DENISE RILEY

Is there linguistic guilt?

The I of each is to the I of each a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself Marianne Moore, `Black Earth' 1

A confession. I've long been nursing a shapeless suspicion one I can't make presentable that there's a particular guilt, associated both with writing and with taking on an identification, which is itself partly generated by the workings of language. Might not language itself arouse an anxiety which it must also try, through its other circuits, to assuage? These notes, though, aren't directly to do with the psychology of guilt; while I'm aware that an edge of psychoanalytic theory will want to know to what extent the proximity of `language' to `the unconscious' is being either assumed, or ignored. Perhaps to try to speak about a guilt carried at the level of language will turn out only to feebly parrot those familiar Lacanian accounts of the subject already constituted in division, of the unconscious structured like a language.2 Or to be a weak rehashing of lalangue, but this time as connected to `the remainder of language', Jean-Jacques Lecercle's phrase.3 And `guilt' itself is a notably vague, catch-all, and easy word, one of the few mildly negative emotions which is readily admitted to, as if it's quite innocuous; which is in itself suspicious. Some imaginable maxim along the lines of `the greater the guilt, the more swollen the ego that it masks' snakes into my mind. Nevertheless, I've a sense that there may still be something rather different at work, if also quite modest a surface emotionality of language which is carried, simply and broadly, on that level. And that this is somehow acutely in play when it comes to writing; a literary as well as a linguistic guilt. Perhaps there's not only a grammar of guilt, but also a shamefaced sociology of authorship, although such occasions for unease are persisted in. Unwilled plagiarism is one facet of this, which sparks a second confession: discovering that such murky but insistent intuitions have had a literature of their own since at least the 1950s makes me not only an impostor but an

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especially ignorant one, stumbling along forty years after on the tracks of books I should have read, so that taking notes becomes a humiliatingly reassuring act of jettisoning them as I go, finding out that it's all been brilliantly achieved decades earlier. My suggestions in these notes are tentative; and any generalisations about poetry will be taken with the proper dose of salt, since they're made from a partial aesthetic, leaving out other persuasions which wouldn't have an interest in what this is on about. I'm speculating in some hinterland between psychology and linguistics, in a patently amateurish manner. Neither entirely of the psyche nor entirely of the logos, this notion that I'm creeping towards of `a linguistic guilt' fishes up the drowned etymology of psychology. And then this interrogation must painfully bite its own tail. For while I cross-question the first person, I also deploy it heavily. 1 `I' lies

The feeling of not being able to tell the truth, of inauthenticity under certain linguistic circumstances, and, however strenuously one struggles isn't this feeling much commoner than is usually acknowledged? Selfdescription can often be a torment, but its impediments aren't only personal pathologies. If I say `I am an x' or indeed its opposite then I'm confident only that now I am a liar. As an article of rather blind faith, I'm compelled to suppose that this feeling isn't purely idiosyncratic. In the coming pages, I'll have some stabs at why. An obvious way in: the very structure of the language of self-reference seems to demand and indeed to guarantee an authenticity which is closely tied to originality, while simultaneously it cancels this possibility. Any I seems to speak for herself; her utterance comes from her own mouth, and the first person pronoun is hers, if only for just so long as she pronounces it. Yet as a human speaker she must know that it is also everyone's, and that this grammatical offer of uniqueness (which always gets horribly conflated with authenticity) is radically untrue, is always being snatched away. The I which speaks from only one place is simultaneously everyone's everywhere; it's the linguistic marker of rarity but is always democratic. Of course I never does exist except (and critically!) as a momentary site of space-time individuation, and its mocking promise of linguistic originality must be, and always is, thwarted in order for language to exist in its proper communality.4 All this is old hat. Wittgenstein floated the idea of a private language in order to capsize it as oxymoronic; such interiority was impossible because it made for unintelligibility. Derrida, among others, described the emptiness

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of linguistic ownership: `The structure of theft already lodges (itself in) the relation of speech to language [. . .] The speaking subject discusses his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is always already eluded; for the origin is always already eluded on the basis of an organised field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing'.5 My autobiography always arrives from somewhere outside me; my narrating I is really anybody's, promiscuously. Never mind the coming story of my life; simply to enunciate that initial `I' makes me slow down in confusion. But maybe the `structure of theft' is still closer to home than `in the relation of speech to language', perhaps it's waiting in the language itself and, a bold burglar, has put its feet up there, long before the unsuspecting speaker strolls into it. To be stripped bare isn't the only kind of linguistic dispossession, which can also come about through plenitude. Sheer proliferation bewilders. Artaud writes desperately of forgetting how to be able to think, of interruptions and `fissures' which fail his articulation and which can never be mended. Often this is because he is rushed down diversions which branch out unstoppably: `There is therefore one single thing which destroys my ideas [. . .]. Something furtive which robs me of the words I have found, which reduces my terseness of mind, progressively destroying the bulk of my ideas within its own matter.' 6 He insists that this broken thought is `terribly abnormal', radically destructive, not merely what happens to everyone. `In a way, we might consider the impossibility of formulating and prolonging thought on the same level as the stammering which overcomes my external utterances just about every time I want to speak. Then it is as if my thought shrinks every time it wants to manifest itself and this is the contradiction which slaps my inner thought down inwardly, compresses it like a spasm. The thought, the expression stops because the flow is too powerful, the brain wants to say too many things, it thinks all at once, ten thoughts instead of one rush towards the exit, the brain sees thought as a unit in full detail and it also sees all the multiple points of view with which it could ally itself and the forms with which it could endow them. A vast conceptual juxtaposition, all seemingly more essential and also more dubious than the next and which all the syntactic brackets in the world would never be able to express and explain.' 7 His readers, filled with the empathy of recognition, may want to challenge his assertion of the abnormality of this experience. With due respect to Artaud's conviction of the uniqueness of his misery, I've quoted him as voicing a familiar chaos which cannot be tidied away by the concept of the I 's shortcomings. The false feeling of an I-pronouncement can't simply be to do with its air of claiming to originate while one senses that

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one's first being spoken to by language, and that `I' is a pretender to an impossible throne. So Heidegger describes language as an invocation to which man, although its ostensible `speaker', must resonate; or as The Platters less gloriously had it, `Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.' Yet it would be absurd to attach so much blame to the grammar of `I', which is, after all, necessarily everyone's for language to be possible; as if secretly you longed for a marker, like that private language Wittgenstein mocked, all of your own. The concept of the I 's linguistic alienation can only get so much done, and an unhappy mess soon overwhelms its efforts at housework. Despite Wittgenstein's notion of philosophy as a broom and its task as sweepingup, I'd prefer to stand by this stubborn heaped untidiness of unease attached to writing in the first person. 2 A liar writes

When I for I daren't speak for anyone else, and yet probably this emotion is very widespread when I write I and follow up the pronoun with a selfdescription, feelings of fraud grip me. Not always, of course. I can easily say `I'm worn out, I've just got the shopping back on the bus from Sainsbury's' but certainly can't say, for instance, `I'm a writer' and only under baroque circumstances would I wish to utter `I'm a woman'. Steering clear of the great sociological or sexual categories of identity, which are almost easier to analyse in their historical discomfiture, just what is the awkwardness of the self-description `I'm a writer'? Is it the halo of self-regarding leisure alone or my dread of the demand that I should prove it by coming up with the goods? Is it the incongruence of the ostensible stamp of originality, the authorial I, with the cultural capital, always derived and borrowed, on which I draw? Is it that the only novelty of anyone's I resides not in its utterance but in its accidents its style unwilled and incriminating as a fingerprint, its lingering cadences, its flavour or its smell, almost? The writer may, even to her own revulsion, hit on a tone as arbitrary and inimitable as a signature. These aspects are completely beyond my management, a fact which may or may not be worrying. But it does force a disassociation between ideas of `originality' and of `control'. There's a hum of language at my ear, I swat it away, it rises to resettle in thick clouds. It's outside me, I do not make it up, and it doesn't quite make me up. I go on struggling inside this doubled failure of origination. My guess is that while indeed there's an embarrassing sociology of `being a writer', there's also something more intimately to do with the imperatives of writing as an intensification of a common enough guilt. I learnt my English from books, which perhaps increased my sense

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of learning it as a foreign language, as a borrowed or a stolen thing, but I'm sure that the impression of displacement isn't ever solely due to any such psychobiographical accident. To claim to be a writer is like making a special claim to be a breather. It's easy enough if you have the minimal materials, and so the activity can be carried out furtively, secretively. A student confesses `I don't want to admit to my friends that I write, I won't come out to them.' But everyone does it, I want to reassure her, it's quite natural, nothing to be ashamed of. My phrases would resemble unconvincing sexual emollients which only serve to sharpen anxiety. Then her next worry would come hard on its heels: `And exactly because everyone does it, what right do I have to make public my own concerns? Why should my life's ordinary preoccupations be of the least interest to anyone else?' I've heard this concern (and voiced overwhelmingly by women who are beginning to write poetry) a hundred times. It's a real, a serious question, and it can't be properly addressed through the terms it usually receives that it shows an individual psychology of low self-confidence. Many who've survived creative writing classes must also feel silent doubt when exhorted to describe only what they've experienced. It seems a further well-intentioned cruelty to exhort such students to `find their own voices', especially when, under the same institutional roof, another pedagogy of literary criticism may be rehearsing them in the intertextuality of literature, where everything's quotation. This resembles the problem of writing an original love letter, or rather a convincing love letter, since originality in love is hardly possible a letter that could convince me, its author, of its constancy and mine, when inevitably I find myself repeating the same expressions I have used to others before. Falling in love repeatedly is humiliating when the apparent rarity of feeling announces itself as, after all, condemned to verbal repetition; while it seems cheapskate to echo the phrases one's written, in all sincerity, over the years. Cos fan tutte is from this angle a hideously upsetting opera, since in its cruel and backwards logic (I sidestep any possible truth of this) what generates love is playing the part of a lover. But if there's no originality in emotion, there's none in language. This reflection is hardly consoling. Some further doubts which turn on self-description: I can't believe in a selfhood which is other than generated by language over time; yet can readily feel inauthentic if I speak of myself as a sociologised subject. This describing `I' produces an anxiety which can't be mollified by any theory of its constructedness. The falseness of my persona telling its, my, tale resounds in my own ears, despite my best intentions, and however plausible it may sound to an audience. What purports to be `I' speaks back

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to me, and I can't quite believe what I hear it say. My unease isn't so much with lying to others, which I think I'd know about, as with lying to myself, which I wouldn't. Polonius's strictures in Hamlet, `to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man' offer me not tautology but hopelessness. I am hard to please myself, and can't take much comfort from the usual evasions for example, that what I write is merely floated out with no destination, no expectation that it should be read. Or that writing is one prolonged piece of self-informing repudiation; getting rid of it, but in order to find out just what it was you thought; for then the rational gesture would be to delete the work. Then there's the writer costumed as a tease, the jack-in-the-box who'll elaborately mislay himself to bob up again. Underlying any such equivocations, what persists is the recognition of being as derived as I am derivative. What's a style? A veneer, imposed irresistibly, yet by no identifiable agency. As with my physical appearance, it's not what I'd have chosen, given a free hand, but it's what I'm stuck with, and have to live with. I can trace a writing style in others, but can't refashion it in myself. I could just about parody myself but couldn't work up a fresh style, even by theft. But in the case of poetry, it's often seemed a relief not to possess that familiar desideratum, `a voice', and not to resemble oneself; like Foucault's mantra: `I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same'.8 Like, I imagine, many others, I can only leave alone a poem once it no longer resembles any product of mine, even if its fate will be to get read as characteristic. The strange convention of the poetry reading ushers in a theatrical self with a vengeance, the performing I bringing her accidents of voice and costume and mannerisms to flesh out her starved text, married and reconstituted with it in fullness before all eyes, like wartime powdered egg soaked in water. Inside this show and working against it, the borderline inauthenticity of the lyric `I' gets relieved only inside the performed I's speaking, where everyone, you hope, finally sees the truth of the matter that it isn't you. Yet there are far more plausible ways of defamiliarising oneself. Does the writer none the less repeat the dubious I with an agnostic's wager of making, against all odds, a successful appeal; or in a trusting dream of telepathy? Despite suspicions, I still circulate something, and sometimes people speak as if only the act of publishing can fix any trace of this half-repudiated I onto the world's surface. If self-description remains a dangerous fiction, there is in the same breath the anchoring power of a signed piece of work; Marguerite Yourcenar has spoken of `Ce moi incertain et flottant dont j'ai conteste me l'existence, et que je ne sens vraiment delimite que par les moi-me quelques ouvrages qu'il m'est arrive d'ecrire'.9

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Is this discrepancy between the glue of the printed signature and the hesitancy of the lying writer the reason for that sharp embarrassment at the sight of something of mine in print? Posting my typescript to its publisher, I've thrown away that work; I haven't exactly disavowed its contents but it must takes its chances, I don't know how I'd defend it if asked to, and certainly don't ever want to see it again. Once it's written and sent off, then it's also written off. Somewhere in her diaries, Virginia Woolf mentions the embarrassment of noticing a letter she'd sent lying around in the house of the friend who'd received it. What familiar shame, though, is this? It all arouses faint thoughts of the sequel to the end of the affair, when you'd far rather not clap eyes again on the person who once aroused such devastating emotion. It's unseemly to see my letter, once sent; it's no longer for my eyes. Is glimpsing it disconcerting because it's relentlessly out in the world, taken over, no longer mine to recall and revise? `The word in language is half someone else's. [. . .] Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated overpopulated with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process', wrote Bakhtin.10 But suppose you suspect that the word is already not `half ' but is wholly `someone else's', in fact everyone else's, and that it's well beyond retrieval, can only be copied, or stolen back again? Then suppose that things are worse again than this; perhaps some of my discomfiture is that, while I quietly believe that I don't exist, any letter signed in my handwriting gives the lie to this conviction of mine, it's evidence before all else for the ontological prosecution. It looks as if after all I must exist, since I leave and choose to leave these papery trails everywhere behind me; yet no one should be taken in by them. Emily Dickinson describes a disembodiedness here, but she revels in it: `A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.' 11 Less spiritual, I can only feel that to catch sight of myself as if dead is awkward, and that to become a revenant is to feel sheepish. Why? given that I'd rather go with phenomenology's truth and accept that I live `outside myself ', am clean of all depths, am no darkly glowing cavity stuffed with dreaming secrets. So a first inspection of Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided came as an unexpected relief neither the dead cow nor the dead calf 's skull offered the least vacant space for the soul or the unconscious, for all was crammed full of pallid organs, right up to the edge of the skin. Pronouncements, published in speech, must also lack interiority. Enunciation comes from the outside, or does so in its most magisterial forms. The weekly winning

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lottery numbers, once announced, take on a blinding self-evidence. Of course it's 2, 16, 44 etcetera how come I hadn't remembered their proper sequence when I bought my ticket? These are numbers always known, yet somehow stupidly forgotten, incorrectly transcribed. Broadcast, they have all the gravitas of an Ian Hamilton Finlay maxim handsomely lettered on stone, noble, inevitable. They are given from elsewhere, like Moses's tablets borne down from the mountain; alas, all such retrospective knowledge arrives too late. I should consistently espouse this being `outside from the start' in its lived intelligibility `Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but on the contrary because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world' 12 but it must have its limits for me, since the surprise of my letter glimpsed sitting at its destination remains a mild near-death experience. As if it's a sliver of what it's violently improper for me to see my own death. My letter, though, is living on very nicely without me; it flourishes far better alone, since it's one witness to my past I can no longer argue with. There's enough documentary evidence of autobiography as thanatology. `Everything that we inscribe in the living present of our relation to others already carries, always, the signature of memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave' Derrida writes.13 `Tout discours de ``ma vie'' est un discours sur la Mort' concludes Parret.14 And even the modern fable of `the death of the author' condemns the still-living writer to return, unhappily, to haunt her own productions, though without any door to walk through; it's not gratifying to find oneself the unheimlich who hasn't quite expired, and who can't be in any position to make a comeback. If my letter survives me even in my lifetime, how radically am I dispossessed by my graphic traces? Am I, in practice, written? Sometimes it sounds more desirable that I should be written. I'll sketch in a thought of why. In an ironical twist, perhaps, to the very necessary if largely unwritten history of modern rhetoric, it's Heidegger who proposed a benevolent account of a linguistic passivity. His is a blocking-in of ideas, its propositions tied, arched in together, like dry-stone walling. Any summary must be shaky but in brief: his positive conception of invocation renders calls as summons into being, like God's and Adam's joint exercises in naming species before the Fall, and not as accusations. An active silence calls forth a naming far from any self-generated descriptiveness: `Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. When this relation of dominance gets inverted, man hits upon strange manoeuvres. Language becomes the means of expression. As expression, language can decay into a mere medium for the printed word.' 15 In place of such debased expressivity, there's an ideal

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power of stillness to which speaking is a response. Stillness is a fullness, and its `peal' is bidding, or invocation. To hear becomes dynamic, a concentrated attentiveness. Then `Language speaks'. It is in charge, but its rule is not repressive; on the contrary, it's markedly inventive. `Does it merely deck out things with words of a language? No. This naming does not hand out titles, it does not apply terms, but it calls into the word. The naming calls.' 16 So, for Heidegger, to name is not the same as to bestow an identification. It does not work through a wound. Originary naming is without threat, unlike other ideas of from-on-high categorising, such as Althusser's interpellative tableau, in which naming conveys being by issuing an aggressive charge against its addressee. Heidegger's calling does have its own energetic tension, and invocation also guarantees a lively distance. To answer his own questions of `What is it to speak? What is this naming?' Heidegger goes straight to the praxis of poetry. `Language speaks' in the poem, and marks a productive non-identification. `Language speaks in that the command of dif-ference calls world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy', but in the same breath, `Language goes on as the taking place or occurring of the dif-ference for world and things'.17 Here is a high conception of poetic function which elevates language above `man' and towers well above local concerns as to the guilt of individual authorship. I'll resume a beetle's-eye view. 3 The liar tries lyric

Poetry in its composing is an inrush of others' voices. So `finding one's own voice' must be an always-frustrated search, fishing around in a strange fry-up or a bouillabaisse in which half-forgotten spiky or slimy things bubble up to the surface, shaking its blandness. Words crowd in uninvited, regardless of sense, flocking not through the brain but through the ear, like the Byzantine iconography of conception. This is well established. Jakobson says mildly `paronomasia, a semantic confrontation of phonemically similar words irrespective of any etymological connection, plays a considerable role in the life of language'.18 In poetry you may succeed in exploiting its tacit permission to put sound in command over semantic meaning. Sound runs on well ahead of the writer's tactics. The aural laws of rhyme precede and dictate its incarnation and this is only one element of an enforced passivity in the very genre where that irritating thing `creativity' is supposed to most forcefully hold court. Style in its idiosyncratic rarity is often recognisable without its author's written signature. This tone isn't produced by my deliberation, any more than I can alter my stature by taking thought. This fact can be an irritant. It's

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all well beyond my control. But the lyric `I' offers a simulacrum of control under the guise of form; a profound artifice, and the writer and reader both know it. There's an offer here of craft, but of a strange sort since it can only be exercised retrospectively; held by form I work backwards, chipping away at words, until maybe something gets uncovered which I can acknowledge as what I might have had to say. There are, though, venerable alternatives to this notion of thought being made in the ear. Again it's Heidegger who proposes a high and a genial account of poetry as dictation. It utters, and is heard as, a calm and clear call. `For, strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when and only when he responds to language by listening to its appeal. [. . .] The responding in which man authentically listens to the appeal of language is that which speaks in the element of poetry.' 19 Heidegger proffers his own brand of knowing through an attentive waiting, held in a listening reserve to hear the commanding peal of stillness. What's important is `learning to live in the speaking of language', and this needs a capacity to respond through listening, by `anticipating in reserve'. A dynamic hearing, then, is necessary. Poetry marks a resonant absence, and Heidegger, elucidating one of Georg Trakl's lyrics, demonstrates practically what he means by listening to its calling. But aren't things more agitated from the point of view of the writer, even one who's most serene once beached on the page? Those who work in any medium which uses quotation and allusion, whether paint or celluloid or sound, will be all too familiar with the phenomenon of associations rising spontaneously, crowding in, giving you a constant editing headache. An inescapable, and disconcerting, accompaniment of writing is unwanted intrusions, an autopilot intertextuality to drive you spare, unwilled quotation as white noise. There's a characteristic excess in working with lyric, that buzz of ramifications through soundechoes, not in the first place sense-echoes; like forms of speech disturbance from the psychiatric literature on schizophrenia. You need to process them into a controlled madness, but you can only exert such control afterwards and not before or as they arrive; as writer, you may manage to cut through the blur of sound-associations, but only retrospectively, after you've detected them on the page. Do they stay or do they go? There's a feeling of being seized against your will by too much language, of being inscribed by language, when the sounds or shapes of what you've written, not their meaning, determine what comes next an untidy, semi-conscious, vacillating affair after which you have to dust yourself down, maybe to realise `what's really been going on here' only in retrospect. If you do perhaps the writer is the last person to know. Some tentative concept of

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`retrospective knowledge' is endlessly enticing, full of doubtful charm, and may hold wide sway, for how often in life do you discover what you meant, or felt, via some backwards route? But it's an odd idea. What does it mean to only come to know backwards, and what kind of credit can anyone ever take for such an over-the-shoulder knowing? What does it mean, to come to know what you `meant to say' only after it's written down? How should I speak for something that has preceded me? As Tristan Tzara remarked, with dazzling accuracy, `Thought is made in the mouth' 20 it reverberates also in the ear, a more passive orifice. And here I've got so puzzled by that necessary, if fertile, passivity involved in finishing a piece of writing, which literary criticism then over-generously hails as exemplifying `control' yet it's in practice a febrile `being written', which has always seemed to me to turn half-mechanically on the stuff of words. I don't mean the contingency of the relation of sound to sense, which Mallarme worried over when he explained that both the words `la nuit' and `le jour' sounded wrong to him for what they denoted, because the sound of `nuit' had a light timbre (as it does in the English `night') yet the sound of `jour' had a dark timbre.21 But something differently contingent: that this process, labelled as knowing craft, is actually given through the active materiality of the word. Any `rationality' gets exercised only in retrospect, through self-editing; while writing, you can feel like a blindfolded sculptor slapped around the head by damp lumps of clay, which you must try to seize and throw back at the haphazardly-forming art object before it stiffens itself into some shape you never quite intended. This sense had embarrassed me, not only because this writing through the energetic materiality of words went unacknowledged or rather, for many years I'd not found any hint of it but because I didn't want to have to espouse awkward theories of `irrationality' to cope with it. This working process also begins to sound rather close to the idea of selfknowledge gained through psychoanalytic means. But I'm thinking about something more immediate, the experienced retrospective knowledge that swims up at you from the surface of the fresh page when you suddenly see something of what `you have really written'. And this may be quite alarming but not at all because of some worrying content, but because the power of linguistic process itself is revealed in a disquietingly oblique way not because of what it says, but because of the way it has said it, which is somehow across the writer. Not `through', not the writer as conduit; and not quite `despite', but across. The problem of this adverb `across' is how to understand its directionality. A spatial metaphor of high to low, or the reverse, would be easier; an espousal of either abasement to or control by language. And yet. We know about `the death of the author' still, in the morgue toes can itch to twitch.

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Heidegger writes that speakers inhabit the house of language. Yes but when the landlord must call round to collect the rent, isn't there likely to be some back-chat? Agreed, the feeling that one's being made, like a nervous secretary, to `take a letter' by the old-fashioned boss, Poetic Language, must be common enough. Yet I'd still want to revive some half-disgraced notion of the dialectic, some quite modest notion of mutuality between the great dictator language and the writer, even if the boss inevitably retains the upper hand. If kneaded by language, then needed by language. Reaching out for a fragment of mastery may always fall short. But you do try. Otherwise there are two standard ways of considering the matter. You could make an aesthetic out of varnishing your fingernails, of reclining under the autonomous power of language in a blissfully resigned surrender to the process of being written or else you could set your jaw at a stern angle and beat the language-trollop into behaving herself as you shape her up nicely in verse. Neither aesthetic seems to be enticing or accurate. To write is at once a more modest, yet a more disconcerting matter than these two unattractive metaphors imply. And it's arguable that the slogan of `allowing the free play of the signifier' or `putting the signifier in control' secretly elevates an old notion of authorial power, since the writer is then special by appointment as the vatic mouthpiece through which language frolics. Its opposite, an unwavering control over the signifier in the name of `craft', is dully unrealistic. In practice, a hurried pruning and snipping away at the thickets of verbal foliage luxuriating everywhere across the page can turn the poet into a determined topiarist, hell-bent on shaping a peacock where a wilful bushiness is running riot. The embarrassment lies partly in finding out, too late again, that one has been despite one's vigilance once more done over by language. Sound-determinations and puns have surreptitiously issued their usual forceful silent dictations so that I have written both above and beneath what I `really meant'. Then comes a confession of nearhelplessness, like W. S. Graham's:
What is the language using us for? I don't know. Have the words ever Made anything of you, near a kind Of truth you thought you were? Me Neither.22

So a shamefaced reaction of `That is not it, that is not what I meant at all' may arise in response to some amiable critic whose commendations to the poet on her `choice of language' she can't accept with a clear conscience, since she senses that language has arbitrarily chosen, has lighted upon her. And that really she had intended rather less than the critic has so

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conscientiously unearthed from her text. The impact of sheer contingency may get a hearing, but often as a defence against the accusation that an obscure reference is `elitist'. So the writer can retort `No, it's not elitist, it's aleatory it's chance, I wanted to incorporate accident into my work to suggest randomness, a lack of solemnity, and so let the air in a little.' But if you don't happen to buy that line, then the domination of accident goes unmentioned. The missing question here can't be put as a problem of authorial volition, or a failure of linguistic accounting, like Jean-Claude Milner's question about the linguist's specific domain, slipped into his L'Amour de la Langue under a sardonic banner of `proud to be boring'.23 It won't be, What does the author or the linguist want? but, What does the language want?, a question with something of the rhetoric of Graham's:
What is the language using us for? It uses us all and in its dark Of dark actions selections differ.24

Roman Jakobson dwells on the poet's lack of control over what's up, prefacing his remarks with a qualification from Saussure; `Que le critique d'une part, et que le versificateur d'autre part, le veuille ou non'. Sheer accident could not, he thinks, possibly determine the poetic complexities he can dig up through his own linguistic analyses; such a rich design must be accorded to the poet, since `any significant poetic composition, whether it is an improvisation or the fruit of long and painstaking labour, implies a goal-oriented choice of verbal material'.25 But the poet is not always, continues Jakobson, the deliberating chooser. `There remains, however, an open question: whether in certain cases intuitive verbal latency does not precede and underlie even such a conscious consideration. The rational account (prise de conscience) of the very framework may arise in the author ex post facto or never at all.' 26 This is delicate and compelling ground, rarely discussed practically; but there are some historical instances which Jakobson retrieves. So Schiller, corresponding with Goethe, held that the poet starts off `merely with the unconscious', but Goethe replied that he himself wanted to go further, to assert that true poetic creation happened unconsciously, while everything done after careful reasoning happened only casually. And the Russian formalist poet Khlebnikov `joined all those poets who acknowledged that a complex verbal design may be inherent in their work irrespective of their apprehension and volition (que . . . le versificateur . . . le veuille ou non) or to use William Blake's testimony ``without premeditation and even against my Will.'' ' 27 Jakobson scrutinises Khlebnikov's own analysis of his `Grasshopper' to establish that even the poet's retrospective analyses

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of its sound patterns which occurred, as Khlebnikov says, `without the wish of the one who wrote this nonsense' fell well short of being exhaustive. Linguist easily outstrips poet in his exegesis of the phonemes' patterning: `The chain of quintets which dominate the phonological structuration of this passage can be neither fortuitous nor poetically indifferent. Not only the poet himself, originally unaware of the underlying contrivance, but also his responsive readers spontaneously perceive the astonishing integrity of the cited lines without unearthing their foundations.' 28 Jakobson, however, ploughs on to reveal a formal ingenuity, of which its author is innocent: `The poet's metalanguage may lag far behind his poetic language and Khlebnikov proves it not only by the substantial gaps in his observations'.29 Then who, or rather what, has done this ingenious poetic choosing? Jakobson's tentative phrase is `intuitive verbal latency'; this seems very close in its implications to Jean-Jacques Lecercle's phrase `the remainder of language'. Especially if one pushes the latter a little to mean `the unconscious of language'. But suppose one just rejigged the idea of `poet' to mean anyone who submits to words for the time being, but with the clear plan of fighting back, through self-editing, later? Or is this what's tacitly understood and accepted by most people anyway, and am I only labouring an unremarkable point which ought to be quietly taken for granted, when I dwell on this backwards aspect to writing? Quite probably. Still there's an obstinate temporal problem in here, though; it's a more immediate puzzle about time than is embraced in the conception of the writer who's constituted as such by habitual self-checking. There's a strange time of rhyme. (The rhyming of these two words in English almost makes me a full-blown Brissetian, longing to throw in `mime'.) You anticipate the rhyme, but you hear it in retrospect; aurally it works forwards and backwards, though on the page you can see it coming. Though conventions like the couplet or terza rima will establish their own aural regularities, for less shaped writing only an aural hope can be entertained by the ear. Then it works by anticipation and its gratification, or through jarring and denial. Here Jakobson talks of a `regressive action' in language, illustrating this with `a typical slip' by a radio announcer, in which `the convention was in session' became `the confession was in session', and `a regressive assimilative influence' had been exerted by `session' upon `convention'.30 It's the sort of example which Timpanaro would discuss later in The Freudian Slip 31 while an orthodox Freudian reading would gladly have made more of that substituted word `confession'. It's also a case of reading-into-speech, in which the radio announcer's eye has run ahead on his script and his eye has instructed his tongue. But writing is a different case, for sound-anticipation runs in the ear

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well before the eye gets to track and to pull back what's typed on the page; instead, the ear instructs the eye, but reason is only ever able to intervene later. This eccentric temporality, the time of rhyme, is a concrete instance of retrospective knowledge. But this hardly diminishes its strange undecidability. Lecercle's electrifying The Violence of Language does, however, produce the foundations for that desirable third path between capitalised notions of a sheer hegemony of Language on the one hand, and the controlling Writer on the other. Although he politely concedes to the authority of the poet, this is a concession that, I think, the implications of his own work undercut; and usefully, for they bring longed-for relief to the poet's private awkwardness at being written and at scrabbling for belated self-editing. It gives a convincing and a non-psychologised account of this process, in part through a description of how metaphors work through ramification. It elaborates the odd potential of that `multiple analysis' of language espoused by `the delirious French linguist who believed that man is descended from the frog', Jean-Pierre Brisset. His method was `etymology gone mad': that etymology isn't just the truth about words, but about the world; that `all the ideas expressed with similar sounds have the same origin and all refer, initially, to the same subject'.32 One of the many questions raised by Lecercle in his engaging book is: to what extent, and in the teeth of which modern linguistic opinion, does language actually behave as Brisset suggests? My marginal note to this surmise would ask if this isn't a phenomenon which dogs the act of writing poetry. Not the familiar critical idea of an `ambiguity of meaning', which suggests finely poised alternatives among richly suggestive interpretations under the control of the skilful poet but a far less malleable affair, continuous white noise, an anarchic constant whirring-away, unstoppable, relentless, sinking sometimes into the background, sometimes dominant in full cry. So homophony is just one fertile menace among many others here words which deploy the same sounds for different semantic ends, like `rough' and `ruff ', congenitally at risk from the interference of their double or triple meanings. Once you hear them in a room which demands close listening, or you scrutinise them laid out on the page, those suppressed other meanings cannot but spring forward. And what reading a poem entails is obsessively facing it down, staring at it until you're at risk of dissolving it into a plurality of possible meanings, or a little further towards nonsense. Or it reduces you to helpless wanderings down its byways, down thin goat-paths of association. You put it at your mercy but you are put at its mercy. You're never sure which of you has got the upper hand, or quite what to make of this half-acknowledged struggle.

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These concerns are familiar enough in different non-poetic contexts, and the idea that there's method in linguistic madness is venerable. Freud differently exploits it in his many analyses of dreams and jokes. The Interpretation of Dreams offers `condensation' as one sub-class of those overdeterminations which characterise the content of dreams, as he unpacks a chain of jammed-together meanings out of the `nonsense' words or strange neologisms which the dreamer utters or reads.33 A vast scholarly literature now annotates or interrogates this work. Among the mildly sceptical, Sebastiano Timpanaro's carefully undogmatic discussion of parapraxes deploys philology, the effects of banalisation, and printers' errors to cross-question Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, enquiring to what extent all linguistic slips may be attributed to a `Freudian' motive. And whether, instead of `the polyglot unconscious', a more prosaic but more accurate explanation in terms of `superficial psychology', such as a haplography (the shortening of a sound duplicated in a word) may be found.34 Timpanaro doesn't, he explains, want to follow Freud's belief that neurophysiological and other mechanical sources are, while real enough in themselves, significant largely as occasions to let a psychically driven slip flourish. Instead, he tentatively ventures a revised version of the unconscious: could there be `a much more mechanical-instinctual unconscious, and thus one less connected with the individual history of the person who committed the ``slip''?' 35 How close in their ultimate effects, although not in method, Timpanaro's suggestions are to Lecercle's conception of `the remainder' of language is debatable. Both seem to propose a sort of underbelly of language, vast enough to overhang the territory of any speaker. Less demanding is the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing's liking for examples of the misattributed insanity that follows if you fail to decipher the meanings of condensed speech; so a young schizophrenic patient declares of herself that she `was born under a black sun. She's the occidental sun', and Laing delightedly comments that she really was `the accidental black son', unwanted, scorched by family hatred.36 Whereas poetry, you could say, is purposively and systematically `mad language': not because of its authors, but because the half-latent craziness endemic to ordinary language is professionally exploited by poetry. That and not something more ethereally glorious is what poetry does; and what it is. The writer is then in the delicate position of giving her limited assent to this craziness in its infinite ramification of sound-associations and puns. How grudgingly or how readily that assent will be given depends partly on the fluctuations of taste and fashion. In short it's a matter of history, of the solid history of words in the world. Wallace Stevens suggests that `a

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language, considered semantically, evolves through a series of conflicts between the denotative and the connotative forces in words; between an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of all association, and a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations. These conflicts are nothing more than changes in the relation between the imagination and reality.' 37 Or, you might prefer to say, changes in intellectual fashion. 4 Taking credit where credit isn't due

It's a peculiar business to work today as a writer of lyric who suspects something about her own death, yet who still fears her own disinterment. I'll mention, apologising for self-references, what I guess must be a common experience. When reviewers interpret a poem, inevitably they'll confidently misconstrue an allusion. Often they'll think up the most ingeniously elaborate sources for something in the text that had a plainer association or a less baroque connection behind it. I don't mean the genre of reviews which are imagined character-profiles or amateur psychoanalyses of the author (all too common) or technical commentaries (all too rare), but reviews which base their evaluation upon detailed textual interpretations. Sometimes these arrive before they're published, sent to the author by the critic. As we both know that I, as writer, have virtually had it, I have to perform an awkward trick of propping myself up on my deathbed on one elbow before collapsing artistically prostrate again (as in the painting of another famous impostor, Thomas Chatterton) to say `Of course, I'm grateful for your careful interpretations and all your attention to this text, but as it happens all that I was referring to by ``x'' was y, but naturally I don't want to set myself up as some privileged author, or claim any special weight for the allusions I actually intended in my text here.' The reviewers habitually ignore the author's politely spectral murmurs. They go right ahead and publish their original draft, as if they hadn't ever been impelled to make their detour to the monument of the moribund author. As if they'd embarked on a pilgrimage, but one undertaken after the knowing loss of their faith like post-marxists who'd despite themselves really wanted to set out for the shrine of Marx in Highgate cemetery, but could, disappointedly, discover only withered carnations from the North Korean embassy there. Then since the writer doesn't ever respond to published reviews if she follows the usual etiquette that's the end of it. Or secretly it isn't, quite. Her near-death experiences leave her floating above her body on the ceiling of the operating theatre in some unease. It's odd to be left gasping sotto voce `But I . . .' when one doesn't believe in a

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lordly I of the writer or the sacral `being a poet'. Maybe there is a moment, just before one's death-via-publication, when the organic connection between the author and her text isn't quite severed or, in the old metaphor, when the umbilical cord hasn't yet been cut, so that the work hasn't quite come to birth as a text which will trot off on its own. But as soon as something has been posted off, printed, and distributed, one loses all attachment to it, and is drawn on to the next project, or more likely swears to give the whole business up. This underwrites the temporal disjunction between the writing person and her later incarnation, or entombment, as author who's frozen into that being only by the act of undergoing publication. Maybe such hair-splitting is mildly useful because it suggests that `the author' really was always-already dead. The moment before the writer is interred, through the process of publication, into the catacombcategory of `the author' is the moment of protest one wants to sit up suddenly in the bath like the villains at the end of the movies Les Diaboliques and Fatal Attraction, and roll one's eyes . . . There are other difficulties concerned with `taking responsibility for' that which has half-written its writer. The ethics of allusion go largely undiscussed, which seems a curious absence. It brings up the problem of private reference; suppose you have textual associations, odd references which your audience aren't necessarily going to know, because why should they do you cut these out of your work, in the interests of intelligibility or accessibility? Footnoting can cover this, although it may lay you open to charges of being pedantic. But the case of misattributed allusions perplexes me. For example, I'll get haunted by sound-echoes, aural traces of lines from, say, Wordsworth or Auden. Occasionally I have to give in to their persistence, put my hands in the air and settle to use them in some lyric of mine, hoping that they'll be recognised as borrowings by the reader. A critic, however, reviews the thing according to his own prior reading, and overlooks the origin of those lines whose tones and cadences I've stolen, against my will, senselessly and under compulsion. He credits me or upbraids me with them. Then I feel ashamed and want to say `No, I'm sorry, I was stupidly making an allusion I couldn't help, do forgive this tendency of mine, one can't always use footnotes, not for this kind of insignificant sound-allusion.' I can't, though. There are no channels for communications for the dead. The only answer to this dilemma, I suppose, would be to excise all such traces from my work; to my horror they're always liable to creep out of the text again, just when I'd thought them all finally cleaned up. There seems to be very little which isn't driven by sound-association, maybe in the form of puns, maybe in the form of cadence, maybe in the form of half-realised borrowings. I don't mind not

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being `original', there's no possibility of originality but I do mind being credited with something I didn't invent. My guess is that what I've called `retrospective knowledge' operates intensely at the site of the guilts which I now think are related: of writing and of refusing to be or not to be named. If I am called a poet, on the site where I'm least inventive, then I'm told who I am but can't be convinced by it, because I know better. I know what the language, across me, gets up to. Like Althusser, I feel guilty. But at present there is no available theoretical outlet through which I can declare my guilt. If my spectral demurrals, under the unattractive flowery hat of poet, about some `misreading' of my text aren't to have the power to sway a critic, then neither should an academic's objections to any `misreading' of a slice of his theory. The literary text's author's intentions aren't pertinent; then nor is the critical text's. What's sauce for the literary goose should be sauce for the theoretical gander. But the critic doesn't usually behave in such an egalitarian fashion. He argues in print, he exudes defences and refutations, he publishes `A Reply to John Lewis', he refutes misinterpretations, he writes yet another book to disarm his critics, and he engages in fully armed defensive warfare. Its severity is limited only by his ethical convictions, his modesty, and his interest in the letters page of the New York Review of Books. He wriggles to reinsert himself, a Houdini reversed, into his book; and wriggles posthumously, for he won't be gracefully killed off by the act of its publication, he fights for control of its destiny afterwards. He uses his lungs to argue his case, which he is confident is simultaneously his book's case. And academic publishing and journalistic conventions encourage him to do this. Meanwhile the poet's book is reviewed and her character, read therein, is admired or interrogated, her sexual history guessed at, her unconscious readily analysed, her reading and her `influences' inferred or invented. But, as literary author, she has and quite rightly no redress. There's a curiously different treatment of the academic text and its author, and of the `creative' text and its writer. That there's markedly little by way of a critical history of criticism itself only serves to synthetically isolate the supposedly originary integrity of the `creative' work. The academic's text is more open to intellectual attack from its professional contemporaries, but it has more channels for its protection under the alibis of `a stimulating exchange' or `a scholarly debate'. The poetic text is more open to biographical speculation, against which its author, given her moribund state, has no come-back. The critical author, champion of his own texts, lives to dissect the always-already-pickled literary author. If the poem is tough enough, that doesn't matter. As Heidegger, quoting from Trakl,

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commented, `Who the author is remains unimportant here, as with every other masterful poem. The mastery consists precisely in this, that the poem can deny the poet's person and nature.' 38 The less tough poem, however, gets criticised in that name of its author which it can't disavow. But I as writer can always disavow it. If I am to deploy my suggestions in these pages, then I did not quite write that poem which almost wrote me but didn't quite. By now, all this is beginning to sound suspiciously like something else; something rather different but which also depends on a doubled disavowal of agency, twisted through time and which I'll also characterise as an instance of linguistic guilt. 5 Who, me?

In remoter Cornwall, supposedly magical wells and chapels still flourish. An alder tree overhanging the sacred spot will be draped with fluttering white rags tied on as votive offerings by modern pagans. Encouraged by these festoons, the secular onlooker furtively hangs her own torn-up paper handkerchief on its branches. `Interpellation' is another shrine which still compels revisiting and attracts fresh commentary layered upon older commentaries. Althusser's scenario was built in only a few paragraphs,39 but it retains the lure of a grotto in the woods, a site of possible illumination to which the faithful or the curious are repeatedly drawn. I traipse well behind two very recent visitors to this shrine.40 For a native French speaker the resonances of une interpellation are, I'm told, to do with calling someone to account, but it makes an awkward word in English. It remains a gallicism. That pedant's refuge, the Oxford English Dictionary, gives it a sixteenth-century currency but holds that it was reimported from French in the nineteenth century to signify `The action of interrupting the order of the day (in a foreign legislative Chamber) by asking from a minister an explanation of some matter belonging to his department, 1837'. The dictionary also pleasantly cites Carlyle's `incessant fire of questions, interpellations, objurgations', close to its etymological sense of interrupting, thrusting or breaking across another's speech. `Interpellation' wasn't so much an originary act of authoritative naming, but more of an aggressive interrogation to cut across normal business. The former sense, however, overshadows this key word in Althusser translated into English. But first, laboriously faithful to Althusser's injunction to `read' an original text, let's inspect what he wrote in his decisive 1970 essay. He's painstakingly cautious to lay out his scenario. Ideology, he explains,

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functions to turn individuals into `subjects' through interpellation `which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ``Hey, you there!'' [. . .] Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. [. . .] Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognises that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by ``guilt feelings'' despite the large numbers who ``have something on their consciences''.' But he footnotes this passage in an awkward sentence studded with asterisks to the point of self-parody: `Hailing as an everyday practice subject to a precise ritual takes a quite ``special'' form in the policeman's practice of ``hailing'' which concerns the hailing of ``suspects''.' 41 That is, Althusser carefully denies that guilt is the sole motor of interpellation. He then announces that interpellation, irrespective of his puppet show in the street, issues a call which always gets it right. Yet he's sketched in a powerfully distracting vignette. What he himself terms his `little theoretical theatre' is a prop which he adds expressly in order to undercut it, by rapidly rewriting it without its temporal sequence, so that now it's to be understood as `always-already' in play. For, he explains, interpellation and subjection both happen in one and the same blow. Actually there is no balletic spinning round, and no outdoors either: `But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing. I might add: what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street) in reality takes place in ideology.' And ideology, he continues, always works, as subjects `work all by themselves'.42 I want to concentrate on what seems at first sight to be the sheer perversity of this scenario of Althusser's; I mean its tendency to undermine a conception it's ostensibly devised to illuminate. The timing of the turn is deliberately wiped out by its creator, who explains that all this happens simultaneously. It looks as if his model is quietly corrosive of his thesis, that it starts to eat into his own theory of subjects who are always, as such, in place. It gives rise as well to some glaring misgivings as to why the call always gets it right, if it does; and its bothersome details must have vexed many practically minded readers for years, since realism suggests that any half-competent villain would refuse the temptation to glance round but would carry on purposefully walking or leap insouciantly onto a bus; while most passers-by would, if the shout was forceful enough, crane round

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themselves. Yet interpellation's fascination as a model obstinately outlives any such commonsensical complaint. How? A provisional answer may come from a detour around the strange timing of guilt which might offer a more convincing way of accounting for the theory's durability than any critique founded solely on its idea of simultaneity. Why should interpellation so often entail guilt? Partly this is because most interpellations (like Althusser's tableau of the shout on the street) just are verbal attacks. `You angel!' is a cry that I don't, alas, often get to hear. But isn't there a circularity here, when the Althusserian subject, whom interpellation calls into place, is produced as guilty of being himself? And if a ready guilt lies dormant and in wait for its own incarnation, longing to be fleshed out by interpellation's accusatory grammar of `You x !' then there must be a half-hidden psychology latent in Althusser's story oddly like one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories of `How The Subject Comes to Be'. Some readers may turn contentedly to his autobiography L'Avenir Dure Longtemps, or The Future Lasts a Long Time, as clinching evidence for this point as if the guilt latent in the essay on interpellation has finally become manifest in this last self-examination of the elderly killer. I'm not at all sure, though, that the psychology of confessional guilt which undoubtedly courses through the autobiography is the same sort of guilt which shadows the scenario of interpellation. I begin to think that these two operas have different phantoms. To dwell first on the former in any life story, a sense of being an impostor may well follow automatically from its formal architecture of the `I' plus the past tense, an inescapable deceit exacerbated by failed memory and blurred reconstructions of lost events. But, well beyond such ordinary hesitancy, Althusser's autobiography lays bare explicit worries about imposture. He doesn't retrace his ideas of interpellation as such, yet what's patent is his discomfort with his assigned childhood and adult roles, both at his mortification and at his readiness to `take them on' even if he did so resentfully or, more frequently, histrionically. But he also feels horror at succeeding in them; and this horror of being taken at face value seems crucial to his account of what it ever is to play a social part. L`Avenir Dure Longtemps is shadowed by a slide from appel to appeal, in that what Althusser claims he fears from others is being seduced by them. He becomes rather good at initiating such enticements himself, so he despises himself for his own performative powers. His sense of being an impostor is intensified by shame not so much at an achieved act of cheating, but at being so fluent in rendering himself deceitfully seductive. His whole childhood existence, secured, he says, by metaphorically seducing his mother, through appearing to be what she wanted him to be, depended

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solely on pretence. To save himself from his `imaginary sense of guilt' he must devote himself, quite inauthentically, to his mother. Lamenting the intimacy between semblance and achievement, he describes how the artifice of seduction was bound up with deception, so he had not truly won her heart. Incidents of `emotional' guilt pack his story, responses to a real or an imagined accusation; the couple of shots fired in a noisy crowd at a sports stadium, into which he and his father had slipped without paying for their tickets, were `meant' for him.43 His mother had misnamed him. The `who, me?' of interpellation is always, from one perspective, wrong in Althusser's life as he narrates it it's one prolonged case of misidentification. Yet even a misidentification as an interpellation is always inevitably right too, as it works, it does secure the subject it wants for itself. He feels that he has no existence since even his name isn't his; his mother loved not him but an original Louis, and his `Louis' was always really meant for another, the name of that man, lui, his mother had wanted but who had died. The son was a successful impostor although planted in place by someone else: `Deep down, unconsciously (and my unconscious desires endlessly found expression in reasoned arguments), I wanted at all costs to destroy myself because I had never existed. And what better proof of my non-existence could there be than to draw from it the conclusion that I should destroy myself, having destroyed those closest to me, all those on whom I could rely for help and support? It was then that I began to think that my life consisted of nothing but endless artifice and deceit, that it was totally inauthentic, with nothing true or real about it'.44 Althusser's guilt at his own being prepared to be the seductive impostor he describes does resemble the underpinning of his theory of interpellation but, I think, at the critical level not of its psychology, but of its temporality. If everyone spins round when interpellated, that's only because each is well primed in advance, so each feels alwaysalready guilty. And the guilt is right. It secures the subjecthood of those fattened like geese for this end with a contrived inevitability reminiscent of John Milton's doctrine of divine `right reason' `And reason He made right'. J.-J. Lecercle announces his own work on the ubiquity of theoretical imposture as an act of filial piety towards Althusser after his death, of dragging the corpse away from the vultures and safely back inside the city walls. To counter a rash of triumphantly psychologistic and reductive readings of the autobiography, and against its author's own confessions as analysand, he studies it `against the grain of the text, as an instance of irony. I want to take imposture not as a confession of truth or a psychoanalytic symptom but as a philosophical concept, even if the

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narrator himself seems to insist on a psychoanalytic reading.' 45 He tries to deflect `psychological' readings of L'Avenir by offering an ingenious and persuasive philosophical-linguistic one, turning, roughly, on the inescapable and mutual parasitism of text and theory. Though guilt as a unifying device in the autobiography returns with a vengeance, its deployment is, as Lecercle remarks, almost `too pat'. And certainly when you read through L'Avenir you do get a vivid impression of someone who's telling himself, like a case history. Lecercle holds that Althusser was in effect, not in intention, displaying the possibilities of irony as a trope. I think myself that irony isn't quite the word, because the sense of a pupil repeating a lesson is too strong; and Lecercle's account of the ubiquity of imposture, although in itself compelling, leaves the schoolboy and adult Althusser still alone, still devoured by the guilt which had always haunted him. Maybe the figure of the impostor is close to the figure of Echo, the nymph unloved by Narcissus. I've retrieved her elsewhere as a trope for lyric's troubled nature, in that both are condemned to hapless repetition.46 Echo's copying was involuntary, but the deliberating impostor is also burdened by an additional weight: on top of anyone's vulnerability and derivative helplessness in the jaws of language, he's also an intentional as well as an accidental thief. Then if, like Althusser, he's conscientious, he will feel shame. That is, Lecercle's polemical idea of an ubiquitous linguistictheoretical imposture is not necessarily contaminated by a psychologism if we do attach to it a concept of guilt, albeit of a distinctive kind. You can't entirely replace individual shame at cheating with a concept of collective cheating blamelessly endemic to every writing and reading life. So I wonder if there's a position between understanding the genesis of imposture as linguistic, and the emotion of guilt as psychologistic in which that real feeling of being an impostor, which remains intact at the end of Althusser's story, could be recognised as not so rare, culpable, or pathological at all, but as itself immanently generated, as feeling, by the everyday machinations of interpellative language. That's a way of suggesting that some guilt is linguistic, or that it may have a linguistic component to it. 6 A strange temporality of guilt

Time taken up in pleats is quietly critical for Althusser's idea of how subjects come to be themselves not least because they do so `in no time at all'. Sequentiality is obliterated by his thesis of the simultaneity of the subject's interpellation and its recognition of its collective place. This, under the logic of grammar, seems implausible but such questions have

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generated their own extensive scholarly literature. Althusser himself, of course, knew all about the temporal strangeness embedded in his theory, indeed had deliberately made it integral to his polemic. Sticking to the matter of the oddity of the interpellation vignette's internal timing, I wonder if it can be clarified through its temporal logic only in so far as that's shared with guilt. Perhaps Althusser's famous adverbial adjective, his `always-already', with its strange-but-true temporality, itself possesses a shading of guilt. Or it has an elective affinity to guilt, the emotion that runs in advance of the deed and is always primed to be activated. The temporal structure of guilt is bizarre. Unlike shame, it can precede some wrongdoing which may never materialise; it can often be an anticipatory emotion. The whole scenario of aggressive interpellation only works through its silent understanding that the temporality of guilt does indeed run backwards. Then first, before any crime, comes the subject, ripe to be instantly turned into himself by means of an accusation. Not forgetting the truth of Madame Althusser's death, the autobiography is also crammed with memories of guilt for what its author had in fact not done, or which he's relieved not to have yet done. This is all too like a textbook illustration. In this vein there's a well-known popular psychology of the guilt which invents the misdeed; police time is regularly wasted by habitual confessors who are inept innocents, for whom to feel guilty of something is to have already committed it, if only in the hope of achieving wickedness. That florid thirster after the happiness of the knife, Nietzsche's `pale criminal', lay at the ready for his accusers through the mouthpiece of Zarathustra `Listen, ye judges! There is, besides, another madness, it is before the deed.' This pale criminal's `highest moment was when he judged himself ' and only afterwards did he contrive a crime to match his anticipated punishment: `But one thing is thought, another is deed, another is the picture of the deed. The wheel of reason rolleth not between them. A picture made this man pale.' 47 And Freud's own `criminals from a sense of guilt' are close cousins to others among his vexed character-types, `those wrecked by success'. They star in some of his most celebrated case histories.48 Less dramatically, one of his patients, he wrote, might well contrive to do some wrong act but without the mitigating circumstances of youth and, provocatively, while undergoing analysis: `Analytic work then brought the surprising discovery that such deeds were done principally because they were forbidden, and because their execution was accompanied by mental relief for their doer. He was suffering from an oppressive feeling of guilt, of which he did not know the origin, and after he had committed a misdeed this oppression was mitigated. His sense of guilt was at least attached to something. Paradoxical as it may sound,

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I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt.' 49 For Freud, in such patients, the Oedipus complex was hard at work. But the guilt of Althusserian innocents who'll readily respond to an interpellation, though they haven't committed a mortal sin and pray that they never will, is of a somewhat different order. Indeed, if you were intending to steer scrupulously clear of wrongdoing, you might, dispiritingly, feel worse because you realised that you'd forbidden yourself any prospect of relief, through commission, for your anticipatory guilt. Perhaps something shallower and broader is at work for those who respond with a stubbornly persisting disquiet which defies the fact that rationally their consciences should be quite clear. But that's the usual effect of being accused to be made to feel guilty, whether or not you actually are. Then doesn't any critical interpellation, with its syntactical structure of an attack, automatically produce a reflex guiltiness in even the most sanguine? So do we next decide that a certain temperament, an especially anxious soul, will linger over this structure and its pointing finger, while another, more robust, will quickly brush it aside? But if there really is a linguistics of guilt to be distinguished from a psychology of guilt, then the former can't rely on any such finer specification of the psychological. Let's go back to the threatening double syntax or grammar of an aggressive interpellation, which demands consent and incites refusal. I'm using the words syntax and grammar loosely to indicate that this demand is enacted almost at the level of language; the individual subject can't quite either be or not be in the collective category, can't coincide with it or easily escape it; these aren't genuine alternatives. Then is Althusser's idea of interpellation blind to the facts of its provisionality? No, rather a degree of failure is quietly built in to the model. Because it announces `you are this category' it's structured as accusing, yet as soon as it's pronounced, the way is thrown open to partly refuse it, because no one quite so smoothly submits to subjectification. Interpellation has to falter almost as often as it succeeds; and for linguistic and historical reasons, but not necessarily for idiosyncratic depth-psychological ones. Perhaps some special sense of guilt is a necessary concomitant to the shortcomings of categorisation. As an `I' sidles into a category, it both gains and loses. Both `I am an x' and `I am not an x' can cause unease, whether through the fear of arrogance or the risks of being scrutinised for psychic damage. Demurring about not being a wholehearted deviant, an unflagging nationalist, or whatever, can be a consequence of the unlikeliness of either settling solidly into a category, or

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of cleanly evading it either way, guilt can accrue at having to disappoint the boss Language, at refusing its dictates whichever way you jump, whether to obedience or to rebellion. But such apprehensions are not narrowly linguistic. They are properly rhetorical because they are also political and historical. `You are an x' does, as I've mentioned, just have the shape of an accusation, as it almost always is. Maybe especially in the ears of anyone who has a history of being bad-mouthed, interpellation signals no good. Still, one possible retort to the cry of `Hey, you! You bad x!' is `Who, me?' uttered with a raised eyebrow; cross-questioning the category and its would-be conscription. Or someone may hesitate because she can't authentically enter in to an attribution, can't internalise it. And as a way of `answering back', a refused interpellation can, occasionally, be faintly reassuring. Yet to back away from something so apparently reasonable as a liberal self-indictment can also produce a feeling of stubborn wilfulness, a guilt that one can't wholeheartedly sign up for a club. The stammer of disengagement can follow some invitation as a guilt at refusing guilt; for not agreeing to acknowledge one's co-responsibility for the Third World Debt, say, or for not taking on collective blame for racism. There's the `But I . . .' which wants to slide away from the confessional, to retort `But I'm not a criminal, I'm not guilty'. Yet we could also remember the guilt of a too-easy enrolment in its ranks. Then must becoming a subject always be linked with a helplessly unhappy subjectification? Interpellation isn't usually a benevolent invitation into a `good' category; but it can be refurbished as a sardonic entry into a `bad' one, like those old slogans of political empathy: `we are all foreign scum', `nous sommes tous juifs '. One can always flounce. The importance of irony and its inventive rhetoric here can never be underestimated. This touches on the long history of `progressive' identifications, of how emancipation movements have reworked and parodied themselves rhetorically as, say, the history of the designation `homosexual', half-recaptured, half-jettisoned as `queer'. Are there always costs to be paid for the adoption of a collective identity; yet to what extent was there ever a choice? Each collectivity necessitates its own answers. So I can cheerfully argue that sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not a woman, because of the historicised and politicised nature of that category's deployments. But is it harder to agree to say, I am a poet, because disregarding the matter of vanity of the lack of much critical historicisation of that category? It's sometimes easier to overcome such an occupational hesitancy by replacing a categorising noun with a verb `All right, I am engaged in x-ing, but that doesn't make me an x.' This, though, is reminiscent of that well-meaning advice

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on child management: don't say he is an insensitive boy, just tell him that you don't like him torturing the cat. All such speculations have been recently refashioned by Judith Butler. In the course of her powerfully illuminating discussion of subjectification, she goes straight to the nature of authority, asking `And how is it that Althusser's sanctification of the scale of interpellation makes the possibility of becoming a ``bad'' subject more remote and less incendiary than it might be? The doctrine of interpellation appears to presuppose a prior and unelaborated doctrine of conscience, a turning back upon oneself in the sense that Nietzsche described in On the Genealogy of Morals.' 50 She argues that Althusser's whole conception of ideology is filtered through a conception of religious authority, or through `a divine power of naming'. The subject's whole existence as social is secured by a readiness to be named as guilty, through a passionate onrush to the law. Her analysis seems fully convincing: that for Althusser `interpellation is essentially figured through the religious example'.51 It follows that his own use of scriptural references as an instance of interpellation can be reversed, so that interpellation in itself becomes theological. Here I wonder whether interpellation as near-divine injunction still preserves in amber some stiffened traces of Heidegger's sense of language as an invocation with the Edenic power to bring into being what it names. Even if Althusser's version has lost all optimism, and is darker: naming as threat. Still, there's a potentially brighter rendering of this iconography of God's index finger descending from the sky to seek out, with unerring aim, its unresisting subject for baptism by interpellation's fire. That is, that interpellation can't restrict itself as a grandiloquently normative marker, or else there'd be no critical politics of social categories, no persistent badness, and no private attempts at the flip-side of dodging a category, that is, by not having an orthodox conscience. I'd add that an aura of the doctrine of original sin enshrouds Althusser's account; now at last, in a scriptural embellishment of Judith Butler's analysis, I can find a use for my childhood training. The author (God, perhaps?) of the Book of Genesis strikes me as a wellversed Althusserian. For Adam and Eve were forced to recognise that they were guilty; in the instant that they ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so they immediately acquired a conscienceridden fear of God, and they became self-conscious, where no shame had been. It might be tempting, to certain theorists anyway, to suppose that their abrupt knowledge of good and evil coincided with the first categorising in human history of sexual difference but faithfulness to the scriptures tells us that at least a partition of the sexes by designation did precede the Fall. God was chief namer, naturally, but Adam also named

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what God had allowed him to, the beasts and fowls of the air, and also Woman `because she was taken out of Man' and then after the Fall, specifically as Eve `because she was the mother of all living'. What marked the Fall, then, was not names but shame: `And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons'. So Adam, discovered by God, confessed `I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself '. Among the punishments visited on the pair was to become godlike in a depressing sense: `the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil'. As God had warned in respect of the fruit of the tree, such knowledge was also a killer, `for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die'.52 This warning the serpent had twisted to insinuate that not death, but divine knowledge alone, would follow the eating of the fruit. Giving chapter and verse for what Judith Butler has characterised as interpellation's `essential religiosity', this glancing exegesis also implies that a prime site of `the religious example' of interpellation, the Book of Genesis, tells us a great deal more about the naming and categorising of species and the bestowal of Christian names. The dawning of guilt therein coincides with the acquiring of conscience as the capacity to differentiate, not just nominally but ethically, to know good and evil. To be sure, in the New Testament, the Gospel of St John, with far greater economy, simply identifies Logos and authority: `In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'.53 This recipe is quick, and does omit any intervening guilt. Althusser, though, was no evangelist, but a decidedly post-lapsarian philosopher. So the structure of the guilt embedded in his concept of how subjects are made is theological after the example of Genesis and its Divine Interpellator, as well as temporally skewed by guilt's ordinarily promissory logic. Althusser, however, himself expounds what he calls with misleading simplicity the `Christian religious ideology' by drawing on Peter, leader of the apostles, as his first exemplary subject, named and interpellated in one fell swoop by God.54 Yet once again Althusser presumably deliberately has offered a somewhat perverse illustration for his main thesis; he has curiously evaded his own Catholic indoctrination. He could not have escaped knowing that Peter, meaning the rock, was merely re-christened as such by Jesus in His earthly lifetime, in recognition of the solidity of his faith and as a fisher of men `upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it'.55 Peter, then, was hardly psychically submissive in the face of an originary designation. More banally, he'd already earned his new appellation in advance; first he was it, and then he got to be

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called it. Once again a suspicion of retrospective knowledge settles in; and this time it's dictating the facts to Jesus. And this illustration of the supposedly perfectly interpellated subject is more uncertain still than Althusser's theory avows. For it overlooks Peter's career of frequently departing from his rock-like attribution to be pigheaded and wavering, shaken to the core with grave doubts at the time of Gethsemane, even to the point of thrice denying any knowledge of Christ, his namer. Interpellation didn't always do too well with Peter. In general, too, its grammar is hardly monolithic, it remains practically ambiguous; so as well as the submissive guilt that makes me walk in to an interpellation with my hands held high, there's plain misgiving or the defiant guilt that retorts `Actually, no, I'm not an x as you understand it, and I don't like your terms'. That makes possible, but is also produced by, those objections to collective identifications which, historically, act to form political movements. Not that these reworkings of collective identities ever proceed straightforwardly, privately, in a linear fashion, or without emotional costs; and they can also possess a tactical element. Knowing that others will find it less of an irritant if they can characterise and then pigeonhole your tendency, you may, while preparing to undermine their rhetorical basecamp, adopt an identity satirically. Or you might elect to do so for the time being a measure which, unlike poor Althusser's future, is certain not to last long. 7 What I was really trying to say was . . .

Why should these notes have moved, under the uncertain cover of the notion of linguistic guilt, from remarks about poetic writing to remarks about being picked out as a subject? Only along this chain of connections that I've hazarded: that a shared phenomenon of a retrospective `externality' is native to the three genres that I've touched on here. No doubt one could add to this number; and certainly I don't want to defend this tentative notion of linguistic guilt as, in itself, fundamental or prior. These three all come `from outside themselves': the business of being named and taking on a social category, the working experience of writing, and the guilt which wonders what it might have done. All entail puzzles about agency; and if you look at them as purely psychological anxieties about a lack of control, you could rapidly dismiss them as of interest only to, in that awful phrase, a control freak. I persist, though, in feeling that there is something more engaging here, to do with their common temporal element of working backwards of being externally given, at the heart of a supposed inwardness. In those very areas where I am in theory most

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sharply and inimitably myself, where my originary capacities might most be supposed to reign in what I freely write, in what I am, in what I will take responsibility for there's instead a task of retrieving from the outside whatever I can for my own domain; yet only after the event has handed me the materials I am to work with, or against. There's the aspect of self-description's problematic aspect of inclusiveness; neither identity nor non-identity can quite work. But a more significant angle of guilt as a linguistic candidate lies, I think, in its peculiar temporality. Merleau-Ponty's comment that `all our experiences, inasmuch as they are ours, arrange themselves in terms of before and after, because temporality, in Kantian language, is the form taken by our inner sense, and because it is the most general characteristic of ``psychic facts'' ' 56 is modified by guilt's reversed and anticipating character. Its constant impulse is to take responsibility for something that hasn't yet happened, and its determined megalomania repeatedly suffers, then survives, its own defeat. So that guilt is in itself very close to that property of writing, or at least, of particular kinds of writing, where what you `want to say' you discover not initially by deliberation but only over your shoulder, humiliatingly late on in the process. I've taken the writing of poetry as an acute exemplar of such retrospective knowing, which it isolates and exaggerates. Words are brought forward as things, while their semantic element is, at least conventionally, not completely overthrown. Stuff predominates, but sense insistently wells up through it later. This generates some awkwardness at being called a writer; because really I am largely written. I wrote it, but rather more interestingly I didn't write it, and I am not its agent nor vice versa. For my suggestions in these notes to have any plausibility, this phenomenon is critical. As writer I must be the source of my own work, yet I know that I've only been the conduit for the onrush, or the rusty trickle, of language. I'm pinned in a position of `I did and didn't do it'; there's an inescapable oscillation at the heart of such authorship. So the temporal oddities of how according to Althusser's interpellation you become `who you are' aren't so far removed from those of writing, where you find out `what you know' through a backwards process in which you, the ostensible author, are at best the editor of whatever language has forcibly dictated. Your status as originator is vacuous; and you become a writer only insofar as you consent to struggle, more or less reluctantly, with what has already been carried to you from the underbelly of words and sounds, and as you skirt the mined field of involuntary plagiarism where nothing is ever for the first time. That is, your work always arrives on your page largely from the outside just as your identification does. In both instances, questions arise of what you are

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willing to take on with any sense of integrity. Who, me? I couldn't have written that well, all right, my wrist and hand did, but it wasn't my self at work. It was my ear that had a field day, and the accidents of rhyme in time ran through their pathways in my passive skull. Wanting to refuse to be a writer has, I suspect, to do with practically recognising the poverty of linguistic `originality'. Such knowledge is not in the least assuaged by meditations on the inevitability of mutual plagiarism; or on the anarchic virtues of the signifier's free play, which only mystifies (in the early-marxist sense) the figure of the writer; or on the delightful communality of this culture in which who first wrote what is beyond retrieval. This guilt of writing, both as composition and as authorship, is a sharp facet of a broader guilt. Given by what I shall call itself and be called, this guilt acts in one and the same moment through an emotional grammar and a linguistic psychology. The pseudo-integrity of the category of psychology is disaggregated, and at least some of it is dispatched to language. How, or if, this sits with other claimants to the vexed terrain of the unconscious is another question: and is this speculation merely a shaky invention of the Lacanian wheel? For Althusser himself characterised Lacan's `paradox, formally familiar to linguistics, of a double yet single discourse, unconscious yet verbal, having for its double field only a single field, with no beyond except in itself: the field of the ``signifying chain'' ',57 but he went on to insist that `the factual primacy of language' was inadequate, and to reassert the law of language in human order. The suggestions in these notes are more to do with the practical, and lawless, materiality of words. Maybe at this point there's more of an intimate link between `language' and `the unconscious' than that afforded by the usual parallelism of analogy, of the unconscious structured like a language and which, in the manner of all intimate links, rather blurs the character of both partners to the arrangement. That is, to what extent might it ever be interesting to speak of an unconscious of language itself? This last phrase is an abbreviation of J.-J. Lecercle's conception of language as having `a remainder', although it's a pleat which he might want to let down again. Couldn't a grand act of compression fuse elements of present concepts of `the unconscious' with language-and-its-remainders, yet not by analogy, or even as scribe? 58 Sometimes it seems attractive to be completely flat. J.-C. Milner almost, but not quite, makes the elision when he glosses Lacan's lalangue as `that by which, with one and the same stroke, there is language (or beings who can be qualified as speaking, which comes down to the same thing) and there is an unconscious' and again that `Language is then what in practice the unconscious is, lending itself to all imaginable games, so that truth, under the sway of words, speaks'.59

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Less ambitiously, what now seems most apt for my title question as to whether guilt is linguistic is an equivocal answer. No, if some battle for supremacy against other claimants is imagined. Yes, if this adjective `linguistic' can indicate that guilt is also structurally given by its nonsequential temporality, and that this in itself produces unease about agency, responsibility, culpability, subjecthood, identification, composition, and authorship. And to consider that guilt also drifts at the broad level of language may be a de-dramatising move, in that it restores it to ordinariness too, lifting it away from a purely idiosyncratic psychopathology of omnipotence by reinstating it in a common place. This place is emphatically not the collective unconscious. It cheerfully lacks depths, and is also truly historical, because language is historical, and truly materialist, because language is solid. Following this line of musing, then, there are familiar, unexceptional effects which do operate strongly and directly on a terrain, not of the older psycholinguistics, but pitched somewhere between emotionality or psychology, and linguistics. That is, an individual `psychic unconscious' would not be rigorously opposed to some general `linguistic unconscious'. No inflexible ridge would demarcate them. Instead one would, ideally, reconcile both via a subtle alteration of each. But here I'm ineluctably reminded of the fate of Doris Lessing's heroine, shifted from a youth of espousing communism to a middle age of professing marriage guidance.60

Notes
1 2 3 Marianne Moore, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 59. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1973; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). I'm greatly indebted to Jean-Jacques Lecercle for exchanges of work, and the present notes are really an extended footnote to some of the ideas advanced in his The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990). All misinterpretations and involuntary plagiarisms are mine. Herman Parret, ` ``Ma vie'' comme effet de discours', La Licorne, 14, 1988, 16177. Parret writes `L'autobiographie de ``ma vie'' est avant tout l'histoire d'une temporalite dont Je suis absent. Le Je, effet de discours, est essen crit ne tiellement un simulacre, un epiphenomene, et c'est ainsi que le Moi-e peut avoir affaire avec le Je temporalisant et spatialisant qui existe au niveau de la deixis grammaticale des surfaces discursives' (p. 175). I owe this reference to Robert Smith's vividly helpful Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which lays out the deathliness of that genre. e, In La parole souffle Tel Quel, no. 20, winter 1965, trans. Alan Bass, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: RKP, 178).

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Letter to Jacques Riviere, 29 January 1924, quoted in Antonin Artaud, Collected Works vol. 1, trans. Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1968), 31. Artaud presses on: `But to analyse such a state of mind correctly, the conscious does not err because it is brimming over but because it is empty, for this teeming and above all unstable and changeable juxtaposition is an illusion. There was no juxtaposition initially, for it seems clear that in every conscious state there is always a dominant note and if the mind has not chosen a dominant note mechanically it is through weakness and because nothing dominated it at that moment, nothing cropped up strongly enough or prolonged enough in the field of consciousness to register. Thus instead of being overloaded with a surplus, there is a shortage instead, without any precise thought being able to find a fissure when it manifests itself and so we have this slackening, disorder, and instability.' Ibid., 21415. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Books and New York: Pantheon Books), 17, from ologie du Savoir (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1969). L'Arche Marguerite Yourcenar, cited in Herman Parret, `Ma vie comme effet de discours', La Licorne, 14, Poitiers, 1988, 16177; 161. Mikhail Bakhtin, `Discourse in the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293. Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958), L388. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 456. Jacques Derrida, Memoires, for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Herman Parret, ` ``Ma vie'' comme effect de discours', op. cit., 177. Heidegger, `Poetically Man Dwells', from Poetry Language Thought, trans. and introd. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 21516. Heidegger, `A Meditation on Trakl', Poetry Language Thought, op. cit., 198. Ibid., 207. `Quest for the Essence of Language', in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 41327; 423. Heidegger, `Poetically Man Dwells', from Poetry Language Thought, op. cit., 216. Dada Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love, 1924, one of the Sept Manifestes tes, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1975). Dada, in Tristan Tzara, Oeuvres Comple Stephane Mallarme, Divagations (Paris 1899). `What Is The Language Using Us For?' in W. S. Graham, Collected Poems 1942-1977 (London: Faber, 1979), 1956. Jean-Claude Milner, L'Amour de la Langue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), translated by Ann Banfield as For The Love of Language (London: Macmillan, 1990), 64. W. S. Graham, `What Is The Language Using Us For?' op. cit., 194. `Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry', in Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, op. cit., 25061; 250.

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 251. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 253. `Language in Operation', Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, op. cit., 5056; 54. Jakobson borrows his example from R. G. Kent, `Assimilation and Dissimilation', in Language, 12, 1936. Or, as Jakobson more generously concludes his chapter on `What is Poetry?' with an analogous point about another formal uncertainty: `Why is all this necessary? Why is it necessary to make a special point of the fact that sign does not fall together with object? Because, besides the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object (A is A) there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequcy of that identity (A is not A). The reason that this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatised. Activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out' (p. 378). Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, trans. Kate Soper (London: NLB, 1976), 224, from Il Lapsus Freudiano (La Nuova Italia, 1974). J.-J. Lecercle, in The Violence of Language, op. cit., discusses Jean-Pierre Brisset, 18371923, on pp. 612 and elsewhere. Sigmund Freud, `The Work of Condensation in the Dream-Work', in The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey (London: The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4, 1991), 383, 387. Sebastiano Timpanaro, op. cit.., 141. Ibid., 224. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock Publications, 1960), 2034. Wallace Stevens paraphrases Bateson like this, on p. 13 of an essay written in 1942, `The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words', in The Necessary Angel (London: Faber, 1960), 336. Heidegger, `Language', from Poetry Language Thought, op. cit., 195. Althusser, `Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971), 12173; 163. J.-J. Lecercle, in `The Imposture of Theory: Louis Althusser's Autobiography', forthcoming in The Pragmatics of Interpretation (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), and Judith Butler, Subjection (in press, Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Mladen Dolar, `Beyond Interpellation', in The Subject in Democracy, vol. 1 (Ljubljana: IMS, 1988), and Judith Butler's commentary on this essay in her Subjection. Since finishing these notes, I've also stumbled across Slavoj Zizek's discussion of Althusser's interpellation in his Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994); he links it to Lacan's letter which always finds its addressee. Althusser, op. cit., 163. Ibid., 169. Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 46, from L'Avenir Dure Longtemps (Paris: Editions Stock/ Imec, 1992). Ibid., 277. J.-J. Lecercle's `The Imposture of Theory: Louis Althusser's Autobiography', op. cit., 4.

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Denise Riley, `Affections of the Ear', 1995. Friedrich Nietzsche, `On the Pale Criminal', in Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Alexander Tille (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 45; and noted by Freud in his own paper on `Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', in vol. 14, Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 3323; 332. Also, Karl Jaspers' discussion of guilt in The Question of German Guilt, 1946, English translation 1947. Strachey notes the case studies of `Little Hans' and the `Wolf Man' here. Freud's `Those Wrecked by Success' is in `Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work', 1916, in vol. 14, Standard Edition, as above, 31631. `Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', op. cit., 332. I've benefited from the chapter on interpellation in the typescript of Judith Butler's forthcoming Subjection. For the general idea of historicising categories of people, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1978). For a recent example of the historical vulnerability and political adaptability of discursive strategies, see Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer; French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996). Judith Butler, op. cit., 18. Genesis, chapters 2 and 3, Holy Bible (Authorized Version). John 1:1, Holy Bible (Authorized Version). `Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses;, op. cit., 165. Matthew 16:18, Holy Bible (Authorized Version). The Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 410. Althusser, `Freud and Lacan', in Lenin and Philosophy, op. cit., 181202; 1913. Moustafa Safouan, L'Inconscient Et Son Scribe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982). Jean-Claude Milner, op. cit., 64. In The Golden Notebook (1962; St Albans, Herts: Panther Books, 1973), 638.

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60