parallax, 2005, vol. 11, no.

2, 93103

Name No One Man

John Paul Ricco

As someone engaged in critical theory, I take my work to be a problematization, specifically a putting into question and a rethinking of visual representation, visualbased epistemologies, and visualizations of social-sexual subjects. Whereas others have defined theory as a mode of representation, I wish to pursue a theoretical practice that in terms of both its objects of inquiry and its method (concepts that are here being put into question) approaches the unrepresentable, without necessarily becoming abstract, ephemeral, or an absolute negation. As a critical queer theorist, my goal, if I may put it that way, is a social ethics thought in terms of the spatiality of erotics and writing, predicated on the persistence of the anonymous, itinerant, imperceptible, and inaudible. This then, is just as much a matter of legibility as it is of visibility of reading what is yet to be written, and visualizing what remains unforeseen. These are political questions in that, as Jacques Ranciere affirms, politics is always a policing of visibility ` and invisibility, and so to make the political happen as something other than sanctioned politics, it is necessary to break through this double bind in a movement towards that which is unforeseeable and imperceptible, that which exists outside the bounds and mandates of a compulsory and confessional visibility and identification, AND a violent visual oblivion or disappearance.1 Following this, the work that I do as a writer, in my writing, is itself problematized, such that one might locate my critical theoretical practice at the juncture of the threshold or limits of perception and the illegibility and iterability of writing. Which is to say, at the inevitable disjuncture between seeing, saying, and writing, an inevitably that marks an unavoidable and ineradicable blind spot in art historical discourse, that is intensified in my work by an attention to such non-evidentiary things as betrayal, loss, disappeared, imperceptible, blinks, winks, blindness, and, as my principle focus here: erasure. So again, I must emphasize that this is not a critical negation or a positive valorization but rather an affirmation, that which insists that it will always be difficult to say what one is seeing when it comes to the clandestine, the indiscernible, those yet to come. The essay that follows involves a return to various scenes of writing, beginning here with Jacques Derridas 1966 lecture, Freud and the Scene of Writing.2 In it, Derrida addresses the metaphors of writing in Freuds ongoing development of theories of perception, the unconscious, and memory, all of which might be said to culminate in Freuds 1925 paper, A Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad .3 The last sentence of Freuds paper imagines what seems to be an impossible two-handed, writing-erasing.
parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640500058582

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If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic WritingPad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of the mind. Towards the end of his lecture, Derrida argues that in that paper, Freud performed for us the scene of writing. But we must think this scene in other terms than those of individual or collective psychology, or even of anthropology. It must be thought in the horizon of the scene/stage of the world, as the history of that scene/stage.4 Specifically, this is, at once, a path-breaking scene/stage (for Freud and for Derrida, and for us too, here) and a path that breaks through any possible scene/stage. As early as 1895 Freud had stated that in what pathbreaking [sic] consists remains undetermined, and we might add that at the same time, path-breaking persists as something ob-scene and unbecoming. For although we might surmise that the scene referred to in the title of Derridas lecture intends to hint at the so-called primal scene, in the end Derrida suggests that it might also refer to other scenes of an equally prohibitive sexual nature, that in part would find their analogy in writing. He intimates this through a quote from Freuds Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety: As soon as writing, which entails making liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act.5 In what follows, I write on the sociality and spatiality of other scenes and surfaces that imply neither the masturbatory nor the incestuous acts suggested by Freud, but some other equally forbidden alliance, and a path-breaking all their own, that I will argue is the opening onto, or an exposure to, the promise and potential of community. Community understood not in terms of a collective totality (psychological, anthropological, or otherwise, say, even, political), but as an indistinct and incalculable sharing that is, at times, also a traitorous collaboration. Community, only as the one to come and incessantly so an unbecoming community.6 I shall begin then, with two divergent statements, each in response to work made by the artist Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1950s. The first is that of an exasperated Barnett Newman, upon seeing Rauschenbergs Unpainted Canvas paintings: Humph! Thinks its easy. The point is to do it with paint. The second, is part of the epigraph to John Cages essay about his close friend and collaborator Rauschenberg, addressed to an anonymous addressee, and clarifying a question of chronology: To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first, my silent piece came later. J.C.7 The White Paintings referred to by Cage are a series of works that Rauschenberg executed in 1951, using nothing more than ordinary white house paint and canvas, and my silent piece of course refers to Cages perhaps most well-known and often discussed composition, 49330, (1952) which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Clearly, Cage and Rauschenberg understood the potential of an artistic practice that effectively, and yet through the simplest of methods, could fundamentally alter conceptions of painting and musical composition, in which, for instance, an unpainted canvas and a specific duration of silence, which are none other than that unpainted canvas and that
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specific time of silence, are the persistence of existing as painting and as musical composition.8 In the White Paintings, 49330, and Rauschenbergs Erased De Kooning Drawing (the principle focus of this essay), the work of art exposes and is exposed to the potential to be and to not-be at once, an exposure that is what Bill Haver refers to as arts work.9 Arts work runs the risk that is the full force of potentiality, such that in the wake of the White Paintings it is difficult any longer to ignore the absence of image that is the condition that enables any image to be registered, just as Cages piece performs silence as the outside that insidiously dwells within all sound and enables the latter to be heard. Erasure

Erasure turns drawing, turns a, and perhaps any, drawing around. It turns on drawing, it betrays drawing. Within the realm of drawing, erasing cannot be trusted or counted on. As we shall see, the incalculable, that which cannot be counted, is a predicament that we may not be able to, nor want to, overcome. The questions of calculation, of how many count and even more so, of how one counts and of who counts (both as counter and counted), all of these it will seem, must remain only partially answerable. For when it is a matter of drawing, does erasing still count, even if, as I have already suggested, it cannot be counted on, that is, trusted? When it comes to drawing, what can one count on? In the case of Willem De Kooning, it seems justified to say that not only did he continue in the artistic tradition of preliminary sketches, drawings, and studies, but that he was a consummate draughtsman; not simply one who drew, but who masterfully exhibited the qualities of disegno, that artistic achievement enshrined by Giorgio Vasari and academically maintained for centuries. Presumably this played some part in Rauschenbergs decision to approach this well-known older artist and request one of his drawings for the purposes of erasing it. Evidently and not too surprisingly, De Kooning initially balked at the idea, but eventually relented, and decided to give the young artist not simply any drawing, but one that was thoroughly and heavily covered with pencil, crayon, charcoal, etc. Yet as Leo Steinberg suggests in his recent lecture on Rauschenberg, there may be another reason why he, Rauschenberg, was drawn to De Kooning (the pun is intentional and perhaps inevitable), one that has less to do with De Koonings drawing practice then it has to do with his, De Koonings own erasing, or more accurately the fact that, in Steinbergs words, De Kooning was the one who belabored his drawings with an eraser.10 One might go so far as to argue that De Koonings expert draughtsmanship was predicated upon his approach or exposure to drawings potentiality, including its potential to not-be, namely the force of erasure. The relation between drawing and erasing then is not oppositional as much as it is an infinite folding of the two across each other. Erasure is the un-drawing or better yet the with-drawing of drawing, of drawing with the eraser that is the withdrawal of drawing, without necessarily being drawings negation or annihilation. A de-creation rather than a destruction, a worklessness rather than the total absence of work. As Rauschenberg has said, he wished to use the eraser as a drawing tool.11
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Erasing, as an un-working of the work of drawing, puts into question what it is we mean when we speak of the work of art, and of artistic practice as productive. Erasing is a process or event, a means of doing as a means of undoing, in which a matted and framed sheet of paper, as work of art, is the inessential residue of arts work as unworking erasure. Erasure is the event of wanting not to or, as Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener might say, of preferring not to, draw in drawing. Yet it is a withdrawing that remains, residually and inexhaustibly, with drawing and within drawing. Erasing is potentially infinite, and defies closure or completion, such that Rauschenberg could have never erased enough. It is this inexhaustibility of erasure, with which he leaves us, or gives to us, as though a gift, here at the exhaustion of drawing. Between the two, drawing and erasing, is the disaster, not as mediating event or third term, work nor the absence of work, but instead the disaster as the force of unbecoming, such that it might be said that it is this unworking that drawing and erasing share, in and as the intimacy (and distance) of their touch.12 In this regard it might be said that drawing is beside itself, not just here now, but always, located at that non-localizable juncture where drawing ends and erasing begins. One might also say, that here, drawing is beside the point, including the point or is it points? with which to draw. So to re-phrase and reverse Newmans statement, the point is not to do it with the pointed end of the pencil. But what is the it that is being done (Newmans and Rauschenbergs and even my own)? The answer as to what is at stake here might be something like: art, drawing, or perhaps something else as well, which remains imperceptible, again, not only here and now but always and infinitely or, better yet, as infinitely imperceptible right on the very surface of the sheet of paper. For the moment, let us remain with drawing, and say that the point of erasing is to do it, namely drawing, in reverse, a restating of drawing that is literally a turning back on the act of drawing, perhaps of turning ones own back on drawing, and at the same time a turning again of, or within, drawing, that opens up or exposes drawing to its potential return (re-inscription) or its potential abandonment. Erasure then, is a drawing over, that inversely draws over drawing, and returns drawing to its former self, namely erasure. Which is to argue that erasure, rather than being inevitably destined to follow drawing, precedes and is anterior to drawing it is drawings pure potentiality. It is not that erasure exists on top of drawing, as superficial trace (clearly an impossibility), but that drawing is, that drawing happens, always under-erasure, thereby affirming erasures prior, or originary, status (as what Derrida refers to as architrace). Drawings origins, like all origins, is nothing more than a beginning again, a repetitive re-turning of drawing that is predicated upon erasures reversing or turning (its) back on drawing. One only draws to the extent that erasure has already happened, calling or demanding for drawings return. John Cage, in that essay on Rauschenberg cited earlier, writes, The door is never locked []. Its a joy in fact to begin over again. In preparation he erases the De Kooning.13 As Derrida had repeatedly pointed out, An unerasable trace is not a trace.14 Which is to say that unless there is something to erase, drawing cannot be said to exist. This condition might be rephrased by the question: in what way can a drawing still be considered a drawing if it cannot be erased? Drawing presupposes erasure as originary
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absence, as that which enables drawing to be recognizable as drawing. Drawing is then to be understood as an inscriptive amnesia, the forgetting of, and the getting over, of erasure. Ironically then, erasing is the remembering of this absence within drawing, it is what helps drawing remember its own forgetting, not only what drawing forgets, but speaking ontologically, what drawing is, namely an inscriptive forgetting. Drawing is one of those technologies, in this case, perhaps older than almost all others, through which forgetting is (at least momentarily) forgotten.15 Signatures

In a word, no draftsmanship. And even in 1953, he sensed where he was heading toward a visual art that had no further use for the genius of drawing. He may himself have begun to use the eraser, not in De Koonings manner, constructively, but to see drawing expunged.16 Whereas in a certain sense it seems quite correct to say, as Steinberg does in this statement just quoted, that by executing the Erased De Kooning Drawing, Rauschenberg effectively announced the de-privileging of draughtsmanship within the art historical and aesthetic criteria of judgment, ironically, it might also be said that Rauschenberg reveals the most fundamental aspects, one might go so far as to say, the ontology, of drawing. It may not be that following Rauschenbergs erasing, drawing must be proclaimed dead (clearly an impossibility, even beyond the obvious history that it has subsequently enjoyed), but that the force of erasure in drawing, that is, drawings potentiality, will be all the more difficult to deny. Which is to say that once erasure happens, in the way that it happened back in 1953, it is difficult to erase it. This is affirmed by the title of the work, in which the retention of the word drawing bears the persistent and inextricably folded relation between drawing and erasing. Yet this sense of the ontology of drawing also seems to be affirmed by Steinberg himself, when he calls our attention to the historiographic eminence of this very drawing within De Koonings oeuvre. For it can be argued that this is De Koonings most famous drawing, an assertion to which one might add that the same can be said for Rauschenberg.17 Yet perhaps more perplexing than this mutual sharing, in a similarly strange basis of recognition, is the way it can be said that the Erased De Kooning Drawing is both De Koonings and Rauschenbergs most famous drawing. It is here that the question of calculation necessarily arises, as one asks how it is that two artists, without working together on the same project, can receive fame from a single work. How might one account for this doubling of signatures, once drawn and once erased? In terms of collaboration; but of what sort? Claims have been made for two signatory presences, all the while based upon signatory traces that are in fact negligible to the point of being illegible. So, two signatures and no signatures, at once. The Erased De Kooning Drawing is a ghosting of signatory traces that, as traces, must be understood to be ghostly. Here therefore, is a mutual haunting: of Rauschenberg and
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De Kooning, and of erasing and drawing. Ghosts (Fr. revenants) are literally the ones who return (Fr. revenir, to come again and to come back), and in this case, both artists can be said to have a ghostly presence. De Kooning in a persistence of inscribed traces that can never be completely erased; Rauschenberg in a turning drawing back, a returning to drawing through erasure that returns drawing to its originary condition, yet origin in the sense of remainder, return, and revenant (ghost). Both artists are present and absent, mutually and in reverse: De Kooning is absent as the one who draws, and Rauschenberg is present as the one who erases absent in drawing and present in erasing, but in such a way that absence and presence no longer adequately serve as descriptors (perhaps suggesting that they never have and never will be adequate). This might be taken as a perverse inversion of the logic of absence and presence, yet no more so than any other instance of writing and re-writing. If we think of the sheet of drawing paper as the material space in which these two artists are drawn together by erasure, then we can begin to understand how it is that, with the Erased De Kooning Drawing, and the adding up of signatory traces which is to say accounting for this doubling of signatures, and thereby addressing what appears to be a legal bind it is necessary that we name no one man. For this drawing-erasing absolutely disrupts the logic of the first-person present indicative from which the validity and legitimacy of the signature is derived. Is this then, a two-handed affair, or is it four? Whos counting, and how? It is here, in this zone of the incalculable, where drawing and erasing can be said (even if not seen) to coexist, that one encounters what might be understood, in all of its indeterminancy, as originary writing that which, according to Derrida, if there is one, must produce the space and the materiality of the sheet itself .18 This is a shared space, perhaps even spacing as sharing, yet not in the sense of an equal partaking of some completed whole, but rather as that which, in its persistent open-endedness, always remains to be shared. The disaster that unverifiably marks the touching of drawing and erasing, their coexistence, at the same time leaves both drawing and erasing untouched and thereby hauntingly registers a rhythm that they share, and marks their eternal recurrence as that which is without complete reclamation or preservation. In an early essay on what she referred to as Rauschenbergs materialized images, Rosalind Krauss observed that the surfaces of the artists early works existed as places where a certain equalization of things and a sense of sameness were achieved.19 In his essay, The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes famously argued that a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet [he emphasized, and in a way that is not unimportant to the remainder of my own argument] this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. I would like to argue that the single sheet of paper that is the material basis of Rauschenbergs Erased De Kooning Drawing, is just such a single field, where a relation between artists takes the form of a non-identitarian and impersonal sameness, that is effected by a directionality that brings them, and drawing and erasing, together. In this
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way, I wish to treat this as a question of spacing, in which it is no longer possible to name one man, even though we dont know at this point exactly how many more men there are to be counted, because we still dont know which men count and which do not. Nonetheless, we might proceed by giving ourselves over to a palindromic reading and writing practice, in which sameness is generated regardless of whether the reading or the writing follows a forward or backward direction.20 For what the Erased De Kooning Drawing attests to, is that at the conjunction/disjunction of drawing and erasing which is the very space and materiality of sharing of sameness in difference, there is one single demand: name no one man. It is this phrase, exemplary in its palindromic effect, that in this case here, is the demand for a bi-directional multiplicity and unicity. A palindromic logic is structured through a reversibility: a moving in two opposing directions that nonetheless yields an undeniable sameness. In terms of the correspondence between these two artists, it might be said that Rauschenberg is behind De Kooning, following the older artist, yet at the same time, De Kooning, as creator of the drawing, is behind Rauschenberg. However, Rauschenberg, as a newcomer, is now in front of or ahead of De Kooning. De Kooning has turned his back on the young artist, and has endorsed Rauschenbergs erasure by putting his drawing behind him, and yet Rauschenberg, in turning back to De Koonings drawing, returns it or takes it back exappropriates it by erasing it. They are then both traitors and collaborators, and it is in this traitorous collaboration of drawing and erasing, this nearly secret and imperceptible intimacy, that they await and haunt each other, and share in their mutual coming and unbecoming. Rauschenberg approaches De Kooning in a movement that is neither a matter of a directional back-to-back (implying succession, opposite ends, divergence), nor front-to-front (as in a mutual face-to-face, implying fusion, union, closure, confusion), but of front-to-back and, at the same time, back-to-front (of approaching or being approached from behind; of taking the door alluded to by Cage in his discussion of this erased drawing, as a back door; of doing it, from behind or in reverse, as in coitus a tergo, or sex from behind, back-to-front). It is through such a sexual-spatial positioning, such a di-erectionality,21 that a non-relational relation occurs, that is also, a non-relational betrayal (again, the other meaning of collaborator), through a sameness that is not identity, and that makes it difficult to name one man in the space of drawing-erasing, and to be confident that there are ever simply two. This is also the position assumed by the German soldier Erik and the young French collaborator Riton, on a Parisian rooftop during the liberation of Paris, in one of the final scenes of Jean Genets 1953 novel Funeral Rites. Funeral Rites is Genets elegy to his lover Jean Decarnin (the doubling of first names should not be overlooked such scenes of writing), who, as a Communist member of the French resistance was picked off the barricades by a French collaborator whom Genet names Riton. More specifically and subversively, it is elegiac, by way of what Genet forces us to consider to be a positive form of betrayal. For Genet imagines avenging the death of his lover and affirming the suffering he experiences over his loss, by falling in love with the collaborator and the enemy, with an intensity equal to that he felt for Jean.22
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Leaning back against the brick monument, facing a Paris that was watching and waiting, Erik buggered Riton. Their trousers were lowered over their heels where the belt buckles clinked at each movement. The group was strengthened by leaning against the wall, by being backed up, protected by it. If the two standing males had looked at each other, the quality of the pleasure would not have been the same. Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, with their knees tangled, they would have been entwined in a rapture that would have confined them in a kind of oval that excluded all light, but the bodies in the figurehead which they formed looked into the darkness, as one looks into the future, the weak sheltered by the stronger, the four eyes staring in front of them. They were projecting the frightful ray of their love to infinity. [] Erik and Riton were not loving one in the other, they were escaping from themselves over the world, in full view of the world, in a gesture of victory.23 Rauschenberg and De Kooning also share in the same direction, or perhaps it should be said that they share a non-relational space in which drawing and erasing are no longer diametrically opposed but rather expose them, together and in the same place, to an inexact sameness. This spatial relationality and directionality is neither intersubjective fusion or some oedipal conflict, but the pleasure and joy of facing in the same direction, that leads to an expenditure of all signatory traces (i.e. identities), and is the dissolution of distinctions between self and other, absence and presence, creation and destruction. Together, they face in the same direction, onto a future without individual artistic egos and the sociality that is the relation of ego to ego that typically goes by the name of community. A reversal, or perhaps more radically an undoing of the structural logics of the indexical trace and the rhetorical apostrophe, the Erased De Kooning Drawing effects what I take Leo Bersani to mean when he speaks of an anonymous, relational narcissism, which is neither a mirror reflection of the self nor a representation of the other but the sense without image of an affective bond that interminably awaits its completion, as it is cast-out and returned back; inscribed and erased, at once.24 Such a nonidentitarian narcissism (that is without individuation and ego), is, according to Bersani, the pleasure of losing oneself and inaccurately and yet never fully finding oneself replicated outside oneself, in which the self has obviously become something other than a subjective interiority and the outside is now understood to be the extensibility that is the ontological self, itself. A self then, that is neither split nor doubled but singularly plural, and therefore exists in a non-alienating relation to the world, an indexical relation that is not the inscribed mark of a now-absent presence but the erased traces that mark a ghostly and multiple co-presence.25 Much of this might lead one to recall Marcel Duchamps Tu m (1918) which represents a relapse or return to painting on the part of the artist, as well as a return to some of his earlier works, in the form of painted shadows of his readymades (i.e. bicycle wheel, hat rack).26 The title of the work is a linguistic fragment, in which a portion of a phrase is missing or erased and thereby left open to any number of possible words that might complete it. As a French linguistic fragment, a number (again the question of how
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many arises) of transitive or reflexive verbs beginning with a vowel could be added to it. Yet perhaps this is an invitation offered by Duchamp to resist such temptations spurred by a desire for completion, to fill-in and to add to what is not there, but instead to accept it as it is, in its very fragmentary and open-ended condition: you [] me. For I would argue that in its coupled incompletion, it indicates the sociality shared between Rauschenberg and De Kooning, that is neither drawing nor erasing but the space that neither one can fully appropriate, perversely indexed as this very sheet of paper, and not unlike the single white rectangle resembling a sheet of paper, painted in the central foreground of Duchamps Tu m, next to a painted hand (executed by a A. Klang, sign painter and here, a collaborator) with index finger extended, pointing to this white sheet, as though it too was saying: you (blank) me. This is a writing without addressor and addressee, written simply to whom it may concern, a noncommunicative performative act (i.e. without significance and subjectification) that is not writing proper nor is it exactly erasing, but a different way of meaning, a testifying to an ineluctable disappearance, something like Cages silence, a becomingimperceptible in a zone of indiscernibility that is, nothing more nor less, than this sheet of paper, readymade, and always already unmade. Unbecoming Community

This calls upon us to retain the political as unnameable and incalculable, and to remain close to the truth of this traitorous collaboration, neither in the form of drawing or erasing (or a drawing or an erasing), this or that artist, but in their nonveridical coming, neither completely together or finally, but infinitely and multiply. For this is the only affirmation provided by this work, although only in the sense of that which is potentially endless without being everything. An affirmation that can neither be drawn nor, perhaps more powerfully, erased, it is the persistence of affirmation itself, the yes in response to an always already yes, the promise of an unforeseeable future in all of its open-endedness. The Erased De Kooning Drawing is neither a machine of meaning nor a tool of production, but a work, and more specifically the residue or materialized supplement (neither ruin nor excrement) of the unbecoming force of worklessness. In terms of the number of hands involved, this must forever remain incalculable to the point of being innumerable. Therefore, one can no longer speak in terms of conceptual opposition (i.e. self and other), but rather must resort to the exposure of a certain imperceptible difference, and a mode of relationality that persists on the threshold of perception (neither implicit nor explicit, but perhaps illicit). This would be something like unforeseen forms of relationality, and it is this opening and exposure, this absolute incompletion that is the stage/scene of a sociality to come, a coming community, and of the political as that which can never be prescribed but only attained in its fleeting yet effective enactment (de-scribed) on and as this stage/scene. This then, is the only assurance that nihilism will remain avoidable, nihilism in the sense of absolute immanence and resolution (for instance as completion and redemption, that is, as totalitarianism). This is the infinite labor to which art is assigned and to which it is
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traitorously dedicated. A non-technological mode of techne, a path-breaking rather than an end-reaching. In terms of inscription, including writing and drawing, it is the architrace: an originary writing-drawing-erasing that marks the erasure of the sovereign subject and authoritative presence. Indeed, not only must one name no one man, but one will be forever uncertain as to which men might be named, difficult as it is to assign proper names to such writing, drawing, reading, erasing practices. The inability to say who, the impossibility to testify (including in the sense of the legal-juridical), it is this incommunicability of identity that is the language of those without community, those who refuse to be counted traitorous collaborators27 a writing that calls for a different method of calculation, one that can register the incessant and imperceptible coming of two or more men, that is neither a coming together nor apart, but simply prior; a mode of sociality that is a non-relational sharing in sameness without being reduced to a unitary oneness or collective totality.28 This then, would be the unbecoming community, a sharing in the promise of a future to come in all of its uncertainty, and a future that is the promise of uncertainty shared. The alternative may be that of the refugee; the migrant worker; the detainee; the disappeared; the sexual predator; those orphaned from AIDS, famine, war, and genocide; the asylum seeker; each and every one a status that each of us, otherwise, will increasingly need to come to recognize as our own.

Notes See for instance, Jacques Ranciere, The cause of ` the other, parallax 7 (April 1998), pp.2533, and especially the following passage: And the police are not primarily a strong-arm repressive force, but a form of intervention which prescribes what can be seen and what cannot be seen, what can be said and what cannot be said. And politics is constructed in relation to that prescription []. Politics is something that is declared in the face of policing, defined as the law that prescribes what emerges and what is heard, what can be counted and what cannot be counted, pp.2829. 2 Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp.196231. 3 Sigmund Freud, A Note on the Mystic WritingPad (1924), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol.19 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1961), pp.227232. 4 Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, p.229 (emphasis in the original). 5 As quoted in Derrida Freud and Scene of Writing, p.229. 6 This essay is part of a book that I am currently working on that examines works by a number of writers, visual artists, and playwrights, in which a seemingly blank wall, canvas, or sheet of paper, becomes a zone of relationality by functioning as a Ricco 102
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surface of exposure and opening onto an outside. In these ways, Herman Melville, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jean Genet, Felix-Gonzalez-Torres, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Duchamp, and Yasmina Reza, suggest new ways to think social ethics and politics, and require a radical rethinking of aesthetics and art. For less than an object of hermeneutic inquiry and interpretation, the blank wall, canvas or sheet of paper is a supplement and remnant of non-evidentiary and yet inexhaustible dimensions of anonymous, imperceptible, and singularly-multiple modes of sociality, forms of coexistence that I refer to as unbecoming community. 7 John Cage, On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work, in Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp.98107. 8 For a similar argument and the finest recent study on Rauschenberg, see, Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2003). 9 In addition to the essay included in this volume of the journal, earlier articulations of William Havers theory of arts work, can be found in, William Haver, Really Bad Infinities: Queers Honour and the Pornographic Life, parallax 13 (October 1999), pp.921; and William Haver, Foreword: The Logic of the Lure and the New Pornography, in John Paul

Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp.xixiv. 10 Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (Houston and Chicago: Menil Collection and University of Chicago Press, 2000), p.19. 11 Maxime de la Falaise McKendry, Robert Rauschenberg Talks to Maxime de la Falaise McKendry, Interview 6, no.5 (May 1976), pp.3436. 12 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 13 John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work, p.101. 14 Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, p.230; also in, From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism without Reserve, p.265; both in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 15 The page is white but it has been written on from time immemorial; it is white through forgetfulness of what has been written, through erasure of the text on which everything that is written is written. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p.310. 16 Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg, p.20. 17 One might note here that this curious basis for fame and notoriety is one that these two artists share with John Cage, to the extent that his most well known sound composition is the silent one (49330). 18 Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, p.210. 19 Rosalind Krauss, Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image, October 13 (Summer 1980), pp.3643. 20 Although I am not interested in using this as supporting evidence for the palindromic reading that I wish to pursue here, nonetheless it is perhaps worth recalling Rauschenbergs relatively wellknown diaplexia, which causes him in his speech and writing, to switch and reverse the order of letters and words in his prints. 21 Di-erectional is derived from Derridas stunning meditation on the spatial-temporal correspondence of writers and thinkers from Plato to Freud, of which in the current context I am unable to do any amount

of justice. Much of my thinking on the space shared by Rauschenberg and De Kooning in this work, has been informed by my reading of Derrida, most especially: Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 22 I derive this reading from the brilliant analysis of this scene put forth by Leo Bersani in the final chapter of his book, Homos (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1995). 23 Jean Genet, Funeral Rites, (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p.249. 24 Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, A Conversation with Leo Bersani, October 82 (Fall 1997), pp.316; Leo Bersani, Sociality and Sexuality, Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000), pp.641656. 25 My thinking on the singular plural, sense, sharing, co-existence, and art as vestige and remnant has been greatly informed by my reading of JeanLuc Nancy, that includes: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 26 Karl Gertsner, Marcel Duchamp: Tu m Puzzle upon Puzzle, (Bonn: Hatje Cantz, 2003). For a reading of Tu m in terms of the semiotic notion of the index see, Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index, Part 1, in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985), pp.196209. 27 This is at least partly intended to provoke a reconsideration of Rauschenbergs repeatedly articulated interest in collaborating with materials. See Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p.204 and p.232. 28 Branden W. Joseph has ascribed an aversion to just such political logics and forms to Rauschenberg and Cage in the 1950s, as when we writes: For Rauschenberg, as for Cage, all forms of collectivity whether advocated by the Left or the Right, for political mobilization or mass cultural conformity were suspect. Branden W. Joseph, White on White, Critical Inquiry 27 (Autumn 2000), pp.90 121.

John Paul Ricco is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal.

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