).
8. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 225-37.
9. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, vol. 1 of The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, para.
13. Future references will use the abbreviation EL (Encyclopedia-Logic) followed by the paragraph
number.
10. One can, of course, speak of a Coherence Theory of Truth in Hegel: "Truth, then, is only
possible as a universe or totality of thought. . . . Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical
whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. . . . The idea appears in each single circle, but at
the same time the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a
 162 D NOTES

necessary member of the organization" (EL 14-15). But what matters is that this Coherence Theory
emerges when a certain notion of objectivity as adherence to the articulatory structure of the object
is, in effect, fitted inside an apparently simple prepositional truth—the Absolute Syllogism—and that
this theory then meshes with Hegel's historical claims in such a way as to give the bare notion of
"post-Hegelian philosophy" resonance throughout the system.
11. Queneau, "Premieres confrontations avec Hegel," p. 697.
12. Heidegger, Hegel's Concept of Experience and Identity and Difference. References to the
latter text will be abbreviated ID.
13. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 43. Future references will be abbreviated BT.
14. "In the woods are paths which mostly wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impene-
trable thicket.
"They are called 'woodpaths.'
"Each goes its peculiar way, but in the same forest. Often it seems as though they were like one
another. Yet it only seems so.
"Woodcutters and forest-dwellers are familiar with these paths. They know what it means to be
on a woodpath." Heidegger, Holzwege, as cited by Krell in his introduction to Heidegger, Early
Greek Thinking, pp. 3-4. On the lime-twig passage, see Heidegger's discussion in Hegel's Concept
of Experience, pp. 29-31.
15. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 158, B 197. See also Heidegger, Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics, pp. 118-29, especially p. 123. Two useful books on Heidegger and Kant are Sher-
over, Heidegger, Kant and Time, and Decleve, Heidegger et Kant.
16. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 138, B 177.
17. Ibid., A 141, B 180-81.
18. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 213-29. Heidegger's reading of Holderlin, of
which this essay is the keystone, was of central interest to de Man in the mid-fifties and gave rise
to three of his most important early essays: "Les Exegeses de Holderlin par Martin Heidegger,"
"Tentation de la permanence," "Le Devenir, la poesie." The continuity of vision between these works
and de Man's late work is overwhelming.
19. Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor," p. 14. It is not accidental that this statement arises when
Derrida is concerned to articulate his distance from Heidegger.
20. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 181.
21. Ibid.
22. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 195. For "getting sucked" the French text has
"se faire sucer." Serge Leclaire in his Psychanalyser has taken this view one step further to argue
that the erogenous zone must be understood as a letter inscribed upon the surface of the body.
23. And from here we can begin to take account of Heidegger's valorization of the poet and see
something of the peculiar, deep risks that valorization opens for philosophy - risks with which
Derrida is profoundly engaged.
24. See Marx, Reason and World, especially chapter 2, "Reason and Language," and his Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit.
25. Queneau, "Premieres confrontations avec Hegel," p. 700.
26. Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, V: 56. Henceforth cited in the text as Oeuvres, followed by
volume and page number.
27. Bataille, "Hegel, lamortet le sacrifice," p. 21. Subsequent references to this work are given
in the text as "Hegel."
28. The second citation is from Sur Nietzsche as cited by Charles Larmore in "Bataille's Heter-
ology," p. 100.
29. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice.
30. This is perhaps usefully set against Levi-Strauss's statements on ritual: "On the whole, the
opposition between rite and myth is the same as that between living and thinking, and ritual repre-
 NOTES D 163

sents a bastardization of thought, brought about by the constraints of life. It reduces, or rather vainly
tries to reduce, the demands of thought to an extreme limit, which can never be reached, since it
would involve the actual abolition of thought. This desperate, and inevitably unsuccessful, attempt
to re-establish the continuity of lived experience, segmented through the schematism by which
mythic speculation has replaced it, is the essence of ritual, and accounts for its distinctive charac-
teristics" (The Naked Man, p. 675). But this settles all the issues Bataille wants to raise-about the
persistence of possibility-and allows no room for his comic sense.
31. The essential heterodoxy of Bataille's Marxism lies in his assumption of a fundamental situa-
tion of luxury rather than scarcity. It qualifies as a Marxism, if it does, largely through its emphasis
on labor as alienation.
32. Such formulations seem to me to approach the sense in which Cavell wants to meet the
skeptic. "Only what is there to point or gesture towards, since everything I know you know? It
shows; everything in our worlds shows it. But I am filled with this feeling—of our separateness, let
us say—and I want you to have it too. So I give voice to it. And then my powerlessness presents
itself as ignorance—a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack" (MWM, pp. 262-63). What is at
stake here is the full complexity of the act of acknowledgment.
33. Goodheart, The Failure of Criticism, p. 5. Abrams's charge against J. Hillis Miller is also
worth recalling in this context: "As a Deconstructive Angel, Hillis Miller, I am happy to say, is not
serious about deconstruction, in Hegel's sense of 'serious'; that is, he does not entirely and consis-
tently commit himself to the consequences of his premises. He is in fact . . . a double agent"
(Abrams, "The Deconstructive Angel," p. 437).

Chapter 3. Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction

1. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, pp. 196-97.
2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, V:517. All references to
Freud will be by volume and page number in The Standard Edition.
3. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, XVIII:22.
4. Although "The Seminar on The Purloined Letter' " has been published in an English trans-
lation (in Yale French Studies 48), this version includes none of the introductions and postscripts
that accompany it in Ecrits. The "Points" edition of Ecrits includes an additional preface addressing
Derrida explicitly. The original (year-long) seminar from which "The Seminar" was drawn has been
published as Le Moi dans la theorie de Freud, volume 2 in Le Seminaire, the series of Lacan's
seminars: chapters 15 and 16 are of particular relevance to our discussion.
5. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, VI, chap. 12. We might note also the lovely
conjunction (in "Further Remarks in the Technique of Psychoanalysis") that lets Freud write: "The
first symptoms or chance actions of the patient . . . have a special interest and will betray one of
the governing complexes of the neurosis" (XII:239-79).
6. For Lacan, this imputation of knowledge defines the position of the analyst as, precisely,
"the one who is supposed to know"—the story of an analysis is then in large measure the story of
the defeat of this supposition.
7. The a-lethic play of revealing and concealing implicit here is a part of the Heideggereanism
that Derrida attacks in Lacan. (See the related discussion on phenomenology and anasemy in the
"Contre-bande" section of this chapter.)
8. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Writing and Difference, pp. 196-97.
9. Ibid., pp. 198-99.
10. Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth," pp. 65-66.
11. For copyrights, see Derrida, "Limited Inc"; for footnotes and margins, "Tympan" in Margins
of Philosophy; for shoelaces; "Restitutions" in La Verite enpeinture, pp. 291-436 (the shoelaces are
painted).
12. This is an irony that Booth works to stabilize (in A Rhetoric of Irony) and that Derrida would
 164 D NOTES

reveal as uncontrollable, as capable of deconstructing the philosophic claims of the text, in "Plato's
Pharmacy" in Dissemination, pp. 61-171.
13. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 4-5, B 8-9. This is a passage both Booth and Abrams have
wanted to cite against deconstructive criticism-on the assumption that something like "fixed mean-
ings" are the medium of literary criticism. It is important to see that Derrida is working already very
deeply within the Kantian frame and is concerned above all with determining that medium in which
philosophy does fly—and always has (even if, with Hegel, too late, spreading her wings only at
dusk). What deconstruction would then seem to have to offer to literary criticism would be a way
to its own acknowledgment of its proper medium-and this does not necessarily mean a "theory of
literature." (The gist of our argument with de Man will be that he makes the mistake—the very
sophisticated and compelling mistake—of taking from deconstruction something like a theory of
literature rather than a question about the medium of criticism; the gist of an argument with Booth
would then be that he is in some sense unable to conceive of criticism as having-as having always
had—a medium.)
14. The contrast we are setting up here between Heidegger and Derrida is the same contrast we
drew within Clement Greenberg's writings and arises likewise as first of all a contrast within Kant-
turning, perhaps, on the differences between taking Kant's project to be a purifying correction of
past philosophic excess or more nearly an attempt at acknowledging and making explicit the grounds
of philosophic success. The explicitly Kantian line in Derrida's work is relatively recent and develops
through readings of the third Critique especially opening into Heidegger's aesthetics as well. See La
Verite en peinture and "Economimesis."
15. Bataille's "materialism" is essentially critical—a way of examining and criticizing the
restricted economies within which one lives, rather than a theory of what (economic) matter is and
how it should be changed. It is as this sort of materialist (one who has, as Andrew Parker has put
it, Marx in protective custody) that Derrida criticizes Lacan's notion of the "materiality of the letter"
(in "The Purveyor of Truth," pp. 86-87). See Parker's "Of Politics and Limits."
16. This is the core formulation through which Derrida's essay on Blanchot turns and on which
it plays out its variations; the interlacing within it of pas as step and as negation (and as other than
negation, split particle of negation) works Derrida's writing on Beyond the Pleasure Principle as
well. See Derrida, "Pas."
17. These formulations may be somewhat easier to follow if one keeps in mind that for Derrida
there is no "mere" appearance, but neither is there some fully present truth. "Merely appearing" is,
as it were, a central way in which the world manages to be-and coming to grips with the world
then demands a certain careful dancing in and on this business of appearing. Is the "logocentric
enclosure" merely an appearance or does it really exist? Why not say that it "really appears" or that
it "merely exists"? We might say that the logocentric enclosure insists—makes such presence as it
has felt-precisely in these difficulties and questions. To follow out this line of inquiry would be
to bring Nietzsche, and especially his short, pointed fable "How the World Became an Error," very
much into the foreground. See Pautrat, Versions du soleil.
18. Miller, "Stevens' Rock," p. 11.
19. "Envois," "Le Facteur de la ve'rite'," "Speculer-sur 'Freud,' " and "Du tout" are published
together as La Carte postale. (The English translation of "Le Facteur de la ve'rite," "The Purveyor
of Truth," appeared in Yale French Studies', parts of "Speculer" have been translated in the Oxford
Literary Review and in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, edited by Geoffrey Hartman.)
An English translation of "Fors" appeared in The Georgia Review. "Me-Psychoanalysis" and Abra-
ham's "The Shell and the Kernel" both appeared in "The Tropology of Freud" issue of Diacritics.
20. Abraham and Torok, L'Ecorce et le noyau, pp. 337-39, p. 386.
21. Abraham's direct critique of Lacan is thus quite straightforward: "The Lacanian error con-
sists in putting 'castration' at the origin of language when it is only its universal content. And the
question anasemic clarification should resolve is this: what is the function and, eventually, the gene-
 NOTES D 165

sis of the intrapsychic falsehood insofar as it is the source of the significance of language?" (L'Ecorce
et le noyau, pp. 386-87).
22. The problems of theory and legacy we are exploring here unfold as well into questions of
practice. For more on this, see Derrida's discussion of "la tranche" (literally, a slice), an attempt
to register within the practice of psychoanalysis its necessary heterogeneity, in "Du tout," in La Carte
postals, pp. 525-49.
23. The working of this "grandfather law" (I take the phrase from Walter Friedlander) can be
seen clearly enough in, for example, our own presentation of the relations between Kant, Hegel,
Heidegger, and Derrida. One might want to say here that the idea of "grandpaternity" is needed to
anchor the idea of "generations"—much as the future perfect is needed to anchor the apparently
simpler and more obvious idea of the future.
24. Abraham and Torok, L'Ecorce et le noyau, p. 350.
25. Written by two of Lacan's colleagues, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, The Lan-
guage of Psychoanalysis is an extraordinarily useful glossary of psychoanalytic concepts. It is also
the basis for Laplanche's Life and Death in Psychoanalysis.
26. Abraham, "The Shell and the Kernel," p. 17.
27. Freud, "Observations on 'Wild' Psychoanalysis," XI:222.
28. This phrase echoes the terms in which we earlier described the Heideggerean project of a
hermeneutic retrieve of the question of Being as the living kernel beneath the sclerosis of the tradi-
tion.
29. Abraham, "The Shell and the Kernel," pp. 18-19.
30. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
31. It is this decramponnement that allows the passage from the metapsychological considera-
tions with which we are engaged here to the more properly psychological aspects of the work of
Abraham and Torok on dual unity, mourning, the crypt, and the phantasm. Derrida's introduction
to this material will be found in "Fors"; these writings are also addressed in "Ja, ou le faux-bond"
and "Entre crochets."
32. The "-sans-" structure carries over into English very nicely, since "without" plays so natur-
ally on Derrida's favorite topic of inside and outside.
33. Derrida, "Me—Psychoanalysis," p. 5.
34. Here, then, we can begin to acknowledge explicitly the way in which a certain language of
purity can be at once inevitable and inadequate—how it could belong in, for example, a larger gram-
mar of modernism.
35. We might note that if the "law of the Father" is always complicated by the fact and prospect
of grandpaternity, so also is it complicated by the insistence of the (grand-)child and its theories.
Abraham's writings assume the existence of "child-theories" within the logic of psychoanalysis.
36. Derrida, "Living On/Border Lines," p. 171.
37. Derrida, "Me-Psychoanalysis," p. 5.
38. Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor," p. 23.
39. "It is the word 'between,' whether it names fusion or separation, that thus carries all the force
of the operation. . . . This tip advances according to the irreducible excess of the syntactic over
the semantic. The word 'between' has no full meaning of its own. Inter acting forms a syntactical
plug; not a categorem, but a syncategorem: what philosophers from the Middle Ages to Husserl's
Logical Investigations have called an incomplete signification" (Derrida, Dissemination, pp.
220-21).
40. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 130.
41. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 3.
42. Derrida, "Pas," p. 197.
43. Derrida, Positions, p. 54.
44. Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor," p. 20.
 166 D NOTES

45. Derrida, "The White Mythology," in Margins of Philosophy. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor.
See the eighth study especially.
46. Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor," p. 33.
47. It is tempting to suggest that Derrida has reinstalled Heidegger's "ontological difference" at
the heart of every being-so that this difference (differance) is that which accomplishes the unique-
ness of each being in its being. This difference allows no room for a hypostasized "Being."
48. Derrida, "Pas," p. 187.
49. Ibid., pp. 138-39.
50. Derrida, La Carte postale, p. 433—as also the citation immediately following.
51. MWM, p. xxi. Cavell closes his recent book The Claim of Reason with the following (he
has been discussing Othello): "So we are here, knowing they are 'gone to burning hell,' she with
a lie on her lips, protecting him, he with her blood on him. Perhaps Blake has what he calls songs
to win them back with, to make room for hell in a juster city. But can philosophy accept them back
at the hands of poetry? Certainly not so long as philosophy continues, as it has from the first, to
demand the banishment of poetry from its republic. Perhaps it could if it could itself become litera-
ture. But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?" (p. 496).
52. Johnson, "The Frame of Reference," p. 505.

Chapter 4. Paul de Man: The Time of Criticism

1. There is an old story about a man who tries on a coat that doesn't fit him at all. The salesman
tells him to bend over this way, hold his arm just so, hunch up here, and everything will be just
fine. So the man buys the coat and wears it, as instructed, home. Two women pass him—one says,
"Oh, look at that poor deformed man!" and the other answers, "True, but his coat fits beautifully!"
This may become a parable about contemporary literary criticism.
2. The influence of this book is still more extraordinary when one considers that it was out of
print for most of the past decade and has only recently been reissued, with additional material, by
the University of Minnesota. (Henceforth referred to as Blindness.)
3. De Man's early work is in general little known (it is characteristic, perhaps even essentially
so, that de Man almost never refers back to earlier work). A complete bibliography can be found
in Arac, Godzich, and Martin, eds., The Yale Critics.
In lieu of any detailed reading of this work, I offer a sampling from some of the more important
of the essays. It will be readily apparent that they already hold the positions associated with "decon-
structive criticism," although without the linguistic and rhetorical sophistication of de Man's work
of the late sixties and seventies. The center of de Man's interest in most of these essays lies in
Heidegger on poetry (on Holderlin especially); Blanchot is a constant, if fugitive, presence in them.

"Le Devenir, la poesie":

Far from being a knowledge with a positive and determinate contest, becoming is thus essen-
tially the knowledge of a non-knowledge, of the persistent indeterminacy that is historical
temporality. (P. 114)
The poetic consciousness of becoming thus maintains itself insofar as it is self-consciousness.
This poetry knows itself entirely and accounts for its own existence. (P. 117)
It seems then that, no matter how we look at the return Holderlin calls for, it promises noth-
ing but aridity, dryness, and lack. Such is, perhaps, in its beginnings, the climate of our truth.
(P. 124; this is the concluding paragraph of the essay.)
"Tentation de la permanence":
Far from being anti-historical, the poetic act (in the general sense that includes all art) is the
historical act par excellence: that through which we become conscious of the divided charac-
 NOTES D 167

ter of our being and consequently the need to achieve it, to make it, in time instead of undergo
it in eternity. (P. 53)
Our age seems indeed an age of fatigue. One sees manifold examples of that collapse of the
spirit taking refuge in the earth. However, because these signs often give themselves as what
they are not and because we all suffer from this fatigue, this collapse may appear to us in
the opposite form of a promise, a lightening. If one wants to avoid being duped, one must
strive to see it for what it is. (P. 51; one might want to set this alongside the closing lines
of his "The Resistance to Theory.")
Historical poetics can be spoken of only in the conditional, for it exists but in scattered form.
Strictly speaking, Marxist criticism is not historical for it is bound to the necessity of a recon-
ciliation scheduled to occur at the end of a linear temporal development, and its dialectical
movement does not include itself as one of its terms. A truly historical poetics would attempt
to think the divide in truly temporal dimensions. . . . Poetic consciousness, which emerges
from the separation, constitutes a certain time as the noematic correlate of its action. Such
a poetics promises nothing except the fact that poetic thought will keep on becoming; will
continue to ground itself in a space beyond its failure. Although it is true that a poetics of
this kind has not found expression in an established critical language, it has, nevertheless,
presided over certain great poetic works, at times even consciously. (P. 241-42)

"Les Exegeses de Holderlin par Martin Heidegger":

In conclusion, this hymn suggests a conception of the poetic as an essentially open and free
act, a pure intention, a mediated and conscious prayer that achieves self-consciousness in its
failure; in short, a conception diametrically opposed to Heidegger's. . . . In the works of
his madness, the complexity gives way to a childlike simplicity, coupled, one suspects, with
a terrifying lucid irony. Who will dare say whether this madness was a collapse of the mind
or Holderlin's way of experiencing totally, absolute skepticism? (P. 263)

It should be noted that de Man approaches his Heideggerean concerns with a significantly Sartrean
vocabulary and vision of clear consciousness and pure intention; an essay on Mallarme ("Le Neant
poetique") brings to the fore de Man's ethical interest in the choice (between history and occultism,
Hegel and Eliphas Levi, the facts of separation and their wishful overcoming) imposed by the con-
frontation with "le neant poetique." The Sartrean vocabulary and moral pathos is a persistent feature
of de Man's writing; Frank Lentricchia argues for its centrality in After the New Criticism.
4. See Marshall, "History, Theory, and Influence."
5. Felman, "Turning the Screw of Interpretation."
6. Derrida, Signsponge, p. 2.
7. Other, less compelling, efforts to understand our current use of this word include Jonathan
Culler, On Deconstruction, and Elizabeth Bruss, Beautiful Theories.
8. De Man, "Resistance to Theory," p. 20.
9. Bove, Destructive Poetics, pp. ix, 32, 46, 48.
10. De Man, "The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," p. 77. Henceforth referred to
as "Intentional Structure."
11. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 270. Christopher Norris's small introduction, Deconstruc-
tion, is notable for its willingness to recognize this uncanny fit between de Man and Bloom. It is
a subthesis of the argument of this chapter that the Yale School, insofar as it is organized by its cen-
tral reference to de Man, does not well understand its own alliances and oppositions, intersections
and divergences; in particular, the fundamental internal distinction between demystifiers (de Man,
Miller) and revalorizers (Hartman, Bloom) seems to me untenable and misleading.
12. The radical skepticism about other minds so casually thrown up in the first sentence of this
passage should not escape the reader's notice. Neither should the breakdown of parallelism that it
 168 D NOTES

causes: the invention of fictional emotions to create the illusion of recollection is not on the same
footing as the invention of fictional subjects to create the illusion of the reality of others.
13. De Man, "Introduction," Studies in Romanticism 18, p. 498. The resurgence of Sartrean
terms in this piece is quite remarkable.
14. De Man's statement of the problem locates these questions not only in response to specific
modernist devaluations of romanticism but also precisely at the place -intheplayof Enlightenment
and reaction-that Greenberg and Fried found their account of modernism.
15. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, and Miller, "Tradition and Difference."
16. The word "seam" has for me a quasi-technical sense that, whether I have actually derived
it from Cavell or not, I take to be close to at least some part of what he means by it. I think its use
here is clear enough as it stands, but the reader might want to look at the last part of The Claim
of Reason, pp. 424-25 especially.
17. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 13.
18. "The Rhetoric of Temporality" adumbrates a theory of the novel as well. De Man has not
gone on to develop it systematically; I will touch on some aspects of it in the next chapter.
19. Here we should be able to glimpse the way in which de Man's Sartrean commitments unsur-
prisingly preclude any psychoanalytic approach to the literary text from the outset. We will be
exploring the difficult relation between de Man's deconstructive criticism and psychoanalysis in
more detail in the next chapter, but it can be remarked here that there are important ways in which
the debate between Lacan and Derrida, with its overriding concern—on both sides —for psycho-
analysis and for some sort of realism of the Unconscious, takes place entirely outside the space of
de Man's problematic. There is a clear sense in which any de Manian effort to grapple with this
argument (as, for example, Barbara Johnson's "The Frame of Reference") is determined in advance
as an attempt to fold it back into a space organized by (self-)knowledge, truth, clear consciousness,
and good or bad faith. (It is interesting then that both Johnson and de Man speak of features in
Derrida's arguments that they take to betray "a pattern too interesting not to be deliberate" and make
a portion of their argument turn on this refusal of psychoanalytic construal.)
20. "Thus generalized, allegory rapidly acquires the status of the trope of tropes, representative
of the figurality of all language, the distance between signifier and signified, and, correlatively, the
response to allegory becomes representative of critical activity per se." Fineman, "The Structure of
Allegorical Desire," p. 48. Joel Fineman's essay and companion essays by Craig Owens ("The
Allegorical Impulse," pts. 1 and 2) offer an interesting counterpoint to de Man's formulations.
21. In a recent essay on the work of H. R. Jauss (the introduction to Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic
of Reception) de Man plays the literary historical notion of "reception" off against the Benjaminian
notion of "translation" (as developed in Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations)
precisely in order to reabsorb the moment of reception into the temporal dialectics of the work's
rhetoricity.
22. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L'Absolu litteraire.
23. De Man's tendency has been to avoid the German romantics and their explicit philosophic
involvements as "aestheticist" ("Introduction," Studies in Romanticism 18, p. 469). His last work
however presents itself precisely as a critique of aestheticism and led him to focus on Kant, Schell-
ing, and Hegel.
24. De Man's valorization of allegory has led to a more general interest in allegory as central
to the phenomenon of "post-modernism." For more on this topic, see the work by Craig Owens and
Douglas Crimp listed in the bibliography (and Hal Foster's recent anthology, The Anti-Aesthetic).
I discuss this position in my "Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory."
25. See "Intentional Structure," especially the discussion of "origination."
26. Christopher Fynsk has begun exploring this web of relations in a series of essays and lectures
to appear under the title The Cast of Heidegger's Early Thought.
27. Much of the argument I have to offer in this chapter can be condensed around Miller's state-
 NOTES D 169

ment that "literature, however, has always performed its own mise-en-abyme" (Miller, Stevens'
Rock, II," p. 330). I can make no sense of this statement as it stands; the best I can manage is the
assertion that literature will have always performed its own mise-en-abyme (that is, will always be
found to have done so)—but this is a statement about criticism and how it inevitably stands to its
texts, and not about what literature is. Everything is right in Miller's statement-except that it cannot
be said coherently.
28. De Man, "Shelley Disfigured," p. 69. De Man's insistence on the sheer fact of randomness
here can be plausibly viewed as the inversion of Lacan's insistence on random order. Both function
as statements of the Symbolic law to which we are submitted and both refuse the question of the
seam between or within the essential oxymoron.
29. Miller, "Stevens' Rock, II," p. 331.
30. With this "deliberate blurring" we are brought back to Fried's assertion that "whatever lies
between the arts is theater"—the same may be said of disciplines (and this would not be an argument
against interdisciplinary work but a measure of its difficulty and its risks).

Chapter 5. Psychoanalysis, Criticism, Self-Criticism

1. De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 174-75.
2. It is interesting in this respect to speculate on the way in which the word "aporia" came to
its current place in critical theory; it seems to have passed, as nearly as I can tell, from Lacan (see
"The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power" and "The Signification of the
Phallus" in Ecrits) to de Man and thence to Derrida.
3. Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977). All otherwise unidentified page references in this chapter
are to this volume (abbreviated as YFS). It should be clear that the distinction I will be trying to draw
between these two articles is one I take to be internal to and constitutive of the common field in which
they both arise. Similar distinctions could thus be drawn between, for example, Johnson's essay dis-
cussed here and her essay on Billy Budd, or between the latter essay and her work on Mallarme and
Austin (see Johnson's The Critical Difference), or even between the first and the last sections of
Felman's Le Scandals du corps parlant. In each case the object of the critique is to bring out the
problematic structure of the field in which the work unfolds. Johnson's own remarks on differences
"between" and "within" in her Billy Budd essay are very much to the point; see The Critical Differ-
ence, pp. 105-6.
4. I am offering a characterization of Johnson's work and its interest for us parallel to Cavell's
characterization of the nature and force of the skeptic's claim in "Knowing and Acknowledging" (in
MWM) and The Claim of Reason.
5. The complexity of Derrida's position "between" rupture and acknowledgment, destruction
and retrieve, repetition and radicality, is interestingly reflected in his remarks on the historical atti-
tudes of some of the work being done in his wake—see, for example, La Carte postale, pp. 163-65
or p. 285.
6. This means that Johnson's "nonchoice" is ultimately a choice for Lacan—for the Lacan who
is capable of forgetting the Unconscious; that is, for Johnson, Lacan comes to stand in for de Man
as the paradigm of deconstruction. It is as such that Lacan emerges as the central figure in Johnson's
fine study of the prose poem in Baudelaire and Mallarme, Defigurations du langage poetique.
1. These lines repeat, with a simple change of subject from "la psychanalyse" to "la litterature"
the opening lines of "Le Facteur de la verite" (La Cane postale, p. 441).
8. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. xiv.
9. Miller, "Stevens' Rock, II," p. 330. This question interests Booth and Abrams as well as
Miller and de Man: all four stand together in a fundamental uneasiness with the ungrounded fact
of criticism, although they diverge in how they finally deal with it.
10. "A literary text which both analyzes itself and shows that it actually has neither a self nor
any neutral metalanguage with which to do the analyzing, calls out irresistibly for analysis. And
 170 D NOTES

when that call is answered by two eminent French thinkers whose readings emit an equally para-
doxical call-to-analysis of their own, the resulting triptych, in the context of the question of the act-
of-reading (-literature), places its would-be reader in a vertiginously insecure position" (YFS, p.
457).
11. At this point Felman's path crosses Johnson's. The contrast between the temporality empha-
sized by Felman's linking of "framing" to narrative and the transmission of narrative, and the spatial-
ity of Johnson's implicitly pictorial frame is striking and instructive.
12. I am reminded of Cavell's statement that "a standing discovery of auteur theory was of the
need for a canon of movies to which any remarks about "the movies" should hold themselves answer-
able" (The World Viewed, p. 9). However transgressive our criticism becomes, it cannot do without
some notion of canon (although it certainly can do without a fixed canon).
13. If understanding can kill-and it can, particularly (this is not unrelated to the case of little
Miles) when someone claims (even rightly) to understand us better than we understand ourselves-
then it is not always the case that "whenever [understanding] is achieved, our life is enhanced"
(Wayne Booth, Critical Understanding, p. 349). The interlocking of vitality, justice, and under-
standing within criticism can be complex.
14. What we may want to say here is that Felman's reading lets "the work . . . be its own rule-
maker" and "is open to makings in all modes, without surrendering to complete relativism" (Wayne
Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, p. 276). But it will take a considerable revision in our understanding
of our critical field, its divisions and controversies, before we can be comfortable with this con-
fluence of critical modes.
15. I owe this felicitous formulation to Donald Marshall.
Bibliography
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Bibliography

The reader is referred to the following bibliographies:

"French and English Bibliography of Jacques Derrida," compiled by John Leavey and David B. Alli-
son, and appended to Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, translated
by John P. Leavey and David B. Allison, pp. 181-93. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978.
This bibliography also appears in Research in Phenomenology 8 (1978): 145-60.
"Deconstructive Criticism: A Selected Bibliography," by Richard A. Barney, SCE Reports 8, sup-
plement (1980). This includes material on a number of figures in addition to Derrida, including
Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and J. Hillis Miller.
"Bibliography," compiled by Wallace Martin. In Arac et al., The Yale Critics (1983), pp. 203-12.
"Bibliography" to Textual Strategies, edited by Josue V. Harari, pp. 443-63. Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1979. This bibliography is broken down into sections on "Structuralism," "Post-
Structuralism," "Literary Criticism," "Philosophy," "Psychoanalysis," "Anthropology," "Linguis-
tics, Semiotics, and Related Subjects," and "Periodicals."

Of more specialized interest are:

"Bibliographic," translated by Lee Hildreth. Semiotexte 2 (1976): 121-33.

This is a special issue devoted to Georges Bataille.
"Maurice Blanchot: A Bibliographical Check-list," by Steven Ungar. Sub-Stance 14 (1976): 142-59.

Abraham, Nicholas. "The Shell and the Kernel." Translated by Nicholas Rand. Diacritics 9 (Spring
1979): 16-28.
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L'Ecorce et le noyau (Anasemies If). Paris: Aubier-Flam-
marion, 1978.
Abrams, M. H. "Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics." In New Perspectives in German
Literary Criticism, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, pp. 150-81. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971.

173
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America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers. Edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford
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Bataille, Georges. "Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice." Decaulion 5 (1955): 21-43.
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This page intentionally left blank
Index
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Index

Differance is neither a word nor a concept.

-Jacques Derrida

Abraham, Nicolas: 85, 110; break with "psy- and negation, 25; as having past as prob-
chologism," 23; critique of Lacan, 164-65 lem, 136; of indecidability, 148; of litera-
n21; and Maria Torok, opposed to Lacan ture, by philosophy, 154; of modern as
by Derrida, 97-106; L'Ecorce et le noyau, impossible, 131; of positionality in Hegel,
98-99, 101; "The Shell and the Kernel," 38; and reconception of skepticism, 20;
101, 102, 103 and repudiation, 40; and rupture, 116; and
Abrams, M. H.: 120, 152, 153; and medium temporality of language, 128; transforma-
of criticism, 164 n13; and "seriousness," tive of history, 15; in The Turn of the
163 n33; "Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Screw, 147; and voice in writing, 26-27
Modernist Poetics," 135; "The Deconstruc- Action, deferred. See Deferred action
tive Angel," 135; Natural Supernatural- Allegory: 124-28, 135, 141, 144, 145, 154;
ism, 42, 122, 123, 135 and irony in de Man, 150; limits of, in
Absorption: 10; pure, 13; and theatricality, Felman, 149; and postmodernism, 168
dialectic of, 11. See also Theatricality n24; as trope of tropes, 168 n20
Abyss: in Hegel, 72, 73, 75, 78, 161 n7; in Anasemy/anasemie: 99, 101-6, 108, 110; and
Heidegger, 57, 109; and imagination in aufliebung, 112; and criticism, 138, 152
Kant, 56. See also Mise-en-abtme Andre, Carl, 29
Acknowledgment: 104, 105, 112, 116, 117, Aporia, 169 n2
118, 127, 142, 146, 151, 153, 155; of Arnold, Matthew, 146
beholder in Manet, 14; in Blindness and A-thetic, 101, 104, 106, 107, 156
Insight, 137; and denial, 25; and dis- Aufliebung: 38; and anasemie, 112; Cavell
ciplinarity, 27; of double necessity, 35; as on, 25; and "step back," 55, 56, 57-58,
event in history of painting, 14; failure of, 93. See also Negation; Pas; Step

183
 184 D INDEX

Austen, Jane, 8 Must We Mean What We Say?, 17-18, 19,

Austin, J. L.: 21, 107, 132, 151; on binary 20, 21, 22, 25-26, 29-30, 33, 35, 113
oppositions, 160-61 n18 Community, 154-56
Autonomy: of philosophy, 27; and purity, 9, Contingency: in Fried's dialectic, 12, 15; in
10 Hegel, 78; of human separateness, 22; and
materiality, 83; and Real in Lacan, 87-89
Bad faith, 132, 140, 168 n19 Convention, 9, 13, 23-24
Earth, John, 29 Courbet, Gustave, 13-14, 15, 16
Barthelme, Donald, 29 Couture, Thomas, 12, 14
Bataille, Georges: 43, 46, 47, 60, 71-82, 92,
103; economics of, 79-81; materialism of, Dasein: defined, 49
163 n31, 164 n15; and self-reflection, 96; David, Jacques-Louis, 12, 14
sovereignty in, 78-79; "Hegel, la mort et Deconstruction: as revision of Heideggerean
le sacrifice," 74-78, 82; Oeuvres com- Destruktion, 4
pletes, 47, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80, 81 Deferred Action/deferred action: 105, 146.
Bateson, Gregory, 161 nl See also Belatedness; Temporality; Tense
Baudelaire, Charles: Le Peintre de la vie de Man, Paul: 115-38, 152, 153, 155; on
moderne, 132-34 allegory, 124-28; early work cited,
Belatedness: 54, 95, 107, 113, 138; and criti- 166-67 n3; and medium of criticism, 164
cism, 146, 152; and facticity in Heideg- n13; on modernity, 128-38; and other
ger, 54; and recognition, 108. See also minds, 167-68 n12; and psychoanalysis,
Deferred action; Temporality; Tense 139-41, 143, 168 n19; on randomness,
"Between," 37, 39, 107, 109, 165 n39, 169 169 n28; and Sarte, 168 n19; Allegories of
n3, 169 n5 Reading, 124, 133, 139, 149-50; Blind-
Blanchot, Maurice, 99, 106, 107, 117, 126, ness and Insight, 114, 116, 117, 119,
128-29 120-21, 124, 128-38, 139, 140, 141, 150,
Bloom, Harold, 120 153; "Intentional Structure of the Roman-
Booth, Wayne: 151, 152, 153, 154; and tic Image," 120, 122-23, 133; "Introduc-
irony, 163 n12; and medium of criticism, tion" (Studies in Romanticism), 121; "The
164 n13; on understanding and vitality Resistance to Theory," 118, 138; "The
(Critical Understanding), 170 n13; on Rhetoric of Temporality," 120, 121, 124,
work as rule-maker (A Rhetoric of Irony), 125, 126, 130, 150-51; "Shelley Dis-
170 n14 figured," 133, 138; "Symbolic Landscape
Boucher, Francois, 8 in Wordsworth and Yeats," 136
Bove, Paul, 152, 153; Destructive Poetics, Demystification, 54, 95, 119, 120-22, 123,
119 127, 132, 134, 135, 137, 147, 150, 152
Denial: 11, 40, 140; of modernism in de
Capitalization, 102. See also Designification Man, 130; as organizing a history, 15;
Cavell, Stanley: 17-33, 36, 38, 40, 54, 85, and psychoanalysis, 160 n6; as radical
119; on borderline cases, 160 n13; on failure of acknowledgment, 25-26; and
canons, 170 n12; on criteria, 21; on fini- recognition, 9; of self in de Man, 138; as
tude, 163 n32; on fraudulence, 28-30; on supreme fiction, 13; of theory in de Man
Freud and French thought, 143; on Hegel, and Lacan, 140
25, 35-36; on literature and literary criti- Derrida, works cited: La Carte postale, 112;
cism, 19, 166 n51; on the modern, 17-33; "Difference," 4; "Dissemination," 97, 107;
on ordinariness, 21, 24; on psychology "The Double Session," 97; "Du tout," 97;
and psychologism, 21-22; on "seams," "Entre crochets," 34, 97; "Envois," 98,
168 n16; on skepticism, 21-27; "Existen- 99, 105; "Fors," 23, 97; "Freud and the
tialism and Analytical Philosophy," 24; Scene of Writing," 85, 92-93, 97; Glas,
 INDEX D 185

98, 105; "Ja, ou le faux-bond," 35, 97; Capitalization; Designification; Quotation

"Living On/Border Lines," 106; "Me— marks
Psychoanalysis," 97, 104; Of Grammatol- Event/"event," 3, 4, 14, 17, 18, 31-32, 33,
ogy, 84; "Ou commence et comment finit 105, 122, 146, 153
un corps enseignant," 4, 32; "Pas," 109, Exclusion, 13, 16, 26, 32, 70-71, 92, 100,
111, 112; Positions, 97, 109; "The Pur- 104
veyor of Truth," 32, 93, 97, 143; "The
Retrait of Metaphor," 61, 109, 110-11; Faith, bad. See Bad faith
Signsponge, 117; "Speculer—sur 'Freud,' " Felman, Shoshana, 116, 117, 140, 141,
97, 100-101; Speech and Phenomena, 143-50, 153, 155
108; Spurs, 106; "Structure, Sign and Play Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 38
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Fiction, 104-5, 125, 138, 149
3; "White Mythology," 110 Fielding, Henry, 151
Designification: 3, 103-4, 106, 111. See also Forgetting, 23, 25, 48, 54, 56, 60, 84, 95,
Capitalization; Erasure; Quotation marks 109, 113, 114, 127, 131. See also
Dialectic: of absorption and theatricality, 11; Repression
Bataille's disruption of, 78-79; broken or Frege, Gottlob, 22
limping, 60, 61, 112, 127; and contin- Freud, Sigmund: 25, 62, 85, 86, 95, 99-100,
gency in Fried, 12; deconstruction as 101, 102, 104, 105, 139, 143, 163 n5;
simulacrum of, 60; of desire in Hegel and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 100-101,
Lacan, 64-66; and "double invagination," 106, 112, 146; The Interpretation of
61; Hegelian contrasted with Heideg- Dreams, 86; The Psychopathology of
gerean, 43, 44, 55-56; of master and Everyday Life, 90
slave, 65-66, 76-78; of mind and nature Fried, Michael: 8-18, 127; Absorption and
in romantic poetry, 122; in psychoanaly- Theatricality, 8, 9; "The Beholder in
sis, 93; and purity, 7. See also Deferred Courbet," 13; "Manet's Sources," 14;
action; Negation; Pas; Step Three American Painters, 18
Diderot, Denis, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16
Difference/Difference: 35, 55-56, 57, 104, Generations: as internal to theory, 165 n23,
108, 127, 142, 152, 166 n47; and abso- 165 n35
lute sociability of self, 154 Gide, Andre, 96
Disciplines/disciplinarity: acknowledgment or Goodheart, Eugene, 83
profession of, 27, 35-36; and criticism, Grammar: 3, 10, 15-16, 18-19, 26, 29,
93, 115, 138, 154, 156; economics of, 30-31, 32, 36, 52, 165 n34; of this book,
104; in Hegel, 38-40, 43-44; and heter- 156. See also "Between"; Designification;
ogeneity, 81, 95; limits as truth of, 20; Dialectic; "Is"; Mere; Mood; Quotation
and modernism, 6, 154; and philosophy, marks; Tense
24, 37, 43, 46, 68, 71; and psychoanaly- Greenberg, Clement, 4-8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 28,
sis, 61-62, 71, 87, 104, 116; and purity, 29, 31, 38, 39, 127, 160 n1l
24, 38 GREPH, 40
Domestication: 4, 37; of Negative in Hegel, Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 11, 15
76 Gurvitch, G., 47
Double bind/Double bande: 3, 34-35, 37,
108, 142; Bateson's definition of, 161 nl Hegel, G. W. F.: 25, 28, 34-83, 87, 92, 93,
Durkheim, Emile, 80 103, 104, 116, 138, 161-62 nlO; and
Continental modernism, 28; critique of
Economics: 79-81, 113, 127; and mise-en- Kant, 37-40; and Heidegger, 55-56; his-
abime, 96; of psychoanalysis, 104 tory and discipline in, 43; as last profes-
Erasure: 3, 151; in Hegel, 69-70. See also sor of philosophy, 35-36; legacy of,
 186 D INDEX

45-47; reception of, in France, 47; on of philosophy, 164 n13; orientation of

skepticism and determinate negation, Heidegger toward, 48, 49; and the posi-
40-42; speculative proposition in, 68-69; tion of the philosopher, 37; and the post-
on truth and temporality, 43-44; and Witt- Kantian 37-38; Critique of Judgment, 37;
genstein, 25; Encyclopedia of the Critique of Pure Reason, 37, 49, 50, 51,
Philosophical Sciences, 42-43, 44, 45; 53, 94-95
Phenomenology of Spirit, 4, 38, 39, 41, Kernel, 5, 7, 58, 95, 102, 142, 155. See also
62, 64-65, 66, 67-70, 72, 74-75, 78, 82, Anasemy; Purity
86, 112; Philosophy of Right, 36, 66, 72. Kojeve, Alexandre, 47, 71, 74, 75. 76, 77
See also Dialectic Krauss, Rosalind, 160 n9
Heidegger, Martin: 4, 27, 28, 29, 40-43,
45-60, 63, 71, 72, 78, 84, 94, 100, 106, Lacan, Jacques: 43, 46, 47, 60-71, 86, 99,
109, 110, 111, 127, 128, 134, 142, 162 n 100, 103, 105, 109, 111, 114, 140, 142,
14; in de Man's early work, 166-67 n3; 144, 151; controversy with Derrida,
and Hegel, 48, 54-60; and Kant, 48-54; 84-114; and Hegel, 64-65; and Heideg-
and language, 3-4, 53, 58, 109-110; as ger, 59, 163 n7; mirror-stage, 62, 63-64,
reader of Holderlin, 117, 129; Being and 88; randomness in, 88-92; "Discourse of
Time, 48-49, 53; Hegel's Concept of Rome," 47; Ecrits, 62, 63; Four Fun-
Experience, 48; Identity and Difference, damental Concepts, 64; Le Moi, 88;
54-60; "Poetically Man Dwells," 53. See "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " 106
also Step Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 127
Hermann, Imre, 98, 99 Language: Bataille's, 76, 82-83; Derrida's,
Heterogeneity, 93, 95, 96, 103, 110, 127, 3-4, 106-12; Hegel's, 67-71; Heidegger's,
145, 152 3-4, 53, 56, 58, 109-11; remarkability
Hitchcock, Alfred, 105 and temporality of, 108, 128. See also
Holderlin, Friedrich, 117, 122, 129, 166-67 Capitalization; Designification; Grammar;
n3 Mood; Quotation Marks; Tense
Hubert, Henri, 77, 80 Laplanche, Jean, 101
Husserl, Edmund, 22, 47 Leclaire, Serge, 162 n22
Hyppolite, Jean, 47, 74 Leiris, Michel, 96
Levinas, Emmanuel, 47
Imaginary (Lacan), 66, 71, 86, 88, 91 Levi-Strauss, Claude: 62; on ritual, 162-63
Imagination: in Kant, 50-52; radicalized by n30
Heidegger, 52-54 Logocentrism: 87, 92-93, 154; exemplified in
Impossibility. See Possibility Heidegger, 58. See also Tradition
Invagination, 61, 107 Louis, Morris, 15, 18
Irony, 150-52, 154, 163-64 n12
"Is," 3-4, 42, 48, 56, 57 Mallarme, Stephane, 10, 128, 129, 136
Manet, Edouard, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18
James, Henry, 8, 146-50, 153 Marshall, Donald, 117
Johnson, Barbara, 8, 114, 116, 140, 141-43, Marx, Karl, 80, 95
144, 148, 151, 155, 169 n3, 169 n6 Mauss, Marcel, 77, 80
Johnson, Samuel, 146 Mere (merely, merest): ability to remark, 90;
Joke, Harold's, 166 nl accident, 15, 92; act of reading, 68-69;
Judd, Donald, 15 appearance, 41, 164 n17; appetite, 65;
beings, 55; decoration, 6, 9, 10; dis-
Kant, Immanuel: 20, 25, 28, 36, 39, 40, 50, cipline, 104; entertainment, 6; epistemo-
67, 68, 127, 138, 164 n14; and Hegel, logical regress, 20; existence, 45, 164
37-40; imagination in, 50-53; on medium n17; fact, 45, 47; ideal, 96; idiolect, 106;
 INDEX D 187

metaphoricity, 110; modernizing, 31; criticism, 152, 156; and double bind, 35;
nothingness, 75; opposition, 38; possibil- of fraudulence, 30; in game of odds-and-
ity, 45, 79; preliminary, 67; rhetoric, evens, 90; and impossibility, 79; of loss,
108; taste, 17; text, 67, 94; theatricality, failure, error, 7-8, 10, 14, 100; of the
14; wrongness, 155 modern, 130; of philosophy after Hegel,
Metaphilosophy: refusal of, 20-21 45, 59, 73-74; "real," 8; of self-reading,
Metaphysical enclosure. See Tradition 129; of theory, 138; of transition or medi-
Miller, J. Hillis: 152, 153, 168-69 n27; ation, 116
"Stevens' Rock," 130, 137, 144; "Tradition Postmodernism, 7, 17, 160 n9, 160 nlO, 168
and Difference," 122, 135 n24
Milton, John, 121 Poussin, Nicolas, 8
Mirror-stage (Lacan), 62, 63-64, 88 Psychoanalysis, 23, 24-25, 60-71, 84-114,
Mise-en-abime, 96-97, 141-42. See also 116, 139, 168 n19
Abyss Psychology/psychologism, 21-22, 23-24, 86,
Modernism: 3-33, 122, 136, 146, 151, 154; 89
in Blindness and Insight, 128-38; defined "Purity," 5-6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 24, 38, 60, 80,
by Cavell, 17-18; defined by Greenberg, 87, 93, 99, 131, 152, 155, 165 n34. See
4; and retrospection, 11-12, 17 also Heterogeneity; Kernel; Mere; Quota-
Mood: 146, 153; in Cavell, 19; imperative, tion marks
modernist, 32; subjunctive of last profes-
sor, 36 Queneau, Raymond, 47, 71, 72
Quotation marks, 3, 85, 108, 151. See also
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 127 Capitalization; Designification; Erasure
Negation/negative: 65, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82,
111, 125; abstract, 41; determinate, 40, Real (Lacan), 91
41, 42. See also Dialectic; Not/knot; Pas; Recognition. See Acknowledgment; Denial
Step Rembrandt van Rijn, 8
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 6, 59, 61, 95, 106 Repression/repression: 109; for Cavell, 26;
Not/knot, 9, 10. See also Dialectic; Negation; read anasemically, 105; of writing, 84,
Pas; Step 97, 107
Novalis, 38 Rhetoricity: defined by de Man, 129; halting
of, in Felman's reading, 149
Old Masters, 17, 29 Rhythm, 69, 70, 100, 107, 112, 146, 156
Ricoeur, Paul, 110, 139
Pas, 55, 95, 11, 164 n 16. See also under Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 29
Derrida; and Dialectic; Negation; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 84, 116, 121, 122,
Not/knot; Step 124, 128, 129
Phallocentrism, phallogocentrism, See Tra- Rupture: 116, 122; and acknowledgment,
dition 116; and continuity, 16- 18, 31, 154; and
Phonocentrism, See Tradition redoubling, 3, 18, 36, 40, 49, 127, 136,
Plato/plato, 94, 105 142, 146, 153; and repetition, 59; and
Poe, Edgar Allen, 88, 100 reproduction, 33. See also Abyss
Pollock, Jackson, 73
Ponge, Francis, 96, 106, 107, 126 Sacrifice, 77-78, 80-81
Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste, 101 Saint-Saens, Camille, 30, 33
Position/positionality, 24, 37, 42, 45, 60, 73, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 116, 127
81-83, 107, 142 Schelling, Friedrich, 59
Possibility/(Im)possibility: and autonomy, 77; Schlegel, A. W., 38, 151
of choice in Barbara Johnson, 144; of Schlegel, F., 38, 151
 188 D INDEX

Seam/seamless, 63, 122, 126, 127, 143, 145, ger, 52-54; and schematism in Kant, 51-
149, 152, 168 n16 53. See also Belatedness; Deferred action;
Searle, John, 107, 151 Mood; Tense
Self-criticism, 4-6, 16-19, 37, 85, 118, 140, Tense, 107, 140, 153
144, 154 Text: emergence of, in Hegel, 66-71
Self-reflection, 96-97 Theatricality: 10, 11, 14-15, 18, 30, 118,
Self-resistance, 118, 138 127, 141-42, 160 n1l, 169 n30
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 133, 138, 151 Torok, Maria. See Abraham, Nicolas
Sidney, Sir Philip, 132 Tradition: 17, 27, 28, 54, 58, 61, 93, 109,
Skepticism, 21-27, 40-42, 50, 75, 147 142, 155; as anasemic homonym, 105;
Smith, Tony, 15 critical, 145; as forgetting, 48, 109; and
Socrates, 105 Hegel, 43, 46; and Heidegger, 46, 60-61,
Speculative proposition (Hegel), 68-69, 94-96
111-12 Trilling, Lionel, 8
Stendhal, 151 Turkle, Sherry, 61
Step: 111-12; back, in Heidegger, 55, 56,
57-58, 61; beyond philosophy, 95. See Unconscious: as post-Hegelian object, 62, 71
also Dialectic, broken or limping; Pas Unthought (Heidegger): 54; as criterion for
Sterne, Laurence, 151 conversation, 55
Stierle, Karlheinz, 136
Subject: of psychoanalysis, 70; subjectivity Wahl, Jean, 47
of, in Heidegger, 53 Wasserman, Earl, 122
Supplement, 84, 95, 96, 105, 152 Wimsatt, W. K., 12
Symbolic (Lacan), 62, 64, 66, 86, 88, 91, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19, 22, 24, 25, 27-28,
100, 145 39-40, 85
Wordsworth, William, 121, 124
Tasso, Torquato, 87
Temporality: 128, 170 n1l; of criticism, 146, Yale School, 167 n1l
154; in de Man, 125, 131-33; in Heideg- Yeats, William Butler, 121, 122, 124
Stephen W. Melville earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Studies in Literature
at the University of Chicago in 1981; he is assistant professor of English at
Syracuse University. During the 1985-86 academic year he served as Getty
Foundation Fellow in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.

Donald Marshall is professor of English at the University of Iowa; he earned

his Ph.D. in English at Yale University in 1971. He is also author of the in-
troduction to a forthcoming book in the Theory and History of Literature se-
ries, Geoffrey Hartman's The Unremarkable Wordsworth.