Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Tom Conley
MLN 121 (2006): 850861 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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sense of the term was riddled by the attention drawn to the dry
characters inhabiting the second syllable. In other words, is presence
where you see and read it in the same instance? Sec was seen no less
as an acronym of the title of the essay,
signature vnement contexte
(printed in lower case and without commas): the doubt about presence
ever being here in est-ce ici? became the force of the form of the
writing of the essay. It was an element that could not be recovered in
the regime of a speech-act. The writing-act that comprised the essay
was grasped, it appeared to alert readers, in a quasi-cinematic montage
of sounds and graphs.
In the exchange that followed between Derrida and Austins acolyte
the latter took Derrida to task for misunderstanding the tenor of his
masters theory. In an article that Searle had put under copyright
when delivering it to Glyph, the journal printing the dialogue, Derrida responded with a voluminous manuscript written under the title
Limited Inc, in which he exploited the ruses of chicane.3 Derrida
argued over every sentence of Searles article in order, in the end, in
flagrant violation of copyright laws, to cite the text in its entirety. In
a psychoanalytical sense Searle was less incorporated (or indelibly
repressed) than introjected in the space and volume of Derridas
text. Searle was held in the palatal region of the writers mouth, in an
area where it could, following Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, be
semiotized and negotiated.4 But in a broader contextone of dispute
and power in the world of rhetoric and speech-act theorySearle was
contained. Derridas had been a facetious strategy of containment
that broke the copyright law which Searle had erected defensively and
for limited ends. The reader (and clearly it was not Searle because
he never saw what Derrida had done to him) needed to see how the
verbal instances were engulfing Searles projection of himself as selfsufficient and self-identical when he felt it necessary to immortalize
himself and his wisdom under exclusive copyright. Derridas was a
visible strategy of containment. He literally encircled and laid siege
to his critic by means of ruse and legal process.
3
Le Dictionnaire Robert: 1 Difficult incident quon suscite dans un process, sur
une vtille, pour embrouiller laffaire [. . .] 2 Objection captieuse, contradiction o
lon est de mauvaise foi. V. Argutie, artifice, contestation, equivoque, ergoterie, subtilit. 3 Par ext. Toute espce de querelle [. . .] 4 Passage en zigzag quon est oblige
demprunter [. . .]
4
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, LEcorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
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What comes forward from the exchange of almost thirty years ago
is not only the sense of ruse or artful obliquity in Derridas style, what
he had even earlier called bricole (understood in a logistical sense
as ricochet, zigzag, tromperie in the sixteenth century) but also
a mode that requires language to be seen and heard at once and,
in that process, to translate or move from one linguistic border to
another. The result was that many of Derridas pieces could be read
as spatial poemsand Derridas earliest work was on Mallarmin
which tensions were evinced from the plotting of discourse.5 As a title
Limited Inc suggested that Searles pen contained a limited charge of
fluid where Derridas did not; that correct (or corps recte) meaning
is always a function of imposed limits somewhat comparable to what
psychoanalysts (Guy Rosolato for one) call signifiers of demarcation, that is, instances of expression that distinguish the space of
speakers from their locators.6 Herein the sight and situation of the
title became especially resonant in Derridas writing. In a concurrent
publication of an article titled Le titrier (later reprinted in the aptly
titled Parages), Derrida alluded to his affinities for Maurice Blanchot
by way of his Pas. Working through Le Pas au-del, he initially argued
that no work can go without a title. The subtitle of the piece, Titre
prciser (Title to be specified), referred to the practice of deferment or difference by which authors or speakers agree to hold forth
on topics whose titles, later to be specified, generally indicate that
they have not decided about what they will deliver.
When it was read the paper made clear the conditions and protocol
that determined the site of the event of titling: Derrida had no title
to send and therefore let the protocol of organization fill the blank
with Titre prciser. The formula of a title, later to be specified,
became Le titrier, a substantive invoking the medieval sense of a
confectioner of titles that would be both authentic and counterfeit.
Le titrier caused the reader to hear the homonym le titre y est: in other
words, if turned in English, the titrier would be the titleer and the
title here. In movement between its visual and aural tracks the title
bears (or becomes the vehicle of) the tenor of its meaning. Derrida
added that in all events there exists between the title and the text over
which it stands the presence of legal protocol. A discourse must in
5
Christophe Wall-Romana, in Mallarms Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the
Cinmatographe, 189398, PMLA 120.1 (2005) 12847, draws attention to the cinematic
foundation of the material with which Derrida had always been affiliated.
6
Guy Rosolato, Pour une psychanalyse exploratrice dans la culture (Paris: PUF, 1993), and
Elments de linterprtation (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
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some way respond to or account for the title, like a lawyer (or even a
devils advocate) that represents it. If it does not, it is in errancy; if it
seems not to do so, the reader can always invent a relation that will
make sense in binding or limiting the title to what follows. The text,
in a traditionally emblematic relation to the superscriptive title, must
indeed subscribe to or underwrite what is above it. Or else, in the
case of a poem, it must defer its presence or attend to its meaning
in the strange and circuitous course taken from the titular point of
departure to a destination. Quite often the title is scripted so as to
return in the text and thus come back as if it were a specter or a ghost.
Through two patient readings of Ponge and Blanchot, Derrida brought
forward what seems to be an axiom concerning the perception and
creation of events in writing. Between a title and a text (or a painting,
a movie, or whatever is appended to the title) is opened a space that
can be analyzed through the filter of psychoanalysis, social relations,
economic theory, or politics in general. In the relation one seesas
Derrida later makes clear in Spectres de Marxthe stakes of meaning
in a spatial register that is both abstract and graphically immediate.
The point is refined further in a long and difficult reflection on
Blanchot, Heidegger, and Meyer Schapiro in the final chapter of La
Vrit en peinture (1978), a book-quadrant of four essays on painting
and philosophy that he calls painting acts (in English in the original)
that expand on as many essays published earlier in shorter form: in
Digraphe, on le beau and the sublime; in Derrire le miroir, for a show
of Valerio Adamis paintings and drawings, two of which were titled
Etudes pour un dessin daprs Glas; an article for the catalogue
of Grard Titus-Carmels exposition called The Pocket Size Tlinget
Coffin et les 61 premiers dessins qui sensuivirent; finally, Restitutions: de la vrit en peinture, in Macula, what becomes in this volume a longer polylogue that carries an algebraic subtitle ( n + 1
voixfminine). As in Limited Inc the expansion and dilation of the
writing beg the reader to see how the art of chicane and bricole inform its
style. New volumes, new spaces are opened, and therein are deployed
graphic strategies that bring painting to bear on printed writing. As
usual, inverted commas, titles, subtitles, headings and subheadings,
dashes, numbers in algebraic equations, dates in epigraph, sentences
without periods, and masses of text are isolated as blocks or even as
islands in a greater and often secret cartography.
With respect to the title Derrida remarks that it is sign Czanne
(signed Czanne), and that as an author he must acknowledge the
debt of the attribution to his friend, Hubert Damisch, who had cited
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The painter is he who speaks in writing and who first tells a joke about
truth in painting and with an idiomatic term and with a concurrent
sense of revulsion (. . . en peinture) insofar as Czanne indeed, like
anyone worth his or her salt, cannot stand truth. Here the title of the
book becomes a duplicitous mechanism of a quasi-infinitely recurring
citation that moves across all of the essays, but especially the last, the
keystone piece on Van Gogh and Heidegger, on the poet and the philosopher, that bears the name, RESTITUTIONS de la vrit en peinture
(291436).8 The double instance of restoring and shattering truth and
painting come to a surface in the formula that resituates (as it encloses)
the field of view in the writing. The essay is crucial to the volume for the
reason that it returns to the issue of the protocol of the responsibilities
accorded to the title and the text in the decisive statement, a shard of
dialogue, that both floats and locates its own origin:
Posons en axiome que le dsir dattribution est un dsir dappropriation.
En matire dart comme partout ailleurs. (297)
At the beginning of the second section of the piece, that begins when
the text in Macula suddenly ends, he returns to the issue of attribution
as if it were a musical refrain in a serial symphony (302). Thus the
desire to title, to bear or wear a title, to bear an attribution in a political
and a professional sense alike, engages a will to appropriate or even
to arrogate. Yet Derrida, in order to make manifest the double bind
in which he places himself in titling the work that he wantsor may
not wantto attribute to himself, has recourse to the former strategy
of the reiterated signature, the tailpiece or coda that had crystallized
La Vrit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) 67.
Comparison with the first version shows that the text is considerably amplified in
its later stage. In Macula 3/4 (1978), it is written in small typeface (pointure) and occupies pages 1137; without any noticeable alteration, it occupies pages 291362 of
La Vrit en peinture. Derrida adds 74 pages of polylogue to the essay in its final form
(pages 362436).
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its force from its continued reiteration. It can be inferred that where
other philosophers write of difference, repetition, and variation, it is
Derrida who makes their principles operative in the writing itself. A
fitting conclusion would, in obedience to the laws and protocol of titles
and the arguments that sustain them, return to cinema. The projection
room would be the privileged site for all the twists and turns of the
style that becomes visible in the 1970s. It has a common trait in what
Derrida discerns in Freuds writing, in what the founder of psychoanalysis called Bilderschriften, picture-writings that require the reader to
see and hear the written text along and across at least two tracks. His
own words are likened to what Eisenstein called montage, the word
that Derrida once borrowed to translate Zusammensetzungen.10 Yet the
operation could not stop or be arrested in the name of a concept or
any closure. It could not be said, either, that when informed by the
cinematic process, the reader is better able to discern the political
force of the later works, like Voyous, that weave philosophy and reflection on the state of the world after September 11, 2001.11
It might be more appropriate (without there being a will to appropriate Derrida and his work) to return to the inspired and inspiring
dialogue that Hlne Cixous led with Derrida, a dialogue in which
the issues taken up in the paragraphs above are treated in view of
friendship. In Insister Cixous dreams of returning to the first turns,
to the first scenes of reading of Derrida, to their first encounters
that were already written in them, long before they met, as if they
were avatars of Montaigne and La Botie:
Tout oui Toute oue, voil ce que nous sommes, moi deux fois oue, oue
toi et oue de toi, le premier jour, avant tout voir, avant tout visage, avant
le tout premier, avant, devant, ds linstant avant tout premier o sans
savoir ni vouloir, ne de la part, sans part donc, la parole sempare de mon
oue sans que jaie dit non ni ni oui une adresse, ta parole, cest--dire
ton crit, la parole de ton crit, de ton crire.12
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Much of what follows in this first chapter of Cixouss poem (Insistre: comment traduire cela?, 1154) returns to the art of ruse and
bricolecombine tu aimes la puissance des mots petits ou dans ces
petits tres la condensation, la ruse (27). It recalls Derridas style
of the middle 1970s, but it projects it forward, too, into his more
recent reading of Manhattan, in which both share the public secret
of a common love of literature (32). The literature they love is one
of polyphony. They share their passions for its multiple voices and
rhythms and together they create a writing of many sensuous sights
and sounds. In any assessment of Derrida it would be wrong not to
recognize the creative power of a love shared in the modulations and
differences of the writing and in its incredible twists and turns.
Harvard University
Contributors
Saddek Aouadi is Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Annaba, Algeria. His fields of interest include comparative literature,
literary theory, and North African literature in French.
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner is a Professor of French at Boston College, whose
work focuses primarily on the fields of medieval French romance and troubadour lyric. Her publications include Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century
French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (11601200), Shaping Romance:
Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions, and (with
co-authors Laurie Shepard and Sarah White), an edition and translation of
Songs of the Women Troubadours.
David Carroll is Professor of French at the University of California, Irvine.
His books include French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the
Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998) and Albert Camus, The
Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia UP, forthcoming
April, 2007).
Hlne Cixouss many works include LExil de Joyce ou lart du remplacement
(Paris: Grasset, 1968), La Jeune Ne (with Catherine Clment, [Paris: Union
gnrale dditions, 1975]), LHeure de Clarisse Lispector (Paris: Des femmes,
1989), and Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Paris: Galile, 2001)
along with a great number of plays and works of fiction. With Jacques Derrida, she is the author of Voiles (Paris: Galile, 1998).
Tom Conley is Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and
Literatures at Harvard University. His major publications include A Map in
a Movie: A Study of Cartography and Cinema (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
forthcoming 2006), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern
France (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), The Graphic Unconscious in Early
Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992). He is also the co-editor of Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in
Twentieth-Century France (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996).
Christian Delacampagne is a professor in the Department of German and
Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, teaching
MLN 121 (2006): 10381040 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.