ANAMNESIS, AMNESIA, AFFIRMATION

If the affirmation of eternal recurrence dreams of redemption, that affirmative thought is itself decadent: such is one of the vicious circles of Nietzsche’s “thought of thoughts.” Another circle is that of remembering and forgetting, as Pierre Klossowski demonstrates in the third major section of his book (CV, 89-112). Not that anamnesis and amnesia can be neatly distinguished on the circumference of the circle or the declination of the spiral. The very act of thinking the thought—Klossowski’s question is in essential proximity to Heidegger’s—risks at each instant the loss of lucidity, as though it were caught in a vortex of simultaneous ascent and descent: “That a thought rises only by descending, progresses only by regressing—inconceivable spiral whose ‘pointless’ description proves to be repugnant” (CV, 14).

The very act of thinking on the helix, as it were, is radically dependent on the pulsional life of the body—its drives, humors, migraines, neuralgias, its ups and downs. “The act of thinking comes to be identical with suffering and suffering with thinking.” Suffering at the hands of what Nietzsche in “The Wanderer and His Shadow” calls “the closest things” will nevertheless ultimately make thinking as such impossible for him (CV, 47—48). The very brain is menaced, wholly in consonance with the phylogenetic process of cephalization, which is inevitably linked with hazard, effraction, violence, and pain. In the case of Nietzsche, physical suffering can be endured only through a “voluptuous lucidity,” a delirium that allows thought to reside alia breve alongside ecstasy. Yet ecstasy and delirium are as closely linked to oblivion as to lucid thought, to amnesia as to a gathering anamnesis. The mirror of reflection has a tain, thin and fragile, on which reflexive lucidity depends: “No mirror without a tain: the tain forms the base [fond] of ‘reason.’ Thanks to the opacity of impulsions, oblivion is possible. No consciousness without forgetting. Yet as soon as consciousness ‘scratches’ the tain, it confuses itself in its very transparency with the flux and reflux of impulsions” (CV, 53).

Such confusion is lodged in the erect and vertical human being, who measures high and low, front and back, with mindless confidence. What Merleau-Ponty in the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception calls the “absolute generality” and “double anonymity” of the body here betrays its most sinister aspect: even though “the cohesion of the body is the cohesion of the self,” defining the “irreversible course” of a life, that very body, one’s own body—here, Nietzsche’s body—is “no more than a fortuitous gathering of temporarily reconciled, contradictory impulses” (CV, 54—55). Nietzsche’s experience of eternal return, of the vicious circle, announces a rupture with the unilinear sense that dominates the erect and oblivious body. By conjoining commencement and end, direction and goal, the circle confounds the history of thought, for which the body is a property of the self. The body, as the site and the product of contradictory pulsions, reversible pulsions in the sense that they prevail, bide their time, pass, and return, gains a new centrality for thought. The thought of thoughts, eternal return, is thus a bodying thought, une pensée corporante (CV, 55-56). Klossowski attempts to secure a new “cohesion” for the Nietzschean body through a “memory that ultimately detaches itself from the cerebral self, a memory that no longer designates itself except according to the most remote motifs” (CV, 57). He elaborates that cohesion in the most traditional of possible terms: par des traces d’excitations antérieures . . .; la trace des excitations antérieures . . . qui assure la permanence de l‘identité du moi. And yet the quotidian code of “traces” compels the question: “How will the memory subsist if it is to be borne back to all the things that are no longer the self: how to remember without becoming that which remembers everything save itself ?” Nietzsche’s doctrine of the vicious circle, his “invention” of eternal return, challenges lucidity by virtue of its impossible demands on memory. The vicious circle is the very emblem of oblivion. It is founded on “the forgetting of the fact that we were and will be, not only numberless times but always, different from what we now are: other, not somewhere else, but always in this same life” (CV, 86). In short, the very thinking of the affirmative thought, eternal recurrence of the same, revolutionizes memory, reminiscence, and writing. So much for the vestibule of Klossowski’s structure: it is time to enter the vicious circularity of his labyrinth (see Plate 8).

PLATE 8

In the “lived experience” of the eternal return of the same, Nietzsche undergoes a “sudden revelation,” a revelation based on a Stimmung or “certain tonality of soul”; even after the experience detaches itself from the float of experience and assumes the form of a “thought,” one that Nietzsche will try to demonstrate scientifically and deploy for purposes of pedagogy and “selection,” eternal return remains “a brusque awakening,” “a sudden unveiling” (CV, 93). Yet does not oblivion have to play an essential role in the revelation? Is not forgetfulness in fact “the source as well as the indispensable condition” of the thought? How else account for the always startling character of the revelation? Does not eternal return challenge the very identity of the one to whom it is (eternally recurrently) revealed? And if the affirming individual suffers fragmentation, does not the individual affirmation suffer likewise? Instead of da capo! da capo!—da-da? Klossowski accentuates the willed loss of identity in the thought of return:

From the instant eternal return has been revealed to me, I cease to be myself hie et nunc and am susceptible of becoming innumerable others, knowing that I am going to forget this revelation once I am outside [une fois hors de] the memory of myself; this forgetting forms the object of my present will; because the very forgetting would be equivalent to a memory outside my proper limits: and my current state of consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of my other possible identities. (CV, 94—95)

The memory of eternal return is thus the vicious circularity to which I must yield, precisely because it excludes me, expulses me. If the revelation makes any sense at all, it must cause me to lose consciousness of my self. The thought banishes me once and for all from my self, in order to embrace me as its fortuitous moment. Except that precisely this “once and for all,” une fois pour toutes, is the very thing I must surrender:

Yet to re-will oneself as a fortuitous moment is to renounce being oneself once and for all: inasmuch as it is not once and for all that I renounced it there, not once and for all that I must will it: and I am not even this fortuitous moment once and for all, if it is the case that I am to re-will this moment: one more time! For nothing? For myself. “Nothing” being here the circle once and for all. It is the valid sign of all that has happened, all that happens, all that will happen in the world. (CV, 95)

Renunciation of one’s self, for oneself! Once and for all, one more time! How can these conflicting shibboleths abide one another? Must they not rather decapitate one another? Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan is an extended reflection precisely on the impossibility of une seule fois, the absolute resistance of the unique time and place to thought, and I shall digress a moment now in order to consider it.

If the datability of an event appears to circumscribe and circumcise the event once and for all, locking it in the historical archive of the tribe, the very comprehension of its date necessitates a liberation and dispersion of the event. If every event appears to be as unique and impassable as death, utterly unüberholbar, it nonetheless appears as eminently repeatable, wiederholbar, at least in terms of commemoration. To be sure, datability first comes to the fore as an enigma, a conundrum (SH, 13): “How date that which does not repeat itself, if dating also appeals to some form of return, if it calls us back [rapelle]to the readability of a repetition? But how date anything else than the very thing that never repeats itself?” If Celan dates his poems, and incorporates dates into his poems, it is in order to commit events to memory, to a memory that still disposes over and commands a future (SH, 20). The date of the poem in the poem effaces itself in order to let the memory of the event(s) circulate one more time. If the date is cryptic, scarcely decipherable, it is only in order that the trauma never be forgotten, that the incision or wound remain in memory and return to haunt us Mit Brief und Uhr, “With Letter and Clock”:

The traumas—political oppression, fascism, antisemitism, genocide, extermination—are commemorated by their dates, yet also put at risk by the hazards of inversion (56) and oblivion (40):

Yet if readability effaces the date, effaces the very thing it gives to read, this strange process will have begun with the very inscription of the date. The date must in some way dissimulate the stigma of singularity in itself in order to last longer: this is the poem, and what it commemorates. That is the only chance to assure its returning to haunt. Effacement or dissimulation, the annulation [both annullment and anniversary] proper to the ring of return [l’anneau de retour], pertains to the movement of dating. That which is to be commemorated, gathering and repeating at once [a la fois], is from thence at once annihilation of the date, a sort of nothing, or ash.

The ash awaits us.

Every date is thus a future anterior, a future perfect, inasmuch as it grants from its bourn the anniversaries that will have commemorated it (48). Yet those anniversaries will never restore the full presence of the encrypted event, just as no absolute witness will ever have deciphered the poem exhaustively: the future of poet and poem alike remain imperfect, and each is radically isolate (60). If the poem should seem perfectly readable, eminently decipherable, its ideality “bears oblivion in its memory,” “the memory of oblivion itself, the truth of oblivion” (65).

That ideality remains bound to the sheer chance and chances of the body: the tongue and buccal orifice of an entire tribe unable to wrap around the shot shibboleth. Legend has it that 42,000 Ephraimite soldiers were put to the sword by Jephtha as they tried to escape to their homeland on the West Bank. The memory of the event and the place, the bloodred riverbank, Shibboleth, is scorched by the solar annulation that commemorates it. Any specific date and signature that one might attribute to such an event would soon incinerate, as Locke would affirm, burning to cinder and ash (72-75). Paul Celan’s poems are such incinerations, ashen benedictions in the face of horror, appeals broadcast to chance. From Engführung Derrida cites these few lines on return and nonreturn, “amnesia without remnant,” the “return of nonreturn”:

However different the tonality of both Derrida’s Shibboleth and Paul Celan’s poetry may be from Klossowski’s Vicious Circle, they share the task of thinking the circle once and for all, one more time. In Klossowski’s labyrinth, the circle of recurrence (once and for all) is reaffirmed by an act of will (one more time!) beyond the self and thus becomes the sign of chaos. Chaos is neither the Hesiodic gap between sky and earth nor the swamp of a contemporary malaise. It appears by virtue of “traces of signifying fluctuations” in the “code of everyday signs” (CV, 99). Chaos is the sign by which the thinking (or remembering) self falls outside the circle into incoherence. No longer is the circle delineated by the radius of lucid experience, by an Aristotelian thought-thinking-itself. No longer is the circle the radial, radiant path of the absolute within an autonomic system, as it is for at least one of the Hegels. No longer is the circle the sign of essential being, the grammè of ousia.⁴ “The circle opens me to inanity and encloses me in this alternative: either everything recurs because nothing ever had any meaning, or the meaning never returns to anything except through the return of all things without beginning or end” (CV, 101). Reaffirmation as an act of the will both executes and eliminates the very meaning of (re)willing, sacrificing deliberation to chance and metaphysical recollection to a vicious circuitry of anamnesis with amnesia. The result, according to Klossowski, is a flux and reflux of contradictory pulsions—bitterness, laughter, and silence:

Re-willing, pure adherence to the vicious circle: to re-will the entire series once again [encore une fois]—to re-will all these experiences, all these acts, but not insofar as they are mine: precisely this possessive no longer makes sense, nor does it represent a goal. The sense of direction and goal are liquidated by the circle. Whence Zarathustra’s silence, the interruption of his message. Unless his message is a burst of laughter that bears all its own bitterness.⁵

To be on the verge of the thought of eternal recurrence is to sacrifice both cool deliberation and ardent will to chance. To be on the verge of affirmation is to find oneself within the vicious circle of anamnesis-with-amnesia—which is to say, outside the circle of self-sufficient thought. It is perhaps to be abashed in the face of Zarathustra’s laughter and bitterness both, and to understand better than anything else the interruption of messages, the intermittent silences.

IMPOSSIBLE MOURNING POSSIBLE

It breaches the bounds of discretion to cite a work of mourning as though it were a work like any other, and as though its wounds were not being continually prodded, reopened, salted, and insulted. Yet Derrida’s Mémoires: For Paul de Man is so rich a text on memory, reminiscence, and writing that I cannot afford discretion. Its three parts—three lectures delivered not long after Paul de Man’s death in December 1983—touch on various topics that are central to my own undertaking. Hegel’s Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” and Heidegger’s An-denken, the gathering of thinking in memory, emerge there as thoughts that induce mirth and mourning, yes-saying and promise, but also contamination and hesitation. Hesitation—as though on the verge.

The first lecture, “Mnemosyne,” begins with the confession of a certain incapacity on the lecturer’s part, a confession that may well be a parody, full of Odyssean ruses, or a straightforward lamentation about gifts withheld:

I have never known how to tell a story.

And since I love nothing better than remembering and Memory itself—Mnemosyne—I have always felt this inability as a sad infirmity. Why am I denied narration? Why have I not received this gift? Why have I never received it from Mnemosyne, tēs ton Mousōn mētros, the mother of all the muses, as Socrates recalls in Theaetetus (191d)? The gift (dōron) of Mnemosyne, Socrates insists, is like the wax in which all that we wish to guard in our memory is engraved in relief so that it may leave a mark, like that of rings, bands, or seals. We preserve our memory and our knowledge of them; we can then speak of them, and do them justice, as long as their image (eidōlon) remains legible.

To suffer the memory but lose the narrative is no personal failing, one might well insist, but the failure of typography, iconography, and engrammatology. Simulacra displace the icon, and a straightforward reading of typed marks becomes impossible. Engravement in relief, the gravemarking of all hermeneutics, instead of producing monuments to eternity now signals a default of mourning. Derrida cites Hōlderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” from which one might extract these telling lines, lines that with some variations conclude all three drafts of the hymn:

Mourning is as indefinite and as overdetermined as the Gleich and the Zusammengenommen of Holderlin’s recalcitrant verses, as remote as Achilles and Patroklos both, as distant as God and the gods, with furious Ajax deep in the grottoes of the sea. We are therefore justified in securing aid and counsel wherever we can find it. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us—as does Edward S. Casey’s Remembering (273; 353 n. 17-22)—that mourning and memory are scions of the same semantic vine. Mourn has as its Indogermanic root smer ”to remember,” a root that yields the Greek merimna, “care, sorrow, solicitude”; perhaps there is no real disagreement with those scholars who emphasize the Old Nordic root morna, “to pine away,” apparently derived from the Indogermanic mer ”to die.” One would hardly be surprised to find that mourning and morior, mourir are related. What may surprise us is the way in which merimna lends a kind of fundamental-ontological force to the conjunction of memory and mourning: in Being and Time (SZ, 199 n. 1) Heidegger refers to the Stoic term merimna, translated in the Vulgate as sollicitudo, as an important stepping-stone on the way to his notion of cura, Sorge, “care,” as the existential-ontological designation of human being. Memory-and-mourning would not simply be a contingent and distressing way to bring a book about memory, reminiscence, and writing to a close; rather, whatever our skepticism concerning the temporalization of anxiety and the purported hold that “appropriate care” ought to lend our existence, mourning would remain in memory of being. Yet can we be sure of even this remnant of fundamental ontology? Can we hold onto mourning, or can it hold us? Is mourning a possibility of Dasein? Is it possible at all—or is precisely mourning in default? Derrida asks:

What is an impossible mourning? What does it tell us, this impossible mourning, about an essence of memory? And as concerns the other in us, even in this “distant premonition of the other” [Par son pressentiment lointain: Armel Guerne’s translation of line 33 of the third draft of “Mnemosyne”: Fern ahnend . . . ], where is the most unjust betrayal? Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or vault of some narcissism? (MPM, 29/6)

These questions haunt Derrida’s Memoires, whether Paul de Man, Holderlin, Hegel, or Heidegger is the personage in question, whether deconstruction, memory, or affirmation is the theme under scrutiny. For that reason we would do well to recall the basic features of Freud’s account of the work of mourning, die Trauerarbeit, in “Trauer und Melancholie” (StA 3, 193—212). The thematic arrangement whereby mourning should simply be the “normal” counterpart of “pathological” melancholy or depression is disturbed by the fact that Freud’s earliest reference to mourning places it at the heart of neurosis and the Oedipus complex. Indeed, one of Freud’s earliest references to mourning is also the first reference to the Oedipus complex: it appears in the third set of notes from the Fliess period, published as Manuscript N, mailed to Fliess as an appendix to letter 64, dated May 31, 1897 (Aus den Anfängen, 221). The first note of the appendix bears the title “Impulses”:

Inimical impulses toward one’s parents (the wish that they should die) are likewise an integral component of neurosis. They come into the daylight of consciousness as compulsive representations. In paranoia they correspond to the most severe delusions of persecution (pathological mistrust of rulers and monarchs). These impulses are repressed whenever compassion for the parents predominates, during the periods of their illness and death. Then it is an expression of mourning to blame oneself for their death (so-called melancholia) or to punish oneself by means of hysteria, suffering the very same symptoms they suffered, as though by way of retribution. The identification that takes place in this instance is, as we can see, nothing other than a mode of thought, and it makes the search for a motive superfluous.

The word identification (as elsewhere introjection) betrays the fact that mourning touches the very heart of ego-formation. Freud is exercised by the problem of ego-formation from the 1890s through The Ego and the Id (1923), especially from the time of the “Narcissism” essays (1914). If we dare to simplify Freud’s accounts of an extremely complex set of processes, we can say that “successful” mourning manages to withdraw its libidinal “occupation” of every “memory and expectation” connected with the mourned person. No doubt, a great deal of time and effort goes into this withdrawal. The sole compensation for the loss is provided by “the sum of narcissistic satisfactions” that one attains by being the survivor (3, 209). However, even though Freud would like to contrapose successful mourning to depression—”With mourning the world has become poor and empty; with melancholy it is the ego itself that becomes so” (3, 200)—their similar symptomatology becomes ever more compelling as “Mourning and Melancholy” proceeds. Unsuccessful mourning seems the likelier fate, with its concomitant outrages: clinging to the lost object in well-nigh psychotic, hallucinatory desire (as though regressing to the earliest possible mistake), lacerating the self with accusations of guilt, identifying fully with the lost object (so that the self becomes a flitting “shadow” of the beloved), and regressing to the most primitive form of object-choice in “original Narcissism” (3, 203). Such primitive “choice” occurs as the desire to devour and ingest the other, the “ambivalent” consumption, destruction, and preservation of the other (cf. “Drives and Their Vicissitudes,” StA 3, 101). True, a discussion of the manic phase of depression leaves Freud without a corresponding “economic” explanation for mourning, unless it be sheer renunciation of the (lost) object, “declaring the object dead and offering the ego the prize of survival [die Pramie des Amlebenbleibens]. . . .” And yet the meager prize does not compensate for the effraction suffered when the reality principle breaks through: whether the work of mourning is successful or collapses into depression and melancholy there will inevitably be the severe pain of loss—Schmerz.

Perhaps it is the unassuaged pain of mourning, whether “successful” or not, that enables Derrida to ask about the greater injustice: if one should pull back from the departed one, having snatched up the laurel of survival, or if one should inter the other in oneself either as an intimate idol or as a shade at an “infinite remove,” that is to say, either in the communion of a complacent Narcissism or the encystation of a wretched one—is not the pain equal in intensity? Whether mourning is possible by means of obsequy, obsequience, or some other strategy of the interpreting ego; or impossible, whereupon the second best’s a gay good night and quickly turn away; the questions of fidelity and faithlessness haunt the logic of the living and the logic of the dead.⁷

No totalizing answer to such questions concerning mourning, fidelity, or betrayal seems possible. No narrative can exhaust them, no semiology encode and decipher them, no memoir absorb and defuse them. Mourning isI have said, that I minutely remember the details of the chamber—yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memoryand remains cryptic.

In “Fors: Les mots angles de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” Derrida investigates the psychoanalytical-anasemiological concept of cryptonymy. Developed in articles and books by Abraham and Torok since 1961, cryptonymy focuses on the distinction between introjection (related to the situation of mourning) and incorporation (related to the interment of phantoms of pleasure and prohibition in the self, more closely related to unsuccessful mourning, melancholy or depression). Their analysis of Freud’s Wolfman case combines linguistics and mythopoetics with more traditional psychoanalytical approaches. Derrida focuses on the various kinds of interiors that may be constructed, according to Abraham and Torok, within the walls of the psyche, within the forums and fortresses of the unconscious—in a word, within fors. (For, a masculine noun derived from forum, public place or tribunal, is in its literary usage le for in-terieur: the tribunal of conscience, located at the very foundation [fond] of oneself. However, by writing the word in the plural, fors, Derrida produces its antonym, the preposition fors, from foris “outside the walls” [concordia domi foris pax], as suggested by the English phrases “except for, apart from, outside of.” The interior place is no doubt related to impregnable strength and force [cf. the adjective fort], as long as that place is protected from the piercing and perforating action of forer, forage, from the outside.—Robert.) The crypt in which the traumatic event (or dual event involving pleasure/prohibition) is sealed becomes an interior for. Yet the for thereby becomes “an outside excluded from the internal interior of the inside” (Fors, 13). The crypt seals off its contents from the outside—but from the inside of the psyche as well. (This difficulty of distinguishing inclusions from exclusions arose for us when we tried to understand how Descartes’ interior gland H could have had an exterior, and how the icons engraved on that interior exterior could ever be engrammatologically identified as figures or objects on the exterior exterior; it also arose in Hegel’s account of the nocturnal shaft of signs that spirit appears to be able to mine, inasmuch as the shaft is interior to the interiority of spirit, and is hence a kind of encrypted exteriority—in a word, a kind of crypt.) Because the crypt in which the traumatic event remains sealed is barred to me, it is both within me and without me. It is an effraction, a violence, for it keeps alive in me something extraneous, something dead, something of the father which was never enjoyed and yet which never perishes (14). Unlike the steady, progressive, laborious work of mourning, defined by Torok as the work of introjection, incorporation imposes itself with alacrity—through a kind of foreign invasion into the cryptic heart of the self. Imposes itself as the phantom invasion of a foreign body: “. . . phantasmatic, nonmediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory” (17). A phantom invasion inasmuch as the incorporated desire was never anything but excluded desire: “What the crypt commemorates, as the ‘monument’ or ‘tomb’ of the incorporated object, is not the object itself but its exclusion; exclusion of the desire outside the process of introjection, its portal to the interior of the self condemned, the excluded /or” (18).

Cryptonymy—no doubt uncomfortably housed in the long tradition that extends from Plato’s aviary, Augustine’s cavern, and the mnemonist’s theatrum mundi to Descartes’ tubes, Hegel’s shaft, and Nietzsche’s cave haunted for a thousand years by the shade of the dead god—does not spell the end of lucidity. (An end that haunts Klossowski’s vicious circle, insofar as his book begins and ends with the challenge of lucidity.) Yet its lucidity is that of a votive candle, flickering uncertainly in the rarified air of the crypt. Such lucidity “illumines the inside wall of a cracked symbol” (23). It is the lucidity of a cryptic communication within the unconscious, one that inverts the egological maxim of psychoanalysis, as follows: Wo ich war soil Es werden. The Es invokes not only the Id but also incorrigible imperfection—Es war, “It was.” Absorption through incorporation is thus never entirely successful, and is never fully achieved (25). The phantom (father or sister, or both, in the Wolfman’s case) occupies its own encrypted placeCaddy’s head was on Father’s shoulder. Her hair was like fire, and little points of fire were in her eyes, and I went and Father lifted me into the chair too, and Caddy held me. She smelled like treesin the self, heterogeneous both to the self and to the other (41—42). The role of signs in cryptonymy—signs as a kind of mortgaged desire—and especially the role of the Wolfman’s secret sign (tieret) cannot detain us here. Neither the ingestion of such signs nor the “satisfactions of the mouth” can be explained sufficiently in a few lines; enough if we recall the importance of quality signs and reality signs in overcoming the primal hallucination analysed by the 1895 “Project.” That such signs are encrypted means that they are somehow both incorporated and excluded at the same time, vomited, as it were, into an interior receptacle or pocket (56), indeterminately dead and alive, undecidably within and without. Cryptonymy is therefore the science of the signs of an impossible mourning.

The very linguistic multivalence of the word mémoire—to pick up the thread again of Derrida’s Mémoires—whether masculine or feminine, singular or plural, preserves the cryptic quality of mourning. “These entanglements are multiple; they meet nowhere, neither in a point nor in a memory. There is no singular memory” (MPM, 38/14). Mourning does not (allow) rest. It pushes ahead. The desire to think and speak in memory of a departed friend is the intense desire for and affirmation of the future. It engages the bereaved in an alliance, not for purposes of progress or power, but toward an uncertain future to which one nevertheless must say “yes”:

. . . the “yes,” which is a non-active act, which states or describes nothing, which in itself neither manifests nor defines any content, this yes only commits, before and beyond everything else. And to do so, it must repeat itself to itself: yes, yes. It must preserve memory; it must commit itself to keeping its own memory; it must promise itself to itself; it must bind itself to memory for memory, if anything is ever to come from the future. This is the law, and this is what the performative category, in its current state, can merely approach, at the moment when “yes” is said, and “yes” to that “yes.” (MPM, 42/20)

Again and again in Derrida’s recent work we confront this series of imperatives. Here too his precursor (“. . . if anything is ever to come from the future”) appears to be Heidegger, however different the tone of “memory” in the two thinkers may be. The difference in tone doubtless has to do with both mourning and mirth—and thus perhaps with the role that Nietzsche plays in the thinking of each. Be that as it may, mourning is in ascendancy for the moment:

What do we mean by “in memory of,” or, as we also say, “to the memory of”? For example, we reaffirm our fidelity to the departed friend by acting in a certain manner in memory of him, or by dedicating a speech to his memory. Each time, we know our friend to be gone forever, irremediably absent, annulled to the point where he himself knows and receives nothing of what takes place in his memory. In this terrifying lucidity, in the light of this incinerating blaze where nothingness appears, we remain in disbelief itself. Never will we believe in either death or immortality; and we sustain the blaze of this terrible light through devotion, for it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and because we live this-or-that in his memory, in memory of him. (MPM, 43/21)

The lucidity that so challenges and goads Klossowski returns here to haunt the obscurity of the phrase in his memory. He, the dead one, has no memory; he, Nietzsche would say, war. To know that he is gone forever, es ist mit ihm vorbei!, and not to take comfort too quickly in his having been or being gewesen, is the doleful mark of such lucidity. No resurrection. No narcissistic fantasy of inclusion by incorporation or even introjection. “Already installed in the narcissistic structure, the other so marks the self of the relationship to self, so conditions it, that the being ‘in us’ of bereaved memory becomes the coming of the other. . . . And even, however terrifying this thought may be, the first coming of the other” (MPM, 44/22). How the first coming? Inasmuch as advenience to full presence never takes place in life, but only in the infinite distance that is opened by death, when a proper name sets the seal on a life by the typography of a final date: December 21, 1983June 2, 1910. Yet the law of memoire sees to it that a twist and turn of memory prevents the full gathering of any being into an epitaph or any trope of personification. “This specular reflection never closes in on itself; it does not appear before this possibility of mourning . . .” (MPM, 49/28). If the friend lives only in us, we ourselves never live comfortably there. Friends know of such mortality, such finitude, not as a limit situation (such as anxiety, perhaps), but as radical alterity:

If there is a finitude of memory, it is because there is something of the other, and of memory as a memory of the other, which comes from the other and goes back to the other. It defies any totalization and directs us to a scene of allegory, to a fiction of prosopopeia, that is, to tropologies of mourning: to the memory of mourning and to the mourning for memory. This is why there can be no true mourning, even if truth and lucidity always presuppose it. . . . (50/29)

Truth as revealing/concealing or as self-showing and withdrawal would have to remain in mourning and sustained imperfection: a perfect typographical error, if error it was, demonstrates this when in Memoires: For Paul de Man (page 30, line 8) Nietzsche’s question “What then is truth?” appears as “What then is Warheit ?” What then is was-ness? Es war. It was. He war.

“True” mourning is “the tendency to accept incomprehension, to leave a place for it” (51/30). Proust’s Marcel slips into the place of such incomprehension when he returns (in Sodome et Gomorrhe) to his grandmother’s haunts over a year after her death. He finds the very “anachronism” of his sudden paroxysm of mourning the most shocking aspect of the bouleversement. It is the very infidelity of his memory, which he traces back to “the intermittences of the heart,” that make his mourning so profoundly painful. “Incomprehensible” is his own word for the “strange contradiction of survivance and nihilation” in him. “. . . The brusque revelation of death had like lightning hollowed out in me [creusée en moi] in line with some supernatural and nonhuman graphics, a mysterious double furrow” (Recherche, II, 755—63). Such graphic doubling is the doleful “truth” (War-heit) of mourning: the one who lives on also bears the prize of nihilation, la douloureuse synthèse de la survivance et du néant.

In the final pages of “Mnemosyne,” Derrida brings his reflections on the death of a friend to the question of being as gathering and as the law of memory. I shall reproduce a number of extracts, with very little commentary:

This terrible solitude which is mine or ours at the death of the other is what constitutes that relationship to self which we call “me,” “us,” “between us,” “subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory.” The possibility of death “happens,” so to speak, “before” these different instances, and makes them possible. Or, more precisely, the possibility of the death of the other as mine or ours in-forms any relation to the other and the finitude of memory. (53/33)

No resolute openedness or readiness for an anxiety that is poised for the leap could prepare us for such solitude. Or for such companionship. No choice of or election to this possibility. No brave mustering of “our generation” to struggle and heroism. Impossible mourning is not possible anxiety. Nor is it a gathering, unless as a persistent focusing on what has slipped through the fingers, as Heidegger’s Stefan George writes: “Worauf es meiner Hand entrann” “Whereupon it slipped from my hand” (US, 220). Such slippage, or seepage, or loss Heidegger calls der Schmerz, “pain,” and we shall some day have to return to Heidegger’s own sense of mourning (Trauer) and joy (Ereude). Such pain, in Heidegger too, remains unfamiliar. It is not the repeatable-insurmountable, not the possible impassable possibility of “my own” death that initiates mourning, but the otherness impacted in “my” “own” living beyond and surviving the other. The prize of survival. Congratulations.

Derrida writes:

We weep precisely over what happens to us when everything is entrusted to the sole memory that is “in me” or “in us.” But we must also recall in another turn of memory that the “within me” and the “within us” do not arise or appear before this terrible experience. Or at least not before its possibility, actually felt and inscribed in us, signed. The “within me” and the “within us” acquire their sense and their bearing only by carrying within themselves the death and the memory of the other; of an other who is greater than them, greater than what they or we can bear, carry, or comprehend, since we then lament being no more than “memory,” “in memory.” Which is another way of remaining inconsolable before the finitude of memory. We know, we knew, we remember—before the death of one we loved—that being-in-me or being-in-us is constituted out of the possibility of mourning. We are ourselves only from the perspective of this knowledge that is older than ourselves; and this is why I say that we begin by recalling this to ourselves: we come to ourselves through this memory of possible mourning. (53/ 33-34)

Derrida calls such memory of possible mourning an allegory in de Man’s sense and in de Man’s memory, an allegory of impossible mourning, of the un-readability of mourning, of the double-bind of successful/unsuccessful labors of mourning. “The possibility of the impossible commands here the whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory.” Such a rhetoric is no doubt stamped powerfully by both Hegel and Heidegger: because the other is nowhere to be found outside, mourning is interiorization of the other’s memory; yet the other resists closure within me precisely by being nothing, and we experience the failure of our appropriation as “the dark light of this nothing,” which Heidegger in “What Is Metaphysics?” calls die helle Nacht des Nichts. The dazzling night releases not intimations of my own mortality but the impossible intimation (Derrida suggests this word as a translation of Erinnerung: MPM, 54/35) of the mourned other. Even if we should interiorize and idealize the body and voice of the other, devouring them, incarnating, assimilating, and mimicking them, such interiorizing has at all events always already happened, catching us by surprise, so that everything begins by remembering. Yet nothing fails like success. We bear the dead alive—yet also defunct or stillborn—into our own future. Failure alone succeeds. We tenderly eject or release the other, “outside, over there, in his death, outside of us.” The infertile dialectic of mourning seems an inexorable law, a decree of Ananke, beyond being.

And yet Derrida doubts whether we can acquiesce in it. “Can we accept this schema? I do not think so, even though it is in part a hard and undeniable necessity, the very one that makes true mourning impossible.” He thereby points beyond impossible mourning to something possible, outside of acceptance and beyond consent, but also without a tinge of bitterness. Perhaps it is closer to a kind of affirmation, not as a resounding celebration of success, but as an inevitable reiteration—a kind of anniversary—of the failure. For “the other will have spoken first” (56/37), and will have had effects only as a trace. The trace that nevertheless regulates all our relations with others, with the other “tfs other, that is, as mortal for a mortal, with the one always capable of dying before the other” (57/39). “Our ‘own’ mortality is not dissociated from, but rather also conditions this rhetoric of faithful memory, all of which serves to seal an alliance and to call us to an affirmation of the other.” Even if faithful memory is precisely always and only on the verge of remembering.

GEDÄCHTNIS AND ANDENKEN: IN MEMORY
OF HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER

Perhaps it comes to the same: whether one emphasizes the exteriority that attaches itself to thinking memory (Gedächtnis) in Hegel’s system of subjective spirit (and this is the emphasis of Paul de Man: see Notes, chapter 5, note 15); or whether one stresses the eminence and immanence of Erinnerung, which is everywhere and nowhere in the system, all-consuming and all-excreting at once (as I have stressed “interiorizing remembrance” throughout chapter 5); in either case it is a matter of unsuccessful sublation and the failure of dialectic. In his central lecture on de Man, Derrida takes up de Man’s thesis on Gedächtnis in “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics .” I will not pursue the lines of either de Man’s or Derrida’s argument, but will consider the nature of the failure of dialectic—which is a failure of recollective memory—and de Man’s and Derrida’s strategies for successfully keeping the failure in mind. These strategies involve (1) establishing the relation of the name to mourning; (2) interpreting memory as allegory and irony; and (3) envisaging a “nonarchitectonic” gathering of memory.

Derrida has long been intrigued by the relation of the name and the signature to death and mourning. Whether in chapter seven of Voice and Phenomenon (VP, 104—8), which considers what Husserl calls the “essentially occasional” expression “I,” a supplement to the zero-point of subjectivity in the soliloquy of mental life, along with the written, testamentary “I” as a transcendental ideality ensconced in the very possibility of my death, or in “The Logic of the Living” of Otobiographies, where Nietzsche’s signature is read as a mark of his absence, an obsequy, Derrida has pursued the question of the proper name and death.⁸

In “The Art of Mémoires ” (MPM, 62-63/49) he defines memory as the “name” that has to do with the very possibility and preservation of names—as though in a nocturnal shaft or crypt. Derrida qualifies the nature of such preservation as follows:

Not preservation as what conserves or maintains the thing named: we have just seen on the contrary that death reveals the power of the name to the very extent that the name continues to name or call what we call the bearer of the name, who can no longer answer to or answer in and for his name. And since the possibility of this situation is revealed at death, we can infer that it does not wait for death, or that in it death does not wait for death.

Because “I” could not stop for death, “he” kindly stopped for “me.” Stopped well ahead of time. Stopped in the name, in my name—monumentalized, for example, on the title-page of a book. In “Interpreting Signatures,” Derrida reflects on Heidegger’s insistence that the name Nietzsche stands for the matter of Nietzsche’s thinking, as opposed to the mere person of Nietzsche, Herr Nietzsche, whom Nietzsche himself (in the Foreword to the second edition of The Gay Science: 3, 347) encourages us to ignore.⁹ But to continue:

In calling or naming someone while he is alive, we know that his name can survive him and already survives him; the name begins during his life to get along without him, speaking and bearing his death each time it is pronounced in naming or calling. . . . [The name] is from the outset “in memory of.” We cannot separate the name of “memory” and “memory” of the name; we cannot separate the name and memory. (MPM, 62—63/49)

Thus “the ambiguity of memory,” which encompasses what we bear within us in mourning and what is forever outside us, like an epitaph on a stele or monument (MPM, 63—64/50—51). To be “in memory of” is thus “the most ambiguous fidelity.”

The “ambiguity of memory”Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousnessexpresses the ultimate failure of interiorizing remembrance. Whether one chases Erinnerung or champions Gedächtnis, the result is “rupture, heterogeneity, disjunction,” rather than dialectical resolution or speculative reconciliation. In Derrida’s view, such disjunction arises from the ineradicable alterity of the other—and also of the other-in-me as narrated in the allegory of mourning (69/56). Derrida cites Paul de Man’s study of Georges Poulet, which speaks to (and from) an experience of the verge:

The instant de passage supplants memory or, to be more precise, supplants the naive illusion that memory would be capable of conquering the distance that separates the present from the past moment. . . . Memory becomes important as failure rather than as achievement and acquires a negative value. . . . The illusion that continuity can be restored by an act of memory turns out to be merely another moment of transition. Only the poetic mind can gather scattered fragments of time into a single moment and endow it with generative power.¹⁰

Passage as both Vorbeigang of the last god and the Vorbei of a human existence cast toward its future; as the “moment of transition,” Übergang, in Heidegger’s interpretation of the moment of recurrence, transition as downgoing, Untergang; passage as absolutely resistant to the recuperative powers of memory; passage as the failure of recollection, the “negative value” of memory. Yet the negativity and finitude of memory, Derrida emphasizes, must also be recognized as “the very opening of difference,” a difference somewhere between the ontological difference between being and beings and the difference that occupied us in chapter 4, a difference that has to do with the rhetoric of memory insofar as it involves traces and tracings. Derrida reiterates his effort to remove from that rhetoric the Hegelian (and Heideggerian?) heritage of an “essential past,” Wesen and Ge-wesen. “Memory stays with traces, in order to ‘preserve’ them, but traces of a past that has never been present, traces which themselves never occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come—come from the future, from the to come ” (MPM, 70/58). Ironically, or allegorically, such a memory would be not of the past, as Aristotle avows, but of the present; of the present not as the guarantor of presence but as the site of difference. “What if there were a memory of the present, and what if, far from fitting the present to itself, it divided the instant?” (72/60). The very duplicity of Mnemosyne/Lethe sunders presence and opens the space of memory as mourning. Such a memory would be “already ‘older’ than Gedächtnis and Erinnerung” (81/71). Derrida portrays it as a “nonarchitectonic Versamm-lung ” (83/73), a force of both allegory and irony which, gathering and disseminating “over the dead body” of Hegelian reconciliation, leads to “disjunction, dissociation, and discontinuity” (84—85/74-75). Only a long and careful detour through the work of Paul de Man, as Derrida reads it, could show how the combination of allegory and irony produces the rhetoric of memory—”the common discovery,” writes de Man, “of a truly temporal predicament” and of “an authentic experience of temporality which, seen from the point of view of the self engaged in the world, is a negative one.”¹¹

It is perhaps sufficient for our purposes to note Derrida’s identification of “the allegorical Mnemosyne and the ironic Lethe,” and his own ironic identification with one of these rather than equally with both. He refers to de Man’s discussion of a novelist who “manages to be at the same time an allegorist and an ironist” (92—93/85). Such a novelist would “know how to tell a story” (remember: “I have never known how to tell a story”), “but he would refrain from doing so, without one ever being able to know whether he were telling the truth.” Such a novelist would be very much like a verger, a two-faced Janus bifrons, a Gemini, his manner hesitant but his face full of mirth and mischief. A Socrates so embellished and modernized that he does all the writing for Plato.

However, because we have invoked Mnemosyne as well as Lethe; because allegory accompanies irony, granting irony the chance to work its effects; and because Derrida himself has spoken of a nonarchitectonic gathering of memory; it will not do simply to let Heidegger sink into oblivion. Derrida’s third lecture in memory of Paul de Man concentrates on the enigma of memory as both gathering and disjunction. It begins (98/91-92) by citing that long passage from “What Calls for Thinking?” that ties memory (Gedächtnis) to thought (Gedachtes, Gedanke), and thought to thanks (Gedanc, Dank: see pages 265—66, above). The passage encompasses in a strange way the thought of promise, “probably today the most profound, most singular, and most necessary thought; probably, too, the most difficult and disconcerting” (99/ 93). Again, it will not be possible here to reduce de Man’s texts on the promise to a brief report. Derrida cites the concluding lines of de Man’s (revised version of) “Promises,” on Rousseau’s Social Contract: “The error is not within the reader; language itself dissociates the cognition from the act. Die Sprache verspricbt (sich); to the extent that it is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth. This is why textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history.”¹²

Die Sprache verspricht) sich). The parody is multifaceted. The first essay of Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache (“Die Sprache”) has as its refrain, “Die Sprache spricht,” “Language speaks.” It is a refrain that Derrida, as we shall see, does not scorn. Yet he also values de Man’s “discreet parody” of it: de Man alters spricht to verspricht (“Language promises”), but then adds the reflexive pronoun sich in parentheses—die Sprache verspricht (sich). Language promises itself, but lapses, makes slips of the tongue. Language slips into promises. Language gives its (false) word. Language commits (errors). Language always tells the War-heit. A light touch of mockery here, one that suggests a difference in the styles of thinking: “Heidegger does not laugh often in his texts” (101/96). Yet the important points to be made are that “language is not the governable instrument of a speaking being” and that “the essence of speech is the promise” (101—2/97). The first point is of course Heidegger’s own in his essays on language. That Derrida takes it seriously—and in the direction of the second, language as promise—becomes clear in a long note from Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (DE, 147—54), to which we must now turn, by way of a digression.

The “question of the question,” which spurs Derrida’s thinking about Heidegger, “veers into the memory of a language, the memory of an experience of language that is ‘older’ than the question, always anterior and presupposed, so old that it has never been present in an ‘experience’ or an ‘act of language’—in the current sense of these words” (DE, 147). An experience that is not an “experience,” an act (“Acts” is the title of Derrida’s third lecture on de Man) that is not an “act.” And both of these involving a moment that is not a “moment”—yet one that is marked in Heidegger’s own text. The text in which the question of the question “turns” in Heidegger’s thought is “The Essence of Language” (US, 174-76), a text to which Derrida was led through discussions with Françoise Dastur (DE, 154). Here Heidegger concedes that to pose the question of language is already to be caught up in language. Language must always already speak to and for us; in it we are spoken to and addressed, zugesprochen. Precisely this Zuspruch of language precedes any inquiry or investigation into language. Language thus precedes and exceeds interrogation. Its precedence constitutes “a sort of promise or originary alliance” in which we have always already acquiesced, to which we have said yes, handing hostages to fortune, as it were, the (mis)fortunes of our future discourse. Such acquiescence Heidegger calls Zusage, and it is the pendant to Zuspruch. Heidegger affirms Zusage as the “ultimate instance of the questioning attitude” (DE, 148). His most candid statement of the preeminence of language-as-promise over language-as-questioning now appears (US, 175; DE, 148): “What do we experience when we ponder this sufficiently? That questioning [das Fragen] is not the appropriate gesture of thinking [nicht die eigentliche Gebarde des Denkens ist]; rather, [the appropriate gesture is] hearing the assent [die Zusage] of what is to come into question.” Before the word, in a perhaps unspoken yes, mortals are engaged to language, en-gaged in the sense that they have always already paid a gage or forfeit to speech. Questioning is thus a response, is engaged to a responsibility that it has not, and never can have, chosen.

The gage will have been given prior to all other events. However, in its very antecedence the gage is an event, but one whose every remembrance [souvenir]memory [la memoire] has left behind, and to which a faith that defies all telling [tout recit] binds us. No erasure is possible with regard to this kind of gage. No getting back behind it.

Derrida’s note goes on to demonstrate the overwhelming consequences such a subordination of questioning to the appropriate gesture of assent might have for Heidegger’s thought—for example, for the very question of being, posed by that ostensibly exemplary being (Dasein) which poses questions. And yet if the Zusage cannot be circumscribed, if it is always already “behind” every questioning, what sense would it make to recommence or to insist that Heidegger expand and radicalize his “immanent critique” of Being and Time?¹³ Derrida’s strategy is to discern those “strata” traversed by Heidegger’s path of thinking which, although “less massive” than the themes commonly discussed, restructure the landscape of his discourse. For example, the stratum of responsibility—which is much more than an example. That strategy would search for “another topology, for new tasks.” Ethical and political tasks, to be sure, but also tasks involving Heidegger’s relation to other discourses—the sciences, linguistics, poetics, psychoanalysis, and so on. There is no need here and now to pursue these various strata and topologies, which Derrida outlines with typical meticulousness. (At this point in the note Derrida introduces [in brackets] a “pause.” He pauses for a daydream, an admittedly perverse and wicked fantasy: he tries to imagine what the Heideggerian corpus would look like if one were to apply quite literally and across the board all the strictures that Heidegger himself at one time or another enforces on his readers. What would happen if one ranged over Heidegger’s text like a voracious rat, gnawing, ruminant, and ravenous, a mechanical animalThe machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he got paralyzed there and no-one knew how to stop them they’d clank on and on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the whole thing. Want a cool headobedient to the following instructions: avoid the word Geist; at the very least, place it always in quotation marks; erase all the words that relate to world and worldliness whenever discussing forms of life other than Dasein; cross out the word Sein; finally, erase all the question-marks in the text whenever language is under discussion, which is to say, just about everywhere. Concerning his daydream about obsessive obedience Derrida concedes this: “It would not simply be ‘unspirited’ and ‘witless’ [‘sans esprit’]; it would be a figure of evil. The perverse reading of Heidegger. End of pause.”)

Heidegger’s emphasis on “hearing” and “assent” in the essays underway to language is not an invitation to docility or “hearsay.” (Such hearsay, ouï-dire, will nevertheless soon occupy us.) It is rather testimony to Heidegger’s experience of the commitment of mortals, who are always already engaged to language. At the moment language addresses us (zuspricht), it has already elicited our assent (Zusage), “. . . and this past never returns, never again becomes present. . .” (DE, 153). Rather, “. . . it reverts always to an older event, which will have engaged us ahead of time in this subscription of en-gagement.” Engagement to the address marks the essential unfolding of language, Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens (US, 181; DE, 154). The colon serves to erase the copulative ist, while preserving and intensifying Wesen as “essential unfolding.” Erasure of being thus introduces the thinking of Ereignis, and Derrida’s note ends as follows:

Thought of Ereignis measures itself upon this acquiescence that responds—engages itself—to the address. And what is proper to the human being advenes only in this response or in this responsibility. It does so at least only when man acquiesces, consents, renders himself to the address of that which addresses him; that is to say, to its address, which properly becomes his own only in this response. After having named Ereignis in this context, Heidegger reminds us that the Zusage does not err in the wilderness. “It has already struck home [Sie hat schon getroffen].Who else than the human being? Denn der Mensch ist nur Mensch, insofern er dem Zuspruch der Sprache zugesagt, fur die Sprache, sie zu sprechen, gehraucht ist [For human beings are human only to the extent that they assent to the address of language and are needed and used for speaking language].” (US, 196; DE, 154)

The context of Derrida’s note in De l’esprit is the selfsame promise and lapsus of language that we have been discussing in the context of Mémoires: For Paul de Man. Derrida calls that context “the dysymmetry of an affirmation, of a yes prior to all opposition of yes and no ” (DE, 147). We shall soon take up discussion of this dysymmetry. Yet not before noting that the word consent has just now fallen—as a translation of Zusage. Is Heidegger’s piety or docility (Frömmigkeit as Fügsamkeit), whether expressed toward being, pro-priation, essential unfolding, or the speaking of language, tainted by a nostalgia for restoration of the lost dreamworld of presence? The homesickness (Heim-weh = nost-algie) that Nietzsche diagnosed at and as the heart of German philosophy? Would such nostalgia be essentially altered in the French heart, or in any other, if engagement to language is a matter of “consent”?

That it is not nostalgia is at least suggested by the intensity of pain in the Zusage, precisely in these essays that are underway to language. Derrida himself introduces the theme of pain when he writes about the flame and ash invoked in Heidegger’s essay on Trakl (see DE, 173-75). Yet as I suggested some pages back, der Schmerz requires far more detailed treatment: it gathers (nonarchitectonically) Heidegger’s thinking on thought as gathering, on poetic language and song, on the Riss that is both the rift or fault in being and the outline of the work of art, and on the gathering of humankind into one Geschlecht. If early in Unterwegs zur Sprache it is a matter of the pain that turned the threshold to stone (“Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle”—Georg Trakl, “Ein Winterabend”), it is later the pain associated with death that becomes increasingly explicit in Heidegger’s reflections on language:

Yet as the joy grows more joyous still, mourning slumbers all the more purely within it. As the mourning grows more profound, the joy that resides in it calls all the more. Mourning and joy engage in interplay. The play that attunes the two to one another, letting what is remote come near and what is near lie afar, is itself pain [der Schmerz]. Thus both supreme joy and profoundest mourning are painful, each in its own way. And pain tempers the sensibility [mutet das Gemüt] of mortals, so that they derive from pain their center of gravity. That center holds mortals—for all their vacillation—in the tranquillity of their essential unfolding. (US, 235)

To be sure, it is still a matter of the hold, to prevent vacillation. Yet the vacillation Heidegger is referring to is the ever-inventive craving for subterfuges of one kind or another. Nostalgia being not the least of these. So that precisely when we are ready to consign Heidegger to the ranks of the homesick, hoping in that way finally to be rid of him, purged of all his Teutonic failings and Titanic failures, spared the entire enigma of Heidegger, these words of pain and mourning stop us. Unless we are very good at subterfuges, mourning and pain make it difficult to lose Heidegger.¹⁴

Even enjoying a laugh at Heidegger’s expense—Die Sprache) ver)spricht) sich)—brings us back to mourning. And to debts that Derrida has never ceased to acknowledge, however great the pain. The promise of language itself exacts this unacquittable debt, inasmuch as the “fatal drift” of language itself accompanies even the most fervent promise. “The promise is impossible but inevitable” (MPM, 102/98). We are engaged to language even as it slips and slides and makes of our “pure promise” something considerably less pristine than we had hoped. We are engaged to it, engaged in it, even when we read. Yet the “allegory of unreadability” does not result in resignation or dogmatism. Rather, it acknowledges the abyss of yes-saying: “You cannot read without speaking, speak without promising, promise without writing, write without reading that you have already promised even before you began to speak, and so on. And you can only take note of this—in other words, take a note as acte—before every act. You can only say and sign: yes, yes in memory of yes” (MPM, 103—4/100). Such notatio and notio do not secure the promise typographically, by way of contract, but only indicate a kind of rupture or interruption: a signature, signed and sealed, if not delivered, “can only promise itself, and can only (inevitably) promise itself insofar as the path toward its destination is barred, within a no-exit, without end, a dead-end, the impasse of the aporia” (MPM, 103-4/100). Die Sprache verspricht) sich): language promises itself to itself, and in so doing misspeaks itself. Derrida calls it “the aporetic event”: the shadow of Ereignis, the withdrawal or expropriation “of a promise which never occurs, which never happens, but which cannot not occur . . .” (104/101).

These reflections—redolent of paradox—on the aporetic event of promise lead to Derrida’s most detailed remarks on the overdetermined Memoires in which he is engaged. He does not cite Heidegger’s gesture toward a “gynemorphic” Gedächtnis, his invocation of the mother, Dame Mnemosyne, die Gedächtnis. Nor, when discussing the many senses of the English memento, from the Sanscrit manmi, Latin Memini, “I know, I remember,” does he ponder one of the most extraordinary scions of mnēmē, one that no doubt has to do with memory as affirmation. Affirmation in the face of every dead-end or impasse. The Middle High German word minne, “love,” remembered today because of the Minnesingers, springs from “keeping in mind,” “dwelling on,” remembering. Yet such remembering, apparently from early on in the history of the word, is philia, “brotherliness in the community.” The word “community” (Gemeinde) is itself related to loving memory. Mneme as minne comes to have during the thirteenth century the sense of both love of God and sexual love, both agapē/caritas and erōs/amor, thanks toWhat a mnice old mness it all mnakeslthe writings of the mystics, although even in Old High German the sense of sexual love is never altogether absent. Nor is the erotic sense of minne deprived of the mnemic senses of “friendship, dedication, and good will” until quite late, well after the great poets, Walther von der Vogelweide and Gottfried von Strassburg.¹⁵

Nor is minne without its ancient counterpart. The “suitors” who assemble at Penelope’s palace during Odysseus’ absence are called in Greek mnēstēres (Odyssey 14, 81; iy, 65 passim). They would gladly “minister” to Penelope’s every need; she wishes they would “mind” their own affairs. Their courting or wooing (16, 391; 21, 161: mnasthō; 14, 91: mnasthai), their “ministry,” as it were (cf. 16, 294: mnestu), is less a being mindful of and doting on a much sought-after woman (14, 64: polymnēstē) than a calculated plundering of the household. To say the least, these ministers are not thinking thankfully on their host (cf. 1 j, 54: mimnēisketai). It is therefore ironic, and even gruesome, when the leader of the suitors—and the first to be slaughtered—assures the others that he remembers Odysseus: kai gar mnēmōn eimi, “For I am still very much in mind of him” (21, 95). Finally, the lover’s keepsake or memento brings together love and memory in unforgettable ways. When Helen gives Telemachos the peplos she has woven for him she says—perhaps a bit coyly, perhaps to irritate Menelaos—that it is to be “a memento of the hands of Helen” (15, 126). The keepsake that Nausicaa presents to Odysseus is nothing more than the vision he has of her at the banquet prior to his departure, and these words of hers: “I hope that when you are in your homeland you will, every now and then, dwell on me (8, 462: mnēsēi emei).

If Derrida fails to draft a specific memo on the minne in mneme, Heidegger will surely be unable to remind him. Yet minne’ s mneme is vital to Heidegger’s thought of Gedanc and Dank, the “heart,” and Dame Mnemosyne, as well as the thought of Geschlecht and “the more gentle twofold.” And however manic it may seem, minne should be vital to both mourning and mirth in Derrida’s thinking. Perhaps it will be.

Bypassing now Derrida’s remarks on Rousseau, Holderlin, and Nietzsche, “the three madmen of Western modernity,” who brought Derrida and Paul de Man together (MPM, 126/128); bypassing them even though they would enable me to rejoin Pierre Klossowski’s “mad lucidity” and “light of lunacy” (126/129); bypassing “the madness of the promise and the madness of memory” (129/132); bypassing the aporias and disjunctions of a promise that retains irony, its incalculable and fickle other; bypassing a memory that “does not lead us back to any anteriority ” (133/137); I wish only to summarize Derrida’s own account of the differences in the “style of promise” found in Heidegger’s and in his own texts. Derrida tries to dispense with Heidegger’s insistence on the “originality” of the Gedanc, as das anfängliche Wort, the matutinal word; with the gesture of gathering, das gesammelte, alles versammelnde Gedenken; with the more originary, ursprünglichere, thought of the heart—all this encompassed in the original essence of memory, das ursprüngliche Wesen des Gedächtnisses (MPM, 136/141; WhD? 91-93; see above, pages 265—77). However, as we saw in chapter 4, the “indispensable reference to originality” is as attributable to Derrida’s early work as it is to Heidegger, and even here in Memoires, Versammlung has been admitted with the proviso that it not be “architectonic,” that it perhaps be only quasitranscendental. Not only that. Derrida’s own note on the future tasks of a reading of Heidegger insists on an originary, antecedent yes, Zu-sage, or gage to language, which would be anterior to questioning and secure from all erasure.

What Derrida continues to affirm in Heidegger’s thinking of memory is its call, its invitation and command, its promise to respond affirmatively to the call of thinking. Nevertheless, the mortal promise traces out a tentative and precarious future rather than recollecting or hoarding a past. It responds to the call of an absent friend, responds to a mourning—rather than to a being—in default. It changes its shape in Derrida’s lectures on memory and mourning, differs from Heidegger’s text more than it can know, whatever the undeniable debts and confessed loyalties. Before passing on to the second trait of memory as affirmation, the joy or mirth that Heidegger—after Holderlin, yet more sternly than he—would call Heiterkeit, these final words from Memoires:

What is love, friendship, memory, from the moment two impossible promises are involved with them, sublimely, without any possible exchange, in difference and dysymmetry, in the incommensurable? What are we, who are we, to what and to whom are we, and to what and to whom are we destined in the experience of this impossible promise? Henceforth: what is experience?

These questions can be posed only after the death of a friend, and they are not limited to the question of mourning. What should we think of all this—of love, of memory, of promise, of destination, of experience—from the moment a promise, the instant it pledges, and however impossible it appears, pledges beyond death, beyond what we call, without knowing of what or of whom we speak, death. It involves, in reverse, the other, dead in us, from the first moment, even if no one is there to respond to the promise or speak for the promise. What does “w ws” mean if such an impossible promise is thinkable, that is to say, possible in its impossibility? This is perhaps what thinking gives us to think about; this is perhaps what gives us to think about thinking. (143/149)

MIRTH

The two long lectures that constitute Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce arise from and speak to an essentially comic situation: in both cases the Philosopher has been invited by the most formidable scholarly machine at work in literary studies today, the machine of Etudes joyciennes, in order that he might address the machine on the matter of its own expertise. Derrida comes to the Joyce experts as Elijah, though with less prophetic dignity than fear and trembling, “at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.”¹⁶

The Philosopher, to whom the gift of narration has ostensibly been denied, regales the assembled Joyce Scholars with tales of his recent travels—his odys-seys to Tokyo and Ohio, for example. Like Scheherezade, he hopes thereby to postpone the moment when he will have to lose his head and beg for acknowledgment or at least a stay of execution from the Sultans of Joyce Scholarship. And yet the most serious of Derrida’s recent preoccupations are to be found here among all these jimmyjokes: memory, mourning, and the yes-saying of affirmation. If it breaches the bounds of discretion to have commented on Derrida’s lectures on Paul de Man, my account here will no doubt stultify the humor, verve, and trenchancy of his “two words for Joyce.”

HE WAR. These are the two words, extracted from the penultimate page of the first section of Book II (“Feenichts Playhouse”) of Finnegans Wake (258.12). The context? Only the Joyce Scholar knows for sure whether there is (n)one. From the penultimate page of II, 1:

Yip! Yup! Yarrah! And let Nek Nekulon extol Mak Makal and let him say unto him: Immi ammi Semmi. And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war. And he shall open his mouth and answer. I hear, O Ismael, how they laud is only as my loud is one.

“And he war.” “And he deed.” Derrida also cites the final lines of the final page of II, 1 (259.3-4; 7-10):

O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these they unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour’s time, O Loud! (. . .)

Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!

Ha he hi ho hu.

Mummum.

The infinite Babel of Joyce’s archive and the infinite Yahwism of I-am-who-am are Derrida’s two preoccupations throughout. “He” wars, that is to say, the Loud prosecutes war and commits all the acts of violence and outrage that constitute the nightmare of human history. And yet, because war, pronounced somewhat differently, is also the past tense, the imperfect, of the German bin, “I am,” and ist, “he/she/it is,” Joyce’s phrase suggests that He was. In other words, the Loud is inextricably bound up with Vorbeigang, the “It was” of time—even though Derrida does not explicitly mention the (possible) connection with Nietzsche. Further, the German war is gramophonically bound up with wahr, “true,” with the truth of being as preserving (wahren, bewahren)and, one would have to add, with gewahren, the “granting” of time and being in and through the propriative event, Er-eignis. Yet who is He?

In the first place, argues Derrida, He is the James Joyce of the Joyce Scholars, the Joyce who is not unalloyed joy to Derrida: “I am not sure I like Joyce.” “More precisely, I am not sure that he is well liked. Except when he laughs—and you will tell me that he laughs all the time” (UG, 20/146). It will therefore be a matter of distinguishing among various tonalities of laughter: for example, the laughter of one who like a Universal Spider spins a web that neither Scholar nor Philosopher will be able to flee, a weft of writing designed to be all-embracing and all-consuming, permitting no escape, paralyzing all who enter its silky mesh. Web of Atropos. The laughter of one who has the laugh of all those he will cause to be indebted to him—cause to be in memory of him (UG, 21/147). Perhaps the laughter of a writer or thinker who imagines that university chairs will one day be endowed for the purpose of encyclopedic research into his own texts; so that future generations will be consigned to a memory larger than their own, trapped in a hypermnemic tissue that gathers all it can (rassembler; cf. Heidegger’s Versammlung) of “cultures, languages, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, histories of spirit or of literatures” (UG, 22/147). “He” would thus “war” against all future generations of readers and scholars, never allowing them to forget “the sadistic demiurge” looming at the origin of it all.

Finnegans Wake is no doubt but one book; yet it is a book with “the greatest possible memory” (UG, 26/149). Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, Derrida remembers his own debt to the memory of Joyce, extending from his 1962 Introduction to Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” in which Hegelian Erinnerung and Husserlian Epoche are made to spin about the Joycean axis, through the 1968 “Plato’s Pharmacy,” where the apotheca as a whole is brought under the spells of Bataille and Joyce, to the 1977 Carte postale, in which the “he war” explicitly resounds.¹⁷ The memory of debts, the entire economy of promise and contract as delineated in the second treatise of Nietzsche’s Genealogy, spins a web of incredible complexity and density. Such is the archival system of computations and accounts to which the memory of Joyce—genitivus subiectivus et obiectivus—appears to commit and condemn us. The Joyce who laughs up his sleeve ironice at generations to come; the Joyce who, understandably, Derrida does not like to like. He war. YHWH bristling with omnipotence, weaving all the webs, weaver of the wind.

Yet he war is also a sign of fall and ruinance, as we have seen, a sign of the vorbei and of bygones. YHWH is gttrdmmrng, deathly consonants without the breath of vowels. The imperfect tense of ist invokes “a past without appeal,” a past which, “before being, and before being present, was” (UG, 40/154). Derrida relates the was, the fut, to the fuit, and thence to the fire of Spinoza’s jealous (zelotypic) God. Let us pray. One could also relate it to the fui of Quentin Compson and, rather than to any zelotypography, to the eternally wretched “Too late!” Es war. Signature of God and memory of the whole world (UG, 48/157), he war ultimately only in mourning and mirth, only with “laughters low” (FW, 259.7-8; UG, 51/158). However, if Derrida worries about “Joyce’s vengeance vis-a-vis the God of Babel” (UG, 52/158) in a way that the verger does not, it is nonetheless a question of the tonality of laughter, and of giving according to the fine arts of laughter. Calling upon the countersigning goddess, Molly, who says yes and thus issues Bloom’s passport to eternity, Derrida concludes his two words for Joyce with a kind of invocation and prayer: “Countersigned God, God who signs yourself in us, let us laugh, amen, sic, si, oc, oil” (UG, 53/158). Oc, oil. Hoc illud, “here and there,” presumably the origin of the French oui. The theme of Derrida’s second lecture on Joyce, “Ulysse gramophone: Oui’-dire de Joyce,” is Joyce’s hearsay and yes-saying. Ouï-dire and oui, rire: Joyce’s hearsay is also, yes, laughter. Let us play.

Derrida begins his Frankfurt lecture with the double assurance oui, oui; yes, yes. A “particle,” a particle of language that particularly in French likes to double itself, as though under contract with itself. In English, yes appears to have been formed by the affirmation yea and the third person singular of heon “to be,” si. “Yes” would thus be the contraction of the form that appears so often in Ulysses as a form of assent, “Ay,” “It is,” “Ay, it is.” Before he discusses the import of the double-yes (in ways already familiar to us through our discussion of Memoires), Derrida relates two tales concerning the yes as dysymmetrical with the no, hence as outside the oppositional or dialectical pair, yes/no. He swears the tales he tells are true, Ja, wahr. He reports visiting the state of Ohio—”A perfect cretic! the professor said. Long, short and long” (U, 105. 369), the name of that great state itself obviously being a play on oïl, oui-oui—and finding in a supermarket there a brand of yogurt called Yes. Beneath the grand affirmation of the brandname on the cap an advertising jingle teases, “Bet You Can’t Say No to Yes” (UG, 61; in American in the original). He then recounts an incident in the newspaper shop of the Hotel Okura in Tokyo, where he is looking for postcards to buy. He sees a businessman’s “self-help” book on the shelf entitled 16 Ways to Avoid Saying No and recalls that the Japanese always avoid saying no (out of courtesy) even when they mean no. “Beside this book, on the same shelf, another book by the same author, once again in English translation: Never Take Yes for an Answer ” (UG, 70).

The double-yes can doubtless take a servile or an obstreperous, a reassuring or an impatient form. Derrida does not dream of barring contamination or parody from the repetition. Nevertheless, he stresses “the yes of affirmation, assent, or consent, of alliance, engagement, signature, or giving,” which must bear repetition in itself “if it is to be taken in the way it wants to be taken” (UG, 89). The double-yes “must immediately and a priori confirm its promise and promise its confirmation.” As we heard Derrida say in Memoires, the yes can be said only if it “promises to itself the memory of itself,” so that affirmation of the yes “is affirmation of memory.” This is the gramophone-effect that attaches itself to the yes. It seems to contradict in the strongest possible terms the amnesia that as Pierre Klossowski’s Vicious Circle insists must intervene in the re-willing of eternal return. Are we to take it that the double-yes does not emanate from that high tonality of the soul, the Stimmung of ecstasy, of which Klossowski and Nietzsche write? Is the repetitious yes prosaic?

That this need not be the case—and that the yes of consent need not be cloying—is suggested by Derrida’s insistence on parody and mimicry, as well as on “the mourning of the yes” (UG, 90). For the yes appeals to an other yes, the yes of an other. Derrida speaks of “the distress of a signature that demands yes of the other, the suppliant’s injunction for a countersignature . . .” (UG, 99). And what is true of the yes is true of the entire corpus over which the Joyce Scholar would attain mastery: hypermnemic interiorization, like the yes, can never close in on itself once and for all. If only for the reason that the countersignature may come in the form of a very nervous guest speaking in foreign tongues—speaking French to a German audience that is expert in Joyce’s Hibernian English—as follows:

For a very long time the question of the yes has mobilized or traversed all that I apply myself to think, write, teach, or read. To mention only readings—I have devoted seminars and texts to the yes, the double yes of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (“Thus spake Zarathustra,” as Mulligan also says [19.727-28]), the yes, yes of the hymen, which is always the best example of it, the yes of the grand affirmation of midday, and then the ambiguity of the double yes: the one reverting to the Christian assumption of a burden, the “Ja, Ja ” of the donkey laden like the Christ with memory and responsibility; the other yes, a light, airy, dancing, solar yes, also a yes of reaffirmation, promise, and profession of faith, a yes to eternal return. The difference between these two yeses, or rather between the two repetitions of the yes, remains unstable, subtle, sublime. One repetition haunts the other. (UG, 108)

It would be necessary (though impossible) to distinguish, between two repetitions of the yes. There can be no doubt that both Nietzsche and Joyce place—or find—the precarious yet persistent yes in the mouth of a woman. Not simply woman as mother, flesh, and earth—the attributes of Tellurian Penelope in the secondary literature surrounding Ulysses and in Joyce’s own utterances. Derrida therefore rereads the novel with the aim of providing a typology of the yeses, especially those of Molly Bloom, who commences with a suspicious confirmation (“Yes because he never did a thing like that before . . .”) and concludes with an eschatological signature of affirmation doubled and trebled (“. . . and yes I said yes I will Yes”). Molly’s affirmation occupies the site of Joyce’s own signature, above the place and date that mark the period of the novel’s gestation. These two signatures of affirmation “appeal to one another, appropriately, across a yes that always sets the scene of appeal and demand: confirm and countersign” (UG, 110). Affirmation calls forth the “a priori confirmation, repetition, retention, and memory of the yes .” Such eschatological affirmation is merely the more dramatic appearance of a certain “narrativity” at the “heart” of the simplest yes: “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes . . .” (U, 644.1605-6).

Because laughter is as infectious as the yes, and because the possible differences in tone are vital in both, Derrida now (re)turns to the theme of laughter. And to the man who laughs. In French in the original, in caricature of Victor Hugo, as follows:

THE HOBGOBLIN

(his jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs) II vient! C’est moi! L’homme qui rit! (U, 413.2156-60)

The apocalyptic epiphany of the man (not the vache) who laughs transpires between the raucous, repetitious bellowings of the gramophone in Nighttown. It occurs quite a few pages after Bloom has rescued himself from the nastiest sorts of incriminations by virtue of a shibboleth—a passage of the mocking Joyce which Derrida does not cite:

BLOOM

(behind his hand) She’s drunk. The woman is inebriated, (he murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim) Shitbroleeth.

But back to the apocalyptic homme qui rit! Derrida distinguishes between the written (gramo) and the spoken (phonic) yes: the oui that is heard (ouï) does not differ from the oui that is written. Although unrelated etymologically, the homophonic oui and out (the trema marks the written word as “heard,” even though no one can hear it) captivate Derrida. Hearsay, ou’i-dire, becomes a “yes for the ears,” and the dire induces laughter, rire. Yes, laughter (oui-rire) could have been Derrida’s title as readily as hearsay (ouï-dire), especially given the series of accidents that went into the arrangements preceding his Frankfurt lecture. (Whose arrangements? Dire-rire-da’s, no doubt.) After having informed Jean-Michel Rabate by long-distance telephone from Tokyo of the title of his proposed paper for the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium, “L’oui-dire de Joyce,” he received the following confirmation from the chairman, Klaus Reichert (in English in the text): “I am very curious to know about your Lui/Oui’s which could be spelt Louis as well I suppose. And the Louis’ have not yet been detected in Joyce as far as I know. Thus it sounds promising from every angle” (UG, 77).

Why laughter, when it is a matter of yes, yes, double affirmation in the face of mourning? One hopes in vain that mirth and merriment will prove to share the roots smer- and mar-, so that they can be etymological cousins to merimna and mourning. Derrida speaks nevertheless of the rire as a remnant, a reste, not unrelated in fact to mourning. It is the Stimmung or pathos of the yes-laugh (l’oui-rire) that intrigues him, just as the challenge to sustain the high tonality of the experience of return obsesses Klossowski (UG, 116). Derrida now carries out the typology (not typography) of laughter that was envisaged in the lecture on Finnegans Wake. “With one ear, and for a certain hearing [ouie], I hear a yes-laugh [oui-rire] resonating that is reactive, negative” (UG, 117). (Derrida employs the Deleuzean genealogical category of the reactive, even though his recent work takes greater distance from the genealogical project than does Of Grammatology.)¹⁸ The reactive laugh is a laugh of defiance: let herhim disentangle himherself from this web who can. Again Derrida calls it “hypermnemic mastery,” a fortress as “impregnable as an alpha and omegaprogramophone,” to which “all histories, stories, discourses, forms of knowledge, and all signatures to come” must address themselves. Thus there is a James Joyce polytropos, as cunning and as ruse as Odysseus himself, master of the Grand Tour, yet also cautious—remembering his former toils, confronting a novel choice. “A triumphant, jubilant laughter, to be sure, but a jubilation that always betrays a sense of mourning [quelque deuil]; the laughter is also one of lucid resignation.” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, “supercharged with a savvy that is as impatient to show itself as it is to hide itself” (UG, 118), are but two tomes in the Library of Congress. Even if they contain the universe (of discourses), one may still fail to find them on sale in the souterrain newspaper shop of the Hotel Okura. Derrida has already recounted this part of the chronicle of “my experiences,” and again he swears that it is true, or was true, ja, er war wahr:

As I was taking note of these titles [16 Ways to Avoid Saying No, and Never Take Yes for an Answer], an American tourist of the most typical sort leaned on my shoulder and sighed, “So many books! Which is the definitive one? Is there any?” It was a tiny bookshop, a newspaper kiosk. I refrained from telling him, “Yes, there are two of them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.” Instead, I kept this yes to myself and smiled stupidly like someone who did not understand the language. (UG, 71)

That sighing American was of course Melville’s Pierre, feigning garrulousness, and we can be sure that he knew who he was talking to and what he was asking for.

The laugh of hypermnemic mastery, waxing sardonic, mocking, engorges itself “on all memory,” de toute la memoire (UG, 119). It assumes, resumes, and exhausts perfect presence or parousia. By a curious operation of anagram, its OUI becomes an I.O.U., and the donation of laughter an impressment or indenturing of the reader:

There is no contradiction in putting it this way: such yes-laughter is that of Nietzsche’s Christian donkey, the one who cries Ja ja, the Judeo-Christian animal who wants to make the Greek laugh now that he has been circumcised of his own laugh: absolute knowing as the truth of religion, arrogated memory, culpability, literature burdened by the summa and become what one might think of as “a beast of burden,” a literature of summation, moment of the debt: A, E, I, O, U, I owe you, whereby the “I” is constituted in the very debt and comes to itself only where it gets into debt.

OUI, I.O.U., I owe you. The anagrammatical operation dots the i into the bargain. When the jackass of “The Awakening” and “The Ass Festival” (ASZ IV: 4, 388—90) screeches his hee-haw litany of pure affirmationsthe long, ardently protracted lovecry of the assit takes the orthographic form I-A, i-a, in order better to approximate the music. Dotting the i in the inane litany of I.O.U.s—this is precisely the function of the monarch in Hegel’s sovereign state (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §281, Zusatz: 7, 451)’

One often hears the complaint raised against the monarch that he puts the fortunes of the state at risk, inasmuch as he may be poorly educated to the task and may not be worthy to occupy the summit of the state; and that it is a nonsense that precisely for that reason there was perhaps no second heroism of love as disconsolately sweet as his such a situation should exist as a rational one. The complaint’s premise—that what matters is the particular character of the person involved—is invalid. In a consummately well-organized state, matters at the top require merely formal decision-making; for a monarch one needs only a human being who says “Yes” and dots the I [einen Menschen, der “Ja” sagt und den Punkt auf das I setzt. . . ].

When at the end of Hegel’s treatise (§352) all the peoples of the Earth “throng about the throne” of the regal Weltgeist, one must wonder whether the universal spirit of world history is a capital long-ear dotting the j’s of all the asinine ja-ja’s. I.O.U. U.O.me. Yes, yes. Yet one must also wonder whether wondering so is not the reactive laughter of frustrated mastery. Brood of mockers. Mock mockers after that, for we traffic in mockery.

Yet there is a second kind of yes-laugh, an affirmation not of recuperation but of potlatch. The eschatological tonality of I’homme qui rit is “worked,” “traversed,” and even “haunted” by another kind of music, a jinglejoyous ventriloquy. “I also hear, close to the other, as the yes-laughter of a gift without debt, the light-winged affirmation [l‘affirmation légère], almost amnesiac, of a gift or an event abandoned . . .” (UG, 120). Almost amnesiac: a burst of laughter that bears all its own bitterness, or, at least, a generous spray of chuckles. Not Elijah despatched from some celestial Central Telecom, but the unexpected expected guest, Elie. Yet the contamination of these two figures—Elijah as master of the chair and vagabond Elie—is the very rule of laughter: one courts the risk of mockery and masterful appropriation in the very celebration of a laughter that does not indebt. Laughter signs on the dotty line, but its signature remains unassignable. “Thus if laughter is a fundamental or abyssal tonality of Ulysses, if analysis of that book is not exhausted by any of the branches of knowledge available to us precisely because Ulysses laughs knowingly at knowledge, then laughter explodes in the very event of signature” (121).¹⁹

Not that the explosion of signatures precludes the signing. Far from it. Assent is always already engaged, as in the instance of Heideggerian Zu-sage. “If the signature does not recur in order to manipulate or mention a name, it does presuppose the irreversible engagement of the one who confirms—by saying or doing yes—the hostage of a mark that has made its mark [le gage d’une marque laissée].” What happens when the yes makes it mark? In the first place, it need not be spoken or written at all; something the French translations of Ulysses demonstrate when they render many words and phrases as oui. Especially in French, as I have mentioned, but also in English (ja ja OK OK auf deutsch auch si si), the yes inclines of itself to reaffirmation, reconfirmation, doubling. For example, in telephonic exchanges: “. . . the yes comes from me to me, from me to the other in me, from the other to me, confirming the first hello? over the telephone: yes, that’s it, that’s just what I’m saying, in effect I’m speaking, yes, here I am, speaking, yes, yes, you hear me, I hear you, we are here to talk, there is language, you understand me well, that’s just how it is, it’s taking place, it’s happening, it’s writing itself, marking itself, yes, yes” (124). No doubt, it is difficult to find a referent for yes, difficult to make proper use or even mention of it. Scarcely an adverb, an “affirmative particle,” reiterate the dictionaries. Yet more than any other adverb, yes exhibits “transcendental adverbiality”; it is “the ineffaceable supplement” of every verbum, an interjection, almost “an inarticulate cry”; yeah, oui, ja is something like a “preconcept-ual vocalization,” “the perfume of a discourse” (125). Yes is less a performative than a perfumative (129). A Bloom, as it were, in the pharmacy. Disconsolately sweet. Every constative seems to need and presuppose it: Yes, I can confirm that. . . ; yes, it is the case that . . . ; Ay, S is p. Nor can the fragrance of the yes be captured by the words approbation, affirmation, confirmation, acquiescence, and consent. When a bombardier confirms over the radio his orders to waste this or that supply depot, village, or hospital, he replies, “Affirmative.” Yet his reply presupposes this: “Yes, you hear me, I’m saying ‘Affirmative,’ and we both know what that means.” Yes performs rather than constates:

What does it call on us to think, this yes that names, describes, designates nothing and that has no reference outside the mark? not outside language, because the yes can dispense with words, at least with the word yes. In accord with its radically nonconstative or nondescriptive dimension, even if a description or a narrative says yes, the yes is from top to bottom and par excellence a performative.

However, the Heideggerian question, which is also Klossowski’s question, is insufficiently answered by such talk of performatives. Performance, at least in a well-defined situation, always produces a determinate effect. Derrida again has recourse to the classic philosophical discourse through which we saw him passing in chapter 4: yes is “the transcendental condition of every performative dimension” (126). Any promise, declaration, order, or engagement occupies the dimension of a “Yes, I’m signing .” Such a yes, Derrida affirms, again with recourse to the classic philosophical discourse, is anterior to affirmation and denegation, “anterior,” in scare-quotes, to all symmetries and dialectics. Even if one should go on to say no and do no, even if one should say, Yes, I’m going in there wasting, the “affirmation” of me-here responding cannot be eradicated. It is marked as a site there occupied by me-here, “je-là,” performing or constating a “yes”-there. Là is of course the inaudible site of ashes (Il y a là cendre), ashes of Plato’s Second Letter, burned by the Philosopher in the backroom of “Plato’s Pharmacy.” We shall soon have to return to those cinders. Yet because Derrida has now invoked the transcendental dimension of the yes, we confront once again all the questions of memory, reminiscence, and writing on the verge. Does the yes grant time and being, is it equivalent to being as such, as opposed to beings; equivalent to propriation; is yes a new principle of sufficient reason; a co-responding to the speaking of language; is it the condition of all conditions, the be-thinging of things, the worlding of world; are yes, yes the raptures or ecstases of time and space? Derrida replies:

I had to cede to the rhetorical necessity of translating this minimal and indeterminate address, almost virginal, into words. Into words like “I,” “I am,” “language,” and so on, where the position of the I, of being, and of language still remain derivative with regard to the yes. That is precisely the difficulty for one who wants to say something on the subject of the yes. A meta-language will always be impossible on this subject, inasmuch as it will itself presuppose an event of the yes that it will not be able to comprehend. The matter will fall out the same way for all accountability and computation, all calculation aiming to order a series of yeses according to the principle of reason and its machines. Yes marks the fact that there is address to the other [qui’il y a de I’adresse a /’autre].

Such address is not necessarily dialogue or interlocution, for it presupposes neither the voice nor symmetry. Yet from the outset it presupposes the precipitation of a response that already is demanding. For if there is something of the other [s’il y a de 1’autre], if there is something of the yes, then the other can no longer be produced by the same or by the self. Yes, condition of all signature and of every performative, is addressed to the other, which it does not constitute, and with respect to which it can commence only by asking, in response to a demand that is always anterior, asking it to ask it to say yes. Time appears only after this singular anachrony. (127-28)

Molly’s “monologue” is therefore anything but monologue. It is rather “a discourse embraced by two forms of ‘Yes,’ two capital ‘Yeses,’ hence two gramophonic ‘Yeses.’ “ At least two, inasmuch as a certain confusion of Leopold Bloom, Marion Bloom, and James Joyce occurs here, to say nothing of Henry Flower, Bartell D’Arcy, Boylan, Mulvey, Gardner, Paul de K. or Poldy B. A second yes, an other yes, comes to augment the first. Yet the second yes is, in its turn, “a yes that recalls itself [un oui qui se rapelle].” Molly herself commences with the other Yes. “The yes says nothing but yes, an other yes that resembles it, even if it says yes to the coming of an altogether other yes ” (128). The yes “addresses itself to the other and can only appeal to the yes of the other; it begins by responding” (130). And if we insist on recalling once again the classic philosophical discourse, as perhaps we must, Derrida replies that the apparent self-positing of the yes “keeps open the circle it inscribes” (132). It is neither strictly performative nor strictly transcendental, even if performativity presupposes the yes. It is “preontological”—a category to which Heidegger too appeals, incidentally, when it is a matter of situating the understanding-of-being in being-there between the nearest and the farthest reaches of being (SZ, 15-17 and 65). During the final moments of “Ulysse gramophone,” in a “telegraphic” style, Derrida situates the possibility of the yes and of yes-laughter “in this place where transcendental egology, the onto-encyclopedia, grand speculative logic, fundamental ontology, and the thought of being open upon a thought of the gift and a thought of the envoy that they presuppose but can never contain” (UG, 132). In order to ensure nonclosure of the circle—if such can ever be ensured—he recalls the essentially comic situation of a sending that can never cease even if it can never arrive, even if it must be always only on the verge of arriving: “Molly says to herself (apparently talking to herself all alone), recalls to herself, that she says yes in the course of asking the other to ask her to say yes, and she begins or ends by saying yes in the course of responding to the other in herself, but in order to tell him [pour lui dire] that she will say yes, if the other asks her, yes, to say yes” (133). L’oui-dire. Pour lui dire. The sending is always a being sent, love’s old sweet song, Sam Cooke’s minnesang, “Darling, you send me.”

Yet if the yes is consigned “to the memory of the other,” if it has to take its chances, if it can be menaced, then mirth inevitably reverts to mourning. Memory is not hypermnemic reappropriation but a kind of faithful dissemination or dispersion, a return of nonreturn, as we heard earlier.

With or without words, apprehended in its minimal event, a yes demands a priori its repetition, its being placed in memory [sa mise en mémoire]; and it requires that a yes to the yes inhabit the arrival of the “first” yes, which is therefore never simply originary. One cannot say yes without promising to confirm and remember it, retain it, countersigned in another yes; one cannot say it without promise and memory, the promise of memory. Molly recalls. (UG, 136-37)

That the yes can readily collapse back into the circle of automatic or technical repetition and dissimulation cannot be denied or prevented. Countersignature opens up, and is open to, absolute risk. Countersignature is not iconography. The “quasi-transcendental” situation of yes-laughter requires that it remain suspended between the Stimmungen of restitution and gift-giving. Somewhere between poisonous mockery and the milk of mirth.

ASHES

as though one could conclude a book on the vergeNothing crowded her, no clinging to the past, no striving toward the future; when her gaze fell upon something in her surroundings it was as though she were calling to a baby lamb: either it approached quietly, to be near her, or it paid her no mind—but she never grasped it by way of an intention, with that inner seizing movement that lends to all chilly understanding something both violent and vain, inasmuch as it dispels the happiness that is in the thingsof memory, reminiscence, and writing by reminding oneself of what happens when the materiality of the matrix for typography, iconography, and engrammatology alters irreversibly from stone or wood or wax to ashes. Locke’s granite tombstone calcined to powdery ash. So that while traces or tracings would be at issue in both kinds of materials—ashes themselves containing trace elements and so preserving microscopic monuments to what was—the solidity, durability, and duration of the marks of memory would be radically reduced for us. Us who in passing say yes to the passing of what was. Yes to a vortex of ashesIn this way everything around Agathe seemed to be much more comprehensible than usual; but it was still her conversations with her brother that occupied her above allin the wind. And this swirl of cinders should satisfy a concluding chapter on memory and affirmation? Yes

In 1980 friends invited Jacques Derrida to write on the unpromising theme of ashes for a now defunct journal, Anima. “Feu la cendre” appeared in Anima 5 in 1985, and was then released in 1987 as a slim volume by Des femmes and simultaneously as a cassette in “La Bibliotheque des Voix,” read by Derrida and Carole Bouquet.In accord with the peculiar nature of her unusually faithful memory, a memory that did not deform its material by any kind of bias or prejudice, once again there emerged all about her the living words, the little surprises in the tone of voice and in the gestures of these conversations; they were not altogether coherent, were more after the manner in which they had occurred before Agathe properly grasped them and knew what they wanted.The title, Feu la cendre, resists translation. “Fire, the ash,” yes; but also “the smoldering ash,” “the extinguished and expired ash,” taking feu as the invariable adjective meaning “recently dead,” as in the phrase feu la mere de Madame, Madame’s mother, who recently passed away, Madame’s mother, of recent memory. Feu la cendre. Ashen fire, defunct ash; fiery cinder, clinkered ash. The book and the recording hover or shift and feint in this ambiguity: the polylogue of voices male and female, a minnesang of ardor and a chronicle of chill.Nevertheless, everything was meaningful in the highest degree; her capacity for remembrance, dominated so often by rue, this time was full of tranquil fidelity, and in a graceful way time past clung closely to the warmth of her body, instead of losing itself as it usually did in the frosty obscurity that swallows everything lived in vain.

“Animadversions” or fragments from “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Glas, and La Carte postale themselves mark Feu la cendre with traces of Derrida’s work. Among these traces is the phrase that has already resounded here as well as in chapter 4: il y a la cendre, “There there is ash,” heard in the backroom of “Plato’s Pharmacy” and in the “dedication” at the end of Dissemination. The fifteen years of Derrida’s career that separate these first appearances of the phrase from its mirroringsOn the very morning of her brother’s departure Agathe had observed herself minutely: it had begun with her face, begun by accident, for her gaze fell upon it and then never came back from the mirrorin Feu la cendre testify to the memory of the trace and the trace of the memory. The phrase il y a là cendre returns, returns to haunt. Its “author” responds to it, is engaged to it, but by no means does he command it. She was held fast, as when one has no intention of walking but repeatedly takes a hundred more steps toward a thing that has only at that moment become visible, at which point one then firmly proposes to turn back, but then once again declines to do so.Yet the phrase itself, with the là dissimulating la to the ear and the very word cendre so close to tendre, seems an “immemorial image” of something unspeakably remote, something “there” rather than “here,” “down there” or “back there” as a lost memoryFrom out of the mirror the somewhat uncanny feeling of the indeterminate hour returnedof something that never was present. Ash both preserves and loses the trace. Preserves it through all the heat of incineration, holocaust, immolation, and passion; loses it in the chill of all things ill-fated, fugitive, fled, defunct. A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words. Peacefullest words. Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.

Nevertheless, Feu la cendre is not without fire. A certain pyrification, if not purification, assures us that something has taken place, that there is a placeShe came to her hair, which was still like bright satin; she unbut toned her collar to her mirror image and, brushing back her dress, bared her shoulders; finally, she undressed completely that image and brought it all to attention, down to the pink lacquer of the nails, where in hands and feet the body comes to an end and but barely belongs to itselfin which something takes place. And is remembered. Or is on the very verge of being remembered. Intensely. Like the late-morning or midday sun, approaching the moment of the shortest shadow, whenIt was all still like the brightly blazing day as it nears its zenith: ascendant, pure, precise, and permeated by the becoming that is fore-noon, the becoming that expresses itself in a human being or young animal in the same indescribable way it does in a ball that has not yet reached its apogee but is only a tiny arc below itthe flame is invisible, effaced, but more intense than ever:

—but that is precisely what he calls the trace, this effacement. I now have the impression that the best paradigm of the trace, for him, is not (as certain people have believed, and perhaps he himself as well) the animal’s tracks, effraction, the rill in the sand, the wake in the sea, the affinity of a footstep for its imprint, but the ash (that which remains without remaining of the holocaust, the conflagration, incense ablaze) (LAC, 27)

As the flame annihilates and annuls, it opens up the ring of annulation, anniversary, and“Maybe the ball is passing through its apogee at this moment,” thought Agathe. This thought startled herrecurrence to memory: the sun in Hegel’s account of the religion of the sun, or in Bataille’s thought of solar extravagance (LAC, 30). What moves the voices of Feu la cendre is not the labor of mourning (“How could we agree to work for Monseigneur Mourning?”) but the history of the very refusal to incorporate and incarnate the otherHer body, uninfluenced by sport instructors and masseurs, unaltered by childbearing and motherhood, had been formed by nothing other than its own waxing and flourishingas the wolf does the grandmother or the Wolfman his father and sister.

If you no longer recall, it is because incineration follows its course and consummation goes without saying, down to the very ash. Trace destined to disappearHad one been able to transpose it naked to one of those vast and lonely landscapes that great chains of mountains show in the face they turn to the sky, she would have been borne on the swollen and barren surge of such heights like a heathen goddessall by itself, like everything else, in order to open up the way, rather than to rekindle a memory. The ash is fitting [est juste]: because it is without trace, precisely ash traces more than one other, and as the other trace(s) [elle trace plus qu’une autre, et comme l’autre trace]. (39)

Feu la cendre memorializes the traceIn a terrain of this kind, midday pours no streams of light and heat to the earth; it merely seems to climb apace to its summit and pass indiscernibly over into the declining, hovering beauty of afternoonof the other, reproducing the animadversions of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” distinguishing, between two repetitions, the “Two knocks . . . four . . .” of the later version (here reprinted first) from the “Three knocks . . .” of the earlier version published in Tel Quel (LAC, 40-43; 60). Marcel remembers les trois petits coups he would give the wall that separated his bedroom from his grandmother’s, three knocks every morning that she would answer par ces autres coups as though saying, “Don’t worry, little mouse, I know you are impatient, but I’m coming soon.” Yet these reassuring “three knocks” have been silenced forever, and the knocks on the pharmacy door—”They seem to be coming from outside this time, these coups ”—are more disconcerting. Feu la cenfre does not account for them, neither for the three nor for the two and four. It does not explain. It allows the other the last word. Not “the” other of an inflated ethical pretension—which is the pretension to full recovery and totalizing restitution through one judgment once and for all—but the other(s) who are or were loved.But in some mode of fantasy she heard—before she could call her memories of it to account—behind everything she had experienced, the long, ardently protracted lovecry of the ass, a cry that had always excited her in a strange way: it sounded infinitely ridiculous and odious, yet precisely for that reason there was perhaps no second heroism of love as disconsolately sweet as his.

With these final, remarkable animadversions from La Carte postale (CP, 46/40 and 211/196; LAC, 46 and 58), Feu la cendre moves toward its own evanescence: “The symbol? A great holocaustic fire, a conflagration, really, into which we would throw—along with our entire memory—our names, the letters, the photographs, the little objects, keys, fetishes, etc.’ (. . .)” One sentence-fragment from the original passage in La Carte postale is missing from its reproduction in Feu la cendre. After “. . . keys, fetishes, etc.” in the original version appear the words: Et s’il nen reste rien, “Even if nothing should remain of them.” In Feu la cendre there are remains. Ashes. Reminiscences. Reveries. The final animadversion reads:

Before my death I would give these orders: if you are not there, they are to recover my body from the lake [mon corps du lac], burn it, and send you my ashes, with the urn well-protected (“fragile”) but not sent registered mail, not to tempt fate. This would be an envoy of mine that would no longer come from me (or an envoy coming from me—who will have ordered it done—but more like or no longer an envoy of mine, as you like). You would then want to mix my ashes into the food you eat (morning coffee, brioche, five o’clock tea, etc.). Once a certain dosage were taken, you would begin to go numb, fall in love with yourself; I would watch you advancing slowly toward death; you would approach me within yourself, with a serenity we have never known, absolute reconciliation. And you would give orders. . . . Awaiting you, I am going to sleep; you are always there, my sweet love.

as though one could yes finish a book with the likes of such yes lugubrious lakes of cinderShe shrugged her shoulders on the subject of her life and turned once again with firm purpose to her image, seeking to discover there a place where her appearance betrayed signs of agingand ash; as though Derrida himself finished this way, because of courseThere are the little places near the eyes and ears that are the first to change, and when it starts they look like something had slept on them, or the curve beneath the inner sides of the breasts that so readily loses its transparency: it would have satisfied her at this moment, and promised her peace, had she noticed a change; but as yet there was nowhere such to behold, and the beauty of her body hovered almost uncannily in the depths of the mirrorhe does not. Feu la cendre ends and evanesces with one of the interlacing interlocutory voices objecting to the uses made there of LAC and LA Cendre, the lake of capital recovery and restoration:

—No, you are treating the phrase like the accumulation of a surplus value, as though it were speculation on some capital cendre. It is rather a matter of retrait [a redrawing and reinscribing as well as a retreat],²⁰ in order to enable a gift to take its chances, without the least memory of itself, after all the accounts have been drawn up; not²¹ a corpus, but a pile of ashes careless of its form, merely a retrait without any relation to what I now through love have just done and am on the verge of telling you \je m’en vais vous dire]—

as though a musical idea“I am a bit dead “—this feeling Agathe often had, and precisely at moments like this when she had just become conscious of the health and contours of her young body, conscious of this tensed beauty, as groundless in its mysterious cohesion as in the dissolution of elements in death, moments when she easily slipped from a state of happy security into a state of fright, astonishment, taciturnity, as happens when one steps out of a noisy, crowded room to confront the shimmer of starswere constantly in retreat from itself, retracing itself in its own ashes only to shift and veer away from itself, shunning every resolution to its own tonic: Sibelius’s Seventh and last symphony, Opus 105 in C, composed between 1918 and 1924, originally entitled Fantasia Sinfonica, with its four scarcely isolable or identifiable movements (Adagio, Rallentando al. . . Adagio, Allegro molto moderato, Presto-Adagio) fused into one relentless kinesis of sound, announcing itself forthrightly as being in the key of C, the most common and chantable of keys, without sharps or flats, absolutely candid } II y a là cendre); and yet from the perfunctory opening in the tympaniFor in accord with the original, uncomplicated way of thinking that was hers, Agathe felt her disposition to be warm, vital, happy, easy to please—a disposition that had accompanied her into life’s most diverse situations and made them bearable; never had there been a collapse into indifference, as happens to women who can no longer bear their disappointment: but in the midst of her very laughter or the uproar of some sensuous adventure, which continued in spite of all, there dwelled the devaluation that made every fiber of her body slacken and yearn for something else, something that might best be described asNothing all is modulation, gliding on by, Vorbeigang, evading and avoiding the tonic, as though the Seventh were locked under seven seals, fleeing the tonic every instant and retreating into a kind of crypt; as though the somber strings ascending and descending, their melodies mildly elegiac and unpretentious, then the frivolous woodwinds in scherzo hurrying and worrying the stately tempo lento, and finally the bursts of brass piercing the mounting turbulence—as though each of these were colluding in retardation and postponement, frustrating again and again each irresolutely proffered resolution; even the evocation of Northern woods and invigorating winds in the third movement (Allegro molto moderato), even the most homespun of chants unable to still the shifting tonal clusters, clusters based on semitones rather than whole tones, approximating minor keys, always merely on the verge of C, then gliding on the oblique away from the very place toward which it is presumably all tending; as though the crisis precipitated in rondo by steadily mounting waves of strings in tandem with or striving against (impossible to say which) the horns, trombones, and trumpets, ascending finally to a vast plateau of calm, meantA terrifying expanse of emptiness suddenly oppressed her, a shoreless glare occluded her spirit, and her heart was swept away in anxietysomething like nothing; as though the final plaintive cries and distended harmonies in the string section were trying to remember the point of origin that was never there from the outset; and as though a series of false resolutions glancing off of C, hitting it, clutching at it, while a semitone seventh drags it down from below, succumbs to it finally, surrenders, rising at the very end to the tonic as though to say, “Yes, yes, this is where we will have been heading all the while, here is where we shall never have arrived, certainly not now, certainly not as you are now hearing it now end now”; as though such deferral were nonetheless always mindful of what it most loves, mournfully letting what it loves slip irretrievably into passing away; as though shoutingThrow everything you have into the fire, down to your shoes. When you have nothing left, think of nothing, not even your shroud, and leap naked into the fire!yes yes to eternal recurrence, laughing to the point of tears, mirth and mourning alike spurning the triplicate blows of typography, iconography, engrammatology; as though in the end it were enough to say that repetition, recollection, recall, reminiscence, remembrance, revery, and all the motions of memory were on the very verge of being written on the verge