Textual Practice, Volume 6, Number 1 (Textual Practice Journal)

TEXTUAL PRACTICE Editor Terence Hawkes University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Editorial board Christopher Norris University of Wales College of Cardiff (Review Editor) Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Catherine Belsey University of Wales College of Cardiff Angela Carter Terry Eagleton Linacre College, Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Editorial Assistant Tamsin Spargo

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at Univer sity of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Christopher Norris at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Advertisements. Enquiries to David Policy, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. ISSN 0950-236X © Routledge 1991 ISBN 0-203-99039-0 Master e-book ISBN

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Notes for contributors Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Terence Hawkes at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to Textual Practice will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in a high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. C.Norris, The Deconstructive Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible.

Offprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 5 NUMBER 1 SPRING 1991

Contents Articles Postmodernist chutneys DAVID BIRCH Zoo-logics: questions of analysis in a film by Peter Greenaway DAVID WILLS and ALEC MCHOUL Back to the author: romanticism, postmodernism, de Man FRED BOTTING The subject of history: Gadamer, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Lyotard NEIL LEVI Reading the body in The Merchant of Venice LAWRENCE NORMAND ‘What ish my nation?’: Shakespeare and national identities GRAHAM HOLDERNESS

1 7 21 34 47 65

Bibliography A bibliography of the French and English works of Jacques Derrida, 1962–90 ALBERT LEVENTURE

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Reviews Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain IAIN CHAMBERS Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals. Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature JOHN HINES Alan Donagan, Spinoza ANDREW BELSEY Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here WENDY B.FARIS Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism ROSEMAIRE A.BATTAGLIA

113 117

122 125 128

Norman Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost MATTHEW PARFITT

131

Postmodernist chutneys DAVID BIRCH What is all this writing-shiting? (Padma, Midnight’s Children)

Li Bo is a poet. He is in bed, drunk, when an order arrives for him to go to the Chinese Court at once. To get there as fast as possible he will need to use a horse. He staggers out of bed, out of the house and mounts his horse. It is at this point in the Chinese opera, ‘Li Bo Composing a Poem While Drunk’, that an actor playing this role has to demonstrate extraordinary skills because horses in Chinese opera are always portrayed by the actors riding them—a long tasselled switch is the only prop that is used. The point, of course, is that Li Bo is drunk, but the horse is sober. The complication arises, however, because the horse is not signalled in Chinese opera by discrete bits of the actor’s body. The whole. of the actor is the horse and the whole of the actor is Li Bo the poet. The actor has therefore to be both drunk and sober at the same time. Signalling a discrete difference, therefore, between sobriety and inebriation is not the skill involved—what is, is showing and not showing the difference simultaneously whilst establishing the identity of the horse and maintaining the identity of Li Bo. This dialectical combination of opposites is central to Chinese opera, and to its underlying constitutive relations of Taoist, Confucianist and Buddhist philosophies. Central to this syncretism is a mode of thinking which involves a dynamic of several modes of thought and action operating at one and the same time— what might be referred to as a dialogic concept of totality1—a ‘non-violent unity of the multiple’;2 what Jameson considers in terms of the allegorical ‘which seeks a designation for a form able to hold radical discontinuities and incommensurabilities together without annulling precisely those ‘differences’.3 Linda Hutcheon refers to this as parodic, not in the sense of imitation for the purposes of ridicule, but as a practice ‘which redefines parody as ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity’.4 Parody in this sense enacts both change and cultural continuity where, as Hutcheon points out, para has both the sense of ‘against’ or ‘counter to’ and ‘near’ or ‘beside’. My illustration from Chinese opera serves two useful, and related, purposes. It introduces the notion of concurrence and it raises questions about identity. Postmodernism fears confrontation with both, and to that extent may be seen as politically limiting for a critical practice that seeks change in a world oppressed by numerous injustices. Fear of an identity—a self that has already been expressed; a fear of being pre-empted by the past, rather than a forgetting of the past by consuming it—is central to a postmodern pragmatics.5 As a consequence, postmodernism avoids ‘complicity with the past’6 by refusing to contribute to that past by keeping in constant flux the impact that texts have upon the world. A past only exists when the present is temporarily halted and decisions are made about the way the world means; a postmodern pragmatics resists making these decisions and to that extent is in a continual process of

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rewriting the past through the present; a continual process of description without evaluation; what Eagleton calls the confrontation of the contemporary ‘for what it is, in all its blank immediacy’.7 It is not interested, therefore, in enabling different futures. The Hindu concept of Maya assumes that the world operates in terms of surface and deep structure—at a quintessential level the fragments connect—surface absurdities disappear into a deeper unified order and vision.8 Saleem, narrator of Midnight’s Children,9 disagrees—the world, reality, history, the past and memories are an absurdist illusion. There are only surfaces. Saleem is an amnesiac—constructing the present is always a process of forgetting the past. Retrospective processes of interpretation result, not in reconstructing the truths of the past, but in misreadings. A hundred pages or so after the start of the novel what appeared to be the family of Saleem turns out to be an illusion; a retrospective reading signals that descriptions of a nose lead to these misreadings; lead to the establishment of an illusory coherence. This is not just ambiguity; the apparent irreconcilability of the readings and misreadings are a major deconstructive process resting on a recognition that language—discourse—compels all readings to be misreadings. Alternative readings are given throughout the novel about past events, raising interesting questions about the meaning-then/meaning-now dialectic.10 Undecidability is the only means of understanding realities—deferred allusions and misreadings create multiple perspectives suggesting the unreliability of the text as a means of presenting the past as real. The past is rewritten therefore always as a misreading—always as a present. It happened that way because it happened that way is a statement not about the past but about the present since the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them; it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. Meaning is therefore a relation of signifier to signifier, not signifier to signified; closure is impossible; reality is a question of perspective and as a consequence history is meaningless. It is, therefore, a Machereyan ambivalence deferring its own resolution.11 There are so many stories to tell… I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Thirty pickle jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation. (And beside them, one jar stands empty.) The past is consumed into the present so that the narrator—the fiction—becomes responsible for the past because it only exists in fictions, in this way I became directly responsible for triggering off violence, not only did I overthrow a government—I also consigned a president to exile. But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next. Padma as desire, as reader constantly questioning, constantly urging the narrative to move forward—to be fulfilled, to reach its climax, its jouissance.12 When Padma, the stirrer of the chutney in the pickle factory, leaves Saleem a balance has been upset; I feel cracks widening down the length of my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn’t enough. I am seized by a sudden fit of anger: why should I be so unreasonably treated by my one disciple? Saleem as narrator—as writer—is insecure, all illusion is insecurity. That is the point of history as chutnification, a central image of the novel. Chutneys are attempts at preservation— illusions of past ingredients being held unchangingly to be brought out in a present—but what appears is a different reality; the process of pickling changes the reality of the ingredients; it doesn’t preserve them, it makes new commodities. Reality, Saleem argues,

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is metaphorical. Midnight’s children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished; but what they must not become is the creation of a rambling, diseased mind. Interruptions, nothing but interruptions! The different parts of my somewhat complicated life refuse, with a wholly unreasonable obstinacy, to stay neatly in their separate compartments. Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality. History—reality—illusion are issues constantly raised and it is this that gives the dialectic between Saleem and Padma—between writer and reader—its impetus. Whose history, whose reality? These are questions constantly foregrounded. It was only a matter of time, my father said, with every appearance of pleasure; but time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon… If they can change the time just like that, what’s real any more? I ask you? What’s true?… What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don’t believe me— tied to electricity, it’s usually a few hours wrong. Unless we’re the ones who are wrong…no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on time…because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and we are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might—as pessimists—give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will. If we are not to believe that, then it is a misreading which resists resolution—is not allowed to be resolved—so the conflict between past and present, presence and absence, writer and reader, truth and fiction, history and reality, reality and illusion; fiction and metafiction, narrator and academic writer, are not resolved too, and this has a political price. I must interrupt myself. I wasn’t going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings; but I simply must register a protest. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts…the disjointed unreality of the times—the children of midnight were also the children of the time; fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments. Expanding the stories doesn’t give any more depth; it merely, as Jameson would put it, expands the surfaces, resisting the absolutism of the depths—the sort of absolutism displayed by Uncle Hanif who, when playing rummy, will only lead with a full hand of thirteen hearts, and is the sort of absolutism which is registered throughout the novel. Tai the boatman says ‘So, come on come on, ask me questions! Give examination.’ But his answers are meant to be the right ones, the correct ones, Saleem demands errors and misreadings whilst appearing not to: Does one error

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invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to rewrite the whole history of my times in order to place myself in a central role? My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin…no matter. We all owe death a life. Please believe that I am falling apart. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, is subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. But I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air…everything, and not just a few clues one stumbles across, for instance, by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebbed and closed. I make no comment; these events, which have tumbled from my lips any old how, garbled by haste and emotion, are for others to judge. Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge. I’ll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began…the process of revision should be constant and endless because no audience is without its idiosyncracies of belief, to pickle is to give immortality after all… Opening up discursive spaces like this is a crucially important tenet of postmodernism but loses its critical importance if it is done simply because of a philosophical fear of closure. It is critically useful, however, if it recognizes that by opening up those spaces the conditions of the production of meanings can be isolated and a way can be made for political action. ‘To speak is to fight’ Lyotard writes, but only in the sense of fighting as playing.13 His agonistics is about innocent play without power; a sort of Eurocentric Utopia, a locus amoenus; a pastoral golden age where competitors sparred in friendly Olympian bouts with each other. But texts do matter in the way that they impact upon the world. Language as opening out; as vehicle only; as nothing but a free play of signifiers, is a radically necessary tactic to make in order to free theory and practice from authoritarian tyrannies which constrain and reify knowledges, but endlessly to defer decisions about meaning is endlessly to defer making political decisions about identity and change.14 Fear of an authoritarian past should not force a postmodern pragmatics into a position which assumes that any decision is absolutist or that the radicality, and hence point of, postmodernism will be lost by its becoming like the past. There are, it seems to me, politically specific readings which have to be made in order to effect radical change.15 This does not mean they are the only readings for a particular text at a particular moment, but that they may well be the politically necessary ones.16 The modality of my last statement is important. Political necessity is relative; always changing; never fixed; always a matter of multi-perspectives. It is critical choice that determines whether a single perspective becomes absolutist; it is fear of this critical choice that motivates postmodernism to keep on the move; never stopping, a fugitive, like Saleem, from both past and future. The result, therefore, has to be the creation, albeit temporary, of a shifting centre of convergence; a surface where the fragments—Lyotard’s clouds of linguistic particles— are brought together critically. This centre is not in the text; it is a critical and political

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reading formation. It is always unstable. It constantly shifts ground according to contexts and situations of reading. To freeze it—to create temporary stability; to create a meaning event, to accept the essential phenomenality of critical practice, not for the purpose of relating writerly artistic sensibilities to cultural contexts and creating some sort of writerly identity—the sort of thing which in the hands of people like Eliot and Pound took away from modernism its essential radicality—but to recognize an identity, socially and institutionally interpellated and constructed as subject by language. Stability is relative therefore to context. For postmodernism to be postmodernism it seems to demand that fragmentation not lead to stable coherence, and hence the creation of an authoritarian aesthetic or grammar. To this extent its refusal to recode; to reclassify; to create; to take the risk of identities; to use only borrowed terms of the past to deconstruct the past; to be adversarial (as an avant-garde movement) with reference only to its own practices; to concentrate exclusively on process; to resist a dominant voice and to privilege a both/and perspective, and a decentring of both ego and past on what O’Leary calls, with respect to theology, ‘the long march towards a demystified critical freedom’17 with its concentration on a modernist preoccupation with a textualism of the here-and-now and a phenomenality of the contemporary, is critically necessary but at the same time poses distinct analytic problems for a critical practice which requires some decisions to be made about textual readings.18 A major point about postmodernism is that language is aleatory—subject to uncertainties and indeterminacies, resistant to determined meanings—a process of deferring which constantly displaces the subject. But aleatoriness is not innocent—it is about power and desire—it is not about pure, innocent, exchange. There is no pure exchange. Or if there is, what is its essentialist point? The struggle for power is about social conditions and cultural forms as sites of political tension. And these are the means by which we begin to understand what it is that makes sense to do; what it is that determines social actions.19 The sort of postmodern pragmatics posed by Lyotard resists answering questions about ‘what it makes sense to do’ and its consequences for social action. What seems to go unproblematized in such a pragmatics is what Bourdieu talks about as the reality of the model, rather than a model of reality; of social action. And of course ‘what it makes sense to do’ may very well be instantiated quite differently in different cultures because actions are determined by differing social and cultural dispositions. What it makes sense to do is not, of course, what it may be rational to do. And what is rational is relative to, amongst other things, cultural determination. A critical practice needs therefore to take into consideration that people do try to make sense of the world, but they might do it in very different ways.20 Global truths are of little value here; a universalist essentialism is pointless. What is of value is understanding local, temporary, ‘truths’. We therefore make critical decisions about those perspectives. Is there, then, contrary to a Lyotardian postmodernism, an ‘enlightenment’ to be had, in the sense used by Habermas as political emancipation, in the analysis of texts; of reading formations? If there is, then critical practice therefore needs ways and means of understanding and articulating it politically. A textualism is needed, therefore, which recognizes discourse as documents of cultural power and desire, and which is prepared to engage critically and politically with the consequences of the free play of signification, and not just the freeplay itself. Murdoch University

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NOTES 1 F.Jameson, ‘Interview’ (with Leonard Green, Jonathan Culler and Richard Klein), Diacritics, 12 (1982), pp. 72–91, p. 82. 2 A.Wellmar, ‘On the dialectic of modernism and postmodernism’, Praxis International, 4:4 (1985), pp. 337–62, p. 339. 3 Jameson, op. cit., p. 83. 4 L.Hutcheon, ‘The politics of postmodernism: ‘parody and history’, Cultural Critique, 5 (1986/7), pp. 179–207, p. 185. 5 cf. R.Radhakrishnan, ‘The post-modern event and the end of logocentricism’, Boundary 2, 12/1 (1983), pp. 33–60. 6 ibid., p. 37. 7 T.Eagleton, ‘Criticism, modernism and postmodernism’, New Left Review, 52 (1985), pp. 60– 73, p. 68. 8 R.Shepherd, ‘Midnight’s Children. The parody of an Indian novel’, in P.Simpson (ed.), The Given Condition. Essays in Post Colonial Literatures, Span, 21 (1985), pp. 184–92, p. 187. 9 S.Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1981). 10 ibid., p. 186. 11 See J.Stephens,‘“To tell the truth I lied…”. Retrospectivity and deconstruction as (contribution) strategies for reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, in P.Simpson (ed.), The Given Condition, Span, 21 (1985), pp. 193–208. 12 See K.Wilson, ‘Midnight’s Children and reader responsibility’, Critical Quarterly, 26:3 (1984), pp. 23–37. 13 See S.Benhabib, ‘Epistemologies of postmodernism: a rejoinder to Jean-François Lyotard’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), pp. 103–26, p. 111, and cf. C.Norris, ‘Whose game is it anyway? or The politics of post-modernism’, Southern Review, 19:3 (1986), pp. 334–43. 14 See C.Norris, ‘On marxist deconstruction, profiles and prospects’, Southern Review, 17:2 (1984), pp. 203–11. 15 See D.Birch, The Language of Drama: Critical Theory and Practice, forthcoming (London: Macmillan, 1991). 16 cf. S.Gunew, ‘Framing marginality. Distinguishing the textual politics of the marginal voice’, Southern Review, 18:2 (1985), pp. 142–56. 17 J.O’Leary, ‘Theory on the brink of modernism’, Boundary 2, 13:2–3 (1985), pp. 145–56, p. 147. 18 See D.Birch, Language, Literature and Critical Practice. Ways of Analysing Text (London, Routledge, 1989). 19 cf. T.R.Schatzki, ‘An overdue analysis of Bourdieu’s theory of practice’, Inquiry, 30 (1987), pp. 113–35, p. 115. 20 See D.Birch,’ “Working effects with words”—Whose words?: Stylistics and reader intertextuality’, in R.Carter and P.Simpson (eds), Language, Discourse and Literature. An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 259–77.

Zoo-logics: questions of analysis in a film by Peter Greenaway DAVID WILLS AND ALEC McHOUL A The forms of texts that we might call, for want of a better word, postmodern, are not unfamiliar to us. We can immediately call to mind Joyce, the nouveau roman, so-called metafiction, Pynchon, De Lillo and so on. And we can argue about the applicability of those examples with respect to a category that means little for us anyway. Then we can imagine or invoke forms of analysis that have been applied inter alia to those texts; for example, the Barthesian, the Genettian, the Derridean, etc. They are not mysteries. But such analyses, more and more, are treating the texts they treat not just as objects for analysis, but as means to investigate the terms of that analysis itself, and indeed of analysis in general. The tendency starts to some extent with Genette, but becomes most explicit in the work of Kristeva, Barthes, and of course Derrida. All that has been oftrepeated. And of course, it did not require a category like ‘postmodern fiction’ to elicit such inquiries into analysis; rather they are part and parcel of analysis itself, to the extent that any analysis is required to establish its own terms, whether or not it acknowledges such a task as an exercise in self-reflexivity. The point about Peter Greenaway’s film, A Zed and Two Noughts1 (henceforth AZ&00) is not that it perplexes in the way that Joyce, Pynchon, or even Duras might perplex. Its signifiers are not especially fluid, but neither is it what used to be called ‘hermetic’; it does not lack coherence that much. On the contrary, it is, if anything, too transparent, too organized; we want to say too ‘contrived’. If we were to look for other examples we were familiar with in order to make a case for a genre, then we might quote Blue Velvet or any number of films which video outlets insist on shelving under the rubrics of ‘Midnight’, ‘Festival’ and so on. But Blue Velvet has so many lapses into a Hollywood mould—ordinary melodrama, ordinary sexism, ordinary, more or less, narrative resolution. AZ&00 has much less of that. It remains an intellectual exercise, albeit a clever and perhaps even a gratifying one, to the end. (If not ‘from the beginning’.) Not that it doesn’t have its melodrama or narrative resolution, but they are contrived within an overly intellectualist framework. ((And right away—we may not both be in entire agreement here. Perhaps AZ&00 does make emotional appeal sufficient to structure its narrative and thematics; perhaps the fact of grieving for one’s wife, or failing to do so, cannot but be melodramatic, or genuinely moving, or whatever it is we might call the excess that would so threaten to disrupt the contrivances of the film. Perhaps too it is impossible to watch limbs being lost without some kind of emotional investment. But here, our disagreement would have to be a function of reading and the terms of the analysis, about which more below.))

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Hence, when we say that it’s difficult to know how to describe this film, we are conscious of all that we have just said. Sure, we could tell the story, or stories—we’ve done that before—we could, and no doubt will refer to amputation, as well as decay, grief, the alphabet, and so on. But we would still, it seems, be short of a satisfactory analysis. And we would be forced into the unenviable position of presuming that the most satisfactory analysis was the one nearest to being all-embracing, the one that discovered the film’s system, and found a word for it. Analysis then, as it always threatens to do, would be reduced to a form of appropriation. But it is as if the film has already made that assumption, and made the appropriate dare, the appropriative dare. Again, it is too smartarsed, too clever, in an intellectualist way; it is a film made with a conscious or unconscious knowledge of certain questions concerning analysis: the hermeneutic impulse for instance, the question of the alphabet and the anagram, the play of the physis/techne opposition. In this case, perhaps it could be compared to a novel by Umberto Eco or any other theoretically informed contemporary fiction. Yet we can’t presume that the position of the film is quite that kosher—although only JHWH and perhaps some Italian bankers would know why we should grant that status to Eco. Thus, whether it’s because we can’t establish or don’t want to establish what it all adds up to, we lean towards seeing the film as contrived to the point of being vacuous. Now, unfortunately this leaves us in something of a bind, because we have heard that word vacuous before. It is usually applied to the likes of us, proponents of that ‘Parisinspired Nietzsche-influenced school of thought that claims that there is no objective knowledge but simply interpretations and rhetorical persuasions…hermeneutics, deconstructionism, radical feminism and other trendy isms’, as it was called recently in the New York Times. (Note that we restrict our reference here to the press in view of the level of vulgarization that ‘theory’ has by now undergone, and in view of the familiarity of the intonations repeated in every register of critical usage: we’ve heard the same thing from good journalists and respected colleagues.) We have even been known to address the reproach to each other, as one of us appears to the other to be dancing out of step. But we still have our set reply, and we still maintain its validity: if They can convincingly show us where fullness resides, we’ll accept that idea that what we say is vacuous. Show us the ultimately objective grounds, a totally adequate discourse, a spring of eternal truth, and we’ll clear off for good. But maybe the tables have been turned here: maybe AZ&00 has occupied the ‘outer’ position, leaving us in the position of the reactionaries, calling it vacuous. In that case we are trapped, for we don’t want to retreat to a conservative position, to be caught presuming to speak from a site of fullness. Yet we need to, or want to—perhaps because of this very bind—say something about the film. Hence what follows. We begin, if you will, with an ‘internalist’ analysis of three possible readings that could be made of AZ&00. The analysis deals with profilmic narrative or thematic structures only in so far as this allows us to address the film’s structuring impulse, its will-to-contrivance. We call the approach ‘internalist’—albeit with hesitation—to the extent that the film is sufficiently self-reflexive, easily so, to be said to thematize, or even narrativize, contrivance. Then we proceed with two further analytic approaches that might conceivably be called more ‘externalist’ in that they try, as explicitly as possible, to deal with the film from outside its own grounds. They ask how to write something in spite of the film. But all three analyses have something of a resistance about them; they are at

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pains to find a grain to go against. That for two reasons: first, the film is in practice so finely grained, so organized in its lines of force, so much of a grid, that a reading which does not to some extent cut across its lines would not be a reading, in that it would not expose the grain. Second: as a matter of principle, a deconstructive principle if you insist, but in any case one with any number of theoretical pedigrees—from Althusser to Derrida—a reading needs to mark its difference to exist in the first place as a reading. It is at that point—the point of insistence on difference as the locus of meaning—that we become conservative. It is that idea that we hold to be closer to a fullness than anything else in this paper; yet it is not so much a fullness that it cannot be the subject and object of a shifting set of strategies put in play here. It is perhaps the tactic from which all our strategies are derived, and it, like anything else, gains its meaning only from the system of differences that constitute it. In the case of AZ&00, reading against the grain tends to promote what we have called ‘externalist’ more than ‘internalist’ approaches. Inside, the film is well sewn-up, though it may simply be that our analysis has not been up to the task, that we have shrunk from a refining of the systematic tools, out of cowardice or from a fear of the appropriative gesture that seems to be required. Yet even our most resistive readings cannot avoid having something of a will-to-mastery about them, a desire to take discussion of the film into a realm that it seems to preclude, or to engage in a game of oneupmanship with the fact of contrivance. It is here that the antagonisms of our own text become important, as functions of an exercise in collective authorship. We know of no more important principle or tactic for reading than that which practises mul-tiple readings. Reading, it seems to us, gains much from becoming a matter of rehearsing a number of readings. Only by displaying its difference will reading come to have meaning. ZED: CONTRIVANCES There is a tension in poststructuralist thought between on the one hand its promotion of what Barthes calls jouissance—shorthand here for a variety of practices that exploit criticism as a writing—and on the other hand its attention to the ‘serious’ detail of western philosophy and the critique of metaphysics. The tension surrounds the notion of ‘seriousness’: the idea that play, and a whole range of other concepts which are formed around the absence of a central grounding for theory, should be taken as ‘serious’ contenders against those traditional philosophical concepts which do offer definite theoretical grounds. Up to now we have alluded to this tension in terms of the vacuous and the full—despite problems with that type of notation. And, as we have seen, too, the way the tension is framed for us in the case of AZ&00 is by the idea of its contrivances. This is perhaps because the notion of ‘contrivance’, in AZ&00 especially, is not unaffected by the problematics of difference. How can the term have meaning in the context of poststructuralist critical theory, when candidates for its opposite (its other) are concepts which are effectively ruled out, in and by that very context? These concepts would be such things as ‘the authentic’ and ‘the natural’. Everything would, in some senses, have to come under the rubric of contrivance—so where would the difference lie? However, AZ&00, on pretty much any reading, appears to be more contrived than many a text—fraught with contrivance, predicated upon it even. For example it appears highly

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‘staged’, almost like an opera or tableau vivant. It is also contrived in the sense that it brings off repeated, clever and obvious conjunctures between ‘conceptual’ elements some of which are not normally so conjoined except as opposites. This is one of the reasons why we write of the film’s intellectualism. For example, there are contrived associations: 1 Between the alphabet and processes of evolution and decay The twins start with an Apple decaying and move on to a Zebra: and beyond. The alphabet comes to stand for a teleological ordering principle (even though its ordering—unlike the ordering of numbers—is arbitrary), somewhat akin to the kind of teleology which some bioevolutionists find in nature. In some other Greenaway films (particularly, Drowning by Numbers), ordering principles which are routinely associated with nature (or at least with scientific and arithmetical discourses on nature) come to be associated with sociocultural forms and practices. In AZ&00 the association is reversed: the natural process of decay and evolutionary change is imbricated with the convention of the alphabet. 2 Between symmetry and animation The animate (people and animals) are normally associated with symmetry. Says Van Meegeren: ‘Animals on the whole are designed with a view to symmetry. One of decay’s first characteristics is to spoil that symmetry.’ But this is so only up to a point. That is, individual bodies are relatively symmetrical, but the arrangement of more than a single body—a social arrangement, perhaps—is rarely symmetrical. It only comes to be so under specially contrived circumstances like synchronized swimming, ballet and so on. And that is precisely what AZ&00 offers, particularly in the partially frozen scenes in Alba’s bedroom, with the twins to her left and right: a tableau with attemptedly perfect mirror-image symmetry. But being so frozen, preserved from decay, perhaps, they cease to be animated. And we may come to wonder whether it is symmetry and not asymmetry which is properly associated with the animate after all. To add to this, the ‘progressions’ within the film move at cross purposes. Alba moves from being a whole body to a one-legged body to a legless body to a corpse. The twins move, on the other hand, from being distinct persons to being brothers, to being twins, to being Siamese twins—a single person in effect—before they also die. 3 Between prostitution and story-telling The zoo’s resident prostitute, Venus de Milo, likes to show pandas to the visitors. She peddles much less her sex than she does her other talents: for story-telling and sewing, though these two also emerge as parallel crafts, to some extent. She sells her stories to the twins: sitting nude on Oliver’s bed as he plays with his snails, or else wearing Oswald’s wife’s décolleté gown while he sits to one side and listens. But what she really wants to sell is the publication rights to her stories: an ambition which works out for her during the film to some extent. Her model is Anaïs Nin: and she has calculated the rate-per-word Nin was paid for her erotic tales. Evidently, then, there is an economy to narratives and to sexuality, just as there is to stitching. As Venus stitches up a Siamese-twin suit for Oswald and Oliver, stitching them together (as they are through the narrative of the film), so Van Meegeren, the surgeon, stitches up Alba, not just following surgery on her legs but also to the music stool she sits on in order to mock up his Vermeer painting. Hence: 4 Between medicine and art theory Alba says: ‘I’m an excuse for medical experiments, and art theory. Look, I’m stitched and sewn to the music stool.’ So hence also:

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5 Between film/cinema and art/painting The film, not only via the almost frozen frames in Alba’s bedroom, but more explicitly in terms of the Vermeer aspects of the narrative and the reconstruction of several well-known examples of still life, contrives to make its status as a contribution to visual art somewhat overly obvious. For example, just as this was achieved in Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract through the use of an artist’s grid laid across the profilmic landscape, in AZ&00 the effect is achieved in terms of the grid against which the decaying life-forms are shot for the purpose of time-lapse photography. 6 Between fact/history and fiction/narrative The film repeatedly and extensively uses scenes from Attenborough’s TV documentary, Life on Earth and we are led to believe that this is one way in which the twins are searching for a ‘meaning’ for the death of their wives. So a popular scientific approach to biological evolution becomes a means of dealing with grief. Oliver in particular seems to believe that a hermeneutic approach to the documentary (looking for clues, omitting the red herrings) will give him a scientific solution to the occurrence of death and decay. The problem is that the categories of evolution and decay can be seen as parallel, but they can also be construed as opposites. Hence: 7 Between accidence and telos For example, there is the car accident at the start of the film in which the wives are killed. This can’t be explained in terms of the western empiricist modes and structures the twins opt for. How it happened is documented: an egg-bound white swan, perhaps from the zoo, strays in front of the car which duly swerves to avoid it. But why it happened is not scientifically explicable. Nevertheless, the twins’ will-to-explain ties their grief to a scientific mode of explanation, leading them to Alba Bewick (whom they like to think of as the death-swan herself) and hence giving them a responsible subject to interrogate. But all they find is another arbitrary principle: that of the alphabet which motivates Alba herself who wants to have a child corresponding to each letter in the Greek alphabet. 8 Between nature-as-decomposition and art-as-composition For example, as we have seen, the film’s own frame symmetry as well as that of the twins’ time-lapse films stands as a principle against which to measure or think the processes of nature: decay and evolution. Alba says: ‘What’s the point of watching me, my body’s only half here?’; to which the answer is, ‘You’ll fit better into the film frame.’ She adds: ‘A fine epitaph: here lies a body cut down to fit the picture.’ Sometimes the natural is thwarted by the artificial: the twins want to maintain their natural paternity against the contrivance that Felipe is the father. Sometimes the reverse: in the final scene the artificial is thwarted by the natural when a low-life form, the snails, destroy the artifice of the camera and the time-lapse technique. 9 Between the zoo as a site of entertainment and as an institution for the empirical/photographic analysis of ‘animal behaviour’ Sometimes the zoo figures as a place for watching, imitation, pleasure. It appears as a scene for mindless pleasures; a certain kind of vacuity even. Yet it most often appears at night like a kind of unpopulated mausoleum. You need special keys to get in, or else you need stealth and the help of insider trading: ‘Do you have a flat piece of plastic and a pencil?—you are wellequipped,’ says Venus on at least two such occasions. The special equipment extends to the elaborate laboratories of the twins—‘animal behaviourists’—who keep detailed records of the decay-processes of various life-forms, fruit, animals…people. But

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sometimes the ‘light-heartedness’ of the zoo-goer gets transferred on to these more serious (if ghoulish) scientific practices. In particular, speeded-up fairground music is the constant form of accompaniment on the sound-track when the time-lapse pieces are played back or, perhaps, quoted within the frame of AZ&00. And, parallel to this, there is a ‘serious’ side to the pleasure of the zoo: a sinister set of controlling figures whose interests are hard to explain, including Van Hoyten, the keeper (Joshua Plate) and the zoo-manager (Fallast). The lightest and funniest scenes are, then, accompanied by a slow, heart-rhythm-based type of music associated in films with dire consequence. Again, what we might call the ‘valencies’ of each side of the double-associations appear to swap over in a kind of cancellation so that the film may be saying, in both senses, nothing of particular value. So, one thing we might ask is how such contrivance is brought off if its opposite/other is not clearly available. The first contending interpretation might be as follows: the film quite simply asserts a romanticist conception of the natural as the authentic. This would be, for example, how we would interpret the role of the place called ‘Escargot’ which is first shown in a frame of its own, literally. It is beyond the regularly claustrophobic confines of the film, in the country, a ‘traditional’, possibly even ancestral home and garden. It might be read as a kind of Eden, or some other place of the Return. Other allusions to the natural and to evolution could be read this way too: for example the use of the body, nudity and the ‘innocence’ of (at least some) animals. On this first reading, AZ&00 would emerge as, ultimately, not a postmodern film at all—but as one which affirms, against postmodernism, a modernist or existential notion of romantic authenticity. A second contending interpretation of the film’s contrivance could run as follows: these just-mentioned allusions to a domain which appears natural and outside the space of contrivance are themselves contrived: they are contrived only to give contrivance itself an opposite and therefore a meaning. They are a kind of red herring—the kind which Oliver himself mentions early in the film when watching the Attenborough documentary. The fact that it is the Attenborough which is being referred to here might be something which gives us a clue—for it is one of the main points at which a definite discourse on ‘the natural’ is inserted into the film. In this case ‘the natural’ (which gives contrivance its opposite and its meaning) is in fact only another film, only a quotation or citation of the natural—as indeed it must be. It is like the ‘natural look’ in make-up—which is a form of make-up none the less. On the first of these two readings, you’d have to say that the zoo is synecdochal of postmodern society and that persons in that society are like zoo animals, pacing up and down. They appear to have lost their ‘natural habitat’ and are grieving for it. That habitat, in the case of ‘man’, is nature itself: an authentic, non-ideologized existence: ‘Escargot’. This explains the theme of grief in the film: the grief of the two brothers for their dead wives, making the figure of woman/wife into the figure of lost nature. It would also explain their concern over the paternity of the twin babies—since to call Felipe Arc-enCiel the father denies ‘natural parenthood’. (Though to be sure, double paternity itself seems more contrived than natural.) It would also mean that such matters as death and decay (which the brothers are trying unsuccessfully to film using time-lapse photography) are ultimately natural and cannot be staved off by synthetic means.

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On the second reading, these equations between the zoo and post-modern society as a whole would themselves be drastically undercut as a contrivance. The film, on this reading, would be taking an ironical position on the matter: showing that even the separation between nature and culture is a cultural contrivance. The idea of wife/woman representing authenticity would, for example, be undercut by reading Alba Bewick as the fountainhead of contrivance. Although a woman herself, she would be read as the ‘cause’ of the wives’ death since, as we have said, she is identified with the swan (hence her name) which perhaps caused the wives’ car to run off the road. And given the interest that at least Oliver, if not the film itself, shows in her name and in connecting it to the accident, then it becomes almost as if it were the convention (or accident) of a name, rather than any scientific notion of cause and effect, that brought about the wives’ demise. (‘The wives of two zoologists die in a car driven by a woman called Bewick who’s attacked by a swan on Swann’s Way!’) Thus by no means all women (and later Alba takes on the role of wife for the twins, also) and by no means all animals are innocent. On this reading, the film would be allowed a little more critical space and scope. It would emerge as a more clearly postmodern film since it would be seen to eschew romanticism and to decentre notions such as ‘nature’ and ‘authenticity’, leaving questions of interpretation more open, indeterminate. This is in a sense where our analysis begins: identifying the ‘system’ of contrivance, but being unable to determine which way, or in favour of what, such a system operates. Hence, there is a problem with this second reading. It has to do with the fact that contrivance or inauthenticity threatens to turn into a monolithic concept in its own right: against the grain of this reading itself. It threatens to become a kind of centre or fullness which the second reading was working hard to displace. For example, we could note, in this regard, the initial differences between the twins on the question of women: the fact that at least one of them—Oswald—is quite openly misogynistic while the other— Oliver—is an explorer or detective. He is interested in women in the sense that he wants to find out about them in a somewhat appropriative way. So if such a difference can be established between the twins, it would amount to a split story (conte/rived) or schism. Their problem is to know whether their difference (how they begin the film) or else their sameness (how they end it) constitutes their ‘authenticity’. And this might be read as analogous to two different theories of meaning: does meaning arise by means of identity or because of difference? The twins start off the movie looking and acting very differently. To continue with examples: they have different coloured hair; one appears to weigh a fair bit more than the other; they treat Venus de Milo’s stories/narratives quite differently—one preferring the énoncé and the other the énonciation—and so on. Later, as they reveal that they are not only brothers but twins and, eventually, Siamese twins— one person with too many limbs—they come to resemble each other a good deal more. Eventually they become identical with each other and meet their end. So we might say that the differences between them (misogyny vs. curiosity, for instance) are shown, ultimately, to be the same (for example, as different tensions of patriarchy)—that meaning resides in self-identity (in ‘a thing’s identity with itself’ as some logicians have called it) rather than in difference. In this sense, and by now we have effectively a third reading of contrivance stemming out of problems with the second, the film’s position could be that nothing—contrivance included—actually needs an opposite in order to be significant. In the final analysis, it simply needs itself. In this case, it appears as if the

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film plays, not just within, but also with, a theory of difference, but ends up rejecting it in favour of an identity-based theory of meaning. On this reading, it would be a highly conservative film but by no means pre-theoretical: a rare example of reactionary intelligence. A further question would be: how to choose between these two or three readings? What difference does it make? Would the film look different if only one reading were selected? Can a film be read in more than one way at a time, if the contending readings contradict one another yet can be ‘supported’ by the same profilmic evidence? Is it possible that the demise of structuralism and its binaristic principle could mean that two contradictory propositions (about the film, for example) can be held at the same time? Like Venus de Milo’s repeated phrase, ‘You are well equipped,’ mentioned above, which the first time means ‘what it says’ and the second time means its opposite. But it consists of the same words. Once we can no longer have faith in the self-evidence of language’s inner workings (here intonation), nor in the saturability of context (the twins’ answer to her question had been ‘no’, Van Hoyten’s is ‘yes’? thus we understand Venus’ statement as affirmatively reinforcing his competence), then can we really be sure where the true sense lies? Could we have just answered ‘yes’ to our own question—that we did understand as we ought? On the other hand, could we maintain the opposite? For the film has certainly done plenty to draw attention to the play of words; it does so by the very fact of Venus’ repetition. Given the sexual interest she has in the twins, and her lack of interest in Van Hoyten, then could her reference to equipment be affirmative in their case and negative for him? So does an assertion of difference as the locus of meaning ‘defeat’ standard logics, in this sense, or does it propose an alternative logic—one which does not exclude contradiction and paradox? One which would allow a number of readings to stand against each other and against the film? & If so… NOUGHT: MISSING BITS OK, I promise. No stories, not about wooden legs, nor summer in Paris trying to catch up on Peter Greenaway films with the best intentions and always missing them, or bits of them. Like the beginning of this one, AZ&00. Let’s just say there was an accident which meant that the first five minutes of the film were missing. More than missing, cut off. So that the first image is that of Alba in bed with one leg, flanked by Oliver and Oswald. You say that I missed all sorts of structural set-ups in those first five minutes. But I say that I didn’t miss anything, nothing that wasn’t set up throughout the rest of the film. I guess I missed some images, some obvious ones, some ambiguous ones, maybe some moving ones. But it’s hard to know to what extent I can therefore be said to have seen a different film, hard to know to what extent that might be important. (Controlled experiment: have someone watch all but the last five minutes, or all but any five minutes, and ask the same questions. And for that matter, up to what point in the film could one ‘avoid seeing it’?) But what for, why be so silly? Two reasons. First: it’s a contrivance, a simple, yet effective one, one that neither AZ&00 nor Peter Greenaway can foresee or control. One that is definitely not in the film,

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although the idea for it might be. It is reasonably resolutely independent of the film’s tight system. That is to say that however much the film might have accident and amputation as its central premise, its treatment of them is still, as we have emphasized, contrived in the extreme. This idea of missing a bit, on the other hand, however contrived it might in turn be, recognizes, or reinforces, the idea of loss as irretrievability beyond the control of the film. (Still, I can hear the objection, by resorting to a further contrivance to exploit loss beyond the control of the film, one does not for all that escape the film’s own thematic structure of contrivance, thus one still remains as it were within its ambit. There is no escape, in fact; at least no more or less than with any other text. There is no utter otherness from a given text, especially as long as one wants to write about it.) So the film begins with accident and loss; one doesn’t have to see the first five minutes to know that. And throughout the rest of its tight structure, it seems two ways of repairing, or accounting for, that loss are put into play. Two ways that I might call creationist on the one hand, and evolutionist on the other. Alba, or at least her body, refuses the further contrivances of artificial legs; instead she replaces her loss with the two babies she gives birth to. We see the twins place them on the bed where her legs should be. She thus avoids the bind of the whore of Marseille, who refused prosthetic legs all her life, only to have them thrust upon her in death. By finding her Felipe Arc-en-Ciel and giving birth to twins, Alba gains the promise of no further catastrophe and arranges her death and burial as she would have them. She works within a somewhat mystical system with her references to the deluge, the ark, and the rainbow. ‘Her’ animal is the swan, a common poetic symbol often evocative of the prelapsarian. ‘I have to find a Felipe Arc-en-Ciel to stop my crying’ she says early on, and later: ‘They went in in twos and they came out in twos. It’s stopped raining. I’ve found my arc-en-ciel.’ It matters little that the story of the whore of Marseille is one she has made up, for once she has created it, there is nothing to stop it taking its place within the logic and teleology of the film’s diegesis. As we have seen, in this film facts are narrated facts, difficult to distinguish from fiction. So Alba seems to stand for the remedying of loss by the ‘miracle’ of renewal, of a finally benevolent nature. Oliver and Oswald, on the other hand, counter the notion of loss with that of decay, another supposedly natural process. Perhaps the scientific, masculine or evolutionist one. They think that by studying the progressive evolution and decay of the species, or of a variety of species, they will be able to inscribe the loss of their wives within a natural order which functions according to evolutionary principles. In the same way, their freeing of the zoo animals, however badly thought through, as Fallast points out, turns a loss for the zoo or the human order, into a gain for the environment in which nature takes care of itself, follows its own laws of selection, survival and so on. Thus there is a sense of irretrievable loss to be reinstated, artificially so, in the absence of the film’s first few minutes. It ruins all the finely constructed teleological series, and also displaces the theme of mourning. In the film, at least in the print I saw, there is none, no public ritual of mourning, no social status for grief. There are only the private deliria of the twins. But it might be possible to displace the idea of loss from the film to cinema, from the individual and private consumption of the film-text to the public experience of cinema in its industrial reality. One might mourn what is irretrievably lost from cinema: the theatres in Paris, or anywhere else, now numbering so few, that show films like this one, which means that the chance of missing the first five minutes, losing oneself in a

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quartier invaded by tourists and fast-food joints, and of never being able to see the film again or having to organize one’s whole programme because it is only going to show once at some impossible time every week, all that likelihood is greatly increased. One might mourn the ‘loss’ or still birth of films such as those by Peter Greenaway in that they barely get a showing at all in most of the cinematic world, even the Western cinematic world that gives rise to them. Such losses can be considered to exist within the natural order of cinema, its natural evolution, or as a fact of the desire for popular art which created cinema and insured that any sort of ‘avant-garde’ would be short-lived within it; yet we know from either point of view how contrived the history of cinema has been. This gesture of writing about AZ&00 may have about it something of a desire to retrieve a species threatened with extinction within the later history of cinema; but my insistence on the missing first five minutes, and running out of breath through supposedly familiar streets that suddenly changed on me when I turned my back and had me arriving late at the theatre, that is an attempt to write and reinforce loss and discontinuity as an always-already of cinema. This is a simple fact of economics, the economics of capitalist consumerism, which cinema has obeyed and refined, more and more so in the last ten years as it has become almost completely monolithic. Probably the only other cinema in a healthier state than Hollywood is Hindi film. Yet that refining by cinema of a capitalist consumer economy has been going hand in hand with the monolithic refinements of capitalism in general over the last few years, being completely caught up within the cycle of buyouts, leveraged or otherwise, that has left post-industrial capitalism—at least the American version, which is what we are talking about here—both more triumphant and more teetering than ever before. After the food business, the entertainment/communications conglomerates have been the objects of the greatest mergers. All this would fit within an evolutionary model of economics, which is exactly what the market economy represents, replacing a creationist model according to which it is the land which spontaneously gives birth to wealth and prosperity. We can see all the ironies this packman capitalism produces in something like Sony’s buyout of Columbia. How they scramble to make it fit the existing models, by either inveighing against the perceived xenophobia of the Japanese to make their own century of cultural colonization seem less ominous, or hoping like Ronald Reagan that the Japanese will succeed where America has failed in returning the cinema to its original wholesomeness. (Though where admiration for Rambo fits in is hard to say.) Either reaction works to re-establish the natural order of cinematic evolution. But running parallel to buyouts and mergers are threats of and flirts with a crash, with cinema being tied ever more closely into the instabilities and unpredictabilities of an economy whose principles are yet to be written, what we might call an economics of sudden loss or amputation. But there is a more specific sense in which the economics of cinema is tied to functions of loss, and here I come to my second reason for the contrivance of missing a bit. A certain history of film analysis, perhaps the entire history of what might be called serious film analysis represented by semiotics, relies upon the possibility of intervening in the material conditions of film consumption; that is to say upon the possibility of controlling the running of the film by means of review, pause, cueing, etc. In other words upon the emergence of video, given that access to an editing table always remained limited even for those writing on film. This capacity was conceived of as striking a blow

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for film as discontinuity against those, often filmmakers, who wanted their films to be treated as intact entities exempt from such fragmentation. Video, which from one point of view was instrumental in shrinking the film market, greatly expanded the market of film criticism. Yet that criticism, while claiming allegiance to a conception of film as discontinuity, tended in practice to reinforce the idea of the text as a totality, as an entity to be grasped in its very detail by the analyst. Missing bits of film on the other hand doesn’t mean returning to analysis which is at the mercy of one particular form of filmviewing, but promotes analysis of the fragment and the fragmentary. The type of image which video in its relations to television has given us is after all the video-clip, and it is a clipped film that we often view with our VCRs. Yet such images remain very much the other of cinema, given, in all but a few examples, to indulgence in the relatively slow caress of the camera. There is a tendency to inveigh in turn against the majority of rock videos, for their banal or simplistic conception, amateurish direction, and so on. But they do treat the fragmentary nature of the image that the majority of cinema continues to repress. I don’t think I’m about to start writing on them instead of, for instance, AZ&00. But perhaps part of learning how to read film, learning more, learning again, learning for a future, is to learn not to watch, and to learn what that might mean. Or watch what we missed, what was missing. In the end, I may or may not have, may or may not have had to, for whatever reason. In any case, if I’d arrived much later than I did, I might have missed Alba’s strange comment about her sexual organs: ‘That’s pretty redundant, except to pee through.’ Then I might not have been able to point out how the difference between the creationist and evolutionist is reduced when it comes to the difference between the alphabet and numbering systems. Alba’s sex is a null set, she less than zero. But her comment is out of character; you might say it just means that she wants some, for she has already told the tale of the whore of Marseille for whom amputation was the opposite of an impediment, and she will go on to quite successfully seduce both twins and give birth to two more. So much for redundancy. Then again, we used to represent the empty set by a Greek letter—phi—also the letter for philosophy. All the numbers have corresponding Greek letters. One and the same system, that of ordering, the alphabetical and the numerical. The grammatical nonsense and the logical impossibility, both numerical infractions: ‘We are the father…. Bad grammar doesn’t signify anything.’ Alba in general refers to the alphabet, mostly the Greek. She will have twenty-six children, one for each letter, and ask—with her usual confidence that it is the alphabetical act of naming that brings into being—whether Greek letters have a sex. But it is Latin which has twenty-six letters, Greek only twenty-three, we are told. Well that depends how you count. She, with her children, will create and arrange the letters as creatively as she wishes; just as Van Meegeren creatively increases the number of paintings by Vermeer (twenty-six, but three of those were dubious). The twins plot and photograph decay from an Apple to a Zebra, and beyond; they reduce the alphabet to a purely numerical series, a teleological stricture akin to the evolutionary process. What counts for them in the alphabet is nothing more than its progressive effect, the fact that one letter necessarily ensues from the last, and entails the next. The danger in altering the number of letters is precisely that the order might come to be interfered with. But perhaps they misjudge. Perhaps there is something to the alphabet beyond Alba’s litter of letters or their ordering system, perhaps writing. We could have made something big of it, the way the film invites us to, right down to some idea of the anagrammatical.

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We see the letters change places in the film as a neon ‘zoo’ becomes ‘ooz’, and we can read in it the animals’ decay. But whichever way you read it, it makes a title, a zed and two noughts. AZ&00. It is spoken also in the film, by Alba, she the A become Zed, Oliver and Oswald the two noughts. But for a reading of loss the title is less than that, less than the idea that the generator Alba has skipped her hopes for something after Beta and is about to end it all in whatever language you choose; that the twins are shrinking progressively back to their origins, and so on and so forth. Fewer than any of that. For loss, A Z & 00 is writing, and anagrammatical writing, reduced to a digital order, the on & off of A & Z, of AZ & 00, of letters & numbers, or any of the differences referred to above, the rest any number of nullity. Which means the alphabet expanded to all manner of strokes and blips that come into play, well beyond what might be called the diacritical, once it is really put to use; which means difference working through an ampersand. & less still, down to zero, the whole thing trying to start over with a new series. Starting with a character for every minute missed. NOUGHT: GOING TO THE ZOO ‘Oh, why do we have to go to the zoo?’—you may well ask. And I would say: as therapy—for the film and for the world of AZ&00. To get outside that text and maybe this one. To see if there is an ‘outside the text’. You wanted to go without—miss bits, drop the first five minutes. Now I want to go without—outside, to the zoo. I insist you come. I’ll pay. It’s work—perhaps I can claim it on tax? For example, one point of the therapy is to see that some of the film’s conceits are deceptions. For example Van Hoyten asks, ironizing the philosopher, whether a zebra is a black beast with white stripes or a white beast with black stripes. So we go to the zoo. Just a glance at a zebra will tell you which: it’s unarguably the latter, at first sight. There is no mystery; nothing is hidden. The problem is a conundrum designed by the film to poke fun at sophistry—but the irony fails by a refusal to think through the problem, by insisting on a solution rather than a dissolution—by seeing how hollow it is (a hollowgram) in the face of another set of markings, another ‘text’ if you like: in my case, the zebra in Audubon Park. Philosophy, it is true, may need less sophistry, fewer silly questions, less metaphysics: but anti-philosophy (which, on at least one reading, AZ&00 is) might do better than simply repeat the sophistry with an added ironical tone. Both would do better by going to the zoo and taking a look: not necessarily a pretheoretical, uninformed, naïve or empiricist look, however. In fact, by no means that kind of look at all. At the zoo, for example, you can get a strange sense of indeterminacy as you(r) look. You are in the presence of the ‘actual animals’ and you are not—at the same time. Same film, two readings. Just 3 feet away, across a wall, its eyes level with yours, is an unarguably real white tiger. You can see the meniscus of spittle across its mouth as it yawns. It is not a film. You can see where its claws have drawn blood from fresh meat. It is not a drawing. It is not a quotation or citation of a tiger. It’s a fucking tiger! But it’s also not. It’s not a tiger in the place that tigers do and should occur. This is the tragedy—the displacement—of zoos. It’s why a lot of people don’t like to visit zoos, even if they’re not exactly romantics or animal liberationists. And I’m certainly not

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one—‘stick a fork in its ass and turn it over, it’s cooked’ is my attitude to animals. They don’t want to see giraffes plodding around in a pen when, somehow, part of being a giraffe is that they should be getting up to 40-odd mph and bashing a way through the bush, looking for new growth on new trees, way up high. Without that—and lots of other stuff—they just aren’t giraffes. Close your eyes and you can’t even tell they’re there—not a sound—for the zoo giraffe is the very emblem of anti-phonocentrism. It has no vocal chords and can’t run, being penned in. So that’s why animals in zoos aren’t quite ‘the real animals’ and it’s also why they’re not quite pictures or representations either. They appear to exist, as it were, half way between the sign (a picture, a definition) and the referent. Zoo animals are parergonal in this sense—especially if we remember that animals are, if anything is, the original referents, having been represented from the very first moment of representational history. Zoo animals exist on and as the oblique slash between an animal and its representation. In some cultures this positioning is associated with ‘ghosts’: neither the thing nor its mere image—between the two (worlds). The ghost is a remainder: something left over from either the sign or its referent, something left behind. It is an excess (if only a slight one) and, as such, speaks against the amputationism of AZ&00. If there is something missing from zoo animals (pace Greenaway’s gorilla with its missing leg) it is not, then, something so simple as a limb. We might like to think of the Greenaway amputations as synecdochal of what is missing from zoo animals: but this would be very kind to the film. What it seems to miss—via the contrivance of the amputation—is the fact that the ‘missing thing’ always turns paradoxically into an addition or surplus: the slash between sign and referent which commands attention in the case of zoo animals; which is the (invisible) punctum of zoo animals; but not of either ‘real’ (wild) animals or of pictures of animals—necessarily including AZ&00. This then leaves us with two points which may appear contradictory but which are not—and which are not in important ways. That is: we go to the zoo in order to check out the misleading philosophical conundrums, in order to dissolve them with a look, let the fly out of the fly-bottle and so on. But, at the same time, what allows us to do this is invisible: it is the space or spacing between the zebra and its picture. So we seem to have an empiricism (‘go to the zoo, have a look, see if it’s true what they say in theory…’) which is effective precisely because of something which is not available to the sense organs or to technical extensions of them (microscopes, telescopes, etc.). And that, given any definition of empiricism, is as contradictory as it’s possible to be. Or is it? Perhaps instead we could think of classical empiricism as having been allowed to colonize and appropriate all forms of the look, of looking in general, and to get away with it, scot free. Why have we just stood by and (not) watched? Why have we granted the monopoly on looking to the empiricists? Preponderantly we go along with them and mean, by ‘looking’, a literal inspection using human eyesight. This is what Baconian empiricism intended by ‘looking’—looking at (and only at) the presences available to the eyesight. But this neglects the fact that in looking, in any form of looking, one must necessarily be aware of matters which are absent. (And this is true for hearing and other senses too: for example hearing that the giraffe is silent.) The presences make no sense otherwise. And the particular case of looking at zoo animals only heightens this requirement of looking in general. So ‘look’ becomes, necessarily, non-literal. Its socalled ‘ordinary language meaning’ always includes what is, for classical empiricism, an

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impossibility—namely, looking at what is not there. In your case, the first five minutes. Looking is not—cannot be—immune from the requirement of difference. And, remembering this, I can begin to advocate a kind of counter-empiricism, in order to get outside the text of AZ&00. It is a counter-empiricism because it offers a therapy to regular varieties of empiricism: reminding them of the critical differences that always already lurk in and around their realist certitudes about the human senses and the relation of the senses to the world. But it is still an empiricism of sorts: something as simple as going to the zoo to zero-in on the zebra conundrum and seeing how seeing this takes us, immediately, beyond the zero. And it is an empiricism, too, in the sense that while it depends upon and asserts the value of critical theory, it stridently rejects any vulgarization of theory by showing and remembering the limits of any mere (pretentious, intellectualist) theoreticism. Louisiana State University Murdoch University NOTE 1 A Zed and Two Noughts. A film by Peter Greenaway. Produced by Peter Sainsbury and Kees Kasander. Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. BFI/All Arts/Artificial Eye/Film Four International, 1985.

Back to the author: romanticism, postmodernism, de Man FRED BOTTING Though the author has been declared dead, particularly by Roland Barthes,1 reports of his or her demise often seem highly exaggerated as the figure reappears with stubborn persistence to reaffirm its originary creative power over the vicissitudes of language and texts in which its identity is supposed to be constructed and displaced. Even the analogy between author and God endures, though with some degree of irony, as Brian McHale observes in his book on postmodernist writing.2 Bearing the traces of Romantic attempts at a godlike transcendence by means of the authorial imagination, the author that lingers in postmodern forms of writing seems to have undiminished humanist aspirations towards resourcefully displaying authority and creativity. Despite the diversity of the texts examined here—Paul de Man’s ‘The rhetoric of temporality’, Robert Zemeckis’ film Back to the Future (1986) and Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural address (21 January 1985)—there is a binding cultural link between all three: this is their affirmation of an authorial presence. However, the authorial fantasy in which the humanist self is mythologized and sustained as an autonomous, authoritative and originary being remains, in all the accounts, under a certain amount of stress. Stress, not only on its potency, but on its very identity as it is threatened with the loss of its imagined authority. Yet the disturbing figures of linguistic and historical difference that confront the author with the possibility of imminent disintegration also enable an instant in which unity can be reconstituted. Indeed the negation and affirmation of self which plays a key part in Romantic writing endures, it seems, within discourses that have something of the postmodern about them. Thus de Man’s pathbreaking reappraisal of Romantic language and its critical implications manifests an important relationship to other cultural productions that are imbued and empowered with the ideology of the humanist author and intimately involved in struggles to preserve self over other. De Man’s influential rereading of Romanticism, ‘The rhetoric of temporality’, both questions conventional critical assumptions about Romantic language—assumptions that privilege symbol over allegory—and pro-poses a very different issue—of temporality— as a major concern within the language of Romanticism. The focus upon temporality and language, as allegory, challenges the priority assigned to the categories of self, nature, and experience, categories which are assumed to be sustained by the power of symbolic language. Examining the confusions and contradictions engendered by the valorization of symbolic modes of writing, de Man’s critique also raises questions about the nature of the creative self, questions, however, which his essay seems reluctant to resolve. De Man’s argument begins by noting that literary criticism since the late eighteenth century has tended to accord primacy to the symbol. Embued with the possibility of achieving unity and totality by synthesizing experience and the representation of experience, the symbol is linked to notions of the artist, assuming him/her to be a creative

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genius whose work offers a richness that leads to the presentation of universal meaning. In contrast, allegory is denigrated: its reach is restricted and particular, for it only refers back to a distant past event or text and thus fails to present meaning or experience. Assuming the priority of the symbol, de Man notes, induces critical confusion and impasse because, insisting on a relationship between self and nature, the symbol’s place of origin becomes indeterminable: assertions of the priority of both nature and self, as origin of the experience related in symbolic language, are equally possible in readings of Romantic texts. Indeed, the privilege accorded the symbol produces this confusion, since its investment with the capacity of immediacy and synthesis occludes the temporality which announces language’s difference and distance from experience: Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self. It is this painful knowledge that we perceive at the moments when early romantic literature finds its true voice.3 The assumption of the primacy of the symbol produces a form of self-mystification which presupposes that the identity of the self is sustained, and that its experience is preserved in language which has the unifying capacity of immediate presentation. Yet, the belief that language can synthesize, totalize and transcend temporal distance and difference is contradicted within Romantic language which, de Man notes, articulates, not self and nature, but a relationship between subjects. Manifested in the frequent use of terms like ‘affinity’ and ‘sympathy’, ‘the relationship with nature has been superseded by an intersubjective, interpersonal relationship that, in the last analysis, is a relationship of the subject towards itself’ (p. 196). The tension between symbol and allegory discloses a crucial issue with Romanticism: the temporal relationship of self to self. For de Man, ‘the prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny’ (p. 206), since, in language, as allegory, ‘time is the originary constitutive category’ (p. 207): signs refer back to other signs that they can only repeat, and with which they can never coincide. No longer able to assume the trancendent synthesizing power of the symbol, or to achieve the metatemporal stability associated with nature, Romantic language is marked by the different and distanced figures of temporality. Confronted with the unending anteriority announced by allegory, the self is immersed in a conflict in which it attempts to defend itself from the ‘negative self-knowledge’ presented in the discovery of its own ‘temporal predicament’ (p. 208). Irony, too, depends on a relationship with temporality. De Man argues that irony is marked by a discontinuous relationship of sign and meaning in which, like allegory, ‘the sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning and has for its function the thematization of this difference’ (p. 209). The reflection called for by irony posits a distance within the self that reflects upon itself, and thus involves a division or duplication of the self engaged in reflection. In the process, the ‘empirical self’, as de

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Man terms it, is lost in a movement to the world of ironic language. Consciousness or self-definition is made possible within language by an act that differentiates self from non-self: The dédoublement thus designates the activity of a consciousness by which a man differentiates himself from the non-human world. The capacity for such duplication is rare, says Baudelaire, but belongs specifically to those who, like artists or philosophers, deal in language. (p. 213) Irony thus endows the self with a consciousness of itself, at the expense of the revelation of its lack of authenticity or empirical stability. However, the momentum of ironic doubling suggests that the temporality confronted is not organic or total, since the distance from any origin places the self within a void that divides temporal experience into a mystified past and a future of inauthenticity. Like allegory, which implies an ‘unreachable anteriority’, irony refuses any temporal stability: they are ‘thus linked in their common discovery of a truly temporal predicament’ (p. 222). There remains, none the less, an important distinction to be made between allegory and irony, a distinction manifested in their different relationships to the experience of time. Elaborating upon this distinction, de Man offers a reading of Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, as a non-ironic allegorical poem, in which the poet is distinguished for his sensitivity to the temporal condition of humanity. For de Man, the poem’s two stanzas represent two different mental states. The first is one of ignorance, of slumbering, unaware of the effects of time. The second self-conscious or wise state—the ‘now’ of the second stanza—conceives of the first as a state of error or mystification. Outlining a change from unawareness to consciousness, the poem demystifies the illusion of human life existing outside time: the mystified self is oblivious to the effects of time, oblivious, that is, until the death of the poem’s unnamed ‘she’ shocks the speaker into human self-consciousness evoked by ‘human fears’ of death and time. Her demise happens, de Man observes, in the gap between the two stanzas, and forms the instant in which the unaware self is confronted with fatal temporality, to be shifted, by this knowledge, into a new state of consciousness: while it is recognized that time turns self into non-self, this consciousness of time also provides a moment of insight that reconstitutes the observing self. The difference between allegory and irony that de Man uncovers is a difference between a unified and a divided self. In Wordsworth’s poem, the experience of time is related from the unified position of a speaker already possessed of the knowledge of the effects of time: the past, unaware state forms a state of error from which the speaker, in the poem’s present, has been separated by his attainment of temporal awareness. Unified, the speaker’s insight establishes a position ‘no longer vulnerable to irony’ (p. 224). Opposed to the unity supplied by allegory, irony can be constructed by de Man as an instant in which the self is divided into empirical and ironic selves. Within their own terms, each may consider its position superior, but both modes of language, de Man maintains, present a knowledge that is ‘essentially the same’. Both positions remain ‘vulnerable to renewed blindness as soon as they leave it for the empirical world’, since ‘both are determined by an authentic experience of temporality which, seen from the

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point of view of the self engaged in the world, is a negative one’ (p. 226). Temporality causes dialectical conflicts between modes of language, a dialectical play which, de Man concludes, constitutes the movements of literary history. While de Man’s identification of a ‘dialectical play’ between linguistic modes gives a certain openness to his conclusion, an analysis of the interimplication of allegory and irony, temporality and simultaneity, can disclose the persistence or repetition within his argument of conventional assumptions about language, history, and authors. Allegory, constituted by a temporal, distanced, relationship to its referent, operates as a form of language which defers the actuality of the experience or sign to which it refers: it ‘designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of temporal experience’ (p. 207). Separating language from the empirical world, allegory constructs a unified self within its frames and institutes a distance between that self and an empirical moment. In this respect, the irony of allegory is also the allegory of irony, since irony, too, involves the loss of an ‘authentic’ empirical self in the instant when a linguistic consciousness differentiates between an ironic self and an empirical self located in the otherness of temporal distance. Yet, after his reading of Wordsworth’s ‘allegorical’ poem, de Man distinguishes allegory and irony by means of an opposition of time and space: allegory divides language from experience along a temporal axis, while irony divides empirical from ironic self in a synchronic moment. It is, however, also the case that irony ‘divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic’ (p. 222). Though there lingers, within the language of irony, a longing for the authenticity of an empirical world, this version of irony appears to be as appropriate a mode to describe Wordsworth’s poem as the allegorical status given it by de Man. The state of slumber, in an ironic reading of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, would correspond with the mystification of an empirical self, while the ‘now’ of the second stanza would mark an attempt to sustain an instant of ironic consciousness aroused by a knowledge of the effects of time: ‘an eternal insight into the rocky barrenness of the human predicament prevails’ (p. 225; my emphasis). The interimplication of allegory and irony is further extended in de Man’s reading of the poem, to the degree that allegory seems to depend on a moment of ironic reflection. Identifying a ‘tragic irony’ in the third and fourth lines of the first stanza (‘She seemed a thing that could not feel/The touch of earthly years’), de Man states that it is resolved by the wisdom of the second stanza. Indeed, the irony, only perceptible from the position of the speaker at a double remove from the first stanza, is that, after death, she has literally become a ‘thing’:

No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. No longer human, she is absorbed into the movement of time as a lifeless object possessed of no motion of her own. Against the description of the object world, the

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speaker’s position remains outside, differentiated from, that world of non-self: unlike the first stanza, there is no ‘I’ to identify a subject. Ironically, however, that subject is an object too. For the ‘I’ of the first stanza exists only in a past state, which is a state absorbed into time. This subject is a ‘thing’, in the sense that s/he possesses no ‘human fears’, the fears that come with the realization of the fatal effects of time. A further movement in the vertiginous play of irony is that the present is not presentable in language: the ‘I’ of the poem is a narrative reconstruction of a past state. Moreover, the ‘I’ that de Man identifies as the speaker of the poem not only reconstructs a past, lost ‘I’ in the poem’s narrative temporality, but also represents the synchronic moment in which the present ‘I’ achieves self-consciousness: in the instant of death that occurs in the space between the two stanzas. The irony of de Man’s allegorical reading of the poem is that its allegorical unity depends upon the discovery of an ironic instant. The ironic effect of language is to install an illusion of a unified position of speaker outside the text of the poem. It forms a reflexive position of wisdom differentiated, in the language of the poem, from error, just as humanity is constituted against death, time, and the empirical world in the imaginary instant when one is shocked into the self-defining state of human fear by the threat of these others. The ‘knowledge’ offered by this differentiation of self from non-self remains as an absence, a gap between the two stanzas. It is a gap that corresponds to de Man’s subsequent description of irony as a synchronic moment when difference resides in the subject, but this difference, within allegory, seems to enable a self-conscious unification in the ‘self-created temporality of narrative’ through a progression from slumbering and error to insight and knowledge: a past state is constructed and, against it, identity can be fixed in an unpresentable present, the position of the absent ‘I’ that seems to exist, for de Man, both in and out of the text. While the absence of a subject that can be identified in the present seems to suggest that language abolishes the possibility of presence as it renders to impossibility any experience of time beyond the orders of language, de Man succeeds in finding a moment of presence in a dialectical play of allegory and irony. While ‘real’ time remains always and ever-unknowably past, a past is reconstructed in language in a process of differentiation from a linguistic present which structures time in its own ‘fictional’ frames. These intricate movements of difference seem to work against de Man’s own differentiation of language from experience: The difference does not exist within the subject which remains unique throughout and therefore can restore the tragic irony of lines 3 and 4 in the wisdom of the concluding lines. The difference has been spread out over a temporality which is exclusively that of the poem and in which the conditions of error and wisdom have become successive. This is possible within the ideal self-created temporality engendered by the language of the poem, but it is not possible within the actual temporality of experience. The ‘now’ of the poem is not an actual now, which is that of the moment of death, lies hidden in the blank space between the two stanzas. The fundamental structure of allegory reappears here in the tendency of the language towards narrative, the spreading out along the

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axis of an imaginary time in order to give duration to what is, in fact, simultaneous within the subject. (p. 225) The insistence upon experience and simultaneity, ‘an actual “now”’, seems a little strange, if not rather ironic. Differentiating the ‘self-created temporality’ of narrative language from the ‘actual temporality of experience’, de Man institutes a difference that homogenizes language and unifies the position of the poem’s speaker, as well as the position of the essay’s writer. It appears that, even as allegory renders the simultaneity of experience inaccessible by reconstructing it within its own linguistic temporality, de Man’s notion of allegory is dependent or predicated upon the assumption that there is an originary world and an ‘actual’ self beyond language. For, though it remains absent, the experience of time determines the emergence of allegory and irony. It is, indeed, ironic that the assumption of the existence of an identifiable experience outside and prior to language assumes what cannot be assumed by allegory since, as a form of language which refuses a synthesis of past and present or experience of its representation, allegory refers back along chains of anteriority, pointing to meaning located elsewhere, an ‘elsewhere’ that is not beyond language, but lies among other signs or texts. None the less, de Man’s reading of Wordsworth’s poem manages to present what the text leaves absent: it identifies, in the blank space between the two stanzas, the moment of death. The reading turns on and is unified by this assumption. By filling the gap that the poem does not fill, by inscribing the blank space with significance, de Man authorizes his reading through an act of writing. By means of this space and silence, and, moreover, despite the temporal distance that separates reader from text, de Man is able to distinguish himself as a reader by becoming a writer, by supplanting the authorial consciousness attributed to Wordsworth with his own enactment of authority. De Man’s essay thus seems to repeat the progression he identifies as the poem’s, for he rewrites Romanticism and literary history with his notion of temporality: first there was error and misreading, a blindness caused by the belief in the priority of the symbol, then came the insight into allegory’s disclosure of temporality. With the knowledge of humanity’s temporal predicament, ‘The rhetoric of temporality’ is able to transcend historical differences with the discovery of truth ‘hidden’ between the stanzas: the essay makes visible Wordsworth’s ‘eternal insight into the rocky barrenness of the human predicament’ (p. 225). Preventing self from an illusory identification with non-self, allegory offers this ‘painful knowledge’ as the ‘true voice’ of early Romantic literature (p. 207). Indeed, this painful ‘negative self-knowledge’ of an ‘authentically temporal predicament’ constitutes one of ‘the truths that come to light in the last quarter of the eighteenth century’ (p. 208). Thus, de Man can elide the movements of temporality and fix difference, in opposition to ‘actual’ temporality, with the narrative of his own ‘selfcreated temporality’. Constraining the diachronic movements of historical difference within the structure of his essay, de Man deploys his notion of temporality in a synchronic manner. It is a move which is surely ironic. As Saussure, in order to analyse the production of meaning from binary oppositions, artificially froze the system of differences that constitute language within an eternal, synchronic present, so de Man freezes the diachronic movements of difference within the narrative of his own ‘self-created temporality’. Self is defined in a

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process of differentiation from non-self, a relationship with and against temporality that can offer only a ‘negative self-knowledge’. Without such an opposition or relationship of difference the identity of self cannot be affirmed. Indeed, in Wordsworth’s poem, the ‘I’ of the first stanza has his/her spirits sealed in slumber and is without the ‘human fears’ of otherness that are constitutive of human self-consciousness. Furthermore, de Man’s use of the phrase ‘self-created temporality’, through its opposition to ‘the actual experience of temporality’, implies the hope of resisting and transcending temporal difference by asserting the priority of the self over and against time. The affirmation of self, against time as non-self, also implies a desire to transcend the differences of language and elevate self to the identity of an author through an ability to create its own temporality in narrative. The writer’s identity is affirmed against the otherness of language: composed of dead signifiers that differ from each other, defer presence and delay meaning with an endless divergence of meanings, language is opposed to the self that imagines its power to be creative and authorial, and believes it realizes this power by writing. And it is writing in a different, Derridean, sense that precisely does, momentarily, realize this identity: the difference that establishes the opposition of self and language is constituted by, and disintegrates in, the infinite differences and divergences of language. Though language provides the conditions for the conception of a ‘self-created temporality’, it only does so because it is prepossessed of a self creating temporality, a temporality which constructs images of an ‘empirical’ world. From this position, the tensions that are identified in ‘The rhetoric of temporality’ can be read, not as the anxieties of a self attempting to suppress the negative knowledge of its temporal predicament, but as the conflicts of a self desiring to return to its imaginary ideal, thus resisting its subjection to the movements of linguistic difference in which it is always already constituted and displaced. While it is possible to read ‘The rhetoric of temporality’ differently, the stress upon the tensions between language and self is political, in that it attempts to disclose the humanist self-mystification that depends upon the assumption of an authorial and autonomous ideal of self. It is a project allied to Frank Lentricchia’s analysis of de Man’s ‘rhetoric of authority’ in which, particularly in de Man’s earlier texts, presuppositions of the metaphysical terms of Satrean existentialism are identified. Thus, Lentricchia argues that, in ‘The rhetoric of temporality’, de Man does not justify the presumed existence of a unified authoritative self but merely vindicates his assumption by means of rhetorical dexterity: He assumes the privileged position of a writer in possession of the truth and then proceeds to pump up the ego of his readers, lifting them to his own level of awareness by assuming their acceptance, as revealed truth, of existentialist ideology.4 The consequence, Lentricchia argues, of such a rhetoric of authority is to move literary criticism out of time, history, and ideology, and into a space where literature is privileged:

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As an autonomous, closed, fortresslike world, literary discourse will countenance no conditioning by, no investment in, other lands of discourses, unless those discourses can be robbed of their own determinative force as they are taken in by the self-deconstructing dynamics of what is called literary language. The issue here, as Foucault has argued, is not one of allowing history, as something ‘outside’ discourse, ‘inside’. The issue is one of allowing the myriad discourses that are history to have some power. The difficulty is that de Man and too many poststructuralists unnecessarily grant power only to the selfdeconstructing move of the literary, a move which succeeded in emptying literary discourse of everything but the aporia, the undecidable. (p. 310) The meaning of ‘literature’ (and the reason for its being valued) at any given time is defined, not on its own or in the narrowed confines of ‘literary criticism’, but within the many ideologies or discourses which circulate and conflict in any cultural, social, and economic nexus. ‘Literature’ is never pure, never separate or isolated from other discourses, but always (and already) ‘contaminated’ by ideology. Thus to attempt to isolate the ‘literary’ from other discourses is both to try to efface the historical, ideological form of criticism and also to deny the specific pressures and implications that underlie such an attempt. The authorial self forms an ideological figure crucial to the isolation of literature from other discourses, as well as a figure that is central to attempts to efface the movements of history, ideology, and difference. It is also the central figure of Reagan’s second inaugural address, as well as featuring in other American cultural productions, like the film Back to the Future. Back to the Future is a juvenile fantasy of time-travel which contrasts the decaying suburban lifestyle of 1980s America with the homogenized suburban dream of the 1950s. The main protagonist is a teenage boy, Marty McFly, who inhabits a world of refuse and disintegration: his home is visibly crumbling as are the family relations within it. An alcoholic mother and an ineffectual father (still under the thumb of the bully from his schooldays) try to regulate Marty’s life. The boy, however, dreams of other things; becoming a rock and roll guitarist, possessing a shiny black truck and with it his girlfriend. The cinematic realization of these dreams is made possible with a trip ‘back to the future’. Marty becomes involved with the film’s ‘mad professor’, Dr Emmet Brown, who has stolen the necessary nuclear fuel to power his time-machine—a DeLorean sports car with time-travel attachments. As the vehicle is prepared a group of armed Libyan terrorists burst on the scene to claim the stolen plutonium and shoot the scientist. Marty only escapes by diving into the machine and, pursued by the terrorists, driving to the speed required to activate the time-travel mechanism. He crash lands in the same vicinity but some thirty years earlier. Back in the fifties things are a lot cleaner: the people, the streets, and the expanding suburbs. In his return to the place of his birth before the time of his birth Marty encounters both his mother-to-be, who falls in love with him, and his father-to-be whom he befriends even though he is disconcerted to discover that this adolescent version of his father is a peeping-tom and a writer of science fiction stories. A marriage seems impossible unless Marty can intervene to right the balance of history, that is, to be the

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author of, to create, his own destiny. He decides to play Cupid and persuade his prospective father to ask the future Mrs McFly to accompany him to the forthcoming high-school dance. She, however, prefers to go with her son-to-be and so Marty is forced to conspire with his father in order to realign events in accordance with future exigencies: at the dance the father will wrest his future wife from the clutches of his rival, his son. Unfortunately the confused oedipal triangle is not so easily resolved since, as Marty fends off the most unmaternal of advances, it is not his father but the local bully who appears. Threatened with a disastrous turn of events which will mean that Marty can never exist, the future is finally righted when his father arrives to assert his latent masculinity and overpower the bully to win his bride-to-be. Marty has just enough time to ‘invent’ rock and roll before he must, with the help of a younger version of his eighties scientist friend, go back to the future. When he arrives there at virtually the same time that he left, this world has been totally transformed. Home and family are no longer in a state of disrepair, his parents are now a happily married, loving and successful American couple, his father a best-selling science fiction writer, and the former bully is now firmly subordinated, having just cleaned Marty’s very own truck: the same one that, earlier in the film, was the object of the boy’s desire. With this happy ending the film appears to affirm the power of wishful thinking. As we watch it from the unified position of the young protagonist we are invited to share in his dream, to identify with the power of the absolute (American) self that can transcend temporal difference and rewrite history as its own fantasy. Indeed, we are empowered with the ideology or mythology of the authorial self and endowed with a godlike capacity: to remain the same in the face of all changes, be they temporal, cultural, or historical. This desire for a unified consciousness against the dislocations, disintegrations, and dissolutions of difference is also, according to the Cardiff Text Analysis Group, the project of Reagan’s second inaugural address.5 Moreover, Back to the Future seems to reproduce and realize on celluloid Reagan’s vision of a revitalized American society: ‘There can be no limits to growth and human progress, when men and women are free to follow their dreams.’6 Reagan’s text is distinctly polar in structure, identifying all signifiers that are conventionally valued—humanity, peace, progress, prosperity, individuality, freedom, etc.—with the terms that reinforce their appeal: strength, health, birth, sunlight, and plenitude. Against these there looms the ever-present threat of difference: of death, disunity, weakness, hunger and ‘the dark allies of oppression and war’. By means of what is ultimately one age-old antithesis, of good and evil (where self is good and other evil), the text promises and assumes the authority of a totally unified position at the privileged pole. The project is to transcend all difference (historical, linguistic, political) by the authority of one voice that is guaranteed by the names of humanity, right and God: For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old. We raise our voices to the God who is the author of this most tender music. And may He continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound—in unity, affection, and love: one people under God, dedicated to the dream

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of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and hopeful world. (p. 388) The autonomous, authoritative self verges on divine union as the singing of God’s praises elevates the singers to share His own voice. In the age of nuclear technology humans have the power to fill the absence of the omnipresent being and efface differences entirely: nuclear weapons, which Reagan wanted to replace or reinforce with ‘Star Wars’, invest humans with the power of life and death over a world of others. Yet the desire for an absolute self remains a ‘dream of freedom’, a desire to transcend and efface the boundaries of difference which can only repeat the desire, reproducing it in the face of the very differences it promises but is unable to efface: the necessity of difference constitutes the dream of a fullness of self in its own want of plenitude. In Reagan’s dream the self can only remain as heroic and embattled figure whose selfidentity can never be made present as a complete, unified or whole being. Instead it is produced out of the very differences it seeks to efface by means of the threat of non-self: nothing, it seems, provokes a sense of self-consciousness or self-preservation better than the fears of one’s own imminent destruction. While this reconstitution of identity assumes a singular relationship of self and other, the antitheses in Reagan’s text do not stay fixed in one opposition, and thus deny a single meaning. The unified self collapses into the realm of its others as Reagan’s text advocates actions that it had previously identified as evil: militaristic images permeate the call for peace (‘human freedom is on the march’; it is ‘our best ally’ in the striking of ‘blows’ against those ‘dark allies of oppression and war’) and the text becomes a declaration of war on difference. On the face of it Reagan’s text seems to have very little to do with any postmodern form of discourse since it aims towards unity, synthesis, and symbol rather than disintegration, difference and allegory which have been identified as features of the latter.7 Reagan’s invocation of a total and totalizing authoritative self seems to have more to do with human-ism, or perhaps a rampant ultra-humanism, in which, in the name of freedom, the self seeks to transcend all bounds of time and language. In contrast postmodernism has been identified as proclaiming the end of the author and the return to the radical differences of history and the self-reflexivity of texts whose inside and outside remain indeterminable, unfixable by any human ‘origin’. Yet, perhaps because of the stress on unity and transcendence in Reagan’s text, it is forced to confirm itself through a reproduction of the very boundaries it attempts to exceed: its differences return to disfigure the unity of its surfaces and display tensions of a postmodernist kind. In the text there are moments when it produces paradoxes that reaffirm linguistic difference: ‘to strive with all our strength toward the ultimate individual freedom, consistent with an orderly society’. Near the end of the speech there is a sudden shift in style as Reagan dramatically describes brief scenes from the heroic American past: A general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. (p. 388)

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Unannounced, this paragraph slips out of the preceding rhetorical mode and appears unconnected with anything spoken of before, a fragment made up of fragmented moments. This disjunction is also a moment of pastiche and collage as the form of one medium is incorporated into another. These fragments are film clips from the everpresent past of the movies, visual aids in the televised speech of a former actor. The following paragraph refers to the ‘soundtrack’ of those film fragments, the settler’s song: ‘It is the American sound: it is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic—daring, decent, and fair.’ The gap is filled by this addition of the authoritative voice-over to the images of American’s own self-advertisement, a pastiche of its most consumed form, television commercials. In these moments unity is threatened; the text refers to other texts and thus announces its own difference from them. Despite its own project the text foregrounds its own postmodernity. Hal Foster has termed this type ‘neoconservative’ postmodernism, formally similar to its ‘poststructuralist’ opposite but characterized by its insistence on returning to a unifying humanist discourse.8 Classifying Back to the Future in terms of Foster’s postmodern polemics is not so easy. The film unfolds from a unified perspective as a fantasy of total authority over time: the scientist returns to the eighties, at the end of the film, and transports Marty and his girlfriend into the future so that they can solve the problems they, married and with children, have with their own offspring: the precarious bourgeois family ideal requires constant attention. The film’s end is also a place where science and its nuclear power is made safe: the DeLorean time-machine, once nuclear-powered, now functions with household waste as fuel! The openness of the ending inaugurates a new adventure in a different time and confronts the viewer with further interpretative difficulties. The authorial self’s fantasy of controlling time is stretched still further, and with it the representative capacity of language: the temporality of narrative can only account for such a fantasy in paradoxical terms. Language is less than adequate to the demands of the authorial self and confronts it not with its own transcendent presence but with contradictions which foreground its own wordliness. The fantasy of authority over time submits to temporal and linguistic difference in which the self is dislocated and fragmented: Marty, in the 1950s, is threatened with his own extinction—manifested by the gradual fading of his image from a photograph taken in his own time. Shifting from place to place his eternal youth and unchanging identity is contrasted with the major transformations of those around him. His being is split when he returns slightly early from the fifties to witness his initial departure to that period. Beyond time, Marty has no place. In the fifties his difference is noticed, nowhere more sharply than when he crash lands in his own neighbourhood. Instead of finding recognition and hospitality, he is greeted, to his surprise, with a shotgun. But then what could he expect, crashing at night, in a strange vehicle, at a time when cold war science fiction depicted all aliens, almost exclusively, as a menacing enemy bent on the destruction of America? There were no E.T.’s then. It his own space, Marty is an alien, an other, his difference unconcealable. Difference is desirable, though, as Marty discovers when his mother-to-be attempts to seduce him, discovering also that the fifties may not have been as pure or innocent as they are made out to be in the pastiches of coffee-bar simplicity, teenage romance and

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high-school dance. Historical difference returns even as it is being rewritten and homogenized. It is, for example, at the dance that rock and roll is invented or reinvented by a middle-class white boy. The guitarist for the local band having been incapacitated, Marty steps into the breach and offers what is, for him, a very traditional rendition of rock and roll. For the audience, however, it is new and exciting and for the musician on the sidelines it is just the sound his guitarist brother has been searching for; that brother, contacted there and then by telephone, is none other than Chuck Berry! Here, however, history reasserts its difference as Marty, exhilarated by his reception, exceeds that time and, in a frenzy of histrionic playing and posturing, delivers a version of rock and roll more suited to the eighties. This produces only incredulity, and Marty is forced to acknowledge historical limitations and conclude with the remark: ‘I guess you’re not ready for that yet.’ Such remarks and the transhistorical jokes that frequently interrupt the narrative indicate an ironic self-consciousness which undermines the realization of any authorial fantasy of transcendence. The film’s comic reflexivity is also incorporated into its story as the juvenile science fiction writer of the fifties becomes a successful author of the eighties: the fantasy of authority, fulfilment, and success, the American dream, is achieved through fantasy or science fiction writing in a film that reproduces and parodies that fantasy in its own fantastic form. The self-consciousness of Back to the Future as a fantasy about fantasy manifests its own historical difference from its subject and its recognition of its own time and place. It marks an acknowledgement, also, of its own and its culture’s involvement in the reconstruction of the past it represents: the irony that supplies much of the film’s humour is addressed only to the knowing subject of the eighties, foregrounding, not a nostalgic return to the period, but a recognition that history is read and recreated from positions in the present. This ‘history of the present’ is nowhere more blatant than in the jokes about Ronald Reagan. Not only is one of his films playing at the local cinema, but Marty’s revelation that the man will be President is met with incredulous laughter. But what of the audience’s laughter? Is it a laugh that confirms them in their superior knowledge or one of ironic agreement with the ‘innocents’ of the fifties: though ridiculous, fantastic perhaps, for the audience of the eighties, there may well be a bitter taste. The film’s reference to Reagan, as actor first, then President, has interesting implications for reading the parodic possibilities. It can be read as a parody of the American dream as it emerged in the fifties but more as a parody of the vain attempt to recover that past, lost age of innocence, of selfhood, unity, progress, and freedom since the film represents that ideal as a retrospective reconstruction. It is fantastic modes like its own that have fabricated and mythologized the rebirth of the American dream of freedom for markets and individuals. The American ego is deflated as its paranoid fear of its own others is comically represented. Thus, demythologized as mere fantasy, the ideology of the authorial self is confronted with the ineffaceability of the historical differences in which it is/was constructed. Yet an irony persists, and with it the power of the (ideology of the) authorial self: the fantasy of success and fulfilment is also the success and fulfilment of fantasy. In the film the author of science fiction achieves his fantasy as does his son, another juvenile fantasist who has rewritten history in the fulfilment of his wishes. In and out of the film, Reagan, an actor of fictions, reaches the authority of the highest office of his country,

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while the film’s producer and arch-fantasist, Stephen Spielberg, has made millions of dollars through the screening of fantasy. This twist suggests that, far from being disarmed, the mythology of self is celebrated as the American dream is fulfilled in and as fantasy. The distinction of fantasy from reality is, however, blurred since fantasy produces material effects: the power of making money and moving people to vote. The very materiality of the texts also constitutes the authorial self as a crucial part of a persistent, pervasive, and powerful mythology. Nor does the American deconstructor escape its effects, for, constituting his authority against the texts he reads, the freeplay of signifiers that he releases remains subordinated to his mastery, just as Reagan’s voice of authority allows him to assume a position of mastery. An understanding of the authorial self is necessary, also, for a discrimination of postmodernisms since the imagined ‘presence’ of that self provides the means to ahistoricize history: while many texts may be assembled or collaged, they are subsumed within the discourse of the authorial self.9 The authorial self, however, can only sustain its sense of imaginary plenitude in fleeting moments when recognition of its ideological construction is repressed, that is, when the absolute Other, threatening the self with imminent textual dissolution, evokes the fears for itself which affirm its identity. In this way, the authorial self can conserve its sense or fantasy of selfhood by placing itself in a permanent state of war. University of Wales, College of Cardiff NOTES 1 Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8. 2 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 29–30. 3 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 207. 4 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: Athlone, 1980), p. 293. 5 Cardiff Text Analysis Group, ‘Disarming voices (a nuclear exchange)’, Textual Practice, 2:3 (1988), pp. 381–93. 6 Quoted in CTAG, ‘Disarming voices’, p. 386. 7 See the accounts of postmodernism by Linda Hutcheon, ‘Beginning to theorize postmodernism’, Textual Practice, 1, (1987), pp. 10–31, and Ihab Hassan, ‘Pluralism in postmodern perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1986), pp. 503–20. 8 Hal Foster, ‘(Post)modern polemics’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), pp. 67–78. 9 This is the strategy of Ihab Hassan in his ‘Quest for the subject: the self in literature’, Contemporary Literature, 29 1:3 (1988), pp. 420–37.

The subject of history: Gadamer, LacoueLabarthe, and Lyotard NEIL LEVI The way we understand history is inevitably intertwined with the way we interpret everything else. The way we understand history is also commonly understood to influence the way in which we understand ourselves, which influences in turn our understanding of history. The field of hermeneutics builds its model of interpretation on this apparently unproblematic exchange, often conceived of as a circle. Recently, poststructuralist writers have claimed that there is something fundamentally wrong about the way in which thinkers such as Gadamer connect the subject to the tradition, and thus also to history. It appears that a large gap exists between Gadamer’s ‘The problem of historical consciousness’ and a text such as Heidegger’s notorious speech made upon accepting the Rectorate of the University of Freiburg in 1933. Yet if we are to take Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe at his word, it seems that the gap is an illusion. Speaking of Heidegger’s complicity in Nazism, Lacoue-Labarthe says, from the moment that one considers the idea that Heidegger, and before him the entire great German tradition (Marx, on the one hand…included), had of the historical destiny of the West, we are not dealing with a mistake…. It is not a mistake, but it is a consequence.1 Furthermore, according to Lacoue-Labarthe ‘[i]n the apocalypse at Auschwitz, it is no more or less than the essence of the West that is revealed—and that has not ceased since that time to reveal itself’ (p. 484). The key claims are that, firstly, all ideas of the historical destiny, or inevitable and inexorable progress of the West, are implicated in the manifestation of that belief as put into practice in the concentration camps, and, secondly, that this idea of destiny is essential to, rather than an aberration of, the essential features of Western civilization. In so far as Gadamer’s ideas perpetuate the notion of historical destiny, then, they would perpetuate also, for Lacoue-Labarthe, the essential violence of Western civilization. Part of what follows involves a reading of Gadamer in the light of such an understanding of the concepts of history and tradition. However, I shall present not only a reading of his hermeneutics, but also a critique of both Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-François Lyotard, placing into question the legitimacy of such a reading as an argumentative strategy against hermeneutics. Despite the rhetorical power of the poststructuralist assault on the hermeneuticists’ analysis of the relationship of the subject to history, the poststructuralists’ understanding of history and subjectivity is not selfevidently radically different from something like Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle. My aim is to examine their reasons for differentiation, for escaping from the lurching spin of the historical hermeneutic circle. However, I shall commence with an excursus on HansGeorg Gadamer.

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In ‘The problem of historical consciousness’2 Gadamer attempts a synthesis of ideas he finds in Aristotle’s Ethics and Heidegger’s Being and Time, with the goal of sketching ‘the foundation of a hermeneutic’. The theme he suggests as being common to Aristotle and Heidegger is their recognition of human being-in-the-world. The concept of being-inthe-world appears to be developed out of the idea that certain structures, ideas, and practices in the human or social world are so embedded in that world that it cannot be conceived independently of them. The worlds of justice and virtues, or contracts, judgements, and games, or ideologies and superstructures, are always already in operation. This does not mean that the social world fell from the sky ready-made; it does mean that our modes of thought are so embedded within this world that we cannot think outside of its bounds. We cannot even attempt to think the origins of social life, for example, without making use of concepts which presuppose its existence. For Gadamer this being-in-the-world is manifest in a phrase he takes from the English language: ‘know-how’. In Gadamer’s Aristotle this know-how is manifest in ‘ethical being’. The idea of ethical being in turn arises out of the question of the function of knowledge in the constitution of ethical behaviour (p. 116). That is, what is the relationship between the generalized propositions we understand to be knowledge (and here a familiar dichotomy begins to emerge) and practical life? Rather than directly applying a body of knowledge in the form of rules, the agent must know ‘in general how to decide and what to prefer, but also, he must know and understand how he ought to act in the given occasion, a responsibility that he can never evade’ (p. 117). Ethical being is the state of being in the world in such a way as to be faced with such judgements and decisions as these, in which the use of ethical know-how is required. Ethical know-how is a skill. In some ways it is like a technical skill; the key differences between the two elucidated by Gadamer arise out of the necessity of ethical know-how to one’s being-in-the-world in contrast to technical skills which can, in principle, be acquired or forgotten, used or dispensed with. Gadamer locates a similar concept within Heideggerean hermeneutics. For Heidegger, it seems, understanding is ‘a primordial mode of being of human life itself’ (p. 110). Further, the German verb verstehen (under-standing) has the twin meanings of understanding as comprehension, and understanding in the sense of ‘she (doesn’t) know how to read’. For Gadamer these senses have in common ‘an act of knowing, a knowing about something, a knowing how to go about something’ (p. 110). So verstehen is in both cases oriented not only towards the object of understanding itself, but towards the subject who understands, who acquires through understanding a new liberty of the mind. This involves numerous and new possibilities, like interpreting a text, seeing the hidden relations that it conceals, drawing conclusions, and so on—precisely those things which define what we mean when we speak of the understanding of the text. Similarly, those with mechanical know-how… really know ‘how to go about it’. (p. 110) Thus ‘with Heidegger we witness an ontological evaluation of the problem of the structure of historical understanding, grounded on human existence which is essentially oriented towards the future’ (p. 111). The point is that for hermeneutics, understanding is

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to be located neither in the past of the historically situated text, nor in the present of the reader, but in the way the reader’s interaction with the text resituates what Heidegger terms her pro-ject in the world, her ‘potentiality-for-Being’ (p. 113). Evidently this potentiality is oriented towards the future. It is important to recognize also the converse, that this potentiality ‘is a being which here and now has been’, that this orientation towards the future is predicated upon the facticity of the past. Gadamer applies in his own hermeneutic what he takes to be the Aristotelean approach to the problem of ethics and its inherent mode of knowledge, that it ‘does not try to apply a general criterion to a particular case…[but rather] is interested in the fundamentally original significance of the writing under his consideration’ (p. 126). However, this apparent emphasis on the object as determining ‘the real and concrete content of the hermeneutical understanding’ (p. 125) is balanced by the interpreting subject’s selfreflexion: Every textual interpretation must begin…with the interpreter’s reflection on the preconceptions which result from the hermeneutical situation in which he finds himself. He must legitimate them, that is look for their adequacy…without it [this self-reflexion] our knowledge of the historically other is but a simple reduction. (pp. 130–3) This understanding constitutes a hermeneutic which aims to understand the historical object, event, or text both in so far as it is familiar with, and in so far as it is foreign to, the conceptual framework, the always already (in Heidegger’s terms, the preunderstanding) of the interpreter. Although the understanding takes account of the present location of the interpreter, it is the object or event in the past which is supposed to dictate the terms on which it is understood. Clearly, though, Gadamer’s hermeneutic is not exclusively intentionalist, as the incorporation of the interpretive consciousness into the hermeneutic scheme means that ‘understanding is related to the thing itself as manifest in the tradition, and at the same time to a tradition from where the thing can speak to me’ (p. 135). In so far as the interpreter’s encounter with the foreign is incorporated into his/her conceptual framework, the pre-understanding is modified, and the potentiality of her/his being, the know-how with which he/she is equipped, is changed. Changes are made in ‘the anticipation of perfect coherence’, and of course respond to the tension ‘between the familiar and the foreign character of the message transmitted to us by tradition’ (pp. 135– 6). Thus Gadamer’s hermeneutic recognizes and respects not only the historical specificity of the historical object of text, but also the particularity of the interpreter’s situation, the historicity of the interpreter’s know-how (the way she goes about interpreting texts) and the fashion in which that know-how is shown to be historical by changing in time, principally through an engagement with the foreignness of the (historical) other. The necessary presumption of a shared rationality between interpreter and interpreted, the assumption that there is something in common between the two, is counterbalanced in Gadamer’s system by this sensitivity to this otherness. In all of these respects it appears to be a sophisticated and open-textured account of historical understanding.3 Many other accounts of this understanding collapse either into the sort of objectivism which sees history as simply the accumulation of true statements about the

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past,4 or an idealism which reads history as the imposition of arbitrary patterns upon a chaotic historical field.5 In the face of these virtues, where does one situate, how does one account for, the rationality of the following: the aim of hermeneutics is always to restore the authentic intention and reestablish the concordance, to fill in the lacunas of argumentation. This is entirely confirmed by the history of hermeneutics when we follow…its major contours: St. Augustine spoke to us of the Old Testament which must be seen through Christian truths; Protestantism resumed this same task during the Reformation. (p. 128) The rhetoric of this passage does not immediately suggest a consciousness that has contemplated the possibility of its object being radically foreign to its prejudices; Augustine’s ‘must’ and Protestantism’s ‘task’ both suggest rather the urgency of a mission that cannot be completed too soon, as if the ‘authentic intention’ is under threat from a history of distortion and mistake. One need not read Gadamer as endorsing entirely what either Augustine or the Reformation said to see that he accepts the aims of each hermeneutic as necessary. But is this acceptable? There is a case which can be located, among other sites, within poststructuralist theory, which would resist Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics at this point, which would find him to be giving an account which, far from listening to the original voice of the text, instead reduces the historically other to the contemporary and identical.6 It may well be that to the eyes of Christian, and more specifically within Christianity, Protestant hermeneuticists, I have identified one of their true [as opposed to blind]…prejudices which govern understanding and in this way realize the possibility that other aims emerge in their own right from tradition—which is nothing other than realizing the possibility that we can understand something in its otherness. (p. 137) Yet for the Jews, and later, the Catholics, the conventional meaning of ‘prejudice’ remains intact. The point here is not to accuse Gadamer of latent antisemitism, but to explore the question of suppressions and silences in such a theoretical framework. What I want to begin now to explore in this essay, without any pretence of presenting a conclusive argument, is the possibility of this negative prejudice (only in the context of Gadamer need one affix that adjective) being a structural component of this form of hermeneutic, rather than a question of competing traditions, and of circumstance. That is, the possibility that there is something fundamentally wrong about the way in which Gadamer connects the subject to the tradition, and thus to history. Let us consider the argument presented by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. You will recall the two premises of his argument, firstly, that all ideas of the historical destiny, or inevitable and inexorable progress of the West, are implicated in the manifestation of that belief as put into practice in the concentration camps, and, secondly, that this idea of destiny is essential to, rather than an aberration of, the essential features of Western civilization. It does seem that the terms in which Gadamer posited his history of hermeneutics, from the Old Testament to

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Augustine, and to the Reformation, suggests an idea of destiny which is made explicit in one’s analysis of the text, some self-discovery through the fulfilment of historical signs. Further, his concept of a tradition to which we are related suggests a continuous negotiation of a history with an unproblematic subject; he does not seem to consider the question of which tradition he is addressing, nor of who may or may not belong to it. The difficulty Gadamer imputes to this relation and understanding (p. 135) is not a problem of whose history this is, nor of what that history consists of, but is rather to do with the constitution of our possibility-of-Being in the face of what we seem to understand through the tradition, and the putting into question of our prejudices (which are, none the less, always potentially productive): ‘[t]he interpreter is torn between his belongingness to a tradition and his distance from the objects which are the theme of his investigation’ (p. 136). The interpreter’s belongingness is not, in this account, preceded by questions either of which tradition, or traditions, the subject may belong to (this may be seen by some as a peculiarly modern problem, but I do not think it is) nor of how that belongingness is constituted.7 In some of what follows I shall try to divest Gadamer’s hermeneutic of this highly problematic aspect in order to reconstruct an account of hermeneutics and traditions which may pose problems for the other accounts of interpretation I shall survey. What the account of the hermeneutics of the Old Testament also seems to indicate is that even the most reflective account of one’s constitutive beliefs about the world, both prejudices and truths, cannot overcome the way in which they are always already inscribed into that understanding. The very name of the ‘Old’ Testament within that world already situates it within the history of Christianity before it is contemplated as historically other than that Christian history. To the degree that all thought takes place within a tradition, all thought of the other from within that tradition must be appropriative. There is another angle at which to approach Gadamer, at which to attempt to appreciate the foreignness of his text. The Introduction to ‘The problem of historical consciousness’ places the essays in the context in which they were first presented—a German Protestant (Gadamer) teaching a course at the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1957. Can we read Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics as, in part, a pacifier of possible sectarian antagonism, as a call to a shared community of interpretive tradition (for which the other is elsewhere)? This reading is resisted by his second example, which suggests rather an aggressive act, asserting the imperative of the Protestant hermeneutic in the face of a community which would reject such interpretation as heresy. Either way his hermeneutic seems to collapse to the extent that it proposes a general and unproblematic account of how we read, for in both cases the blind/ true prejudice distinction folds in in the face of the other against whom the text is inevitably, and necessarily, to be read. The very feature I earlier found to be a positive feature of Gadamer’s hermeneutic, its structural openness to the other, instead appears to read as an appropriative organ through which to incorporate the foreign into the familiar and the destined-to-be. So is it then inevitable that an interpreter who reads in Gadamer’s mode, searching the past for positive modifications to make to the present in the form of resistances to her own prejudices, is caught up in just those questions of historical destiny Lacoue-Labarthe claims to be the essence of the West? A reading of the work to which he puts the concept

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of ‘tradition’, both in theory and example suggests so. But there is another question: can one avoid an account of history which is constituted by something apparently so essential to the West, or is historical destiny the ‘always already’ of the West? The best way to address this latter question is to ask whether, if this complicity is unavoidable for Gadamer, Lacoue-Labarthe himself has fared any better. What are the consequences of making the claims that he makes, not only those above, but something like ‘Heidegger’s involvement is completely consistent with his thought’, or [u]ndoubtedly it is still possible to answer the question: How is one to judge? But certainly one can no longer answer the questions: From what vantage point are we to judge? In the name of what and whom? For henceforth [since the Holocaust] what we lack are the names… the ‘holy names’, that in many ways used to govern, unaided, the space (public or not) in which ethical life used to unfold. (p. 483) Undoubtedly Lacoue-Labarthe would also find Gadamer to be telling us to judge and to read in the name of traditions and gods whose names have been disgraced, whose holy names have been lost. But in announcing this era of namelessness, does not LacoueLabarthe himself invoke a name? For it certainly appears that his statement rests upon the name of the Jews, and that it is in their name that he makes his claim against those for whom ‘anti-Semitism became a matter of profits and losses’ (p. 484). This name is not, however, one of those beneath which ethical life used to unfold—unlike those of ‘justice’, ‘God’ and ‘truth’, for example. Of course, these terms also seem implicit in Gadamer’s history. Yet Lacoue-Labarthe’s discourse is still governed by this name in a way that seems to share something with the Western tradition he attacks. For example, can he make his claim ‘henceforth what we lack…’ without himself positing a counterdestiny, one in which the ‘final solution’ to a history of persecution subsequently represents the final overturning of the talk of tradition and historical destiny? He seems here to have posited a counter-tradition and a counter-hermeneutic, one which reads against the grain appealed to by Gadamer, but a tradition none the less, in which the real subject of the history of the West is the subjected of the West. Lacoue-Labarthe seems to see an essence of Auschwitz which speaks to him through time, and in the shadow of which the rest of the history of the West must be interpreted. In this his strategy does not seem structurally different from that of either Gadamer or Augustine. Further, although the sense of crisis in Lacoue-Labarthe’s text must be set against the more complacent faith in rationality of post-war hermeneutics, it still seems to be the case that most of the force of his assault upon the historical events of the West rests upon an appeal to the horror which most people who read him will feel in response to this history, a horror which is based upon an ethics grounded in a relation to the practices and institutions of its own culture. This is true for any ethics, however in this case the appeal is based upon a direct relation to the practices and institutions of the West itself; the Holocaust would have provoked, and continues to cause, horror in people who believe in just those things that Lacoue-Labarthe identifies as responsible. The point is not that Lacoue-Labarthe is taking issue with the entirety of rationality and reason. It is rather that if the concept of historical destiny had become as much a part of the West as he says— one cannot get much closer than essence—then surely its extension is beyond that of the

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National Socialists. Indeed, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts as much: ‘it is no more or less than the essence of the West that is revealed—and that has not ceased since that time to reveal itself’ (p. 484). Yet the attack upon the essential aspect of Western rationality on the grounds of its being implicated in the violence of Western practice is itself derived from a compelling appeal to some related aspect of that very rationality. So from where comes the critique and the horror? One possibility is that, as I suggested, Lacoue-Labarthe is working from a counter-tradition. But this does not free his critique from an implicit selfinculpation in the violent problematic of historical destiny. He may be quite wrong to legislate against the idea of a culture’s historical destiny. Yet this is not, of course, an option for Lacoue-Labarthe’s account. A third possibility is more fully articulated by Lyotard, and suggests that the event of Auschwitz itself re-formed the language in which it was subsequently spoken of and thought about, principally by a fragmentation of discourses. If this fragmentation argument can be sustained, it might in turn enable us to see Lacoue-Labarthe’s position as coherent. In ‘The sign of history’8 Lyotard re-presents Kant’s views on politics, history, and judgement as they bear upon the responses of people to the Begebenheit (loosely, the ‘definitive’ events) of their times. In Kant’s case this was of course the French Revolution. Lyotard locates the Begebenheit of our own time in a series of names. These names are not significant, as with Lacoue-Labarthe’s names, for their absence, but rather for their power to evoke or signify what Lyotard calls an abyss: the name ‘Auschwitz’ invalidates the presupposition…of the genre of Hegelian speculative discourse…namely that all that is real is rational, and that all that is rational is real. Budapest ’56…invalidates that presupposition…that all that is proletarian is communist, and that all that is communist is proletarian. (p. 162) He lists also the French poststructuralist favourite, May 1968, and the crisis of overcapitalization, as debunkers of grand narratives (liberal democracy and Keynesian economics), names into which Western concepts of historical destiny vanish. The names of Auschwitz and Budapest ’56 in particular signify for Lyotard the terror and threat of ‘the pretension to realize a single purpose’ (p. 179). Yet, like Gadamer, he also believes that they, as part of what I will provisionally call historical consciousness, liberate judgement: that if they are to be felt, judgement must take place without a criterion, and that this feeling becomes in turn a sign of history. But however negative the signs to which most of the proper names of our political history give rise, we should nevertheless have to judge them as if they proved that this history had moved on a step in its progress…. This step would consist in the fact that it is not only the Idea of a single purpose which would be pointed to in our feeling, but already the Idea that this purpose consists in the formation and… exploration of Ideas in the plural, the Idea that this end is the beginning of the infinity of heterogeneous finalities. (p. 179)

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What Lyotard is proclaiming is the ‘fission of single purpose’. Like Gadamer, and Kant, he believes that historical understanding is essen-tially future-orientated. For Lyotard too history seems to be a crucial element of our being-in-the-world, of the way in which we know how to go about things in the world, since he traces out, through Kant, the effect of the Begebenheit upon the consciousnesses of the members of a society, and since he designates ‘our time’ with reference to those Begebenheit. However, as befits the style of the time (‘what has been called “postmodernity”’ (p. 178)), Lyotard’s judgements take place without the possibility of ascertaining a criterion for them. In contrast to Gadamer’s mediations between object and interpreter, Lyotard seems to occupy some shifting point in space from which he can gain no fixed idea of either of these. Whereas Gadamer’s is resolutely a philosophy of the subject, Lyotard rejects such a philosophy, and any ‘Idea of man’, in order to judge ‘according to the “transitions” between heterogeneous phrases, and respecting their heterogeneity’ (p. 180). This seems to imply a ‘dissolution of the subject’, however it is in fact not a dissolution at all, but a shift in explanatory and conceptual frameworks. The crucial point to recognize is that if ideas are to be explored as plural and heterogeneous, then the subject cannot be the locus of the concepts or explanations, because the unified subject can only be understood as occupying a single discursive world, or family of phrases. History cannot be conceived in terms of a subject because there is, for Lyotard, no way to decide who that privileged subject is to be. Not only is there no way to decide, any attempt to do so seems consequently to be rebuilding the grand narratives of single purpose that Lyotard finds to be so dangerous. All that can be done then is to attempt to understand the competing discourses, the conflicting attempts to account for, or appropriate, history. Consequently the post-Auschwitz, post-Budapest world can only be conceived of in terms of sets of heterogeneous phrases. Lyotard’s talk of feelings and judgements, his appeals to a community—‘our time’, ‘the reflective function which is ours to transform’ (p. 180), should more than assuage the fears of those who fear his arguments to be repeating at a rhetorical level the massacre of human subjects upon which he reflects. Such rhetoric suggests that his argument is closer to the claim that the postmodern subject is constituted by his/her negotiations of and transitions between the competing families of phrases—presumably those arising out of the ‘fission’ created by the names of the postmodern Begebenheit. Yet this inevitably raises the question of whether or not Lyotard ultimately re-constitutes a subject of history. Who is this ‘we’ that traverses the ground between the heterogeneous phrases of historical subjectivities? Perhaps, however, a different reading of Lyotard is possible. He might well want to say that because of the Begebenheit of the time, any subsequent usage of the words ‘we’, ‘our’, and ‘community’ must be made under these signs of history. That is, these terms are, for our being-in-the-world, always already subject to the necessity of negotiating between the disputes arising out of the fission of this Begebenheit, the ‘we’ of Lyotard’s ‘The sign of history’, he might say, lasts only until it is revealed to be a fiction by the questions its audience poses for it, questions which, in our times, can always be incommensurable (Lyotard feels this to be the least he can say of this fission) with the discourse which they interrogate. Crucial to the notion of the subject of history then is this idea of (at least) incommensurability. If it makes no sense to talk of incommensurability, that is, if Lyotard, in attempting to describe heterogeneity as the

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definitive event of our time, is refuting himself by recuperating heterogeneity into the discourse of the subject of history, then no ground has been gained over Gadamer’s hermeneutic, and Lyotard’s account collapses back into a schizoid account of historical consciousness. If, however, the sketch I made of a possible Lyotardian defence of his position through the notion of incommensurability can be maintained (complete with qualification), then it may be worth directing his ideas towards a different problematic (for want of a better word) of history and ethics. If Lyotard is right, then Lacoue-Labarthe also deserves a second hearing. For if our Begebenheit have wrought such change as Lyotard suggests, then it might be that Lacoue-Labarthe is also writing his terms ‘under (historical) erasure’. But if LacoueLabarthe is permitted this charity, why not Gadamer? Perhaps because there is no explicit attempt to question the authority of other of the terms he has inherited. I shall leave this large issue unresolved. It is important that Lyotard’s conception of incommensurability be distinguished from other notions of ideological difference, for this latter is a concept that many theorists of traditions accept. Something like the problem Gadamer’s account of the history of hermeneutics raises can be assimilated to a question of difference, in which the meaning of a term (or, in this case, a text) is specific to one’s culture. A Jew and a Christian will inevitably differ in their interpretations of the Torah/Old Testament because of the different traditions in which this text is situated for them. One cannot simultaneously hold both readings to be correct, for they are irreducibly different. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a similar point about the place-names ‘Doire Columcille’ and ‘Londonderry’. Both terms refer to the same place, however both also convey information, and exist within a structure of beliefs, to the extent that they cannot be translated from one to the other, since ‘[t]o use either name is to deny the legitimacy of the other.’9 Of course, both of these disputes also have histories that go past the designated Begebenheit of our time; in both cases well over a thousand years. So if all Lyotard means by incommensurability is that there are irreconcilable differences of belief, then he has told us nothing new about conceptual frameworks, and has told us nothing distinctive about our times. His claim that a philosophy of phrases should be concerned to emphasize disputes, ‘even at the risk of aggravating them’ (p. 180) would then constitute a radical position that remained within the tradition of traditions. Can Lyotard be read otherwise? Is the only purpose of the reflective function, which is ours to transform, as Kant thought, dispute [differend] into litigation, by substituting the law-court for the battle-field? Is not its aim also that of emphasising disputes, even at the risk of aggravating them, of giving a language to what cannot be expressed in the language of the judge, even if he is a critical judge? (p. 180) What is of interest here, what I see as the critical difference between Lyotard’s account and the others I have mentioned, is his concern to express ‘what cannot be expressed in the language of the judge’. Indeed, his use of Kant’s term Begebenheit is supposed to serve a similar function, to name a previously ‘unnamed feeling’ (p. 180). Lyotard’s statement is that

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when I say: not commensurable, this is the least one can say. This pretension to realize a single purpose can, as we know, be threatening enough to embalm what is already dead, as is the case in Red Square, or to give life to a fable by terror and massacre, as under the Third Reich. (p. 179) This clearly discounts one possible sense of the claim, which could have been read as suggesting that it is important to take sides in disputes; the commitment to a single purpose, which he attacks in the name of the Begebenheit, is quite commensurable with this latter idea. This indicates that it is instead the dispute itself which requires emphasis. Lyotard’s version of incommensurability was always to be the lower limit of his ‘system’. It seems to extend into areas which are not yet articulated. This does not mean that they are beyond utterance, necessary metaphysical silences, but that they remain to be addressed, that they are yet to be spoken of. An examination of the definitive events of the time may help here. Consider the sign of ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Auschwitz’ as a sign of history. Immediately there is a recoil from the thought of reducing such an event to a ‘sign’, or even of reducing it to an ‘event’. Even discussing the word ‘Auschwitz’ in terms of its resistance to description may suggest an irreverent play where play is prohibited. Even the terms commonly used to express such an idea as is evoked by this word—unthinkable, unimaginable, unspeakable—have about them an air of postmodernist aestheticism of the sort Adorno prohibited in his famous dictum. This seems to be one part of what Lyotard means by an ‘abyss’: ‘Auschwitz’ represents something for which, and of which, we were (and possibly are) not equipped to speak. To find out just what this difference, this abyss, is for Lyotard, we must look to a slightly later work of his, one pointed towards in ‘The sign of history’. In ‘Le-Differend’ Lyotard makes use of a term, differend, which generally means dispute, conflict, disagreement, difference.10 As is the way for our time, it means something slightly different in Lyotard’s work. He says ‘I would like to call differend the case wherein the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes on that account a victim’ (p. 5). And later ‘[t]he differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to put into phrases cannot yet be’ (p. 7). His example of the differend is the impossibility of giving testimony about experiencing the gas chambers. That the differend differs from an abyss as I have defined them should not appear problematic; rather, it testifies to the fission of discursive homogeneity of which Lyotard speaks. The dilemma someone under the differend faces is of the following form: [e]ither you are the victim of an injustice, or you are not. If you are not, you are fooling yourself (or lying) in testifying that you are. If you are, since you can bear witness to this injustice, it is not an injustice, and you are fooling yourself (or lying) in testifying that you are the victim of an injustice. (p. 5) This dilemma, the impossibility of proof, arises because ‘[r]eality is always the plaintiff’s responsibility’ (p. 5). What is yet to be demonstrated cannot be shown to exist in the already existent phrases of the defence, of the existing criterion for what is and is not real.

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To be so subject is to be a case of the differend. Lyotard’s examples of established bodies for the making of such decisions according to the criterion already in operation include courts of law, the juries of labour arbitration boards, and ‘the human and linguistic sciences’ (p. 6). Lyotard cannot be accused of self-refutation merely on the ground that he has articulated the differend which he says is marked by silence. The differend is explicitly historical, and thus can always be articulated after the fact, as indicated by such remarks as ‘cannot yet be’ (my emphasis) and to say that the Jews are no longer victims is one thing, but that there are no more victims at all is another. A universal cannot be concluded from a particular…the phrase: There are no more victims (which is tautological when taken with the phrase: There are no more differends) is not a cognitive phrase, and can neither be verified nor refuted by the means proper to the establishment and validation of cognitives. (p. 8) Indeed, the project suggested by both ‘The sign of history’ and ‘The differend, the referent, and the proper name’ seems to seek the end of the differend as differend through an attempt to construct a family of phrases in which the injustice may be articulated. Thus Lyotard’s project can be read against a conservative (in the literal sense of the word) hermeneutics, which accepts the discursive status quo. And evidently he reads the human sciences as obedient to the imperative of such a hermeneutic. He says that with Auschwitz something new has happened in history (which can only be a sign and not a fact) which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of heres and nows, the documents which indicated the meaning or meanings of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of diverse kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possible. (p. 14) Ignoring the archaeology of the camps, the architectural evidence for what occurred, Lyotard concentrates on the missing text of testimony. On this point his argument concerns less the accuracy of history and more the justice deserved by those giving an account of their own histories. What he seems to be saying about Auschwitz is that it could not be considered a ‘cognitive phrase’: neither in the context of rationalist discourse, nor under the criteria of historical inquiry, which suffer from a ‘monopoly’ ‘granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases’ and so was not only the geographical site for a mechanized victimization and extermination, but as a sign in the process of history was a victim of the criteria of the cognitive regimen in the human sciences. (One might add the disbelief of people outside the disciplines to this list.) Lyotard’s solution to the problem posed for the human sciences in dealing with the differend is for the inquirer to venture forth by lending his ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge. Every reality entails this exigency in so far as it entails

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possible unknown meanings. Auschwitz is the most real of realities in this respect. (p. 14) So the difference between the idea of incommensurability as manifest in analyses of tradition, and Lyotard’s idea of it, which I have suggested he later calls differend instead, is a question of articulation. Because MacIntyre can tell two competing stories about Doire Columcille and Londonderry, or because I can contest Gadamer’s concept of hermeneutic history, these incommensurabilities do not count as cases of differend. I have hinted that Gadamer’s hermeneutic puts a contestatory reading in the position of a differend in that it silences whatever claims the text might make in itself. However, this suggestion can be reduced to an argument between two traditions, each of which silences the other. If this is true of all traditions then the differend must be seen as a necessary subjection of any substantial truth claim. Lyotard and Gadamer might then be seen as drawing different conclusions from the same phenomenon. Yet because the differend is yet to be articulated, it cannot be considered as the subject of a history, or a historical tradition, until the interpreter breaks the rules of knowledge (of his/her own tradition) and writes such a narrative. Gadamer’s hermeneutic can be seen to fail in the face of the differend in so far as it is based on the speech of the historical text: ‘understanding is related to the thing itself as manifest in the tradition, and at the same time to a tradition from where the thing can speak to me’ (p. 135). Lyotard’s concept of the hermeneutic appears to be more capable of listening to that which does not speak through a tradition, or to that which speaks through a silenced tradition. It entails that the know-how we acquire in the world, the always already of our being-in-the-world, are so sedimented with oppressive criteria for knowing, criteria that silence differends, that our know-how is insufficient and unreliable. For Lyotard, what Auschwitz signifies is the fission of the knowledge and experience that constitutes our know-how and the continuity of our beingin-the-world to the extent that they must be rejected when we judge and make decisions. This brings us closer to Lyotard’s reading of Aristotle than Gadamer’s. For Lyotard, Aristotle is not talking about our being-in-the-world, but about the nature of judgement, in which ‘the true nature of the judge is precisely to pronounce judgements, and therefore prescriptions, without criteria.’11 This lack of criteria is a radical absence in contexts such as the modern Begebenheit, in which, Lyotard seems to suggest, our most fundamental know-how is put into question on the basis of what it has been revealed not to know, and not to know how to deal with. It is especially when that which is most constitutive of the human subject—know-how or being-in-the-world—is shattered, that reality has more to do with negotiating passages between heterogeneous phrases than the subject. Whether this is manifest only in the shadow of a particular Begebenheit, or is constitutive of the structure of the world, is another question, to be addressed elsewhere. Whether this concept is available in practice, or whether it would in fact collapse into Gadamer’s account of know-how and being-in-the-world—how does one make decisions without any criterion? How does one know that one has to decide something without an implicit criterion?—is the question Lyotard’s account ultimately must face. Whether or not the more attractive politics of Lyotard can overcome the quite possibly oppressive constraints of Gadamer’s hermeneutics remains, within the confines of this discourse, an issue that provokes an unhappy indeterminacy. University of Western Australia

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NOTES 1‘Neither an accident nor a mistake’, trans. Paula Wissing, Critical Inquiry, 15 (Winter 1989), p. 483. 2 Trans. Jeff L.Close, in Paul Rabinow and William M.Sullivan (eds), Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 82–140. 3 In these respects, as well as those discussed below, his position has strong affinities with R.G.Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press, 1961). 4 For example, the work of Carl Hempel. See ‘Reasons and covering laws in historical explanation’, The Philosophy of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 5 e.g. Hayden White, ‘History, historicism, and the figurative imagination’, in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 101–20. 6 I address the Protestant ‘sublation’ of Catholicism, which may, of course, be seen as paralleling Christianity’s sublation of Judaism, below. 7 Terry Eagleton also finds Gadamer’s notion of the tradition and its subject somewhat monolithic—see Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 72– 3. 8 Trans. Geoff Bennington, Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 162–80. 9 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 378. See also Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the sciences of man’, in Interpretive Social Science, pp. 33–81, especially on ‘freedom’ and quebecois, esp. pp. 60–1. 10 ‘The differend, the referent, and the proper name’, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Diacritics, 14 (Fall 1984), p. 4. 11 Au Juste, pp. 52–3. Quoted in Cecile Lindsay, ‘Experiments in postmodern dialogue’, Diacritics 14 (Fall 1984), p. 58.

I would like to thank Alex Segal, Ian Saunders, and Tim Dolin for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Reading the body in The Merchant of Venice LAWRENCE NORMAND When Morocco challenges a hypothetical fair-skinned suitor ‘to make incision for [Portia’s] love,/To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine’ (II.i.6–7),1 he invokes the human body as a place where certain disputed questions can be tested and decided: ‘What is Morocco’s real nature?’, ‘What is Morocco’s real value?’ The question who the better man is, the ‘fairest creature northward born’ (II.i.4) or the ‘tawny Moor’ (s.d. II.i), might be settled by cutting their bodies and comparing their blood: Morocco’s redder blood will show his greater courage, and prove his personal value despite his devalued skin colour. His challenge is couched in the Petrarchan rhetoric he uses throughout this scene, and the ‘body’ is merely verbal; yet a fleeting threat to bring his real body into the scene is voiced. Morocco is challenging the prevailing racist depreciation of his ‘complexion’ by turning to another conventional corporeal sign, redness of blood. The call for incision invokes a figurative body as a means of asserting personal value, and is typical of many moments in the play when a body is invoked. Stephen Greenblatt has written that Shakespearean comedy ‘constantly appeals to the body and in particular to sexuality as the heart of its theatrical magic’.2 But, he goes on to argue, there ‘is no unmediated access to the body’, for sexuality ‘is itself a network of historically contingent figures that constitute the culture’s categorical understanding of erotic experience’.3 It is through the mediation of a commonplace cultural figure concerning blood that Morocco brings his body into play in order to demonstrate a case about his human value. When Launcelot scrutinizes the palm of his hand (II.ii.150ff.), he reads his destiny through the figure of palmistry inscribed in his body. Greenblatt’s notion that the body makes its appearance through the mediation of familiar cultural figures in language is the starting-point for this essay, which is concerned not only with sexuality but also with wider questions of human value and identity. It is a startling exception to this rule of mediation when Portia commands Antonio in the courtroom to ‘lay bare your bosom’ (IV.i.248), and Antonio’s naked human body appears in the actor’s person. A concern with the culturally figured body focuses attention on the relation between language and reality, the interactions between verbal bodies and real ones. But language and its relation to reality is clearly problematized in the play, as the plot’s depending on the interpretation of difficult words on the caskets and in the bond easily shows. Language is a bar to communication as much as its easy medium, and its manifestations (speaking, writing, and silence) are areas in which conflicts are actualized and resolutions sought.4 The play’s bodily discourse interpenetrates linguistic discourses such as the legal, theological, and amatory, functioning as a supplement to language, or offering an alternative articulation of the struggles of desire and dominance. The entanglements of the action are brought about through a discourse of figured and real bodies; and disentanglement requires a systematic rearticulation of this discourse in order to arrive at a resolution.

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I Portia starts the play with the power to dispose her own property and voice, but not her body in a sexual relation of her own choosing. She experiences this subjection in her body: ‘By my troth Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world’ (I.ii.1–2). Language and body interact as her father’s will holds her in confinement. Portia is caught within the inscribed word of patriarchal power, ‘under the bind of the law, deprived of her will because of her father’s will, inscribed in the living force of his dead letter, locked in a leaden casket’.5 Opposed to the restriction of his ‘cold decree’ (I.ii.18–19) are pitted the warm desires of her body, her ‘blood’ and ‘hot temper’ (I.ii.18). Portia’s resistance to these restrictions lies in mocking, subversive wit, what Lacan calls deriding the signifier.6 She finds a kind of freedom in mocking the doltish suitors and deriding her father’s word by punning on ‘will’ itself: ‘I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb’d by the will of a dead father.’ (I.ii.22–5). The opposed meanings of ‘will’ as ‘sexual desire’ and ‘testament’, reveal the conflicting desires of a physically active body and a dead father. Portia’s mockery of the suitors has no perlocutionary force since it is powerless to change her situation. Like the speech of a Fool, it makes no mark on the world. In her linguistic play Portia protests at her situation without being able to imagine any solution to it: he hears merry tales and smiles not, (I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth), I had rather be married to a death’s-head with a bone in his mouth, than to either of these: God defend me from these two. (I.ii.46–51) It is Shylock who most consistently draws the body into his discourse. As Portia is subjected by her father’s will, so Shylock is subjected by the dominant antisemitic discourse of Venice, which characterizes him as inhuman. To Launcelot ‘the Jew is the very devil incarnation’ (II.ii.26); and to Solanio he is ‘the dog Jew’ (II.viii.14) and ‘the devil…in the likeness of a Jew’ (III.i.19–20). Characterization of Shylock as sub-human voices itself in Lancelot’s catachresis (‘incarnation’ for ‘incarnate’), which ungrammatically misbodies the idea of the monstrous. In the court scene, Gratiano imagines Shylock’s birth as a monstrous fusing of human and animal, as a wolf’s soul enters his mother’s womb. Shylock becomes Antichrist in this parody of the anomalous human-divine union of the Virgin Birth:

thy currish spirit Governed a wolf, who hang’d for human slaughter— Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam Infus’d itself in thee… (IV.i.133–7)

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When Shylock comes to defend himself, his counter-definitions entail the body. Shylock defends his practice of usury to Antonio and Bassanio in I.iii when he is asked to lend money, by arguing that the increase it involves is analogous to the natural processes of animal procreation. Antagonism erupts over the word ‘interest’ as Shylock and Antonio attempt to arrange a loan, and there is a struggle over the interpretation of certain biblical texts. Shylock’s account of the story of Jacob and Laban in Genesis seeks to present a counter-gloss of Antonio’s word ‘excess’ (57) as Shylock’s ‘thrift’ (45). The crux of Shylock’s interpretation of Jacob’s actions lies in its representation of production as a bodily process.7 Shylock thinks of Jacob’s skill in sticking ‘wands’ (79) before the sheep while they are mating, which exploits an analogy in nature between ‘parti-colour’d lambs’ (83) and partly stripped twigs, as demonstrating both human skill in understanding those laws of analogy, and divine approval in Jacob’s profiting from the resulting lambs. Shylock’s narrative remains open to various interpretations, but his idea of thrift lies in seeing production which takes place through the body, of either sheep or coins, as natural and ultimately part of God’s will. Coins are like sheep in that their use may produce profit. For Shylock the body, understood to be the physical substance of something and its powers of generation, is a site of truth, evidencing human and divine nature. The argument over interest ends with neither side winning. Antonio merely stops Shylock from speaking further: ‘Mark you this, Bassanio,/The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’ (92–3). ‘Shylock does treat Antonio as if he were from a group of human beings other than his own Jewish one, but Antonio treats Shylock as if he were from a species of animal other than the human one (a dog)’.8 Shylock is denied a human body, and therefore possession of human rights. At the same time he is denied the right to coherent speech. In III.i, when he enters distraught at news of his daughter’s ‘flight’ and accuses Solanio and Salarino of complicity in it, they attack the integrity of his speech by cruel quibbling: Shylock: You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter’s flight. Salerio: That’s certain,—I (for my part) knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal. (III.i.22–5) As Shylock’s words are rendered ineffectual and their coherent sense destroyed, he resorts to the literal meanings of words, in an attempt to make a perlocutionary utterance with the force of assertion: Shylock: She is damn’d for it. Salerio: That’s certain, if the devil may be her judge. Shylock: My own flesh and blood to rebel! Solanio: Out upon it old carrion! rebels it at these years? Shylock: I say my daughter is my flesh and my blood. (III.i.29–33) Shylock’s assertion is the discursive counterweight to the disintegrating attacks being made on his speech and on his body in general by the two Christians, whose replies subvert his discourse and dissipate its emotional and ideological force. In the face of this,

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Shylock foregrounds the very act of speaking in order to affirm that his daughter partakes of the same physical substance as himself, and so shares the same racial identity. But Salarino denies even the biological relatedness of father and daughter: There is more difference between thy flesh and hers, than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods, than there is between red wine and Rhenish… (III.i.34–6) Shylock’s relatedness to his daughter is threatened by Salerio and Solanio’s assaults on the integrity first of his speech, then of his figured body. Shylock defends his speech by apparently literal statements, and by presenting family ties as irrefutably corporeal. The attack on the cultural meanings of Shylock’s body prompts another defence which again uses his body as evidence, this time of human identity. ‘I am a Jew’, Shylock states and goes on to claim a human identity with the Christians on the basis of shared parts and functions of the body: ‘eyes…hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions’ (III.i.53–4). Since the Venetians do not see a Jew as being human, Shylock anatomizes himself, disintegrating his body into separate functionings which are then presented as neutral and innocent of guilt that attaches, in Christian eyes, to a Jewish body. The Jewish Gestalt, more than the sum of its parts, is offensive; but bodily parts might seem innocent of the general guilt.9 But to Christians who do not recognize a Jew as human this argument is unpersuasive, as Stanley Cavell explains: ‘one who does not already know that the other’s body “is connected with” sentience cannot be convinced by this argument, or rather cannot understand what it is an argument about, the existence of others’.10 In this scene the struggle for the recognition of one’s speech is implicated in the struggle for the recognition of one’s body. The violations of Shylock by the Venetians are directed at his physical body (‘You that did void your rheum upon my beard, /And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur’ (I.iii.112–13)), his speech, and his cultural body. Shylock ends the scene by swerving from a rhetoric seeking empathy for himself as a human body to a declaration of spiritual affinity for Christian revenge: ‘If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?—why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’ (III.i.63–6). The forfeit Shylock asks, should Antonio default on the loan, is a fragment of his body: ‘an equal pound/Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken/In what part of your body pleaseth me’ (I.iii.145–7). When he suggests this condition, Shylock can have no expectation of ever claiming the forfeit, for Antonio confidently expects his ships to return with handsome profits. For Shylock the bond is a carnivalesque bargain, a form of words which is indeed at the moment he mentions it a ‘merry sport’, for the terms are self-evidently absurd and unreal. Despite the malice Shylock voices in an aside that he ‘will feed fat the ancient grudge’ he bears Antonio (I.iii.43), no narrative extension is imaginable between words and flesh, between the condition inscribed in the bond and the real body which might suffer its effect. Yet the terms of the bond spring from the real relations between Shylock and Antonio, for they will return to Shylock the mutilation of the self which he has suffered from Antonio in the past, and suffers again in this scene. As Cavell argues, Shylock’s terms for ‘A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off/Nearest the merchant’s heart’ (IV.i.228–9) is the exact counterpart of what he thinks Antonio in

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particular has done to him. Shylock ‘is telling us that he perceives Antonio’s refusal of acknowledgement as mutilation—the denial, the destruction, of his intactness.’11 Shylock is a subject mutilated by the Venetians’ hostile discourse; Antonio is a subject not securely in discourse at all. Shylock counters Venice’s denigration of him, by asserting a secure counter-self in the deployment of his cultural body. Antonio is a decentred self who speaks of himself as inscrutable and mysterious: ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’ (I.i.1). He sees himself as an actor whose part is ‘a sad one’ (I.i.79) and whose true self is therefore at one remove from his role. His mental state at the start of the play is a pre-discursive one, for its origin and nature are not yet articulated: ‘But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,/What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,/I am to learn’ (I.i.3–5). While Antonio offers no discursive version of himself, his friends give voice to possible selves for him. In a deliberate game of speech-making he is the subject of attempts to account for his being ‘marvellously chang’d’ (76). The speeches project verbal forms meant to capture the mysterious melancholy, and they are offered as halfserious self-explanations. Gratiano, whose name recalls the comic doctor of commedia dell’arte,12 and who speaks, as he says, like ‘the fool’ (79), generates diagnostic fantasies on Antonio’s self-presentation, the first of which suggests a cause for melancholy in the body’s inactivity. His garrulous discommendation of silence warns that a body which is still and silent turns into a funerary statue, as the blood cools and the living form becomes an effigy: ‘Why should a man whose blood is warm within, /Sit like his grandsire, cut in alablaster?’ (I.i.83–4). Accordingly, Antonio’s alienation from Venetian speech threatens a sort of death. Gratiano focuses on Antonio’s ‘wilfull stillness’ (90) and ‘saying nothing’ (97), and associates silence with sexual impotence, in allusions to a shrivelled penis and an old maid: ‘for silence is only commendable/In a neat’s tongue dried, and a maid not vendible’ (111–12).13 The real source of Antonio’s sadness, of course, springs from the change in his relation with Bassanio. His identity as Bassanio’s friend is put at risk by Bassanio’s imminent journey to Belmont to win a wife, for Antonio would thereupon be displaced from first place in Bassanio’s affections. Antonio’s passionate declaration that ‘My purse, my person, my extremest means/Lie all unlock’d to your occasions’ (I.i.138–9) represents a way of reaffirming his love for Bassanio and remaining involved in his affairs at the very moment when Bassanio’s ‘venture’ might lead to Antonio’s displacement. It is under threat of this displacement that Antonio agrees so recklessly to Shylock’s bond. Antonio brushes aside his friends’ attempts to put him into words, and offers no discursive version of himself; instead, he responds to his melancholy by putting his body into the bond. The terms of the bond which Shylock suggests implicate Antonio’s body into the financial and legal practices of Venetian society:

Go with me to a notary, seal me there Your single bond, and (in a merry sport) If you repay me not on such a day In such a place, such sum or sums as are Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit Be nominated for an equal pound

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Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken In what part of your body pleaseth me. (I.iii.140–7) Antonio’s promise to commit his flesh for three thousand ducats reaffirms his bond of friendship with Bassanio at the very moment when Bassanio’s turning to the lady might well lead to its dissolution. His passionate attachment to Bassanio is now inscribed in the bond, and authenticated by the body with the promise of his corporeal ‘person’ in exchange for three thousand ducats. Antonio breaks his silence by means of the bond in which his love is invisibly lodged in a displaced discourse, a financial-cum-legal agreement. What Foucault writes of the workings of sixteenth-century language is true of the bond, for ‘what it says is enclosed within it like a promise, a bequest to yet another discourse’.14 The ‘condition’ (141) writes Antonio’s body as a figure which is a joke, whose transform-ation into reality is unimaginable. As events will show the body latent in the bond becomes manifest and that body itself ‘speaks’. II Freud thought that the caskets symbolize the body of a woman: ‘If we had to do with a dream, it would at once occur to us that caskets are also women, symbols of the essential thing in woman, and therefore of a woman herself.’15 The caskets not only symbolize what the suitors seek, they also have inscribed on them texts which the suitors must successfully interpret in order to reach their desired object. As in the case of the bond, textuality and the body are overlaid. The caskets are simultaneously the destination of the suitors’ desire, as symbols of woman, and the path along which desire must travel to reach its destination. The reward for correct textual interpretation is possession of Portia’s body and her wealth. Portia’s picture is hidden in one of the caskets, shielded by the metal and by her father’s inscription. The suitors trace a perilous path through language to seek to arrive at the body. They struggle with a complex set of inscriptions which invites definition of the woman as well as themselves, and in which the body is crucially involved. Morocco’s unsuccessful negotiation of the casket test results from his ideological orthodoxy, which holds that there should be a correspondence between the fairest lady and the fairest metal, ‘never so rich a gem/Was set in worse than gold’ (II.vii.54–5). In Petrarchan terms the choice of the gold casket is logical, but Morocco’s way of thinking makes him ignore the person herself and re-present her in coded love-language. Portia’s physicality disappears and she is re-inscribed as a purely transcendent value: a ‘breathing saint’, whose ‘heavenly picture’ Morocco seeks, and ‘an angel’ (II.vii.40–58). Edmund Spenser uses the image of woman as an angel swathed in gold in Epithalamion, published in 1595, the year before The Merchant of Venice was probably first produced:

Some angell had she beene.

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Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre, Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowers a tweene, Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre…16 Spenser inscribes his future wife as a creature of pure spirit, as Morocco does to Portia. But this aristocratic mode of writing is misplaced in the bourgeois world of the play in which money has a precise value. In fact, Morocco specifically rejects comparison of Portia with another kind of angel which is a coin—‘They have in England/A coin that bears the figure of an angel/Stamp’d in gold, but that’s insculp’d upon’ (II.vii.55–7). The comparison is rejected because the angel on the English coin is merely on the surface of the metal, and therefore not truly part of it. In Morocco’s trope of the angel inside the casket, the angel is like the soul which lies deep inside the body, as what animates it and is its truest reality.17 In this way of thinking, the soul is accorded a far greater value than the body, the angel much more than the gold casket. His discourse of love separates spirit and body, and privileges spirit over body. The figure of the monetary angel, which Morocco specifically rejects, stands in fact as a more accurate image for Portia, for the coin has its beauty marked on its surface, and once put into exchange has financial value, just like Portia herself when she marries. Arragon fixes on the silver casket because its inscription, ‘“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves”’ (II.ix.36), prompts him into enunciating his own worth:

And well said too; for who shall go about To cozen Fortune, and be honourable Without the stamp of merit? (II.ix.37–9) The metaphor of ‘the stamp’ refers to the authenticating of a document, and its validation for social use: Arragon thinks of himself as inscribed.18 In this metaphor of Arragon as a document on which is written the account of his value lies the fantasy that his body has received a ‘stamp of merit’. The stamp is irreversible and publicly attested, and Arragon imagines he can invoke his powers as an imaginary document and employ them to win Portia: he can exchange himself for a fortune—‘I will assume desert; give me a key for this,/And instantly unlock my fortunes here’ (II.ix.51–2). The suitors all struggle with the same problem of how to arrange the signifying elements arranged before them—caskets of different metals, and inscriptions—into an order which arrives at the ‘correct’ answer which is already determined by the father. Morocco aims too high, assembling the elements into a discourse of the transcendent, splitting the spiritual from the material. Portia’s body is thereby lost in the Petrarchan mode into which she is cast. Arragon’s response combines the material and immaterial in an image which represents his body textually as a legal document; but he excludes Portia from his response and mistakes his own social value. Morocco reads the gold casket as being Portia, Arragon reads the silver casket as being himself, but Bassanio reads the lead casket and its inscription as being a comment on the ironic discourse of choosing.

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Bassanio is in the best position to grasp the ironic meaning of the lead casket’s inscription, and of lead itself, because he is the figure ‘in whom outside appearance and inside reality are most unlike’:19 ‘So may the outward shows be least themselves’ (III.ii.73). Bassanio and Portia have already discovered each other by falling in love, demonstrated in the amorous banter which precedes the choice. There is no need, then, to involve ‘ornament’ in the choice when love has already been discovered and actualized in verbal exchanges:

ornament is but the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea… in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest. (III.ii.97–101) Bassanio does not seek a secreted signified in the inscriptions or the metals themselves. He recognizes lead as signifying the redundancy of ‘ornament’ to symbolize a love which has already been realized: ‘but thou, thou meagre lead/Which rather threaten’st than dost promise aught,/Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence,/And here choose I,—joy be the consequence!’ (III.iii.104–7). The process of choosing nevertheless presents dangers which are expressed as threats to the lovers’ living bodies. As Bassanio moves towards the caskets to make his choice Portia participates by announcing herself to be threatened at that moment by death. Invoking the story of Hercules’ rescue of Hesione from the sea monster (Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi) she effects a metaphorical transformation on the scene. In this textual superimposition she becomes Hesione, and Bassanio Hercules; and just as Hesione was mortally threatened by the sea monster, so she is threatened with an emotional death if Bassanio fails to overcome the monstrous impositions of the will:

I stand for sacrifice, The rest aloof are the Dardanian wives, With bleared visages come forth to view The issue of th’ exploit: go Hercules! Live thou, I live. (III.ii.57–61) If Hercules fails to slay the sea monster then Hesione will be its victim. The threat of death, albeit a figurative one, recalls Antonio’s figurative death-in-silence at the start of the play.

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Bassanio’s response to discovering the picture of Portia focuses on his body; he speaks of the dissolution of the corporeal boundaries between himself as perceiving subject, and the picture as perceived object:

Fair Portia’s counterfeit! What demi-god Hath come so near creation? move these eyes? Or whether (riding on the balls of mine) Seem they in motion? (III.ii.115–18) Bassanio imagines the picture not simply as a static similitude but a source of power in its own right, with painted hair ‘t’entrap the hearts of men’ (III.ii.122); and as it was being painted it threatened to disable the painter who was painting it, depriving him of his eyes:

but her eyes! How could he see to do them? having made one, Methinks it should have power to steal both his And leave itself unfurnish’d. (III.ii.123–6) The picture, the image of a body, is imagined as entering into relationships with real bodies and capturing parts of them for itself. Bassanio’s speech plays over the interrelationships of bodies and their representations. At this moment of most intense pleasure, Bassanio focuses on the tremulous relation of his body and the image of Portia’s; and announces a moment of blissful physical merging with Portia. The bliss is the counterpart of erotic bliss, but it is doubly displaced: Bassanio’s body moves only in his language, not his actions, and Portia appears as a picture not as herself. The fullness of erotic pleasure which his language implies falls away in the end as language’s inability fully to represent experience reasserts itself. Bassanio ends by articulating a chain of representations—his praise, the picture of Portia, and Portia herself—which shows his desire pursuing its object along the chain and always failing to capture its fullness:

yet look how far The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow In underprizing it, so far this shadow Doth limp behind the substance. (III.ii.126–9)

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Bassanio is completely in control of his discourse; indeed, his value as Portia’s lover is demonstrated dramatically by this very discursive dominance and subtlety. This part of the scene, the expressive climax of Portia and Bassanio’s love, achieves its dramatic persuasiveness through its intelligent self-consciousness about language. Bassanio’s discourse advertises the inadequacy of language to capture the real; expressing love not as full of self-presence, but as something beyond and outside the play of language. It does not inscribe love directly, but speaks instead of the impossibility of love’s full inscription in language, picture, or bodies. Words fail Bassanio when Portia hands everything, including herself, over to him: ‘Madam, you have bereft me of all words’ (III.ii.175). The consequent ‘confusion’ in Bassanio’s ‘powers’ (177) is a disruption of the normal workings of his body, and it is represented as the noise of a crowd in which the meanings of the separately spoken sentences of praise are lost in a blur of speech-noise:

there doth appear Among the buzzing pleased multitude, Where every something being blent together, Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy Express’d, and not expressed. (III.ii.179–83) Bassanio’s sense of joy has temporarily exceeded his body’s ability to muster the power of language to capture and express it. The experience nevertheless exists as a confused energy inside his body which is stirred like the crowd, but unable to direct it to a coherent speech act. But Bassanio still communicates his feelings in the pre-linguistic state of the body’s own workings, which form another kind of speech: ‘Only my blood speaks to you in my veins’ (III.ii.176). The body’s blood-flow is the authenticating sign of his intense responsiveness which cannot at that moment find its way into language. These ambiguities are resolved by a simple return to the body, the note in the casket commanding the successful suitor to ‘Turn you where your lady is,/And claim her with a loving kiss’ (III.ii.137–8). The body authenticates the moment. Gratiano’s suggestion for a wager on the first boy the couples can produce anticipates the lovers’ physical absorption into the social life of Venice. At this moment when a double marriage is anticipated another body enters the scene which blocks that outcome. Bassanio receives a letter from Antonio giving news that he is subject to Shylock’s forfeit. Bassanio describes the letter to Portia as a mutilated and dying body:

Here is a letter lady, The paper as the body of my friend, And every word in it a gaping wound Issuing life-blood.

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(III.ii.262–5) Bassanio represents the letter as Antonio’s body, and that body in turn as a kind of writing. The paper marked with inked words is like a body cut with wounds from which flows its ‘lifeblood’. Each wound is also ‘gaping’, a mouth shaped for speaking, or signalling pain. This is truly a speaking body. The letter’s material signifiers—paper and inkmarks—produce meaning prior to its signifieds, and are more emotionally compelling. The wounds gaping like mouths are an emptiness that cries out for Bassanio’s presence. Bassanio’s strong writerly response, tracing a figurative dying body, shows his profound emotional responsiveness to Antonio’s plight. However, the entry of this spectral body, represented in writing, disrupts the imminent marriage and signifies the emotional and practical obstacles that will have to be overcome before it can take place.20 This letter has a similar power to the bond, for each calls in its debt, and each has as its real aim something in excess of what it seems to signify. In his letter Antonio’s focus is on Bassanio, not on the money owed nor his own impending death: ‘Sweet Bassanio,…my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and (since in paying it, it is impossible I should live), all debts are clear’d between you and I, if I might but see you at my death’ (III.ii.314–18). Antonio’s letter points to the real nature of the favour he did Bassanio in borrowing money for his venture: it seeks the return in the form of love on Antonio’s pledging of ‘person’. Antonio’s claim for Bassanio’s presence represents the calling in of the excess of their agreement, that for Antonio is Bassanio’s love. For Antonio the process is now in hand by which the writing of his body into the bond to maintain his place in Bassanio’s affairs, now unexpectedly promises to realize the desires underlying it. Antonio does not explicitly speak of his relation to Bassanio; but others do. Lorenzo had evidently been discussing the subject with Portia when he enters at the start of III.iv. His phrase ‘god-like amity’ (3), derives from Renaissance neo-platonic ideas of friendship, and shows ‘the exalted tone of much Renaissance writing on male friendship’.21 In such accounts of male friendship the sexual is banished, leaving only the spiritual.22 However, the account which Portia proceeds to give of this kind of male friendship does recognize a particular sort of shared physicality in friendship:

for in companions That do converse and waste the time together, Whose souls do bear an egall yoke of love, There must be needs a like proportion Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit; Which makes me think that this Antonio Being the bosom lover of my lord, Must needs be like my lord. If it be so, How little is the cost I have bestowed In purchasing the semblance of my soul From out the state of hellish cruelty!

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(III.iv.11–21) Her notion of friendship is that between friends who love equally there must also be a similarity of bodies, manners, and spirit. Two friends are supposed to be alike physically and temperamentally, and are also supposed to correspond in their souls. Portia can therefore call paying off Antonio’s debt, ‘purchasing the semblance of my soul’, for she and Bassanio, now married, are one soul, and Antonio’s soul exactly corresponds to Bassanio’s. The conflict of friendship and marriage arises precisely out of two different kinds of merging that are represented by marriage and friendship. In Christian marriage two different bodies and souls are thought of as becoming one; in neo-platonic friendship two similar bodies and souls become as one in an identity of exact similarity. Bassanio is here poised between the conflicting demands of marriage and friendship. It is Portia’s assuming the male sexual identity of Balthazar which enables her ‘to displace Antonio’s hold on Bassanio’s affections and loyalties’,23 and to replace friendship with marriage. The action in the courtroom is an interpretive contest over the bond. Shylock’s refusal to tell the hostile court his reasons for pursuing the bond to its bloody conclusion in Antonio’s body should be seen in the same light as Bassanio’s warning to Gratiano, before they leave for Belmont, not to be ‘too rude, and bold of voice’ (II.ii.172) when he goes ‘where [he is] not known’ (175), and thus risk being ‘misconst’red’ (179). Shylock refuses to risk being ‘misconst’red’ by the court, and represses any historical account of himself. Instead he short-circuits the question by locating his motives in nature rather than culture, in corporeal humours not historical influence:

You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have A weight of carrion flesh, than to receive Three thousand ducats: I’ll not answer that! But say it is my humour,—is it answer’d? (IV.i.40–3) Shylock’s refusal to answer has similar effects to Antonio’s silence in the first scene in that both thereby become inscrutable to others. The incomprehensibility to the Christians of Shylock’s seeking his bond is expressed as his having an irregular body which is both unnaturally hard and empty. The Duke calls him a ‘stony adversary’ (IV.i.4) and speaks of his being like those with ‘brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint’ (IV.i.31). For Antonio Shylock’s impenetrability is located at the vital organ of the heart: ‘You may as well do any thing most hard/As seek to soften that—than which what’s harder?—/His Jewish heart!’ (IV.i.78–80). And Gratiano demands, ‘can no prayers pierce thee?’ (IV.i.126). Along with hardness goes emptiness. The Duke wonders if Shylock can be ‘void, and empty/From any dram of mercy’ (IV.i.5–6). When Shylock’s resistance is greatest to the persuasions of Portia/ Balthazar and the insults of Gratiano and Antonio, he declares himself to be immune from the effect of their words. Secure in the absolute efficacy of the bond, he declares himself to be beyond the reach of language: ‘by my soul I swear,/There is no power in the tongue of man/To alter me’ (IV.i.236–7).

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In the courtroom Antonio is willing to lose his life for Bassanio’s sake: ‘Grieve not that I am fall’n to this for you’ (IV.i.262), he says. Facing death, Antonio makes his farewell to Bassanio; but his attention is actually focused beyond death, for the corporeal mutilation he is about to suffer is to have its real point of arrival in social discourse, as a narrative. He is not concerned with Shylock’s malevolence, but rather at the way in which his death will be transformed into discourse.24 Furthermore, his attention is directed not at Bassanio but at Portia who will hear the story of his death which Bassanio will tell. Antonio utters a string of imperatives which lay down the track and destination for the story which his death will produce, projecting a hypothetical process which runs from bodily mutilation through death to discourse:

Commend me to your honourable wife, Tell her the process of Antonio’s end, Say how I lov’d you, speak me fair in death: And when the tale is told, bid her be judge Whether Bassanio had not once a love. (IV.i.269–73) Antonio projects a transformation of his death into a story and a question, in which the word ‘love’ is finally uttered. Were he to realize the scenario he projects, his love for Bassanio would be inscribed in his living body, and its truth proved by incisions which would be neither deletable nor reversible. The speech anticipates an exchange which would turn his physical death into social discourse aimed at recording and validating a certain meaning for it. On the brink of death, Antonio imagines a future scene in which his physical mutilation would be productive of a certain created value of ‘love’. That authenticated love, passing through his physical body to a transcendent verbal body of Bassanio’s discourse, would require Portia’s response, interpretation, and judgement; and would thereby produce its own life-after-death effects. Antonio’s rhetorical question would make Portia the judge in the case of the competing claims between her love and Antonio’s for Bassanio; and in his scenario she would deliver and face a judgement already weighted against herself. Of course, Portia-Balthazar releases Antonio from the bond. She takes the bond’s signifiers and reduces them to their barest signifieds, at which point the bond breaks down in non-sense. When Portia prevents Shylock’s forfeit by telling him that he may take ‘a pound of flesh’ and no more, she is setting limits to the meanings of words and to the interpenetration of bodies: words are defined with absolute literalness; the integrity of a body is defended. Exchange, one of the characteristic actions of the play, is halted: a pound of flesh is not taken in exchange for three thousand ducats. It is then Shylock’s turn to have his life endangered for the offence of seeking the life of a Venetian citizen: ‘the offender’s life lies in the mercy/ Of the Duke only’ (IV.i.351– 2). Although the Duke’s pardon frees him from the threat of judicial violence, it subjects him to the power of the court’s words. Shylock is not beyond the reach of language as the court strips him of half his wealth, confirms the stealing of his daughter, and enforces his conversion to Christianity. The court does not destroy Shylock’s physical body, but

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destroys instead the complex cultural body in which his identity inheres. By his forced conversion to Christianity (in which he will be silenced as the words of baptism are spoken over him) he loses the power to define himself as a Jew; at the same time as he loses the offspring of his body to Lorenzo, who ‘lately stole his daughter’ (IV.i.381). He protests at the destructiveness of the court’s conditions:

Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that,— You take my house, when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house: you take my life When you do take the means whereby I live. (IV.i.370–3) The ‘house’, as a metaphor for life, has the double sense of building and clan; ‘the image and the thing imaged fuse with great dramatic force’.25 Shylock has earlier shown the same habit of fusing image and thing in the figure of his house as a body when he tells Jessica not to ‘thrust [her] head into the public street/To gaze on Christian fools’ (II.v.32– 3):

But stop my house’s ears, I mean my casements, Let not the sound of shallow fopp’ry enter My sober house. (II.v.34–6) His house is his body which he would defend from penetration by the sounds of Christian music. These links between house as body, clan, and life itself show the interconnectedness of the parts of Shylock’s identity, and are precisely what the court destroys in its judgements on him.26 The court’s mercy in sparing his body must be set against its decisions which disintegrate his social identity: livelihood, religion, and succession will all be barred. Shylock’s body is not destroyed but his self-identity is disintegrated and deleted, and this deletion is confirmed by Act V. III In the first four Acts the body is written into the interlocking struggles of personal desire and social practices; and its power is real but uncertain as long as those struggles continue. In Act V, out of the crises of entanglement posed by the interdependence of bodies, resolutions are offered which define the boundaries of body and spirit, and articulate what is socially legitimate and dominant. As Walter Cohen has shown, the dramatic effects of the last act are radical and extensive, as the ‘construction of the pastoral world’ of Belmont ‘ideologically reconciles the socially irreconcilable…. The aristocratic fantasy of Act V, unusually sustained and unironic even for Shakespearean

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romantic comedy, may accordingly be seen as a formal effort to obliterate the memory of what has preceded.’27 Shylock’s person (and name) disappears from Act V along with traces of Jewishness. Lorenzo’s reference to manna when he is told of the will of ‘the rich Jew’ (V.i.292) is the exception—‘Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way/Of starved people’ (V.i.294–5)—which shows the appropriation into Christian discourse of the Jewish element that with Shylock’s undoing has been deleted from Belmont. Christian dominance is thereby confirmed. Lorenzo’s notion of music has effects which assume the interpenetration of corporeal and incorporeal: he calls for music to ‘Creep in our ears’ with ‘touches of sweet harmony’ (V.i.56–7), and directs Stephano, ‘With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear’ (V.i.67). But boundaries between bodies and the abstract harmonies of music are clearly established as he directs Jessica’s (and the audience’s) attention to the music of the spheres:

Sit, Jessica,—look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold, There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-ey’d cherubins… (V.i.58–62) The harmony of the spheres is a figure in Act V which effects ideological reconciliation. The spheres are a totalizing image which renders unimaginable anything which is not of it. It is thus a falsifying general analogy for the conflictual social scenes of Venice and Belmont grounded on differences of religion, citizenship, and race. Lorenzo goes on to define the relationship between the music of the orbs and its perception:

Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (V.i.63–5) The play invokes the music of the spheres as an image of universal harmony, but it places the perception of that harmony in the soul, a human part which lies outside ordinary human consciousness; and simultaneously debases the body by calling it the ‘muddy vesture of decay’, an impediment to perceiving the ‘highest’ truth. In Lorenzo’s rhetorical construction the idea of comprehensive harmony, located in ‘cherubins’ and human ‘immortal souls’, is concomitant with devaluing the human body. Heavenly bodies are supposed to produce music representing fullness and highest truth, while the corporeal is debased and the truth it can produce ignored. In Act V words and bodies are redefined in the new circumstances of Belmont, a name which suggests ‘the ‘beautiful mountain’ of a fairytale’28, as well as the beautiful female

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pubic mound. The redefinition of the value of bodies is seen in the ring episode. Portia threatens to give her body to the lawyer since her husband has given the lawyer their ring:

Since he hath got the jewel that I loved,… I will become as liberal as you, I’ll not deny him any thing I have, No, not my body, nor my husband’s bed. (V.i.224–8) The threat expresses the impossibility of a wife’s sharing her body with another man and still being a wife. Bassanio learns the lesson of bodily exclusivity that marriage signifies, and as part of this process friendship is subordinated to marriage. Portia’s clear view of friendship sees that male friends exactly correspond—‘a like proportion/Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit’ (III.iv.14–15)—and it is the impulses of friendship that prompted Antonio ‘to lend [his] body for [Bassanio’s] wealth’ (V.i.249), and Bassanio to give the ring to Balthazar-Portia. Bassanio learns that in terms of marriage men are not identical and equivalent and therefore not freely exchangeable by their wives. Friendship, on the other hand, imagines men as equivalent to each other. In the micro-drama of the return of the rings Bassanio is inducted into the ideology of marriage which represents each husband as separate and different, and accorded unique right of sexual access. Understanding this idea is said by Portia to be more than just a matter of words, but as being a fusion of words, ring, and body itself: she tells Bassanio that his ‘wife’s first gift’ of the ring is ‘A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger, /And so riveted with faith unto your flesh’ (IV.i.167–9). The ring riveted to flesh fixes the body’s meaning within the ideology of marriage; it creates a self embodied in marriage. The separation of Antonio’s body from the scene of his friendship with Bassanio is effected when he pledges his soul that Bassanio will be true to his wife:

I once did lend my body for his wealth, Which but for him that had your husband’s ring Had quite miscarried. I dare be bound again, My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord Will never more break faith advisedly. (V.i.249–53) Antonio’s body disappears from the scene and with it his material involvement in Bassanio’s affairs. His penultimate words—‘I am dumb’ (279)—echo Shylock’s defeated last words, ‘I am content’ (IV.i.389), and ominously return him to the silence in which he began. The play ends with words and the body being put into parodic conflict. As the two married pairs prepare to leave the stage Gratiano sets up a question:

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—the first inter’gatory That my Nerissa shall be sworn on, is, Whether till the next night she had rather stay, Or go to bed now (being two hours to day)… (V.i.300–3) The question is a real one inasmuch as the pleasure of the night will lie in talking about making love as well as in making love itself. No doubt consummation will take place, but for a moment consummation is teasingly delayed. In a play in which the body has passed fleetingly in and out of discourse it is appropriate that the telos of desire in the body should once more be deferred. Gratiano’s last words bring back the body—‘Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing/So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring’ (V.i.306–7)—and recall the knowledge that bodies continue to produce problems of value and identity even after marriage. St David’s University College, Lampeter NOTES 1 All references are to the Arden edition of The Merchant of Venice, ed. J.R.Brown (London: Methuen, 1955). All other Shakespeare references are to The Complete Works, Compact Edition, gen. eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 2‘Fiction and friction’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 86. 3 ibid. 4 See Keir Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 202–9, for an analysis of the discursive struggles of the courtroom scene. 5 Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Shakespearean inscriptions: the voicing of power’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 122. 6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 158: ‘man defies his very destiny when he derides the signifier’. 7 For a full discussion of the play in terms of generation and production, see Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thoughts: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 47–83. 8 ibid., p. 53. 9 Cf. King Lear’s wish to discover if the body will show the source of guilt if it is anatomized: ‘Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard-hearts?’, King Lear, III.vi.34–6. 10 The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 479. 11 ibid., p. 480. 12 See note to I.i.79 of The Merchant of Venice ed J.R.Brown. 13 M.M.Mahood’s note on these lines is ‘lack of activity is only proper to a sexually impotent old man or a sexually unmarketable woman’, The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 62. She also notes that ‘neat’s tongue dried’ is ‘cured ox tongue (and so a withered penis incapable of excitement)’, ibid. 14 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Tavistock, 1970), p. 41. 15 The theme of the three caskets’, in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1925, pp. 245–56. 16 Epithalamium, 11.153–6, in Poetical Works, ed. J.C.Smith and E.de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 17 Cf. John Donne’s ‘Aire and Angels’, which uses the trope of the relation of angels to corporeal things to complicate and thereby diminish clear boundaries between flesh and spirit. 18 Shell, op. cit., p. 57. 19 ibid. 20 For a discussion of the love-versus-friendship débat-theme see Keith Geary, ‘The nature of Portia’s victory: turning to men in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Survey, 37 (1984), pp. 55–68. 21 Note to III.iv.3. of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Mahood. For a full account of Renaissance ideas of friendship see ‘The virtue of friendship and the plan of Book Four’, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., The Faerie Queene, Book Four, special editor Ray Heffner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), pp. 281–313, passim. 22 See, for instance, Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici: ‘that part of our noble friends that we love is not that part that we embrace but that insensible part that our arms cannot embrace’, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. G. Keynes, vol. 1 (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), p. 92; quoted by Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), p. 60. 23 Geary, op. cit., p. 64. 24 Cf. Hamlet’s concern at the point of death that Horatio should ‘Report me and my cause aright/To the unsatisfied’ (V.ii.291–2); and Othello’s providing an interpretation of his actions to be reported to the Venetian state after his death (V.ii.347–65). 25 Note to IV.i.371 of The Merchant of Venice, ed. Mahood. 26 Other examples of Shylock’s thinking of his identity as connected with his body occur when he calls the jewels Jessica stole ‘two stones, two rich and precious stones’ (II.viii.20), thus unconsciously associating them with his testicles and seed; and when he hears of his daughter’s profligacy from Tubal: ‘Thou stick’st a dagger in me’ (III.i.100). 27 ‘The Merchant of Venice and the possibilities of historical criticism’, ELH, 49 (1982), pp. 765–89; p. 777. 28 J.R.Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 70.

‘What ish my nation?’: Shakespeare and national identities GRAHAM HOLDERNESS I Offhand I can’t remember a day when it seemed so marvellous or mad to be English. Suddenly the chronic inconvenience of London’s transport strike and the continuing horrors of the mining dispute were put into the merciful perspective of history. It began in Westminster Abbey where I sat close to the Queen Mother and watched her fight back tears and surrender to smiles with a packed congregation as the funniest hours of her reign were celebrated in the familiar words and music of Sir Noel Coward. And it ended here at Stratford, with a young, brave and poetic Henry bridging the centuries between by reminding us of the unlikely spirit which won Agincourt. Nothing much seemed so very different… What links the vision of young Mr Kenneth Branagh, making his Royal Shakespeare debut as a raw, stocky warrior, with Coward’s latterday musings, is the patriotic poet which lurked beneath their different facades… To hear Mr Branagh wonder incredulously at the valour of his ragtag-and-bobtail troops was to hear echoes of Derek Jacobi reading the moving war diaries of Coward at the unveiling of his memorial stone. And when Branagh squats among his men, blackened with the efforts of the war, and urges them once more into the breach—well,—we had heard that sentiment back in the Abbey when Penelope Keith set the sea of hankerchiefs dabbing at moist eyes… I won’t press the coincidence. Suffice to say that neither the service at the Abbey nor Adrian Noble’s spare, bare production at Stratford were mere tub-thumping exercises in mindless nationalism. There was pain, irony, wit and humanity in both. As Ian McDairmid’s conversational chorus informs us: Henry had a kingdom for a stage. Which of course was like Coward turning his stage into a kingdom. Both, in their way make a little thing like a transport shutdown seem irrelevant. All this from old masters and new blood! Between Harry’s Harfleur spirit and Coward’s London Pride, it did not, after all, seem improbable that there are still good reasons to be in England now that April’s almost here. Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 29 March 19841 The distinction here between ‘patriotism’ (of the handkerchief-dabbing type) and ‘nationalism’ (of the tub-thumping variety) is a reasonable starting-point for the following explorations of British patriotic and national identities, as they appear mediated through the cultural reproduction of Shakespearean drama, and in particular through

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Kenneth Branagh’s widely celebrated film adaptation of Henry V, itself based on the 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company stage production eulogized in Jack Tinker’s review.2 To have a forceful and vigorous ideology of nationalism, you have to have a forceful and vigorous nation to enact and substantiate it. If the ‘nation’ in question happens, like Britain, to be an eclipsed world power—no longer a great imperial aggressor, no longer a significant colonial leader, no longer a dominant industrial or economic force—then what basis remains for a particular, quantifiable ‘national’ consciousness? If the political and economic character of the ‘nation’ owes more to its participation in larger political and economic units—the EEC, NATO, American foreign policy, the multinational capitalist economy, the International Monetary Fund—then what sense does it make to continue talking about a specific, isolable ‘national’ identity? All that seems left to the disappointed or reformed British nationalist is an emotion of ‘patriotism’, which can evidently be distinguished from the politics of nationalism, and is capable of surviving such losses and transformations as the demise of Empire and the descent from world eminence relatively undamaged and unscathed. Patriotism is associated with ‘poetry’, with emotion, with the heart, with tears; ‘nationalism’ with ‘mindless’ aggression, with ‘tub-thumping’ jingoistic assertiveness. In a review of the subsequent film version of Henry V, Tom Hutchinson in the Mail on Sunday later proposed the same distinction: ‘the film… touches the heart of emotion rather than the instinct for patriotism’.3 But in the earlier review of the stage production, patriotism is indissolubly linked with the past. The plangency of patriotic feeling here derives from what Tom Nairn calls ‘the glamour of backwardness’: a nostalgia, a craving, unappeasable hunger for that which is irretrievably lost. Yet that loss may be regarded also as neither complete nor inconsolable, since the utterances of a ‘patriotic poet’ such as William Shakespeare (or Noel Coward) can transcend the absence and negation of history, and suffuse the soul with—not exactly a new fulfilment, but at least a new longing, a new mixing of memory and desire. Militaristic violence, inseparable from the historical actuality of nationalism, is strangely appeased in this flood of remembrance,4 strangely pacified by ‘the merciful perspective of history’. The British patriot, now no longer a nationalist, looks back regretfully, with resigned sadness, to his ‘finest hour’ in 1940, or the ‘unlikely’ victory of his ancestors at Agincourt; but, as re-awakened memories, these scenes of historical violence, recollected in tranquillity, acquire a power to comfort and console. The patriotic emotion is anchored in the past. Inspired by the ‘valour’, ‘gallantry’ and ‘courage’ displayed by the manly deeds of a warrior race, and immortalized in the words of the ‘old masters’ (represented here by the in-this-context-unfortunately-named ‘Shakespear’ and ‘Coward’), patriotism paradoxically expresses itself in gestures of weakness, in a ‘surrender’ to tears. The binary polarization of gender implicit in this construction is evident in the feminity shared by those cast, respectively, as tear-jerker and tear-jerked (Penelope Keith and the Queen Mother); and the contradictory quality of the patriotic emotion itself manifested in the male observer’s luxurious relishing of a weakness discovered in the contemplation of strength—like D.H.Lawrence, the writer here enjoys feeling his ‘manhood cast/Down in the flood of remembrance’ as he ‘weeps like a child for the past.’5 The patriotic emotion is anchored in the past, and besieged, embattled in the present. The England that surrounds Jack Tinker gives him no cause for patriotic celebration: it is

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rather a scene of bitter social conflict and class-antagonism, an England of transport and coalfield strikes. The English patriot doesn’t see his emotional conviction rooted in the actuality of the nation that surrounds him, which seems systematically to negate his ideal national image. The patriotic emotion searches past and future for a habitable space, nostalgically embracing the glamour of backwardness, and optimistically extrapolating a projected landscape of hope. Elsewhere in the review Tinker quotes some lines from Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, which exactly encapsulate that contradictory emotion: Let’s drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let’s drink to the Hope, that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again.

II The authentic accent of what might anachronistically be described as a ‘postmodern’ patriotism can in fact be located in what we think of as the very heart of the traditional discourse of British nationalism: it is even there in that notorious speech attributed to John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II, which in turn provided subsequent ages with a basic vocabulary of patriotic rhetoric.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in a silver sea Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England… (Richard II, II.i.40–50) It is natural to think of this fictionalized John of Gaunt as a great supporter of monarchical prerogative and royal power: certainly outside the play his famous patriotic speech has invariably been employed to endorse absolute authority, to support the autocratic will of many subsequent British kings and governments. Within the play of course this speech actually functions as a diatribe of criticism against the ruling monarch: Gaunt is not even depicting the England of the present, but expressing a nostalgic regret for an England which has long since vanished into the historical past. It is precisely

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because the England he sees before him—Richard’s England—falls so far short of his idealized vision of what he believes England once was, that his poetic vision of national glory is so brightly and vividly imagined. The realm of England is here defined largely in terms of its monarchy, its history distinguished by the quality of its kings: but the monarchs Gaunt idealizes are not like Richard. They are the warlike, crusading, feudal kings of the early Middle Ages: so Gaunt’s speech is after all no panegyric of royal absolutism, but a lament for the passing of a feudal kingdom in which king and nobility were united by a natural balance of forces into a united ‘happy breed of men’. Gaunt’s speech is not merely an appeal for strong leadership in the king, and it is certainly not a defence of the Renaissance doctrine of divine right and absolute royal authority. On the contrary, he imagines royal authority as inseparable from the power of the nobility; the golden age he longs for and regrets is that of a feudalism held together by the authority of a strong king and by the power of a strong aristocracy. Gaunt’s attack on Richard’s style of government concentrates on the fact that Richard has replaced the feudal bonds of ‘fealty’—the system of reciprocal obligations which bind lord and subject in a feudal polity—with economic contracts:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea… …is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds (II.i.63–4) Richard is now a mere ‘landlord’ of England, rather than a king; he has sought to dispense with the loyal co-operation of the nobility, and to rule with the assistance of an upstart bureaucracy of ‘favourites’. Determined to shake off the influence of the barons, he has introduced radical economic policies to raise revenue without reliance on the great land-holders. The unacceptability of Richard’s kingship consists, in Gaunt’s eyes, in his modernizing programme of de-feudalization, and his consequent slighting of the traditional aristocracy. It is ironic that so many subsequent appeals to English patriotism have been mounted on the basis of this elegant and barbaric statement of baronial selfinterest, this celebration of a class that has scarcely earned the unqualified admiration of even the most conservative of thinkers. But as we shall see, this hypostatization of a sectional class-interest as the ideology of a ‘nation’ is a symptomatic element in the history of British patriotism. When the patriotic rhetoric of this speech is imitated, Gaunt’s investment in the glamour of backwardness is often incoporated along with the imperious vigour of his nationalistic vision. Some years ago the Department of the Environment produced a television advertisement as part of an anti-litter campaign. A succession of visual images depicted urban squalor, industrial detritus and general untidiness—a river sweating oil and tar; empty streets blowing with waste paper like tumbleweed in a Western ghosttown; a cat snarling in a filthy gutter outside the idly flapping doors of a pub. The images were accompanied by those famous and familiar Shakespearean lines, spoken in voiceover commentary. Lines we are accustomed to hear uttered with a hush of reverence and breathless adoration, and with a musical effect akin to the sound of the last post being

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played at sunset across some colonial parade-ground in the Far East, were here intoned harshly, with an accent of resentment, bitterness, and dissatisfaction. Gaunt’s patriotic speech was made to operate as an aggrieved, harshly ironic commentary on the scenes of depressing untidiness. At some time, the voice implied, things have been different; Britain was once a proud (and tidy) nation; this royal throne of Kings has not always been so besmirched and soiled by—litter; there was a time when the seat of Mars was cleaned regularly, and when this other Eden was genuinely fit for human habitation. A moment’s consideration of the standards of civic hygiene prevalent in the 1590s would provoke some scepticism about this implicit claim. The advertisement however had little use for authentic historical difference, being concerned only to construct, through the language of Shakespeare, an ideal type of ‘the English nation’, against which image the shortcomings of the present might be measured. Its persuasive discourse was no simple reproof, admonishment, or rational appeal, but rather a paternalistic rebuke, a constituting of the untidy British subject as a violator of purity and innocence, guilty of profaning an idealized image of what the nation once was, and might be again. Think, intones the Shakespearean voice, think of the august and distinguished company of ancestral illuminati, ancient and modern, you are offending by your anti-social behaviour: those celebrated knights of the theatre like Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud, with whom such speeches are customarily associated; their great chivalric grandsires, that earlier generation of militaristic rather than histrionic knights, such as John of Gaunt; various kings and queens, ancient and modern, sometime rulers of ‘this sceptred isle’; and above all their heir, the modern custodian of this precious stone, set in a silver sea— (Mrs) Thatcher, the national housekeeper Herself. Thus a text which was originally the expression of an inconsol-able nostalgia for another time, is mobilized as an authoritative voice enjoining on us all an active commitment to the glamour of backwardness. The nostalgic lament for a vanished Elizabethan age takes us spiralling vertiginously down the intertextual labyrinths of quotation, with no terminus in sight, this side of Paradise, other than a fourth term of Tory government. III We began in Westminster Abbey, that focal point of traditional ‘British’ culture where the institutions of church, monarchy, and democratic constitution (in Philip Larkin’s words) ‘meet, blend and are robed as destinies’.6 With imagined wing our swift scene now flies, via John of Gaunt’s image of England as a ‘precious stone set in a silver sea’, to a margin, an edge, a border; to the south coast of Britain, and specifically to those white cliffs of Dover, over which, in Vera Lynn’s wartime song, ‘there will be bluebirds’—‘tomorrow, just you wait and see’. What more lyrical expression could there be of the patriotic hunger for an endlessly deferred fulfilment than that poignant expression of elegaic existentialism which, like John of Gaunt’s speech, and Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, attaches its emotion to the past and future as a way of confronting the absence and pain of the present? The iconic image that goes with the song is of course the famous white cliffs themselves, that long chalk escarpment which offers to the envy of less happier lands so characteristically ‘English’ a seascape.

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‘Wherefore to Dover?’ my reader might well enquire, echoing the accumulating incredulities of Regan and Cornwall in King Lear: ‘Wherefore to Dover?’. The seaport of Dover, those famous white cliffs, and more generally the stretch of coastline from Southampton to the Thames estuary, occupy a peculiar and privileged place in the iconography and mythology of British nationalism. My initial reference to Vera Lynn invokes the Second World War, and specifically the period 1940–4 when France was under German occupation, and Britain in constant fear of an invasion. That ‘rump’ of England then felt (not for the first time) the vulnerability of exposure to another landmass, the threatening point of France that pokes aggressively towards southern Britain, intimately close in space (narrow enough to swim across) yet always mistrusted, perpetually perceived as alien, frequently feared. Of course in a war of aerial transport, long-range heavy bombers, guided missiles, that part of England was (though subject to shelling from the French coast) in many ways no more vulnerable than any other, its borders capable of being breached at any point. But it is those cliffs of the south coast that provide us with our most characteristic national image of vulnerability, exposure, openness to the peril of foreign invasion. The mythological status of the white cliffs of Dover is far more ancient than 1940. In those legendary and mythological narratives that preceded the advent of modern historiography, Dover was actually what the anthropologist Malinowski called a ‘spot of origins’, a particular geographical location regarded by tradition as the source of a nation’s genesis. Anthropologists have identified in the proliferation of such narratives a structural form which they term the ‘myth of origin’, a narrative which purports to explain the process of a nation’s appearance in history. Medieval historians traced the ancestry of their various national populations and monarchies to the dispersal of the Trojan princes after the fall of Troy: Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that the English were descended from Brutus, allegedly a descendant of Aeneas. In Holinshed there is a narrative describing the conquest of what was to become Britain by Brutus, whose companion Corineus succeeded in overthrowing the giant Gogmagog, the island’s original inhabitant—‘by reason whereof the place was named long after, The Fall or leape of Gogmagog, but afterwards it was called The Fall of Dover’.7 As John Turner has shown, such pseudo-historical narratives were retold in the Renaissance as morality fables, calculated to guide political conduct; but they were also retold as myths, designed to legitimize power: ‘The black holes in time were to be occluded, the dangerous discontinuities of history papered over with myths that would confirm authority and marginalize the claims of political opposition.’8 When James I in 1604 had himself proclaimed King of ‘Great Britain’, he was deliberately re-introducing an antiquarian geographical term in order to establish ‘one single rule’ over England and Scotland. The name itself was falsely derived from Brutus, and in 1605 James was celebrated in the Lord Mayor’s show as the second Brutus who, in fulfilment of Merlin’s ancient prophecy, would ‘reunite what the original Brutus had put asunder’.9 The narratives of this ‘mythical charter’ enact a sequence of invasion, conquest, colonization and fragmenting. Dover is the point of entry, the aperture through which a new force of domination can enter the territory, settle it, and then—in a tragic political error—part it asunder. Reading through the political to the sexual, Britain is the female body, invaded by the colonizing male; the appropriate feminine resistance is overthrown, and the country planted with fertile seed. The inevitable result of this process is however

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not unity, but parturition, splitting, division; not the formation of a single unified whole, but the multiplying of centrifugal energies. The myth imagines national origin as a cyclical process of invasion, unification, plantation, and division. Precisely because in this myth Dover is the source of national identity, it is also the weakest point of the territory’s physical defences. What one male can do to a female body, what one conqueror can do to a territory, another male, another conqueror, can repeat; and in every repetition the action is (in an important sense) identical. The fundamentally unitary nature of conquest/intercourse cuts sharply across powerful taboos based on binary oppositions of difference (legitimate/illegitimate, married/unmarried, pure/contaminated, good/evil); and thereby forms the basis of that male sexual jealousy which in turn butts onto xenophobic nationalism: that point where the linked elements of ‘father’ and ‘fatherland’ in the word ‘patriotism’ meet. Along the south coast England presents her white, chaste purity to the potential invader as a defensive repellent, but also as a temptation. ‘Succeed where Napolean failed’ urges an advertisement for the local South-East England tourist industry, the words emblazoned across an aerial photograph of the familiar iconic escarpment: ‘spend a day in White Cliffs country’. The point where the nation’s identity begins is also the point where it could most easily be violated or reconquered.10 IV A key scene of Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act II, scene ii) is set on that coastline, historically at Southampton (though usefully, for my purposes, the Folio text of the play misprints Southampton as ‘Dover’). Henry and his nobles have here reached the ‘extreme verge’ of their territorial confine, a point of no return. Everything has been staked on the success of the French adventure; at the end of the scene Henry affirms, rhetorically but accurately, that his authority as monarch depends on victory: ‘No King of England, if not King of France’. At this margin of the kingdom, which has the perilous quality of all territorial borders, the riskiest, most dangerous aspect of the whole enterprise—more subversive than the uneven odds at Agincourt—is encountered: internal dissension, mutiny within the ranks, self-betrayal. The periphery of England, that no-man’s-land between England and France, marked by the sharp dividing line of the white cliffs, sanctified by the legendary myth of origins, is the point chosen for the enactment of a particular ritual: the cleansing of the English body politic by a sacrificial execution. In the play-text Exeter defines the treachery of the conspirators simply as a hired murder, a contract killing undertaken for a French purse. On discovery however one of them, the Earl of Cambridge, hints at an ulterior motive:

For me, the gold of France did not seduce, Although I did admit it as a motive The sooner to effect what I intended. (II.ii.151–3)

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In fact of course the three men arraigned here historically represented the cause of the deposed Richard II; the Earl of Cambridge’s ulterior motive was that of re-establishing the legitimate dynasty toppled by the Lancastrians’ usurpation. Ultimately they succeeded in forming the Yorkist power in the Wars of the Roses, in murdering Henry’s son and in putting three kings on the English throne. The narrowing-down of this complex constitutional problem to a simple focus on the question of political loyalty is a characteristic achievement of Henry’s style of government, and of course a familiar mechanism of ideological coercion in times of war. Political dissent becomes treachery: internal difference is forced to collapse under the moral and ideological pressures of international conflict.11 Kenneth Branagh placed particular emphasis on his decision to reinstate sections of the play-text omitted from Laurence Olivier’s film version, and in particular the whole of Act II, scene ii: I decided on including some significant scenes that Olivier’s film, for obvious reasons, had left out: in particular, the conspirators’ scene where Henry stage-manages a public cashiering of the bosom friends who have been revealed as traitors. The violence and extremism of Henry’s behaviour and its effect on a volatile war cabinet were elements that the Olivier version was not likely to spotlight.12 The general line of comparison here is that Olivier’s film treatment was severely constrained by its wartime context of production: as a patriotic celebration of Britain’s military strength and resolve, sponsored by the Ministry of Information, indissolubly linked both psychologically and strategically with the projected (and of course successful) Allied invasion of occupied France, the film was unlikely to place any emphasis on internal treachery, or to foreground qualities in Henry’s character and behaviour that might be read as unpleasantly ‘violent’ or ‘extreme’. Both film versions establish this scene by adapting the device of Shakespeare’s Chorus. In the Olivier version, a painting of the white cliffs of Southampton/Dover frames an unmistakably theatrical set, the prow of a stage ship where Henry and his nobles receive the sacrament before embarking. The overtly theatrical quality of the scene relates it closely to the reconstructed Elizabethan stage on which all the earlier scenes have been played. In the Branagh version Derek Jacobi as Chorus appears on a cliff-top (white, of course) from which he delivers the prologue to Act II. The sequence of directions reads:13 The Chorus is standing on a grassy cliff edge, looking out to sea. He turns to look at the camera. CHORUS The French, advised by good intelligence Of this most ‘dreadful’ preparation… He turns to look towards the cliff top and we cut closer to the traitors who have now appeared, passing through frame as their names are mentioned.

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CHORUS One, Richard Earl of Cambridge… As he walks away along the cliff edge, wrapping his scarf around him against the cold sea air, beyond him we see the dramatic white cliffs of the English coastline. Once the dramatic action is resumed, the Chorus disappears (though in the original theatrical production he frequently remained on stage), and the ‘traitor scene’ is established firmly in a naturalistic ‘hostelry’ (p. 36). The action is also played naturalistically, with a consistent emphasis on individual emotion. The key issue here is personal rather than political; the key emphasis falls on the shocking treachery of Henry’s friends, particularly his ‘bed-fellow’ the Earl of Cambridge. At one point Henry throws Cambridge over a table with an almost sexual intensity, violently enacting the pain of personal betrayal (s.d. p. 40, illustration p. 41). The conspirators confess only their guilt: Cambridge’s lines about an alternative motive are cut. The main interest of the scene as presented here consists in a dramatization of the psychological stresses and strains of such a critical situation, as experienced in Henry’s character. The dominant device of close-up is used here, as throughout the film, to register the psychological costs of authority. Branagh’s intention may have been to foreground the violence and extremism of Henry’s behaviour: but the naturalistic medium ensures that the nature of the spectator’s engagement with the action is one of individual identification. Branagh’s use, in the quotation on p. 88, of theatrical metaphors—‘stage-manages’, ‘spotlight’—actually draws attention to the anti-theatrical medium of filmic naturalism, in which very little space is left for the spectator to reflect on the nature of the dramatic medium itself. No one could gather from this scene, any more than from Olivier’s version of the same scene, that there is implicit in the dramatic text a subtext related to the critical question of legitimacy. Branagh has conspired with the character of Henry himself to obliterate the play’s momentary exposure of a stresspoint in the unity of the commonwealth. In this way the possibility of political dissent can be completely occluded, both within and through the text, since all political opposition is converted on this ideological terrain to civil treachery and personal betrayal. The key difference between the two film versions seems to me to reside in their respective adaptations of Shakespeare’s Chorus. I have argued elsewhere14 that Olivier’s adaptation of the Chorus, and his initial setting of the production-text within a reconstructed Elizabethan theatre, put into circulation some of the ‘radical and subversive potentiality of Shakespeare’s play…to foreground the artificiality of its dramatic devices’. Branagh’s adaptation of the Chorus is equally inventive and in many ways effective. The device of beginning with the Chorus in an empty film studio, and opening set doors on to the dramatic action, is an ingenious updating of Olivier’s mock Globe theatre. Though the Chorus is sometimes shown to be involved in the action (e.g. at the siege of Harfleur), he more characteristically appears as an alienation-effect, emerging surprisingly from behind a tree after the execution of Bardolph, or appearing to block out the final scene of diplomatic reconciliation in the French court, where he delivers that sharply undercutting prophecy which calls into question Henry’s political achievement. But the radical departure from Olivier’s use of this device rests in the fact that although the Chorus becomes involved in the action, the action never strays on to the territory of

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the Chorus. At one point in the original Royal Shakespeare Company stage production, Henry and the Chorus, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, almost bumped into one another, miming a surprised double-take of near-recognition: with a shock of delight we saw the fictional world of the dramatic action suddenly enter the fictionalizing activity of the Chorus. But in the film the naturalism of the action itself is never compromised in this way, despite the self-reflexive interventions of the intrusive choric witness. It is abundantly clear, despite its radical features, in what relation Olivier’s film stood to the nationalistic ideology of its time. But where does the Branagh film stand in relation to contemporary patriotic and nationalist ideologies? The original (1984) stage production, directed by Adrian Noble, and in which Branagh played the king, became known as the ‘post-Falklands’ Henry V. That suggests of course a prevailing mood of revulsion against war, against imperialistic shows of strength, against militaristic patriotism. The film can easily be read in line with this view: it was ‘made for a generation with the Indo-China war and the Falklands behind it and is wary of calls to arms’, according to Philip French.15 Branagh has ‘stripped the veneer of jingoism from the play and shown war in its true horror’;16 the film ‘emphasises the horror and futility of battle’.17 But the term ‘post-Falklands’ may not be quite as simple as that. ‘Post’ (as in ‘postmodernism’) does not always translate easily as ‘anti’ or ‘counter’: and it could well be that along with the obvious political advantages accruing to the power victorious in a military conflict (‘no Prime Minister of Britain, if not Empress of South Georgia’), the Falk-lands war bequeathed to British culture a decidedly ambiguous interest in war, not entirely unconnected with the characteristic emotions of patriotism. Certainly many of the post-Falklands cultural productions, such as Charles Wood’s play Tumbledown,18 betray a fascination with the experience of combat, with soldierly camaraderie, with the anguish of extreme suffering, with the psychological stresses of military leadership. Branagh’s approach to the character of Henry V19 was certainly to some degree founded on exactly such a fascination with the moral and emotional complexities made available in the theatre of war. His notorious consultation of Prince Charles,20 by way of research into the isolation of office and the loneliness of command, indicates a readiness to refer directly and to attend sympathetically to the contemporary experience of monarchical power. In the stage production he played the character of Henry so as to disclose those emotional complexities, to reveal weakness as well as strength, self-suppression as well as selfaggrandisement, personal loss as well as national victory. In that production the Brechtian device of the Chorus was able to offer a counterpoise to this open though ambivalent admiration for the heroic individual: in the relatively naturalistic medium of the film, and of course under Branagh’s own direction, there is no such system of checks and balances to subvert the invitation to empathic identification with the psychology of power. Again, if we compare the very different social roles of Olivier and Branagh, we would expect very different perspectives on the play to emerge. The one was almost a natural product of the English ancien régime, his manly shoulders practically designed for the touch of the regal sword; the other aggressively constructs his own social persona as the tough and ambitious boy from working-class Belfast, determined to make it in the competitive market-place of the British theatre, as impatient with traditional institutions and fossilized establishments as the young shock-troops of the Thatcherite Stock Exchange. Now it is quite evident that Branagh’s studious and systematic campaign of

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self-publicity, a strategy he obviously considers necessary to the fulfilment of his artistic ambitions, engages with the naturalistic medium of the film to provoke a structural parallelism between actor and hero.21 This theme runs through all the reviews of the film. In deciding to make it, Branagh ‘took on much the same odds as Henry did at Agincourt’;22 he ‘has marshalled his forces as well as Henry led his army’.23 ‘Clearly he has some sort of affinity with the part of King Henry, but it doesn’t seem an actorly affinity. Branagh too talks like a winner, and Henry V offers him better than any other play in the repertoire what might be called a yuppy dynamic, a mythology of success and self-definition rather than struggle.’24 A structural parallel is also perceived between the ‘band of brothers’ with whose help Henry achieves such extraordinary success, and the team of actors assembled by Branagh to make the film. Here in the reviews we encounter a series of metaphors which oddly and unselfconsciously link theatrical and militaristic vocabularies. ‘Before shooting started, Branagh, like Henry, addressed his troops, his happy few, saying he wanted to make it a “company picture”’.25 ‘There is already something of the spirit of Henry’s happy few in the cast and crew behind the camera…every member of this film unit would go to the wall for Kenneth Branagh.’26 ‘The actors…beamed like the happy few, ready to cry God for Kenneth.’27 Even odder is a tendency, quite in the spirit of that great tradition of public school patriotism which identified hand grenades with cricket balls, to express the relationship between theatre and heroic combat in metaphors of sport. Branagh himself dubbed his team ‘the English all-stars’, and several critics quipped along the same hearty and sporting lines: ‘Branagh has fielded the first XV.’28 ‘This is how Englishmen play their football, so it seems a perfectly natural style in which to wage their wars.’29 ‘The English take Harfleur with the help of one horse and the first XI.’30 Alexander Walker described Branagh as resembling ‘a rugby forward who collects a bloody nose on the battlefield’.31 We don’t have to search for long among these testaments of reception to observe the repressed spirit of patriotic emotion returning in these attenuated forms. Lastly there is the crucial relationship between this film as a cultural product and the kind of cultural pattern being forged by Branagh in his entrepreneurial interventions into the theatrical economy. He stands for a reaction against the established national institutions of theatre, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for the development of a privatized theatrical economy, with organizations like his own Renaissance Theatre Company supported by private and corporate sponsorship. Those who also approve of such developments are filled with passions of admiration when they contemplate Branagh’s audacity, energy, ambition, nerve, determination, etc., etc., right through the whole vocabulary of self-help and entrepreneurial capitalism. ‘Branagh’s blitzkrieg left the profession breathless at his nerve, his energy and his disregard for the obstacles.’32 ‘The cream of our classical talent and an army of extras, horses and stunt-men…was in itself a saga of nail-biting crises surmounted by his calm certainty of what he wants to do, and unshakeable confidence in being able to do it.’33 Emma Thompson, who is married to Branagh and who plays Katherine in the film, embraces the same free-market vocabulary of risk and initiative, linked with the heroic language of war: ‘These are the warrior years. These are the times to take the risks and do the big things we might not have the courage or energy for later on.’34 Some critics offered a clearer-sighted analysis, whether prompted by enthusiasm or reservation: Richard Corliss in The Times called Branagh ‘an

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icon of Thatcherite initiative’, and Adam Mars-Jones in The Independent proposed an exact model for the cultural dialectics involved: ‘The real chemistry is not between actor and part, but between the idea of the star as entrepreneur and the idea of the king as a self-made man.’35 Clearly the myth enacted in this film is capable of signifying at this level, perhaps even more readily than at the level of national culture and politics. I still of course haven’t answered the question posed in my title: ‘What ish my nation?’, as the Irishman Macmorris belligerently inquires of the Welshman Fluellen in Henry V (III.ii.125). The answer will lie, I think, in a recognition that the emotion of patriotism and the politics of nationalism always involve, in any given historical situation, attachment to a particular sectional group, or class, or ‘team’, or army, which can be seen as bearing or leading the national destiny. At the same time in every historical situation there is a larger, more pluralistic and multiple, more complex and contradictory national collective which any sectarian nationalist ideology must ignore, deny, or suppress. The most natural context for this operation to be successfully conducted is that of war: and we have seen in the dramatization of Henry V’s policy how it can be done. We also know from our own experience of the Falklands war that it is possible for a government voted into power by 40 per cent of the population, and an army voted into power by nobody, to become self-appointed bearers of the entire nation’s moral consciousness. Raphael Samuel suggests that in contemporary Britain patriotic and nationalist feeling has sought and found a new home in the concept of the individual.36 Orwell wrote in 1940 that the ‘privateness’ of English life was one of the secrets of its strength…his account anticipates some major themes in postwar British life, in particular the break-up, or erosion, of corporate loyalties, and the increasingly home-centred character of British social life. Patriotism, on the face of it, is one of the victims of those developments. Yet it may be that, denied expression in the public sphere, it is finding subliminal support in the semiotics of everyday life. …Individualism also has more solid material supports. The spread of home ownership, the sale of council houses, and the inflation of house prices has renewed the importance of family wealth and given a whole new terrain to Lockean notions of private property. The revival of small businesses—a feature of British as of other post-industrial societies—is multiplying the number of home-based or family-run concerns, while the dispersal of employment shows signs of reunifying work and home. Ideologically, public spirit is much less highly regarded than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. On both Left and Right of the political spectrum, selfexpression is treated as the highest good, individual rights as sacrosanct, and the enlargement of personal freedom—or its protection—the ideal object of policy. Government, for its part, has built a whole platform out of freedom of choice, making, or attempting to make, health, insurance, pensions, and schooling matters of individual responsibility, and turning non-intervention into the highest of statesmanly tasks. As Margaret Thatcher put it in one of her best-remembered maxims: ‘There is no society, only men and women and families.’

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Branagh’s film version of Henry V is very clearly a product of this new age of individualism, and it is in this respect that it differs so sharply from the play-text of the 1590s and the Olivier film of the 1940s. Denied a home in nationalist politics, the emotional resources of patriotism gravitate inexorably towards their true heartland in the individualism of the new entrepreneur, whose conquest of new economic and artistic worlds continually endorses the cultural and ideological power of the old. Kenneth Branagh did not, however, become constituted as such an individual subject, this ‘icon of Thatcherite initiative’, without a complex process of cultural negotiation. The film also has another history, through which can be traced the possibilities of its being read otherwise. Branagh is himself, of course, as a product of working-class Protestant Belfast, a compatriot of Captain MacMorris, as well as a fellow-countryman of William Shakespeare, heir to the mantle of Lord Olivier, and a loyal subject of Prince Charles’s mother. The question ‘what ish my nation?’ would at certain stages of his life, if now no longer, have been capable of provoking in him an existential anxiety parallel to the confused and exasperated anger voiced by Shakespeare’s Captain MacMorris. When in 1970 his family, horrified by the growth of political violence in the province, moved permanently to England (where his father had already been working for some years) Branagh felt, according to the testimony of his ‘autobiography’, ‘like a stranger…in a very strange land’.37 This initial condition of alienation was resolved only by the assumption of ‘dual nationality’ in a divided self: ‘After a year or so I’d managed to become English at school and Irish at home’ (p. 23). He lived, he acknowledges, a ‘double life’ (p. 24), perpetually conscious of a deep cultural difference masked by apparent assimilation and ethnic homogeneity. Branagh’s formative childhood experience was thus enacted on a highly significant marginal space of ‘British’ culture, close to another of those territorial borders on which the contradictions of a nationalist ideology become acutely visible. Born a British citizen, within the borders of the ‘United’ Kingdom, Branagh inherited a particular Irish subculture, that of a large working-class extended family on the edge of the Belfast docks. He was also heir, however, to the questionable advantages of that ‘British’ culture of selfimprovement and meritocratic social mobility which took him eventually to RADA, the RSC and Kensington Palace. These social contradictions of divided culture and fragmented nationality can be read immediately from the brash, ambitious, self-mocking, self-important, painfully unstable discourse of Branagh’s premature ‘autobiography’, a project in itself designed to consolidate a coherent social identity out of a fissured and contradictory social experience. They can also be read from the film, which, despite its totalizing attempt to relocate the problems of national identity and international conflict within the charismatic individual, occasionally uncovers and discloses surprising depths of cultural anxiety. This anxiety can be traced in a symptomatic moment of textual ‘excess’, a point where the filmic narrative discloses an ideological ‘stress-point’ by delivering an emotional affect which remains unexplained by the contingent dramatic circumstances. As the miraculous victory of Agincourt becomes apparent, Captain Fluellen (played by Ian Holm) reminds Henry of the heroic deeds of his ancestor Edward, ‘the Black Prince of Wales’. Fluellen offers a Celtic rereading of Anglo-Norman history, celebrating the heroic deeds of Welsh men-at-arms at Crecy, and appropriating Edward himself as an honorary Welshman. Branagh’s screenplay interprets this exchange as follows:38

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FLUELLEN …I do believe your Majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Davy’s day. The power of the Welshman’s simple feeling is too much for the King who speaks the following through tears which he cannot prevent. He is near collapse. HENRY V I wear it for a memorable For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman. The King breaks down, and the two men hug each other.

honour;

Such cinematic surges of emotional intensity are of course ambiguous in their effects, and can be read in many ways. Here there are readily available psychological explanations: this is the bitter price of heroism and military success; the post-orgasmic melancholy of the victor, satiated on violence; or the human cost of successful rule. Branagh’s Henry also sheds tears at the hanging of Bardolph, the screenplay emphasizing the ‘enormous cost’ to the King of this necessary exercise of impartial justice (pp. 71–4). More generally, the film’s capacity to reduce its participants and observers to tears is frequently cited as a measure of its authenticity: after the shooting of Agincourt, Branagh ‘went home exhausted and somehow defeated, and for no good reason burst into tears’;39 and Prince Charles is reputed to have been similarly ‘reduced to tears’ at a special preview.40 The demonstrative parading of open grief may at first sight appear subversive of the values of tough masculinity, the rigid suppression of emotion required for the serious business of warfare. But it should be clear from the sodden royal handkerchief with which we began, that these tears are closer to those rituals of mourning (such as the militaristic memorial service of ‘Remembrance Day’), which are rather a liturgical collusion with the ideology of patriotic war than an emotional interrogation of its values. The moment in the film of extreme emotional exchange between Fluellen and Henry is in fact quite different from these examples. Neither the film-text nor the screenplay can adequately explain its intensity, its excessive superabundance of significance. And that leaking out of embarrassingly public grief seems to me to locate a fault-line in the film’s hegemony: for the sudden burst of reciprocal grief is linked by the dialogue with questions of national identity. As we observe the dramatization of an English king and a Welsh soldier plangently embracing in a symbolic ritual of national unity, we also catch a momentary glimpse of an Irishman and a Scot weeping over the historical devastations of British imperialism. Can we not then read through the film’s imagery of post-Agincourt ‘carnage and wreckage’ (p. 113) the smoking ruins of that battlefield that is Ulster? And can we not catch in those verminous men and women ‘pillaging the bodies of the dead’ (p. 113) a fleeting glimpse of the young Kenneth Branagh, joining in the looting of a bombed-out Belfast supermarket?41 The iconic image of the dead boy carried by Henry throughout this sequence, in turn carries in this respect richer and deeper psychological reverberations than I have space to explore. One of the most interesting details of Branagh’s Henry V does not appear in the film (and is not therefore in the published screenplay, which is a record of the final edited version, not the screenplay from which the film was developed). When shooting the

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scene where the Chorus strides the white cliffs of Southampton/Dover (filmed in fact at Beachy Head, which is of course exactly midway between the two), Branagh tried to use the same location for another sequence:42 We tried unsuccessfully to get another shot which I had felt at one stage could open the movie—a pan across the French coastline eventually taking in the white cliffs of England and ending on the contemplative face of yours truly. The whole thing was accompanied by the hollow crown soliloquy from Richard II, which seemed to express something of the message of our Henry V. The shot did not work, and I decided to drop the Richard anyway. It simply didn’t belong. Who, in that strangely elliptical and impersonal phrase, is ‘yours truly’? The actor or the role? English Harry or Irish Ken? The doubling of identities is paralleled by a corresponding spatial ambivalence: that camera-pan simultaneously offers a depiction of the point-of-view of King Henry, firmly established on his own territory, contemplatively surveying the enemy coast; and delivers an external view of the ‘English’ coast as it would be seen by an enemy, an invader—or an immigrant. Prompted by the echoing words of Richard II, a king ousted from his own territory by the usurper whose heir now literally occupies its commanding heights, and by the semiotic value latent in Branagh’s ‘dual identity’, the spectator presented with this filmic moment would have had ample opportunity to appreciate the position of an internal émigré, whose status within the nation is in some way questionable; the paradox of belonging and alienation, the cultural anxiety of the internal émigré about to establish his own territorial rights by violently overthrowing another’s. What would this sequence, if included in the film, have signified; and what are the underlying reasons for its exclusion? The speech in question from Richard II (Act III, scene ii, 144–77) is a penetrating interrogation of the realities of power. The state is about to fall into the hands of Bolingbroke, Henry V’s father, and Richard’s imagination is released to a vivid realization of the difference between effective power and mere legitimacy. Richard has no property in the realm to bequeath to his heirs, only the experience of royal tragedy—‘sad stories of the deaths of kings’. The imagery of hollowness runs throughout the speech, taking in the hollow grave, the hollow crown, and the ‘wall of flesh’ encircling the mortal life, which seems impregnable as a castle, yet contains only a vulnerable, isolated life. If the king’s body is mortal, then sovereignty is a mere pageant, a stage performance, and the real sovereign of the royal court is death, the ‘antic’ who parodies and mocks all seriousness. The awareness of royal tragedy expressed here is nothing less than the Divine Right of Kings inverted, hollowed out to disclose the true nature of power.43 In the projected additional scene of Branagh’s film, Richard’s challenging interrogation is placed exactly on the sharp white line of a territorial border. Located there, the insistent questioning of the speech goes beyond an expression of melancholy resignation at the emptiness of power (the kind of thing calculated to set Prince Charles clutching for the royal nose-rag), to an earnest meditation on the nature of the peripheral delineations by which such spaces of hollowness are bound and contained. If we read that border as simultaneously the south coast of England, and the border between Ulster and

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Eire, we can grasp simultaneously the paradox of definition and arbitrariness, of clear geographical division and constructed geopolitical disposition, which belongs to all territorial borders, especially those between an imperialist and a colonized nation. Travelling back to that mythical spot of origins, which is simultaneously a possible point of exit (Beachy Head is a favourite haunt of suicides), some of the fundamental questions of British national identity can at last be posed. Does a geographical boundary such as the English Channel prescribe mutual hostility and reciprocal violence between the neighbouring nations?

the contending kingdoms Of France and England, whose very shores look pale With envy of each other’s happiness, May cease their hatred (Henry V, V.ii.377–9) The inclusion of that speech from Richard II, significantly poised on the edge of England, could have hollowed out an illuminating space between actor and character: a disclosure which could have expressed these cultural contradictions even more eloquently, if the film had found a means of including Shakespeare’s reference to Essex, returning from Ireland, ‘bringing Rebellion broached on his sword’. Meanwhile, as the film cameras whirred on the summit of Beachy Head, constructing a sequence destined to become a hollow absence in the film-text, far below and out to sea, other kinds of machinery were simultaneously hollowing out a link between ‘the contending kingdoms’, that ‘Chunnel’ which when completed will rob the white cliffs of much of their centuries-old symbolism. For once Britain is physically a part of Europe, the ideological stress on ancient national mythologies will be enormously intensified. The interesting combination, on the part of Britain’s Tory government, of pro-European commitment and chauvinistic resistance to European union, testifies to the problems facing British national ideology. The government’s insistence on the private funding of what is self-evidently a public construction project (leading to an endless series of financial crises), and the anxieties frequently expressed about what kinds of contamination may enter the realm once a major transport artery is plugged deep into its vitals (those who applaud the demolition of the Berlin Wall tend, when contemplating the Chunnel, towards extravagant fantasies of invasion by terrorists and rabid animals), indicate deep ideological ambivalences towards the destruction of a ‘natural’ boundary. Some residual reverence for the acculturated sanctity of the south coast even underlies reasonable conservationist anxieties about the fate of the white cliffs themselves; focusing as they do in particular on a spot some distance from the site of the tunnel itself, but legitimated by its very name as a space of that England (of which, according to the words of another popular wartime song, there will always be one) to be conserved: Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover. Roehampton Institute, London

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NOTES 1 Reprinted in London Theatre Record, IV: 7 (1984), p. 270. 2 Henry V, directed by Kenneth Branagh, produced by Bruce Sharman (1989); based on a 1984 production of the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Adrian Noble. My description ‘widely celebrated’ can be measured in the press reviews quoted later in this paper; and see also the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, 14:2, which cites in support of Robert F.Wilson’s positive evaluation (‘Henry V/Branagh’s and Olivier’s Choruses’) a celebratory ‘Chorus of critics’ (pp. 1–2). Branagh received Academy Award nominations as best actor and best director. 3 Tom Hutchinson, The Mail on Sunday, 8 October 1989. 4 The phrase derives of course from D.H.Lawrence’s poem ‘Piano’ (see note 5), but occurs in the stage directions of Branagh’s Henry V screenplay: see K.Branagh, Henry V by William Shakespeare: a Screen Adaptation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), p. 32. 5 D.H.Lawrence, ‘Piano’, in K.Sagar (ed.), Selected Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 21. 6 Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’, The Less Deceived (London: Faber & Faber, 1957). 7 Holinshed’s Chronicles, I, p. 443. 8 J.Turner, ‘King Lear’, in G.Holderness, N.Potter, and J.Turner, Shakespeare: the Play of History (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 92. See also T.Hawkes, ‘Lear’s map: a general survey’, Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1989), pp. 36–7. 9 Turner, in Holderness, Potter, and Turner (1988), p. 93. 10 cf. Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Act of Union’, where a sexual relationship is linked metaphorically with the political connection of Britain and Ireland, colonizer and colonized: ‘I grow older/Conceding your halfindependent shore/Within whose borders now my legacy/Culminates inexorably.’ 11 See K.P.Wentersdorf, ‘The conspiracy of silence in Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1976), and G.Holderness, ‘Henry V’, in Holderness, Potter, and Turner (1988), pp. 70–2. 12 Branagh, Henry V (1989), p. 12. 13 ibid., pp. 35–6. 14 See G.Holderness, ‘Agincourt 1944: readings in the Shakespeare myth’, Literature and History, 10:1 (1984), pp. 31–4; Shakespeare’s History (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1985), pp. 184–91; and Holderness, Potter, and Turner (1988), pp. 72–9. 15 P.French, in The Observer, 8 October 1989. 16 A.Mars-Jones, in The Independent, 5 October 1989. 17 C.Tookey, in The Sunday Telegraph, 8 October 1989. 18 Charles Wood, Tumbledown, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987). 19 Kenneth Branagh discusses his approach to the stage role of Henry V in Philip Brockbank (ed.), Players of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and in his own autobiography, Beginning (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), pp. 137–9. 20 See Branagh, Beginning, pp. 141–4. 21 See Michael Quinn, ‘Celebrity and the semiotics of acting’, New Theatre Quarterly, VI : 22 (1990). 22 P.Lewis, Sunday Times, 10 September 1989. 23 P.French, Observer, 8 October 1989. 24 A.Mars-Jones, Independent, 5 October 1989. 25 P.Lewis, Sunday Telegraph, 24–30 September 1989. 26 B.Bamigboye, Daily Mail, 18 November 1989. 27 P.Lewis, Sunday Times, 10 September 1989. 28 Ian Johnstone, Sunday Times, 8 October 1989.

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29 A.Lane, The Independent, 30 September 1989. 30 A.Bilson, Sunday Correspondent, 8 October 1989. 31 A.Walker, in the London Evening Standard, 25 May 1989. Branagh himself ironically traced the roots of his career to a conjuncture of drama and sport: at school he was made captain of both rugby and football teams, ‘I suspect for my innate sense of drama—I loved shouting theatrically butch encouragement to “my lads”’ (Branagh, Beginning, p. 28). 32 P.Lewis, Sunday Times, 10 September 1989. 33 P.Lewis, Sunday Telegraph, 24–30 September 1989. 34 Quoted by P.Lewis, Sunday Telegraph, 24–30 September 1989. 35 R.Corliss, The Times, 13 November 1989, and A.Mars-Jones, The Independent, 5 October 1989. 36 Raphael Samuel, ‘Introduction: exciting to be English’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of National Identity, vol. 1, History and Politics (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. xli-xlii, xxxix-xl. 37 Branagh, Beginning, p. 22. 38 Branagh, Henry V, p. 111. 39 Quoted by P.Lewis, Sunday Times, 10 September 1989. 40 H.Davenport, Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1989. 41 See Branagh, Beginning, p. 20. 42 ibid., p. 239. 43 See Holderness (1985), pp. 59–61.

A bibliography of the French and English works of Jacques Derrida 1962–90 ALBERT LEVENTURE In the preparation of this bibliography, I have benefited from the circumspection and commitment accorded Derrida’s work by many of his translators and commentators. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity I received from the numerous libraries who placed their facilities at my disposal; in particular, my gratitude is extended to the staff at the University of London. For their assistance, my thanks go to Peggy Kamuf, John Llewelyn, Christopher Norris, and Peter Webb. John P.Leavey, Jr read an early draft of this work. Without his significant contribution, the bibliography would have been less accurate and comprehensive. An equally important contribution was that made by Jacques Derrida. The interest he took in this work, and the courtesy he unfailingly exhibited when offering suggestions and comments, was of inestimable value to me. ‘Let me say above all how conscious I am of the hard work, the solicitude and vigilant care that must have gone into [your] project over the past few years…this gesture is for me a very precious and encouraging sign and I would like to thank you for it without delay…the bibliography seems to me quite impeccable’ (Jacques Derrida, July 1989).

BOOKS 1962 Traduction et Introduction à L’Origine de la Géométrie d’Edmund Husserl. Epiméthée, Essais Philosophiques, Collection fondée par Jean Hyppolite. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. English translation (of the second French edition): Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Translator: John P.Leavey, Jr., who also supplies a Preface. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978; in England, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978. Reprinted in 1989 by the University of Nebraska Press, with a new afterword by the translator. 1967 Le Voix et le Phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans le phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. English translation: Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translator: David B. Allison, who also provides an Introduction. Preface by Newton Garver. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973. In addition to ‘Speech and Phenomena’, the volume contains two other essays: ‘La Forme et le vouloir-dire: Note sur la phénoménologie du langage’/‘Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language’, and ‘La Différance’/‘Difference’. Chapter 1 of Speech and Phenomena, ‘Signs and Signs’, and other material incorporated into the book, was published as

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‘Jacques Derrida’s Husserl Interpretation: text and commentary’, in Philosophy Today, vol. XI, no. 2/4, Summer 1967, pp. 106–23. This text has been condensed from the 130 pages that Derrida prepared, but did not deliver, for the American Phenomenology Society at Pennsylvania State University in October 1966. The selection of the material was made by F.Joseph Smith, who is responsible for the translation and the commentary which accompanies its presentation. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967. English translation: Of Grammatology. Translator: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who also supplies a Preface. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. In her Preface—see especially pp. lxxix–lxxxv—Spivak delineates some of the emendations performed by Derrida between the first appearance of the Grammatology as a two-part review article (see 1965–6 entries in Texts) and its publication in book form. An English translation of part 1, chapter 2, ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’, was published in Sub-Stance, no. 10, 1974, pp. 127–81. The opening section of part 1, ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’, is reprinted in Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. Edited by Joseph Margolis. Temple University Press, 1986. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. English translation: Writing and Difference. Translator: Alan Bass, who provides an Introduction and Additional Notes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; in England, London: Routledge & K Kegan Paul, 1978. ‘Force et signification’/‘Force and Signification’ ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’/‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ ‘Edmond Jabès et la question du livre’/‘Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book’ ‘Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas’/ ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ ‘“Genèse et structure” et la phénoménologie’/‘“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’ ‘La parole soufflé’ ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’/‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la représentation’/‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ ‘De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hégélianisme sans réserve’/‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’/ ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ ‘L’ellipse’/‘Ellipsis’ 1972 La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. English translation: Dissemination. Translator: Barbara Johnson, who provides an Introduction and Additional Notes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; in England, London: Athlone Press, 1981.

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‘Hors Livre’/‘Outwork, prefacing’ ‘La pharmacie de Platon’/‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ ‘La double séance’/‘The Double Session’ ‘La Dissémination’/‘Dissemination’ Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. English translation: Margins of Philosophy. Translator: Alan Bass, who provides Additional Notes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; in England, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982. ‘Tympan’ ‘La “Différance”’/‘Difference’ ‘Ousia et Grammé: Note sur une note de Sein und Zeit’/‘Ousia and Grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time’ ‘Le puits et la pyramide: Introduction à la sémiologie de Hegel’/‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology’ ‘Les fins de l’homme’/‘The Ends of Man’ ‘Le cercle linguistique de Genève’/‘The Linguistic Circle of Geneva’ ‘La Forme et le vouloir-dire: Note sur la phénoménologie du langage’/ ‘Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language’ ‘Le supplément de copule: La philosophie devant la linguistique’/‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’ ‘La mythologie blanche (la métaphore dans le texte philosophique)’/ ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’ ‘Qual, Quelle: Les sources de Valéry’/Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources’ ‘Signature evénement contexte’/‘Signature Event Context’ Positions. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972. English translation: Positions. Translator: Alan Bass, who also supplies the annotations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; in England, London: Athlone Press, 1981. ‘Implications: Entretien avec Henri Ronse’/‘Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse’ ‘Sémiologie et grammatologie: Entretien avec Julia Kristeva’/‘Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva’ ‘Positions: Entretien avec Jean-Louis Houdebine et Guy Scarpetta’/ ‘Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta’ The volume also contains fragments of letters exchanged between Derrida and Houdebine, dated, respectively, July 15 and July 1, 1971. 1974 Glas. Editions Galilée, 1974. Also available in the Denoël/Gonthier two-volume edition. Paris, 1981. English translation: Glas. Translators: John P.Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Some brief passages of Leavey’s translation were published as ‘Jacques Derrida’s Glas: A Translated Selection and some Comments on an Absent Colossus’, in Clio, vol. 11, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 327–37. For the

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complement to Glas, see Glassary by John P.Leavey, Jr. The University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 1976 L’Archéologie du frivole: Lire Condillac. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1976. English translation: The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. Translator: John P.Leavey, Jr., who also provides an Introduction. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980. Reprinted in 1987 by the University of Nebraska Press. Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1976. First French edition appeared in 1978, published by Aubier-Flammarion. English translation (of a bilingual— French and English—text): Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Translator: Barbara Harlow. Introduction by Stefano Agosti. Drawings by François Loubrieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 1977 Limited Inc. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. This is the French text published as a supplement to its English translation by Samuel Weber, which originally appeared in Glyph, no. 2, 1977. See 1977 entry in Texts (and 1988 entries in Books and Texts). 1978 La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978. English translation: The Truth in Painting. Translators: Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, who also provide a Preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ‘Passe-Partout’ ‘Le Parergon’/‘Parergon’ ‘+R (par dessus le marché)’/‘+R (Into the Bargain)’ ‘Cartouches’ ‘Restitutions de la vérité en pointure’/‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing’ ‘Passe-Partout’ and an extract from ‘+R’ are to be found in the Benning-ton-McLeod translation in Art and Design, vol. 4, nos. 3 & 4, 1988, pp. 19–25. 1980 La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980. English translation: The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translator: Alan Bass, who supplies an Introduction and Additional Notes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ‘Envois’ ‘Spéculer—sur “Freud”’/‘To Speculate—on “Freud”’ ‘Le facteur de la vérité’ ‘Du Tout’

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An extract from ‘To Speculate—on “Freud”’, in Bass’s translation, appears in On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985; in England, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 236–58. Another version of this text is to be found, in a translation by Ian McLeod, in The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 1978, pp. 78–97, where it appears as ‘Speculations—on Freud’. 1982 L’oreille de l’autre: transferts, traductions, otobiographies: textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida. Montréal: VLB Editions, 1982. Edited by Claude Lévesque and Christie V.McDonald. English translation: The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida. Translators: Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (who translates ‘Otobiographies’). English edition edited by Christie V.McDonald, who provides a Preface. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Republished in 1988 by the University of Nebraska Press, with a new preface by the editor and the inclusion of ‘Choreographies’ (see 1982 Texts entry). A fragment from ‘Otobiographies’ was published in Yale French Studies, no. 63, 1982, pp. 245–50, as ‘All Ears: Nietzsche’s Otobiography’. In 1984 Editions Galilée published Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. The French edition contains only the essay on Nietzsche. (L’oreille de l’autre is the result of a colloquium held at the University of Montreal, October 22–4, 1979. ‘Nietzsche’s Otobiography’ was delivered in the spring of 1982 at Yale, Emory, and the University of Florida. 1983 D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1983. An English translation by John P.Leavey, Jr. is available in Semeia and The Oxford Literary Review. See 1981 entry in Texts. 1984 Feu la cendre/cio’che resta del fuoco. Florence: Sansoni, 1984. A bilingual—French and Italian—presentation, with Stefano Agosti providing the Italian translation. Published in France in 1987 by Editions des femmes. An English translation by Ned Lukacher is in preparation, and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press. See (also) entry under Recording. Signéponge/Signsponge. Translator: Richard Rand. A bilingual—French and English—presentation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. A fragment of this essay appeared in an earlier translation of Rand’s in The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 5, nos. 1 & 2, 1982, pp. 102–12. In the same issue appears ‘Signsponge 2,’ which is described as being in no sense an ‘annotated version’ of ‘Signsponge 1’. It is translated by Geoff Bennington and Richard Rand. The French edition of Signéponge was published in 1988 by Seuil. 1986 Mémoires for Paul de Man. English translation by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Mémoires pour Paul de Man was published in France by Editions Galilée in 1988, and includes ‘Comme le bruit de la mer au fond d’un coquillage: La guerre de Paul de Man’ (see 1988 entry in Texts)

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and ‘In Memoriam’ (see 1985 entry in Texts). Columbia University Press will be publishing shortly a revised edition of the book, containing the material found only in the French volume. (Mémoires for Paul de Man was written in January–February 1984, and first delivered (in French) at Yale University in March of that year. Parages. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986. An English edition is in preparation by John P.Leavey, Jr., and is scheduled for publication in 1990 by the University of Nebraska Press. Introduction ‘Pas’ ‘Survivre’/‘Living On—Border Lines’ ‘Titre (à préciser)’/‘Title (to be specified)’ ‘La loi du genre’/‘The Law of Genre’ Schibboleth, pour Paul Célan. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986. English translation: ‘Shibboleth.’ Translator: Joshua Wilner. In Midrash and Literature. Edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 307–47. ‘Schibboleth’ is also available in Cahiers de l’Archipel, no. 13, 1985, and in Argumentum e Silentio, edited by Amy D.Colin. Berlin/New York: Walter de Greyter, 1987. (‘Shibboleth’ was first delivered as a lecture at a conference on the work of Paul Célan, held at the University of Washington, Seattle, in October 1984.) 1987 De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1987. English translation: Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translators: Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. See ‘De l’esprit’/‘Of Spirit’ entries in 1988–9 Texts. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1987. ‘Psyché: Invention de l’autre’/‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’ ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’/‘The retrait of Metaphor’ ‘Ce qui reste à force de musique’ ‘Envoi’/‘Sending: On Representation’ ‘Moi—la psychanalyse’/‘Me—Psychoanalysis’ ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage’ ‘Des Tours de Babel’ ‘Télépathie’/‘Telepathy’ ‘Ex-abrupto’ ‘Les morts de Roland Barthes’/‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’ ‘Une idée de Flaubert: la lettre de Platon’/‘An Idea of Flaubert: ‘Plato’s Letter’’ ‘Géopsychanalyse—et ‘all the rest of the world’ ’ ‘Le dernier mot du racisme’/‘Racism’s Last Word’ ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (à toute vitesse, sept missives, sept missiles)’/‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missives, seven missiles)’

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‘Lettre à un ami japonais’/‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ ‘Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique’/‘Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference’ ‘La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)’/‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’ ‘Admiration de Nelson Mandela: ou les lois de la réflexion’/‘The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’ ‘Point de folie—maintenant l’architecture’ ‘Pourquoi Peter Eisenman écrit de si bons livres’/‘Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books’ ‘Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos’/‘Fifty-two Aphorisms for a Foreword’ ‘L’aphorisme à contretemps’ ‘Comment ne pas parler: dénégations’/‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ ‘Désistance’ ‘Nombre de oui’/‘A Number of Yes (Nombre de oui)’ Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1987. ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’/‘Two Words for Joyce’ ‘Ulysse gramophone: oü-dire de Joyce’/‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce’ 1988 Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1988. English translations by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Edited by Gerald Graff. See 1972 and 1977 entries in Books and 1971, 1977, and 1988 entries in Texts. Published in France in 1990 by Editions Galilée. Presentation and translations by Elisabeth Weber. ‘Signature Event Context’ ‘Limited Inc abc…’ ‘Afterword: Towards an Ethic of Discussion’ 1990 Du Droit à la philosophie. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1990. Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990.

TEXTS 1963 ‘Phänomenologische Psychologie, de E.Husserl’. Les études philosophiques, no. 2, April–June 1963, pp. 203–6.

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‘Force et signification’. Critique, vol. 19, nos. 193–4, June–July 1963, pp. 483–99, 619–36. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, no. 68, 1963, pp. 460–94. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. An extract from this text appears in Descartes: Textes et débats. Edited by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis. Librarie Générale Française: le livre de poche, 1985. (‘With the exception of several notes and a short passage (in brackets), this paper is the reproduction of a lecture given 4 March 1963 at the Collège Philosophique’ (Derrida).) 1964 ‘A propos de Cogito et histoire de la folie’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, no. 69, 1964, pp. 116–19. ‘Edmond Jabès et la question du livre’. Critique, vol. 20, no. 201, February 1964, pp. 99–115. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/ Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. ‘Violence et métaphysique: Essai, sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, no. 69, 1964, pp. 322–45, 425–73. Reprinted with alterations in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. (Certain of the revisions made by Derrida between the original appearance of the essay and its subsequent publication in L’écriture are recorded by Robert Bernasconi in ‘The Trace of Levinas in Derrida’, in Derrida and Différance, edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. England, Coventry, University of Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985; in the United States, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988.) 1965 ‘“Genèse et structure” et la phénoménologie’. Entretiens sur les notions de genèse et de structure. Edited by Maurice de Gandillac, Lucien Goldmann, and Jean Piaget. Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1965, pp. 243–60. Reprinted—without the discussion, pp. 261–8— in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. (First delivered as a lecture in 1959 at Cérisy-la-Salle.) ‘La parole soufflée’. Tel Quel, no. 20, Winter 1965, pp. 41–67. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. ‘De la Grammatologie’. Critique, nos. 223–4, December 1965–January 1966, pp. 16– 42, 23–53. Reprinted with substantial modifications in De la Grammatologie/Of Grammatology. See 1967 Book entry. 1966 ‘La Phénoménologie et la clôture de la métaphysique: Introduction à la pensée de Husserl’. Epoches, vol. VII, February 1966, pp. 181–9. ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’. Tel Quel, no. 26, Summer 1966, pp. 10–41. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. In addition to its availability in Writing and Difference, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ has appeared in Yale French Studies: French Freud, Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, no. 48, 1972, pp. 74–117 (in a translation by Jeffrey Mehlman), and in Freud: A Collection of

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Critical Essays, edited by Perry Meisel. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981. Both reprints omit the essay’s preface and postface. ‘Nature, culture, écriture (de Lévi-Strauss à Rousseau)’. Cahiers pour l’analyse, no. 4, September–October 1966, pp. 1–45. Reprinted in De la Grammatologie/Of Grammatology. See 1967 Book entry. ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la clôture de la representation’. Critique, vol. 22, no. 230, July 1966, pp. 595–618. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. Also available in Theatre, no. 9, Summer 1978, pp. 7–19. (Lecture delivered at the Antonin Artaud colloquium, International Festival of University Theatre, Parma, April 1966.) ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’. L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. An English translation of a revised version of this paper, by Richard Macksey, first appeared in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man as ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, pp. 247–72. When published in paperback format in 1972, the book’s title and subtitle were reversed, thus becoming The Structuralist Controversy. In Alan Bass’s translation, the text has been anthologized in Debating Texts: A Reader in 20th Century Literary Theory and Method. Edited by Rick Rylance. University of Toronto Press, 1987; in England, Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1987. It is also to be found in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology. Edited by Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. New York: Stony Brook, 1987. Excerpts, ‘reorganized and renumbered from the original’ (sic), in the Macksey translation, have been published in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. Edited by K.M.Newton. London: Macmillan, 1988. (Lecture delivered on October 21, 1966 at the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man, held October 18–21 at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Derrida participates in the discussion following the presentation of his paper (The Structuralist Controversy, pp. 265–72), and contributes to the discussions occasioned by Roland Barthes’s ‘To Write: An Intransitive Verb?’ (ibid., pp. 155–6) and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s ‘Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation’ (ibid., p. 294).) 1967 ‘De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hégélianisme sans reserve’. L’Arc: Georges Bataille, no. 32, May 1967, pp. 24–44. Reprinted in L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry.‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ appears in an English translation by Alan Bass in Semiotext(e), vol. 2, no. 2, 1976, pp. 25–55. ‘La Forme et le vouloir-dire: Note sur la phénoménologie du langage’. Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 21, no. 81, September 1967, pp. 277–99. Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. ‘Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language’ is also available, in a translation by David B.Allison, in Speech and Phenomena. See 1967 Book entry. ‘La Linguistique de Rousseau’. Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 21, no. 82, 1967, pp. 443–62. Reprinted with slight alterations—the title is changed to ‘Le Cercle linguistique de Genève’—in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972

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Book entry. Also available in Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, Summer 1982, pp. 675–91. (Lecture given at the colloquium on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held in London, February 3– 4, 1967.) ‘Implications: Entretien avec Henri Ronse’. Les Lettres Françaises, no. 1211, December 6–12, 1967, pp. 6–14. Reprinted in Positions. See 1972 Book entry. ‘L’ellipse’. L’écriture et la différence/Writing and Difference. See 1967 Book entry. 1968 ‘Le puits et la pyramide: Introduction à la sémiologie de Hegel’. Hegel et la pensée moderne. Editor: Jacques d’Hondt. Paris: Presses Universit-aires de France, 1970, pp. 27–83. Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie/ Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. A version of this essay, retitled ‘Speech and Writing According to Hegel’, appeared in an English translation by Alphonso Lingis in Man and World, 1–2, 1978, pp. 107–30. No acknowledgement is made by the translator that his text is an abridgement, omitting the final section (see Bass, Margins, pp. 96–108) and reproducing only two of Derrida’s notes. (Paper first presented at Jean Hyppolite’s seminar at the Collège de France on January 16, 1968.) ‘Ousia et Grammê: Note sur une note de Sein und Zeit’. L’endurance de la pensée: pour saluer Jean Beaufret. Editor: Marcel Jouhandeau. Paris: Plon, 1968, pp. 219–66. Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie/ Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. Also available in an English translation by Edward Casey as ‘“Ousia” and “Grammē”: A Note to a Footnote in Being and Time’, in Phenomenology in Perspective. Editor: F.Joseph Smith. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970, pp. 54–93. ‘Sémiologie et grammatologie: Entretien avec Julia Kristeva’. Information sur les sciences sociales, no. 7, June 3, 1968, pp. 135–48. Reprinted in Positions. See 1972 Book entry. The interview also appears in Essays in Semiotics: Essais de sémiotique (Approaches to Semiotics 4). Edited by Julia Kristeva, Josette Rey-Debove, and Donna Jean Unicker. Paris: The Hague and Mouton, 1971, pp. 11–27. An extract from ‘Sémiologie et grammatologie’ appears as ‘L’ecriture: grammé et différance’, in Panorama des Sciences Humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1973, p. 582. ‘Culture et écriture: la prolifération des livres et la fin du livre’. Noroit, no. 127, April 1968 and no. 130, August-September 1968. A debate with Derrida appears in issue no. 132 (November 1968) of the periodical. ‘La “Différance”’. Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, vol. lxii, no. 3, July–September 1968, pp. 73–101, and Théorie d’ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968, pp. 41– 66. Reprinted with slight alterations in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. Also available in Speech and Phenomena. See 1967 Book entry. The discussion which followed the original presentation of ‘La “Différance”’, although included in the Bulletin, is omitted from the four volumes referred to above. An English translation by David Wood, Sarah Richmond, and Malcolm Barnard can be found in Derrida and Différance; edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Coventry, University of Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985; in the United States, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, pp. 83–95. The participants in the discussion are Derrida, G.Comtesse, Lucien Goldmann, J.Hersh, P.Kaufmann, Brice Parain, A.Philonenko, and Jean Wahl. In Alan Bass’s translation, ‘Différance’ is included in Deconstruction in Context, edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago

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Press, 1986. (‘La “Différance”’ was first delivered as a lecture at a meeting of the Société française de philosophie, in the Amphithéâtre Michelet on January 27, 1968.) ‘The Ends of Man’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 30, no. 1, 1969, pp. 31–57. English translation by Edouard Morot-Sir, Wesley C.Puisol, Hubert L.Dreyfus, and Barbara Reid of ‘Les fins de l’homme’. Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. Also appears in an English translation in After Philosophy, edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas MaCarthy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. (Lecture given at a French-American philosophers’ conference, held October 18–19, 1968, at the State University of New York Conference Center on ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’.) ‘La pharmacie de Platon’. Tel Quel, nos. 32–33, Winter 1968–Spring 1969, pp. 3–48, 18–59. Reprinted in La Dissémination/Dissemination. See 1972 Book entry. 1969 ‘La Dissémination’. Critique, vol. 25, nos. 261–2, February–March 1969, pp. 99–139, 215–49. Reprinted in La Dissémination/Dissemination. See 1972 Book entry. 1970 ‘D’un texte à l’écart’. Les Temps Modernes, vol. 25, no. 284, March 1970, pp. 1546–52. ‘La double séance’. Tel Quel, nos. 41–2, Spring–Summer 1970, pp. 3–43, 3–45. Reprinted in La Dissémination/Dissemination. See 1972 Book entry. 1971 ‘La mythologie blanche (la métaphore dans le texte philosophique)’. Poétique, no. 5, 1971, pp. 1–52. Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie/ Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. Also available in another English translation by F.C.T.Moore as ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in New Literary History, vol. 6, no. 1, Autumn 1974, pp. 5–74. ‘Signature evénement contexte’. La Communication II, Actes du XVe Congrès de l’Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française. Université de Montreal, Montreal: Editions Montmorency, 1973, pp. 49–76. Reprinted—without the discussion, pp. 393–431—in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. ‘Signature Event Context’ is also available in an English translation by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, no. 1, 1977, pp. 172–97; and reprinted in Limited Inc, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988. See 1977 and 1988 Book entries. Participants in the round-table discussion, presided over by René Schaerer, are Derrida, Ernest Joos, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Blume, Gilles Lane, Yvon Gauthier, Claude Pannccio, Clément Légairé, Roger Marcotte, Thomas De Koninck, Henry Declève, and Jeanne Parain-Vial. (A communication delivered to the Congrès international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française, in Montrêal, August 1971. The theme of the colloquium was ‘Communication’.) ‘Positions: Entretien avec Jean-Louis Houdebine et Guy Scarpetta’. Promesse, nos. 30–1, Autumn–Winter 1971, pp. 5–62. Reprinted in Positions. See 1972 Book entry. First appeared in an English translation in Diacritics, vols. 2 & 3, Winter 1972–Spring 1973, pp. 35–43, 33–59. (The interview was conducted on June 17, 1971, with ‘certain complements’ added to the transcription. See Bass, Positions, p. 38.

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‘Les sources de Valéry: Qual, Quelle’. MLN, vol. 87, no. 4, May 1972, pp. 563–99. Reprinted as ‘Qual, Quelle: Les sources de Valéry’ in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. (Lecture given on November 6, 1971 at the Johns Hopkins University on the centenary of Paul Valéry’s birth.) ‘Le supplément de copule: La philosophie devant la linguistique’. Langages, no. 24, December 1971, pp. 14–39. Reprinted in Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. In addition to the translation by Alan Bass, two further versions of ‘The Supplement of Copula’ have appeared in English. As ‘The Copula Supplement’, translated by David B.Allison, the essay is published in Dialogues in Phenomenology, edited by Don Ihde and Richard M.Zaner, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 7–48. And as ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics’, it appeared in The Georgia Review, vol. 30, Fall 1976, pp. 527–64, in a translation by James Creech and Josué V.Harari. This translation was used when the essay formed part of the collection Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, edited and with an Introduction by Josué V.Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979; in England, London: Methuen, 1980, pp. 82–120. 1972 ‘Tympan’. Marges de la philosophie/Margins of Philosophy. See 1972 Book entry. ‘La question du style’. Nietzsche aujourd’hur? I: Intensités. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973, pp. 235–87. Reprinted in an altered formamong the changes made, Derrida’s replies to the series of questions addressed to him are not included—in Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche/ Spurs (Éperons): Nietzsche’s Styles. See 1976 Book entry. Selections from this essay were published in an English translation by Ruben Berezdivin in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David B. Allison. New York: Dell Publishing, 1977, pp. 176–89. An excerpt from Éperons appeared as ‘Becoming Woman’, translated by Barbara Harlow, in Semiotext(e), vol. 3, no. 1, 1978. (‘La question du style’ was first presented at a colloquium on Nietzsche, held at Cérisy-la-Salle in July 1972.) ‘Jacques Derrida: Avoir l’oreille de la philosophie’. La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 152, November 16–30, 1972, pp. 13–16. Lucette Finas’s interview with Derrida is reprinted in Ecarts: quatre essais à propos Jacques Derrida. Lucette Finas, Sarah Kofman, Roger Laporte, Jean-Michel Rey. Paris: Fayard, 1973, pp. 303–12. ‘Hors Livre’. La Dissémination/Dissemination. See 1972 Book entry. ‘Edmond Jabès aujourd’hui’. Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 31, Winter 1972–3, p. 56. Derrida reconstitutes his first impressions of encountering Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions. 1973 ‘Glas’. L’Arc: Jacques Derrida, no. 54, 1973, pp. 4–15. Excerpts appeared in La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 172, 1973, pp. 23–36. Reprinted in Glas. See 1974 Book entry. ‘L’Archéologie du frivole’. Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines. Editor: Charles Porset. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1975, pp. 9–95. Reprinted as L’Archéologie du frivole: Lire Condillac/The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. See 1976 Book entry.

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1974 ‘Mallarmé’. Tableau de la littéraire française: De Madame Staël à Rimbaud, vol. 3. Edited by Dominique Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1974, pp. 368–79. ‘Le Parergon’. Digraphe, no. 2, 1974, pp. 21–57. This essay was expanded considerably when published in La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting. See 1978 Book entry. An abbreviated version of ‘The Parergon’ appeared in an English translation by Craig Owens in October, no. 9, 1979, pp. 3–40. ‘Le sens de la coupure pure (Le parergon II)’. Digraphe, no. 3, 1974, pp. 5–31. Revised for publication in La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting. See 1978 Book entry. 1975 ‘Economimesis’. Mimesis des articulations. Derrida, Sylviane Agacinski, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Pautrat. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975, pp. 55–93. ‘Economimesis’ is published in an English translation by Richard Klein in Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, Summer 1981, pp. 3–25. ‘Le facteur de la vérité’. Poétique, no. 21, 1975, pp. 96–147. Revised for publication in La Carte postale/The Post Card. See 1980 Book entry. Translated as ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ by Marie-Rose Logan, Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, and Moshe Ron, the essay was published in Yale French Studies. Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy, no. 52, 1975, pp. 31–113. It has also been made available in English in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, in Alan Bass’s translation. Edited by John P.Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. (‘Le facteur de la vérité’ was first delivered as a lecture at Johns Hopkins University in November 1971.) ‘+R (par dessus le marché)’. Derrière le miroir, no. 214, May 1975. Paris: Editions Maeght, 1975, pp. 1–23. Revised for publication in La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting. See 1978 Book entry. An extract from ‘+R’, consisting of material from the essay’s final section on Adami’s drawing Ritratto di Walter Benjamin, appears in La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 211, June 15, 1975, pp. 14–16. ‘+R’ is also to be found in Adami. Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. This is the catalogue produced in conjunction with the retrospective of Valerio Adami’s work, held in Paris between December 4 and February 10, 1985–6. ‘Pour la philosophie’. La Nouvelle Critique, no. 84, May 1975, pp. 25–9 (a letter by Derrida appears in the subsequent issue of the journal p. 73). Altered to ‘Réponses à la Nouvelle Critique’ when published in Qui a peur de la philosophie? Groupe de Recherches sur l’Enseignement Philosophique (GREPH). Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977, pp. 451–8. ‘Signéponge’. Francis Ponge inventeur et classique, Colloque de Cérisy. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977, pp. 115–44. Without the discussion, ‘Signéponge’ was expanded and published as Signéponge/ Signsponge. See 1984 Book entry. (Part of ‘Signéponge’ was originally delivered as a lecture at the colloquim on Francis Ponge, held at Cérisy-la-Salle in July 1975.) ‘A-coup’. Digraphe, no. 6, October 1975, pp. 152–3. This text is Derrida’s response to questions on the avant-garde.

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‘La philosophie et ses classes’. Qui a peur de la philosophie? (GREPH). Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977, pp. 445–50. An extract from this paper was published as ‘La philosophie refoulée’ in Le Monde de l’Education, no. 4, 1975, pp. 14–15. 1976 ‘Entre crochets: Entretien avec Jacques Derrida, première partie’. Digraphe, no. 8, April 1976, pp. 97–114. English translation by Peggy Kamuf forthcoming in Negotiations: Writings, edited by Deborah Esch and Thomas Keenan. University of Minnesota Press. The interview with Derrida took place during September–October, 1975. ‘Pas I’. Gramma: Lire Blanchot, nos. 3–4, 1976, pp. 111–215. Reprinted in Parages. See 1986 Book entry. An English translation by John P. Leavey, Jr. is in preparation. ‘Signéponge’. Digraphe, no. 8, April 1976, pp. 17–39. A further fragment of a work then in progress—see 1975 entry in Texts—and eventually published as Signéponge/Signsponge. See 1984 Book entry. ‘Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignant’. Politiques de la philosophie: Châtelet, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Serres. Edited by Dominique Grisoni. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1976, pp. 60–89. English translation forthcoming in Institutions of Philosophy, edited by Deborah Esch and Thomas Keenan. Harvard University Press. ‘Où sont les chasseurs de sorcières?’ Le Monde, July 1, 1976, p. 9. ‘Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’. Foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonomie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976, pp. 7–73. English translation by Nicholas Rand, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. XI– XLVIII. The Foreword by Derrida is translated by Barbara Johnson as ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, and first appeared in her translation in The Georgia Review, vol. 31, no. 1, Spring 1977, pp. 64–116. Letter by Derrida in Archives des Lettres Modernes 1976 (2), no. 160. 1977 ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond’. Digraphe, no. 11, March 1977, pp. 83–121. This is the second and concluding part of an interview with Derrida. The first part is ‘Entre crochets’. See 1976 entry in Texts. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see above). ‘L’âge de Hegel’. Qui a peur de la philosophie? (GREPH). Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977, pp. 73–107. ‘The Age of Hegel’ is available in an English translation by Susan Winnett, in Glyph Textual Studies 1 (new series), Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy, Literature, Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. 3–35. ‘Scribble (pouvoir/écrire)’. Preface to book IV, section 4 of the second edition of Bishop William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated, Essai sur les hiéroglyphes des Egyptiens. Paris: Collection Palimpseste, Aubier-Flammarion, 1977, pp. 7–43. In a truncated form—it lacks the preliminary section—the essay has been published in an English translation by Cary Plotkin as ‘Scribble (writing-power)’, in Yale French Studies, no. 58, 1979, pp. 116–47. Reprinted in La Revue des Lettres modernes, 1988. ‘Limited Inc abc…’ Glyph 2: Johns Hopkins University Press (Textual Studies), 1977, pp. 162–254. English translation by Samuel Weber. See 1977 and 1988 Book entries. ‘Prière d’insérer’. Mathieu Bénézet: Dits et récits du mortel. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.

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1978 ‘Table ronde avec le GREPH: Qui a peur de la philosophie?’ Noroit, nos. 224–7, January—April 1978. ‘Le retrait de la métaphore’. Poésie, no. 7, 1978, pp. 103–26. Reprinted in Analecta Husserliana, Pays-Bas, vol. 14, 1983, pp. 273–300, and in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. An English translation, ‘The Retrait of metaphor’, is available in Enclitic, vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 1978, pp. 5–33. The translation is by Frieda Gasdner, Biodun Iginla, Richard Madden, and William West. (Lecture originally presented at the University of Geneva on June 1, 1978, at a colloquium on ‘Philosophy and Metaphor’.) ‘Legs de Freud’. Etudes freudiennes, ‘Présence de Nicolas Abraham’, nos. 13–14, April 1978 pp. 87–125. Paris: Editions Denoël. Incorporated as chapter 2 of ‘To Speculate—on “Freud”’ in La Carte postale/The Post Card. See 1980 Book entry. A corruption of ‘Freud’s Legacy’ was published as ‘Coming Into One’s Own’ (in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, edited by Geoffrey Hartman, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 114–48) in a translation by James Hulbert. The mutilation of ‘Freud’s Legacy’ is attributed by the translator to ‘limitations of space’, and he records the following: ‘This section has been abridged by more than one third; cuts have been made in almost every paragraph, and many paragraphs have been omitted altogether…. I have made the cuts, occasionally juggled sentences, divided the text into sections, and supplied all the titles, as part of this effort of translation.’ (‘Legs de Freud’ is an ‘Extract of a seminar held in 1975 at l’Ecole normale supérieure under the heading Life death’ (Derrida).) ‘Cartouches.’ Gérard Titus-Carmel: The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin. This is the catalogue that accompanied the Titus-Carmel exhibition, held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Pompidou Centre, between March 1 and April 10, 1978. A revised version of ‘Cartouches’ was published in La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting. See 1978 Book entry. ‘Le Colossal’. Erres, no. 6–7, 1978. This is the fourth section of ‘Le Parergon’. See La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting, in 1978 Book entry. ‘Restitutions de la vérité en pointure’. Macula, no. 3–4, September 1978. This is the first part of the essay which was enlarged for inclusion in La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting. See 1978 Book entry. A shortened version of this text was translated by John P.Leavey, Jr. as ‘Restitutions of Truth to Size’, in Research in Phenomenology, vol. 8, 1978, pp. 1–44. Leavey’s abridgement reproduces approximately (the first) half of the integral text. (An excerpt from ‘Restitutions’ was delivered at Columbia University, in a seminar on Theory of Literature, on October 6, 1977.) ‘Du Tout’. Cahiers Confrontation I, 1978, pp. 63–77. Reprinted in La Carte postale/The Post Card. See 1980 Book entry. (‘Du Tout’ is Derrida’s response to questions addressed to him by René Major, on November 21, 1977.) ‘Passe-Partout’. La Vérité en peinture/The Truth in Painting. See 1978 Book entry. 1979 ‘Philosophie des Etats Généraux’. Etats Généraux de la philosophie. GREPH. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. Available also in Liberation, June 20, 1979, pp. 14–15. English translation forthcoming in Institutions of Philosophy (see 1976 Text entry ‘Où commence…’). (This communication was the principal address delivered by Derrida, as

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one of the five-member committee formed to examine the diminishing role of philosophy in French education. The debate took place at the Sorbonne on June 16–17, 1979.) ‘Me—Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to the Translation of “The Shell and the Kernel” by Nicolas Abraham’. Diacritics, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 1979, pp. 4–12. English translation by Richard Klein. ‘Moi—la psychanalyse’ was published in France in 1982, in Cahiers Confrontation 8, pp. 5–15. It has also been published in Méta, vol. 27, no. 1, March 1982, and is reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. ‘Illustrer, dit-il…’ Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne. Ateliers Aujourd-hui, no. 17, 1979. ‘Ce qui reste à force de musique’. Digraphe, nos. 18–19, April 1979, pp. 165–74. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. ‘Living On—Border Lines’. Deconstruction and Criticism. Derrida, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey H.Hartman, and J.Hillis Miller. New York: Seabury Press, 1979; in England, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 75–176. As ‘Survivre’, the essay is to be found in Parages. See 1986 Book entry. 1980 ‘Ocelle comme pas un’. Preface to L’enfant au chien-assis. Jos Joliet. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1980. ‘Qui a peur de la philosophie?’ Esprit, no. 38, February 1980, pp. 52–75. Round-table discussion with Derrida, Roland Brunet, Guy Coq, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Olivier Mongin. Response by Derrida to an inquiry from Revue Poésie, no. 6: Ecrit à Nice. May 1980. ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici’. Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Francis Laruelle. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980, pp. 21–60. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. An English translation by Ruben Berezdivin, ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, is to appear in Re-Reading Levinas, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: Routledge, 1990. ‘The Law of Genre’. Glyph 7: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1980, pp. 176–232. English translation by Avital Ronell. Reprinted in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1980, pp. 55–81, and in On Narrative, edited by W.J.T.Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. ‘La loi du genre’ is available in Parages. See 1986 Book entry. (‘La loi du genre’ was first delivered as a lecture in July 1979 at the University of Strasbourg, and later at a symposium on ‘Narrative: the Illusion of Sequence’, held at the University of Chicago, October 26–8, 1979.) ‘An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. The Literary Review, April 18–May 1, 1980, pp. 21–2. Derrida is interviewed by James Kearns and Ken Newton during his lecture visit to Scotland. His subject: ‘Should Philosophy be Taught in Schools?’ ‘Envoi’. Actes du XVIIIe congrès des sociétés de philosophie de langue française (Strasbourg, July 1980). Paris: Librarie J.Vrin, 1980, pp. 5–30. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. With some excisions, the essay appears in an English translation by Peter and Mary Ann Caws as ‘Sending: On Representation’, in Social Research, vol. 49, no. 2, Summer 1982, pp. 294–326. ‘Envois’. La Carte postale/The Post Card. See 1980 Book entry. 1981

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‘D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie’. Les fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida. Edited by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981, pp. 445–79. This essay, with slight modifications, was published as a book two years later. See 1983 Book entry. As ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, the essay is available in an English translation by John P.Leavey, Jr., in Semeia, no. 23, 1982, pp. 63–97. In accordance with the revisions made by Derrida for its republication in 1983, Leavey revised his earlier translation for its inclusion in The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1984, pp. 3–37. The exchanges between Derrida and commentators on his work, while included in Les fins de l’homme, have not been reproduced in the Leavey texts. These include a discussion between Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard (pp. 311–13), and Derrida’s response (pp. 675–6) to Jean-Marie Wipf’s ‘La pratique de enseignement et la figure de la communication’. A further intervention of Derrida’s, responding to Sarah Kofman’s paper, ‘Ça cloche’, is available in an English translation by Caren Kaplan, in Continental Philosophy II: Derrida and Deconstruction, edited by Hugh J. Silverman. London and New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 133–8. (‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’ was originally presented at a colloquium occasioned by Derrida’s work, held at Cérisy-laSalle between July 23 and August 2, 1980.) Letter by Derrida to John P.Leavey, Jr. Semeia, no. 23, 1982, pp. 61–2. Derrida’s letter (dated January 2, 1981) is a response to the request to submit a contribution to be included in that issue of the journal. See above. ‘Titre (à préciser)’. Nuova Corrente, January–April, 1981, pp. 7–32. Reprinted in Parages. See 1986 Book entry. As ‘Title (to be specified)’, this text is available in an English translation by Tom Conley, in SubStance, no. 31, 1981, pp. 5–22. (‘Titre (à préciser)’ was first delivered as a lecture on March 14, 1979 at Saint Louis College in Brussels.) ‘Géopsychanalyse—et “the rest of the world”’. Géopsychanalyse les souterains de l’institution. Paris, 1981. Reprinted in Psyche: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see 1976 Text entry ‘Entre crochets’). ‘Une idée de Flaubert: la lettre de Platon’. Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, nos. 4–5, July–October, 1981, pp. 658–76. Reprinted in Cahiers Confrontation, no. 12, 1984, and in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. This essay is available in an English translation by Peter Starr as ‘An Idea of Flaubert: “Plato’s Letter”’, in MLN, vol. 99, September 1984, pp. 748–68. (‘Une idée de Flaubert’ was a communication delivered at an international colloquium organized by the Société d’Histoire littéraire de la France, to commemorate the centenary of Flaubert’s death, and held in Paris, November 28–9, 1980.) ‘Ex-abrupto’. Avant-Guerre, no. 2, 1981. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. ‘Télépathie.’ Furor 2, February 1981, pp. 5–41. Reprinted in Cahiers Confrontation, no. 10, Autumn 1983, pp. 201–30, and in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. ‘Telepathy’ has been translated into English by Nicholas Royle, in The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 10, nos. 1 & 2, 1988, pp. 3–41. ‘Les morts de Roland Barthes’. Poétique, no. 47, September 1981, pp. 269–92. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. An English translation,

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‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass has been published in Continental Philosophy I: Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since MerleauPonty. Edited by Hugh J.Silverman. New York and London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 259– 97. 1982 ‘Coup d’envoi’. Extraits d’un rapport pour le Collège International de Philosophie. Paris: Collège International de Philosophie, 1982. English translation to appear in Institutions of Philosophy (see 1976 Text entry ‘Où commence…’). ‘Choreographies’, Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 2, Summer 1982, pp. 66–76. Also available in the University of Nebraska Press reprint, The Ear of the Other (pp. 163–85). See 1982 Book entry. (The product of an exchange of letters between Derrida and Christie V.McDonald during the autumn of 1981. The translation is by McDonald.) ‘Signsponge 2’. The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 5, nos. 1 & 2, 1982, pp. 96–101. English translation by Geoff Bennington and Richard Rand. See 1984 Book entry. Letter written by Derrida to Sub-Stance, no. 35, 1982, p. 2, commending the journal for its work. The letter is dated June 15, 1982. Affranchissement du transfert et de la lettre. Edited by René Major. Paris: Editions Confrontation, 1982. The proceedings of a colloquium on La Carte postale, presided over by René Major, held in Paris, April 4–5, 1981, which includes Derrida’s responses to the discussion of his book. ‘Feu la cendre’. Anima 5, December 1982, pp. 47–99. See 1984 Book entry. 1983 ‘Mes chances, Au rendez-vous de quelques stéréophonies épicuriennes’. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 45e Jaargang, Number 1, 1983, pp. 3–40. As ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’, the essay is available in an English translation by Irene E. Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature. Edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 1–32. Also available in Cahiers Confrontation, no. 19, 1988. (This is a revised version of a text Derrida delivered as the Edith Weigert Lecture, sponsored by the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities, at the Washington School of Psychiatry on October 15, 1982.) ‘Ce que j’aurais dit…’ Création et Développement. Rencontres intern-ationales de la Sorbonne, February 12–13, 1983. Paris: Ministère de la Culture. Republished in Le Complexe de Léonard ou la Société de Création. Actes de la Rencontre Internationale de la Sorbonne. Paris: Les Editions de Nouvel Observateur/J.C.Lattès, 1984. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see 1976 Text entry ‘Entre crochets’). Derrida contributes to the Discussion (pp. 155–67) occasioned by Thomas Fries’s paper ‘Critical Relation: Peter Szondi’s Studies on Célan’. Boundary 2, vol. XI, no. 3, Spring 1983. Special issue on the criticism of Peter Szondi; edited by Michael Hays. James G.Hughes is responsible for the English translation of Derrida’s interventions. The French text is available in Cahiers de Philologie, vol. 5, 1985, pp. 237–53. The French volume includes additional remarks of Derrida’s (pp. 255–64) which the American journal does not reproduce. (The colloquium on the work of Peter Szondi was held in Paris, June 21–3, 1979.)

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‘Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique’. Martin Heidegger. Edited by Michael Haar. Paris: Les Cahiers de l’Herne, 1983, pp. 419–30. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. This essay is available in an uncredited (Ruben Berezdivin) English translation as ‘Geschlecht: sexual difference, ontological difference’, in Research in Phenomenology, vol. XIII, 1983, pp. 65–83. ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’. Philosophy in France Today. Edited by Alan Montefiore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 34–50. English translation by Kathleen McLaughlin. (‘This is the text of a presentation which was given, according to custom, at the opening of a thesis defence (based on published works), 2 June 1980 at the Sorbonne.’) ‘Economies de la crise’. La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 33c, August 1983, p. 4. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see 1976 Text entry ‘Entre crochets’). ‘Tout redéfinir (non signé)’. Le Matin, July 28, 1983. This text is part of the series ‘Le silence des Intellectuels face au pouvoir’. ‘Derrida L’Insoumis’. Le Nouvel Observateur, September 9, 1983, pp. 62–7. The interview with Derrida was conducted by Catherine David in the spring of 1983, and received ‘extensive emendations’ prior to its publication in the Observateur. An English translation, prepared by the members of the Contemporary Texts Seminar of the SUNYStony Brook and the Paris-IV Programme in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, is available in Derrida and Différance; edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Coventry, University of Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985; in the United States, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, pp. 71–82. ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’. Diacritics, vol. 13, no. 3, Fall 1983, pp. 3–20. English translation by Catherine Porter and Edward P.Morris of ‘Les pupilles de l’Université, Le principe de raison et l’idée de l’Université’. Reprinted in a slightly altered form in Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal, no. 10, Spring 1984, pp. 5–45. Also available in Cahiers du Collège International de Philosophie, no. 2, July 1986, pp. 7–34. (‘The Principle of Reason’ was delivered as a lecture in 1983 at the universities of Cornell and Frankfurt.) ‘La langue et le discours de la méthode’. Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage, no. 3 (Grenoble: Université des Sciences Sociales de Grenoble). Paris: Librarie J.Vrin, 1983, pp. 35–51. Derrida interviewed by Christian Descamps. Entretiens avec ‘Le Monde’: I. Philosophies. Paris: Editions La Découverte and Le Monde, 1984. ‘Le dernier mot du racisme’. Art contre/against Apartheid. Les artistes du monde contre l’apartheid/Artists of the World against Apartheid. This text appeared in the bilingual—French and English—catalogue that accompanied the exhibition which opened in Paris in November 1983. A revised version of ‘Racism’s Last Word’, translated by Peggy Kamuf, is available in Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, 1985, pp. 290–9. It has been reprinted in Race, Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. It has also been included in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. An extract appeared in L’événement du jeudi, August 22–8, 1985. ‘Une conversation avec Jacques Derrida’. Fruits, no. 1, December 1983, pp. 75–91. Derrida is in conversation with Anne Berger; the meeting took place on September 27 of that year.

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1984 ‘Devant la loi’. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 16, Supplement to Philosophy, 1983: ‘Philosophy and Literature’. Edited by A.Phillips Griffiths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 173–88. The Editor states: ‘“Devant la loi” was first read in an English translation prepared by Dr. Paul Foulkes. Having done so, the author felt that Dr. Foulkes’ translation was too English for publication. The article is therefore published in the original French, edited by Dr. Foulkes, with some cuts imposed by limitations of space.’ An incomplete English translation of ‘Devant la Loi’ by Avital Ronell is to be found in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings. Edited by Alan Udoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 128–49. Published in France as ‘Prejuges: Devant la loi’, in La Faculté de juger. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985, pp. 87–139. (‘Devant la loi’ was delivered as a lecture on February 12, 1982, at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (London), under the title: ‘Philosophy and Literature: Before the Law’. It was also presented at Cérisy-la-Salle in July–August of that year.) ‘Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida’. subjects/ objects, Spring 1984, pp. 5–19. Reprinted in Men in Feminism. Edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. New York and London: Methuen, 1987, pp. 189–203. (This text is a ‘modified transcript of a seminar given by the Pembroke Center for teaching and research on women with guest speaker Jacques Derrida.’) ‘Deconstruction and the Other’. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 105–26. (The dialogue between Derrida and Kearney was recorded in Paris in 1981.) ‘Mochlos ou le conflit des facultés’. Philosophie, no. 2, April 1984, pp. 21–53. An English translation, ‘The Conflict of the Faculties’, will be appearing in Our Academic Contract: The Conflict of the Faculties in America, edited by Richard Rand. (Paper originally delivered at a conference at Columbia University on April 17, 1980.) ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missives, seven missiles)’. Diacritics, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer 1984, pp. 20–31. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis are responsible for the translation of No Apocalypse, Not Now (à toute vitesse, sept missives, sept missiles)’. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. (‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ was delivered at a colloquium in April 1984 at Cornell University.) ‘Bonnes volontés de puissance (une réponse à Hans-Georg Gadamer)’. Herméneutique et néo-structuralisme: Derrida, Gadamer, Searle. Avantpropos de Manfred Frank. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. 38, no. 151, facsimile 4, pp. 341–3. Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Translated into English by Diane P.Michelfelder and Richard E.Palmer as ‘Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer’, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, edited by Michelfelder and Palmer. New York: State University of New York, 1989, pp. 52–4. ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’. Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 145–58. The English translation, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, is by Geoff Bennington. This text is also available in Les Cahiers de L’Herne, 50, 1985, and in Ulysse gramophone.

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See 1987 Book entry. (‘Deux mots pour Joyce’ is a transcription of a ‘more or less extemporary talk given at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, on November 15, 1982.’) ‘Les événements? quels événements?’ 1964–1984: Les Grands Tournants. Le Nouvel Observateur. Special anniversary issue, no. 1045, p. 83. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see 1976 Text entry ‘Entre crochets’). ‘Languages and Institutions of Philosophy’. RSSI (Recherches Sémiotiques—Semiotic Inquiry, vol. 4, no. 2, 1984, pp. 91–154. This is a revised version of the four lectures delivered by Derrida at the University of Toronto between May 31 and June 25, 1984; see ‘Les langages et les institutions de la philosophie’ in 1985 entry in Texts. These four texts have been translated into English by Sylvia Söderlind, Rebecca Comay, Barbara Havercroft, and Joseph Adamson, with revisions made by Gabriel Moyal and David Savan. ‘Les philosophes et la parole. Passage du témoin de François Georges à Jacques Derrida’. Le Monde, October 21–2, 1984, p. XI. ‘Voice II…’ Boundary 2, vol. XII, no. 2, Winter 1984, pp. 76–93. Derrida’s text— available in French and English—is a response to a letter addressed to him by Verena Andermatt Conley, published in the same issue of the journal. The translation is by Conley. ‘Artists, Philosophers and Institutions: A Talk with Jacques Derrida’. Rampike, vol. 3, no. 3 and vol. 4, no. 1, 1984–5, pp. 34–6. (Extract from a seminar Derrida gave at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto, at a conference on semiotics in the summer of 1984.) 1985 Interventions by Derrida occasioned by the papers ‘La société scientifique, la technologie et la culture’ (p. 34); ‘L’avenir de la démocratie de masse’ (p. 76); ‘Cooperation francojaponaise, gouvernements et secteur privé’ (p. 135), and ‘Discours de clôture’ (p. 141). L’Avenir de la Culture. Sommet Culturel Franco-Japonais, May 4–9, 1984. Ministère de la Culture/Asahi Shimbun, February 1985. Derrida contributes to the ‘Ouvrage publié à l’occasion de la manifestation “Les Immatériaux”’ with ‘Epreuves d’écriture’. Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. ‘Le langage’. Douze leçons de philosophie. Presentation de Christian Delacampagne. Paris: Editions de La Découverte et Journal Le Monde, 1985, pp. 14–26. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see 1976 Text entry ‘Entre crochets’). ‘Forcener le subjectile’. Le Matin, July 26, 1985. This fragment was enlarged when published in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin’s Antonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1986, pp. 55–108. An English translation by Mary Ann Caws is in preparation. Marie-Françoise Plissart, Droit de regards. Avec une lecture de Jacques Derrida. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985. Derrida’s essay has been translated by David Wills as ‘Right of Inspection’, and is to be found in Art & Text, no. 32, Autumn 1989, pp. 19–97. In its original appearance, Derrida’s text followed Plissart’s photographs; this arrangement has not been observed in the published translation, neither have all the photographs been reproduced. ‘Des Tours de Babel’. Difference in Translation. Edited by Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 165–248. This volume offers a bilingual—English

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and French—presentation of this essay, with Graham being responsible for the English translation. ‘Des Tours de Babel’ is also available in L’Art des confins (sur Walter Benjamin): Mélanges offerts à Maurice de Gandillac. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985. It has also been included in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. (‘Des Tours de Babel’ was originally presented as a conference paper in October 1980 at Binghampton, USA.) ‘Popularités: Du droit à la philosophie du droit’. Preface to Les Sauvages dans le cité: Auto-émandpation de peuple et instruction des prolétaires au XIXe siècle. Paris: Champ Vallon, 1985, pp. 12–19. English translation forthcoming in Institutions of Philosophy (see 1976 Text entry ‘Où commence…’). ‘Théologie de la traduction’. Qu’est-ce-que Dieu? Philosophie/Théologie. Hommage à l’abbé Daniel Coppieters de Gibson. Bruxelles: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1985, pp. 165–84. Also available in Texte, no. 4. See below. ‘Les Langages et les institutions de la philosophie’. Texte: Revue de Critique et de Théorie Littéraire, no. 4: Traduction/Textuality—Text/Translatability, 1985, pp. 9–41. ‘Les Langages…’ consists of two texts: ‘Chaire vacante: censure, maîtrise et magistralité’ and ‘Théologie de la traduction’ (see above). These texts will be published in Institutions of Philosophy (see 1976 Text entry ‘Où commence…’). (‘Les Langages…’ was the title for a series of four lectures given by Derrida at the Fifth International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies at the University of Toronto, which took place between May 31 and June 25, 1984. See also text in Rampike (entry in 1984 Texts).) ‘Ulysse gramophone’. Genèse de Babel. Edited by Claude Jacquet. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1985. Collected with ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’ (see 1984 entry in Texts) in Ulysse gramophone. See 1987 Book entry. As ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce’, the essay has been translated by Tina Kendall (and revised by Shari Benstock), in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Edited by Bernard Benstock. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988, pp. 27–75. (‘Ulysse gramophone’ was first deliv-ered on June 12, 1984 at an international symposium on James Joyce, held in Frankfurt.) ‘Pas la moindre influence…(Réponse à la Cinématheque de Toulouse)’. L’effet Godard, edited by Carole and Jean-Paul Gorce. Toulouse: Editions Milan, 1985 (and 1989). ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’. Derrida and Différance. Edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi. Coventry, University of Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985; in the United States, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, pp. 1–5. The English translation of ‘Lettre à un ami japonais’ is by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin. It is also available in Le Promeneur, vol. XLII, October 1985, pp. 2–4, and in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. The letter is dated July 10, 1983. ‘In Memoriam’. For Paul de Man. Yale French Studies, no. 69, 1985, pp. 323–6. English translation by Kevin Newmark. Available in the French edition of Mémoires (see 1986 entry in Books), and in the expanded, revised edition, Mémoires for Paul de Man (1989). (A commemorative address delivered by Derrida at the Memorial Service for Paul de Man, held at the Yale University Art Gallery on January 18, 1984.) ‘Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Critical Exchange, no. 17, Winter 1985, pp. 1–33. Derrida is interviewed at the University of Miami in April 1984 by James Creech, Peggy Kamuf, and Jane Todd. James Creech is responsible for the English translation.

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1986 ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’. Jacques Derrida in conversation with Geoff Bennington. ICA Documents, nos. 4 & 5, 1986, pp. 66–71. Reprinted in Postmodernism: ICA Documents. Edited by Lisa Appignanesi. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Derrida discusses ‘current preoccupations’, principally the Collège International de Philosophie, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), on November 29, 1985. ‘Jacques Derrida (interview)’. Art Papers (Atlanta), vol. 10, no. 1, January–February 1986, pp. 31–5. Derrida is interviewed by Jerry Cullum and Robert Cheatham. Interview with Derrida conducted by Imre Salusinszky. Southern Review, vol. 19, no. 1, March 1986, pp. 3–12. Reprinted in Criticism in Society. New York and London: Methuen, 1987, pp. 9–24. The interview with Derrida was recorded at Yale University on April 15, 1985. ‘Pardonnez-moi de vous prendre au mot’. La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 459, March 16– 31, 1986, pp. 20–1. English translation forthcoming in Negotiations (see 1976 Text entry ‘Entre crochets’). ‘Petite fuite alexandrine (vers toi)’. Monostiches, one line poems. Rassemblés en 1981 par E.Hocquart et C.Royet-Journoud. In Notes. Publiées par Raquel, no. 1. Malakoff, May 1986. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ‘Declarations of Independence’. New Political Science, no. 15, Summer 1986, pp. 7– 15. English translation by Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper of ‘Déclarations d’Indépendence’. While available in the French edition of Otobiographies (see 1982 Book entry), ‘Declarations of Independence’ was not included in the French-Canadian edition of L’oreille de l’autre, and is therefore omitted from its subsequent English translation as The Ear of the Other. (‘Declarations of Independence’ was first delivered as a lecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1976.) ‘Admiration de Nelson Mandela: ou les lois de la réflexion’. Pour Nelson Mandela. Edited by Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1986. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. An English edition of For Nelson Mandela, with additional material, was published in 1987 by Seaver Books, New York. Derrida’s essay, entitled ‘The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’, is translated by Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz, pp. 13–42. ‘But, beyond…(Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)’. Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, Autumn 1986, pp. 155–70. English translation by Peggy Kamuf. Reprinted in Race, Writing and Difference. Edited by Henry Louis Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Derrida’s letter is addressed to their ‘response’ to ‘Racism’s Last Word’ -see 1984 entry in Texts—and is dated February 6, 1986, with an April 1986 postscript. ‘Point de folie—maintenant l’architecture’. Bernard Tschumi, La Case Vide. London: Architectural Association, Folio VIII, 1986, pp. 4–20. A bilingual—French and English—presentation, with the English translation by Kate Linker. Reprinted in A A Files, no. 12 (London), 1986, and in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. Excerpts from ‘Point de folie’ have been published in the Pratt Journal of Architecture, vol. 2, 1988. Introduction to Parages, pp. 9–19. See 1986 Book entry. ‘Proverb: “He that would pun…”’. Foreword to Glassary by John P. Leavey, Jr.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, pp. 17–20.

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‘Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions’. Philosophy and Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, October 1986, pp. 246–62. English translation by Diane P.Michelfelder and Richard E.Palmer. This text, with ‘Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer’—see 1984 entry in Texts—is included in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, edited by Michelfelder and Palmer. New York: State University of New York, 1989, pp. 57–71. (‘Interpreting Signatures’ was delivered at the Goethe Institute in Paris on April 25, 1981, at a colloquium organized by Philippe Forget. Derrida’s text originally appeared in German in 1984 in Text und Interpretation (Munich), edited by Forget.) ‘L’aphorisme à contretemps’. Roméo et Juliette. Le livre. Gervais Robin d’après William Shakespeare. Paris: Papiers, Théâtre Gérard Philippe de Saint-Denis, 1986. An English translation is in preparation. ‘Les antinomies de la discipline philosophique’. Lettre préface a La grève des philosophes. Ecole et philosophie. Paris: Osiris, 1986. English translation forthcoming in Institutions of Philosophy (see 1976 Text entry ‘Où commence…’). Derrida contributes to the discussion in Pierre-Jean Labarriere’s Altérités. Paris: Osiris, 1986. 1987 ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’. Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida. Edited by John Sallis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 161–96. The English translation of ‘La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)’ is by John P.Leavey, Jr. This text is included in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. (‘Geschlecht II’ was originally presented at an international conference on ‘Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida’, held at Loyola University of Chicago on March 22–3, 1985.) ‘Pourquoi Peter Eisenman écrit de si bons livres’. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. A bilingual—English and Japanese—version, ‘Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books’, is available in Architecture and Urbanism, Extra Edition: Peter Eisenman, August 1988, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 113–24. The English translation is by Sarah Whiting. Also available in Threshold, vol. IV, Spring 1988. ‘L’Oeuvre Chorale’. Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. Une participation à Vaisseau de Pierres 2. Parc-Ville Villette. Volume conçu par I. Auricoste et H.Tonka. Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1987. ‘Nombre de oui’. Cahiers pour un temps. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. Translated as ‘A Number of Yes (Nombre de oui)’ by Brian Holmes, in Qui Parle, vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 1988, pp. 120–33. ‘Some Questions and Responses’. The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Edited by Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987, pp. 252–64. (This is a ‘minimally-edited record’ of Derrida’s replies to questions addressed to him during a conference held on July 4–6, 1986 at the University of Strathclyde, on ‘The Linguistics of Writing’.) ‘Cinquante-deux aphorismes pour un avant-propos’. Preface to a collection of papers dealing with the relationship between philosophy and architecture, published in a special

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edition of Cahiers du CCI, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987. Reprinted in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. ‘Fifty—Two Aphorisms for a Foreword’ is available in an English translation by Andrew Benjamin, in Deconstruction. Omnibus volume. Edited by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin. London: Academy Editions, 1989, pp. 66–9. ‘On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium’. Research in Phenomenology, vol. XVII, 1987, pp. 171–88. Invited to the colloquium ‘Reading Heidegger’, held at the University of Essex, May 16–18, 1986, Derrida did not read a formal paper ‘but presented some remarks on “Reading Heidegger” based on conversations of April 1986 at Yale University, with Tom Keenan, Tom Levin, Tom Pepper, and Andrzej Warminski.’ This text is an outline of those conversations, and has been prepared by David Farrell Krell. (Derrida contributes to the discussions of four of the papers collected in the volume: David Farrell Krell’s ‘Daimon Life, Nearness and Abyss: An Introduction to Za-ology’ (pp. 47–8); Françoise Dastur’s ‘Logic and Ontology: Heidegger’s “Destruction” of Logic’ (pp. 68–71); Robert Bernasconi’s ‘Descartes in the History of Being’ (pp. 95–8); and David Wood’s ‘Heidegger After Derrida’ (pp. 113–14).) ‘Chôra’. Poikilia: Etudes offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1987, pp. 265–96. ‘Désistance’. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. Available in an English translation by Christopher Fynsk as the Introduction to Philippe LacoueLabarthe’s Typography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 1–42. ‘Psyché: Inventions de l’autre’. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. An English translation of this essay, by Catherine Porter, has been published as ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, in Reading de Man Reading. Edited by Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 25–66. (‘Psyché: Invention de l’autre’ was first presented at Cornell University in April 1984.) ‘Comment ne pas parler: dénégations’. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See 1987 Book entry. ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in a translation by Ken Frieden, is to be found in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 3–70. (Paper first presented at a conference in Jerusalem in June 1986, and delivered as a lecture in the same year at Cornell University.) ‘Heidegger l’enfer des philosophes’. Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1203, November 6– 12, 1987, pp. 170–4. Derrida is responding to Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme. A letter by Derrida to Farias is published in the November 27—December 3 (1987) issue of the periodical. Both these texts are available only in the French edition of the Observateur, and not its international version. Of related interest, see below, ‘Heidegger: Derrida—Bourdieu débat’. 1988 ‘Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War’. Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, Spring 1988, pp. 590–652. English translation by Peggy Kamuf of ‘Comme le bruit de la mer au fond d’un coquillage: La guerre de Paul de Man’. See 1986 Book entry (Mémoires). Reprinted in Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism. Edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska

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Press, 1989. Also available in the expanded revised edition of Mémoires for Paul de Man (1989). Letter by Derrida to Maurice Nadeau. La Quinzaine Littéraire, no. 503, February 16– 29, 1988, p. 31. ‘De l’esprit’. Heidegger—questions ouvertes. Presentation by Eliane Escoubas. Le Cahier du Collège International de Philosophie, no. 6, March 1988, pp. 213–45. Paris: Osiris. See 1987 Book entry under this title (also 1989 entry in Texts). (The result of a colloquium on Heidegger, held in Paris, March 12–14, 1987.) ‘Heidegger: Derrida—Bourdieu débat’. Libération, ‘Livres’, March 19–20, 1988. A further contribution—see above—to the polemical debate occasioned by Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme between Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu (L’Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger). See interview with Bourdieu in Libération, March 10, 1988, pp. 6–7. ‘Les chances de la pensée’. Légende du siècle, no. 5, April 19, 1988. Derrida interviewed by Jean-Luc Nancy. Topoi, vol. 7, no. 2, 1988, pp. 113–21. English translation by Peter T.Connor. This is an abridgement of a text which is to be found in its integral form in Cahiers Confron-tation 20, 1989, pp. 91–114, where it appears as ‘‘Il faut bien manger’, ou le calcul de sujet’. ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ Poesia, vol. 1, no. 11, November 1988, pp. 5–10. Milan. Derrida’s text is a bilingual—French and Italian—presentation. An English translation by Peggy Kamuf is forthcoming in A Derrida Reader, edited by Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. ‘Ya-t-il une langue philosophique?’ Four responses. Autrement, no. 102, November 1988. pp. 30–7 Paris: Autrement Revue. ‘The Politics of Friendship’. The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXXV, no. 11, November 1988, pp. 632–45. English translation by Gabriel Motzkin. (Text presented at the American Philosophical Association symposium on Law and Society, on December 30, 1988.) Extract of a letter written by Derrida to the Editors of the Southern Humanities Review, vol. XXII, no. 1, Winter 1988, p. 4. ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’. Limited Inc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, pp. 111–60. English translation by Samuel Weber. See 1988 Book entry. Derrida’s text is a response to questions addressed to him by Gerald Graff, the Editor of the volume. 1989 ‘Liberté au présent: “La démocratie ajournée”’. Le Monde de la Révolution Française. Gazette du bicentenaire (Mensuel), no. 1, January 1989, p. 27. ‘Of Spirit’. Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 2, Winter 1989, pp. 457–74. This text has been excerpted by Arnold I.Davidson from the first five chapters of the BenningtonBowlby translation of De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question. See 1987 Book entry. ‘Jacques Derrida in Conversation with Christopher Norris’. Architectural Design, vol. 58, nos. 1 & 2, 1989, pp. 6–11. See 1988 entry in Film and Video Appearances. Also available in Deconstruction. Omnibus volume. Edited by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin. London: Academy Editions, 1989.

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‘Rhétorique de la drogue’. Autrement, no. 106, April 1989, pp. 197–214. Paris: Autrement Revue. This text is Derrida’s written reply to questions addressed to him by the editors of the periodical. ‘…Una de las virtudes mas recientes…’/‘…L’une des plus récentes vertus…’ Preface to livre de Cristina de Peretti della Rocca. Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1989. ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’. Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 4, Summer 1989, pp. 812–73. English translation by Peggy Kamuf. ‘Interpretations at War. Kant, le Juif, l’allemand’. Phénoménologie et politique. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Taminiaux. Introduction by Danielle Luries and Bernard Stevens. Brussels: Editions Ousia; Paris: J.Vrin, 1989, pp. 209–92. 1990 ‘Mémoires d’aveugle, L’auto-portrait et autres ruines’. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990. ‘Épreuves d’écriture’. Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985. Reprinted in Revue Philosophique, April–June, 1990, pp. 269–84. ‘Épreuves d’écriture’ is Derrida’s contribution to the exhibition catalogue ‘Les Immateriaux’, organised by Jean-François Lyotard, and held at the Centre Georges Pompidou between 28 March–15 July, 1985. ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’. The State of ‘Theory’: History, Art and Critical Discourse. Edited by David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 63–95. The English translation of Derrida’s essay is by Anne Tomiche. Delivered at a colloquium organised by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, in Spring 1987. Interview with Derrida, conducted by Raoul Mortley. French Philosophers in Conversation: Derrida, Irigaray, Levinas, Le Doeuff, Schneider, Serres. London: Routledge, 1990.

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TRANSLATIONS 1962 Derrida translated from German into French Edmund Husserl’s Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem, as L’Origine de la Géométrie. See 1962 Book entry. 1964 Derrida translated, with Roger Martin, from English into French W.V. Quine’s ‘The Frontiers of Logical Theory,’ as ‘Les frontières de la théorie logique’, in Perspectives sur la philosophie nord-américaine. Les Etudes philosophiques, vol. 19, no. 2, 1964. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 191–208. Derrida translated from English into French Marvin Farber’s ‘The World of Life and the Tradition of Philosophy’, as ‘Le monde-de-la vie et la tradition de la philosophie’, in Perspectives sur la philosophie nordaméricaine. Les Etudes philosophiques, vol. 19, no. 2, 1964. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 209–19.

ARCHITECTURE 1986 Derrida collaborated with Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman on La Parc de la Villette and Choral Work. Paris, France.

FILM AND VIDEO APPEARANCES 1983 Ghost Dance. Written, produced and directed by Ken McMullen. Derrida expounds the theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. 1987 Big Words…Small Worlds. Derrida is one of the participants filmed at the University of Strathclyde, during a conference held July 4–6, 1986, on ‘The Linguistics of Writing’. The programme was broadcast on Channel Four (London) on November 22, 1987. Derrida’s comments have been transcribed and published in The Linguistics of Writing. See 1987 entry in Texts. 1988 Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in Art and Architecture: Interview with Christopher Norris. Edited and directed by Marcus Latham. This interview was recorded in March, and was made in conjunction with the International Symposium on Deconstruction, held at the Clore Gallery, London, on March 26, 1988. The transcript of the interview has appeared in Architectural Design. See 1989 entry in Texts.

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1990 The Late Show. (BBC Television). Broadcast on 5 April, 1990. Derrida is one of the contributors discussing the work of Roland Barthes.

RECORDING 1987 Feu la cendre. A cassette recording of Derrida reading the text with Carole Bouquet accompanied the publication of this book in France. See 1984 Book entry and 1982 entry in Texts.

Reviews

• Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 345 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £9.95 (paperback) IAIN CHAMBERS The tone of this book is set by a ‘missed moment’: the promise of 1945, Labour victory, the founding of the Welfare State, and the immediate postwar settlement. Its strengths lie in the detailed textual commentary and the shifting perspectives that the author brings to bear on this theme. The book’s weaknesses also stem from the same point, and lie in the narrative of the drawn-out betrayal of the postwar world embodied in a teleology of defeats and wrong turnings. The book sets out to write, or rewrite, a history of postwar Britain by a detailed examination of the literary representations of British society, paying particular attention to ‘representations of class, race, gender and sexual orientation, relating them to institutional constraint and opportunities, other texts, and the wider ideological framework’ (p. 3). The analysis, in other words, is concerned with the political import of writing, the literary establishment, intellectuals and the arts, and their place in the postwar settlement. Reading Britain through a series of literary texts is clearly an ambitious task, and there is the danger of trying to read too much. Alan Sinfield manages to touch upon virtually every major economic, historical, political and cultural event of the last fortyfive years. He attempts to weave them into a set of intersecting stories, employing literary texts as the stepping stones in constructing a history of contemporary Britain. So, the chapters are organized chronologically, and each offers a different focus: the war, homosexuals and the literary establishment of the 1950s, the Cold War, post-imperial writing, jazz, rock and subcultural styles, Sylvia Plath, intellectuals and working class culture… I don’t feel that Sinfield’s survey and arguments could be better synthesized. I wonder, rather, whether the attempted synthesis is not a misleading narrative, a story that, although touching all the historical bases, is ultimately unable to reveal their secrets, their resonance, their pertinence. Failing to inscribe the specifity, the limits, the relativity, of the literary texts under consideration into the analysis can seemingly mirror the universalism of a traditional literary discourse, whose concern with the ‘human condition’ is now replaced by the apparently more precise theme of postwar ‘British society’. What this can easily overlook is the irreversible consequences of the resettlement, redefinition and re-dimensionalization of the ‘literary’, once the earlier notion of English literature has been challenged. Sinfield’s most incisive analyses are undoubtedly those organized around the gendered inscription of British intellectual life and its literary establishment. The discussion of the popular connection between effeminacy, intellectuals and the arts is surely one of the central histories in the modern constitution of ‘Englishness’ and its general endorsement

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of anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and its view of art as the affair of ‘cissies’. Developing this argument further, in particular the masculinist reaction to such taunts in the ‘angry’ fifties, would have given a welcome specificity to the postwar picture that Sinfield presents, while at the same time contributing to a better, and more focused, understanding of the cultural formation. It is not as though these and other details are not there, it is rather that they are piled up in a slightly uncertain arrangement. The arguments set off in so many different directions and, offering quite distinct patterns in a loosely organized mosaic, tend towards denying the possibility of any narrative closure. Closures we know are rhetorical devices designed to ‘complete’ the picture. I can do without a sense of completion but would have welcomed a moment in which the diverse strands were brought into more of a dialogic proximity. This would not necessarily have revealed a wider ‘truth’, but it might have better concentrated the multi-accentuated nature of postwar English literature that Sinfield wishes to expose. The book represents a brave attempt to cast postwar British literature and writing (although English is really the correct adjective) into a critical cultural frame. Yet I think that had Alan Sinfield been a little less ambitious and written a book more sharply focused on the interplay between race, class, gendered politics and literature, and their shifting installation in the institutional and ideological forms of ‘Englishness’, it would have given both greater focus and sharper critical bite to what he wants to say. For what clearly emerges, yet again, from Sinfield’s work is the centrality of the literary and English intellectual establishment in securing so many of the critical terms and ideological trajectories of the postwar British cultural economy. And yet the status of the literary mode, its peculiar position as a form of moral, aesthetic and social ‘knowledge’, is strangely little discussed. The literary domination of cultural perspectives, rather than by sociology, history or marxism, as Perry Anderson pointed out almost three decades ago, speaks to the specific configuration of that cultural formation and its resulting versions of ‘Englishness’. The relationship between this and a cultural moralism based on the ethnic partialities and nationalist particularities of ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘community’, although constantly referred to, remains critically underdeveloped. I myself have a feeling that the literary mode, no matter how hard you work to expand it, offers too narrow a base fully to provide connection to such themes. As Sinfield himself points out: Societies have to reproduce themselves culturally as well as materially, and this is done in great part by putting into circulation stories of how the world goes. (p. 2) Such stories, certainly since 1945, are more likely to be encountered in newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, advertising, pop music and on the dance floor, than between the boundaries of ‘English literature’. It is as though Sinfield is trying to make a particular mode of representation carry too much weight (who, after all, is reading and interpreting this material?). For if literature has indeed been central to the construction of a particular form of cultural hegemony, the narrative and imaginative reach of the stories it chooses to endorse—through criticism, examination boards, literary journals, school and university syllabuses, publishing houses and book prizes—remains selected and

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restricted compared to some of the other narratives drawn upon in everyday life. As he himself acknowledges, the ‘stories through which we make sense of ourselves are everywhere.’ (p. 23). To attempt somehow to explain the failure of the postwar settlement via literary representations when, quite clearly, there is also available a wider and more complex set of representations, leads to the danger of paradoxically reproducing that hegemony in which ‘English’ is understood, in Arnoldian and Leavisite manner, as providing a privileged access to the moral heart and sense of the nation. Clearly this is not what Sinfield intends. This does not mean that such selected texts cannot be used, but it does appear to suggest that they should be opened up and read in a diverse manner. Sinfield certainly often attempts to do this, and constantly rewrites the texts he chooses in order to underline their subtexts of gender and sexual politics, of cultural and class powers. But what I am suggesting is perhaps something more, or at least, different; that is, literature, the canon, and the sense of ‘Englishness’ that it, in various ways endorses, should perhaps be conceived of not so much in terms of its own specific history, but should rather be drastically relocated within the wider terrain also set by those other narratives that we draw upon in understanding how ‘the world goes’. There is an unresolved (unresolvable?) tension between the literary focus and this wider scope. It also feels a bit strange today to criticize a contemporary literary critic for producing a ‘reading’ that has a disconcertingly one-dimensional tone. Yet Sinfield’s interpretations sometimes seem overdetermined by the immediate political imperative that he brings to bear on his texts; intent on ideological exposure and reading off ‘positions’ from the texts and their authors his analysis often forecloses their more extensive play and position in the wider contours of the more intractable and deeply ambiguous formation of ‘Englishness’. It is perhaps the cultural and historical power of that formation, rather than the identity of individual ideological symptoms, that would have provided a firmer context for a more extensive political ‘reading’ of the literary institution of ‘English’. Reading a formation, rather than a collection of chronologically organized texts, would also have permitted the author to have produced a more ‘open’, less overdetermined, account. Perhaps, beyond the caricatured version that the author presents, probably imbibed from reading too much Baudrillard, the irreverent disruption of a ‘postmodern’ perspective might have helped him more than he thinks. Is postmodernism (and who is speaking here, and from where?) simply saying that everything is equal and that ‘all cultures are now on a level’ (pp. 3–4)? Might it not also be seeking to indicate the contemporary disjuncture between ideological discourses and historical possibilities, between the inherited limits of perception as embodied in such discourses as ‘Englishness’, ‘literature’, ‘authenticity’, ‘tradition’, as they are set against the wider horizons of ‘other worlds’ (Gayatri Spivak), and the ensuing relocation induced by the challenge of difference, differentiation, potential incommensurability and complexity? This might suggest that postmodernism, or at least one reading of its potential, is not out blithely to resolve tensions and disjunctures, but rather seeks to deepen and underline them. For example, are gay politics, feminism, ethnic realities, subaltern studies and postcolonial discourses simply something to be added to the ‘socialist’ agenda, correctives that simultaneously adjust and extend the field of the political? Are such neat alliances

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really possible, or desirable? Or is it not rather the case that the emergence of these other voices and histories disturbs a previous order, no matter how radical it professed to be, leading to fragmentation (the limits of the ‘project’ have been breached), confusion and an urgent sense that what we consider as politics, culture, and democracy are themselves in question? In the end Sinfield’s analysis doesn’t really entertain that possibility. The failure to unpack sufficiently the very position and peculiar nature of the ‘English’ intellectual, or to consider the peculiar purchase that the notion of class (not simply as a theoretical concept, but as an everyday semantic tool) has in British culture, leaves them still stiffly embedded inside the limits of quite specific traditions and insularities. Their centrality in articulating native cultural definitions, both conservative and radical, has historically drawn the margin of a particular historical and cultural formation. Clearly, a more radical sense of perspective, one that rejects both the idealist duality of simple opposition, and the ethnic assumptions of so much British cultural debate, is needed in order to break with that formation. It is in complexity, or what Homi Bhabha calls ‘hybridity’, that is, in a reality induced by difference, even incommensurability, that a sense of radical democracy able to engage with these differences without eliminating them might emerge. Here we would discover a sense of identity that shifts, oscillates, is multiple, rather than that ‘strong’ political subject and unique identity and ‘commitment’ to which the traditional socialist agenda, English conservatism, much radical criticism, and the rather melancholy conclusion of Sinfield’s book, still appeal. Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples

• Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals, Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, paperback edition 1989), xviii+365 pp. (no price) • Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiv+330 pp., £35.00 JOHN HINES Eugene Vance and Piero Boitani are both well-established scholars, the latter being the more familiar here in Britain for his work on medieval English literature. They are scholars of very different character, and in these two books they follow very different lines of argument revealing greatly differing attitudes. Yet as well as, inevitably, being subject to a shared modernity in terms of conceptual priorities and terminology, they base their studies upon common material to a substantial degree, producing a pair of books which culminate with constrasting positions on a particular critical point. Thus the simultaneous publication of these books allows them to enter into an illuminating counterpoint. Vance’s book is not easy reading. This is partly due to its diversity, in terms both of works analysed and of interpretative material applied. It is, however, less casual in its ambitions and less fragmentary than its author seems to suggest when he describes it as a collection of essays that are ‘independent experiments’ sinking exploratory ‘mineshafts’ into medieval linguistic science, represented by the trivium (logic, grammar, and rhetoric). This exemplary modestia is not the only instance of a rather ponderous use of ironic rhetorical devices by Vance: one soon tires of the use of ‘one will recall’ as a sentence adverbialy reminding one that one has not committed to memory—or necessarily ever read—a wide range of literature from, for instance, Aristotle to Freud which informs Vance’s perceptions so fundamentally. The level of coherency in this book in fact is high, with themes amplified from chapter to chapter, and few, if any, arguments presented in relation to any one text that do not subsequently recur in another context. To many, Vance will be best known for work on St Augustine, and it is Augustinianism that proves to dominate the composition of this book. The valuation of Augustine’s place becomes more or less explicit at the beginning of Chapter 2, one of two chapters on Augustine that can be strongly recommended to any semioticist as a fine

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summary of Augustine’s patristic semiology in theory and application. A warning that must be sounded at the same time is that this book makes no attempt to provide anything remotely like a comprehensive view of medieval semiology. There is much in medieval sign theory that is both productive and of sheer intellectual value but which Vance has no place for here. The ‘poetics’ of the book’s subtitle consists of the recurrence in a carefully chosen and widely-drawn series of works of literary explorations of problems intrinsic to language as a medium of human interrelationships. The starting-point is Augustine’s concern with language as a medium of communication between Man and God, but this poetics dramatizes linguistic problems in intra-social contexts: in the contexts of the feudal hierarchy, of medieval commerce, and of love. At the very core of Vance’s analyses resides the dismal—though far from unorthodox -theorem of language being a deceitful and distorting medium, enticing the trust of most of its users (and the anger of others, like Augustine, and, it would seem, Vance), while at the same time being a definitive attribute of humanity—ever the more intimately so the more complex humanity’s cultural state. It is precisely in the exemplification of this theorem that Vance’s arguments are methodologically weakest. His analyses rely disconcertingly on the treatment of ancient and medieval similes and equations between language and other social media as identifications. It is far from an obvious interpretation of St Paul’s ‘I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet’ (Romans 7:7, quoted by Vance in a different translation) that the letter (=the law) begets lust, nor is this what Augustine says in making the readily recognizable claim that the existence of prohibition increases the pleasure, at least of anticipated transgression. Yet this is the basis for an allegorized reading of erotic dramas in metalinguistic discourse, and vice versa, fundamental in chapters on the trouvère lyric and Troilus and Criseyde, and reappearing regularly in between these. Similar fusions are made of money and language—‘coining’ words, etc.— and social order and language: ‘Language…is the most basic of all social contracts, and the order, of discourse is nothing less than the living expression of the social order’. At the same time, much\of the chapter on the French trouvère lyric is taken up with an admirably firm analysis of the syntactical structuring of a rhetorical scene and pose. Enunciation is used here as a precise technical term, possibly an unfamiliar one to many readers but clearly a useful one. A substantial problem in reaching an understanding of Vance’s book is the fact that analysis and data within it are joined and confused like two sides of a Möbius strip. It is evident that Vance has an acute sense for and appreciation of historical objectivity, and on several occasions is careful to recognize potential criticisms by acknowledging that modern analysis and interpretation and original meaning and comprehension may be different things. This is generally done, however, in terms of a declaration of faith in the historical reality of his suggestions. There are many such points on which one may justifiably disagree; perhaps the most persistent of these concerns the representation of medieval events and phenomena in semiotic terms. In analysing the Jeu de la feuillée, for instance, Vance, quite straightforwardly, notes an extension of ‘the arbitrariness of conventional verbal signs…to other classes of objects that also function as conventional signs in the social group: the body of the woman, the coin, the relic.’ Immediately afterwards he writes of ‘man’s absurd will to construct meanings in an aleatory world’. It is most consistent to take this as an element of the historically real medieval poetics

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Vance claims to be uncovering. Yet the terminology—and the implicit attitude—could not be more typically modern. What Vance’s reader is invited to do then, in the end—despite extensive argumentation in the book—is either to concur or not in a subjective reading. It is for this reason that idiosyncrasies of style are of considerable consequence in the effectiveness of the book. There is more than a whiff of inkhorn in the language. Commemoration, for instance, is an act whose purpose is ‘to animate, fecundate, mark, or celebrate some moment in the present’. The fetishism of language is a favourite theme of Vance’s, nowhere exemplified more clearly than in his own usage. In general it simply makes reading the book hard going; it becomes more bizarre and disturbing in the chapter on Troilus and Criseyde where an extreme effort to uncover a three-term equation of the interpersonal media language, sex and the social body politic produces an extended, slavering passage discovering sexual innuendo in a variety of scenes. Here particularly one can disagree with the distorting effect of Vance’s preoccupations and perspective. He makes great play of Criseyde’s thrilled response to the sexual allegory she sees as Troilus rides back from battle through Troy on a horse that ‘gan to bleede’ (=either ‘began to bleed’ or ‘did bleed’): (Troilus, II, 620–65). Reading the scene as a sexual allegory is uncontroversial. But what Vance will not countenance is the elegant poise there is in the vignette between the violence that there may be in sexual intercourse and the gentility and gentleness that Troilus can display in this situation—he rides the wounded horse at ‘an esy pas’ and ‘full softely’, the ennobling effect that this can have on what can otherwise be a sordid situation, and subsequently that it is this tense but inspiring complex of suggestions to which Criseyde may be seen to react. Vance’s treatment of Troilus and Criseyde is crucial because in the scheme of his book that poem marks the culmination of his medieval poetics. Typically, Vance foregrounds a deeply tragic reading of the poem, suggesting to us that it is the author of the work, Chaucer, who appears in a heroic stance at the end of the work as he recognizes the tragic flawedness of the poetic/linguistic world of epic combat and noble love, and judges and condemns poetic discourse accordingly; concluding the poem ‘in a sequence of distinct speech acts that break from narrative itself and coax the believing reader to find the unmediated presence of the “uncircumscript” illuminating word through prayer’. The final chapter of Vance’s book, on Spenser, counterpoints Chaucer’s tragic conclusion. Vance finds at the vital centre of the concept of narrative in the Faerie Queene a radically different Renaissance concept of translatio: literature is identified with, rather than an alternative to, action, and translated literature is not the giving of a version of prior literature but a reincarnation of it, adding to the copia of contemporary culture. Once again, however, the reading of Chaucer’s conclusion is thoroughly singleeyed. Vance seems simply to have no sensitivity to the tone of the final apostrophe to the younge fresshe folkes, In which that love up groweth with your age

he

or

she,

and of the capacity this has to integrate in Chaucer’s peroratio the different modes of discourse, and much more importantly the different experiences/contexts to which they are proper, rather than contrasting them and forming an unambiguous retraction.

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It is as a means to an end that Boitani too offers a tragic reading of Troilus and Criseyde—a reading that subsumes Vance’s interpretation but greatly exceeds it in its diversity—before moving on to a more positive climax to his book, in two brilliant chapters expounding the achievement of sublimity in Dante’s Paradiso. One might argue that it is possible to go further than Boitani as well in reading Troilus optimistically and non-subversively without thereby revealing an incurably sentimental attachment to a reliable and tolerable common-sense world of things as they are. Boitani’s reponse to the strain inherent in Troilus, however, is to elevate the achievement of true sublimity elsewhere in medieval poetry; thus to exemplify the ability of the human mind, through poetry, to transcend and even to harness the chaotic elements that Vance exults in. Boitani’s book is well-ordered, with a balanced structure. It is clear that he strives for clarity in his writing. Although he suggests, after unusual but effective definitions of the tragic and the sublime in his Preface, that these two are simple polar opposites, the substance of his book offers a contrastive relationship between the two that is less reductive than this: the tragic can exist within, and be subtly transformed into, the sublime. The structure of his book is to move, gradually, from the exemplification of the tragic to the exemplification of the sublime, and in the same movement to contrast Chaucer with Dante, Inferno with Paradiso, with a good measure of Petrarch in between. The first and the last two chapters of the book may be judged the most effective; Boitani is more successful here, it seems, because these are the chapters which concentrate on single specific texts: Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale and Dante’s Paradiso XXXIII and II respectively. Through the middle of the book we have a series of chapters on the literary history of tropes, images and type-scenes associated with tragedy and sublimity. The mod-ernist terms transumption and intertextuality are much in evidence here, as material is placed in lengthy sequences from antiquity to the fourteenth century. While the themes here are for the most part given purpose and meaning by reference back in the final chapters, there is a little too much here that gives the impression of an indulgent flitting from flower to flower. Boitani’s usual clarity leaves him somewhat exposed on the question of purpose in these middle chapters of the book. His conscious purposes are set out in his Preface, and one reads here that the book is ‘meant to be read by students’. This assertion is specifically used to justify the inclusion of plot summaries, quotations, and translations [sic], no doubt lest anyone of more elevated status should feel their dignity compromised by being helped along by such aids. Any such reader will no doubt be gratified to find that translations are not supplied for many quotations in Italian, some of them crucial, some of them not; the provision of translations looks thoroughly haphazard. For anyone—whatever their status—who cannot pick their way through the medieval Italian this apparent carelessness will be annoying and frustrating. The difference between the two books reviewed here is a matter of attitude rather than reason. It is modern critical attitudes that the reader is exposed to and can learn of in these books more than anything else. The style of the books governs the degree to which their substance can be comprehended. There is no pretence that the present reviewer’s inclinations are not more in line with Boitani’s than Vance’s. It is nevertheless undeniable that the sort of rhapsodic exposition towards which Boitani works at the climax of his book is an art that can fall upon stony ground as well as into good ground. In his last chapter, Boitani in fact re-enacts a perfectly orthodox medieval mode of

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analytical reading to achieve—and convey—a sense of sublimity: an acute awareness of the inadequacy of any linguistic signifiers properly to signify God—whereby only negative terms like ‘ineffable’ can be proper predicates—creates a transcendental kinesis, a kinetic, expanding and unending sense of the infinite glory and greatness of God. Pseudo-Dionysian teaching seems to be the most institutionalized and frequently used orthodoxy on this point in the later Middle Ages. Vance follows a very different star from the tragic conclusion of his Troilus: into the less-than-sublime Humanism of the Renaissance. Boitani moves into the sublime, but without this less-than-sublime medieval analytical framework. It is almost certainly the case, though, that had he introduced this body of theory his insights would have been more sharable, not least because of their interest and accessibility to a larger world of ‘students’ of whatever rank, including nonmedievalists, whose critical cognition is likely to be strongly over-determined by theoretical abstractions. University of Wales College of Cardiff

• Alan Donagan, Spinoza (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), xviii+219 pp., $34.95 ANDREW BELSEY In any world still unfortunate enough to be in need of heroes, Spinoza is an ideal candidate for heroic status. A man of reason, and of steady hand and eye, who ground out lenses while putting in order the ultimate metaphysical and ethical constituents of the universe, undisturbed by the calumnies of orthodox religion, Christian or Jewish, steadfastly refusing any trade with superstition, whatever physical danger such denial of credit might bring. In the province of the enlightened it is no dishonour to be denounced as an atheist or reviled as a heretic or apostate. From the point of view of the mind which intuits the ultimate love of the universe, no mundane tremor can disturb the motionless current of eternal contemplation. But this is the stuff of myth-making, and Professor Donagan will have little to do with such mock heroics. He concludes that Spinoza’s philosophy yields ‘an austere and tragic view of human life, but a decent one’, but adds that in his opinion it is false (p. xiv). Donagan’s admiration for Spinoza’s philosophy resides, therefore, not in a belief in its truth but in its possibility, its strength as a philosophical system. ‘Even today’, says Donagan, ‘it is possible seriously to wonder whether his philosophy restated in terms of twentieth-century science, is substantially true’ (p. xi), and the point is that even after concluding that it is not true, it is still possible to wonder. But Donagan is too canny a philosopher not to expect trouble here. For what is the object of this wonder? Is Spinoza’s philosophy, restated in terms of twentieth-century science, still Spinoza’s philosophy? The answer to this conundrum is not forthcoming in this book. Quite rightly Donagan recognizes that there is a methodological order of priorities: ‘Useful inquiry cannot begin into whether Spinoza’s philosophy can be adapted to the thought of our day until it has been reconstructed in its relation to the thought of his’ (p. xiii). It is to this task of contextual reconstruction that Donagan devotes himself, with brilliant results. According to Donagan, Spinoza believed that ‘constructing a philosophical system…is forming a comprehensive complex idea of what there is’ (p. 54). And what there is is a unique infinite substance with two humanly cognizable attributes, thought and extension. The human minds that perform this cognition are modes of the unique substance under the attribute of thought, and what they should cognize is that modes of thought and of extension are related in order and connection, not because they run in parallel (which would falsely suggest two sub-stances) but because they are two aspects of the one substance. And so, as Donagan puts it, ‘the whole system of ideas in the infinite thinking substance of which human minds are finite modes can reasonably be supposed to be a

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materially true representation of the whole system of finite bodies in the actual infinite substance constituted by extension’ (p. 86). This is not an easy theory to grasp. It is difficult in Spinoza’s text, and it is still difficult in Donagan’s painstakingly clear exposition of it. Furthermore, Donagan recognizes that however generous one wishes to be to Spinoza, at least two parts of his total system must be abandoned: the Cartesian physics, and the theory of ideas, fathered by Descartes, adopted by Locke and meanwhile fostered by Spinoza, according to which the objects of thought are representations in the mind. But maybe there is more, a lot more, that ought to be jettisoned. After all, Spinoza calls the unique infinite substance God or Nature—not ‘God’ or ‘Nature’, but ‘God-orNature’, a puzzling identification, though not to Donagan, who presents Spinoza as a non-materialist anti-supernaturalist. It is Spinoza’s naturalism, constructing the universe as a system of laws of nature to which even God must conform, that Donagan constantly emphasizes. According to Donagan, Spinoza naturalizes religion. He denies the Christian doctrine of creation, and posits a God who immanently determines nature’s infinite existence and essence, as well as transiently causing the succession of finite states of rest and motion. But why does this naturalize religion rather than supernaturalize science? For after all, Donagan denies that Spinoza is a pantheist: he does not identify God with the totality of finite things. It is not that this totality is God; rather it is in God. Spinoza’s defence is that everything, including God, is determined by the laws of nature, and that therefore there is no realm of the supernatural. However, the difficulty here is brought out by Spinoza’s treatment of miracles. Nothing can exist outside the course of nature. Therefore there cannot be a miracle in the sense of something outside the course of nature, and reports of miracles in this sense must be false. But there is a catch. We cannot, as Spinoza recognized, identify the course of nature with what is now believed to be the course of nature. Our understanding is inadequate, and it is not the science of today, or even tomorrow, but only an ideal science, that can adequately inform us what nature is like. So faced now with a report of a miracle we cannot be sure whether the report is false of whether it correctly reports an as yet unexplained but genuine happening. Today’s advocates of ESP and other ‘paranormal’ phenomena exploit the same ambiguity. These phenomena, they say, are no threat to science, because those that cannot be accommodated by science are illusory, and those that are not illusory can be accommodated by science. But they do not mean science as it is now, but science as it will be when it accommodates paranormal phenomena. So the claim turns out to be what philosophers like to call ‘trivial’, and it in no way implies that this paranormal science will be, in fact, science, or that it will exist. Of course, Spinoza claims that there are no miracles in the sense of supernatural interventions in the course of nature. But since we have at present no adequate science of this nature, to claim that an adequate science would be pretty much like the science we do have now would be an act of faith. So if we followed Spinoza’s path it might turn out that an adequate account of nature would be more appropriately called religion than science. Donagan’s response would be: ‘a being which immanently causes everything, including itself, by virtue of laws of nature, may as well be called “Natura” as “Deus”.’ And in answer to ‘Why?’ he would continue: ‘for both God’s necessary existence and his

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actions are a matter of nature being herself’ (p. 93). But doesn’t this give the game away? Nature isn’t herself. Some commentators, pressing this sort of argument, have insisted that for Spinoza talk of God is a metaphor, or an esoteric disguise for his real beliefs. Donagan does not agree. Spinoza ‘wished to distinguish the existence of his naturalised God from that of all the finite things existing in him’ (p. 60). So this God, obscurely separate but not transcendent, plays the major role in Donagan’s interpretation. Unlike many critics, Donagan is even sympathetic to Spinoza’s use of God as the ‘place’ where human survival after death can be conceived. But before death there is living, and Spinoza’s metaphysical doctrines are really a preparation for the ethics of everyday life: an understanding of ‘the human mind and its highest blessedness’. These are the doctrines that have never lacked enthusiasts when the ideals of human life are debated. For the individual there is a life lived under the guidance of reason, free from the servitude of the passions. Then there is the life of the citizen which is the only state in which the individual life can be lived well: as a member of a political community which permits freedom of thought and expression—even though it may enforce a tolerant religion and forbid sedition. But beyond these exceptions there is a conceptual limit to freedom, for no aspect of human life can be outside the course of nature. So ‘the highest blessedness consists primarily in understanding oneself and other finite things sub specie aeternitatis, from the point of view of God’ (p. 204). From understanding arises acquiescentia, that acceptance of nature that puts you at peace with the universe, and to which there is, ultimately, no alternative. Herein lies the tragedy of Spinoza’s view of life that tempers the austerity and the decency. So why should anyone be concerned about the fate of Spinoza? What value resides in his text, or in Donagan’s meticulous re-articulation of it? And anyway, has not philosophy been superseded in the age of the postmodern? Spinoza, in living the life of reason that he advocated, rejected such fashionable and dangerous hopelessness, and at a time when irrationalism again threatens the life of the mind it is a brave example to follow. If the anathemas of fundamentalists are not repudiated when directed against socalled blasphemers, they will quickly find a further target in all who, through living to the best of their ability a life of reason, wish to challenge superstition. University of Wales College of Cardiff

• Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here (New York: Viking, 1989), 366 pp., $19.95 WENDY B.FARIS The labyrinth appears more and more frequently these days, an increasingly popular metaphor for the living of lives and the telling of stories—and also for the intricate ways in which those realities intersect. The wandering narratives of Bruce Chatwin follow this same vein, or track, as he might prefer to put it, for the idea of the way is essential to his ethos, the nomadic life being his chosen mode of being and thought—and writing. Chatwin’s tales embody the kind of cognitive structure that Umberto Eco in his postscript to The Name of the Rose calls a rhizome, the entangled and entangling root that continually divides and redivides itself, so that every path is connected with every other path—a labyrinth with no centre, no periphery, no exit. Chatwin made his name with The Songlines, which narrates his journey in search of (as he describes it) ‘the labyrinth of invisible pathways which Australian Aboriginals call the “Footprints of the Ancestors” or “The Way of the Law”.’ The title of this new collection of essays evokes the sense of non-programmatic structure that Chatwin’s writing projects. The question of whereabouts posed and-answered at once (because it lacks the customary question mark) tell us that he is doing here just whatever he is doing here, ready for the adventures chance may bring. In some ways, Chatwin resembles the surrealists, his spiritual predecessors and fellow primitivists, in valuing mobility, cultural surprises, the refreshing clash of incongruous events and images. In his doubled wanderings—on foot and in prose—he illustrates well the Romantic feeling of connection between writing and the land that in modern times at least is most often evident in the new worlds of colonies. No wonder, then, that he is drawn largely away from Europe, where so little untouched ground remains, to Australia, Africa, India, the Middle East. Like the tribes of the nomads he loves, Chatwin grazes lightly and yet carefully, historically, over the plains of twentieth-century culture. He writes on creative or public figures, on eccentric wanderers, on places. There are essays on Howard Hodgkin, Diana Vreeland, Nadezhda Mandelstam, André Malraux, Werner Herzog, Maria Reiche, Ernst Junger, Mrs Gandhi; on the botanist Joseph Rock, whose book on the vegetation and customs of a remote region of Yunan was favourite reading for Ezra Pound, and who thus found his way into the Cantos; on Russia, China, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, the Arab quarter of Marseilles, where we follow a racially complicated murder back to its cultural origins in the colonial rule and liberation of Algeria. But like the diarist in Michel Butor’s novel Passing Time, who imagines that his page comprises white paint over a mirror, so that as he writes, his text reveals more and more of his own face and the city surrounding him, as he proceeds, Chatwin also creates his own portrait behind—or in front, or just to the side of—his subjects.

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An early essay on ‘Nomad invasions’ included here articulates Chatwin’s ideology, which generally extols the benefits of wandering. According to Chatwin, nomad ‘justice is personal, brisk and effective’; he believes nomads to be basically more peaceful than sedentary peoples, for ‘instability in nomad society [means that it] lacks the cohesion needed for conquest on a mass-scale’; more generally, we should perhaps allow human nature an appetitive drive for movement in the widest sense. The act of journeying contributes towards a sense of physical and mental well-being, while the monotony of prolonged settlement or regular work weaves patterns in the brain that engender fatigue and a sense of personal inadequacy. Much of what the ethologists have designated ‘aggression’ is simply an angered response to the frustrations of confinement. Such theoretical formulations are scattered throughout the essays and provide a kind of conceptual framework for the otherwise random adventures. In the Himalayas, for example, cairns and prayer-flags along the tracks remind him ‘that Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot’. Strangely enough, Chatwin’s brand of primitivism, his nomadic ideology and its attendant nomadic mode of writing—narratives of wandering that are wandering narratives—seem to suit our industrial and computerized age rather well. On the one hand, as readers, the freedom to wander with Chatwin theoretically and vicariously consoles us for the burdens of immobility in our sedentary metropolises; such is the case with all good travel writing. On the other hand, as writers ourselves, the gap between fantasy and reality is more readily closed; Chatwin’s wandering mode corresponds to one which is now open to all, for writing at the computer can accommodate a kind of compositional nomadism; knowledge of programs (paradoxically) frees us from the tyranny of outlines. The receptive nature of Chatwin’s stance, from which much of his material derives, recalls Gide’s notion of the ‘disponible’, a perennial openness to experience; and appropriately enough, on one of his North African journeys, Chatwin consciously re-lives and re-writes Gide. Pulling into a railway station, he exchanges first Gide’s Nourritures terrestres and then several other books for the ‘real’ ‘fruits of the earth’—pineapples, guavas, paw-paws, a grilled swamp rat, and a straw hat. This ‘disponibilité’ can, of course, produce mixed results, as it does for Chatwin himself—though it is part of the charm of his text that we can vicariously enjoy the risks without actually experiencing the unpleasant consequences. (This is clearly an ideal book for armchair travellers.) A few examples. Tired of heat in the Central Australian Desert, Chatwin called his wife and ‘told her, firmly, [Chatwin does seem to have a certain streak of machismo] to meet me in Nepal’. She replies that she can’t because a favourite aunt is having her ninetieth birthday party in Boston at the time. ‘The offer’s open,’ I said. ‘Call me if you change your mind.’ ‘I’ve changed it’ replies Elizabeth. A conventional happy ending. Chatwin’s own destiny, however, finally followed an unhappy fork in life’s labyrinth: he died (in January of 1989) of a rare bone-disease contracted in China. In between those two poles is the story he recounts of being caught in a confusing coup in Dahomey. He and a Frenchman spend several days in the custody of one military faction, some of it lived up against a mud wall

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with a firing squad at their backs. Both men managed to remain relatively light-hearted about the situation (more machismo?), but it is clear they could well have been shot—and at that point the accidental nature of the event would have lost all of its charm. This book, then, like The Songlines, allows us to sample moments in an unusually varied life, lived in the fullest sense as an adventure, and to share in all the delights and dangers of that mode. And as I’ve been suggesting, like a labyrinth, which may seem confusing when we are in it, but which finally (from a central viewpoint) reveals a coherent design, the essays in this motley collection, both in their narrative style of meandering, and in their philosophical stance of nomadism, form a meaningful pattern in the end. University of Texas at Arlington

• Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 195 pp., $13.95 ROSEMARIE A.BATTAGLIA The Politics of Postmodernism concerns the politics of representation, most especially in the arts of fiction and photography, and describes postmodernism’s project as a “dedoxification” or undermining and subversion of conventional and received strategies in the visual and verbal arts. Hutcheon states that ‘to “de-doxify” is not to act, even if it might be a step toward action or even a necessary precondition of it’ (p. 22). I think we can understand de-doxification as the dissolution of rigidities in conceptualization, often understood as a threat to basic securities in which we have ideological and political stakes. Hutcheon’s basic premise is that visual and verbal arts are ideologically grounded, and that postmodernism, both in theory and in artistic production, self-consciously and paradoxically questions our assumptions about nature, capitalism, patriarchy, and liberal humanism, all of which are cultural constructs. Postmodern art and theory recognizes its complicity with the ideology and culture which it interrogates, and in that lies its paradoxical self-awareness of the impossibility of theorizing or creating from a position beyond culture or ideology. The de-doxification of culture and ideology is not the only aim of postmodernism; it also takes upon itself the issue of de-centring the self by calling into question humanist and capitalist assertions of subjectivity. It is of incidental interest to note that postmodernism’s confused and confusing representation of its own paradoxes might be described as the breakdown of what is often conceived as a Hegelian-like dialectical progression in the history of artistic production, with periodizations such as ‘Neo-classicism’ followed by ‘Romanticism’; postmodernism is often thus bewilderingly accused of nihilism because it does not replace the value-systems it demystifies with one of its own. Here we come to another important insight of Hutcheon’s; postmodern art and theory has no social or political agenda of its own, refusing to substitute another valuestructure for those it critiques because its intention is to call into question the imposition by culture and ideology of systems of values. What postmodernism attempts to do is to make social or political action possible by preparing us for it intellectually through a demystifying critical project. In this respect, the central issue of the last chapter, ‘Postmodernism and feminisms’, is both the distinction between the social and political aims of feminism and the absence of them in postmodernist art and theory and the dedoxifying complicity between feminism and postmodernism. The important section ‘Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modern-ism’ studies the Habermas-Lyotard exchange, which began on the nature of modernism. Jameson’s description of postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ continues the debate in its raising of the issue of the socio-economic and philosophic grounding of postmodernism in postmodernity, which has been defined in philosophical circles as

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theoretical discourse—ranging from Derrida’s to Foucault’s to Lyotard’s. Hutcheon indicates that in this debate the equation of culture and its ground is assumed, and she suggests that we should instead allow for a relation of contestation and subversion between culture and its ground in understanding postmodernism’s complex relation to modernism, in both its inheritance of modernism’s ‘initial oppositional impulses’ and its rejection of modernism’s formalist autonomy (p. 26). In Chapter 2, ‘Postmodernist representation’, Hutcheon defines postmodern representation as self-consciously image, narrative, product and producer of ideology. She asks the important question of whether we can ever know the real except through representation, and she quotes Jameson: ‘A whole new house of mirrors of visual replication and textual production has replaced the older stable reality of reference and of the non-cultural “real”’ (p. 34). A question suggested to me by my reading of Hutcheon’s book and raised by Jameson’s statement is whether or not there can be a ‘non-cultural “real”’ which we can know. In this respect, Hutcheon states that postmodernism questions whether we can know the real except through representation; that is, everything always was cultural. Postmodernism is thus a questioning of what ‘reality can mean and how we can come to know it’ (p. 34). She further writes that postmodern representation does not efface the referent, but now self-consciously knows it is representation, creating its referent, not offering direct and immediate access to it (p. 34). Modernism, according to Hutcheon, created a signifying process or medium which became opaque, drawing attention to itself without realism’s transparency and without direct access to the signified. The postmodernist crossing of boundaries between mass culture and high art, and the discourses of history and art, in its questioning of the issue of representation, is seen by Hutcheon as representing ‘representation’ itself and much ‘border tension’ arises in this crossing (the subject of Chapter 5, ‘Text/image border tensions’, in which postmodern photographic art is studied through the interaction of the verbal and visual). The autobiographical Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is shown to be an excellent example of the self-conscious reflexivity of postmodern representation. Its parodic title, derived from X par lui-même in the French series to which Barthes contributed a volume on Michelet, indicates its representation of the consciousness of the writer Barthes as a subject for writing about himself. As Barthes describes, the family photographs introducing the text are the author’s reward to himself for completing the book and therefore reverse the reader’s normal ‘perceiving order’ from the outset. The author perceives himself as narrator and narrated, and a split-self arises between the self-image and the imaged-self. This is, according to Hutcheon, representation as construction; to represent the self is therefore to constitute the self. (One is put in mind here of Joyce’s autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus, a young self written out as a character by an older self.) Postmodern historiographical metafiction, studied at greater length in Chapter 3, crosses the boundaries between history and fiction, and Hutcheon’s striking example of this, Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme, is based on a real person, José Gaspar Rodrígues Francia, who ruled Paraguay from 1814 to 1840. The novel, however, subverts historical verity on the level of narration, plot, and even its existence; parts of the text were presumed to have been burned. The novel radically undermines concepts of genre, historical accuracy, the sequential nature of time, and subjectivity; Francia states that he

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must write down this story in order to exist. The novel is about writing or, as Hutcheon quotes from it, ‘representation of writing as representation’. This novel can easily be seen as a subversion of conventional narrative, which is still used, however, in the present for political purposes and which is construed as making sense of the world. In Chapter 3, ‘Re-presenting the past’, Hutcheon describes postmodernism as a relativizing process against a totalizing one, and the chapter is concerned with historiographical fiction in postmodernism, which undermines our traditionally transmitted sense of history, mixing with the postmodern undermining of all so-called reliable and stable historical narratives—as seen in postmodern fiction such as I the Supreme, Midnight’s Children, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Tin Drum, The Name of the Rose, and The White Hotel. Hayden White’s Metahistory and the work of Foucault are centrally important to this chapter. Like all postmodern art, postmodern historiographic fiction dedoxifies received notions about presenting the actual. One device of postmodern fiction is paratextuality (footnotes, titles, epigraphs, prologues, photographs, etc.) which uses the semblance of realism to subvert the truth or veracity of the text being written. The juxtaposition of narrative and paratextual devices in historical documents and in metafiction shifts attention away from a seamless historical narrative, as privileged by the historian or narrator, to the usually overlooked margins. One admirable characteristic of Hutcheon’s book is the use of abundant illustrative examples of postmodern visual and verbal art. An example occurs in Chapter 4, ‘The politics of parody’, in which Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton and Henry Wallis’s painting of the death of Chatterton are used to show the parodic representation of the issue of Chatterton’s life, death, and forgery. Hutcheon’s argument against Jameson, his lamenting the loss of a sense of his particular definition of history and his dismissal as nostalgia of the only sense of history we can now know—an intertextual history—seems specious, however, when she claims that postmodernist film and fiction are obsessed with history and with how we can know the past. To counter Hutcheon here, I would suggest that what Jameson laments may be a sense of integrity in our historical consciousness that postmodern historical intertextuality does not recuperate. I mentioned earlier that Jameson states, as quoted on page 34, that we have lost, in effect, our access to the ‘noncultural “real”’ and an ‘older stable reality of reference’ in representation, and more from Hutcheon about the historical processes, events, causes and effects that break up that stable reality might be appropriate. The postmodern photographic art of Kruger, Haacke, Rosler, and Burgin forms the subject of Chapter 5, ‘Text/image border tensions’, and the interaction of verbal and visual representation and effects and the conflation of theory and art are shown, in brief, in photographic dedoxifying strategies which foreground difference in class, gender, race, and sexual preference. I have mentioned earlier Hutcheon’s grounds for both the difference and complicity between feminism and postmodernism. The final chapter, ‘Postmodernism and feminisms’, is appropriate as a conclusion for this book which calls for a greatly needed comprehension of the intentions of postmodern art and theory. It is an appropriate chapter for an ending because it suggests how postmodernism can create the conditions and readiness for action, both social and political, which feminism as well as other movements for human liberation can undertake. Michigan State University

• Norman Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 181 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £12.95 (paperback) MATTHEW PARFITT The subtitle of Holland’s book indicates the subject matter better than his somewhat whimsical title, but given the ambitious project of developing ‘a cognitive approach to literature’, this book is short and quite readable. As often happens, Frost’s poetry and brain provide only a test case for theory rather than the main subject of interest. Holland’s approach brings together some of the insights of cognitive science, brain physiology and even artificial intelligence research with American reader-response theory. The result is a cybernetic model of the process of reading and writing that conforms smoothly to a more general model of human behaviour, so that one’s activity as a reader compares to one’s activity as, say, a driver. The basis of the model is the idea of ‘feedback’: people actively participate in reading (or another activity) by constantly testing hypotheses against the instructions encountered in the text (or other stimulus), producing a dynamic process of adjustment and correction that advances on the basis of the feedback that the subject receives. The reader invokes an array of standards for comparison in this process. These include the several ‘codes’ given by basic skills (literacy, numeracy, etc.) and the more discretionary ‘canons’ (acculturated or specific learning such as beliefs, customs, philosophy, etc.). Hypotheses are also affected by the reader’s personality, by what Holland calls the reader’s ‘identity theme’: a predisposition to respond in a particular way that expresses the depths of one’s personal, perhaps genetic, history. From one point of view, the identity theme anchors the whole model as it governs the kind of feedback that the reader will ultimately get from the text, and it accounts for the remarkable difference between people’s readings when all other factors seem about equal. The model works analogously for the process of writing, and Holland formulates Frost’s identity theme as ‘to manage great unmanageable unknowns by means of small knowns’ (p. 38). Holland finds that this captures something in Frost’s mind—in some sense in his very brain—that conditioned his response to much in his world and thus appears in a myriad of shapes throughout his writing. But Holland wisely refuses to insist too emphatically on the precise formulation of Frost’s identity theme, since he recognizes that such a formulation is contingent on more than one factor. The identity theme itself is susceptible to change: it is not only an agency that conditions hypotheses but reciprocally it is a product of a history of feedback and response. More significantly for this instance, Holland observes that any formulation of a reader’s identity theme must itself be the construct of an observing other whose hypothesis was formulated under the influence of his or her identity and canons.

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This brief epitome of Holland’s cybernetic model gives only a sketchy impression of a quite nuanced approach to literature that boasts considerable support from the evidence of Holland’s own experiments and his research into several sciences. It must be allowed that Holland’s model provides a useful corrective to reader-response theories that often drift into an extreme subjectivism as the authority of the text fades away against the evidence of the authority and freedom of the reader. Still, Holland remains in the circle of the reader-response school as his interest runs more to describing what readers actually do than to what they ought to do—he looks at responses rather than, with traditional hermeneutics, the particular conditions that produce a valid or worthy interpretation. Ultimately, Holland’s approach aspires to a degree of scientific authority and validation we do not usually expect from literary theory: this is really a stimulus-response model adapted to account for the fact that a reader does not respond from a position of empty innocence, but always expresses a richly complex history and character. Holland recognizes that this remains true for the writer, the reader, and even the reader’s reader, Norman Holland—the one who developed a structure of reading in the first place. The implications of this adaptation are more radical than Holland seems to realize, however. For as soon as we recognize that the identity theme of the interpreter is itself the construct of an interpretation, we find ourselves within a circle of total interpretation that has been cut adrift from its scientific foundation in the ideal of a neutral observer. Structuralism reveals itself to be hermeneutics. The radical contingency of the whole interpretative circle introduces all the difficulties of hermeneutics and requires that we abandon the ideal of a simple relation between interpretation and natural science. This is not to say that interpretative truth and scientific method are irreconcilable, but it does not do to suggest that since astrophysics, quantum physics and other sciences now recognize that the observer partly creates his or her observations, therefore the gap between interpretation and explanation has been closed. Rather, Holland must consider more carefully the difference that the special relation of human being to language makes in the process of reading as compared to other activities such as driving or looking at stars. He seems only dimly aware that language is not an ‘object’ like others that we take up and use, and that this problematic is what a great deal of recent literary theory is all about. While encouraging his audience to abandon a simple subject-object relation between reader and text, Holland seems not to realize that many thinkers (including Derrida, Lacan and Geoffrey Hartman, whose ideas he oversimplifies) have already taken up the challenge posed by the abandonment of the Kantian scheme and seek to absorb its implications at a more radical level than Holland himself attempts—and they do so without becoming the mere sceptics that he supposes. At the same time that Holland discards a classical subject-object split, he wants to save something of the basic dualism, and to evade the Copernican revolution of Heidegger, by making the subject the primary actor. He thus rejects what he calls the ‘text-active’ mode of writing about literature. As he remarks, such a way of writing is counter-intuitive, but it is useful in part because it is counter-intuitive, because it displaces our spontaneous sense of being in full control of our understanding of the text. For all the nuance and detail that Holland builds into the model, the metaphor of feedback remains a dehumanizing one in the end. The ways in which Holland saves the model from being wholly mechanistic and deterministic—the ways in which the model provides for a transcendence over the merely preconditioned—are left fuzzy and ill-

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considered, while the structure of conditioning is fully explicated. Despite his best intentions, Holland’s method becomes in practice, then, a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (to use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase) like the ones he tends to oppose. Thus Holland reads Frost’s ‘Once by the Pacific’ as an expression of childhood anxiety about an act of sexual intercourse between his parents and the fear of being abandoned by them. But this reading of what is unconscious in the poem overshadows the whole symbolism of what is conscious: adult guilt, divine omnipotence, and so on. We need a model that can better thematize freedom and self-transcendence without neglecting the contingency of interpretations. These theoretical matters ask for a closer and a better informed treatment. Still, the virtue of Holland’s thinking lies in his bold syncretism, negotiating between disciplines whose differing methodologies frequently isolate them from one another. His book provides a rich array of cues for bringing together Continental and American, humanistic and behavioural approaches to literary study, but Holland makes greater claims for his feedback model than most current theorists will be able to accept. Boston College, Massachusetts