Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading
JEREMY FERNANDO
Raading Blindly Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading
JEREMY FERNANIO
�� -----:::c-CAMBRIA PRESS AMHERST, NEW YORK
Copyright 2009 Jeremy Fernando All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), with out the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to:
[email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 20 Northpointe Parkway, Suite 188 Amherst, NY 14228 Cover concept by Michelle Andrea Wan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fernando, Jeremy. Reading blindly: literature, otherness, and the possibility of an ethi cal reading / Jeremy Fernando. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60497-633-5 (alk. paper) I. Reader response criticism. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Literature- Explication.
4. Literature-Philosophy. I. Title. PN98.R38F47 2009 801'.95-dc22 2009028207
For Brendan Quigley, who taught me how to write (even as I remain completely blind to it); Neil Murphy, who unveiled my blindness to reading, in reading, and when reading; and Werner Hamacher, who once told me to "trust no one-not even me-and just read for yourself" Thankyou for being my teachers, my mentors, and most of all, my dear friends
If the serpents had written History they would have proudly related how their ancestor had belonged to woman. And it was during love dispute between woman and her companion, a dispute god had every interest in no one ever knowing he had been the adulterous cause, as for any oriental god, that the jealous companion violently seized her serpent. But serpents are a people with no writing and it is god who has the word. -Helene Cixous, La
Who could well say: "I fear we cannot rid ourselves of God, because we still believe in grammar " A believer, still ...
a friend of men! But if you still believe in grammar, it is because the idea of being able to rid yourself of god fills you with terror. Fear of no-life , fear of life. -Helene Cixous, La
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Stumbling Around in the Dark
Introduction: On Reading: A Pact With the Devil
xi
1
Part I: Blindness
15
Chapter 1: Blindness, or What Is This No-Thing We See?
19
The Book as a (Death) Sentence
25
Blind Ethics , or Close Your Eyes (to) See the Third Literary Theory and the Erasure of Texts
31 41
Chapter 2: The Contr act: Venus in Furs, or How to Read the Other A Question of Violence; A Statement of Terror
51 52
A Question of Reading , or "Art Lies in the Gap Between the Painting and the Viewer"
56
"What Is To Be Done?" or How to Read While Maintaining Radical Otherness
62
The Reader Before the Law, or What Is My Right of Inspection
67
READING BLINDLY
x
Part II: Reading(s)
83
Chapter 3: Rereading Miller:
J Stands Before the Law
85
Forever Undecided, or "Who Is the Who That Is Reading?"
89
Reading and Testing: Reading as Testing
92
Putting J Back Before the Law
95
Chapter 4: Reading
Roland Bartlres, Rereading Roland Bartlres (Writing Roland Bartlres)
101
Reading (Writing): How, What, and a Secret
III
Do This in Memory of Me
113
Chapter 5: Only Fiction Is Stranger Than Fiction
Part Ill: Tlte Reader Chapter 6: Reading. Or Just Gaming. Spinning, Mixing, Scratching, Cutting, Stabs...
121
129 133 139
Bibliography
155
Index
161
About the Author
167
STUMBLING AROUND IN THE DARK
I was on that journey and nearly at Damascus when about midday a bright light from heaven suddenly shone round me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" I answered: Who are you, Lord? and he said to me, "I am Jesus the Nazarene, and you are persecuting me." The people with me saw the light but did not hear his voice as he spoke to me. I said: What am I to do Lord? The Lord answered, "Stand up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told what you have been appointed to do." The light had been so dazzling that I was blind and my companions had to take me by the hand; and so I came to Damascus.' After the crucifixion, this is arguably the most important scene in Christianity. In fact, one can argue that in the context of
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Christianity as a concept, this scene is more important than the death of Jesus. For it is only with Paul that the term Christian comes into being:2 the birth of Jesus itself would have fulfilled the condition of his coming; in this sense, his death is superflu ous.3 The movement from a title ("Jesus the Christ" or "Jesus the Savior") to a name ("Jesus Christ," where "Jesus" and "Sav ior" become one and the same) required not so much his death, but rather a betrayal, much the same way as the movement from name ("Julius Caesar") to a title ("Caesar") also required one. In this sense, the two key figures in the formation of Christianity are Judas and Paul; Jesus being the medium through and in which it was created. Judas' betrayal moved the name into a singular; Paul's writings transformed the singular into the universal. But for Saul to be created, Saul had to first move through a period of blindness, and it is this that we must look at for the moment. The first question that arises from the above passage from the Acts of the Apostles is, if "the people with me saw the light," then why did they not go blind, as Saul did? After all, he claims that "the light had been so dazzling that I was blind." Either he had been seeing a "light from heaven" that was different from the light his companions saw, or he was lying (Saul didn't have the best of reputations), or he was mistaken about the cause of his blindness. For if it was not the first two possibilities, then would the case be that Saul's blindness was not caused by the light, but rather by the "voice [that] spoke to me" that his com panions "did not hear"?4 In this sense, does Saul need to be blind to the Word in order that he can truly discover what the Word is? In order for Saul to fulfill his role of being the "chosen [one] to know [God's] will, to see the Just One and hear his own voice speaking,"5 he would first have to be blind to all that was being written (and perhaps even said) about God. This was the only
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xiii
way in which he could transubstantiate himself from a Pharisee into the first Christian: the movement from Saul to Paul required a momentary blindness. There is already a hint of the manner in which the blind ness would affect Saul earlier in the passage, when he answers a question ("Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?") with another question ("Who are you Lord?"). It is not so much that he did not hear the question but that he was able to discern what the "voice" was really asking: the "voice" was not looking for a reason for Saul's persecution (after all, as God, wouldn't (S)he already know why?) but for an acknowledgment that (S)he was God. It was this that Saul recognized in his response; even while he was asking who the voice that was speaking was, he had already acknowledged it as "Lord." It was through his blindness that Saul could truly see the "will" of "the Just One." What draws both Judas and Saul together is the motivation in their actions. One can never really ask what their personal intention is-that is never knowable-but one can posit (or at least hypothesize) the traces that can be found in their actions. Both Judas and Saul betray their existing situations, the result of which is a creation of something new: without their betray als, the names "Jesus Christ" and "Christian" would not exist. But it is not that their betrayals are in opposition to their situa tions. What Judas and Saul have done is to be blind to the overt reading of what their situations demand (obey Jesus unques tioningly and be a good Pharisee, respectively) to listen to the secret message that no one else wanted, or perhaps was able, to see, to hear ("Jesus had to die in order to fulfill the prophecy" and "the coming of God was precisely the coming of the Chris tian," respectively). When Jesus asks Judas, "Are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?"6 it wasn't a question ing of the
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appropriateness of the gesture: after all, one cannot betray in the absence of love.7 In order for Judas to act in fidelity to the work and life of Jesus, he had to betray him-he had to be blind to the overt teachings, all the laws, and also all the other disciples. In the same way, Saul had to betray the laws of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish laws, and his training and life as a Pharisee in fidelity to this "voice" that no one else could hear. A similarity can be found in the case of Bq..ltus and Julius Cae
sar: the betrayal and murder of Caesar had to happen in order to preserve the state; it was Brutus' love for what Caesar worked and stood for that resulted in his having to kill Caesar to pre vent him from destroying his own creation. In this sense, both Judas and Brutus betrayed the ones they loved in fidelity to what both Jesus and Caesar, respectively, stood for: Brutus and Judas betrayed Caesar and Jesus for the persons they were becoming, for becoming persons who were other to what they had stood for. Since both betrayals were a response to what the other now stood for, they were a response in fidelity to the other-perhaps an imagined other, a perfected other, a deified other, even, but nonetheless an other-which suggests that the acts were initiated by Jesus and Caesar themselves, almost as if Judas and Brutus were called by Jesus and Caesar to betray the Jesus and Caesar they had become. In Jesus' case, this seems obvious enough: someone had to betray the Son of Man in order that he could be crucified and resurrected. His transfiguration from man to deity required the betrayal; Judas' role was to respond to this call. One could argue that Judas' betrayal of Jesus had to occur; other wise, Jesus would have become God on earth (after all, he was building a following). In order to prevent that from happening (which would have been Jesus' usurpation of God the father), Judas had to respond to Jesus by betraying him, murdering him.s In Brutus' case, one can argue that his murder of Caesar was
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xv
a response to Caesar's name itself, as Avital Ronell elegantly argues in The Test Drive: The very thing meant to do away with Caesar reasserts his name. If Brutus was able to cut Caesar down, his act could not amount to a cut initiated by him, one might say, because the cut is Caesar in his defiant totality; from his birth Caesar bears the naming name of the cut. The act of independence was prescribed by the name of the other.9 Brutus' role was precisely to bring the caesura to its full poten tial. If one considers Paul's role from this angle (the bringing to the fullness of potentiality the name of Jesus Christ), then per haps Saul's betrayal of the Pharisees was only the first moment: in order to complete the movement from Jesus the man to Jesus the universal God (which Judas begins), Paul had to betray Jesus the deity himself. Since only Paul had heard the "voice," in effect he is now not only Pythia but the Oracle itself (at least in the case of Pythia, there were priests that were translating her words, there were others privy to understanding, interpreting the divine words; in Paul's case, he was both receiver and transla tor, legislator and executioner).10 In order to catholicize Jesus, Paul had to become God himself: in order to create the universal Jesus, what Paul had to first do was totalize the Word, to cement a particular version of the Word, to write out all other versions. Since Paul is the only one who heard the "voice," whatever he claimed is true, or, more precisely, all of Paul's statements are truth-claims, constative statements: by staking a claim to the "voice" (which no one can dispute, no one else having heard the "voice"), Paul is, in effect, the "voice." W hether Paul's action was driven by a self-centred motive, a selfish motive (to become an apostle, a specially chosen one, to become the undisputed leader of the Christians, etc.), or whether it was a response to a
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call of the divine, a response to the "voice" of God, a response to the other, will never be known: we will always remain blind to Paul's intent. All that we can discern is that this betrayal of God by becoming the voice of God himself was necessary in order to universalize the Christian. Hence, in our reading of Paul, Paul himself will always remain blind-opaque, invisible-to us. All that we can ever know is about Paul: we will never know the character of Paul, but instead, all we know is th,e character Paul. One might also consider the fact that Paul did not author the
Acts of the Apostles; the only potential author ever suggested has been Luke," as he is considered a close companion of Paul (being from Antioch, there is a chance that he might even have been present at the first use of the term the Saul-and later Paul-of the Acts
Christian). In this sense, of the Apostles is a char
acter in the narrative of the author. Interestingly, nowhere in his own writings does Paul mention the fact of his blindness. In fact, the closest he comes to doing so is when he states that after being chosen by God, he "went off to Arabia ... [for] three years ... and later straight from there back to Damascus";12 in this case, there is yet another blindness, a blind spot of three years about which nothing is known. Could it be that Paul had to sup press the fact that his "vision" was one of blindness, that his vision of God was precisely one of nothing? Instead of being enlightened, all he had was momentary darkness. Assuming that the author of the Acts ofthe Apostles is consis tent, why is there, then, an inconsistency between the narratives in Acts 9:3-9 and the passage which we have been reading? For Acts 9:7 states that "the men traveling with Saul stood there speechless for though they heard the voice they could see no one," which contradicts Acts 22:9, which states, "the people with me saw the light but did not hear his voice as he spoke to me." This reopens the possibility of Saul's non-truth-telling, but
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xvii
a more interesting consideration is why such an obvious incon sistency was left in place. Is it simply an indirect way of sug gesting that there are different "voices" that can be heard, or is this another blind spot in the text? If we read both Acts 9 and Acts 22 as being true, then the reason for Saul's blindness is ultimately unknown; Saul and all his companions see the light and hear the "voice," but only Saul is blinded as a result. In this sense, even the reason for his blindness is now unknown to us. And it is in this situation of absolute blindness-Saul was blind, whilst blind to the cause of his own blindness, as we are too-that the Christian is born. It is in this blindness that the third-the Christian-that ruptures the binary opposition of Jew-Gentile is born. It is in this blindness that a new term (the
Christian) was born with in the existing system of thinking (Juda ism); in Alain Badiou's terms, this would be an instance of a true event, where there is a new potentiality that opens up within an existing conception, an existing space, an existing world. For it is not as if with the coming of the Christian that Judaism was overthrown: the fact that they are similar for the most part sug gests that Christianity is a new conception of Judaism, one in which the Jew-Gentile opposition no longer is crucial. The key moment would be the gesture of imagination-where something is done without any a priori knowledge of the consequences. After all, Saul had no idea that his moment of blindness, of not seeing, of not-knowing-his illegitimate leap of faith-would lead to the birth of a new term, a new possibility. Only in this way might something new occur.J3
xviii
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I. Acts 22:6-11. All references to the Bible are taken from the Jeru
salem Bible. 2. The first known use of the term Christian can be found in Acts 11:26"It was at Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians."
3. It is Islam that recognizes the pointlessness of the death on the cross (and even the resurrection): Isa goes straight to heaven (his movement from human to divine did not require death). The dif ference between Islam and Christianity is precisely the movement of his name: in Islam, Isa does not move from a singular into a universal, but from an individual name to a universal title.
4. There have also been interpretations that Saul was in the centre of the light-it "shone around" him (Acts 22:6). Even if this were so, it does not change the fact that the cause of his blindness was not so much the light but something other than that.
5. Acts 22:14-15. 6. Luke 22:48-49. 7. If there was no love, then it would merely be an act of complic ity to murder. It is only with love that it is a betrayal, for in every betrayal, there is the break of a previous commonality, singular plurality (where two singular persons were linked by a common idea, goal, belief). In this sense, the betrayal is always a double betrayal, of the other person and also of the idea, and in this dou ble betrayal, love itself is shattered.
8. In a way, this was the logic that was explored in Jesus Christ Super star (music and lyrics by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice): in the musical, it was Judas who realized that Jesus was becoming too much of a superstar, and hence had to betray him in order to save Jerusalem (which was Jesus' intention in the first place).
9. Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 310. An excellent meditation on loyalty, betrayal, and love in Brutus and Cordelia from Julius C aesar and King
Lear, respectively, can be found in The Test Drive, 307-310.
Stumbling Around in the Dark
xix
10. Paul is constantly referring to himself as one who is "called to be an apostle, and specially chosen to preach the Good News" (Rom.: 1-2), ignoring the fact that he wasn't actually one of the twelve "appointed by God [ no less] to be an apostle" (I Corinthi ans: I); "an apostle who does not owe his authority to men . .. but who has been appointed by Jesus Christ and by God the Father who raised Jesus from the dead" (Gal.: I). In other words, Paul laid claim to the appointment of interpreter of the Word of God: since he was the one who heard the "voice," one can construe that he has appointed himself as the interpreter of the Word. II. "The only identification of the author ever suggested by the church writers is St Luke, and no critics ancient or modem have ever seriously suggested anyone else. This identification was already known to the churches about the year 175 AD as shown by the Roman canon known as the Muratorian Fragment.. .and is supported by internal evidence: the author must have been a Christian of the apostolic age, either a thoroughly hellenised Jew or, more probably, a well educated Greek with some knowledge of medicine and extremely well acquainted with the LXX and Jewish things in general. Lastly, and more significantly, he had accompanied Paul on his journeys judging from his use of the first person plural in Part 2 of the Acts, and of all Paul's companions none is more strongly indicated than Luke." Introduction to The Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament, 195. 12. Gal. 1:15-19. 13. This will be explored in greater detail in the chapter "Blind Ethics, or Close Your Eyes (to) See the Third." Badiou discusses the "true event," amongst other places, in Being and Event (2006).
Raading Blindly
INTRODUCTION
ON READING A PACT WITH THE DEVIL
How does one read properly, that is, ethically? In an examination of this question, a questioning of the ques tion, there is an obvious link between the terms how and ethi cally; both involve choice, and choosing. Whenever a "how" is invoked, the subject has to choose between one or more options. However, for a situation to involve ethics, there must be a choice made in which the singularity making the choice is responsible to and for all the other(s) in that situation: it is this singularity, this particularity, which makes the choice a proper one. There is a crucial difference between the choice in the situation of a "how" and the choice in an "ethical situation." The choice in "how" involves alternatives which are already laid out before us: hence, the decision made is calculated, calculable, part of a system. In a true ethical situation, the choice is always made in a moment of
2
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blindness: the outcome (and even the situation leading up to it) is unknowable.' So is "how to read properly, ethically," and then, more pre cisely, "how to read as if each reading is a singular situation," an impossible question? Or, if not an impossible question-after all, we did ask it-then perhaps a question that can only remain a question, one that cannot be closed off, be completed, and, by extension, be theorized (in the �ense of forming a complete theory about it)? Ethical reading is a conception of reading as a space of (and for) negotiation. The moment of reading is the moment when the "how" and "ethics" collide; one can never read in a vacuum (both the text and the reader have their respective historicities), but in order to read, the reader must be free to respond fully to the text. In this way, we face two contradictory demands: one must read as if for the first time, that is, without any precon ceived notions of reading or of the text, but at the same time, it is impossible to read without any prior knowledge of reading and this makes the situation aporetic. After all, we are born into reading; reading precedes us, and much of reading relies on con ventions. But it is precisely in this space that the negotiation and choosing take place. Each decision, and each choice, is tempo ral, and each instance of reading is a new one-no two read ings will be the same. It is within this space, this temporal-and singular-space, that reading can occur as a singularity, and in which a potentially new reading can occur. If each reading is temporal and hence potentially new, it opens up this question: Is a virginal reading possible? Can one read as if reading for the first time?2 This brings into question the sta tus of memory and forgetting with respect to reading. Clearly, memory is part of the process of reading: one must remember the rules of language, and one must also remember what one
On Reading
3
has read prior to reading what is in front of one. One must also always keep in mind what is ahead of one. This is especially true when one is reading to unearth the movement of thought in a text, when one is attempting to unveil the different registers in the text: one must speculate what is not-yet-read, one must remember the future, for otherwise, one cannot project how what one is currently reading fits in with respect to the entire text.3 However, in order to open these registers, to allow these different readings to potentially surface, one must also forget what one has read, what one is reading; otherwise, one is merely reiterating what one already knows. At every point of reading that responds to the potentiality of the text, there must be a for getting that occurs prior to the reading: each time one reads, no reading takes place if one does not forget. It is precisely the double function of forgetting and memory that results in language being both general and specific simulta neously (and the two never being able to be reconciled). It is only because forgetting is the very basis of language4 that there is the possibility that at each reading, a unique reading, a new reading (a reading as if reading had never before occurred) might occur. It is forgetting that allows for the single instance of a new read ing, but at the same time, it is memory (of language and, more precisely, grammar and its rules) that allows for reading to take place at all. Hence, every act of reading is when memory and forgetting collide: every act of reading is aporetic, as one has to both remember and forget at the same time. Each time reading occurs, one is not just reading the text for the first time, but also reading for the first time. It is forgetting that ensures that each reading is potentially a virginal reading: not a first reading in the sense of an original reading, but a first reading in the sense of there never being a second reading, there never being a repeated reading. After all,
4
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is not the hymen another shield, another veil, another blind, one that only appears to be broken, split, ruptured, only to reveal that one is within folds, layers, all of which reveal and unveil and hide at the same time? Like the splitting of the veil in the temple, all that is revealed is that the secret of God remains, an unknown, an unknowable, which can only be sometimes glimpsed. Of course, the problem with forgetting is that it cannot be willed, determined, decided; it happens to one. In ot�er words, one cannot count on forgetting, call on forgetting; not only does it happen to one, one might not even know, ever know, that forgetting has taken place. And once it has, there is no object to forgetting: the moment one can designate an object that is forgotten, one is back in the structure of memory. In other words, there is no referentiality to forgetting. Hence, one can never actually know of forgetting; it is always beyond the realm of knowledge. And since reading that is not merely a preconditioned hermeneutical decoding is premised on the possibility of forgetting, this suggests that we can never quite know when, or even whether, reading itself occurs. This suggests that reading can no longer be constituted in the classical tradition of hermeneutics, as an act of deciphering meaning according to a determined set of rules, laws: this would be reading as an act where the reader comes into a convergence, at best, with the text. In fact, reading can no longer be under stood as an act, since an act by necessity is governed by the rules of reading. Reading must be thought of as the event of an encounter with an other-an other who is not the other as identi fied by the reader, but rather an other that remains beyond the cognition of the self. Hence, reading is a prerelational relational ity, an encounter with the other without any claims to knowing who or what this other is in the first place; an unconditional rela tion, and a relation to no fixed object of relation. As such, it is the ethical moment par excellence.s
On Reading
5
Since reading is an event of ethicity, it interdicts any precon ditioned detennination of the encounter. As such, it cannot be conceived as a phenomenal event. This is due to the fact that a phenomenal event is what appears to the senses-a theory of appearances-and is determined by its correspondence to an existing conception; the event is subsumed under the self's "knowledge." What the reader encounters may only be encoun tered before any phenomenon--or at least, the point of encoun tering is always already beyond the reader's knowing. Hence, reading occurs as a nonphenomenal event, or, more precisely, as the event that undoes any possible theory of phenomenal ity. The scene of Saul's blinding demonstrates this, as it is not a blinding by a phenomenon but rather by the very source of phenomenality itself, which remains invisible, undecipherable, and ultimately unknowable, irreducible to any concept of under standing or reason. Hence, it is the blinding not only of the sub ject of cognition-Saul-but also of the object of cognition; it is the event of a double blinding, an encounter that is completely beyond cognition, that is unknowable, that is in exception of everything that is known. As such, at every encounter, each reading is an event of full potentiality, where nothing can be known except the fact that it is the event of an encounter. It is this potentiality that Saul saw when he was blind; it is this potentiality that was embodied in the new name of Paul. How ever, in order for the movement from Saul to Paul-in order for Saul to become Paul-there is a necessary gap, a space, a blind spot (whether it is three days or three years is irrelevant) in the narrative; it is this gap, this unknown, that opens up the space for the becoming, for the Christian. It is not possible to say what this site of negotiation, this third that lies between the Pharisee Saul and Paul, is. The gesture of imagination, this leap that is required to move from Saul to Paul-a transubstantiated Saul, exactly the
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same and slightly different at the same time-is not one that can be defined; it can only be described, narrated (and only after the event). After all, the first time we are made aware of his new name is in Acts 13:9-"Then Saul, whose other name is Paul." It is not as if Saul had suddenly shed his old self and is now a new being: Paul is his other within his old self, Paul is the becoming Christian of Saul. In other words, Paul is the gap, the space within Saul himself, the site of becoming that is th� Christian. All that can be said is, perhaps, what this site of negotiation is not; in this sense, at best, all that can be said is proscriptive. This is precisely because the space of imagination is not an object, but rather, the space itself is what is being imagined: it is the imagination of the possibility of the third, the third that is always in a state of becoming, that allows this transubstantiation to take place. This space of imagination, this imagination of a space, is what allows for reading to take place. After all, reading is never done, it is constantly becoming.6 It was Saul's positing of the possibility of a space between the Jew and the non-Jew that gives rise to the term Christian. It was Saul's blindness to the fact that one cannot know the will of God-he had to act according to the "voice" that he heard, that only he had heard, and act according to this event, this singularity that cannot be explained-that allowed for the Christian. In order to act, Saul had to read the "voice" in blindness-posit a reading that is ultimately illegitimate and unverifiable. Hence, the ques tion that continues to haunt the work of Paul, the question that cannot be answered, will always be, what did the voice say? There is an echo of this in the eternal question that haunts the Bible itself: "Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"? This is the question that is unanswered, and never answerable: after all, no one will know what God said to the woman. Even if we accept the validity of her words, "But
On Reading
7
of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, 'You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death"'8-and there is no reason to do otherwise-the question of whether this was really what God said remains. After all, a prohibition almost always gives rise to a temptation to defY. In this sense, one can question whether it is the serpent that tempted, or whether it was really God who set the scene in the first place. In fact, the serpent is telling the truth when it utters, "No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods know ing good and evil,'''' which is precisely what happened. 10 After eat ing the fruit, "the eyes of both of them were opened,"" the result of which is that Yahweh God acknowledges that "man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil."'2 In order for woman and man to become like God(s), they had to first tum a blind eye to Yahweh's order to not eat from that tree. One might also consider the exchange that is needed in order to obtain the knowledge of good and evil. Yahweh God's admo nition to man is, "You may eat indeed of all the trees in the gar den. Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die."'3 In this sense, one can take it that both woman and man consume the fruit in the full knowledge that they are sacrificing their lives in exchange for the "knowledge of good and evil": it is their gift of death that was required in order for them to become "like one of
US."14
More than just the fact that
they had to ignore Yahweh God's command, in order to become like the God(s), they had to listen to the question and decide for themselves: to gain the knowledge of good and evil, they first had to choose. This is a choice that is made in blindness, for they knew not what they were choosing: after all, one can hardly claim that they, before knowing what good and evil were, were making a cognitive choice about good and evil.'s
8
READING BLINDLY It is this pact with the serpent-the pact that God and the ser
pent have in secret-that sets the scene for the woman to know of the fruit: after all, if God created everything and has full knowl edge of everything that is to happen, then both the serpent and the question are also of Yahweh's creation.16l t is this secret pact (even though the serpent is a creation of Yahweh, Yahweh still needs its complicity in this matter: full knowledge does not necessarily equate to full control) that opens the possibility o£!he woman eat ing the fruit in the first place. One must not forget that it is she who first ate of the tree; it is she who made the blind choice by positing the possibility that perhaps God didn't really mean not to eat from the tree. It is this pact that maintains the possibility of questioning and, more importantly, the possibility that humankind can choose for itself, can have access to the "knowledge of good and evil." It is also the question that ensures that we can continue reading-as knowledge can never totalize-that reading itself can continue. What this suggests is that a prescriptive answer to the ques tions (how to read properly, that is, ethically; did (s)he really say that?) is impossible, for every statement would only hold true in a particular moment, a particular situation, a singular moment. After all, at her moment of choosing to eat of the tree, all the woman could do is to posit whether God really said that or not; there is no certainly, only a possibility or a momentary potential ity for it to be true. It is these moments, these singular particu larities, that we will listen for (we cannot always see them, for they are hidden somewhere in the text, within the text, with the text). All we can hope to do is to listen out for these moments, these details, for as Jean Baudrillard reminds us, there is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment. Freed from the whole and its transcendent ventriloquism, the detail inevitably becomes mysterious.
On Reading
9
Every particle wrested from the natural world is in itself an immediate subversion of the real and its wholeness. Like the fragment, it only has to be elliptical. It only has to be an exception. Every singular image can be reckoned exceptional. And it puts an end to all the others.17 It is only in blindness that we can see exceptions; it is only in exceptions that we can see when we are blind. Only through think ing in terms of the peculiar, the particular, the absurd, even, can we perhaps puncture the flattened book, rescue the text, the unread, the unreadable, such that the book can never be read, such that reading can continue.ls Perhaps to do so, we must first attempt to wrest the real from the reality principle To wrest the image from the representation principle. To rediscover the image as point of convergence between the light from the object and the light from the gaze.19 The fragment is precisely where we can find reading as the event of an encounter. For it is only when each encounter is taken as an exception (and, by extension, that exception is the norm) that reading as an ethical event can be begun to be thought. If each encounter with the text is an encounter with a fragment, then no unity can be established; by extension, there cannot be an over arching whole which can establish itself as a rule and hence pre condition the event of reading. Hence, each event of reading is a reading of a fragment, each reading is itself a fragment, each event of reading is also an event where reading itself is constituted. There is much to learn from the proverb, "The devil is in the details": it is the small things, the fragment, the particular, that prevents any totalizing logic from taking place, from unifying itself, from solidifying itself. Perhaps in this light, or darkness,
READING BLINDLY
10
there must be an attention to, a reading of, the small, the unno ticed, the little, and a blindness to a large, the whole. In this way, there is a potential for the mysterious and the wonderful to appear, and perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the phantoms that haunt the text. After all, one can only see ghosts with the third eye. But first, perhaps we must begin to think of what this blindness that we are thinking of is in the first place. A�d, perhaps more accurately, what this blindness that we are thinking of is not. Is it when we do not see that we are blind, or is it that we are blind when we do not see: is blindness what we do not see, or does blindness shape what we see in the first place? In order to exam ine the question, how does one read properly, that is, ethically? one is faced with the issue of blindness and what it is one does not see, cannot see. Hence, we have to first examine blindness itself and its relation to reading. Since there is a link between see ing and knowledge (captured perfectly in the phrase "Seeing is believing"), we have to reflect on the relationship between what we can and cannot see, and, more specifically, if what we cannot see is always already part of what we see. This would open the consideration of the possibility of knowing and the very limits of knowledge itself, after which we will read texts that attempt to think reading itself, that attempt to think the possibility of read ing. For if we only attempt to speak of-write about-reading without reading anything, we might then just be speak-writing of everything but reading. By attempting to read, perhaps we can begin to meditate on what the text is as such, what the object that we are reading is (if it even is an object), and how we can start to approach it. And since reading is the relationship between the reader and the text, we must then turn our attention to how read ing affects the reader; the effects of the text, and reading, on the body, in the body, of the reader. In this way, we might be able
On Reading
11
to begin thinking of how both the reader and the text read each other, write onto each other, into each other. However, we must begin at the beginning, by taking a detour through blindness-and what blindness entails in the first place. After all, if we refuse to acknowledge what we cannot see, refuse to see that we cannot always see, we might remain stumbling around in the dark.
READING BLINDLY
12
ENDNOTES
I. Of course, to deny that an ethical situation is also historical-it
has its ghosts that continue to haunt it-would be silly. However, at the moment of decision, of choosing, one has little choice but to be blind to both the historicities (leading to the choice) and the potentialities (of the choice), and acknowledge the double blind ness of choosing. 2. Is this even a question for the introduction, one that must be asked
from the very beginning, or must it be left to the very end-an invitation to begin again, to start again, to read again-a question that can only be uttered when the reading is over, when the text is finished, a question that can only be known at the very end? Can you really ask a question about beginnings, about origins, without an idea of the end in mind? Or, another way to put the question: is there a possibility of a beginning without the notion of an end? In this sense, the question of origins is not just an archeological project but always a teleological one as well. 3. Reading in this form is always a reading of the specific with rela
tion to the general-reading the particular text in relation to the universal book. The assumption here, of course, is that there is a totality which is the book to be referenced against, to be compared with, to be kept in mind. This suggests, then, that reading can only occur the second time one looks at a text, or, even more radically, that each reading is always a second reading. 4. The only time one has to utter something is in its absence: if the
object that was referred to were present, then there would be no necessity to utter the signifier. The very recollection of the signi fied to one's mind is premised on the fact that it was momentarily forgotten; otherwise, there would not be a remembering that was taking place. If the signified were already in one's mind, it would be purely knowledge. Hence, the very condition of language itself-the fact that one has to refer to something, and communi cate this to someone else by language-is, precisely, forgetting: if one never forgot, there would be no need for language at all.
On Reading
13
An excellent instance of the thinking of the status of memory and forgetting can be found, among other places,in the writings of Werner Hamacher, including "Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutic Circle in Schleiermacher" in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Meridian, 1999),44-80. 5. l owe much of this analysis to a conversation with Werner Hamacher. 6. It is perfectly apt that the term read both signifies the past and the present tense of the same process. In reading, there is the collision of both the past and the present, memory and forgetting; perhaps reading is always a future possibility, a potentiality. 7. Gen.3:1 (italics added). 8. Gen. 3:3. The only recorded words are what God said to man; we only hear of what God said to the woman from her representation and, perhaps, interpretation--of the admonition not to eat from the tree. 9. Gen.3:4-5. 10. It was not the eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge that caused man and woman to lose eternal life, it was the fact that after eating from the tree, they were banished from the garden and so were unable to eat from the tree of life: "See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live for ever" (Gen. 3:22). II. Gen. 3:7.
12. Gen.3:22. 13. Gen.2:16-17. 14. Gen. 3:22. 15. It is this choosing that is blind to both the law and what it chooses-this choice that was made in double blindness-that we will examine, that we will attempt to see. And in trying to think the question,how to read properly, that is,ethically? we will allow the other question, did (s)he really say that? to haunt us, to ques tion us, to question the question itself. 16. In effect, the serpent is the autoimmunity of Yahweh in order to ensure that Yahweh's law would not be fully obeyed, would not
C HAPTER 1
BLINDNESS,
OR
WHAT IS THIS No-THING WE SEE?
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or psychological factors ...Total blindness is the complete lack of form and light percep tion and is clinically recorded as "NLP," an abbreviation for "no light perception."1 When something is written onto a page, there is an inscription made and the page is marked, there is a mark left behind. The only way which we can read that mark is when light reflects from it and forms an image that goes through the pupil and is focused on the retina. Sensory cells from the retina relate the image via neurons onto the visual cortex, which is the part of the
14
READING BLINDLY be a totalizing law: the serpent's question opened the possibility that the woman consumed the fruit, and as a result, humankind became "one of us" and received the knowledge of the God(s) themselves.
17. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), 103.
18. To rediscover reading as the point of emergence-negotiation, space-between the text and the reader. To think the punctum a point, stop, break, puncture, prick-of the flattened page, the
punctum that lets the text be a text, that allows reading to continue. It is Roland Barthes who never lets us forget that it is punctuation that allows the sentence to stop, pause, but never to settle, as it is punctuation that also breaks, punctures; at best, it is a momentary rest. Barthes' meditation on punctuation and the punctum can be found in many places, one of which is Camera Lucida {I 980).
19. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, \04.
PART I BLINDNESS
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time. -Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, always already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work. In the beginning, at the origin, there was ruin. At the origin comes ruin; ruin comes to the origin, it is what first comes and happens to the origin, in the beginning. With no promise of restoration. This dimension of the ruinous simulacrum has never threatened-quite to the contrary-the emergence of a work. It's just that one must know [savoir], and so one just has to see (it) [voir ca]-Le., that the performative fiction that engages the spectator in the signature of the work is given to be seen only through the blindness that it produces as its truth. As if glimpsed through a blind. -Jacques Derrida, Memoirs o/the Blind:
The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins
20
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brain that processes the information. But the only way in which the image is formed is for some of the light to be absorbed by the image itself (otherwise, all we would see is pure light, an imageless brightness). This means that there is always some part of the object-the letter, the word, or the series of words-that remains unseen, that remains in the dark. What we are interested in is this residue, this that is left behind the ghost of the word that remains unseen: perhaps the only way which we can see the dark is to be blind in the first place. Just because something does not appear to be there does not mean that it isn't there, does not mean that it isn't experienced as being there. In many cases, something that is absent--or, more precisely, that appears to be absent--can affect us just as much as something that is present: I placed a coffee cup in front of John and asked him to grab it [with his phantom limb]. Just as he said he was reaching out, I yanked the cup away. "Ow!" he yelled. "Don't do that!" "What's the matter?" "Don't do that," he repeated. "I had just got my fingers around the cup handle when you pulled it. That really hurts!" Hold on a minute. I wrench a real cup from phantom fin gers and the person yells, ouch! The fingers were illusory, but the pain was real-indeed, so intense that I dared not repeat the experiment.2 If an absent limb can affect one, can it really be all that absent? Is it not the trace of the limb-be it via psychological effects, or even physiological ones3-that continues to haunt the body: the spectre of John's fingers that continue to be with him, inscribing them selves into his body, but this time not necessarily within his con trol? John's spectral fingers are absent in a cognitive sense-he no
Blindness, or What is This No-Thing We See?
21
longer can control them with his brain-but are very much present, slipping in and out of his presence and disappearing the moment he attempts to directly confront them. Here one must consider if a phantom limb has effects only because one has a memory of its sensation, a memory of the sensa tion that was caused by stimuli to the limb before its absence. In other words, is the sensation felt by the patient merely that of a psychological effect? Or, more precisely, is the sensation felt by the patient the result of both the memory of the limb and also the for getting of the fact that the limb itself is missing? For if the missing limb remains in the consciousness of the patient, then would it not be unlikely that (s)he feels a sensation in it? If the sensation is trig gered by an affect of memory, this suggests that it must be beyond merely physiological stimuli; since all external stimuli are absent, it is almost as if the patient feels the sensation because there is an anticipation of what is to be felt. This is perhaps a similar sensation to that one feels just before one is tickled: the only way in which one can feel ticklish even before actual physical stimuli is experi enced is because one knows what feeling ticklish is. In effect, the ticklishness is anticipated and then is felt by the person.4 This might be why the most successful attempts to treat patients with phantom-limb pain have involved the imagination. One such instance is the "mirror box" that was created by Vilayanur S. Ram achandran and colleagues. A "mirror box" is a box with two mirrors in the center, one facing each way. A patient inserts her or his hand into one hole and her or his "phantom hand" into the other. When viewed from an angle, the brain is tricked into seeing two com plete hands. The "mirror box" treatment is based on an observation that phantom-limb patients were more likely to report paralyzed and painful phantoms if the limb was paralyzed prior to amputa tion. The hypothesis is that every time the patient attempts to move her or his limb, (s)he receives sensory feedback that the limb is
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paralyzed. Over time, this feedback stamps itself into the brain such that even when the limb is absent, the brain has learnt that the limb (and its subsequent phantom) is paralyzed. Hence, the patient feels discomfort or even pain because the phantom limb is in an uncom fortable position or is paralyzed. If the brain is tricked into seeing two complete hands when the hand that is present moves, the brain thinks that the phantom limb is also moving; in this way, the per son can "move" her or his phantom limb, and so the brain no lon ger recognizes it as a paralyzed limb.s More recently, virtual reality has been used to treat sufferers of phantom-limb pain; by attaching the present limb to an interface that shows two limbs moving, the somatosensory cortex is tricked again.6 Both the "mirror box" and the virtual-reality interface (developed by the University of Man chester) work on the same principle of visual-kinesthetic synesthe sia, except that the illusion is stronger in the latter. It is through the use of imaginatioll-not accepting the absence as a lack but rather as a spectre that is present but cannot be encoun tered directly-that the symptoms suffered by phantom limb patients can be treated. This is not merely the creation of a "substi tute formation" in the sense that Freud himself asserted, which is "the manufacturing of a [formation] which recompenses the subject for his loss of reality."7 In Freud's case, the "substitute formation" allows one to ignore the cause and simulate one in order to treat the symptom(s); as long as the patient believes that one is treating the "cause," the symptom(s) will go away. This use of the imagina tion is more radical as the concept of the cause--<>rigin-is done away with: it matters not if the limb in question is present or absent (phantom); both are treated as if they are one and the same. The line between the real and the virtual is erased. In fact, all amputees, and all who work with them, know that a phantom limb is essential if an artificial limb is to be used.
Blindness, or What is This No-Thing We See?
23
Dr Michael Kramer writes: "Its value to the amputee is enormous. I am quite certain that no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it." Thus the disappearance of a phantom may be disastrous, and its recovery, its reanimation, a matter of urgency.... One such patient, under my care, describes how he must "wake up" his phantom in the mornings ...Only then can he put on his prosthesis and walk. g It is thus the imagination that allows for the birth of the third term, the phantom-real limb, the limb that is virtual but which treats the symptoms of not only the real (absent) limb, but also the virtual (phantom) limb. It is the imagination that not only bridges the gap between the real and the phantom but more radically allows for the real-virtual, the virtual-real, to exist. In this manner, what cannot be seen can potentially be experienced, be momentarily glimpsed. However, even though the imagination is the space in which treatment of phantom-limb pain takes place, one can never deny that there is physiological aspect. Even as there must be a for getting of the fact that the limb is absent, one cannot completely forget the limb as well; if that were so, there would be no mem ory of its sensation at all. Hence the phantom-limb sensation is neither purely psychological nor physiological. Here, we have to tum to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and consider his claim that what has to be understood, then, is how the psychic deter mining factors and the physiological conditions gear into each other: it is not clear how the imaginary limb, if de pendent on physiological conditions and therefore the result of a third person causality, can in another context arise Ollt of the personal history of the patient, his memo
ries. emotions and volitions.')
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This suggests that sensations are neither purely from external stim uli nor purely from internal cognition: there is rather an interplay between the two, where the body discovers itself via the world and also discovers the world through itself. Hence, the phantom limb "is not the mere outcome of objective causality; no more is it a cogita tio. "10 Lying in the indistinct space between cognition and external
stimuli, the sensation felt by the patient is similar to a reflex-an action that is neither merely a reaction to stimuli nor fully cogni tive. In fact, "reflex movements, whether adumbrated or executed, are still only objective processes whose course and results con sciousness can observe, but in which it is not involved."11 The reflex does not arise from objective stimuli, but moves back towards them, and invests them with a mean ing which they do not possess taken singly
as
psycho
logical agents, but only when taken as a situation ...The reflex, in so far as it open itself to the meaning of a situ ation, and perception; in so far as it does not first of all posit an object of knowledge and is an intention of our whole being, are modalities of a pre-objective view ...12 Hence all cognition--evel)' act of knowing-<:an only happen ret rospectively: the meaning of the reflex can only be inferred after the fact. In other words, the phantom-limb sensation can only be known at the vel)' moment in which it is felt, where the "experi ence does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of essence to survive only as a matter of being and with a certain degree of general ity."13 It is a "personal existence ...without, in other words, being able either to reduce the organism to its existential self, or itself to the organism."14 Hence the phantom limb "is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now ...with no hint of it belonging to the past."15
Blindness, or W hat is This No-Thing We See?
25
Every time there is a sensation in the phantom limb, it is an event, unknowable until the moment in which it is felt; it is both preobjective and presubjective, preceding both the cognitive sub ject and also the very object of cognition itself. So, even as the phantom-limb pain is treatable in the realm of the imagination, this is a treatment of its symptoms; the cause, and the very status of the sensation itself, remains unknown and ultimately unknowable. Just because something is not written on a page does not mean that it is not there. Perhaps in order to read properly, one must always respond to both what is and what is not--or at least seems not to be-there.16 Perhaps, then, reading is the effect the sensation-that lies beyond both the reader and the text; it is something that can only be experienced in its singular situation and known, at best, only retrospectively. Or, more radically still, one must always treat the absent as a (potential) present; it is, after all, the ghosts-the phantoms that haunt the text-that maintain the unknowability of the text, that keep it from becoming a book.
THE
BOOK
AS A (DEATH) SENTENCE
For this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogma tism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins appre hensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their natural vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. 17 The moment a religion shifts from a movement, a constantly changing, morphing, and becoming, into stagnancy-being, a doctrine, a book (and, more precisely, a prescriptive book}-all
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"vitality and growth" are drained from it: it is the systematization of the movement into a linear series, "a sum total of historical events," into a logical sequence, a Socratic "knowledge by rea son," which drains the movement and settles it into a structure, where it becomes lifeless, dead. By attempting to fully under stand the religion-to move it from myths which are dynamic, ever-changing, constantly retold, altered, alive, becoming, to a set story, a history, linear, predictable, retraceable, uncontami nated by variation-what happens is the death of the religion itself into mere dogma and orthodoxy. In the same way, it is the attempt to fully grasp the meaning of the text-in order that words contain a totality of meaning, under a particular category of understanding-that ultimately destroys the text, that destroys the potentiality of a text. Consid ering that there is no logic which can sustain itself-"no proof can possibly exist determining the truth or falsity of the unde cidable statement in the language of the system within which the statement was formulated"'8-in order for there to be any total ity (in the form of a consistent logic that can prove itself within its own logical system), some form of exclusion, by way of the suppression of the axiom that does not conform to the internal logic of the system, must take place. In order for a text to transubstantiate itself into a book, some part(s) of it must be left out; in order that a text (which is a ver sion, a single reading, a potential reading) is transformed into, becomes, a book (a complete reading, a consistent reading, or even the only reading), some parts of the text must always be either subsumed or suppressed.'9 In order for the "vitality and growth" of the text to remain, there must always be a measure of the unknown, of the unknowable, of the to-be-known. The only manner in which a book can be sustained (in its total ity) is through the effacement of the text itself, or, more precisely,
Blindness, or What is This No-Thing We See?
27
through the effacement of the potentiality of the text-for in its full potentiality, the text is always fragmented and never allows for a single reading, for just one reading. This is because every text relies on language as its medium, and since language is first and foremost figurative, it can never be a fully consistent logical system: the trope is what allows language to be, but at the same time is its failing point. The trope is the "undecidable statement" within the system, which is that grammar as tropes are not to be understood aesthetically, as orna ment, nor are they understood semantically as a figurative meaning that derives from literal, proper denomination. Rather, the reverse is the case. The trope is not a derived, marginal , or aberrant form of language but the linguis tic paradigm par excellence. The figurative structure is not one linguistic mode among others but it characterizes language as such.20 The trope is what allows a statement to be made-all statements require comparisons (even something as basic as naming some thing is a transference between the object as such and the object that is named as such, as if the property of one is the property of the other), and it is the trope that allows for these transferences of properties across terms-but is also the failing point of the same statement, as all transferences are appearances. A II state ments are hinged on the appearance of sameness between the term and the object as such, or, more precisely, on the appearance of a link between language and an external referent, and as such, all that the statement actually refers to is the fact that it is refer ring. Since all of language is an appearance and an illusion, there is then no meta-grounding for any interpretation of a text; each reading of a text unveils an opinion (or a potentiality) of the text and never its truth. In this way, each reading of the text is always haunted by the ghost of other readings-other possibilities�ach
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28
of which is potentially as true as the first; the absent readings are the spectres-the phantoms-that continue to disturb the presence of the first reading. It is language that allows for the positing of a particular reading of a text, but it is also language that prevents the text from coming to a unitary interpretation, from being a totalizing book. It is this tension between grammar and the figure that ensures that reading is a continuous process. For, even as grammar attempts to suppress figurative language (in order that it can become a com plete system), it is always unable to do so, as it is precisely the trope that allows language to exist in the first place. The system of relationships that generates the text and that functions independently of its referential meaning is its grammar. To the extent that a text is grammatical, it is a logical code or a machine. And there can be no agram matical text, as the most nongrammatical of poets, Mal larme, was the first to acknowledge. Any nongrammatical text will always be read as a deviation from an assumed grammatical norm. But just as no text is conceivable without grammar, no grammar is conceivable without the suspension of referential meaning. Just as no law can ever be written unless one suspends any consideration of applicability to a particular entity including, of course, oneself, grammatical logic can function only if its refer ential consequences are disregarded. On the other hand, no law is a law unless it also applies to particular individuals. It cannot be left hanging in the air, in the abstraction of its generality. Only by thus refer ring back to particular praxis can thejustice of the law be tested, exactly as thejustesse of any statement can only be tested by its referential verifiability, or by deviation from its verification.... There can be no text without grammar: the logic of grammar generates texts only in the absence of referential meaning, but every text generates a referent
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29
that subverts the grammatical principle to which it owed its constitution.21 In other words, we can call text
any entity that can be considered from such a double
perspective: as a generative, open minded, non-referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence. The "definition" of the text also states the impossibility of its existence and prefigures the allegorical narratives of this impossibility. A text is defined by the necessity of considering a state
ment, at the same time, as performative and constative, and the logical tension between figure and grammar is repeated in the impossibility of distinguishing two lin guistic functions which are not necessarily compatible. It seems that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively ... and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows.22 It is this inability to close off the text that ensures the reader is always reading, and continually reading; one can never claim to have already read. It is also this same inability to read a text and make a claim for having read it that will not allow anyone to stake a legitimate claim to the assuredness of having understood the text or to the assuredness that they have understood the text. This suggests that not only is every reading illegitimate, but that it is precisely this illegitimacy that allows for reading itself: the impossibility of a total reading, a complete reading, is itself the reason-the very condition of the possibility-that there is a space of reading, a space for reading. Since reading ultimately escapes the cognitive knowledge of the reader, it is always a reading that is beyond, outside, the self.
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And if we are attempting to think the possibility of a reading that is not centred on the self-if we are trying to explore "liter ature is otherness"23 in its fullest sense-then the radical other ness of literature, of the text, must be maintained. The text must be approached, and continually be approached, but can never be reached. In order to respond fully to the text, one must be able to respond to the text as other, without subsuming the other under one's conception. In other words, the text must not merely become a reflection of one's self, as that would be merely the construction of the text in order to react to it, a simulated other to which the self responds to; that would result in a literal cir cle: the self creating an(other) self-the reader writing another text-to which (s)he responds. Instead of a simulated other, the otherness of the other must be maintained whilst the reader is reading, responding to, and with the text: this means that the text always remains fully other to the self. One reads whilst never claiming to fully comprehend what one is reading. At the moment of reading, the reader does not merely process the text in the sense of obtaining information from the text; reading is responding, a negotiation and not an exchange, with the text. Reading: not a prescribed act-a one-way projection of the reader onto the text-but a response, two-way and in full com munion between the reader and the text (s)he is reading. Each time a text is read, there is a response not only to what one can see-what one knows-but also to the unknown, the unknow able, the phantom(s) in the text. For like phantom limbs, just because they are not so obviously seen does not mean that they are absent, does not mean they have no effects, does not mean they do not affect. Not only do these phantoms, the unknown potentialities, allow reading to occur in the first place-it is precisely the impreciseness of the figure, the trope, the hidden potentialities of language itself that allow for the general rule to
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31
work in each particular, singular, unique situation-it is also the phantoms that ensure that reading itself can never be legitimate, total, concrete, complete, final; the phantoms are what allow reading to begin and also ensure that it continually continues. However, in order to explore the ability of the reader to respond to and with the text, the responsibility of the reader to the text, we must take another slight detour, one that goes through what it even means to respond to the other in the first place.
BLIND Enlles, OR CLOSE YOUR EVES (TO) SEE THE THIRD In order to be responsible, one must be able to respond to the needs of the other without subsuming the other under one's con ception; in other words, the other must not merely become a reflection of one's self. That would be merely the construction of the other in order to react to her or him: the result is a literal circle, a masturbatory circle, the self responding to itself. In order to have true responsibility, one must maintain the otherness of the other whilst responding. This means that the other always remains fully other to the self: one responds to the needs of the other whilst not fully understanding what these very needs are. At the moment of response, in the terms of Wer ner Hamacher's elegant and deceptively simple formulation, "understanding is in want of understanding":24 the self does not merely act towards the other, it is responding, communicating, negotiating. Responsibility is not a prescribed act-a one-way projection of the self onto the other-but a response: two-way and in full communion between the self and the other. The problem with a responsibility that is known a priori (in the form of an ethics that is predetermined) is that there is no consid eration of the singularity of the situation. This is the problem that
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Jacques Lacan points out in Kant avec Sade-in such a case, there is no other that is responded to, as no matter what the situ ation is, the method is always the same; whilst this doesn't nec essarily mean that the resulting response is exactly the same, it does subsume the situation under the same conception, the same categoryY In this manner, the will of the other is not taken into account; in effect, the will of the other-and the other her- or himself-is effaced. A true response to the needs of the other has to take into account the unique situation that both the self and the other are in at any moment. The Levinasian approach to ethics addresses the issue of the other, but ultimately is lacking in response as well, not in the sense of effacing the other, but, ironically, in its attempt to fully understand the other's needs. By claiming to privilege the "vis age of the Other" and emptying the self up to the point of becom ing "hostage for the Other," what occurs is an inverted arrogance: as if I am the centre whose exis tence threatens all others ... confer[ing] on [it] a central position: this very prohibition to assert [the self] makes [it] into the neutral medium, the place from which the truth about the [other] is accessible.26 What happens in this situation is, the self absorbs the other under its own categories: there is a total consumption of the other. More precisely, the self simulates the other-the response is not to the other but rather to the simulacra of the other. Hence, the self is actually responding to its own projected needs; the other exists, but as an imaginary other. Anytime the claim is made that the other is centered, to the extent that, in Levina sian terms, "subjectivity is being hostage"27-taking the place of and being a sacrifice for the other--even if the intention is to fully understand the other in order to respond to her or his needs,
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what occurs is the disappearance of the other via simulation: another other is created, there is no longer an other. In order for a true response, a full understanding of the other must never be assumed, or even attempted; in this sense, the "visage" of the other must always be (at least partially) hidden. This hidden "visage" of the other is not merely what Slavoj Zizek claims when he says, "The true ethical step is one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face: the choice against the face, for the third."28 Zizek's claim is that in priv ileging the third over the "visage," one is able to have an ethics that isjust (in the legal sense), for then one can "abstract [the face of the Other] and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background."29 Whilst the Zizekian gesture allows one to perform ajustice (which, in his conception, has to be blind to specifics, as in every instance, one can alwaysjustif)t whatever her or his actions are; for instance, personal shortcomings such as the failing nature of man), this is an ethics which privileges the material situation ("the faceless Thirds") whilst effacing the other completely. In the selfs act of "indiffer ence," what one does is indeed "suspend one's power of imagina tion"JO with respect to the other, but what occurs instead is that this imagination is transposed to the "faceless Thirds." In this manner, what is occurring is a simulation of the "faceless Thirds" and their needs. So whilst escaping the Levinasian trap of simulating the other, the Zizekian gesture merely simulates the "faceless others." Indeed, this is not "simply the Derridian-Kierkegaardian point that I always betray the Other because tout autre est un autre, because I have to make a choice to select who my neighbour is from the mass of the Thirds,"JI but is rather a mere reversal of that statement-an "I betray the other because I refuse to select from the thirds" or, even more radically, "I betray both the other and all others because I am merely subsuming all of you under my conception-I have made ALL of you my absolute other(s)."J2
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The site of responsibility is indeed the third, but not as Zizek posits it, for the third exists not as an externality to the other (in the form of the faceless others), but rather in the other her or himself. In responding to and with the needs of the other, the self has to communicate with the other in order to uncover these needs. Communication takes place in the third itself, for true communication is not merely the exchange of information (which requires a flattening-out of differences-which we see in the Zizekian gesture-in order for this exchangeability to take place), but rather is a process where the two parties connect and touch each other. Communication, as Lucretius posits, takes place in the skin (the simulacrum) between the two parties, and it is in that space that the two parties negotiate.33 In this sense, there is no direct transfer of meaning (as posited, for instance, in the Shannon-Weaver model, where every miscommunication is due to interference and misinterpretation of codes), but rather, meaning itself is an emergent property of the process of com munication. There is no such thing as miscommunication: com munication itself is an event, and by definition, its result cannot be predetermined. Responding to the other takes place in the third-between the self and the other-and it is at this site that the needs of the other potentially emerge. There is no doubt that there is an exchange that takes place in communication--otherwise, one will emerge from any process of communication completely unchanged (which is not true). But the exchange that takes place is not one of a direct infor mation exchange; this would be the realm of a general exchange, an exchange of one unit of information for another. This is commu nication conceived as an economic exchange, where all differences have to be flattened (or abstracted from a use-value to an exchange value), and perhaps the sense of meaning that is derived from the act is, then, its surplus value. This fits in perfectly with the logic
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of capital: communication as a process that is calculable, pre dictable, and which produces surplus value that guarantees its continual cycle. An analogy of this would be one of furniture in the modern context: each piece of furniture no longer has a meaning in itself(the last of this is perhaps "Dad's chair," which on Iy he can sit in), except for the fact that it is part of the over all design of that particular room. In this manner, each piece is perfectly substitutable with any other piece; take any chair out and replace it with another chair-as long as it fits in with the overall design, it will work: functionality is the key here. The "ambience" of the room is the concept that determines the individual pieces of furniture, which only have meaning insofar as being part of the network that is the room itself: each piece is individual, but not singular.34 In a concept of communication in which there is a direct exchange of information, each word functions like a piece of furniture: nothing has meaning in itself, and there is no singularity; individual words have meaning only as part of a network of other words, constructions, sentences, other sentences, and so on. Communication itself would be sub sumed under functionality (that is, the purpose of communica tion would be predetermined-exchange a particular piece of information). This is the only way in which one can deem that miscommunication took place: only with an aim that is set can any failure be determined and calculated. With such a concept of communication, the importance of each person is determined by her position in the network, and, by extension, each person is completely and utterly replaceable, exchangeable. Each person is individual, but not singular. A process of communication in which there is no a priori aim (and, by extension, no result) rests on an impossible exchange: an exchange that occurs in spite of the fact that there is no flatten ing of differences.35 An impossible exchange is one that realizes
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that there can be no exchange because all logical systems rest on an exclusion, one that realizes that there is no logical system that can sustain itself within itself; without the possibility of a totalizing logical system, there can never be a natural equiva lence. Therefore, there can never be any direct exchange except if the exchange is simulated. This brings us back to Lucretius' conception of communication: the exchange takes place in the simulacra, an exchange that is impossible but which happens nonetheless. This exchange, in the form of the act of commu nication, is precisely the emergent property of the process of communication: communication occurs for the sake of commu nication and not for some teleological goal. There is no overall "design" or "ambience" to govern the process of communica tion; an emergent property, by strict definition, is unknowable a priori. Hence, each act of communication is unique. Since there is no overall structure under which the act of communication is subsumed, there is a potential for a unique and new response in each act of communication.36 It is this incalculability that resides in every pure decision, where there is, as Jacques Derrida posits, "the sacrifice of econ omy, that without which there is no free responsibility or deci sion."37 It is this incalculability that saves a decision from being a mere prelude to an act. The moment of decision is one in which there is the potential for responding to the other, where the other remains unknowable (if not totally, at least partially), and in which one responds with a degree of blindness. The blindness occurs in two realms: one with regards to the other which the self is responding to (in the sense of not subsuming the other under the self); the second to the act that is to be done in response to the other (in the sense of not knowing a priori what is to be done). It is this double blindness that allows the self to respond, in the fullest sense, to the other: not only does "every other (one)
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or What is This No-Thing We See?
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[remain] every (bit) other"38 in the acknowledgement that every decision privileges one over all the remaining others, toward whom we alway s remain accountable, but also the other that is privileged does not become merely an extension of the self. This is why Kierkegaard proclaims, "The instant of decision is madness":39 one chooses in spite of the fact that there is no ratio nal decision to choose one course over the other(s). If one were to rely solely on logic or rationality, there would always be an apo retic situation, but one has to choose in spite of this. Otherwise, there is a situation of inaction (which is a decision in itself): this would be the decision of nonresponsibility, the refusal to respond to the other and all the other others. This is the problem with Zitek's position: by refusing to choose, he ultimately chooses a position that responds to none, that abandons all the others. How ever, if one chooses to respond, then one must respond whilst being blind (to all other possibilities). It is this double blindness that allows for the potentiality of a response that is an absolute responsibility [that] could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible.40 This is why Zitek claims that the authentic moment, the real moment of decision, has to be one which is "harshness ...sus tained by love,"41 which in his conception is a moment of justice that is guided by love, a blindness in fidelity to the other. This is akin to Derrida's claim that true responsibility is one that doesn't keep account or give an account, neither to man, to humans, to society, to one's fellows, or to one's own. Such a responsibility keeps its secret, it cannot and need not present itself...It refuses to present itself before
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ity to responding to the needs of the other. Whilst responding to the needs of the other, the self and the other remain abso lute singularities-this is why there is no economy of exchange that takes place. The exchange is an impossible exchange: it is an aeconomical exchange that takes place. This is secret of the exchange: there is nothing in the exchange except for the exchange itself. This is the secret of the gift: there is nothing in the giving but the giving itself. In a blind responsibility, one is responsible to no one except to the ability to respond; this is the paradoxical condition of every decision: it cannot be deduced from a form of knowledge of which it would simply be the effect, conclusion or explication. It struc turally breaches knowledge and is thus destined to non manifestation; a decision is, in the end, always secret.43 But in spite of this destiny, in order to respond to the other, one must respond-this is precisely where the element of blind ness lies. To fully respond to the needs of the other, one must be blind to everything else, including the other: it is this that allows the other to remain fully other whilst one responds to her or him. There is no object to responsibility. Of course, once the instant of decision has occurred, there is a consequence which takes the form of the act, after which there is an accountability to the other and to the other others as well-this is when everything is reinscribed into an economy and one can calculate whether the response was "good" or "bad" and so on. However, this is an economy that is "in simulacrum, an economy that is ambiguous enough to seem to integrate non economy."44 For in every true response to the other, there is the
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element of the unknowable-the secret-that is brought into the act itself: there is no preknowledge of the consequences, there is a potentiality for a previously unknown consequence. Ulti mately, "the response and hence responsibility always risk what they cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense and retribution. They risk the exchange that they might expect but are at the same time unable to count on."45 It is impossible to speak of a true responsibility in prescriptive terms, for that would be merely another categorical imperative that attempts to subsume every situation under its logic. The dou ble blindness that is in every decision (as opposed to mere option or alternative), in fidelity to responsibility, is not an exception or an aberrant that can be done away with-it is an essential part of responsibility itself. This blindness ensures that the self responds to the other without doing away with the otherness of the other, the radical otherness of the other. True responsibility is not an answer but a question: it opens up a space in which one can be responsible to the other by being a true question (for which there is no known answer, at least to the one asking the question), and "as often happens, the call of or for the question, and the request that echoes through it, takes us further than the response."46 It is this question, irresponsible to everything except respon sibility itself, blind to everything-even the other-except the possibility of responding to the (unknown) other, that allows both the other and the self to preserve their singularity. In respond ing to each other, there is a coming together that is akin to a marriage, the precise ending of the vow being "what God has joined, man must not divide." The joining is always imperfect and fragile--otherwise, the vow would have read, "man cannot divide." This suggests that man is fully capable of dividing the union, and it is this fragility that ensures that marriage is not a mere constitutive merger; the two remain fully singular and the
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union depends on the two recognizing its fragility and becoming one in spite of the impossibility of doing so. Hence, it is only though this agreement, this contract, that the union is formed, that the union has a potentiality of occurring; in no way does the contract guarantee that the union will last, or even that the union will take place: the function of the contract is only to open up the space for the potentiality of this vel)' union (perhaps in complete futility, as it may never even occur in the first place). In the same vein, the self and the other respond to each other in spite of the potential futility of any act to change or improve the situation; the self and the other respond with each other in spite of the impossibility of doing so. This is a responsibility which is inherently blind, in which blind ness is a part of its vel)' structure, a responsibility that closes its eyes to everything-is blind to everything-except the ability to respond. • •• afo
Since the response of the self with the other occurs within a material reality-that of the situation-we must think about the vel)' situation itself. More precisely, what must be thought about are the rules that govern the situation. In the case of read ing, we must, then, first look at the contract that lies between the reader and the text and exactly what this entails. For it is not as if anyone reads in a vacuum or is the vel)' first to come to reading; hence, there are rules to reading. Just as we are born into language, we are also born into reading. And it is these rules that precede us-both written (grammar) and by social conventions (interpretation)--that influence us and govern how we read. However, in order to think these rules, we must take yet another detour, for how is it possible to speak of the rules of reading
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directly? That would be akin to describing oneself without ever having looked into a mirror: all one ends up doing is talking about a simulated self. In the same vein, attempting to read the rules of reading without reading can only take place if one simulates the text into existence. This is the problem with literary theory-all it is is a prescription of how to read what you are reading; in effect, what it does is everything except reading itself.
LITERARY THEORY AND THE ERASlJRE OF TEXTS Any discourse meant to account for prescriptions, trans forms them into conclusions of reasonings, into proposi tions derived from other propositions, in which the latter are metaphysical propositions on being and history, or on the soul, or on society.47 Despite its claim of trying to understand texts, prescriptive liter ary theory ends up subsuming every text under a metatext, flat tening any differences between texts. In this manner, any text can be read as Marxist, Lacanian, postcolonial, or any other the ory that one desires. This is due to the fact that every text is sub sumed under an a priori concept(ion): either there is a complete consumption of the text, or the text that is looked at, gazed upon, is simulated. In either case, the result is the same: everything is read as if it is the same thing. All understanding texts does is to places texts under its stance. Just as all furniture in a room is part of a network of design (the overall ambience), literary theories construct a network within which texts revolve: each text ceases to have any mean ing except for its position within the theory. In order that a total ity (which is the consistency of the theory itself) is created, the theory which purports to enable the reader to think about the text ends up completely effacing that very text. Not only does
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it not matter that each text is no longer singular, it is so much the better that they are completely exchangeable-in that way, one can switch them around without any substantial cost (to the theory). Prescriptive theories are teleological propositions: their end points are determined a priori. However, their consistency can only be maintained via exclusion(s), for there is no consis tent logical premise that can sustain its own consistency with out a nonnegotiable assumption, without a presumption. In this way, one must either read a text whilst leaving out particulari ties (for if one considers such particularities, the totality always comes asunder), or one must subsume such particularities under one's conception. This in effect flattens every text into a mirror of every other: not exactly the same, but a mere reflection of the same idea, thought, premise. This is precisely the logic that is captured in the saying "Never let facts [of the text] get in the way of a good theory."48 Hence, prescriptive literary theory is a totality that can only occur with a willful, deliberate blindness, a refusal to see: in order that the theory can remain consistent, total, the fragment, the detail, the particularity has to be ignored, be cast aside, suppressed, kept in the dark. Once again, it is Friedrich Nietzsche who resurrects to remind us that it is a yearning for "metaphysical comfort," of certainty, which brings about this theorizing-as opposed to true think ing, which is always uncomfortable, discomforting, unsettling in order to give the "theorist" the false assurance that he knows, that he understands, that he grasps the world in his hands; the ego of the "theoretical man" is satisfied when he can fully explain the world he lives in.49 In other words, his vanity is sati ated when he can subsume the world under his own conception of it. In the same manner, it is the ego of the reader, the desire to be not just the centre from which the text is read, but to be the
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centre of the text itself, that allows for the exclusionary mea sures that allow the text to become a book. In effect, the reader adopts the gesture of the sadist-the total effacement of the text by her or his will.50 In the attempt to totalize the text into a book, there has to be an erasure, a destruction of the life of the text, a sentencing of the text, a capital sentence on the text; in order to maintain the totality of the book, the "I ife and vitality" of the text has to be drained, a death sentence has to be passed on the text itself. The movement from a text to a book is precisely the movement of the reader from one of negotiation with the text to one where the reader displaces the text and becomes the centre of her or his own reading, where (s)he reads nothing but her- or himself. In order to try and avoid this gesture of effacement, we have to allow language to be the mirror into which we look: in this manner, we can look into the text at the same time as the text looks into us. This is reading not as a prescription but as an act, a negotiation, a relationship; in this conception, language is then the third, the gap between the reader and the text, the site of the communication between the text and the reader. What this suggests is that the blindness that is involved in ethical read ing, in proper reading, is not one that is of the self, not one that is willed solely by the self. It is a blindness that is a part of the process of reading, as opposed to a blindness that precedes the reading, a "there are certain moments in which one is blind to what comes before and after, as this is the process of reading, the nature of reading itself," as opposed to an "I will not see some thing because I don't want to." This is because language itself is constantly slipping. One cannot legitimately claim to have a full knowledge of language, understand language: we speak lan guage as much as it speaks us, we read language as much as it reads us. Hence, the blindness of proper reading is precisely the
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blindness that is encountered in making an ethical decision: that of the double blindness. To read properly, one must be blind to both the text that one is reading and also to oneself, the self that precedes the reading of the text. It is in this impossible situation, this impossible exchange between the reader and the text, that reading occurs, that reading can potentially occur. Since we are trying to think of reading as a relationship-the negotiated third-between the reader and the text, we shall look into a text that attempts to read a relationship between two persons. Whilst reading this text about reading persons, perhaps we might uncover a spectre of reading; perhaps we might catch a glimpse of how this act of reading might take place, see reading occur while reading, see reading while not trying to look for it at all.
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ENDNOTES
I. International Council of Ophthalmology, "International Standards:
Visual Standards-Aspects and Ranges of Vision Loss with Empha sis on Population Surveys," (April 2002). 2. V. S. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow and Co.,
1998),43.
3. One such possibility is the "remapping" of the somatosensory cor
tex, which then allows another cortical region to take over from the region that no longer has input. For instance, if someone's right hand is amputated, the cortical region for that hand no lon ger receives direct input. However, the somatosensory system can reorganize such that a neighboring cortical region can now "take over" this cortical region that has no input. Ramachandran and colleagues first demonstrated this remapping by showing that stroking different parts of the face led to perceptions of being touched on different parts of the missing limb. Through magne toencephalography (MEG), which permits visualization of activ ity in the human brain, Ramachandran verified the reorganization in the somatosensory cortex. V. S. Ramachandran, D. C. Rogers Ramachandran, and M. Stewart, "Perceptual Correlates of Mas
258, no. 5085 (1992): 1159-1160. See also T. T. Yang, C. C. Gallen, V. S. Ramachan
sive Cortical Reorganization," Science
dran, et al., "Noninvasive Detection of Cerebral Plasticity in Adult Human Somatosensory Cortex," Neuroreport: An International Journal for the Rapid Communication of Research in Neurosci ence
5, no. 6 (/994): 701-704.
4. This is what Maurice Merleau-Ponty terms "interoceptivity," as
opposed to "exteroceptivity." In this conception, "the 'psycho physical event' is therefore no longer of the type of 'wordly' cau sality ... the excitation is seized and reorganized by transversal functions which make it resemble the perception which it is about to arouse ... anticipating the stimuli and itself tracing out the form which I am about to perceive. I cannot understand the function of
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5. V. S. Ramachandran and D. C. Rogers-Ramachandran, "Synaes thesia in Phantom Limbs Induced with Mirrors," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 263, no. 1369 (1996): 377-386. 6. http://news.bbc.co.uklllhilhealth/6I46I36.stm. 7. As read in Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), 35. 8. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador,1985), 64. 9. Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception, 89. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 91. 12. Ibid., 91-92. 13. Ibid., 96. 14. Ibid.,97. 15. Ibid., 98. 16. J. Hillis Miller calls this the "latent law" of the text in his book The Ethics of Reading (1987). This will be discussed more later in this text,particularly in the chapter "Rereading Miller: J Stands Before the Law." 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967),75. 18. Avital Ronell, The Test Drive, 57. 19. The change in state from a text to a book is exactly like the transubstantiation that happens at communion: it is a change, in essence, that can never be experienced-it is metaphysical. In the same way, the totalizing of a text into a book is completely super sensory: there is nothing in the text itself that suggests that this is even possible-it is on pure faith (in the possibility of a totality, in the possibility of a book) that the book is simulated into exis tence. In this sense, in order to be a priest-or to believe in the totality of a book-one has to be a Platonian whilst forgetting the fact that strictly speaking,the Idea can never be reached,or even known.
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20. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rous seau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer sity Press, 1979), 105. The issue of the tension between rhetoric and grammar and, more precisely, the fact that tropes are a part of language and not merely an aberrant use of language is meditated on in Allegories of Reading. See especially pp. 105-118 on the centrality of tropes in language and argument.
21. Ibid., 268-269. Since one can never escape from grammar, as any text, even a "nongrammatical text[,] will always be read as a devia tion from an assumed grammatical form," this suggests that gram mar itself is a base assumption of language. This is why de Man has to ultimately rely on Mallarme's acknowledgment: one cannot prove the existence of grammar; it is an assumption, a doxa.
22. Ibid., 270. 23. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2001),19. 24. Hamacher, "Premises," in Premises, I. 25. Even if one considers Kant as teleological rather than ontologi cal-as Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud do in Just Gaming-it still holds that the end point becomes the lens to which one then contextualizes the entire situation. Whilst it is true that the end result is undetermined in this manner, the end is always already known: this does not allow the situation to be responded to as such. For a more comprehensive discussion on Kant as teleological, see Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard and Jean- Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 1985), 84-93.
26. Slavoj Zizek, "Smashing the Neighbor's Face," http://www.lacan. comlzizsmash.htm, 8-9, (additions in parentheses are mine). All references to Zizek in this chapter are from this source.
27. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 127.
28. Zizek, "Smashing," 10 (see n. 58). 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., II. 31. Ibid., 9.
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32. In a conversation, Werner Hamacher pointed out that at no point does Levinas suggest that the "visage" of the other can even be seen. In this case, one can then say that Zifek's gesture-effacing Levinas in order to simulate a "Levinas" in order to efface him yet again-is precisely a manifestation of his ethical conception.
33. Lucretius, Sensation and Sex, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Pen guin, 2005), 39-60. 34. This analysis of furniture and "ambience" is taken from Jean Bau drillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005), 30-74. 35. The concept of an "impossible exchange" is taken from Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 200 I). 36. There is also a chance that this does not occur-in fact, the chance of a new and unique response is probably lower than the chance of one that has already occurred. In most occasions, the lack of time dictates that conventions (which are predetermined) govern the "emergent property" of communication such that the "meaning" produced is not a unique one. This potential "not to be" is part of a full potentiality, without which there would be no difference between potentiality and actuality except for different stages in a progression. True potentiality is thus the potential "to be" and the potential "not to be." This is meditated on in detail in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Meridian, 1999). 37. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),95. 38. Ibid., 82. 39. Ibid., 65. This is probably a reference to Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments.
40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.
Ibid.,
61 (italics original). 12 (see n. 58). Derrida, The Gift of Death, 62. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 115.
Zifek, "Smashing,"
r
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47. Lyotard and Thebaud, "Third Day: A General Literature," in Just Gaming, 45. 48. This is akin to the Borges tale where the map which covers the ter ritories becomes more important (and more real) than the territo ries themselves: the model now precedes reality. This is explored in Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila F. Glazer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), espe cially pp. 1-3. 49. Nietzsche, The Birth a/Tragedy, especially sections 15-18 on pp. 93-109. 50. The sadistic and the masochistic modes of reading will be explored in detail in the next chapter, "The Contract: Venus in Furs, or How to Read the Other."
CHAPTER 2 THE CONTRACT VENUS IN FURS, OR
How TO READ THE OTHER "Not yet," said Wanda, "I shall first add the conditions and then you can sign in all due form."1 W hen someone sits before a text, (s)he enters into a contract with the text, and there is a negotiation between her or him and the text. It is a unique situation, where the reader both creates the contract and responds to and with the text at the same time as the binds (in the forms of rules of reading) are set and obeyed by the same person. This is unlike the situation in the social con tract, where one is born into an agreement that precedes the self entering the agreement; the only time this is not true is if one is at the very time and space where this agreement is negotiated.
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However, when one takes into consideration the fact that one is born into language, it reopens the question of how much subjec tivity is present in the creation of the contract with the text: if we are already bound by the existing rules (of grammar), how much space is there for any negotiation? In order to think about reading--or, to be more exact, to think about the possibility of proper reading as such--one must first consider what happens at the juncture when the reader reads the text, the moment of decision when the reader encounters the text. Only if the moment of reading is considered as an encoun ter is reading in its fullest sense possible, for every encounter is potentially new and hence, so is every reading: only then is reading not a prescribed and predetermined outcome, but rather a negotiation between the reader and the text. But in order to do that, we have to first think about the con tract, that is, the site of this negotiation. That would require us to enter the "form" of the contract, for what is a contract but a ritual, a particular relationship between the signatories?
A QUESTION OF VIOLENCE; A STATEMENT OF TERROR My slave, The conditions under which I accept you as my slave and tolerate you at my side are as follows: You shall renounce your identity completely. You shall submit totally to my wil1.2 These are the opening lines of the "Contract between Wanda and Sacher-Masoch." At first glance, it seems as if Sacher-Masoch's will is effaced here, but this is not the case, as the contract only holds due to the fact that Sacher-Masoch submits willingly to this clause: "I undertake, on my word of honor, to be the slave of
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Mrs. Wanda von Dunajew, in the exact way she demands, and to submit myself without resistance to everything she will impose on me."3 The key point of Sacher-Masoch's statement is that he "submit[s]" himself to the will of Wanda-in this manner, the sin gularity of both the masochist and his master are preserved. Both Wanda and Sacher-Masoch remain wholly alterior to each other. This same echo, that of a negotiation between two parties that remain wholly other to the other, is found in Venus in Furs in the "Agreement between Mrs. Wanda von Dunajew and Mr. Severin von Kuziemski."4 In fact, if it were anything other than a negotia tion, there would be no need for an "agreement" between the two parties in the first place; it would merely have been Wanda enforc ing her will on Severin or vice versa. Even the manner in which the contract can be ended-"Having been for many years weary of existence and the disappointments it brings, I have willfully ended my useless life"5-is agreed upon, and this is shown when Severin "quickly copied out the note confinning [his] suicide and handed it over to Wanda.''6 The question of whether death is a plausible, or even fair, means of ending a contract is a moot one--: the fact remains that Severin agrees to it of his own will. In the masochistic contract, there is a precise laying-out of what can and cannot be done: in other words, the boundaries are stated such that the alterity of both parties can be maintained. W hile the limits might not be concretely defined (after all, many particulars do occur according to the master's "will")--they work more on the level of boundaries which can constantly shift, rather than of fixed borders-they set in place the arena in which the contest of wills takes place. It is the contract that ensures that even though the relationship between the masochist and the other is one of master and slave, there is still a contest of wills: both the master and the slave maintain their wills in this relationship.
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and her or his victim, where the will of the other is completely negated. When the sadist approaches her or his other, (s)he does whatever (s)he wants to the other. In this manner, it is not what (s)he does to the other that matters, it is the fact that (s)he does it-{s)he does to the other precisely because (s)he can do it. This is the very nature of the power relation between the sadist and her or his other: the other is merely a victim to the will of the sadist. Hence, it matters little exactly what is done-whether the sadist beats her or his victim, whether the victim beats her or him-as it is a mere manifestation of the fact that it is the sadist who determines what happens. In this relationship, there is no negotiation: the will of the victim is not considered at all, the will of the victim is completely and utterly effaced.7 This is not to say that there are no similarities between the sadist and the masochist; the aims of both are the same: plea sure. Even if on the surface, pain seems to be inherent in the masochistic contract, this is but a by-product as "in sadism no less than in masochism, there is no direct relation to pain; pain should be regarded as an
effect only."g The aim of both the sadist
and the masochist is pleasure; the difference is the manner in which the other is conceived. In the masochistic contract, the other remains wholly other, whereas in sadism, there is no other. One way of looking at it is that the sadist effaces the other completely-there is a complete and utter imposition of her or his will over that of her or his victim. Hence, one could consider that the decision-making process of the sadist is based on her or his whims. Whether these whims are calculated, strategic, or merely random, off the cuff, is irrelevant; what remains crucial is that there is no consideration whatsoever of either the other or the particularity of the situation that (s)he is in. Another possibility
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is that the sadist is subsuming her or his victim under her or his conception-this would be an a priori concept to which the sadist applies in any and every situation. In either case, the other (as victim) is wholly and completely made self. In effect, the other is effaced precisely through the simulation of the other as self the other is completely objectivised, the other is made victim by making her into whatever91 want her or him to be. In a comparison between the structures of relationship of the sadist and the masochist, we are left with this difference: that between terror and violence. This leads us to the question of the third, and whether the third-the space of communication remains free and open to negotiation between the parties. In a relationship of violence, there is a power play, a contest of wills, between the parties: the power relation is the result of a negotiation, and contestation. This suggests that the space of the third remains open-there is no effacement-where communi cation can take place; the negotiation of power relations is one of the potential manifestations of this process of communica tion, undetermined and always situational. So, even if one of the wills eventually overpowers the other, both wills remain alterior to the other, both wills remain singular. Terror occurs when this space is denied-terrorism is precisely when the third is taken hostage. For instance, the event when planes crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, is an act of terrorism not because it was the people within the towers who were taken hostage, but because it was the public--or, more precisely, public opinion-that was. The public had no negotia tion power in this event; there was an imposition of a particular view on them by both the perpetrators of the plane attacks and the state. The people in the building themselves hardly mattered; in this case, they were completely effaced as singularities and were just considered as a group that perished-they were literally
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"victims of terror," as their effacement was the act of terror. This is why the actual number of people who perish in terror attacks rarely matters.1O The space of the third is taken away from the public; even if one contends that they can choose to accept or not accept the versions of the event that they are told, these are merely options.11 In the case of September 11, the fact that the date itself has been hijacked by the event--or, to be more precise, by the interpretation of that particular event, which amounts to a recreation or a simulation of the event-shows the full profun dity of the "Stockholm syndrome": not only is the public (who are the hostages) complicit with the hostage takers, the public is part of the terror itself, as it cannot exist without them.12 This is why violence resides in a question as opposed to a statement: for only when there is a question is there a space for potentiality, a space for negotiation. If the answers are already known-in the sense of an a priori position without any space for change, without any potentiality for differences, otherness there is no negotiation. Instead, there is an imposition of one over all the other possibilities: this is the realm of a statement, the site of terror. This is precisely why a statement always is in the form of a sentence-there is no more negotiation, the trial is over, and this is the final judgment.
A QUESTION OF READING, OR "ART LIES IN THE GAP BETWEEN THE PAINTING AND THE VIEWER"13 What happens when one reads? Or, more precisely, what hap pens during the process of reading: does one impose a reading onto a text, or does one read from the text? This is a question of whether meaning arises from the text (even if one takes into consideration that there is a process of interpretation that takes place) or whether meaning is read into--imposed upon-a text.
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A sadistic mode of reading is one in which the text itself is effaced, where there is absolutely no response to and with the text. This happens when there is an a priori conception that is imposed onto the text. In other words, there is the imposi tion of a theory-which is nothing more than a framework, a preconceived notion, through which one reads--onto a text.14 The result is a "text" that is simulated, as there is no theory that can sustain itself in totality-in consistency with itself-if one allows the text to remain open, to remain a text. This is an attempt to close the text-in other words, to transform the text into a book, to sentence upon a text a totality, a finality. This is what any theory attempts to do: impose a closed system upon the text and, by extension, push any other possibility into the margins. In order for the theory to hold, parts of the text have to be effaced, ignored, left out; this is precisely the exception, the exclusionary gesture, that has to occur for any logic to sustain itself, to close itself, as a totality. In order to maintain this total ity, there either has to be a willful blindness to the exception(s) within the text or a presupposition that there is a meaning that lies beyond the text. The idea of a meaning that lies beyond the text is much like the Platonian concept of the Idea-an Idea that comes from above, a transcendental Idea that becomes an over arching conception that binds any text, that imposes itself onto every textY The Platonian Idea effaces the reader's element of response: there is no longer any reading, negotiating with the text, taking place. More radically, there no longer is a reader: by attempting to possess the text within a totality, the reader is swallowed by the text, or, more accurately, by attempting to make the text whatever the reader wants the text to be, the simu lated text swallows the reader. This is done precisely through the function of the perfect seductress: by being "whatever you want me to be," the text has seduced the reader into its void,
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into its abyss. More than just an "I try to consume you such that you become me," it is a "by consuming you, I become you." Or, even more radically, "I consume you and then I become what I think you should be." Hence, the self-in the form of the reader is held hostage by the simulated text, or the text that the reader simulates to match her or his desires. In an attempt at making the text hostage to the reader, the reverse also happens-both text and reader are bound by the Idea. The simulation of the text in order to match the Idea-which is, by definition, simulated as well, as there is no way of knowing this Idea; it is transcendental-is what effaces any possibility of reading. And, by extension, if there is no reading that is taking place, there is no longer a reader (perhaps a viewer only): ultimately, the simulation effaces the self as reader. By attempting to efface the other, the self is sucked in by the void and becomes nothing as well. Instead of reading, the self only sees, views, gazes at the text, and in return, the text gazes back at the reader, looks back at the reader: both are drawn into a realm of simulation, the differences between both are flattened, equalized, wiped out. And in the end, there is neither text nor reader. In order to respond to, and with, the text as such, the reader needs to maintain the otherness of the text whilst responding. For this to happen, the text must always be approached but never subsumed. It is this ga(r-this space between the reader and the text, the space which is created and bound by the contract in which negotiation takes place. The ga(r-the skin between the parties on which communication takes place-is the place where there is the potentiality for reading. Only within the gap can the reader potentially respond to and with (for one must never forget that one is in a subjective position) the text whilst maintaining the radical otherness of the text. The centrality of the reader's position must be maintained, as it is only this posi tion that allows one to take full accountability for and to the text.
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If one adopts the false modesty of a decentralised position, one is actually saying that one is the absolute centre-I am afraid to take up a central position because I really believe that I affect everything, as everything actually revolves around me-which is the problem of the Levinasian position discussed earlier. In order to have a true response, a full understanding of the other must never be assumed, even as much as it is attempted. The text that is being read maintains its otherness from the reader (who is central) when the reader maintains a certain blind ness to it. In other words, it is only when the reader does not claim full knowledge over the text but is in continual negotiation with it that the text remains fully other. It is the space, the gap, between the reader and the text that is the site of reading, for it is this gap that ensures that "understanding is [always] in want of understand ing": the reader is responding to the text whilst acknowledging that it is impossible to fully understand the text, all the while realizing that understanding itself brings with it a non-understandability}6 It is this gap, between understanding and non-understandabil ity, this gap within understanding itself, that ensures that reading can even begin to take place. To explore this, we have to take a detour back to Venus in Furs. For, even as much as the contract between Wanda and Severin was negotiated, we must always remember that each and every time the issue of the contract was brought up, Severin was "burning with fever."17 The signing of the contract requires a "blind passion,"18 and this removal from the cognitive realm is exemplified by the way in which Severin conceives of his state of affairs: "The comic side of my situation is that I can escape but do not want to; I am ready to endure anything as soon as she threatens to set me free."19 This aporetic situation that Severin finds himself in-of choosing enslavement-results in him hav ing to lead parallel existences of Severin (the one who chose)
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and one that is "no longer Severin, but Gregor"20 (the one with out will), as the two forces cannot be embodied in the same name. In some way, "Gregor" is the manifestation of Severin's fantasy, as "with [him], everything takes root in the imagina tion,"21 as is the "mistress" (as opposed to Wanda), as this is the role that she has put on "merely to be agreeable to [Severin], to fulfill [his] dreams."22 But it is not as if the "mistress" is a role that is completely foreign to Wanda, one that is forced upon her. In fact, the role of the "mistress" is supplementary to her in its fullest sense-other to her, in the sense of a persona added on, yet at the same time "something that was already in [her] ... [that] might never have seen the light of day had [he] not aroused and cultivated these tendencies."23 However, whenever these two collide-the cognitive world of Severin and the fan tasy of Gregor-at the point when fantasy (and imagination) becomes real, there is a nightmare situation: at the point when Severin declares, "Here indeed was the despotic woman of my dreams,"24 instead of rapture, Severin finds himself in a night mare situation, something which Wanda anticipated when she asked, "What will happen when I fully satisfy your wishes ... when I fulfill your ideal and kick and whip yoU?"25 The nightmare of a fulfilled fantasy is caused not by what Severin cannot see-after all, Wanda only does to him what the contract between them allows-but rather by seeing all too clearly what the contract spells out: it is precisely the latent ten dencies in Wanda that now have "seen the light of day," made visible by the terms of the contract, that are the source of Sever in's nightmare. Severin's fantasy is to be the "slave" to an ideal ized Wanda (in the form of the "mistress"); his nightmare begins when this fantasy is realized through his transubstantiation into Gregor. It is the distance that is created by the form, the ritual,
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of the contract that allows Severin pleasure; the moment it is actualized, there is a nightmare situation. It is for this reason that there has to be an escape clause in their contract--even if that clause is death-in order to allow Severin (and Wanda) to retain a level of subjectivity and choice. It is when the fantasy of being completely effaced is fulfilled, when Severin is completely objectivised (as Gregor), that the "comic side of [his] situation . .. that [he] can escape but [does] not want to"26 disappears. After all, one must remember that at the point of signing the contract, Severin was blind to what he was agreeing to, not just because he was "carried away by a madness of passion,"27 but because he could not see what he was signing: "she gently took hold of my hand and my name appeared at the bottom of the contract."28 It is this blindness at the signing of the contract that allows him his momentary "sweet rapture,"29 and it is this nonseeing which also sustains his fantasy. In fact, the moments in which Sever in's fantasy is ruptured-his moments of suffering-are caused precisely by seeing too clearly; the moments when Gregor is not blind to the fact that he is also Severin. Severin's fantasy requires a double blindness: to the fact that Gregor is also Severin; and to the fact that Wanda and the mistress are one and the same. It is only when Gregor is blind to Severin and there is a veil between Wanda and the mistress that this fantasy is sustained. To be more precise, the fantasy is sustained in this double blindness because there is a gap-the space for imagination-where Wanda can become "the despotic woman of [his] dreams": the key here is that in order for Sev erin's fantasy to continue, the mistress has to be his mistress; the moment the gap between the mistress and Wanda is bridged, when Severin's "fantasies [are taken] too seriously,"30 when they become too visible, it is ruptured, destroyed.
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"WHAT Is To BE DONE?" OR How TO READ WHILE MAINTAINING RADICAL OTHERNESS "What is to be done?" is Lenin's question that continues to haunt us and must never be answered, for this is a question that calls for a prescription-a method that can be applied-which in effect effaces all situations, effaces all texts. The moment Lenin set out to answer the question, he set in place a revolution-a continual circle which ends up exactly where it begins-which ensured the end to any possibilities. That is, unless one posits that perhaps the possibility of anything new occurring lies within the repetition of something old: this is akin to Alain Badiou's conception of an Event, in which he claims that anything new is never completely different-it is a "new world within an old world," an opening up of a radical space within the existing world. In Badiou's concep tion of possibilities, one does not attempt to recreate an entirely new entity-this would be akin to creating another whole, which is a totalitarian gesture, as all one has done is replace the old with another one, substituting one logic for another-but instead maintains the gap between the "old world" and the new way of seeing this world (the "new world" is precisely this gap), such that there is no finalization to this possibility itself.3l If "What is to be done?" is not seen
as
a question seeking an
answer, seeking a prescription, but instead is seen as a proscription a negation of itself-then instead of a totalitarian gesture, it becomes a question that contains nothing but a pure question.J2 When his ques tion is seen in that light, Lenin then becomes the great proscriber, he who opens up the eternal question-the continual revolution-in the full knowledge that in a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise that justifies present violence. It is
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rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are-as if by Grace-for a brief time allowed to act as if the utopian future were (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not expe rienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow-in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legit imized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.33 In exactly the same vein, reading is an act that is its own "onto logical proof'-there is nothing to compare with (in order to legitimize or delegitimize itselt}-as it is its own validation, in and through itself. Just like Nietzsche's gay scientist, Lenin's rev olution "offers a model for cognition that cannot simply account for itself or maintain its results within the assumed certitudes of a controlled system of knowledge."34 Simply put, "What is to be done is what is to be done." In order to maintain this gap, must the reader, then, not remain distant-maintain a proper distance35-towards the text? This is not unlike the coldness that Gilles Deleuze speaks of in Coldness and Cruelty when he says, "Coldness is the essential feature of the structure of perversion; it is present both in the apathy of the Sadist, where it figures as theory, and in the ideal of the Masoch ist, where it figures as fantasy."36 In both cases, although with radically differing end results, coldness and distance play the same role-a space between the self and the other such that the
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gap that is required for jouissance can be maintained. After all, what other reason to be a sadist or masochist if not enjoyment, if not pleasure: "Pain ...has no sexual significance at all; on the contrary it represents a desexualization which makes repetition autonomous and gives it instantaneous sway over the pleasures of resexualization."37 And it is not as if there is a direct link between repetition and pleasure-in the sense of "since I like this particu lar act, I shall do it over and over again"-but, more radically, instead of repetition being experienced as a form of behav ior related to pleasure already obtained or anticipated, instead of repetition being governed by the idea of expe riencing or reexperiencing pleasure, repetition runs wild and becomes independent of all previous pleasure. It has itself become an idea or ideaP8 Since the book can never be completed, as an uncontestable sin gle reading can never be reached, reading itself is an act of rep etition, one that brings pleasure not because it is a repetition of a pleasurable act, but because it is a futile attempt at completing the book. It is the very repetition of this process (in the realiza tion that it is never completable) that brings the reader pleasure, as it is precisely the gap-in the form of the fact that the reader will never be able to totalize the text into a book-that ensures that the pleasure principle is never ruptured. There is nothing beyond the pleasure principle; pleasure is the principle.39 How ever, as we have already noted, the pleasure that Severin experi ences is one that is only obtained in blindness. In this sense, it is a pleasure that precedes the contract itself; it is precontractual and, in fact, prerelational: it is a pleasure that lies beyond the phenomenon that is the relation between Severin and Wanda. This is the precise reason why Severin has to be blind at the moment of its inception: he was blind to everything except the
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possibility of its relationality. Hence, it is a pleasure that is both desubjectivised and deobjectivised; one cannot say anything of either the subjects in pleasure or the pleasure itself. In this sense, the pleasure principle is ultimately a principle that is unknow able, a principle that we are blind to. At best, it is an assumed relationality, a positing: pleasure is no longer a principle but rather a desire to be (and to be a desire). Reading: an eternal return of the same-the same process, the same rules, the same laws, a continual repetition, always the same, but just slightly different. It is the ritual, the rite of read ing, that brings about pleasure: reading as if reading were pos sible, as if knowing the text were possible, as if in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short cir cuit between the present and the future, we are-as if by Grace-for a brief time allowed to act as if the uto pian future [where we fully understand the text] were (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed.40 What is crucial is that the reader recognizes the "as if' aspect: the pleasure comes from the fact that (s)he reads "as if' this is possible, while realizing that it is an impossibility. In this man ner, the reading always goes on, the reader is always reading. The moment the reader thinks (s)he has read the text, has fully understood it, and can put away the book, the rite is over, the reading is over, and with it, all the pleasure of the ritual. In the unwillingness to totalize the text (into a book), what occurs is not only the hesitation of the reader to impose a par ticular frame onto the text, but, more radically, the reader is reading her or himself while reading the text. The reader is the mirror onto which both the text and the reader project them selves. Language is the way in which the reader approaches both
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the text and her- or himself; however, the reader also approaches language through her- or himself. What this suggests is that the reader reads the text and her- or himself through her- or himself: (s)he becomes the medium through which reading occurs and also the mirror through which (s)he is read. In order to do so, the reader must be other to her- or himself while reading; (s)he must maintain an otherness or an awareness of otherness to her or himself. Reading then becomes the process in which both the reader and the text are read. It is this hesitation that becomes crucial in the face of the attempted seduction by the text, when, for a brief moment, it allows the reader to imagine that (s)he has mastered it, conquered it, and subsumed it under her or his conceptions, fully tamed it. Or, more precisely, it is the moment when the reader allows her or himself to imagine that the text has been conquered that (s)he is seduced, and it is through this imagined taming of the text that the illusion of the book is formed. This is the spectre of Socratic thinking that continues to haunt us-the trace of optimism that we can know it all whilst forgetting the fact that the Idea is always an ideal, unattainable-and it is this that draws us in, traps us, and ensnares us in our own vanity. For language both ensures that the text will continually live (as the rhetorical ele ment can never be fully disciplined by grammar) and is also the trap that ensnares the reader (it is also the rhetorical element that allows the reader to imagine that (s)he can read anything into the text); at certain moments, the text whispers the words of the per fect seductress: "I can be whatever you want me to be." It is the hesitation of the reader-the Dionysian gesture of pessimism that one will never be able to fully understand anything or know anything for sure-that can save the reader from subsuming the text.41 This is because the Dionysian gesture-the abandonment of the individual self-allows the reader to read her- or himself
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while reading the text; only when the reader doesn't posit her- or himself as the centre of everything, only when there is a moment of reading from the self (this is inevitable) whilst acknowledg ing that the self is not the centre of everything, is there a chance of reading oneself, of catching a glimpse of oneself, of reading in its fullest sense of the in between, the becoming of the text and the reader. In effect, what is being read is the negotiation between the reader and the text-they are an inseparable entity. Therefore, it is not so much that the reader has to maintain a form of radical otherness (in the sense of maintaining a distance, a coldness) towards the text, but more that reading itself is a form of radical otherness, as what is being read (through the pro cess of reading) is other to both the reader and the text. It is in the simulated other, the imagined other-the site of communica tion that lies between the reader and the text-that everything is negotiated: it is in the gap between the reader and the text-the third-that reading is imagined, that the possibility of reading itself can begin to be imagined. However, just because this space is imagined does not mean it is devoid of rules-after all, reading occurs in and through language. Hence, to think of the possibility of reading, one must also consider the very rules that reading operates on, in, within.
TilE READER BEFORE THE LAW, OR WHAT Is My RIGHT OF INSPECTION You have the authority to tell yourself these stories but you cannot gain access to the squares of that other one. You are free but there are rules.42 Citation is the voice of the other and it highlights the double playing of the narrative authority. We constantly hear the footsteps of the other, the footsteps of others in
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language, others speaking in Stephen's language or in Ulysses', I mean the book's language ...It reminds us that we have been caught up in citation ever since we said the first words mama or papa.43 To deny that there are rules to reading is just not possible: after all, we are born into language, and its rules bind us from the very beginning. What has to be thought about is the space in which this negotiation between the reader and the text takes place, and the laws of engagement governing this space, as these laws determine (or at least set the boundaries for) what can potentially occur. However, even with the laws of engagement, there is nothing to prevent one seeing whatever one chooses to see; by extension, one can interpret in whatever manner one desires. But it is not as if one is interpreting in a vacuum: one is bound not only by language, or, to be more precise, by the rules of the particular lan guage that one is reading in, but also by the rules of the genre. The genre always brings with it its baggage of historicity and along with it, its rules and laws that continue to haunt the pages of the text. The page is never completely alone but is always alone-it is singular within a universality-as any reading, and, by extension, interpretation, of the page brings along with it all the potential readings that are absent; the "footsteps of the other [readings]" are always walking with us. In this sense, reading is akin to playing checkers: the number of moves is almost infinite, and each and every move one makes is haunted by the (absent) potentiality of all the other moves. Even more than that, even though the move that is made is the one which directly affects the game, the strat egy of the game is always also haunted by the moves that were not made; in effect, there are always multiple games of checkers played at the same time, some are just not as obviously seen. But it is not as if one can make any move one chooses to; the moves are always bound by the rules of the game, and the fact that one
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has to move (even if it puts one in a worse-off situation) is also determined by the rules. This is the contract that one signs with one's opponent, who is also one's partner (without the other, one cannot even begin to play the game); these are also the same rules that one signs with the game. More precisely, it is these rules that allow both players to engage and negotiate with each other within the game, to have the game as a negotiation, to negotiate as a game. In the same way, when one reads, there is a contract that one signs with the text, and also with oneself: these are the laws of seeing when you read; these are your rules of engagement. The text attempts to bind the reader-this is when narrative, characters, and grammar come in-to a particular reading, as discourse lays down the law, it dictates one's rights, its jurisdiction extends to a form of control. ..as soon as the author, narrator, or character speaks, the visible reduces to a single meaning, or at least a single focus of meaning.44 This is the violence of the context that attempts to bind the reader, and it is this that Caliban noted when he cursed, "The red plague rid you for learning me your language":4s he realized that this was the moment he was fettered to Prospero, for he could no longer utter the words that short-circuit any attempt to subsume, the truly transgressive "I don't know."46 Ironically, it is also lan guage that allows the reader some measure of freedom, as it is the inability of grammar to subsume figural language under its rules that ensures the continual slippage of meaning. It is in that space, that gap between grammar and trope, that the reader has space.47 It is in this space that the reader makes choices and interpretations; in this space, the infinite moves within the finite rules are made. It is for this reason that "anybody at all, pro vided he is skilled at looking, has a right of inspection, which also means the right to interpret whatever is taken into view.,,48
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It is a site of power, a contestation of power, between the reader and the text: each choice that is made by the reader is a moment when (s)he is "appropriating this right with an unpardonable violence"49 to the text, at the same moment when the text is attempting to bind the reader (one has to be "skilled at look ing"; there is a particular skill that one has to acquire before one looks) to its will, to its law. Since each moment of reading is a new contestation, a new situation, with the potentiality for a new outcome, one will never know what will occur in advance (if anything occurs at all). There fore, each act of reading is a true event where "we can no longer discern the limit, no more than we can determine the equiva lence ... we are bewitched by the image of an open circle."50 The circle remains open as there is never completeness, there is never a totality; the text never becomes a book. It is the Dionysian gesture of abandoning the individuality of the subject and entering into the spirit of the text that allows the reader to be free, to be a singularity. This is because one is only truly singular when one realizes that this singularity exists within a universality. This is exactly the same notion that applies to reading: the reader exists not as a separate entity from the text, but rather as part of the text itself. Hence, there is abso lutely no possibility of a prescription on how to read; it is only while reading that the reader can discover what it is to read, in the same way as Aristotle's judge in the Nicomachean Ethics has to discover what it is to be ajustjudge whilstjudging. There is no a priori knowledge of what it is to be just: each judgment is unique, each judgment a singular case. Hence, each time the judge judges, there is a judging of how just (s)he is. And since each time the notion of what isjust is different, and the situation is different, the judge is, in effect, different as well. In the same manner, not only is the reader reading the text into existence
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(in the sense of responding to and with the singularity of the text), the reader is reading her- or himself into existence. Reading is not only the reconstruction of the text, but also the deconstruction of the reader; the negotiated space between the reader and the text is the scene where the constructions occur. Hence, the process of reading is the impossible exchange in which both reader and text are objects for each other: nothing is exchanged except for the fact that the reader and the text read each other. In the space between the reader and the text-with the reader as other, and the text as other-where both seduce each other in their radical otherness, nothing happens except reading. In Harold Bloom's line, "Imaginative literature is otherness,"51 the key word is not "otherness" but "imaginative," for if read ing is the negotiation between the radical otherness of both the reader and the text, then surely it is the act of creativity-the act of imagination-which allows a momentary third to be formed between the two, that is, the cypher. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have taught us, imagination is not random: in order to be truly radical, imagination takes skill and craft. In other words, to be truly transgressive, one does not go directly against the law but rather takes the law itself to its extremes-the imagina tive moment comes when the law is pushed to its limits. This is why the fragment, the detail, is what is always most subversive: whenever a single detail is taken into consideration, the totality of a concept falls apart; the singularity is always an exception to the rule. This is because judgment [like language] engenders the same possibility of reference that it also excises. Its error can therefore not be localized or identified in any way; one could not, for example, say that the error stems from language, as if language were an entity that existed independently of judgment or judgment a faculty that could exercise its
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This is why in a court of law, one can only prove beyond reason able doubt: one must hark back to reaso�r, more precisely, to the figure of reason-in order to suppress the fact that one can never prove beyond doubt. In every sentence, there is always doubt, an unknown, an unknowable, that will unravel the very basis on which the decision is made. In reading the "letter of the law," the law itself is unraveled: eachjudgment is singular, each judgment is specific and cannot be universalized, totalized. Hence, each time a judgment takes place, it is ajudgment that is an exceptional judg ment, ajudgment in exception to the law in general. Perhaps, then, it is time to alter the proverb from "The devil is in the details" to a more succinct "The devil is the detail." In other words, each time an act of reading takes place, there is an act of imagination: one must be "skilled at looking" in that one must have a certain set of skills and know the laws of look ing, the laws of reading, but at the same time, it is the law that also allows one to read, to read in a way that is in exception to the law, is subversive to the law. This is not a reading that refuses to respond to the text but is, more radically, a reading that reads whilst not fully knowing what it reads nor even what it is, a reading that allows reading to continue becoming by not claiming to understand, subsume, a reading that is a continual discovery, an unveiling, of both the text and the reader her- or himself. It is the realization, the remembering, of the contract that lies between the reader and the text that allows for the potentiality of reading that does not efface the other, that does not efface the text. The remembering of the contract is also a
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remembering that reading is a result of that contract and not a preordained right, not a naturally occurring phenomenon, that the possibility of reading is due to this agreement with the text itself. This suggests that reading can never be extrapolated, uni versalized, totalized, as referentiality that is both the result and the basis of reading-and language itself-refers ultimately to nothing except itself: "the innumerable writings that dominate our lives are made intelligible by a preordained agreement as to their referential authority; this agreement however is merely contractual, never constitutive."53 Furthennore, it is impossible to say where quotation ends and "truth" begins, if by truth we understand the possibility of refer ential verification. The very statement by which we assert that the narrative is rooted in reality can be an unreliable quotation; the very document, the manuscript, produced in evidence may point back not to an actual event, but to an endless chain of quotations reaching as far back as the ultimate transcendental signified God, none of which can lay claim to referential authority.54 Hence, each time there is reading, each time we read something, what is being imagined is reading itself. Even though reading is self-referential, this does not mean that it is an exercise in self-centredness, of privileging the self, of having the self as the locus, as the focus of everything. Even as the only honest position of reading is through the self, this does not mean that when one reads, the only thing that one reads is the self; otherwise, we are back to a sadistic mode of reading where everything else is effaced. In order to avoid that, perhaps, then, we have to think of the possibility of an event (since reading is an event, always potentially new) that is not solely of the self. Usually, one would conceive of the movement towards an event in the following manner: something is unknown, then it
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is known, and then there is an occurrence (the event). This is a conceptualization of an event that privileges the self: we don't know something, we discover something, and then it occurs. But for a moment, let us consider this possibility: what if the movement is not from impossibility to possibility, then actuality (something is unknown, we figure it out, and then we do it), but rather from impossibility to actuality and then to possibility (we cannot conceive of it, it happens, and then we think of how it did so after the fact)? In this way, even though imagination requires a "skill in looking," it is not a purely cognitive gesture that is located in the self. For if the possibility (which is captured in the imagination) is only known after, or at best, during, the actu alization of an event, it is then a gesture that cannot be known before the event. In effect, it is a gesture that is hidden from the knowledge of the self: it is a gesture that the self is blind to. As Jean Baudrillard never lets us forget, we must retain for the event its radical definition and its impact in the imagination. It is characterized entirely, in a paradoxical way, by its uncanniness, its troubling strangeness-it is the irruption of something improbable and impossible-and by its troubling familiarity : from the outset it seems totally self-explanatory, as though pre destined, as though it could not but take place.55 In this manner, an event is the moment in which possibility and actuality coincide: the moment of its actualization is also the moment when its possibility is conceived; the possibility of the event could only be conceived of during its actualization. It was only at the moment Hannibal actually led his Carthaginian army across the Alps that the possibility of an army marching inland and actually attacking Rome itself could be conceived: at that moment, a previously impossible action occurred and
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was conceived of at the same time. More importantly, it was only through Hannibal's imagination (not of the possible, but rather of the impossible) that this event occurred. It was only in the con ceiving of the unknowable, a conceiving of something which the results of, or even the possibility of, Hannibal was blind to, that the event could take place. At the same time, the event could only become a possibility because Hannibal responded to a call that he was "predestined" to respond to. Legend has it that he swore that he would always be an enemy of Rome; when he took the vow, there was no way that he could have known that he would lead an attack on Rome, but once he had chosen to do so, the necessity of having to reach Roman soil before encountering the enemy almost forced him to go over the Alps, "as though [the march over the mountains] could not but have taken place." Hence, Han nibal's choice to lead his army over the mountains was (n)either a sole result of his cognitive imagination (n)or just a fulfillment of a vow. Perhaps if we consider reading from this light, or from this position of semidarkness, it is then a process of both "skilled looking" and a blindness at the same time. In stumbling around, the skilled reader begins to read; the skilled reader only can read by stumbling around. What is actually read is unknown till the moment it is read; what is read then becomes glaringly obvious to the person who has read it, but only because (s)he has read it. Just as the justness of each judgment can only be decided at the moment of judging, the truth of each reading lies in the singu larity of the reading itself. Each reading is then a possible read ing, a contingent reading, and also a true reading, as truth itself is contingent. This means that each reading is hence a positing, a hypothesis, a test site for both what is read and reading itself. This then leaves me with a situation that is impossible. I have attempted to lay out a process of what happens whenever one reads; by showing that it is an interplay between the reader and
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the text in the negotiated third, in which every instance of read ing is a different instance and every meaning or interpretation chosen is a pure choice (based on nothing but madness, chosen in blindness), I am left with a situation in which all that can be said is that every time one reads, what happens is reading itself, a reading of both the text and the reader her- or himself. In this sense, all that is left for me to do is to demonstrate reading itself, and for that, I have chosen to read J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and the fi 1m Stranger Than Fiction: the chosen texts are test sites for reading. In science, what is being tested is both the object of inquiry and the method of inquiry itself: the method tested being science itself, what is being tested is the test itself. In the same way, if these texts are texts about reading, what is being tested is both the text (through reading it) and also reading itself. In some way, they might be arbitrary choices-there is no good reason to choose these particular texts over all the others; how good a decision it is can only be evaluated after its choosing-but then again, is there any decision that is not hinged on some form of madness, some form of blindness?
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ENDNOTES
I. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 197. 2. "Two Contracts of von Sacher-Masoch" in von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, 278. 3. Ibid., 279. 4. Ibid., 220 (italics original). 5.
Ibid., 221.
6.
Ibid.
7. In the case of Eugenie, it is not so much that she is liberated but the fact that Dolmance, Madame de Saint-Ange, and Le Chevalier de Mirvel choose to train her into a libertine and, more precisely, to mold her, transform her, into the libertine of their desires. See Marquis de Sade, Philosophy of the Boudoir, trans. Meredith X (New York: Creation Books, 2000). 8. Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 121 (italics original). 9. T here is no longer a "who" in the relationship of the sadist and her or his victim, for if the other is conceived of as a "who," then her or his will still is part of the consideration-and this would not allow the structure of sadism (where "it is not what I do to my vic tim but that I do precisely because I am able to do so") to function. Only if the victim is conceived of as a "what"-an object-can the sadist impose her or his will completely. I o. In many cases, there can be no person who perishes at all. For instance, a bomb hoax can hold the public hostage whilst being technically victimless (in the sense of not having phy sically harmed anyone). Perhaps this is the perfection of terror, for a bomb hoax holds the public hostage indefinitely, infinitely. If there were a bomb and it went off, the damage would have taken place; if it were found, it could be diffused. In the case of a hoax, the bomb can never be found, and hence the terror remains-the bomb is always waiting to explode, or, more radically, the bomb has already exploded and the damage is just waiting to happen.
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II. The underlying assumption, that the event and its representation are
connected, are related, remains. In fact, critique of the representation often strengthens the assumption itself: to claim that a representa tion is inaccurate merely reinforces the presupposition that it can be accurate-that there is a correlation between the two-in the fi rst place. 12. As Lyotard so elegantly stated, "As soon as one makes a determi nant use of the Idea, then it is necessarily the Terror. And then the content of the Idea matters little." Lyotard and Thebaud, "Sixth Day: The Faculty of Political Ideas," in Just Gaming, 92. 13. This was uttered by Slavoj Zizek at a summer seminar of the European Graduate School, August 2004. He was speaking of the space where art resides in reference to the painting, the painter, and the viewer at a gallery. In many ways, he was responding to the thoughts of Yves Klein with regards to art and the process, rather then focusing on the product, the final outcome: the artist as a craftsman, without necessarily producing the final object, with out producing what is usually called the "work of art." The same thought can be found in James L ord's A Giacomelli Portrait (1980). In this novel, the painter Alberto Giacometti is unable to produce a portrait for a friend despite painting one every day. It is only at the end that the friend realizes that a portrait was precisely being painted every day: Giacometti's portrait of him lay not in the final product (which was always destroyed), but in the act of painting, and communication, between the two of them. 14. In a conversation about theorists who do not respond to a text but rather read it in order to gain "evidence" for their theories, Neil Mur phy responded with the statement that they seem to be "reading by recipe" and merely flipping through a text with a checklist. 15. This is precisely the manner in which Kant's categorical impera tive works: even though the categorical imperative does not mean that every result is exactly the same, the imposition of the same framework (or concept) does suggest that the particularities of the situation are not fully taken into consideration-every situation is effaced by the a priori conception. 16. Hamacher, Premises, 1-43. 17. von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, 237.
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18. Ibid., 269. 19. Ibid., 202. 20. Ibid., 205. In fact, there are two distinct relationships in Venus in Furs: one between Severin and Wanda, and the other between Gregor and his mistress. The only time that the distinction is blurred is when the mistress, in a moment of fright and startled from her cognitive state, cries, '" Severin' . . . more frightened than angry" (252). 21. Ibid., 178. 22. Ibid., 230. 23. Ibid., 200. 24. Ibid., 20 I . 25. Ibid., 200. 26. Ibid., 202. 27. Ibid., 221. 28. Ibid., 222. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 200. 31. A comprehensive meditation on this conception of the Event can be found in Alain Badiou, Being and Event (2006). 32. The function of a true prescriber as a proscriber is explored in Samuel Weber. "Afterword" in Lyotard and Thebaud, Just Gam ing, 102-113. This is also addressed later, in the chapter "Read ing. Or Just Gaming." 33. This was in reference to the utopian ideal of the Leninist revolu tion and can be found in Slavoj Zi�ek, "A Plea for Leninist Intol erance," Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002), http://www. uchicago .edu/research/jn I-crit-inq/v28/v28n2.1.i�ek.htm I. 34. Ronell, The Test Drive, 156. Ronell was meditating on Nietzsche and in particular the manner in which his scientificity was both a basis of and the breaking point of science itself-a continual test which both tested for and within itself. All that is ensured is that science is a continual test. In this sense, all that remains is a ques tion: "at some level, the correlated acts of discovery and invention exceed the limits of what is knowable or even, as Jacques Derrida has argued, strictly recognizable" (ibid.).
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35. A "proper distance" in the sense used by Jacques Lacan is when one doesn't try to directly immerse oneself in the appearance and thus attempt to bridge the gap between appearance and reality (as if this were even possible). In maintaining a "proper distance," one allows the fantasy of the appearance (that there is a correspond ing reality) to play itself out; otherwise, in attempting to approach too closely, it is not reality that collapses (there is no reality per se) but rather the appearance itself, and with it the fantasy. This is why "the Church as Institution always perceived zealots as its ultimate enemies: because of their direct identification and belief, they threaten the distance through which the religious institution maintains itself' (Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 267). An attempt to bridge the distance between appearance and real ity is a failure at understanding the role of symbolic structures in maintaining normalcy. For instance, rules-and laws-func tion not so much by their explicit statements (of what is allowed and disallowed) but rather by the symbolic understanding of when they apply and when they must be ignored. It is when one fails to comply with the symbolic network, and not when one goes against the explicit statements, that one has transgressed the rules. In the context of reading, failure to maintain a "proper distance" from the text would be an attempt to find the origin, the truth, of the text by way of a "real reading," the result of which is that the fantasy of reading itself-or the possibility of reading-would collapse.
36. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 117. 37. Ibid., 120. 38. Ibid. 39. Of course, one cannot deny that there is something that is learned, gleaned, from reading as well: to say that one is completely unchanged after reading is just untrue. However, what is learnt-or what is achieved from reading-which is really a question of what the surplus is that comes about from the process of reading, is really a moot question. This is always unknowable (at least in advance) if the text is a text (as opposed to a book, which is knowable after the first reading, which might as well be the last or only reading). In this sense, the learning-or meaning-that comes from reading
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a text is akin to an emergent property that springs from a connec tion-a communion-between two properties, strictly speaking, not known in advance (at best, one can posit a guess from pre vious situations that are similar). Each communion is an event, where something potentially new might occur.
40. Slavoj Zitek, "A Plea for Leninist Intolerance," Critical Inquiry (Winter 2002). 41. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche posits Apollonian (and later Socratic) optimism as the totalitarian gestures that attempt to fully comprehend-though the centering of all existence in the indi vidual-life itself, and by doing so, drain life of all its vitality. It is only the Dionysian gesture of pessimism that refuses com plete knowledge-and, in fact, realizes that the individual is a illusionary concept that merely brings "metaphysical comfort" to the masses-that truly understands life itself. In The Test Drive, Ronell posits that it is this same Dionysian spirit that refuses to allow the stability (and hence "metaphysical comfort") of knowl edge and continually tests any claim (and by virtue of this posi tion, tests itself as well).
42. Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: Monacelli Press, (998), 1. 43. Helene Cixous, Stigmata (London: Routledge, 2005), 135. 44. Ibid,7. 45. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I :2. Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1987.
46. When one doesn't know, one cannot be bound to anything, as a bind always needs a consent of sorts (or, at the very least, the acknowl edgment and recognition of it). This is why the utterance "I don't know" can short-circuit any attempt at violence (in the form of power through the strategy of negotiation): there is an immediate break and refusal to negotiate. After that utterance, the only tactic left is to resort to terror. It is for this reason that the idiot has been such an figure of resistance in both literature and philosophy. An excellent meditation on this figure can be found in Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2003).
47. It is Paul de Man who continually reminds us of the tension between grammar and the figure in language and grammar's inability to
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48. Derrida, Right of Inspection, 30. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 36. A thinking of the impossibility of a closed hermeneutic circle can be found in Hamacher, "Hermeneutical Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutic Circle in Schleimacher," in Premises, 44-80.
51. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2001), 19. 52. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 234 (additions are mine). 53. Ibid., 204. 54. Ibid. 55. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, 129-130.
PART II READING(S)
Not that the act of reading is innocent, far from it. It is the starting point of all evil. -Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading
C HAPTER 3
REREADING MILLER J STANDS BEFORE THE LAW
Before the Law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country, J, who asks to gain entry into the Law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. J thinks about it and asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not now."1 In order for The Ethics of Reading to function as a prescription on how to read, the Law to which both reading and the reader must subscribe must be absolute. The Law-beyond both the reader and the text itself-is what Miller relies on while con tinually deferring the definition of precisely what this Law is. In this manner, the Law-which comes before the reader and which the reader and the text must stand before-is the fig ure which Miller must rely on, but which he also cannot, as
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it continually slips away from him. Each time he attempts to approach the Law, J begins to catch a glimpse of it, but each attempt at definition promises to deliver something sometime, "but not now." For Miller, reading is only proper when it is faithful, not to the text (what is written or claimed) but to the Law that lies beyond the text itself, as true reading "is a far more fundamental 'I must' responding to the language of literature in itself."2 In other words (to use a figure of speech, which is inevitable; one cannot speak of it directly), in order to read ethically, the reader must be faithful to the spirit of the text.3 Ethical reading: reading in fidelity to nothing but reading itself. Even as Miller claims that the Absolute Law that he is speak ing of is contingent-"[the expressions of the law are] subject to revision and re-vision, always 'idiomatic' in the sense that they are good only for one time and place,
"4
in that they are
completely situational, and as such are "never a final and defin itive expression. . . of the law as such"5-there is still a reliance on the Law to exist above and beyond the text and the reader. In this manner, the "law that is Absolute, empty air or an undif ferentiated expanse of shining snow"6 must remain a transcen dental Law. It is for this reason that Miller has to approach-or attempt to approach-the Law using examples: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. Not only is it that "no choice of examples is innocent"7-Miller does nothing less than "take responsibility"8 for that-but, more radically, each example is part of a narrative, for "without storytelling, there is no theory of ethics."9In this manner, The Ethics ofReading is not so much a prescription of how to read ethically, but a demonstration by way of telling a tale. And in exactly the same way that, as Miller
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points out, "realism is catachresis, and it can be named only in catachresis,"10 all of Miller's examples are catachrestic in the precise sense that they are "genuinely performative. [The exam ples] bring something altogether new into the world, something not explicable by its causes."11 For it is not Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin whom Miller invokes, but rather his reading (and hence a revision) of "Kant," "de Man," "Eliot," "Trollope," "James," and "Benjamin." Following Miller's own premise that ethical reading or "genuine reading is a kind of misreading ...as the re-reader or the 'second reader' must subject himself or herself to a higher law than that ascertainable in the text, namely the law to which the text itself was first subject,"'2 what is being read is not what Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin themselves claim within their own texts (if that can even be known), but rather "something latent and gather[ed] within it as a force to determine in me a re-vision of what has been the latent law of the text I read."1J In other words, what is being read is something other to the text itself. In order to perform this task of genuine reading, Miller must be able to (even if only momentarily) gain access to the Abso lute Law, the primordial law to which the text was first subject. The only way for Miller to have access to this Absolute Law that governs both the reader and the text is to either simulate the Law or to apply his own imperative to the text. Hence, this is not so much an "I must," as Miller claims, but is rather the Kantian imperative itself taken to the extreme, an "I will it to be such." For in either simulating the Law or creating his own imperative, what occurs is an effacement of both the text and the reader. A "radical negation"'4 of both the text and the reader occurs when this Absolute Law, which comes above and beyond what is written on the page, takes precedence over everything else: not just that "the text in this specific sense [of knowing
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what the words on the page mean] is unreadable"15 but, more radically, that in order for there to be any genuine reading, the text in this specific sense must not be read. When the Law precedes reading itself-when it is an ontological Law-both the reader and the text are irrelevant. But since the imperative cannot be made universal as "the text is idiomatic, a particular case, subject to what James calls 'a beautiful law of its own, '''16 then every response to this Absolute Law is a result of the will of the reader (in this case, Miller). Hence, it is not so much an "I must" in the form of a calling (which Miller claims), for an "I must" can only occur if there is a certain knowing, even if not a complete understanding, of that Law-which is some thing that Miller claims is not so-and if it is knowable, there is no response and hence, no ethical element to it. However, if it is completely unknowable, then the Law that is being responded to is either a void or is simulated into existence, willed into being. In effect, the reader would then be creating her or his own Law and then reacting to it. Miller has to simulate this Law into existence, as he is in an aporetic situation. On one hand, he has pointed out that read ing is something other to the text itself. On the other hand, he is faced with an Absolute Law that he is compelled to respond to, a Law that he can have no knowledge of. In both situations, Miller can have no knowledge of either: both the Law which he is responding to and the text that he is attempting to read properly are, strictly speaking, unknowable. Hence, in order to even begin reading, Miller has to then adopt a position of otherness to himself. In Miller's conception of reading, the reader is always other to her- or himself. This is reading as radical otherness: an interplay between the otherness of the text and the Law latent to both text and reader. However, this is another impossible situation-another aporetic situation-how can one be both self and other at the
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same time(unless it is a position of false decentredness)?'7 It is for this reason that Miller has no recourse but to rely on a cata chrestic gesture, reading himself as other, simulating himself; there is a double simulation here-of himself as other, and also of the Law itself. The gesture of reading "as if' reading is even possible.
FOREVER UNDECIDED, OR "WHO Is HIE WHO THAT Is READING?" Though language contains within itself the evidence of its own limitation, the knowledge of that limitation can never be formulated in a way that is wholly reasonable or clear, since any formulation contains the limitation again. IS One might say that unreadability ...is to be defined as the impossibility of distinguishing clearly between a linguis tic reading and an ontological one.19 I am unable, finally, to know whether in this experience
I am subject to a linguistic necessity or to an ontological one.20 Since the Law is the basis of all true reading, but does not con form to the usual rules of reading-"reading is not of the text as such but of the thing that is latent and gathered within it as a force to determine in me a re-vision of what has been the latent law of the text I read"21-it functions as the null set of read ing. In order for Miller's argument to function, the Law has to work just like the "0" does in arithmetic-allowing arithmetic itself to function while not being bound by its rules. The Law is not only the "radical negation of sign as value"22 but is the negation of sign as sign-it is a pure negation, a void which is completely unknowable, a "zero base"23 which allows reading to occur yet at the same time undermines reading itself(one can
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never verify whether a proper reading, a correct reading, or even a true reading, has taken place). And it is for this reason that Miller has to approach it allegorically. The most apparent way in which this is done in The Ethics of Reading is through the use of "Kant," "de Man," "Eliot,"
"Trollope," "James," and "Benjamin," not to mention "KafKa" and "Yeats," not only as allegories of reading (since Miller can not speak of an unknowable Law, he can only "speak" of read ing through demonstrating reading of something else; he must speak of "reading" through speaking of Kant), but as allegories of themselves (Miller's "Kant" as an allegory of Kant, as the actual Kant is always unknowable; to even begin speaking of Kant, he must speak of "Kant"). In order to approach the Law, Miller has to rely on allegories of allegories to speak of the Law. In the same way as "the words on the page in a realistic novel are the product of a double translation...[as] the truth of correspondence in realism is not to objective things, or only indirectly to objective things [but] rather to things as they have already made a detour into necessarily distorted subjective reflections,"24 Miller can only speak of the Law in terms of a "subjective reflection": he must make a detour into his versions of "Kant," "de Man," "Eliot," "Trollope," "James," and "Ben jamin" and show how he reads them in order to demonstrate the Law, as there is no way to speak of it directly. The Law-the null set or the zero base-can only be simulated into reality; there is no other way to approach it, as it does not conform to the rules of its own system: one is only privy to the effects of the Law, but never to the Law as such, which means that the Law is outside itself-exterior to itself-as Law. The Law of reading allows reading, but does not allow itself to be read directly, which is precisely why Miller has to first re-vision "Kant," "de Man," "Eliot," "Trollope," "James," and "Benjamin."
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Hence, the null set must always be simply assumed: in Eliot's words, Miller's account of the Law is one that is "mirrored ... in [his] mind."25 It is Miller's unwillingness to universalize that prevents the Law from becoming a totalitarian gesture; it makes the impera tive "Kant ian" rather than Kantian.26 While this prevents the gesture from becoming one that effaces both the reader and the text, this opens another question: is Miller reading Kant in a manner which fits his narrative? As "the function of such char acters, once they are produced and put in circulation, is ethi cal,"27 the question is whether Miller is re-visioning Kant as a character, "Kant," in order to posit the ethical in his tale, The Ethics of Reading. This fulfils the first part of Miller's "double definition of an ethical act. .. it is a response to an irresistible demand,"28 one that is "latent and gathered within [the text],"29 which compels this re-vision. But it is only through my act of reading that the second half of this double definition-"an act which is productive"30-is fulfilled. In my reading of Miller, the "Kant" which I read is yet another from the "Kant" of Miller, for I am now using "Kant" as a character in order to construct my own narrative of ethical reading. The "productive act" is an interplay of the two "Kants"-Miller's and mine-and the ethi cal moment is the emergent property of this intercourse. What this shows, then, is the presence of three (potential) unknowns: the text, the outcome, and the reader. Since the text can only be approached allegorically, it is, strictly speak ing, unknown; if the outcome of reading is only an emergent property of this interplay, then it is also unknown. The question that arises from this is, if the entire process of reading is a true event, must the reader then be an unknown entity as well? And, by extension, in any instance of genuine reading, is the reader reading her- or himself? If the reader is known in advance, then
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the relative positions of both the text and the outcome can be posited, even if the entire process is unknowable (in an absolute sense). Hence, in each instance of true reading, whilst the reader is not completely unknown (everyone has a vague idea of "who" they are), the reader must be prepared to reread, or revise, her self in order for this to take place.J' In this sense, the title of Miller's text is incomplete; it should have read The Ethics of Reading: "Kant, " "de Man," "Eliot," "Trol/ope, " "James, "and "Benjamin" and "Miller. "
READING AND TESTING: READING AS TESTING I f the text, the outcome of reading, and the reader are unknown, how is any reading possible to begin with? If everything is unknown, can anything happen? Reading, in the sense of a "productive act," can only occur if the reader begins by posit ing something-a positing that has absolutely no ground, and no reason, and hence is an act of faith-and then tests it through the act of reading. Reading as a test site, where all three entities are being tested: the text, the reader, and reading itself. It is in this context of testing-without any a priori knowledge of the outcome-that the inscription on the side of the Sorbonne in May '68, which proclaimed, "All power to the imagination,"J2 holds true. For it is only through imagination that one is able to posit something before testing; before a true scientist begins to test an unknown, (s)he has to first posit a hypothesis, and only then can the testing begin. Like all true hypotheses, it is merely a beginning, an attempt to enter into conversation with the test site, without any truth claims made, as "a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction."33 This is imagination in the precise sense of the approach to sci ence that Nietzsche speaks of-a "scientificity that is linked to
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art and play "34-which opens up the potential for new discover ies, new thoughts, and true events. In this way, experimentation supplants the Goal, the collapse of telos and history, without escaping the precariousness that used to be associated with goals of action. Thought would no longer be bound to truth or falsity but turned into the interpretations and evaluations of nonfinite experiments, summoned by interpretations of forces and evaluations of power.35 When true reading occurs, it is a case of an experiment in read ing reading reading: what occurs is communication in the sense that Lucretius posits-a negotiation between unknowns where the outcome is an event. In a true reading, one can only adopt the position of the
infans:
one that is prelanguage, preknowing, and
preunderstanding. Everything that emerges from the process of reading-any "meaning" that is formed about the text, the reader, and the interplay of the two-is from the process itself.36 [Of course, the moment that the figure of the infans is uttered, we are in a problematic position: once it is uttered, we are already in language, and as such, there is no figure of the
in/am
that is possible, yet without this possibility, we are resigned to the fact that one is forever constrained, bound, by the rules of language that precede us. Thus, we have no choice but to speak of this figure as if it were even possible to do so: we have to speak of a prelanguage within language; this is where imagina tion is crucial to proper reading. In order to test the possibility of proper reading, in order to even begin to posit its potentiality, we have to first imagine that it is possible, we have to read as if we have never read before and yet can read.] The imagination that is a fundamental part of reading requires craft and skill; it is not a random process: "acts of imagination
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[are] rule bound, made to submit to laws of internal consistency, continuity, probability, and moderation."37 And even if we fol low Miller's claim that "the pen . .. seems to do the thinking for Trollope,"38 as if the creation of characters were a "spontaneous and uncalculated 'conception,"'39 an "auto-insemination"40 that is divorced from rational thought and authorial control, this still does not refute the fact that in order for the characters to be born, impregnated into the novel, if you will, there has to be craft on the part of Trollope. This is the kind of imagination-that which involves skill and craft-that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari proclaim as the key to moving from the "real to the virtual," a strategy that is truly radical not because it is oppositional in logic to the dispositif, but because it takes the dispositif itself to its extremes.41 Transposed to the context of reading, the act of imagination is precisely the gesture that is required for an ethical reading, a "genuine reading [which] is a kind of mis reading. [Its] value ... against all reason, lies in its difference and deviation from the text it purports to read."42 The transgres sion of Trollope-through the imaginative gesture-was not so much in the fact that "he has perpetuated a kind of fraud, that he has secretly undermined the values of his society"43 while he attempted to gain legitimate entry into that very society, but precisely because he demonstrated that society itself is a fraud: the "counterfeit production [that] is then passed off as legitimate coin,"44 the "simulacra of the others in his novels"45 is the very reflection of society-no one can tell the difference. Miller can only make his point about Trollope's self-contradictory claim by pretending to be able to distinguish Trollope from "Trollope," even though both are but readings of "Trollope." Ironically, it is this performance of the ability to distinguish "Trollope" from "Trollope" which demonstrates "Trollope's" radicalness-the inability to distinguish the two is precisely what allows Trollope
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back into his society; the simulated separation is what allows Miller his narrative. But at the same time, it is this act of imagi nation by Miller-this positing of the difference between the "Trollope" of An Autobiography and the "Trollope" who signs off below the title of Orley Farm-that allows him to test his hypothesis, that allows him to read.
PUTTING J BACK BEFORE THE LAW "What do you still want to know, then?" asks the gate keeper. "You are insatiable." "Everyone strives after the law," says the man, "so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?" The gatekeeper sees that J is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, "Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I'm going now to close it."46 Each act of reading is unique, as J finds out: "this entrance was assigned only to you." It is for this reason that it is not only the writer who must "take responsibility and continue to take responsibility"47 for her or his work but also the reader. In read ing the work, the reader is also responding to the text-and to the latent law that lies beyond and before the text (and the reader)-and as such, this is an act of responsibility. In every act of reading, since the text "was assigned only to [the reader]," all responsibility to and for the text lies with the reader-it is (s)he who stands before the law, and it is (s)he who must answer to the law. Perhaps it is an attempt to get an answer that is ultimately futile, for even as one "makes many attempts to be let in, and... wears the gatekeeper out with his requests ...at the end [the gate keeper] tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet."48
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In this case, the only possible answer is "no": this is the answer that precedes any question that J can pose. However, it is this "yet" that is crucial: it points to the forever-deferred Law which the reader can approach but never reach. The Absolute Law is that which governs both the reader and the text but can never be known by either the text or the reader. It is precisely the unknow ability of the Law that calls for the full responsibility of and by the reader. After all, of the three potential unknowns-the text, the reader, and the outcome of the process of reading itself-the reader is the only one that (s)he has a chance of knowing (at least in a relative sense). It is only through the full response of the reader to and with the Law, through her- or himself, that any hope of glimpsing this Law and, by extension, any hope of true reading, can occur. This is why the only way in which J can hope to approach the Law is by positing what the Law is in the first place. For every attempt to request his way in brings forth the same answer: "it is possible .. . but not now."49 And more than that, since the Law is specifically for him, or at least this particular Law is "assigned only to [him]," then J must first begin by positing who he is. After that, he can begin to test himself and, by extension, the Law which is applied to him, or, if you prefer, imposed upon him. In this way, there is a potentiality that he may one day pass through the gates. In exactly the same way, when Miller begins to attempt to read ethically, what he first does is imagine the possibility of doing so, while acknowledging that the Law is beyond and before both him and the text. In this sense, what Miller has to do first is to imagine himself: this act of reading is Miller reading "Miller." Even if this is not possible (can one imagine oneself reading as if one can really distinguish the reading self from the actual self?), this is the necessary gesture to begin any true reading.
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Otherwise, if the reader is always the same, we are back to the Kantian situation of applying the same method-the universal gesture-to everything: then there is no response and, hence, no responsibility to the text or to the process of reading itself. Miller hints at this imaginative gesture right from the beginning, in his epigraph, when he cites Kafka's The Trial: "'No,' said the priest, 'it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary. '" In this sense, every imagined reader-in this case, when Miller imagines "Miller"-is merely a hypothesis in order to allow for reading to take place: a read ing that has no ground, but must act as if there were one, if only for reading to take place. In writing The Ethics of Reading, Miller attempts to demon strate the manner in which "an author reads himself,"50 but what he actually does is show how a reader reads himself. Perhaps, then, the actual hidden title of the text is The Ethics ofReading: "Miller" Rereading "Miller. "
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ENDNOTES
I . Franz Kafka, Before the Law, trans. Ian Johnston, http://www. mala.bc.cal-johnstoi/ kafkalbeforethelaw.htm (italics added). 2. 1. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trol lope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987),9. 3. And like the Platonian Idea, this spirit that governs the text and
runs in and through the text, is, strictly speaking, unknowable. At the very most, one can experience the effect of the Idea (or the spirit), but as it is transcendental,there can be no direct expe rience of it. This is, unless one is positing that it is a simulated experience. 4. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 121. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.,2. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.,3. 10. Ibid., 74. II . Ibid. 12. Ibid.,118. 13. Ibid., 120.
14. "Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical nega tion of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference." Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simula tions,6.
15. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 121. 16. Ibid. 17. This is the position that Slavoj Zizek has termed "Western Buddhism"-"I am apart from all the material realities of the world; nothing can affect me, as I am centred in my own being
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and away from everything else, as the world is an illusion." This is a position of extreme arrogance, as if to say that "I am above everything else." This is another way of saying, "I am in such an extreme position of power that if I were to get involved in the world, it would fall apart, as I have such a massive influence on everything. I have to save you all by remaining decentred, for I am really the centre of the world."
18. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 58. 19. Ibid., 122. 20. Ibid., 127. 21. Ibid., 120. 22. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 6. 23. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 78. 24. Ibid., 65. 25. As quoted in Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 65. 26. For the Kantian (or, to be fair, the "Kantian," as it is my version of Kant) imperative is totalitarian in the sense that it effaces the singularity of any situation through the application of the same method to all situations.
27. Miller, The Ethics ofReading, 87. 28. Ibid., 120. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. If there are three variables in an equation, X, Y, and Z, and they are only known in relation to and with each other (in other words, there is no transcendental point of reference), and if we posit that the outcome of any combination of the three in an equation is unknown, by definition, all three variables must remain unknow able at all times. If any of the variables is known, then the other two variables will be known, at least in relation to the first: they will be relatively known and no longer absolutely unknowable. Part of the mathematical leaning of this argument comes from a discussion about variables and equations with Jason Ng in Singa pore, 16 November 2006.
32. This phrase is usually attributed to Paul Virilio. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974),344.
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34. Ronell, The Test Drive, 211. Ronell was meditating on the approach to science that Nietzsche was attempting in order to think through the figure of the gay scientist in The Gay Science. See especially pp.151-245. 35. Ibid., 217. 36. The figure of the in/ans is explored in Christopher Fynsk, Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 37. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 83. 38. Ibid., 92. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 95. 41. This strategy of resistance is explored, amongst other places, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capital ism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 1987). 42. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 118. 43. Ibid., 96. 44. Ibid., 95. 45. Ibid. 46. Kafka, Before the Law (see n. I on p. 98). 47. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, lOJ. 48. Kafka, Before the Law (see n. I on p. 98; italics added). 49. Ibid. 50. Miller, The Ethics of Reading, 15.
CHAPTER
4
READING ROLAND BARTHES, REREADING ROLAND BARTHES (WRITING ROLAND BARTHES)
It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a noveL I This is the epigraph in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, a statement that exists only in the beginning-not actually in the text itself but on its fringe-and which continues to haunt us throughout the text. It is an insistence-"it must"--of ambigu ity: not just that a "character in a novel" is more ambiguous than a real person (whatever that means), but that even the status of character itself is unsure. After all, it must only be considered "as if' the person is a character; otherwise, the statement would
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have read, "This is spoken by a character in a novel." Since this is a memoir of sorts--or at least a rereading of Roland Barthes by himself-the uncertainty of the status of the character opens up a question: which Roland Barthes is the character in the novel? Is it Roland Barthes the writer remembering the events in his life in which he is a character; is Roland Barthes a character who is narrating his own life in the course of the novel called Roland Barlhes; is a character Roland Barthes writing about--or even writing into existence--another character Roland Barthes in a novel (with the title Roland Barthes)? (This kind of embarrassment started, for him, very early; he strives to master it-for otherwise he would have to stop writing-by reminding himself that it is language that is assertive, not he. An absurd remedy, everyone would surely agree, to add to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of lan guage could make language tremble.)2 The parentheses that appear everywhere, as if the writer (we are no longer sure if it is Roland Barthes or "Roland Barthes" or even Roland Barthes who is writing, so let's just call her RB) is attempting to hide away parts of her writing throughout the text.3 Perhaps in this hiding away lies a kind of embarrassment, an insecurity about language itself: even though RB proclaims, "As if anything that came out of language could make language tremble," she has to "remind himself that it is language that is assertive"; it is clearly not a truth to her, merely an opinion, a doxa, which is why she has to rely on "everyone agree[ing]."4 If the "novel" Roland Barthes is being told by language alone and can only remain stable because "everyone .. . agree[s]," is it not that in the end, it is the reader who determines what (or who) Roland Barthes (and, by extension, Roland Barthes) is? After
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all, if the "task ... of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new, thereby creating an unheard of speech in which the sign's form is repeated but never is signified,"5 this suggests that each assertion of language is a different one; each reading of
Roland Barthes, then, would
be a different one. It is this repeated difference that allows RB to proclaim, "Precisely what I regard as the very meaning of the word: the connotation."6 The Roland Barthes that is read and the Roland Barthes that RB is narrating are potentially very differ ent: the difference lies not in the signifier, or even in the image of the sign, but in the fact that the "connotation" continually shifts. It is due to the impossibility for the signified (of Roland Barthes) to remain constant that RB continually shifts between "I" and "he": not only can RB not decide whether she is refer ring to herself or maintaining a distance from the character that she is narrating, but, more radically, the "I" is already distant, the "I" is already a "he," a "'he' [that] can refer without warning to many other referents than me."7 In
Roland Barthes, there is no doubt that there is a form of
remembering that is taking place, where RB takes you through her life. But it is never she who says anything, for after all, "it is language that is assertive, not he," and furthermore, a language that is unstable, where
"in the field of the subject,
there is no referent,,,g where "the fact, (biological or textual) is abolished in the signifier, because it immediately coincides with [the fact that there is no referent): [where I am] writing myselj,"9 where I myself am my own symbol, I am the story which happens to me: freewheeling in language, I have nothing to compare myself to; and in this movement, the pronoun of the imagi nary, "I', is im-pertinent: the symbol becomes literally immediate: essential danger for the life of the subject. 10
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In this remembering, in this memory of the character Roland Barthes, in this writing of the novel, the referent is absent. I n effect, what RB is doing is rewriting Roland Barthes into existence, not just Roland Barthes by RB, but narrating how Roland Barthes writes Roland Barthes into existence: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (as told by RB). It is this that allows her to claim she "had no solution than to rewrite myself-at a distance, a great distance-here and now: ...without my ever knowing whether it is about my past or my present that I am speaking."!! This remembering of RB holds "essential danger for the life of the subject,"!2 as the character in the novel no longer has a link to the person: in fact, the person might as well have never existed. The question that arises from this is, what, then, is being remembered here? Who or what is this member that RB (or even the reader) is recalling in this text? What can be found within this "patchwork, a kind of rhapsodic quilt consisting of stitched squares [where,] far from reaching the core of the matter, 1 remain on the surface ... [and where,] reaching the core, depth, profundity, belongs to others"?!3 Whilst this looks like a disavowal of responsibility by RB-in the sense of "I wash my hands of Roland Barthes, and so 1 can tell th is tale, this novel, in any way 1 desire"-this is not the case: even if the narration is not accurate, in the sense of an exact correspondence with the life of the subject in question, this does not mean that it is not true. After all, "denotation would be here a scientific myth: that of a 'true' state of language, as if every sentence had inside it an etymon (origin and truth).''i4 And since there is no origin of and truth to language-where the very meaning of the word is in its denotation-all we have is located in the surface, the skin, between the word and the reader. It is precisely in this way that language gives the same
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phrase inflections that are forever new, that RB never knows whether it is her past or present that she is speaking about (in fact, it may be her future that she is remembering), that each reading brings about a new communion, and each new com munion a new reading. Perhaps we can look again to the epigraph, where we might find another clue: one must never forget the photograph-an image of "the narrator's mother."'5 However, nothing is said of her, of the image; it is just there. Whether the photograph remains meaningless or has a particular significance is left com pletely up to you: all that we can know for sure is that RB's mother has an image. Not an image that has a link to a particular subject-for that would be a link between the subject and its representation, a link that can only be sustained by the imaginary, by simulation-but rather a pure image, a pure signifier, one that resists "the coalescence of the sign, the similitude of signifier and signified, the homeomorphism of images, the Mirror, the captivating bait."'6In this image of the narrator's mother, uncap tioned, unnamed, there lies an image that is in full potentiality: a photograph with an absent object. 17 If a narrator begins at the start of the text and ends with the last page, then who utters the phrase(s) in the epigraph and the afterword? Perhaps it is the same person-there is no reason why it cannot be RB as well-but whether the RB of the epi graph and afterword is the same as the RB in the text is another question; whether RB remains consistent, or is even the same, throughout the text is yet another consideration. There is enough consistency throughout the text to suggest at least a similar narrator, but oftentimes it is in similarity that true differences appear. Perhaps it is even in repetition that the greatest differ ences are to be found: after all, in each invocation of "he" or "I" when RB is referring to Roland Barthes, one can never be sure
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which Roland Barthes (if it is even Roland Barthes) she is refer ring to; the signifier eternally returns, but one never can be sure which connotation does. An echo of the epigraph can be found within the text in the statement, "All this must be considered as if spoken by a charac ter in a novel-or rather by several characters."18 It is the "dash" that connects the sentence from the epigraph to this supplemen tary line, but like all supplements, it is both an addition to and already from the original, never apart, joined by the dash, but never completely joined, always held apart by the dash, joined together by a violent or rapid blow, stroke. The RB of the epi graph or the RB of the text? "In general the context forces us to choose one of the two meanings and to forget the other," but in the spirit of the text, we shall not, as each time he encounters one of these double words, R.B., on the contrary insists on keeping both meanings, as if one were winking at the other and as if the word's mean ing were in that wink, so that one and the same word, in one and the same sentence, means at one at the same time two different things, and so that one delights, semanti cally, in the one by the other,,9 The two (or more) RBs, side by side, as "several characters" and "a character" at the same time: where "a character" is "several characters." Perhaps this is why the RB of the epigraph can be an image of the RB in the text and "the narrator's mother" at the same time: both a mirror image of an image (an image of a char acter, an image and a character), and a pure image (an image without a referent, or at least, a referent that is just another image) at the same time. Roland Barthes: (n)either person (n)or character; (n)either real (n)or imaginary.
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In narrating Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes, what RB does, or what the numerous RBs do, is perhaps "present, not the best pretense, but simply an un-decidable pretense,"20 as the book does not choose, it functions by alternation, it proceeds by impulses of the image-system pure and sim ple and by critical approaches, but these very approaches are never anything but effects of resonance: nothing is more a matter of the image system, of the imaginary, than (self-)criticism. The substance of this book, ultimately, is therefore totally fictive. The intrusion, into the discourse of the essay, of a third person who nonetheless refers to no fictive creature, marks the necessity of remodeling the genres: let the essay avow itself almost a novel: a novel without proper names.21
A double fiction is working here: not only is "the substance of the book ... fictive," but so is the narration of this fictive substance a fictive RB using both the "I" and the "he" in speaking of her self, a self that is already a "character in a novel." Not quite a novel, but "almost a novel," as "without proper names"-names that have a referent, that define, that exclude-the novel remains constantly "freewheeling in language,"22 the freewheeling of the "I" that refers to nothing but itself, that refers to nothing but the fact that it is referring. The instance of a double fiction is also one of a double blind ness: since the "I" (and even the "he") of RB refers to nothing but the fact that it is referring, this suggests that the "self' that is being referred to is unknown, or even absent. It is for this reason that it remains in parentheses: "(self-)criticism" is "of the image system, of the imaginary" precisely because both the "self' and the criticism of this "(self)"-"a matter of the image system, of the imaginary," and hence absent-would have to be simulated. Hence, in narrating this fiction, this "almost novel," RB is blind to
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this character that she is narrating, as the character does not exist outside of her narration. If RB can only see what she is narrat ing, this means that she is blind not only to what was before, in the sense of each narration being only "another utterance, with out my ever knowing whether it is about my past or my present that I am now speaking,"23 but she is blind also to all the other possibilities. In this way, RB is blind to both the Roland Barthes that precedes what she is narrating and also all the other pos sible Roland Barthes that she did not narrate. Since RB sees-or potentially sees-only at the moment of narration, of utterance, this suggests that at every moment, she is making a decision, a choice, of both what to include, and also what to exclude.24 Every instance of narration in Roland Barthes can be consid ered an "anamneses"25-a recollection, a listing-and more than just that, "anamneses [that] are more or less matte, (insignificant: exempt of meaning) [as] the more one succeeds in making them matte, the better they escape the image-system."26 The fact that the section is titled "Pause: anamneses," though, suggests that this recollection, this listing of collections, is not merely a random process; there is a moment of thought, reflection, inaction before every utterance. One must also not forget that in every anamnesis, there is an amnesia echoing in the background; in every act
0'
remembering, there is also the phantom of forgetting: in order t. remember anything, one has to first forget. In this case, since RI has no prior knowledge of the character in her novel, the gestur of remembering and rewriting are one and the very same-whm remains unwritten, then, is in the realm of the forgotten, the always waiting to be remembered, the memory whose remembrance is momentarily (and sometimes eternally) deferred. In the section "Pause: anamneses," the moment of the "Etc. "27 is where remembering and forgetting collide: the invocation of "the rest," "and the others," all the ones that are absent, recalling,
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remembering, potentially admits all the others, all the other possibilities, all the things that are forgotten.28 Hence, not only does "every utterance of a writer (even the fiercest, the wild est) include a secret operator, an unexpressed word, something like the silent morpheme of a category as primitive as negation or interrogation, whose meaning is: A nd let that be known!"'29 '
but, more radically, every utterance also is a secret operator: RB's insistence on "keeping both meanings, as if one were winking at the other and as if the word's meaning were in that wink,"30 even in the face of its impossibility (she has to choose at every juncture), ensures that every utterance is always made in complete blindness, as every utterance is blind to everything but the utterance itself. This is precisely why the only meaning that can emanate is that of another utterance-"And let that be
known!"-an utterance that refers to nothing but the fact that it is uttered. This is why "the meaning transferred matters little or nothing, the terms of the trajectory matter little or nothing: the only thing that counts-and establishes metaphor-is the trans
ference itself."31 It is for this reason that the answer to the question "how to write, given all the snares set up by the collective image of the work"32 could only have been "why, blindly":33 in order to avoid the snares of the image system, of the imaginary-in order to avoid either simulating Roland Barthes into existence or effac ing Roland Barthes completely-RB has no choice but to write blindly, write "as if...a character in a novel," refusing all refer ences such that all that is written is "totally fictive."34 I have the illusion to suppose that by breaking up my discourse I cease to discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself, attenuating the risk of transcendence; but since the fragment ...is finally a rhetorical gesture and since rhetoric is that layer of language which best
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presents itself to interpretation, by supposing I disperse myself I merely return, quite docilely, to the bed of the imaginary. 35 In order to avoid the snares of the imaginary, RB has to rely on a rhetorical gesture, an imaginary gesture, the anamneses, the fragment, "not on Iy ...cut off from its neighbours, but even within each of these fragments parataxis reigns."36 As such, even as the anamneses are fragments--each separate from the other, and each fragmentary within itself; it is their arrangement that gives them meaning, as the index of a text, then, is not only an instrument of ref erence; it is itself a text, a second text which is the relief (remainder and asperity) of the first: what is wandering (interrupted) in the rationality of the sentences.37 Since it is the order in which one reads them that then gives them meaning, RB can legitimately proclaim that "my text is in fact readerlY,"38 not that this is a disavowal of the responsibility of RB as a narrator, but rather in acknowledgment of the fact that in narrating this text, what RB is doing is a rereading of Roland Barthes in order to write the character Roland Barthes. After all, the same blindness that is in RB's writing is found in her reading, for when I read, I accommodate: ...in order to reach the right level of signification (the one that suits me). A responsible linguistics must no longer be concerned with "messages" (to hell with "messages"!) but with these accommoda tions ...: each of us curbs his mind, or curves it, like an eye, in order to grasp in the mass of the text that certain intelligibility he needs in order to know, to take plea sure, etc.39
Reading Roland Barthes
READING (WRITING):
How,
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WHAT, AND A SECRET
How does it go, when I write?-Doubtless by move ments of language sufficiently formal and repeated for me to be able to call them "figures": I divine that there are figures
ofproduction, text operators .... here is another
of such figures: forgery ...My discourse contains many coupled notions
erly).
(denotation/ connotation, readerly/ wril
Such oppositions are artifacts: one borrows from
science certain conceptual procedures, an energy of clas sification, one steals a language, though wishing to apply it to the end: impossible to say: this is denotation, this connotation, or: this passage is readerly, this writerly, etc .... Then what good is it? Quite simply, it serves to say something: it is necessary to posit a paradigm in order to produce a meaning and then to be able to divert, to alter it.40 In this sense, RB's writing is, then, the temporalisation-a freez ing of a moment in time--o f her reading of Roland Barthes; perhaps this was the clue left behind at the beginning: a photo graph, an attempt to capture a moment in time. At the moment in which she writes, she "posit[s] a paradigm" through the arrange ment of the fragment "in order to produce a meaning," but a meaning that is always temporal, for not only does she "divert [and] alter it" but language itself does so for her. After all, every writer "steals a language," a language whose task is to "give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new, thereby creating an unheard of speech in which the sign's form is repeated but never is signified."41 Perhaps, then, the "academic exercise"42 that is included by RB begins to make a bit of sense-at first glance, it is merely a list that has nothing to do with the other fragments; it is a frag ment that is totally cut otT from its neighbours, without reference
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to anything but itself. The first question that arises when one reads this fragment is, to whom is RB addressing the "academic exercise"? The obvious answer would be the reader-who else can see this besides a reader? But if so, why would RB write this fragment differently from all the other fragments in the text? This is, after all, the only fragment in the text which completely does away with the pronoun; it is also the only fragment which refers to "the author" in an objective sense. (One could construe this fragment as the most fragmentary of the fragments). Perhaps it is its fragmentariness that gives us a clue as to its function. The fragment refers to nothing but itself: each sentence stands alone and refers to no other sentence but itself. In fact, the only parts of the fragment that give it a form of continuity (or cohesion) are the numbers, both the "index of a text" and its "second text."43 Perhaps it is this "remainder"44 that is also the "secret opera tor... whose meaning is: 'And let that be known!"'45 And what is known here is precisely that the meaning of the fragment lies in the numbers; it is its arrangement that gives it meaning, but not a meaning that is stable, for one can read the sentences in any order and they would still work as an "exercise." Another possibility is that the reader that RB is referring to is herself, for instead of using her usual pronouns "I" and "he," she uses "the author" instead. It is in this self-reflexive moment-when RB refers to herself-that reading and writing collide: the only time that RB can see her self-reflexive moment is when she is reading it. It is in this moment that the "character in the novel" is the same one that is writing and being read at the same time. This is the very reason why RB admits within the text that the actual title of the text is neither Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, nor Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (as both titles rely on the presence of an external referent), but "Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes."46
Reading Roland Barthes Do Tms
IN
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MEMORY OF ME
To write the body.47
Provided one was willing to read the body in the cOrpUS.48 Reading and writing: the double that haunts RB throughout the text and one that she cannot choose between. For at every moment of writing, she is always also reading the body. And it is this inability to maintain the duality, the binary, which causes the fear (of the monster of totality), for now there is no longer a deliberate act; RB has no choice but to do both simultaneously. It is at this same moment that laughter liberates RB, for it is "laughter [that] by a last reversal, releases demonstration from its demonstrative attribute,"49 releases the signifier from a single signified, frees connotation within denotation. What liberates metaphor, symbol, emblem from poetic mania, what manifests its power of subversion, is the preposterous, that "bewilderment" that Fourier was so
good at getting into his examples, to the scorn of any rhe torical responsibility.50 It is this excess-the inexplicability of laughter-that escapes comprehension, that slips through all attempts at knowing, at labeling, that refuses the tyranny of being named. [One does wonder why, at the moment when RB lets slip that the real title of the novel is Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, she also hides "(Nietzsche)," "(Gide)," and "(desire to write)" away in paren theses; both were thinkers of excess, and the desire to write is, in her own words- one writes with one s desire, and I am not "
through desiring"51-an unending and insuppressible one.]52 It
is in this "bewilderment" that imagination-as opposed to the imaginary (that is, of the image system}-lies.53
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Perhaps, then, the gesture that is most subversive to the "mon ster of totality" is the one that RB has left out. It is the absent gesture, the gesture that we cannot read, cannot see, are blind to, that is the gap in the text that allows her to continue rewrit ing, that ends the text proper by beginning again: she writes in what would be usually regarded as the last entry-logically dated September 3, 1974-if we take into consideration the order, the index, of the text, "this August 6"54 (the opening date of the text). It is the gesture of the open parentheses, the reactive text that remains open and allows RB to continually react with it and continue responding with and to it, infinitely.55 It is this absent gesture that allows us to imagine, and in this imagination, there perhaps appears fleetingly the apparition of ambiguity that haunts the text from the very beginning: A third vision then appears: that of infinitely spread out languages, of parentheses never to be closed: a utopian vision in that it supposes a mobile, plural reader, who nimbly inserts and removes the quotation marks: who begins to write with me.56 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes with of Roland Barthes).
____
(in memory
Reading Roland Barthes
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ENDNOTES
1. Roland Barthes,
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Rich
ard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 2. Ibid., 48. 3. "In what he writes, there are two texts. Text I is reactive, moved by indignations, fears, unspoken rejoinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes. Text II is active, moved by pleasure. But as it is written, corrected, accommodated to the fiction of Style, Text I becomes active too, whereupon it loses its reactive skin, which subsists only in patches
(mere parentheses)." Ibid., 43 (italics
added). 4. Ibid., 48. 5. Ibid., 114. 6. Ibid.,II5. 7. Ibid., 169. 8. Ibid., 56 (italics original). 9. Ibid. (italics original). 10. Ibid. (italics original). II. Ibid., 142 (italics original). 12. Ibid., 56. 13. Ibid., 142. 14. Ibid., 67 (italics original). 15. Ibid., as cited on p. 185. 16. Ibid., 44. 17. Unlike a painting, a photograph must have an object. The image that comes about as a result of photography is the outcome of the writing by light. In this manner, the photograph is usu ally taken to be a representation of the object-there is a link between what is seen on the fi 1m and what was before the lens. However, this Iink is usually defined by the caption, the title, the name that is given to the photograph: without a description, the image is left to float endlessly; so, yes, there is no doubt that the photograph in the epigraph is of a woman, the "narrator's mother," even, but beyond that, nothing can be known. It is a
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link to a subject, or an object; since this image is not within any system and has no referent but itself, a link that is unknown and can never be known. The irony of the mirror image is that one usually attempts to change the person standing in front of the mirror in order to match the idealized image which appears before them. In this way, it is the image that is more important than the person. It is this that RB realizes when she attempts to resist the "captivating bait" that is the mirror: in giving the photograph that appears in the epigraph a name that signifies nothing-"the narrator's mother"-since the narrator herself is unknown, RB allows the image to be an image that has no link to any referent. In this manner, instead of chang ing the referent (which is impossible, as it is absent), what RB does is paint on the mirror itself: by continually rewriting Roland Barthes, RB allows the signifier to escape a constant signified. Hence, it is not the signified that has to change, but the signifier that is doing so (through a repetition that is never the same): "the sign's form is repeated, but is never signified," and hence is con tinually slipping fixed signification. 18. Ibid., 119.
19. Ibid., 72 (italics original). 20. Ibid., 121 (italics original). 21. Ibid., 120 (italics original). 22. Ibid., 56. 23. Ibid., 142. 24. Even though the exclusion might not be a conscious gesture after all, she is blind to what precedes; she is not choosing from an existing pool of information or knowledge-the fact that she can only narrate one thing at a time suggests that all the other possibilities are already excluded.
25. The section titled "Pause: anamneses" is found on pp. 107-110. 26. Ibid., 109-110. 27. Ibid., 109: "(not being of the order of Nature, anamnesis admits of an 'etc.')" (italics original).
28. At the moment when RB remembers, she also forgets: she remem bers that she might have forgotten, she remembers that every act of remembering not only forgets something else, but is in itself
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also a moment of forgetting, a moment when one forgets the for getting of the moment.
29. Ibid., 157 (italics original). 30. Ibid., 72. 31. Ibid., 123 (italics original). 32. Ibid., 136. 33. Ibid. (italics original). 34. Ibid., 120. 35. Ibid., 95 (italics original). 36. Ibid., 93. 37. Ibid. (italics original). 38. Ibid., 92 (italics original). 39. Ibid., 134 (italics original). 40. Ibid., 91-92 (italics original). 41. Ibid., 114. 42. Ibid., 158. I.
Why does the author mention the date of this episode?
2.
How does the site justify "daydreaming" and "diversion"?
3.
How might the philosophy the author describes be "guilty"?
4.
Explain the metaphor "fabric."
5.
Cite the philosophies to which "preferentialism" might be opposed.
6.
Meanings of the words "revolution," "system," "image-reper toire," "inclination."
7.
Why does the author put certain words or expressions In italics?
8.
Characterize the author's style.
43. Ibid., 93. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 157 (italics original). 46. Ibid., 145 (italics original). If a character writes about her self-while she is reading about herself-then is this a total izing gesture: since RB reads and writes herself into existence (simultaneously), is the outcome of this writing one that is with out blindness, without any gaps, without anything that is unsaid? Even as RB claims that there is an element of the text that is
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never subsumed by the active text (that of RB rewriting herself as she is reading herself), as a part of it remains reactive, "moved by indignations, fears, unspoken rejoinders, minor paranoias, defenses, scenes" (ibid., 43)-scenes that "lay bare the cancer of language ... [that] language is impotent to close language," (159) as language continues endlessly without possibility of an end, a conclusion-there is still an attempt to hide it away; after all, this residual reactive text "subsists only in patches (mere paren theses)" (43). However, it is also totality that RB fears, and she "(secretly) aims at denouncing the monster of totality (Totality as monster)" (180). [Why must she do this in secret, though? And why must the secret be hidden away in a parenthesis? Almost as though it is a double secret, a hidden secret, the secret that is found in the reversal: "monster of totality," "totality as mon ster." It is in the realization that the secret lies in reversals that RB's "discourse contains many coupled notions ... [if only] as artifacts," as not only does the paradigm "produce a meaning" but, more importantly, it also allows RB to "be able to divert, to alter it" (42).] It is this subversion-that of the reversal (within coupled notions)-that RB finds in Totality as well; it "at one and the same time inspires laughter and fear" (180). It is this structure of the double that affords RB the freedom-"structure at least affords me two terms, one of which I can deliberately choose and the other dismiss" (117)-to make an active decision, and it is this deliberate act of choosing (along with the acknowledg ment that she is being blind to the other) that prevents this act of self-reading-writing from becoming a totalitarian gesture: in the blindness to the other lies a momentary unseen, an unknown, and, from that point on, unknowable element; there is always a gap, a darkness, at every moment of choosing. 47. Ibid., 180 (italics original). 48. Ibid., 161 (italics original). 49. Ibid., 81. 50. Ibid. (italics original). 51. Ibid., afterword (italics original). 52. Ibid., 145.
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119
53. The imaginary is a simulation (fitting into an overall scheme, pat
tern, theory), which ultimately effaces its object; the imagination is of the realm of possibilities, an image without a name, a name less image. 54. Ibid., 180. 55. Ibid., 140. 56. Ibid., 161 (italics original).
C HAPTER 5
ONLY FICTION Is STRANGER THAN FICTION
Little did he know that events have been set in motion that would lead to his imminent death. This is the moment that the film Stranger Than Fiction I hinges upon: before this utterance by Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) was only annoyed by her voice in his head (which seemed to be accurately narrating his life); upon hearing this, Crick immediately begins to actively seek out the source of this narration, the narrative of his life. As the Dustin Hoffman character, literature professor Jules Hilbert, points out, this is an odd sentence because there is a slip in the standard third-person narrative that Eiffel usually uses: in this case, instead of being a narrator who merely reports what
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Harold has done (which suggests that the character dictates what occurs next), "little did he know ..." suggests that there is some thing that the narrator knows that the character does not. This suggests that it is the narrator who is determining Harold Crick's destiny: Eiffel is the writer and Crick a character in her tale. However, considering that Crick eventually manages to influ ence Eiffel to the extent that she changes the ending of her tale (in the original, unfinished version, Crick is hit by a bus and dies), there is a possibility that Crick does have some form of control over his destiny. Even the scene where Crick tests the hypothesis of whether he has any control over the plot-he sit� in his house and does nothing to see if the plot advances inde pendently of him; it does, which then prompts Professor Hilbel to conclude that the plot is narrative and not character-driven does not completely refute the possibility of Crick's influencl over the narrative. It is possible that both Crick and the narra tor influence the tale: Crick influences the narrative as much as the narrative changes Crick. This opens the question of whether there is an omnipotent narrator, or whether the narrator is as much part of the narrative. Is the narrator as much a character as her characters; is Karen Eiffel being as much a character as Harold Crick? One must also not forget that the eventual version that we are watching in the film is actually the rewritten version; we are reminded of this in the final shot, when we see a script fin ished on a typewriter ("And so it was: a wristwatch saved Har old Crick" is the line that we see). This opens up the possibility that everything that we have seen prior to that final shot is part of a narrative and not a report on one. Without this, the opening line-"This is a story about a man named Harold Crick. And his wristwatch"-would not be possible; it is only with the revised ending, in which Crick does not die, that the opening line makes
Only Fiction Is Stranger Than Fiction
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sense. In this manner, all the people in this film are part of a narrative; this is the only way in which a character in a novel (Crick) can meet the narrator of that same novel (Eiffel): both are characters in yet another novel. In this light-or perhaps lack of light-about the status of both the narrator and her characters (one cannot be sure who is narrating; in some way, both Eiffel and Crick are narrating their own versions of their tales, which affect the other), it is com pletely appropriate that
The Meaning of Life2
is shown as part
of the narrative: the meaning of life is a narrative. In this way, there is no life that is prescriptive, no life that can be prescribed: this is precisely why Jules Hilbert tells Crick, "You have to die, it's a masterpiece," rather than, "You will die." Perhaps without realizing it, Hilbert points out the fact that "little did he know" refers not merely to Crick but also to Eiffel herself: this is exem plified in the fact that Crick actually chooses to die after reading Eiffel's scribbled ending to the tale. However, in response to Crick's willingness to give up his life for the tale, Eiffel changes her mind and alters the ending; both responses are unplanned, illogical even (Crick willingly choosing death for a tale, Eiffel willingly choosing to weaken her tale to save a character), a response to the needs of the other (whether this other is real or imagined is irrelevant here).3 These responses, even though cog nitive choices on the part of Crick and Eiffel, are also choices that are made in situations that are beyond their control (Crick is put in that situation; Eiffel had no way of knowing what Crick would choose). This is why they cannot be prescribed, as there is no way to sustain these actions consistently: their responses are in complete contradiction to their usual meanings of life (Eiffel knowingly lets Crick live, ruining her writing form, which is the tragedy; Crick, who has just found meaning in his life outside of routine, willingly ends it to fulfill a narrative-the
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tragedy-that he has been trying to avoid). Since both Harold Crick's and Karen Eiffel's meanings of life are not consistent within themselves, they would not be sustainable as prescriptive statements, as truth claims-they have no repeatability and can only be truths in themselves, in the singularity of the situation; one cannot extrapolate from this situation-hence, the only way that they can be told is through a fictional account, through a narrative. [The standard proverb that comes to mind when one looks at the title of the film is "Fact is stranger than fiction." Perhaps this is an indication (perhaps more an indication of me than of any one else) of the inclination to complete, finish, end a sentence, to sentence an open phrase to completeness rather than allowing it to remain open, inclusive. However, when one considers that the only way that one can approach "fact" is via fiction (this is shown especially in the oft-used saying "the story of my life"), what it is really suggesting is (if one still feels the need to com plete the phrase) that "fiction is stranger than fiction." However, if the claim now is that "fiction" is "stranger than fiction," it is then a circular claim. At the same time, it is a contradictory claim. What this suggests is that either the statement is absurd or that it can never be completed: "fiction is stranger than fiction is stranger than
.
"]
If Karen Eiffel is as much a part of the narrative as Harold Crick is, then the statement upon which the tale hinges cannot be a statement of fact, of truth; "little did he know ... " cannot be a constative statement. For in order to determine the truth or falsity of the statement, it would have to be outside the nar rative. Since the utterance is part of the same narrative, it is a performative statement; at best, it is a prediction by Eiffel as to the knowledge-status of Crick, a promise that she knows some thing that he doesn't. And, as promises pertain to something that
Only Fiction Is Stranger Than Fiction
125
hasn't yet occurred-when Eiffel utters that statement, she has no idea of what the future holds for Crick-it is an utterance that cannot be verified in the present moment (there is no correlation between the statement and its phenomenological manifestation). In this sense, the film plot, or the narrative, hinges on a state ment, an utterance, that cannot be sure of itself, cannot verify itself. Moreover, it is a promise that ultimately fails to deliver as well: Harold Crick does not die at the end of the tale. This failed promise is more evident with the knowledge of the fact that what we are watching is the rewrite of the novel: Eiffel says as much when she meets Professor Hilbert and tells him that she has to rewrite the story to fit the new ending. What this means is that the utterance of the promise was made in full knowledge of the fact that Harold Crick does not die by the end of the tale. The first temptation is to then accuse Karen Eiffel of uttering an untrue statement. However, for this accusation to hold, we must once again take "little did he know ..." to be a constative utterance. For the utterance to be constative, we must take it that the tale ends when the film closes; otherwise, there is no basis on which to judge. By doing so, a time frame would have to be set on the utterance, on the promise that was made. However, as a promise is an utterance that refers to a future (perhaps a hypo thetical future), is it possible to legitimately set a time frame on it? Since one cannot make a legitimate judgment on the status of the utterance, this suggests that the tale still goes on: perhaps, then, the promise of Harold Crick's death still can come true. However, this suggestion is absurd in the light that Karen Eiffel ends the rewritten novel: we see it end in the final shot of the film. This then suggests that either her utterance has carried over from the world of the novel into the "real" world in which she lives (which doesn't make sense), or that her world is another narration that the utterance has transferred into.
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Perhaps then, the utterance "little did he know... " plunges us into darkness, blindness, when it comes to Harold Crick indeed, "little does he know"-but at the same time opens us to the question of the status of Karen Eiffel. Due to the ambigu ity of the promise-we can never tell whether it is fulfilled or broken-we can also never determine whether Karen Eiffel is a narrator or a character. What is thus "stranger than fiction" is perhaps not fact (in the sense of an objective observation), but the fact that Karen Eiffel is (n)either fact (n)or fiction. The only thing that we can be sure of in the end is, "little do we know...
"
Only Fiction Is Stranger Than Fiction
127
ENDNOTES
I. Stranger Than Fiction, DVD, directed by Marc Forster (Chicago:
Crick Pictures, 2006). 2. There is a scene in the film where Crick is in a cinema watching
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (directed by Terry Jones and
1983). 3. One could also construe that the gestures of both Crick (willingly Terry Gillian,
giving up his life) and Eitfel (giving up her masterpiece) were gifts, or, more precisely, aeconomical gifts: neither had anything to gain from his or her decision. In fact, the only beneficiary of the gift was the other; the only impetus for the gift was a response to the needs of the other. T his is why neither decision can be rational ized, explained away logically, or subsumed under reason: they are illogical decisions, made in madness, in blindness to themselves. The potentiality of the gestures of Harold Crick and Karen Eitfel to be read as pure gifts was brought to my attention in a conversation with Esther Tan.
PART III THE READER
Taking a dish that is well known and transforming all its ingredients, or part of them; then modifying the dish's texture, form and/or its temperature. Deconstructed, such a dish will preserve its essence ...but its appearance will be radically different from the original's. -Ferran Adria, EI Bulli 1994-1997
Text: my body-shot through with streams of song; ...what touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language your woman's style. -Helene Cixous, Laugh o/the Medusa
CHAPTER
6
READING. OR JUST GAMING.
You take the five cards in your left hand and with your
right hand very very gradually you shuffle them around,
you fold them, you twist them one behind the other,
slide, gradually-gradually I say-so you can identify
them by the first fraction of a millimeter ... you make
them appear-this maneuver takes time-as if you were unveiling, creating an absolutely extraordinary tension as you do.1
One opens to a page, scans the words, fixes, affixes one's gaze on one, then the next, then the next, slowly (or quickly) flips a page-losing the site of the previous page, caught in the gap between the first and second pages, momentarily losing the sight of all the pages, of all words-and then begins to scan the words again. And as the reader follows the words that flow across the page, the flow of the words itself, the flow of the page, sometimes
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seeing, sometimes not seeing, one must not forget her body, her body that traces the words, and the words that trace onto her body. [Yet clearly, at the point of reading, one forgets her body-is it possible to read whilst being acutely aware of one's body at the same time? The fact that one immerses herself into a text seems to suggest that the body of the reader enters into---enters within-the text itself: the text and her body become one. Read ing as an act, and a process, of transubstantiation: when the body of the reader remains the same, but is altered, changed, different, but not with a difference that is perceivable, seeable, or even knowable. Each time you pick up a text, the ghost of the writer whispers, "Do this in memory of me," and you read a text that is the same-the letters do not change, the words remain the same, the sentence that is passed is never overruled, overturned, reversed, quashed-but is just slightly different.] But does reading forget her body? That is a slightly differ ent question. For when she immerses herself into the text, when she enters the text, the text enters her as well, immerses into her being, inscribes it(-self) into her. Insofar as she is reading the text, the text is reading her; the text is reading her body, written on her body. If one is affected by words, if one can be wounded by words, it might just be because "words are missiles that explode in your somatic being."2 Where do these missiles come from? Surely, they must have a source. Perhaps the spectre of the author has not been fully exorcised and is hell-bent on one last haunting of the text, or its reader. Or maybe the ghost only appears in the reading-in the exercise of reading, in the exorcism that is attempted in the reading. After all, each time one reads, one pays attention to the inscriptions and not the inscriber, and slowly, the scribe herself is forgotten, left behind, abandoned. In the space that is reading,
Reading. Or Just Gaming.
135
in the negotiation that occurs between the reader and the text, in the ritual that is reading (after all, one goes back again and again to the same words, the same page, the same book, but never to the same text), in the offering of time that is made to the text (perhaps by both the writer and the reader), is there a spectre that is called up, a spirit that is raised? But if from a space, a site of negotiation, then surely we cannot have a sight of it-after all, a space by definition cannot be seen; it only exists in the moment of negotiation itself, it is temporal. The source of the missiles that are words is, then, always nonpresent (as opposed to being actively absent): a potentiality rather than an actual ity. We are then wounded, scarred, written upon, within, from a nothingness, an abyss. Perhaps, then, it is more of a stigmata than a scar, as it comes from without and then leaves a mark, a trace on your body. [It is surely no accident that we call the oeuvre of an author her "body of work." One should note that there is no mention of the body specifically in the term oeuvre-it traces itself back to
opus: work. In this sense, when we refer to the "body of work" of an author, the "body" that we are referring to is the body of the author herself, the work that is written on her self. Perhaps, then, it is for this reason that reading might have a visceral effect: it is potentially a process where two bodies collide. Of course, one can never say what is written on the bodies themselves; one can never say what the result of the collision will be: reading is both this collision and also the moment the bodies themselves come into existence. For only when she has read what she has written does the work come into being; reading is its becoming.] As one fans through the pages of the text, plays with the potential combinations that are present, and negotiates with the possibilities that are infinite within finiteness (there are fifty-two in each deck; there are twenty-six in our pile), one very, very
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gradually shuffles the words, folding and twisting them around and with each other, being very careful to never fold one's hand (after all, there are limits, boundaries, rules to this game). Slowly, she makes the words appear-this maneuver takes time-and a reading takes place, a meaning (if I dare use that term) is unveiled, but like every unveiling, there is a veiling that takes place at the same time: when one possibility appears, all the oth ers disappear (if only temporarily). In order to pursue a possible combination, she has temporarily to ignore the other ones, be blind to the other combinations (even if she might be aware of them); she has to shut her eye-temporal blindness-to all the other potentialities. This is the stake that she plays with-her time, and her body. Time is sacrificed to the text, and her body is the site on and in which this game is played. [In exchange for reading-whatever that begins to even mean the reader has to offer a sacrifice to the text, and a sacrifice that has no guarantee; after all, even if you posit that she receives knowledge from the text, this is often forgotten over time, passed into memory, and then altered by time itself (the very offering she makes). And each time she picks up the text, it only allows her to glimpse what is directly in front of her-the pages, the words, the writings of the text that come before and after are only memories of what has passed, and memories of the future. She only can see what is in front of her; the rest of the text she is blind to. In this sense, her sacrifice is one that is aeconomical there is no necessary exchange for her sacrifice of time-it is a pure sacrifice: all she gives is her gift of time. In the realm of exchange, reading is an impossible exchange.] Even as there are rules, there are limits, there are possibilities that can be calculated, predicted, and staked upon accordingly, one can never subsume the game under one's knowledge.) This is when the unknown comes into play; this is the realm of the
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bluff Poker is not just a game that is played by people around the table, poker is a game of people; the people are part of the game itself. When the cards are unveiled, what remains veiled is the player: the cards are fanned out precisely to provide the screen, her screen. Even as her cards are shown, her strategy secreted, what remains secret is her. It is this same bluffthat pre vents her from being sucked into the abyss that is the text, from her body being completely sacrificed to it: each reading that she undertakes is a positing, a position, a bluff, one that allows the text to call, to raise, or to stay. Any reading, any "avowal[,] only vouches for its own blindness":4 it is a leap of faith, a leap that does not see, a leap that does not know-not only is the bluff on the text, but also on her (she has to bluff herself to adopt one position, one reading, if only for a moment, and refuse to see the other ones). In avowing, she makes a vow, and a vow is always blind to all other possibilities; at the moment of vowing, she must also remain blind to its possible failure. For after all, what is the point of bluffing but to ensure that the game goes on? The reader bluffs both herself and the text in order to ensure that reading itself can go on. However, the bluffis also the moment of another potentiality the end of the game. After all, there is always a chance that the bluff is called: that would be the moment in which she has no choice but to fold, unless, of course, the others are bluffing as well-that would be the moment when all of them are on the boundaries of the game, winning not by the hierarchy, according to the rules of the game, but by simulation. What is simulated is precisely the fact that they are playing to win by the stipu lation of the rules (trying to build a higher hand than the oth ers); she remains within the boundaries because it is these same rules that dictate that she wins. It is for this reason that the one who loses the final call folds, and never reveals her cards; all
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the players know that there is an element of bluffing involved in the game, but one must never openly admit to it, otherwise the game is over. In this sense, the game relies on bluffing (other wise it would be over the moment the cards are dealt), but must suppress it: the moment the bluffcomes to the fore, the game is over, the players can no longer play. A reader must posit, take a position, for that is the only way in
which she can continue reading: in other words, she must choose a possibility. Not only must she bluff the text (she posits one reading only to be able to continue reading), but she must also bluff herself (if she does this with full self-reflexivity, there is no way to continue reading; in this sense, she must read
as
if there
were only one possibility) in order that the reading-this nego tiated game-can continue. [If she refuses to take a position, to posit as if she can legitimately do so, then she is no longer negotiating with the text-if that happens, then reading (which is this site of negotiation) ends.] The moment the fact that she is only positing-or hypothesizing a possibility--comes to the fore, reading itself also collapses: one cannot go on reading if one is continually reflecting on the fact that one is only posit ing, one is only bluffing. In the same way as a scientist can only test her hypothesis if she denies the other possibilities temporar ily in order to fully extend and explore this one, the reader has no choice but to allow a possibility to be the possibility for a moment. Only after the testing is done can she return to the site of the choice and perhaps test the other possibilities, one of the other possibilities. In this way, the bluffis a hinge on which the game is played: it is the bluffthat both allows the game to continue and is also its end point. The bluff is (n)either part of the game (n)or out side the game. The point at which the reader most engages the text-the point where the reader chooses (a particular position;
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a particular direction)-is (n)either part of reading (n)or outside reading: it is the point where the reader (as part of the reading) both continues and ends reading at the same time. In order to say something, one must make a point, but as Roland Barthes reminds us, one must also never forget that it is the point that pricks, ruptures, breaks. [The potentiality of playing is also the potentiality of break ing; a chance for creating, imagining, reading, is also the possi bility of rupture, destruction, and death ...This is the absolutely extraordinary tension of unveiling, of playing, of reading: one
must never forget the stakes, one must never forget that it is her body that this game is played on, played in.]
SPINNING, MIXING, SCRATCHING, ClITTING, STABS
•••
5
"The rule of the undetermined is itself undetermined."6 If the claim made is that reading is an event-an indetermin able space which can only be experienced as such-then can one even begin to write about it, can one begin to enter it into the realm of representation legitimately? I f reading is a space a site-of negotiation, then by writing (or speaking) of it, there is already an attempt (an illegitimate attempt) at the impossible. Or even worse, in doing so, is there then not a possibility that reading as such is ignored, effaced: by speaking (and writing) of reading, do we speak-write of everything but reading? In writ ing-speaking of reading, is it not that reading as such is eternally deferred? [If we are speaking of reading without actually speaking of it, is it not, then, that we are speaking of it by turning away from it, by looking away, metaphorically, blindly? Perhaps by turning away from it, by not looking at it, we might see something that we otherwise would not; how else can one see ghosts but by
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not looking, or by looking through one's third eye, an eye that sees what others cannot see but cannot see what others see at the same time, an eye that is blind to everything else but what it sees?] Perhaps this is the bluff that I must play. Caught in an aporia to write about blindness, one has to be able to see (name) it; the moment one can name (see) it, it is no longer a blindness--one has to posit, take a position, stake on a hand. One has to attempt to read the other players, read the game, and not be read at the same time; one has to remain blind from all the others, and per haps by virtue of that, to all the others as well. In writing about reading, I have to write as if I am reading, I have to stake as if I have a winning hand-I have to write about reading as if you are not reading. [I have to remain blind to you. And in doing so, I must hope that you remain blind to the fact that I have to take a position on blindness whilst claiming that all positions are positionless, cannot be posited, cannot be seenT After all, "the avowal always vouches for its blindness."g A confession of bluffing: almost like showing one's hand after the other has folded, or, conversely, after you have folded when the other called your hand. Here I should recall why we confess to God who knows, cur confitemur Deo scienti, why we only truly confess
ourselves to God-who-knows because He knows it is not a question of knowing; and on condition: on condition there is no other witness than God-who-knows, on condi tion we make our confession to no one other than God, therefore to No One, to God-who-knows-as-Iikewise He-does-not-know, to God the Ear for my word, God as my very own Ear into which, out my silence, I thrust my avowal, aloud, in order to hear myself and (not) be heard by anyone else (other than God).9
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I confess to the reader that already knows, that already can read my bluff because I have failed to hide behind the fan; instead of unveiling the cards to myself, I have revealed, removed the veil that stands between us, shown the cards to the reader, allowed myself to be read. But it is irrelevant whether or not the reader-you already long ago realized the bluff that is blindness, the writing of the reading that is done
as
if blind, for it is in the confession of this,
the unveiling of this secret, that lies the power of the confession. Consider the tale of Ra. When poisoned by Isis to extract the ultimate secret (his true name), he reveals to her-in order to obtain the antidote-that his full name, his real name, is Amen Ra. The secret of his name: the secret that is his name. It is not so much what was concealed that is the secret, for everyone knew his name already, but that his name itself is secret. After all, Amen-Ra is the affirmation of his name: in effect, the secret of Ra's name is "I am Ra." This shows that the power of a secret lies not so much in its content but in the fact that it is a secret. In the same vein, whether or not you have realized that I had to posit blindness-to take a position on something that has no position, cannot be posited-is irrelevant; it is in the telling and the unveiling that the supreme secret is revealed. In the confession of bluffing, of stating, of tak ing up a position as regards to blindness (as opposed to knowing what this blindness is), in the lie that is needed, lies some truth:'o in reading, all we are doing is taking positions, positing, bluffing, all without the possibility of knowing until the game is over, until the reading is over, when the text is closed, when the space that is created and negotiated by the reading is closed, when the space between the reader and the text is closed. In confessing to a reader who obviously knows, there lies a similarity to-an "as if'�onfession to a god who already knows: it is a ritualized confession (aren't all confessions ritualized?), as
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would we confess something to someone who doesn't know or will never know what we are confessing? If the other person doesn't already know, then it is a telling, an unveiling, a revela tion, and not a confession. The object of the confession-"what is being told"-is scarcely important: after all, we all know that the end point of a confession is absolution. This is the only rea son why it can be called a rite of confession. Moreover, it is usu ally followed by an act of contrition-not that a few utterances can actually make a difference or change the fact that a deed has been committed, but rather that it is a ritualized pardon, much like the scapegoat onto which the sins of the community are passed. In any act of confession, there is a aeconomical gift that is uttered, and whether the person is genuine or not is unknow able to the other (except to, perhaps, the Absolute Other, that is, God, and She does nothing but hear: She is the Ear to this con fession; She has already seen the act, now She hears the confes sion and must be blind to all that has happened or will happen. After all, you will fall again). In reading lies a similar ritual: one can only read and then read again. There lies no metaphysical comfort to allay a read er's fears, your fears, that there is a correct reading: there is no reading but in the reading itself, in the same way as there is "no knowledge in the matters of ethics,"11 and "no knowledge of practice,"12 as "one only speaks within the realm of the verisimi lar and one can never speak in the realm of the true."\3 So even as we write-speak of reading (as an Idea, even) and we attempt to think of how one can read ethically, and even as we admit the problems of this (that we have to posit blindness whilst claiming that it is unknowable), we must not lose sight of the essential: even if we admit that the paradoxes ...imply a use of the Idea, that
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is, of time, and the localization of a horizon of things to be done in order to judge things already done, the problem of knowing how this horizon is to be defined remains whole, since there is no possible knowledge of it. 14 In our act of double blindness-now you are being made com plicit to this as well-what remains indefinable, where the "problem of knowing how this horizon is to be defined remains whole," is the text itself: not the text in the sense of the words, marks, on the page (that remains constant), but rather the text that is being read, the text that is active, the text that is con stantly being created in the act of reading. If what is being read-the text-is constantly shifting, chang ing, being redefined, then is it even possible to answer the ques tion "how is one to read?" at all?
(I) The moment the "how"
is answered, one ends up with a sadistic effacement of the text, a totalitarian gesture: in order to maintain the (possibility of) multiplicity, one has to refrain from any certainty, any absolute singularity.15
(2) However, without a singularity, one is unable
to think of anything at all: one is either left with nothingness (which would be absurd), or an anything-goes reading, the standard postmodern position (a guise for total transparency and complete exchangeability-a position that allows for no secrets, rituals), which is merely effacement in another form. (3) Hence, one has to make a hypothesis, take a position, in order to test it: this is the figure of blindness in relation to read ing. The result is, one is left with an aporetic situation: in order to think the question "how to read," one has to posit that "one has to read blindly," but to write-speak of reading blindly, one has to be blind to the fact that one cannot legitimately speak write of it, one can only speak-write of it metaphorically, figuratively.
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In this case, is it, then, ever possible to prescribe a manner, method, or even theory, of read ing? Or does it then follow that the true function of [a] prescriber is not so much to pre scribe, but rather to proscribe. For if[a] prescriber is indis pensable, it is primarily in order to proscribe, while at the
same time obscuring the necessity for proscription.16
It is this "obscuring the necessity for proscription" that allows, almost compels, me to speak of reading blindly (even while it is not possible to do so legitimately) in order to maintain the pos sibility of a multiplicity that lies in reading: in order to maintain the multiplicity that is reading, I have to make an exclusion, an exception, and determine that reading itself is mUltiple, that the text is multiple, and that the singularity of the moment of read ing is premised on this multiplicity. By prescribing that no [single form of reading], espe cially that of prescription, should dominate the others, one is doing exactly what is simultaneously claimed is being avoided: one is dominating the other [readings, and claims that there is a true text, an essential text] in order to protect them from domination.17 In this manner, each utterance of blindness, each attempt to think proper reading through and with the figure of blindness, "each determination, each definition...can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply indeterminate or infinite."18 This is not a blindness that is negative in the sense of a deliberate refusal to see certain readings, certain possibilities, a blindness that is opposed to sight, but is rather a blindness that is inevitable, a blindness that is structural, beyond subjective
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choice. Not an "I do not want to see," but an "I cannot see": after all, "a totally enlightened language , regardless of whether it conceives of itself as a consciousness or not, is unable to con trol the recurrence, in its readers as well as in itself, of the errors it exposes."19 This suggests that regardless of the amount of self reflexivity, it is futile: the problem of self-reflexivity is not the fact that there is a self that is doing the reading (in the form of the self as centre of everything) but, more radically, that this self is impossible to locate in the first place; there is no self that is separate from what (s)he is reading. In this sense, the space of reading, "the other [to both the text and the reader] becomes the intimate condition of possibility of the game [reading itself], remaining all the while out of bounds, like the gods."20 Ultimately, it is for this reason-the inability to see the face of God, the unknowability of God-that Paul goes blind: he has no recourse but to be blind in order to "see" God, in order to hear Her voice and Her word. Perhaps this is why we do not see the Word, but rather hear Her. Instead of "seeing is believing," what we have here is "seeing as reading"-which translates to "seeing as questioning"; did the text really say that?-each and every time you look at the text, attempt to read the text. It is only when you close your eyes and listen that you might hear Her. However, this means that there can be no prescribed Word: you have to hear Her for yourself, which also means that you will be the only one that heard Her, and no one will believe you, as you have nothing and no one to verify with; you are destined to be alone after that point. Not only can it not be prescribed, one can never after the event prescribe it to anyone else: Her word was meant for you and you alone. This is why, when Paul faced the problem of how to speak of the unspeakable, show the unshow able, interpret the word, he had no recourse but to tum away, to address indirectly, to narrate the story. He had to speak of God
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figuratively; this is precisely why there are logical inconsisten cies in his story: it was never meant to be factual, true (in a logi cal sense), but was a narration, a telling, a relaying. And as we have learnt from Ra, J. Hillis Miller, Roland Barthes, and Karen Eiffel, the secret lies not in the content, but in the telling; the secret of reading lies not in what is being read, an interpretation, a hermeneutics, but in the reading itself. [As with21 all figures, tropes, there is always a turning away. Perhaps in that lies the secret of reading--one must tum away, not look directly at the object, be blind to the object. And in that way, perhaps one might actually see something.]
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ENDNOTES
1. Helene Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 41 (italics original). 2. In a lunchtime discussion about Jacques Lacan, Avital Ronell responded to my comment that despite the fact that we are born into language, we never get used to it, never use it, and that all we are is the medium for language, but not a neutral, unin volved medium (for language and words have an ability to wound us), with the utterance, "Words are missiles that explode in our somatic beings"; they are written into us, become us, as much as we become words, feel words, and launch words into others which has inscribed itself into my being.
3. Even when you stake a vampire, you never really know whether it is a vampire or not; all you know is that the one you staked is now dead. This is precisely why it is called a stake: when you drive the piece of wood into the being, you are wagering that it is a vampire that you are killing, and not just another mortal-what is at stake is your judgment, your call, your self.
4. Cixous, Portrait ofJacques Derrida, 48 (addition is mine). 5. Perhaps this would have been the moment to explore sound: how a word sounds to us, how the sounds speak to us, how the sounds that are left out continue to speak to us, how our prayers are always preying on us; do we need to come here in order to hear? This is where an exploration of a DJ and the way her body reads the music, how the tracks record themselves into her, how she lay ers the sound into her own score, might give us another aspect of reading and playing. During a conversation with DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) in Saas Fee, Switzerland, he likened spinning to conducting an orchestra: the score is laid out by the fact that you have a limited number of tracks available at any one time; the instruments are also in front of you; instead of players, you have a player; and the moment of creation is your intervention with all of these, governed, limited
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by a set of rules, laws, ways of hearing, by music, by musicality. According to Miller, it is the imagination of the OJ-the move ment into virtuality-that opens up this space for creation, an intervention by the OJ, such that a moment of negotiation, of com munication, between the OJ, her music, the people in the crowd listening to her tracks, and music itself, can take place. Singapore-based Lady Lue (Quek Sue-Shan) opened up my thoughts in terms of feeling the music, a bodily experience of the beats that are present and also those that are about to be present, feeling for the tracks, feeling the tracks that are on the stylus, and layering them with her fingers, her touch. In this manner, spinning is a bodily experience where she reads the tracks, the music, not just with her ears and her thoughts, but allows the beats to hit her, to record, track, trace themselves into her. Like a reader reading a text, the OJ is always in a process of spinning, of making music the music is always becom ing-playing music. 6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1137b29-30, as cited in Lyotard
and Thebaud, Just Gaming, epigraph, 2. 7. In fact, I have to hide the parentheses within a paragraph in the hope that they will remain unseen, unsighted, a spectre. But one must never forget that "what is secondary is the most powerful. What counts is not the main action, it is what is secondary: it is the running, the pursuit, the interminable desire, the metonymic machine, and not the action ...The accessories, or props, without which there would be no story, drama, no literature, are the secret geniuses of the soul's Theatre, from Othello's handkerchief, to Rousseau's ribbon, the accessories are the occult masters of our tragedies" (Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida, 108-109). After all, it is the prop that holds up, becomes the support, structure, base almost-without it, nothing would be propped up. 8. Ibid., 48. 9. Ibid. 10. There has always been much truth in the oft-used cliche "where the truth lies"-after all, it is not as if we are looking for some metaphysical, transcendent truth (as if this were possible); all that is available is what lies-are lies-and perhaps, like the hysteric, in some of these lies, lies some truth.
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II. Lyotard and Thebaud, Just Gaming, 73. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 75. 14. Ibid., 83. 15. Even when we speak of an ethical reading as one that adopts a sin gular response, a singular reading that cannot be extrapolated and brought beyond a particular context, this singularity is one that takes into consideration mUltiplicity: it is a singular-plural posi tion. The moment a position of absolute singularity is adopted, we are back to the situation of effacement. 16. Sam Weber, "Afterword: Literature-Just Making It," in Lyotard and Thebaud, Just Gaming, 104 (italics original). 17. Ibid., 105. 18. Ibid., 109. 19. de Man, Allegories of Reading, 219n. 20. Weber, "Afterword," 109 (additions are mine). 21. W hen you claim that something is like something else, when you establish a similarity, is there also a trace of preference-a liking that is inscribed into it? Perhaps this suggests that the likeness of one object to the other bears in it an influence of subjective bias; the correlation of one with the other is hinged on a subjec tive intervention: communication-and even language-which is based on the possibility of referentiality is only made possible by a SUbjective will. Hence, even if the subject, the reader, is not the centre of reading, the intervention of the reader, the willingness to read, the openness to the possibility of reading itself is a crucial step, an irreplaceable gesture.* *
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150 **
is like
When we make a statement"
----
what are we actually saying; what does it mean when we make a statement of relation between one thing and another? Perhaps there is always a trace of preference-a liking that is inscribed into this statement: when one says that ----
is like
," there is a likeness between one
and the other because you like it to be so; there is a subjective bias-or at least, a subjective involvement-in the statement of relationality between the two. This suggests that without this subjectivity, without the will of the subject, there can
be no
similarity between things, that subjectivity is the precondition of relationality itself. Moreover, the object that is referred to in the utterance is no longer objective: it is a subjectivised object, it is an object only because it has been called into a relation with another object by a sUbjective moment, a sUbjective will (only when named as an object�alled into being as an object by the subject-does it attain its objective status; otherwise, it remains unnamed, unknown, uncalled,
sans papiers). In this
sense, its status as an object is only as such due to its rela tionality with the other object, and since this relationality itself cannot exist without a subjective moment, the very status of the object is no longer stable: it is a relationality between two objects that are only objects because of this relationality itself. Since the statement"
is like
" is a state-
ment of relationality, would it not be that in order to make the statement, the possibility of relationality between the two things would have to first be in place? In other words, the possibility of the relationality between the two things in question would have to be assumed before one could even make a statement about their relation. So, even if there is a subjective moment to this relationality-in the sense that it requires a subject to utter the statement-the possibility of this relationality precedes the subjective moment, precedes the subject itself. If the possibility of relationality precedes the subject, then it follows that this is a relationality that is precognitive, for cognition can only take place in and through the subject. Since this relationality is one that is precognitive, there is always a
151
Reading. Or Just Gaming. notion of unknowability in it: in the statement " like
is
," there is a relationality that is unknowable, that
precedes both the similarity between the objects and the subject that is uttering the very similarity itself; there is an unknowable relationality within the relationality. One of the possibilities that is opened, then, is if this rela tionality is one that is preceded by an unknowable relational ity, then is it a call to the subject from the unknown, in the sense of the subject responding (by uttering the relationality) to something that it does not fully comprehend? This would suggest that the subject is responding to a transcendental rela tionality between the objects, one that somehow the subject has been made privy to. However, considering that this relation ality is a result of language-it only exists at the moment in which the statement"
is like
" is uttered
this suggests that the prerelationality that calls the subject to making the utterance cannot precede, be outside, language. In this sense, the prerelationality is part of language, part of the language that calls forth the relationality: language itself must encompass a prerelationality within the relationality that it establishes. Not only is prerelationality part of the language that establishes relationality, it is within relationality itself: pre relationality is not something that precedes relationality (in the sense of coming before, to be replaced by relationality), but is rather a condition of relationality itself. All relationality brings with it, is a result of, a prerelationality. [It is etymologically possible to trace the term like to the corpse-this would be through lich (or liche), which literally means "a dead body." This opens up the consideration that this prerelationality is written on the body, is part of the body, and not just that of the subjective body, the cognitive body, but a body that precedes the very subject in question. This opens again the consideration that the body of the subject must already be open to the possibility of a relationality before the relationality itself is even possible: the body is the site in which this prerelationality is written, is situated; the body is where the potentiality for relationality occurs in the first place.]
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READING BLINDLY If there is a prerelationality that is a part of every relational ity, this means that there is a part of every relationality that does not lie within the boundaries of relationality itself: it is not a nonrelationality in the sense of an antonym of relational ity (for that would be just a phase before relationality) but a relationality that is unknown to the relation itself, a relation ality that is unknowable within the boundaries of the rela tionality between the two objects in relation. Not only is this unknowable relationality part of the relationality between the two objects in the statement "
is like
," it
is a condition of this very relationality itself. Hence, whenever there is a statement of relationality, one can never fully legiti mize this relationality, not because there is a subjective bias in making the statement but rather as there is always already an unknowability which allows for this very relationality: this is precisely because the possibility of the relationality between the two objects must be assumed before this relationality can be made. This is not an assumption that rests on subjective bias ("I want there to be a relationality, so there will be one") but is a structural assumption, a structural condition. And it is this assumption of relationality that both allows for the state ment of relationality to be made, and which also never allows the statement to be fully legitimate. It is for this reason that ____
is like
" is a descriptive statement, and
never one that reaches the status of a definition; it can never be a definitive statement: "
is like
" is always
a claim. [One can no longer even discern whether the claim made is true or false as such-this is the point in which one can no longer differentiate between a performative and a con stative statement-as there is no external referent: referential ity is precisely the assumed relationality of language itself.] It is for this precise reason that this project-Reading Blindly-which is a claim of the relationality between the reader and the text (s)he is reading, is forever plagued by the illegitimacy of the "like": in order to explore the relationality between the reader and the text, the possibiIity of this relation ality has to be assumed, has to precede the very project itself.
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Just Gaming.
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In order for the project of reading to take place, there has to be a moment that is beyond reading itself, that is blind to the read ing that is about to take place. In this very precise sense, blind ness is both what allows reading to occur (as demonstrated in the project) and also the very condition that allows the project to come into existence: one has to assume blindness in reading even before speaking of blindness in reading, before protecting the space of blindness in reading. It is the illegitimacy of this reading, the illegitimacy of this blindness in reading, that opens reading itself out to the oth erness that we have been speaking of-the gap between the reader and the text in which reading potentially takes place. Only because this blindness is ultimately indefinable, illegiti mate, unreadable, does it expose us to its absolute otherness: the absolute otherness of the reader and the text (s)he is read ing. And because this absolute otherness is unknowable, and never knowable, reading-or, more precisely, a thinking of "what reading is," which can only ultimately come down to "what reading is like"--can never close itself, can never com plete itself, can never enclose itself. Like the "like," reading can only expose itself-to reading.
The connection to the other is a reading-not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading. -Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acker, Kathy. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press, 1988. ---
. My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini. London: Pan
Books, 1984. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Meridian, 1998. ---
. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans
lated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Meridian, 1999. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2002. ---
. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy.
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. The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London:
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. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1990. ---
. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila F.
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. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict.
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. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint.
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. Stigmata. London: Routledge, 2005.
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Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1999.
---. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
--- . Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
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. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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de Man, Paul.
University Press, 1979. Derrida, Jacques.
The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ---
. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri C. Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ---
. Right of Inspection. Translated by David Wills. New
York: The Monacelli Press, 1998.
---. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pas cale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Meridian, 2005. de Saussure, Ferdinand.
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Reflections on (TJerror. SaarbrUcken: Verlag
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Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Fynsk, Christopher. Press, 2000.
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. Uncalled: A Note on Kafka s 'Test. Open lecture at the '
European Graduate School, Saas Fee, Switzerland, 2007. Jarry, Alfred. The Ubu Plays: Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu, Ubu Enchaine & Ubu sur fa Butte. Translated by Kenneth McLeish. London: Nick Hern Books, 1997. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998. Kierkegaard, Sereno The Seducer s Diary. Translated by Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Latour, Bruno. Pandora s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science
Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Lucretius. Sensation and Sex. Translated by R. E. Latham. London: Penguin, 2005. Lumsden,
Robert. Reading Literature after Deconstruction.
Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009. Lyotard, Jean-Frans;ois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Mas sumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Lyotard, Jean-Frans;ois, and Jean-Loup Thebaud. Just Gam
ing. Translated by W lad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Marquis de Sade. Philosophy in the Boudoir. Translated by Mer edith Bodroghy. New York: Creation Books, 2000.
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New York: Vintage Books, 1967. --- . On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Quigley, Brendan. "The Distant Hero of Samson A gonistes." ELH 72, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 529-551. Ramachandran, V. S., and S. Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind New York: William Morrow and Co., 1998. Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. ---. Dictations: On Haunted W riting. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. . Finitude s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium.
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. Stupidity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
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---
. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Elec
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. The Test Drive. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2005.
Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Lon don: Picador, 1985. Shah, Idries. Reflections: Fables in the Sufi Tradition. New York: Penguin Books, 1974. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. London: Hutchinson, 1984. Stranger Than Fiction, DVD. Directed by Marc Foster. Chi cago: Crick Pictures, 2006. The Jerusalem Bible. Edited by Alexander Jones. Manila: The Philippine Bible Society, 1966. von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold. Venus in Furs. Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. New York: Random House, 1994. Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. --- . Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London: Routledge, 2004. ---
. The Puppet and the Dwarf The Perverse Core of Chris
tianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ---
. The Ticklish Subject: T he Absent Centre of Political
Ontology. London: Verso, 2000.
INDEX
a priori,xvii,31, 36,41-42, 55-57,70,78nI5,92 aporia, 140 aporetic,2-3,37,60,89, 143
book,9,12n3,25-26,28,43, 46nI9,57,64-66,68,70, 80n39,107, 135 Brutus, xiv-xvi
Acts of the Apostles, xii, xvi, xixn l l Adria, Ferran, 130 Agamben,Giorgio,48n36 Aristotle,70,148n6
Caesar, Julius,xii,xiv, xvi calculate, 1,35,38,54, 136 incalculability,36 uncalculated,94 checkers,68
Badiou,Alain,xvii,62
Being and Event, xixn 13, 79n31 Barthes, Roland, 14n 18, 116n 17, 139,146
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 76, \0 1-114 Baudrillard,Jean,8,74
Impossible Exchange, 48n35
choice, 1-2,7-8,12nl, 13n15, 33,61,69-70,75-76,86,93, 108-109,113, 123, 137-138, 145 choose,1,7-8, 13n15, 37, 56,59,68,77n7,106-107, 109,113,118n46, 123, 138 Christian,xi-xiii,xv-xvii,
The Intelligence of Evil,
xviiin2,xixn l l,5-6
14nI7,14nI9,82n55
Cixous, Helene,81n43
Simulacra and Simulation, 49n48,98nI4,99n22
The System of Objects, 48n34 Bloom, Harold "Literature is otherness," 30, 71 bluff,137-138, 140-141 body,10,20,23-24,46n4, 113, 134-137,139,147n5 "written on her body," 134 "written on the body," 151
Portrait ofJacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, 147nl,147n4,148n7 communion,30-31,46n 19, 81n39,105 communication,34-36,43, 48n36,55,58,67,78nI3,93, 148n5,149n21 concept,5, 22,37,7 1 conception,xvii,2 ,5,30-33, 41-43,66,III
READING BLINDLY
162
contract,40,52-54,58-61,69,
event,xvii,4-6, 9,25-26,28,
72-73,75
34,55-56,62,70,73-74,
precontractua1,64
78n11,91,93,139,145
correspondence, 5,90,104
exchange,7,30,39,143 direct exchange,35-36
dark,xvi,9,20,42,118,126 semidarkness,75 "stumbling around in the dark," 11 Deleuze,Gilles,71,94,100n41 Coldness and Cruelty, 63, 77n8,80n36 de Man, Paul,81n 47 Allegories of Reading, 47n20, 82n47,82n52,149nI9 Derrida,Jacques,36-37,79n34 The Gift of Death, 48n37, 48nn42-46 Right of Inspection, 81 n42, 82n48 detail,8,42,71 "devil is in the details," 9,72 double blindness,12n1,13n15, 36-37,39,44,61,107,143 efface,32,48n32,52,54-58, 61-62,72-73,78n15,87,91, 99n26,119n53,139 effacement,26-27,43,143, 149n l 5 elliptical,9 emergent property,34, 36, 48n36,8In39,91 ethics,1-2,4-5,31-33,142 ethical,8-10,12n l ,13nI5, 43-44,86-88,91,94,96 ethicity,5
impossible exchange,35-36, 38,44,71 ,136 faith,xvii,46n19,86,92,137 forget,3,8, 14n18, 58,74, 105-106, 108,122,134,139, 148n7 forgetting,2-4,12n4,13n6, 21,23,46n19,66 fragment,8-9,27,42,79, 109-112 Fynsk, Christopher,100n36 infans,93 gap,5-6, 23,43, 58-59,61-64, 67,69,80n35,114,I18n46, 132,153 Genesis, 13nn7-14 ghosts,12nI,20,25,27,34,39 phantom,10,28,30-31,108 spectre,20,22,28,44,66, 134-135,148n7 third eye,10,140 grammar,3,27-29,40, 47nn20-21,52,66,69,81n47 Guattari,Felix,71,94,100n41 Hamacher,Werner,13nn4-5, 31,48n32 Premises, 13n4,47n24, 78n16,82n50 Hannibal,74-75 hermeneutics, 4,146
163
Index
illegitimate,xvii,6, 29, 139, 153
law,xiv,4, 13n 15,28,46n16,
illusion,22,27,66,81n41,99n17
65,68-72,80n35,86-91,
image,9,19-20,23,70,103,
94-96, 148n5
105-109,113,115nI7,
unknowable law,90
117n42,119n53
laughter, 113,I18n46
imagination,xvii,5�,
Lenin, Vladimir,63, 79n33
21-23,25,33,6�1,
"what is to be done?",62
71-72,74-75,92-95,
Levinas, Emmanuel,32-33,
113-114, 119n53, 148n5 imaginary,23,32,103, 105-107,109-110,113, 119n53 painting,78n 13,115n17 photograph,105, 111,115n17 Iscariot,Judas,xii-xv,xviiin8
47n27,48n32,59 like,4,7,9,30,35,46n19,57, 63,71,89,92,98n3,104, 106, 109-110, 136,140, 142, 145, 147n5, 148n10,149n21, 150-153 literature,86,121,148n7 love,xiv,xviiin7,xviiin9,37
Jesus of Nazareth,xi-xv, xviiin8,xixn 10
Julius Caesar, xviiin9
Lucretius,34,36,48n33,93 Luke, St.,xvi,xviiin6,xixn 11 Lyotard,Jean-Fran�ois,47n25, 78n l 2
Kafka, Franz,97
Just Gaming, 47n25
Before the Law, 85,95,98n 1, 100n46 know,xii-xiii,xvi,3,29,56, 66,87-89,105,113,115nI7, 134,138,141-143
Marquis de Sade,32
Philosophy of the Boudoir, 77n7 sadist,43,54-55,63�, 77
"I don't know," 69,81n46
sadistic,49n50,57,73,143
knowledge,xvii,2,5,7, 10,
sadism,54
24,38,43,59,62 preknowledge,39 unknowable,xvii,2,4,
The Meaning of Life, 123, 127n2 memory,2-4,13n4,21,23, 104, 108,114, 136
25-26,30,36,39,65,
"do this in memory of me," 134
72-75,80n39,88-93,96,
remember,12n4,59,61,72-73,
98n3,99n31,118, 142, 151-153 Kierkegaard, Soren, 33, 37, 48n39
102-104, 108-109,116n28 metaphor, 109,113,117n42, 139,143 catachrestic,87,89
164
READING BLINDLY
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice,23, 45n4,63
Phenomenology qf Perception, 46n4 Miller, Paul. D (aka DJ Spooky),147n5 Miller,J. Hillis,46n16,76, 146
The Ethics 0/ Reading, 85-97,98n2, 98nn4-13, 98nnI5-16,99nnI8-21, 99nn23-25,99nn27-30, 100nn37-40,100nn42-45, 100n47,100n50 Murphy,Neil,78n14 negotiate,34,44,51,59,67,71, 76,8In46,135,138,141 negotiation,2,5--6,14n18, 30,43,51-58,67,69,71, 81n46,139,148 Nietzsche, Friedrich,42,63,79, 92,99n33
The Birth o/Tragedy, 46n17, 49n49,81n41
The Gay Science, 99n33 "metaphysical comfort," 42, 81n41,142
particular,1,8-9,12n3,26,28, 31,35,42,52-55,64--65, 68-70,76,78n15,88,96, 105, 138-139,149n l 5 Paul, St., xii-xvii,xixnnIO-II, 5--6, 145 phantom limb,20-25,30 somatosensory cortex,20,45n3 virtual reality interface, 22 visual-kinesthetic sy nesthesia,22 phenomenon,5,64,73 non phenomenal, 5 phenomenality,5 poker,137 posit, xiii,6,8,24,28,34-37, 62,65,75,91 imposition,54-55,57,78n15 position,32,56,58-59,73, 88,92-93,99n17, 111, 136-143 possible, 40,52,65,93, 96,106, 122,136,151 impossible, 2,18,39,59,73, 75,88,111,116n17,139, 145 impossibility,29,40,65,74, 82n50,89,103,109 potential,xv,2-10,23,25,93-96
otherness,31,56,59,66,153
potentiality,xvii, 12nl,
alterior,53,55
13n6,26-28,30,34-44,
radical otherness,30,39,58,
52-56,103-109, 135-139,
67,71,88
151-153 prescribe,xv,30-3\,52,79n32,
parenthesis,118n46 parentheses,102,107,113-114, 115n3,118n46,148n7
123,144-145 prescriptive,8,25,39, 41-42,123-124
165
Index prescribe (continued) prescription,41,43,62,70, 85,144 proscribe, 62, 79n32, 144 proscription,62,144
Ronell,Avital (continued) The Telephone Book, 154 The Test Drive, xv,xviiin9, 46nI8,79n34,8In41, 100n34 rule(s), 2-4,9,30, 40-41,
Quek,Sue-Shan (aka Lady Lue),148n5 question,xii-xiii, 1-2,6-10, 12n2, 13n15, 14n16, 22,39, 52-56,62,72, 79n34, 80n39, 91,96,102, 104-105, 109, 112,122, 126,134, 140,143, 145,150-151 Ra,141 Isis,141 Ramachandran,V. S.,21, 45nn2-3,46n5 "mirror box," 21-22 referentiality, 4,73, 149n21, 152 relationality, 4,65, 150-153 prerelational relationality,4, 64,151-153 respond,xiv,2-3,25,51,72,75, 88, 147n2 nonresponsibility,37 responding, 58-59, 78n14, 86,95, 114,151 responsibility, 30-40,86, 96-97,104, 110,113 resurrect,xiv,42 resurrection,xviiin3
51-52,65-69,71,80,89-90, 93-94, 136-137, 139, 148n5 Rushdie,Salman,16 Sacks, Oliver, 46n8 Saul. See Paul, St. secret, xiii, 4,8,37-39,94, 109, 112, 118n46, 137, 141,143, 146,148n7 self-referential,73 sentence, 14nI8,35,56-57, 72, 102,104, 106, 110, 112, 124,134 death sentence,43,98n 14 simulate,22,30,32-33,36, 41,46n 19,48n32,57-58, 67,87-88,90,95,98n3, 107,137 double simulation,89 simulation,33,55-56,58, 98n14, 105,I19n53, 137 simulacra,32,36,94 single,3,26-27,64,71, 113, 144 singular,xii,xviiin3,xviiin7, 2,8-9,25,35,42,55,68, 72, 149nl 5 singularities,38 singularity,1,6,31,39,53,
right(s),69-70,73, 110
70-71, 75,99n26, 124,
Ronell,Avital,xv, 147n2
143-144
READING BLINDLY
166
speak,10,39,43,63,69,86,90,
von Sacher-Masoch,Leopold,
93,142-145,147n5,149nl5
52-53
speaking,xii-xiii,68,88,
masochism,49n50,53-55,
104-108,139,153 unspeakable,145 statement,8,28,33,53, 56, 73,80,101,106,124-125, 150-153 constative statement,xv,29 performative statement,29 undecidable statement,26-27 stake,29,136,139-140
63-64 Severin,53,59-64,79n20
Venus in Furs, 77nl-6, 78n17,79n20 Wanda von Dunajew,51-53, 59-64,79n20 vow,39,75 avow,107,137,140 disavow,104,110
vampire,147n3
Stranger than Fiction, 121-126
Weber,Samuel,79n32,149n 16 write,xv,10-11, I10-114,
terror,55-56,77n I 0,78n 12,
115n3,117n46,125,
81n46
139-140, 142-143
terrorism,55
unwritten,108
Thebaud,Jean-Loup,47n25
The Tempest, 81n45 theory,2,5,41-42, 57,63,86, 119n53,144 theorize,2
writer,10,95,102,104,109, 122,135 writerly, III written,28,40,86-87,109, 115n3
third,xvii,5-6,10,23,33-34, 43-44,55-56,67,71,76, 107,114 trope,27-28,30,47n20,69,146
Zi�ek,Slavoj,33-34,37,48n32, 78n13,98n17 "A plea for Leninist
Intolerance," 79n33, veil,4,61,136-137,141 unveil,3-4,27,72,133, 136-137,139,141-142 virginal reading,2-3 violence,38,55-56,62,69-70, 81n46
81n40 "Smashing the Neighbour'S Face," 47nn26-31, 48n41
The Ticklish Subject, 46n7, 80n35
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at the Euro pean Graduate School, where he received his PhD. He works in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and the media, and is the author of Reflections of (T)error and The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death. Exploring his thinking through different media has led him to both film and art, and his works have been exhibited in Seoul, Hong Kong, Vienna, and Singapore. He is the editor of the thematic magazine
One Imperative, and is also
a Research Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sci ences, Nanyang Technological University.
It is a book where each phrase is a moment. Each one complete and necessary. Each one self-reliant: completes its work without leaving it up to the following phrase. As if nobody knew whether another would follow. So each one of them at once modest, urgent, respectful, unreserved. Extremely simple, the most difficult thing: a phrase that doesn't resemble a phrase. Getting to the essential, there are times when one can't get there without going through the non-essential which hides it. But often obstacles barring the way are fallacious: afraid simple words will displease? So difficult to unadorn. Habit. Have to unlearn. Learn to say necessarily: mathematically, which is to say "elegant solution." God is "elegant:' First nature elegance. Ultimate-book would be unadorned, which doesn't mean ungraceful. Each phrase full and slender: belle demoiselle. Will be called: Esperance. (Elegance of words ending in ance: unexplainable? Because open sound, continues, accords: which is why the word "silence" is so disturbing ...) Free book, not subject to judgment. Absolutely non subjugated, neither insubordinate, nor provocative. Alluring as the mystery of a child's enjoyment: internal. Wild book. Initiate of life. Written in a safe place. Before love. Room book, at the same time unlimited. So would be unbound and free. Even from being a book. -Hemme Cixous
Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite
Breinigsville. PA USA 10 December 2009
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1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 111 111 11
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"This work is responsible for initiating a new generation of reflections that make our philosophical certitudes tremble. Grappling with the implications of non-phenomenal reading, Jeremy Fernando scans the works of outstanding thinkers whose insight weighs heavily on our relation to language and world. Fernando locates the constitutive blindness that stalls the ethical imperative while giving it new meaning." - Avital Ronell, Professor of German, English, French, and Comparative Literature, New York University; and author of The Telephone Book, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Test Drive
"There are no encounters in theory, it is said-for theory, whatever its claims, cannot open to the event. As Jeremy Fernando demonstrates masterfully in Reading Blindly, theory must become reading to give the encounter to thought. Here, in a rich and always-challenging meditation, reading is understood from an ethical turn that prompts us to rethink ethics itself." - Christopher Fynsk, Director of the Centre for Modern Thought, The University of Aberdeen; and author of Infant Figures, Language and Relation, and The Claim of Language
ISBN
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